RECLAIMED by Madeleine Roux
Ace Trade Paperback Original | On sale August 17, 2021
Excerpt
More than anything else Senna remembered the bitter silence. At some point during the night, everyone around her on the ship stopped breathing. The soft, human sounds of sleep had mixed with the reverberation of space outside the passenger craft, a lullaby of organic white noise that helped her drift to sleep, but once it was gone, the absence was far louder. Unmistakable.
It was like how she imagined the dead of winter, still and adrift, though Senna had never experienced a true winter herself. Her entire life had been lived in outer space and, more than that, in almost total confinement.
She had taken a pill and gone to sleep surrounded by life, then woke among the dead. Senna had rolled over, tossing restlessly, and felt her hand brush something cold and almost rubbery on the sleeping mat next to hers. Startled by the sensation, she jerked awake, and under the reddish glow of the emergency lights above, she found herself staring down into the open, glazed eyes of her best friend, Mina. The blood trickling from between Mina’s full lips was as crimson as the emergency lights blinking overhead.
Senna gasped, and it was the only sound in the entire ship.
Oh my God. They’re all dead.
“You can’t leave me,” she whispered to Mina. The fear made her tremble; the shock made her grab Mina by the shoulders and shake. Her bones were thin and birdlike, and her head swiveled back and forth as Senna tried to rouse her. Nothing.
A door opened across the room, and Senna whirled to face it, torn between the sudden knowledge that she was alone and now the worse fear that she wasn’t, that whoever was responsible for all this death was still alive and with her. That she was next.
“Senna,” she heard him say. “I didn’t know you were awake.”
Why was she the only one left alive? And why wasn’t he surprised by it? She didn’t know what to say. What could she say?
They’re all dead, every last one of them, except for you and me.
“Hello? Lady? Earth to blondie.”
She blinked, hard, gazing around not at the interior of a doomed passenger craft, but at an impatient barista glaring down into her face. Grabbing her chest, Senna nodded and waved at him, but the memory took its time fading away. One year ago. It still felt like she was living inside that moment, crushed on all sides by it.
I didn’t know you were awake, Preece had said. To her, it still felt like she was deep, deep asleep. Dragged under.
“S-Sorry,” Senna stammered. She hadn’t been outside Marin’s apartment in weeks. The neon haze of Tokyo Bliss Station hurt her eyes. A halo lingered around the barista’s head, the self-driving coffee cart lit with an amber glow. “How much is it?”
“Ten for the drink,” the barista replied. He was tall and thin, tattooed from the collar of his shirt and apron to his mouth. A series of scrollwork arrows pointed to the ring glinting in his lip. “Three for the cup.”
Senna frowned up at him. “Three? Really?”
Rolling his eyes, he shrugged and handed her the mottled brown cup, frothy yellow liquid steaming inside. “Fine, no charge for the cup. Bring something reusable next time, okay? Anything else I can get you?”
Senna stared down into the drink, the familiar color and smell threatening to bring another wave of painful nostalgia.
Anything else, she mused. A new brain? A tranquilizer?
“No,” Senna told the young man. “No, I’m . . . That’s all.”
“Just remember the cup thing,” he muttered, tapping the scanner on the coffee cart counter, waiting for Senna to hold up her wrist and flash the VIT monitor that ought to be there. But Senna still didn’t have one. The barista noticed, the specter of his shaved-off brows looming low over his eyes.
“She will.” Marin to the rescue. “She’ll remember for next time. And I’ll take a sweet drip.”
The barista sighed. “Line jumpers pay double for their cups.”
“Fine.”
Marin, petite and dressed in pristine white patent leather, with a glossy black curtain of hair, leaned across Senna and swiped her own wrist monitor across the scanner. The machine dinged cheerfully, transaction complete. She glared at the thing toiling away behind the barista. AI Servitors, working husks of robots skinned with a kind of human latex mask over a carbon skeleton, were ubiquitous laborers across the stations, on the colonies and on science vessels.
“You know SecDiv is going to roll out lifelike versions of those things soon? With human fucking faces and skin and everything? I guess the regular peacekeeping bots aren’t intimidating enough or something,” said Marin in a disgusted undertone. She shuddered. “So creepy.”
“Will we be able to tell the difference?” Senna asked, more amazed than afraid.
“I’ve seen this dystopian vid, and the answer is no.”
As soon as the coffee arrived, Marin tugged Senna away from the cart quickly, back toward the carbon-black folding chairs and tables clustered on the promenade. The glitzier upper levels of the station rotated above them, rings that rose to impossible heights-financial districts and fashion houses, arcade blocks, cosmetic surgery clinics, augmented-reality parlors and universities . . . Down on their level, close to the bottom of the station and Hydroponica, nothing could be done to control the heat. The food and water operations needed the cooling systems, not the impoverished districts hovering just above them.
So Senna drank her haldi ka doodh in the swelter, accustomed to it. The hot turmeric milk almost scorched her mouth as she took a sip.
“I don’t know how you can drink that stuff,” Marin murmured.
“It’s good,” said Senna, shrugging.
“Blegh. Anyway, sorry I’m late.”
Senna sat across from her at one of the empty tables. The lunch rush crowd swarmed around them in the plaza, drawn to the coffee cart for their midday blast of caffeine. Behind them, six lanes of self-driving cars and a passenger tram funneled workers back toward the main bank of elevators at the center of the district, elevators that ran the full height of the station.
“Don’t worry about it,” Senna said, waving off her apology while swatting at the vapor rising from her milk. She liked the slightly grassy taste of the drink. It made her wonder if it was the kind of earthy smell one experienced during a real Earth summer.
“I do worry,” Marin replied, drinking her coffee. Her nose wrinkled. “Shit. They forgot my Zucros.”
“I can wait.”
“No, I shouldn’t leave you alone again.”
Senna ran her thumb lightly around the softening edge of her disposable cup. She felt stupid and small and unmanageable when Marin said things like that. But Senna also knew she had earned being babied.