“Hmm? She went to see someone.” The sewing machine clatters back to life, the bobbin spinning, and she waits for it to stop.
“But how did she get out the door?”
Father holds up the edges of curtain to match them, places them under the needle, and the machine resumes drumming.
She repeats her question. Instead of answering he uses Mother’s scissors to trim some thread, then says, “Tell me where you went this time, Zucchini. You must have walked for miles.”
“Did Sybil really let Mother out?”
He rises and walks to her berth.
“Take these.”
His voice is calm but his eyes scatter. In his palm are three of Mother’s SleepDrops.
“Why?”
“They’ll help you rest.”
“Isn’t three a lot?”
“Take them, Konstance, it’s safe. I’ll wrap you in your blanket like a pupa inside its chrysalis, remember? Like we used to? And you’ll have answers in the morning, I promise.”
The drops dissolve on her tongue. Father tucks her blanket around her legs and sits again at the sewing machine and the needle starts up again.
She glances over the railing at Mother’s bunk. Her rumpled blanket.
“Father, I’m afraid.”
“Want to hear some of Aethon’s story?” The sewing machine rumbles and dies. “After Aethon escaped the miller, he walked all the way to the rim of the world, do you remember? The land ran down to an icy sea, and snow blew out of the sky, and there was only black sand and frozen seaweed, and not a scent of a rose for a thousand miles.”
The lamp flickers. Konstance presses her back against the wall and strains to keep her eyes open. People are dying. The only way Sybil let Mother out of the compartment was if—
“But Aethon still hoped. There he was, trapped inside a body that wasn’t his, far from home, at the very edge of the known world. He stared up at the moon as he paced the shore, and thought he could see a goddess spiraling down out of the night to assist him.”
In the air above her berth Konstance sees moonlight shimmer on plates of ice, sees Aethon-the-donkey leaving hoof prints in cold sand. She tries to sit up but her neck is suddenly too weak to support the weight of her head. Snow is blowing across her blanket. She raises a hand to it, but her fingers fall away into the dark.
Two hours later Father leans over the rail in the NoLight and helps her out of bed. She’s groggy and muddled from the SleepDrops, and he’s shoving her legs and arms into what looks like a deflated person—a suit that he has fashioned from the bioplastic curtain. It’s too large around her waist, and has no gloves, only sleeves sewn shut at the ends. As he zips her in, Konstance is so sleepy that she can hardly raise her chin.
“Father?”
Now he’s fitting the oxygen hood over her head, pulling it down over her hair and sealing it to the collar of the suit with the same seal-tape he uses to seal drip-lines in the farm. He turns it on and she feels the suit inflate around her.
Oxygen at thirty percent, says a recorded voice inside the hood, directly into her ear, and the white beam of the headlamp switches on and ricochets across the contents of the compartment.
“Can you walk?”
“I’m boiling in here.”
“I know, Zucchini, you’re doing so well. Let me see you walk.” Droplets of sweat on his forehead catch the light of the headlamp, and his pallor looks as white as his beard. Despite the fear and fatigue she manages to take a few steps, the strange, inflated sleeves crinkling. Father squats and picks up Konstance’s Perambulator, and with his other hand also manages to pick up the aluminum stool from Mother’s sewing table, and carries them to the door.
“Sybil,” he says, “one of us is not feeling well.”
Konstance leans against his hip, hot and frightened, and waits for Sybil to dispute, to argue, to say anything but what she does say.
Someone will be here in a moment.
Konstance can feel the gravity of the SleepDrops pulling at her eyelids, her blood, her thoughts. Father’s wan face. Mother’s unfolded blanket. Jessi Ko saying, And if Sybil detects something wrong with you…
Oxygen at twenty-nine percent, says the hood.
As the door opens, two figures in head-to-toe biohazard suits come clomping down the corridor through the NoLight. They have lights strapped to their wrists and their suits are inflated from within so that they look frighteningly large and their faces are lost behind bronze-mirrored face shields. Behind them trail long hoses wrapped in aluminum tape.