Skreem was losing time.
She kept coming back into consciousness, into a world of pain and nausea, only to slide back under again before she could summon the strength to open her eyes. The world – what little she could grasp of it – was different every time she did. There was the growl of an engine, snatches of conversation, static on the radio. There was a glass room that made her gills bubble and her eardrums stretch, and then there was foam – thick white drifts of it that sprayed out of the ceiling and coated all three of them, her and the robot and the man in the suit.
The foam was magic, heaven, sucking out the heat from under her skin and dissipating it. And if there was a cost for that – if she could feel her scales dissipating too – well, it was worth it. Anything was worth it, to stop the burning.
Off, off, off. She'd shed every part of her, to stop the fire in her flesh.
"Should its skin be coming off like that?" someone said -
and -
"You mean humans don't do that?" the robot responded
- and then the first voice said "That thing was human?" in tones of horrified disbelief.
And then the doors hissed open and a third voice – a woman's voice - said "That thing is a mutant, you dribbling worm. What the hell is it doing on my ship?"
Skreem slid to the floor.
The robot wasn't holding her up any more. If he had ever cared, he didn't seem to now.
The two humans were talking, their voices burbly and indistinct in Skreem's foam-clogged ears.
"It was alive, Mother. A living creature, on Earth, after all this time? At the very least I thought you could study it."
"You thought? I don't pay you to think! I pay you to grovel at my teat and take my orders -"
"You don't pay me at all."
"Oh, getting smart, are we? Whose air do you think you're breathing, you snot-nosed bastard?"
"Yours, of course, Mother."
"And don't you forget it . . ."
Skreem slipped again, away from the pain and the voices and the world she didn't understand. She was safer in the darkness, safer asleep. Asleep, she didn't hurt.
Asleep, she wasn't scared.
When she floated back up, the first voice had gone, and the woman was talking to Bender.
"- know you," she was saying. "You were Hubert's bending unit. Rodriguez."
"Bender."
"I remember."
Someone was smoking. From the sound of the woman's breathing, it was her.
"Earth is no place for a robot, Bender. What were you doing down there, hmm? Looting?" The woman took a long drag of her cigarette. "Or maybe the rumors are true. Maybe there really is someone alive down there."
"Nah." Bender shrugged. "The humans are all dead. I only went back to case the joint, but there was nothing good left."
Liar, Skreem thought fuzzily. They're not all dead.
The only thing you came to steal was me.
She wondered why the robot was lying. The woman had been nasty to her son, but the way she spoke to Bender, it was almost as if she liked him. Why would he lie to her?
Skreem shivered. The blisters in her mouth had turned swollen and bloody. She couldn't tell if she was up or down anymore. She couldn't breathe properly.
"Why save the mutant?" the woman asked.
Bender said nothing. Maybe he shrugged.
"Still . . ." the woman went on. "Anything that could survive a year in that putrid hellscape must have some freaky jackpot genetics."
She turned Skreem's lolling head from one side to the other. Skreem wished she had the strength to open her eyes. She wished she had the strength to swat the woman's hand away. Her fingers felt like grasping, bony claws.
"Genetics like that could be worth something . . ." the woman mused, and then she seemed to decide something. She sucked in a deep breath. "LARRY, YOU FREE-LOADING PUSTULE!"
There was the sound of furiously running feet. They stopped, and an unfamiliar voice panted, "Yes, Mother?"
The woman snorted.
"Put down that loofah and empty out my bath. There's been a change of plan." She exhaled a long stream of smoke, and barked out a laugh. "Mommy needs some bone marrow."
Bone marrow.
That was the thought in Skreem's head when she next woke up.
She was lying on the softest bed she'd ever known, and the burning had stopped. Because they'd given her a bone marrow transplant. She could feel the cath port in her chest, and the IV line running into the back of her hand.
Skreem had lived her entire life in a hospital. In the sewer, there had never been anywhere else for her to go. She had grown up watching medical procedures be performed, watching people get sick and die, or sometimes - much more rarely - get better. There had never been enough drugs and never been enough help, and no-one had cared enough to shield Skreem from any of it. So she'd watched and read and listened, and eventually, she'd stopped getting in the way and become an extra pair of hands. She'd never thought of this as a bad thing. She'd never thought of herself as unlucky. It was the only life she had ever known.
The problem was that now, she knew too much. She was the patient, but she saw herself through a doctor's eyes.
They'd given her a bone marrow transplant.
Skreem kept her eyes closed and her breathing even, trying to piece it together.
The only reason she would need such a drastic treatment would be if her system had suffered catastrophic damage. Cancer, repeated infection, aplastic anemia . . . but none of those things came on so suddenly.
So it had to be poison. A toxin. Something in the air, something she hadn't felt until it started to burn . . .
"Are you awake?" A voice broke in on her thoughts. "Mommy says I have to watch you and say when you're awake. But you've been sleeping for a really long time . . ."
Skreem knew that kind of voice. Slow and child-like, it belonged to someone who wasn't a child, but wasn't really an adult.
And . . . Mommy, she noted. This was the third man to say "Mommy" or "Mother."
Cautiously, she opened her eyes.
There was a man sitting by her bed. He was as shiny-faced as a baby, and nearly as bald. His eyes meandered in two separate directions, and he was smiling at nothing in particular. His name was stitched onto the front of his jumpsuit, as if he might forget it.
Igner.
"You're awake!" he said delightedly. As if Skreem had fulfilled his whole life's purpose by simply waking up. "I'll tell Mommy."
"I . . . no, wait!"
Skreem reached out, breaking the habit of a lifetime, and touched his hand.
"Please . . ." Her voice was hoarse and scratchy with disuse. How long had she been asleep? It felt like forever. "What happened to me?"
The man chewed his lower lip, hopping nervously from foot to foot.
"You were on Earth," he said. "Mommy says we can't go to Earth anymore. It's a bad place. The bad people explodeded all their bombs and made it bad. It makes you sick if you go there. It makes you burn." He shuddered. "It stays in your blood like a poison, Mommy says." He smiled again. "So Mommy gave you Larry's blood and made you better!"
Bombs, Skreem thought. He had to mean nuclear bombs, by that. Which meant . . . radiation. Not the slow, mutagenic kind that bubbled away in the lake, but the fiery, killing kind.
All mutants had a low-level immunity to radiation, but if what the man said was true . . . if Earth had set off all their nuclear weapons . . . No living thing could survive exposure to that. No wonder the first man had been so surprised to see her on the surface. Another hour – another ten minutes, maybe – and every organ in her body would have shut down.
Skreem swallowed.
"Why?" she managed.
"Uh?"
"Why did they set off all the bombs? Who did it?"
Igner shook his head.
"No-one knows," he said solemnly.
That wasn't very helpful. But Skreem had more immediate problems.
She touched the closed-up nub of the cath port in her chest, uneasy.
"Igner?"
"Uh?"
"Why did your Mommy save me?"
Igner smiled.
"You lived a whole year in the bad place," he said innocently. "Mommy says if the science men can find out how, you could make her filthy stinking rich. Mommy lost a lot of money when the bombs went off. A lot of her robots got blowed up." He lowered his voice to a stage whisper. "She was mad."
You lived a whole year in the bad place.
But Skreem hadn't been on Earth for a year. The only reason Mom would think she had was if Bender had lied to her. If he had pretended not to know her and let Mom think Skreem was special.
If he had saved her life, only to let her be . . .
Experimented on.
That was what was going to happen to her. That was how you proved a radiation resistant gene. You isolated it, and subjected it to to higher and higher doses of radiation. Different types, with different controls, over and over again . . . until you found the breaking point.
They were going to turn her into a lab rat, looking for a resistance she didn't even have.
She was going to die.
Skreem took a deep breath.
Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid.
"Igner?"
"Uh?"
"What happened to the robot? He was with me, on the – on Earth. Is - is he here? What's he doing? I need to know."
"Mommy likes the robot. He belonged to the glasses man." Igner had spun off into his own mental orbit again. He looked sad. "The glasses man died," he mumbled.
Skreem shook her head.
"I don't know who that is. But I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry too," Igner said forlornly. "When he died it made Mommy sad. And mad. Sad and mad . . ."
"I'm sorry." Skreem put her hands under the covers. Quietly, rolling the IV line under her thumb, she began to work it free. "Where's the robot now, Igner?"
"On this spaceship. With us."
Skreem stopped. The bottom, just for a moment, had dropped out of her world.
"We're . . . we're on a spaceship?" she said, when she found her voice again.
Igner nodded.
"Uh-huh. Mommy's spaceship," he said helpfully.
Skreem blinked.
She was in space. There was nothing under her. There was nothing around her. She was in space.
Don't be scared, she reminded herself. Space was nothing to be scared of. Mr Filmore had gone to space all the time.
Mr Filmore had liked space.
"I have to go tell Mommy you're awake," Igner said suddenly. His thoughts had apparently circled back to his primary purpose again.
"Wait!" Skreem gasped, tears pricking her eyes as the IV was wrenched free. She clutched Igner's hand. "You have to – you have to leave here!"
He stared at her.
"Whuh?"
"You have to get far away from here. Please." Skreem struggled to explain. "If the robot brought me here then . . . then something bad is going to happen. I know it is! And you're – you don't deserve . . . please. Please, run away. Get away from here. Please . . ."
But it was no use. Igner pulled his hand away, whining anxiously. She'd scared him, Skreem realized, but she didn't have time to make it right before he turned on his heel and fled, wailing "Mommmmmmyyyyyy!" as he ran away.
Skreem's hand was still outstretched, reaching for him. For the first time since she'd woken up, she really looked at it.
On the backs of her hands, where she'd been exposed, the scales had died. The surface layer had shed in self-defense, but the new ones underneath . . . they were gray, necrotic, and Skreem knew instinctively that they would never heal.
Slowly, she got out of bed and inched towards the window, the only reflective surface in the room.
Her hands were shaking. She couldn't make them stop.
It was stupid, she knew. Stupid to be afraid of what she'd see. It wasn't like she'd been pretty before. It wasn't like she had anything to lose. And pretty didn't matter, not when you were alive instead.
But some part of her couldn't fully believe that, and that was the part that let out a little cry of pain, when she finally saw her reflection.
She didn't even look like herself, not anymore. Her face was lumpy, gray and disfigured. She was a . . . a dead thing. A freak.
Even Mr Filmore wouldn't know her now.
As she stared at herself, consumed with horror, a tiny, awful thought crept into her brain.
Maybe, it said, that was the point.
Maybe, it whispered, no-one could hide like a dead girl, with a dead face.
There was a click behind her, and an orange flame sparked, reflected, in the glass.
The robot was watching her. He looked as battered and rusty as ever. He was leaning against the door frame, lighting one of his horrible, choking cigars.
If Skreem's appearance took him by surprise, he didn't show it. Maybe he'd been in to look at her while she was asleep - or maybe it had looked even more gruesome while her skin was actually falling off, and the aftermath didn't look so bad to him. Or maybe, Skreem thought, he just didn't care.
Skreem wasn't used to robots, and she had always found the expression on Bender's metal features hard to read. But she thought he looked different than before. His face was colder now, harder . . . more shut down. The light behind his eyes seemed dimmer.
"Time to go, weirdy."
He held out his hand.
Skreem hesitated. But what could she say? No? Don't? Leave me here? She knew what would happen to her if he did.
And besides, she had a promise to keep. It was the only thing that mattered, in whatever was left of her life.
So she took the robot's hand, and shut her eyes, and let him pull her forward again into the blue.