13. Going Home
Going Home
Jude
Lieutenant Jones and I sat shoulder to shoulder, hunched over a pair of headphones stretched between us while the translator spoke over the short-wave radio to the only survivors we had regular contact with on Earth.
She had arrived that morning from Station Two with a handful of other specialists. The translator—a short woman with tanned skin and dark eyes hidden behind oversized round frames—leaned toward us.
“He says they have no contact with anyone besides us,” she said quietly. “Only occasionally.” Then, she straightened and responded to the man’s voice crackling through the radio.
The bunker was somewhere near the Mediterranean.
Of all the surviving groups we knew about, they seemed to be doing the best. The fallout hadn’t hit their region the way it had devastated other parts of the planet.
Still, they waited below, like everyone else.
We checked in with them whenever the signal allowed while they conducted their own experiments on surface survivability.
“There’s only one more,” Elias said, dropping his half of the headphones. “The team from Station Two told Commander Zhang it’s difficult to reach them, so it might take a few days.”
“That’s fine.” I didn’t care, the deeper we got into this, the crazier I considered myself. After dreaming of Solace all night, I’d woken up and run straight to the lab. We’d run a few more diagnostics on SOL, rebooted the system to be sure, and then started working through the translators.
The signal from Earth had only grown stronger and this time we’d been able to narrow its location to the western corner of the United States.
There were survivors there, and if there were survivors—and SOL could read their heat signature—then maybe the radiation was starting to lessen.
Maybe, just maybe, we were seeing the first signs of life again.
Regardless of my nightmares and Solace’s ghost, it gave me hope. Still, my shoulders were wound tight beneath my uniform. I set my cap aside and dragged a hand over my face. “One more.”
“One more,” Elias echoed. “Want to head to the garage afterward and help Kit with the ship?”
I considered it. Kit was Elias’s wife, and a mechanic.
Together, they had been building some kind of experimental craft.
Supposedly it was almost ready to fly, but they’d been saying that for years.
I wasn’t much of a wrench, but anything beat reheating my ration and staring at the ceiling all night.
“Sure.” I took the headphones from him. “I’ll finish this and meet you down there.”
“You sure?” he asked, already gathering his things. He tossed his tablet into a worn leather messenger bag.
“Yeah. Maybe see if you can swindle Marcia into giving you a couple beers on the way.”
He snorted. “Yeah right. I’m not as pretty as you. Last time she swatted me with a spoon and shoved me out the door.”
I shrugged, a crooked grin tugging at my mouth. “Worth a try.”
He laughed and slung the bag over his shoulder. “See you in a bit.”
“See ya.” I turned back toward the front of the room where the translator was sitting at the console.
She caught my eye and gave me a thumbs-up.
She was speaking rapidly in Mandarin, static crackling through the room as someone answered on the other end.
Her expression shifted into a quick flash of surprise, then she pulled the headphones away and pointed at me.
“They may have found your signal,” she whispered. “An American woman.”
My heart kicked hard against my ribs. “What else do they know?”
She shook her head and slid the headphones back on. I listened to the exchange for another moment before she stood and walked over. “Not much,” she answered. “But they were in contact with her a few minutes ago.”
My pulse was racing now.
“Is it possible,” she added carefully, “to connect us through their signal? So we can hear her directly?”
“Yeah.” I dropped my boots to the floor. “That’s possible. SOL alert Commander Zhang she is needed in the control room.”
“Calling Commander Zhang,” SOL hummed beside me.
The translator glanced between us as she continued speaking into the radio, relaying instructions to the bunker as a few of her team worked around her.
“Tell them to leave their transmitter open,” I added. “Anything she sends will pass through their system. We’ll catch it on the relay.”
After a few moments, Commander Zhang burst through the doors and slid into the chair beside me. “Found it?”
“Think so. Can you do it?”
Commander Zhang was a small woman with a narrow frame, but could kill anyone with only a look. She was also the best, at literally everything. She had been in the Royal Navy in her previous life.
She rolled her eyes. “I’m offended.”
I smirked as the translator spoke rapidly into the microphone, and the voice on the other end cracked back, sharp bursts of syllables breaking through the static. The Commander adjusted dials on the board. “They need to leave the channel open,” she barked.
The translator relayed the message, and for a moment nothing happened. Just the low hum of the station and the faint hiss of the radio line stretching across the galaxy. My hands curled into fists on the edge of the console.
“Signal strength?” I asked.
“It’s fine.”
The translator lifted one finger towards us. “They are trying.”
A burst of interference screamed through the speakers and everyone in the room froze. Then, a sound slipped through the noise. It was faint, and it sounded like…
Music?
Commander Zhang frowned, leaning closer to the console. “I don’t hear anyone.”
But the melody grew clearer in my head, piano notes drifting through the fuzz like they were rising from underwater. My chest tightened.
“I know that song.”
She gave me a strange look, and reached for the dial, but I got there first. I held it tight. “No, I know that song.” I turned the volume up, until I was certain of what I was hearing.
Everyone held their breath—the room fell silent, as did my heart. There was no way. No fucking way. I stood abruptly from the desk, chair toppling behind me. My hand dragged over my head before I pressed my face into the crook of my elbow, trying to stop the tears threatening to fall.
It wasn’t her. It couldn’t be.
“Captain?” Commander Zhang turned in her chair, watching me carefully. “What is it?”
And then the radio cut out. The room exploded back into motion. Technicians leaned over their consoles while the Commander barked out orders, scrambling to reestablish the connection.
“Signal loss!”
“Try the relay again!”
“Boost the antenna!”
I couldn’t breathe.
I stumbled toward the door, slamming my badge against the scanner as I clutched at my chest.
The door hissed open.
And I ran.
I didn’t know where I was going—only that I was trapped in a floating metal tube thousands of miles away from her.
I could run for hours and still end up in the same damn place.
Nowhere. My boots screeched against the metal floor as I skidded to a halt.
I bent over, hands braced on my knees, trying to catch my breath. Or maybe to vomit.
I wasn’t sure.
I was having a fucking heart attack. Solace was—Solace was on Earth. Alive. She had to be.
“Captain, I am alerting the medical bay that you are in need of assistance,” SOL said calmly beside my head. “Take deep breaths through your nose—”
I shoved the floating orb away from my face and dropped to my knees. My stomach lurched violently, I was going to be sick.
“Captain Ransom requires medical assistance,” SOL continued. “Ring four, bay five.”
“SOL, mute!” The orb fell silent as I braced my hands on the floor, breathing hard, staring down at my shaking fingers.
Alive.
She was alive.
I considered myself to be pretty level-headed—at least when it came to my job.
I’d invented SOL in my bedroom with supplies gathered over the years from garage sales, thrift shops, and Mr. Mikey, my tenth-grade science teacher.
Boot camp had been less pleasant, but I’d still managed to keep my cool even while standing half-naked in the pissing rain for hours on end.
I could take a beating. I’d even survived implementing SOL’s software in Echelon One and every single station alongside Elias, who never shut up, and was a perfectionist to a fault.
But Solace’s song playing on repeat throughout the conference room had me grinding my jaw and tapping my fingers against a useless mug of tea.
Elias elbowed me again, shooting a sharp look at my hand. “Fuck off with that,” he whispered. I flipped him off, because apparently I was fifteen again.
My breaking point had finally come—nearly a decade after the end of the world. In the form of my best friend who’d embedded herself so deeply into my marrow that even the thought of her being alive had landed me in the med bay, working through my first ever panic attack.
Commander Zhang was coordinating with the next shift’s translator to establish a new connection.
The timing was off and our signal was delayed.
Not to mention the small thread of contact we’d managed to maintain over the years was riddled with interruptions.
It could be days before we reached Solace again.
And goddamn it, I just wanted to hear her voice.
Part of me knew it was crazy—that I might be hearing things that weren’t there.
Creating ghosts out of my own haunting. There was another part of me, small but stubborn, that was so certain I’d be willing to bet everything on it.
On her. On the piece of my life before—the piece I’d lost too many times already.
“Lieutenant Jones,” Commander Zhang snapped without looking up, “get Ransom home, will you? He needs sleep. Drug him, knock him out—whatever needs to be done so that he sleeps.”
“With all due respect, Commander,” I said, “I’m not fucking going anywhere.”
She tilted her glasses further down her nose. “We don’t know that it’s her, Captain. And even if it was, we have zero way of maintaining constant communication.”
“It’s her.”
“And if it is?” she replied coolly. “What exactly is it you plan to do?”
Bring her home.
Home was such a trivial word these days. Nothing was home since the Scourge.
Solace was home though, and more importantly, she was mine.