Damocles (40 page)

Loul shook his head, working the flexible wristband in his fist. “Why should you trust me like that? Why should anyone?”

“Because Meg did. They all did. You’re Loul Pell. You’ll go down in history as the man who made first contact with the aliens.”

Cho smoothed the wire netting down along her spine and waited while she lay back. The sleep sack shifted beneath her and Meg resisted the urge to poke her fingers through the netting. Her skin smelled like the antibacterial scrub that made her arms and legs tingle. When she grew still, he placed the adhesive dots underneath her nose and along her cheekbones, on either side of her mouth and one at the jut of her chin. Once she was deeply asleep, BESS would follow those dots to insert the life-support devices. Meg tried and failed not to shudder at the thought of the machine taking over her body once the tranquilizers took effect.

Cho read her mind. “I promise you, as I always do, that the sleep sack will not draw in until you are completely under. There are fail-safes. Trust me.”

“I trust you.” She raised her hand to stop him from injecting the first of the muscle relaxers into her leg. Cho pulled the injection gun back.

“It’s time, Meg. We’re going to hit maximum velocity soon. You don’t want to be awake for that. None of us do.”

“I know. I just…” A tear slid down into her hair and Cho brushed it away. “Is this what it’s going to be like? Is this what we’re going to do? Just go from world to world crashing in, breaking stuff, and blowing out like a tornado?”

“I don’t know,” Cho said, putting the injection gun beside her on the bed. “This mission, this whole idea is insanity. It seems like everything that could go wrong went wrong down there and we still made it out.”

“And left them with what?”

“Information. Knowledge. Questions.”

Meg sighed. “Who says that’s such a good thing?”

“I do.” Cho leaned over her and looked her in the eye. “You do too. We’re agents of change. We’re part of evolution. It’s who we are. I want to show you something.” He rolled back the sleeve of his sleep shirt and showed her a small tattoo on the inside of his wrist. She’d seen it a hundred times, kissed it half that many. Cho rubbed that particular symbol a lot when he was lost in thought.

“My great-grandfather was born in a concentration camp in North Korea, before the unification. He was a fourth-generation prisoner.” Cho traced the symbol, two broken lines running parallel to each other, like two equal signs side by side. “He told my father that all he ever knew was food, fighting, and fucking. That by the time he was born the guards didn’t even have to beat them, they were so ingrained as prisoners. He said the guards would tell them, ‘Where will you go where you’re freer than this?’ and none of them could answer. The camps were all they knew.”

Cho watched Meg trace her fingers over the tattoo as he continued. “When Japan fell, when the radiation couldn’t be contained, he said refugees poured onto the shores by the hundreds, sick and poisonous. He said they’d watch videos of the soldiers shooting them as they staggered out of the water and it didn’t mean a thing. They were nothing, these bodies piling up on the shore. They weren’t part of the prison so they were nothing to them.”

Cho sighed. “The refugees kept coming in such numbers that they needed more guards to protect the coast. They pulled a whole shift of guards off the gate one day, leaving the prisoners they thought they could trust alone, unwatched. Great-grandfather was one of them. He said the idea of escape had never even once crossed his mind, that he had believed that as bad as the camp was there was no place any better. But he said when he saw that gate unguarded, something moved inside of him. Something changed. He said he and eight other prisoners got up without a word and just walked out the door. They had no money. No shoes. Nowhere to go, but they just walked out the door and walked all the way to the border.

“None of them could read or write but they used symbols. He said that the old-timers had a saying, ‘The gate is inside you.’ This symbol, this is that saying. ‘The gate is inside you.’”

“What does it mean?”

Cho picked up the injection gun again and Meg nodded, letting him shoot the warm chemical into her thigh. He rubbed the spot gently. “He told my grandfather who told his son who told me that at that moment he understood that the gate really is inside each of us. Each of us has a door to walk through, maybe a thousand, and if we don’t walk through them, we aren’t alive. We aren’t human until we walk through that gate regardless of what’s on the other side.”

She reached for his arm and brought the tattoo to her lips, kissing it, feeling his pulse against her mouth. “I almost stayed.”

He brought her fingers to his lips. “I know. I’m glad you didn’t. Go to sleep.”

“Okay.”

He smiled at her. “Okay/good.”

The lights dimmed slowly, and Meg took a deep breath, feeling the artificial relaxation moving through her system. Soon she knew the sleep sack would draw up around her, and fine needles would emerge from the sides of the bunk, following the signal in the electronic dots along the nerve netting. Tranquilizers and anesthetics would flood her system. Tubes would go into her body, and BESS would take over the living for her while the
Damocles
hurtled through the blackness of space.

She tried not to think of it as her eyelids drooped and her breathing slowed. With effort, she turned her head just enough to see the locket secured to the wall of her bunk, nestled against a thin swatch of purple cloth.

Thanks as always to my agent and good friend, Christine Witthohn; to my editor, Terry Goodman, who has entirely too much faith in me; to the amazing team at 47North who work so hard, so fast, and make it all look so easy; to my family who have yet to cull me from the herd; to the fabulous Elizabeth Jennings and all my Matera peeps; and of course endless cheers to the best group of friends a writer could ever hope for: Gina Milum, Debra Burge, Tenna Rusk, Christy Smith, Angie Harp, Alecia Cole, Angela Jackson, Karen Karr, Debra McDanald, Gordon Ramey, and all the fearsome Book Thugs and Debra’s Pictures Aficionados. It’s good to be among my own.

S. G. Redling parlayed her degree in English from Georgetown University into various careers including waitress, monument tour guide, sheepskin packer, and radio host. She has leapt from a plane and a moving train, gotten lost in Istanbul and locked in the dining car of a midnight train through the Carpathians. She currently lives in Huntington, West Virginia, and is also the author of the thriller
Flowertown
.