Nona stared up at the sky. She felt movement next to her. The Captain was looking at her, eyes open: normal eyes—the whites covered in little red spindles from where the veins had burst, the ring around the iris deeply black, the iris deeply brown. One of her hands was clasped to the back of her neck, as though it hurt her.
“Harrowhark?” said the Captain doubtfully.
Nona looked up at the sky. She was very tired—or at least, there was a tiredness happening to her: a huge, neighbouring exhaustion that lived, when she sought it, beneath her neck. It was hard understanding how her body fit together. She had to deliberately think about its different parts, when she wanted to feel a sensation.
She closed her eyes. “No,” she finally admitted. “And I never was.”
JOHN 1:20
IN THE DREAM they breached what he called the reception area and were confronted with a series of long corridors. At intervals down the hallway were more tidal heaps of furniture and stone—and bones, but the bones had been moved by the water and settled far away from where they had originally fallen. Bones and bodies and parts of bodies. He lingered by them and he said, “Those shitty fucking barricades,” and caressed the edges of desks and broken chairs. There were huge black scorch marks on everything, fragments of metal and bone embedded in the walls. Pockmarks everywhere. Little round holes. It was barely traversable.
After a while he hesitated and some of the bones got up. They assembled themselves into wet, splinterous heaps. Chips flew out of the walls and out of the water and they were perfect again, softly white and glowing in the darkness. They scrambled past him and her and started clearing a path. A slow way to do it, but he didn’t seem to mind.
He said, We couldn’t get anywhere near political conferences anymore, physical or online. But the guy I was walking around was still invited, so I got in for free. He was my eyes and ears. Nobody was arguing about the FTL plan at that point, Wave One was in place and getting ready for final international inspections. They were all arguing about us. How to deal with us. Who should deal with us. Always thought it was funny when I had to puppet my guy into doing speeches about how his government thought I should be brought to justice. I didn’t mind.
He said, What I did mind was the fucking state of the first wave of evacuee ships. I saw the inspection reports, I saw the questions about second-wave logistics, about exactly who was getting to ride those ships out of here. None of them could pass any kind of muster. See, back in our headquarters we thought the worst they would do was set up some kind of fucking pay-for-preference system to get the richest bastards out first and save everyone else for second wave, maybe third. I can’t believe how naive I was. It was M— who came to me one night looking like she’d seen a fucking ghost. Apparently A—’s little brother and her nun had been obsessing over bank movements and assets. Going crazy checking manifests. M— said, I’ve worked out what they’re doing. I’ve worked out the plan. I thought they’d merely make people pay to see who got to jump the queue, but there is no queue.
She said to me, John, there is no second wave. There is no third. They’re escaping. The trillionaires have converted everything to material resources. Half these passenger manifests are made up, these aren’t real people. They’ve fucked everyone, even the governments. There’ll be one single ship of internationals who think they’re on Wave One to Tau Ceti, and everyone else will be corporate, or have bought a ticket, or be useful. They’re leaving us to die.
I had to have her breathe into a bag for a while, because she hated it when I tried to fix her anxiety attacks with necromancy. When she could talk I was just all, Are you sure.
She said, John, there they go!!
And I said, Not as long as I have breath in my body.
At this point the skeletons had freed some debris from an entryway and they could both get through. It led to an equally tumbledown, fire-smoked wreck that had not been improved by spending a few weeks underwater. More bodies everywhere—lots of them still with meat on their bones—another assemblage of furniture and a big cracked table with more holes in it. He said, “God, this kitchen’s fucked.” He stepped over bodies as his skeletons fought him a path toward a set of cupboards, and he squatted in front of them and opened a cupboard, and more foetid water came out. She was feeling light-headed by then. Eventually he returned with his arms full of cans, saying, “Hey—peaches in syrup.” He did not seem to know how to open the can. One of his skeletons came over and he fused their fingerbones into a kind of saw, and he sawed through the top of the can. In that dank and awful room they ate peach halves together, slippery and yellow and squashy, with their fingers. They were so sweet she stopped tasting them after the first bite, but they made her feel better.