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“Marcus,” Donna complained, as I swallowed.
“No—he’s right,” I said, looking between the two of them. “And I’ll be eating dinner alone tonight. You can leave it in the hall.”
“What happened to subterfuge?” Cepharius asked, the second I was alone in my room.
“It’s not my strong suit. You might have noticed. Give me a bit,” I said, and felt him go away.
I grabbed a change of clothes and went into the bathroom to take my current scrubs and swimsuit off, before making the mistake of looking at the mirror before I hopped into the shower.
I was always surprised by my scars.
I figured I’d have to have them for as long as I’d had breasts, say, since, I was twelve or so, for them to finally feel like they were normal. Now that they were six months old, they’d gone from looking angry to being like brief topographical maps—two horizontal lines across my chest that didn’t meet, like my breasts had been turned into imaginary rivers.
The joke Lena always made, after she’d had hers removed, and before we’d accepted that her cancer was far beyond surgical solutions and chemo, was that she was going to send my future kids to college with all the money she saved on bras and fractional amounts of unused soap.
“Fuck,” I whispered, and then got into the shower.
I wondered if Donna had a nozzle setting for washing away painful memories.
chapter 33
ELLE
Dinner and Cepharius were waiting for me by the time I got out of the shower. I put my dinner on the desk, raked a towel through my hair, and picked up my tablet, my blankets, and my “shopping bag” on my way to the window.
“What is it like to have to bathe to be clean?” he asked, as I retook my position, sitting down in front of the glass.
“I, uh...don’t know?” I guessed, looking back over my shoulder at him. “You all are always under water...do you ever get dirty?”
“Not as you understand it, no.”
“Sounds like that’s another point for the ‘krakens are superior’ camp,” I said, turning the tablet on. I rummaged around inside the bag like I was on a game show, pulling out winning numbers. “Let’s see who we get.” I plugged the first one in. “The cameras upload to the tablet each night, so we’re only going to get their final day,” I warned Cepharius.
“It’ll be better than nothing,” he said, and I could almost sense his attention through the glass.
Everything on the screen was black for a moment, and then a man’s face appeared—he was wearing a helmet, like the rest of the suits. His face had a subtle glow from the lights inside his helmet, and he was a handsome man, with dark hair and brown eyes.
“If you’re seeing this, Mom and Dad,” he started off, sounding solemn.
“Shut the fuck up,” someone off camera said to him, and then a gloved hand hit the back of his head, making it bob, as the suit the camera was attached to changed views.
“We’re on a mission—be serious, Luis,” someone else said.
“I am serious! It’s a goddamned spaceship!”
I knew the feeling.
They trudged together across the plain, the viewpoint camera owner swinging his head from side to side.
I felt a little bit like I was playing Borderlands, or any other number of first-person shooters; I just didn’t have a game controller in my hand.
“And you’re sure it’s safe for us to go in, Haberman?” said another voice on their line.
“No, of course not,” Haberman said with a snort. The camera shifted, and I realized my colleague was somewhere off to the right. “But I’m going to go in. You all can stay outside, if you want to.”
“Glad to see making bad decisions is not an Elle-particular trait,” Cepharius said in my head, and I wasn’t sure if he was teasing or not.
“Shhh,” I hissed at him.
