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KAIA
The day had been fruitful despite spending most of it being stuck with Alina, who refused to let Kaia out of her sight. Alina’s tour gave Kaia a chance to get her bearings and begin to map out her new “home.” The girl was nosy—nosier than anyone on Riker 109 would’ve dared with a stranger. When Alina had asked about her family, Kaia mumbled something about them all being dead and left it at that. But she used the question as an opening to broach the subject of Upload.
“What about you? I guess you guys all get Uploaded here? Got a bunch of great-great-grandparents waiting for you?” Kaia had asked casually as they sat at the proper, full-sized cafeteria Alina had shown her. Turned out they did exist. Kaia took a small bite of a fry, incapable of stomaching another full meal so soon after breakfast, but unable to resist the temptation of the over-salted oily strips.
“Oh, I wish.” Alina licked burger oil from her lips and scrunched her fingers into a napkin. “We all save for it. Some of us even make it. More of us than out there probably. It can take generations. My parents saved for me, and there’s still not enough. But they’re from the lower decks.” Kaia had to pause, digesting this information. She'd always just assumed colonists were all rich, gallivanting through space in their little bubbles and fucking offtoHeaven when they were ready.
“But you don’t have to worry about that, of course.” Alina slapped her palms together, brushing the salt off her skin to the floor.
Wasting it.
“Hmm?”
“As Commander’s wife you’re guaranteed Upload, of course. Perk of the job.” Alina winked.
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t know. You two must really be in love then, huh?”
Guaranteed. Was Alina exaggerating, or would marrying Orion really be her ticket to Ahton? And if marriage was the only prerequisite… when was the wedding? Kaia’s brain spun in overdrive, and she risked another question.
“How does that work?”
“Well, there’s lots of rules attached. Can’t get suicide approval like normal people, and of course you get to benefit fromColossal’slife extension tech too now. So you’re in for a few hundred years of luxury before you get to Heaven. Pretty great, huh?”
“Yeah… Pretty great.”
No, it wasn’t. It was a dead end. Kaia couldn’t afford to leave Ahton stranded all alone out there for a few hundred years. Kaia chastised herself for letting herself get distracted. She needed to focus on her and Loran’s original plan—that would be her ticket. Only that.
The rest of the day was spent pretending to pay attention to Alina’s tour. When Alina finally dropped her off back at her cabin, Kaia got into bed and grabbed the tablet from under the mattress. She tapped through the footage of Ahton, vids she’d seen a thousand times before, tucking it away for years. He’d been so fucking smart. Even when he was warning her it was time to go home out in that fucking desert, he was being the smart one. She opened a video dated a month before his Upload. In it, he’d still had the strength to wave the little spaceship rocks over his head and make thruster noises as his “colony” came in for a landing.
Kaia had stopped crying about it a long time ago. She wasn’t rewatching the footage again to feel sorry for herself—not even to feel sorry for Ahton. But now she needed the reminder to steel her nerves for what was to come. Dealing with Orion and the things he’d make her do. The things Loran was expecting of her.
Kaia remembered the full-blooded uhyre footage she’d been shown once, from a time when they were still around. They were huge and spiky in all the wrong places, with angled mouths and sharp tongues that leaked black exorin when they spoke in growling baritones. Their skin scarred by cracking, creating jagged lines of lightning that burned bright through the gashes from within. All in all humanoid, but so, so not human.
She would deal with all of it. Outmaneuver all of them. She had to.
She’d already gotten something she could use, which was encouraging. According to Dolores, the cafe owner plying her with “scrambled” eggs that morning, shower water was indeednotsafe for consumption. That must’ve been what had made her sick before. Orion seemed to think it was just her stomach not being able to handle all the new solid food. Kaia decided to keep the root cause to herself. Who knew when she’d need to conveniently fall ill again?
Kaia’s fingertips left prints on the glossy screen as she stroked a finger down the still image of Ahton’s cheek, frozen in laughter before her.
“I’m coming, little brother. Soon.”
* * *
Orion came to fetch her at noon the next day, bursting into her cabin like he owned the place while Kaia was sniffing at another shot glass of coffee—her tentative second attempt.
“Not a knocker, huh?” Kaia fought to keep her voice level, bristling at the intrusion. Orion simply grunted, palm already at his mouth to lick away the pinpricks of blood that enabled him to spoil her privacy.
“Where we going?” Kaia jogged to keep up with his long strides as he led her down the hallway from her cabin. His eyes kept drifting to the spines protruding from the back of his neck, tapering off into sharp little bumps beneath the collar of his shirt.
“Medbay.”
Her ears perked up then. That had to be where the Upload rig was. She wanted to see it with her own eyes, confirm it was real. Check out what state it was in, maybe get some idea of age.
“But wait… Why? You said I wouldn’t need it.”
“Mother’s orders,” Orion said dryly.
