Ghost Planet (22 page)

“How many of you are there here?” I asked.

“About sixty pairs, with a pretty steady trickle of new arrivals. We keep a low profile, but the people who need us can find us. I’ll explain about that later.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Eight months now. Seems like longer.”

Murphy and I stopped next to Blake in the shade of the overhang, looking up at the oblong structure. This was the same click-together type of housing I’d seen in New Seattle, though this structure had a much more basic design.

“Let me give you a quick orientation. This is all prefab, the same housing that’s used by field scientists. We use compact solar cells for power, but we don’t have as many as we’d like, so it’s important to conserve. Hello, Anne.” A woman walked past us carrying a basket of laundry, her colonist following close behind. She cast me a curious glance.

“We collect rainwater and filter water from the river, and we treat and reuse wastewater,” Blake continued. “We have a pretty rudimentary sewage system, so be careful what you put down the pipes. We’re basically pumping it all into a tank buried in the boneyard.”

I gave him a blank look, and he explained, “The burn zone, just outside. Food for our day-to-day needs is stored in pantries in this central structure, and less perishable food is stored in caves. Take what you need. We operate on the honor system for everything.”

I was impressed. “You’ve accomplished a lot in eight months,” I said. I wondered how a bunch of ghosts were financing all this.

Blake smiled. “Come on, I’ll take you to your quarters.”

We walked to the far end of the structure, and Blake led Murphy and me up a stairway between two of the buildings. There were three levels of living quarters, and he took us to an apartment on the top floor—a single room with a small sofa, fold-down bed, and dining table and chairs. There was also a two-burner cooktop, an oven, and a fridge. A flat-reader rested on the table.

“Do you have Net access here?” I asked.

“More or less. We pirate signal from the nearest colony, and updated data is transmitted at regular intervals.”
More expensive gadgetry
. “For the time being, communication with the outside is restricted to myself. We can’t afford to draw attention to our colony.”

A pair of reinforced doors on the back wall caught my attention. They’d been fitted with a heavy bolt. “That’s some closet.”

“Modified for our purposes,” Blake replied. “We recommend you lock them in at night.”

I blinked at him. “Huh?”

He walked over and opened one of the doors. It
was
a closet, with shelves on top and a pallet underneath. Murphy and I exchanged glances—the irony was complete, though my closet had been palatial compared to this one. Murphy would barely be able to sit up in there without knocking his head on a shelf.

Blake’s gaze flickered to Murphy. “Colonists here know that raising a hand against one of us results in swift and severe punishment. But it’s a good precaution, and I recommend you take it.”

Finally I caught on. This was about preventing middle-of-the-night murder attempts. After all, the colonists could live without
us
.

As I was thinking about frying pans and fires, Blake ran a hand through his hair, sighing. “Listen, I respect you, Elizabeth, so I’m not going to bullshit you. No one’s going to be babysitting you in here. Talk to him if you must. Fuck him if you want to. But outside this door, I don’t want to hear his voice, and I don’t want to see him doing anything but what we tell him to do. If at any point I become concerned about your ability to control him, I
will
intervene. Do we understand each other?”

I swallowed. “Yeah.”

“Good. Now, I don’t want to overwhelm you. I’ll see you at lunch, and we’ll be able to talk privately then. Settle in and rest—you’ve had quite a day.”

Blake pulled the door closed with a click, and I stood with a numb feeling creeping over me.

It’s hard to explain what happened next. It had to do with feeling trapped. With feeling caught up in multiple layers of traps, each more difficult to escape than the last.

I looked at Murphy. “Please stay here until I come back.”

He searched my face. “You look a little wild, love,” he said in a low, cautious tone. “Where are you going?”

“I need some air.”

“So do I. I’ll go with you.” He stepped toward me and I stepped back.

“Murphy, I’m not asking. Stay here.”

He folded his arms, continuing to watch me. “Okay.”

I turned and left the apartment.

I walked down the stairs, leaving the shade of the overhang, into the bright sunlight. I stepped onto the first footpath I encountered, following it toward the sound of flowing water.

The first sharp pangs of separation came, but I kept going, clinging to the idea that if I pushed myself long enough, to the limits of my endurance, the cord between Murphy and me might snap. Deep down I knew that
I
was more likely to snap—Mitchell had already tried this—but my dependence had become intolerable.

Pain arced like wildfire through my body. Tears blurred my vision until I couldn’t see where I was putting my feet. Sweat ran down my back and the sides of my face.

The possibility that the new life inside me might be harmed had played no part in my sudden impulse to walk away from Murphy, but as the thought occurred to me, I froze in my tracks.

There is no baby
. No heartbeat. No characteristic identifiable as human
or
alien in the tiny mass of rapidly dividing cells, most vulnerable in these first weeks after conception. The close monitoring at the institute had given me early awareness of a pregnancy that might not even be viable.

“Shit!”
I choked out, falling to my knees.

The pain in my gut was overtaken by a skull-cracking migraine, and I sank all the way to the ground with a moan of agony.

“Elizabeth?”
An urgent, not-Murphy male voice managed to insert itself between me and the pain.

Someone dropped down beside me and I turned my head.

“Ian?!” My voice hurt my head and I squeezed my eyes closed.

“Where’s Murphy?” he said sharply.

“Our quarters,” I rasped.

“Come on.” He pulled me to my feet and slipped an arm around my waist. “Let’s get you back.”

He half dragged, half carried me down the trail. The pain receded as we neared the dwelling, and I managed to get my feet under me.

“Murphy won’t do this again,” Ian said. “When Blake finds out—”

“It’s not Murphy’s fault. I made him stay behind.”

He gave me a puzzled look, but didn’t probe further. “Take it slow, I’ve got you.”

When we were a stone’s throw from the overhang, the migraine relaxed to a steady, dull ache. “I’m okay, Ian—stop for a minute. How is it you’re here? Where’s Julia?”

Sweat had plastered my hair to my face and he cleared it away. “I’m so glad to see you, Elizabeth. I’ve never stopped worrying about you. As soon as we got here I started harassing them to help you. Blake told me you were coming, but I didn’t know it would be so soon.”

“How did you—?” I detected movement over his shoulder and glanced up. Julia stood a few meters back on the trail, eyeing us in a vacant way. “What’s wrong with Julia?”

Ian made me sit on a big rock beside the trail, and he sat next to me. “Julia was in on it, Elizabeth. Lex too.”

“In on what?”

“You going to that facility. Your separation. They convinced one of the other psychologists that Murphy was violating the protocol with you.”

“He was,” I admitted.

“Those people that took you—they had bugged his office, and I guess they were just waiting for something incriminating before they moved in. I saw the whole thing, Elizabeth. They carried you out of the office unconscious. I went a little crazy—tried to take you away from them.”

I grinned at him. “Did you really?”

“It was an idiotic thing to do,” he replied, laughing. “I’m a biology teacher, right? They just knocked me down and kept going.”

“I was different after that, though,” he continued, sobering. “I mean I was already different, just from my conversations with you. But I was so angry with Julia for her part in it, I refused to take any more crap. It was only a day or two before things started to reverse. She got very skittish around me, and then she started sleeping a lot. Once I had the run of the apartment—and Net access using her login—I spent all my time doing research.”

“Is that how you found this camp?”

Ian nodded. “Eventually. After I met you, I decided that somewhere on this planet there had to be others like us. I used my fake alias to join some online communities, and it wasn’t long before references to a ‘ghost underground’ started popping up. I had planned to talk to you about it that last day at the institute, but I never got the chance.”

“How did you end up coming here?”

Ian reached for my hand, holding it between his. “That’s a long story. I had to make multiple attempts at contact, and even once I got a response, there was a lot of maneuvering to make sure our tracks were covered. Blake has a contact in New Seattle—a woman who works for the bank—and I had to meet her so she could verify who I was. I think what got everything moving was the story I told them about you. They were
very
interested in Grayson Murphy’s fall from grace, and the ghost responsible for it. Once they’d checked everything I’d told them, they arranged for a shuttle to bring us here.”

I shook my head, stunned. “You’re amazing. I don’t even know what to say. Thank you for convincing Blake to get us out of there.”

He shook off the praise. “It didn’t take much convincing. Blake’s really interested in your ghost theories. But we can discuss all that later. Tell me they didn’t hurt you in there.”

I took a deep breath, unsure whether I was up to discussing all that had happened in the weeks since I’d seen him last. “Not physically, no, nothing like that, but…” A sympathetic friend was the enemy of self-possession. My throat tightened and I didn’t trust my voice to continue.

Ian watched me teeter on the edge of control and he put his arms around me. I let myself sink against him, exhausted from carrying all the weight of it myself.

His beard tickled my forehead as he said, “Tell me what happened to you.”

I started talking—it was easier this way, not having him looking at me—and found I couldn’t stop. The nightmare of the institute, what we’d had to do to get out, Murphy’s decision to help Mitchell, and the consequences—all of it came gushing out of me. I felt him fiddling with the ends of my hair as he listened, never saying a word, until I finally wound down and fell silent.

Sighing, he said, “I’m so sorry for what you’ve been through. And I can understand why you’re frightened. I don’t blame you for feeling betrayed, but I have to say…”

As the pause lengthened, I drew back so I could see his face. “What?”

Giving me a feeble smile, he said, “You don’t know how tempting it is to tell you what you seem to want to hear—that what he did to you is unforgiveable. But from what you’ve told me, he had the best possible reason for doing it. Maybe he has a hard time saying it, or maybe he doesn’t want to scare you, but everything he’s done … well … I’d do the same to save the woman I loved.”

“Elizabeth?” My head swiveled at the sound of Murphy’s voice. I wondered how long he’d been standing there. His expression darkened as his eyes took in the situation, traveling up from the suntanned arms encircling my waist to the familiar face.

“Ian?”

I felt a pang of guilt about how it looked, and pulled back until Ian’s arms fell away.

Then Murphy’s eyes focused behind us and he said, “Julia!” She glanced up at him, but there was no flicker of recognition. Murphy stepped toward her. “Are you all right?”

Ian picked up my hands, drawing my attention back to him. “Promise me you won’t do anything like this again. If you’re wanting to—rectify the situation you told me about, there are safer ways to go about it. There’s a surgeon here in camp.”

What he was suggesting—it hadn’t even occurred to me as a possibility. I was a ghost. Who would help me with something like this?

Another ghost might.

Glancing down, I discovered that one of my hands had moved to my abdomen in a timeless protective gesture.

I squeezed and released Ian’s hand, and rose to my feet. “It was a stupid thing to do.”

“Hey,” he said, rising beside me, “I’m supposed to be baiting fish traps right now, but I want to see you again soon. I’d ask you to have lunch if I hadn’t already committed to Blake.”

“Sounds like we
are
having lunch. I was invited too. Though I don’t recall that it was presented as optional.”

Ian smiled. “Blake likes to maintain the appearance of democracy, but he never lets you forget it’s his camp.”

Murphy had joined us again. I felt his fingertips at the small of my back.

“I’ll see you soon,” Ian continued. “Maybe we can have a private word or two after.”

“I’m glad you’ll be there. I have to admit he scares me a little.”

“Will you come back now, Elizabeth?” Murphy urged, pressing my back. “I’d like to talk to you.”

Ian raised his eyebrows. “Be careful. You
should
be scared of Blake. If he catches you breaking the rules, he’ll make an example of you.”

*   *   *

When we reached our quarters, I slipped off my shoes and lay down on the bed. The endless day had taken its toll, and there was still more to come. Not the least of which was getting through whatever it was Murphy wanted to talk about.

“I found tea,” he said, switching on a hot water kettle. “Can I make you some?”

“Sure. That sounds good.”

As he took cups down from the cupboard I realized I was hungry. It was midafternoon and I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. “I don’t suppose there’s any food in there.”

“That depends on your definition.” Murphy reached in and pulled out something that looked suspiciously like one of the paper-wrapped ghost biscuits, holding it by one corner like it was something nasty.