Chapter 1, Wherein Aleks Wakes Up to a World Very Different From Her Own
If she were being honest with herself, Aleks Lisciewicz would admit that she never expected to wake up at all. In fact, as she blinked away the blankness of an indefinite sleep, Aleks Lisciewicz might even have admitted that she thought this all a dream. Aleks Lisciewicz was always honest with herself, or at least tried to be, and so this was exactly her admission as the door swung open and invited her to explore the world outside the cryo pod that had served as her bed, house, and island for the last who-knows-how-long.
The air was stale, sharp, frighteningly light. Aleks felt cold, and found she was hugging herself in an instinctive attempt to warm her core. Her arms felt slippery, silky, not her own. Her hands felt terribly weak, as if they were unable to hang on even to her own arms, and they fell back to hang limply at her side. This must be a dream, she admitted to herself, a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad dream.
As the fog of deep, frozen sleep lifted, Aleks felt alone in a world of nothing, and tried, desperately, to regain each of her senses. Nothing, indeed, was all she could see at the moment. Whether her eyes were so unaccustomed to taking in any light whatsoever, or the room was too dark to see even to the end of her nose, she couldn't yet tell. Her ears, meanwhile, were bombarded. Loud. Loud loud loud loud. There was a steady, deafeningly high-pitched beeping, and an obviously pre-recorded voice shouting from above her pod coming through in indecipherable muffles. Still unadjusted to the suddenness of the world around her, Aleks focused on the voice and began to make out its message :
—GENERATOR SYSTEMS FAILURE. EMERGENCY POWER PROTOCOL ONLINE. LIFE SUPPORT UNSUSTAINABLE IN zero MINUTES. RESTORE MAIN POWER SYSTEM—
Shit, Aleks confirmed her previous admission, So this is that kind of dream. Her eyes began to adjust to the low buzz of the yellow emergency lighting, which no longer seemed so blindingly bright, but began to soften and focus. She poked her head out to look around the outside of her pod. Before turning to look to the left or right, though, she wished she hadn't looked at all. Directly across from her, behind the cracked glass of tampered pod window, her husband's unmistakable head lolled lifelessly to the side, a single bullet-sized hole in the center of his forehead.
No! Yu . . . It really was that kind of dream. A bloody wicked one, in which nothing makes sense, and everything is going wrong. Aleks was no stranger to such a dream as this. Yu. Yusef. I'm . . . She needed to reach him. If only she could touch him, pass warmth between their bodies, she might not be alone in this world. Stranger things have happened, Aleks knew, when I dream these dreams. She had a fleeting memory, more like a feeling, that she had thought similarly when she and Yusef were first meeting : I might not be alone in this world.
At any rate, Aleks had an idea that her fate lay across the way, in Yusef's pod. She knew that something important would happen, if only she could reach Yusef. She took a step out of her pod, or tried to, rather, before her leg crumpled underneath her with as much resistance as a soak-frozen toothpick, the small flecks of ice between the wood grain chipping, shredding the pick with ease. Her legs were weak yet. It took her every effort to raise and steady herself, hands gripping the open doorjamb of her pod for support. She tried again to step, this time with a slow, careful precision. Yusef's pod was a simple six-pace away, but it might as well have been twenty leagues. In her measured attempts to teach herself to move in the hallucinogenic dreamscape, she couldn't tell if she felt her body was empty, or filled with lead. She kept her hands clenched on the doorjamb as she reached her legs out in front of her, each foot coming down with a thud that echoed through her body with the weight of the heavy dead. Pushing off of the chilled metal, Aleks failed again to steady herself. She nearly tumbled the four steps remaining to her husband's pod, and for a just moment, as her hands flung out in front of herself, reaching for Yusef, for metal, for anything to brace her fall, she thought she saw in his face the bright glow of the young, brilliant, troubled scientist she'd fallen in love with. Just a flash, and the vision was gone. Her hand hit metal, and plastic—she'd managed to hit the control panel. The door hissed open, and a cool air seeped out of the chamber. Yu's head sank lower as his feet slid forward in the pod, and his glasses fell onto Aleks's left foot. Oh, Yu, Aleks breathed, picking up his glasses. Definitely, definitely dead. She leaned into his pod, pinned him against the back panel, and shuddered a tear into his cold shoulder.
Suddenly, as Aleks leaned into her dead husband's body, she remembered something. Shaun. He wasn't in his father's arms. Odd, she thought, that she couldn't remember why Shaun should be in Yusef's arms. But he definitely was not there, and, as Aleks remembered, he certainly should be. I need to find Shaun.
