Then I allowed myself to drift into fantasy, imagining myself asking Elliot to accompany me on my turn. He’d say yes, mouth turning up into the slightest smile, setting off the dimples I loved so much. Klara would fume, but I wouldn’t care. I’d be floating long before we left the airlock. He’d take my hand, never leaving my side as we cartwheeled, weightless among the stars.
Ahem.
A loud cough behind me broke me from my reverie. I flipped around to find Klara and Elliot standing in the door frame.
“Are they done yet?” Klara asked testily.
I checked the automatic timer I’d set. They had three minutes left. The look on Klara’s face told me that, regardless, their time was up. Oh, well. I pressed the communication button, opening up the channel so they could hear me.
“Sorry, I have to pull you back now,” I said, manually overriding the system. I took care to leave the communication channel open and on speaker so Klara would hear Evgenia and Carina’s sullen protests.
Once they were back and the airlock doors closed, I released the glass safety partition separating us. No sooner had the girls started zipping out of their suits than Klara was dragging Elliot by the hand over to them, and they went ahead and got into the suits right there. I noticed Evgenia sway on her feet. Lightning-fast, Elliot offered his arm to steady her; then I saw him pull close to whisper something in her ear, which only made Evgenia look queasier. I performed the same ritual as before, tethering and snapping them in, instructing Elliot on the compressed air, then moving behind the partition and back to the control panel.
“Leo, give us fifteen minutes,” Klara said breezily, helmet under her arm, looking more glamorous in a spacesuit than was fair. “We want to really take it all in.”
Carina let out the faintest chirp of outrage but held her tongue, so far as calling Klara out on the inequity. I also knew better than to argue with her, so I dutifully programmed fifteen minutes into the system as Carina and Evgenia fell back behind me. Evgenia was resting against the wall, looking a bit flushed.
My eyes remained glued to the console as I keyed in the final commands to close the safety partition and open the airlock. My complete focus was required if I wanted to avoid the way Klara and Elliot were linking arms as the doors shuttled open.
Nope, I did not see that at all.
“All right, how are we going to kill fifteen minutes?” I asked, spinning around to face the girls.
And then Evgenia fainted.
Thirteen
“Evgenia!”
I rushed to catch her before she cracked her head on the floor, my heart practically jumping into my throat as I realized I was too far away. It happened both faster than a blink and as if the world had switched to slow motion. Thankfully Carina reacted to my reaction, grabbing Evgenia by the arm just in time.
“What’s wrong with her?” Carina shrieked. Evgenia’s dead weight pulled her down and back, despite Carina’s wrenching her up by the armpits. My sister wilted back against the wall, and I rushed to help them both.
“I don’t know!” Together, we lowered Evgenia to the floor. I tried fanning her with my hand, but it did nothing to stop the beads of sweat crowding her brow. Something was very wrong.
Then, suddenly, her eyelids fluttered open.
“What happened?” she asked groggily. “Why am I on the floor?”
“You fainted,” I said. She groaned, clutching one hand to her head and the other to her stomach.
“I don’t feel so good, come to think of it. I should maybe lie down.” Evgenia grimaced. “Not on the floor, though. I’d prefer a bed. Beautiful woman optional.”
If she was joking, she had to be half okay, I figured. I laid a hand on her forehead—she was warm, but not burning hot. But then she kept clutching her stomach.
“Do you feel like you’re going to vomit?” I asked, fishing for a diagnosis. I was no medical professional, but I’d seen food poisoning before.
“Definitely maybe a lot,” she replied, clinching it.
I lowered my voice, ducking my head so only Carina could hear. “There’s no time to take her all the way back to the Sofi. She’s probably going to start vomiting, among other things, very soon.”
Carina wrinkled her nose in clear disgust but jumped into action, nevertheless. “We’ll take you downstairs to our quarters,” she said, and we helped Evgenia back on her feet. With the two of us supporting Evgenia’s weight, we managed to half walk/half carry her to the lift, but Evgenia rallied at the doors, pushing me back out into the hallway with her limited but not insubstantial strength.
“No, you have to take your turn with Elliot. Carina can take me.”
Still lucid enough to wing-woman. Amazing. Even so, I was reluctant.
“No, I should go with you,” I said, trying to cross the threshold. But Evgenia slammed her hand against the lift hold button.
“You have to operate the console, remember?” Evgenia insisted. “Please, stay for me.”
Unfortunately she was right—the system would automatically bring Klara and Elliot back into the airlock, but I was the only one who could open the safety partition and shut everything down. Still, I lingered until the door closed, then stood there a minute, contemplating following along after them anyway. I should have enough time to get them settled—fifteen minutes, right? Or, I reasoned with myself, I could go down as soon as they got back, forgoing my turn. Elliot probably wouldn’t say yes to accompanying me, anyway.
The lift zipped away, and I found myself alone in the near darkness. The night settings were on, the usually stark-white ship interiors a flat almost-gray with the brightness turned all the way down. It was eerie. Sterile and ghostly.
A loud sound, a snap like flesh against metal, made me jump. I turned, seeking out the source of the sound, but it did not repeat itself. I crept back the way we’d come, toward the bridge. And there, when I closed my eyes and concentrated on listening, I could hear the muffled rise and fall of someone speaking. Clearly we’d been too swept up in our own crisis to hear the captain, still holed up on deck, and she did not sound happy about something. I hovered outside the open doorway, wondering at the fact that she’d not engaged the automatic close function. Guess she wasn’t used to having company up here this time of night and didn’t expect anyone to be listening in.
“I don’t care what you think. That solution is untenable.”
There was silence for a minute, Captain Lind clearly listening to a response. Then: “I’ll not succumb to idle threats. This is my ship.”
That certainly piqued my interest. Who was threatening Captain Lind? And about what?
“Well, you are entitled to that opinion. Good evening.”
The captain cut short the obviously tense conversation, and I suspected that whoever had been on the other line might not have been quite done with it themselves. Captain Lind was a conversations-end-when-she-wants-them-to type of woman, however.
I was left with silence and a sudden foreboding. With her no longer distracted by her off-ship communication, there was no way for me to make my way past the bridge without her noticing me. While she might have thought me faultlessly reliable on the best of days, Captain Lind would not take kindly to my eavesdropping. I had to be careful.