Chapter 5 #13
I launch from the wall with all the strength of my legs, so I’m torpedoing out of the tunnelway.
As I go, I grab on to the edges of the panel and yank it to my chest. It’s too much for it to bear.
With a wrenching sound, the panel comes free and I soar out of the yellow portal, into the full gravity of the Endeavor. I crash to the floor.
“I am having difficulty interpreting what just happened,” OS says. “Did you have an accident?”
“Yes, I had an accident,” I manage to choke out, still clutching the panel to my chest. “I’m okay, though, OS. We’ll have to find a way to replace this right away.”
“I will have Rover print a new panel,” OS says. The yellow portal starts to close but can’t make a seal—the ragged shard where the panel was once attached has bent into the opening.
Whose blood is on this? is what I want to ask. Instead I say: “This is significant enough damage that I want to let Kodiak know about it.”
“I understand the reasons for your precaution, but this damage is only cosmetic,” OS says. “The ship can operate fine for the few hours it will take Rover to print and mount a new panel. This is nothing you need to be concerned about.”
“I definitely need Kodiak in on this,” I say, already heading toward the orange portal.
“Are you concerned about the polycarb quantities?” OS asks. “Don’t worry. We won’t run out. The printing material is formed from the hydrocarbons you emit into the toilet, after they’ve been purified and deodorized.”
The portal is closed. “Kodiak,” I say as I pound on it. “Kodiak, I need you!”
There’s no answer. I’m not even sure if he can hear my hammering through the thick material. I kick the orange portal, time and again. “Kodiak!”
Maybe he’s dead asleep.
I examine the panel clutched in my hand, its corner covered in dried blood, blood that came from an impact hard enough to damage ship-grade material. A fatal impact?
I cup my hands against the door. “Kodiak, please. Did you . . . bleed in my half of the ship?”
Now I’ve given my suspicions away to OS. I wait for Rover to race in, to jolt me or hammer me or stick a syringe in me, I don’t know.
But OS is quiet. The ship is quiet, except for the womblike hum of its engines.
I hear thudding from the other side of the orange portal, and stagger to my feet as it opens.
Kodiak stands at the other side, in his sleeping shorts and tank top, hair sticking up in five different directions.
It would be adorable if it weren’t for the fury in his eyes.
“Why are you disturbing me? I told you not to disturb me unless it was an emergency.”
Then he sees my expression, and the fury drains.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 71 *-_
Kodiak’s lab is spare and gray. We hunch over a worktable while he rotates the damaged panel in his hands.
Today he smells like motor oil. It’s sort of exotic-erotic; my Cusk life has always kept me far from engines.
“Blunt force damage,” he says. “And yes, I think you’re right, this is blood.
Look how deep it is in the silver grooves, right where the panel was torn.
It dried out a long time ago, and is black in the places most exposed to the air. And see this, here!”
Kodiak’s excitement is unsettling. He’s pointed to a chunk of something that is not blood, but is from a body. A piece of dried flesh. Hair attached, same walnut color as mine. “Have you tested this sample?” he asks.
“I don’t have that kind of equipment. Wait. Do you have that kind of equipment?”
Kodiak nods. “Dimokratía installed it for diagnosing what might have happened to Minerva. It’s not too sophisticated, but I could get some information.”
“What good would that do us?”
“That’s how we determine for sure that the blood doesn’t come from you or me,” Kodiak says.
“I’d remember hitting something that hard,” I scoff, rubbing my head. No dents.
“I’d also think that you’d remember taking off into space, and yet you have no recollection of that, either.”
I cross my arms. “How dare you!” I’m not sure if I’m playing the aristocrat offended by a plucky peasant, or if I am the aristocrat offended by a plucky peasant.
Kodiak continues to examine the panel. His moves are surprisingly delicate, like he’s easing a precious painting out of its frame.
“I can’t picture the panel’s position in the engine room passageway,” Kodiak says.
“Could a spacefarer in zero g get up enough speed to really bang their head on it? Is that possible?”
“First of all, who the hell is this hypothetical spacefarer? Second, probably not. I can show you now if you want to see.”
“I know how observant you are,” Kodiak says. “I trust your description.”
Is he referring to me watching him? “I don’t need your compliments,” I huff. I immediately regret the tone. I’m scrambling to get back my power, in the stupidest and shallowest ways.
“We’ll need a sample of your blood,” Kodiak says.
“I’m A-positive,” I say.
“I should have figured you’d be A-plus, Ambrose Cusk,” Kodiak says dryly. “But I can test for more than just the type.”
He draws a syringe out of a drawer, wraps an elastic around my arm, and delicately inserts the needle. We watch my blood rise in the clear cylinder. He removes the needle, and I treat the puncture with peroxide and a bandage.
“We don’t want a space infection,” Kodiak says.
“Space infection. Yes. No. That would be no good,” I stammer. I’m living inside the pressure of Kodiak’s fingers on the soft inner side of my forearm.
“Luckily we have automated systems to do most of the work,” Kodiak says. He prepares a slide with my blood and inserts it into a slot, tapping at a console until the tests are underway.
He takes out another syringe and raises his own sleeve.
Unlike my uniform, his acrylic jumpsuit doesn’t bunch up loosely.
He tries twice, and then stands up, facing away from me while he removes the jacket.
He’s wearing an undershirt, but it rides up with the jacket, and I have a view of his lower back, from pelvis up along the spine, surrounded by two rises of muscle.
The undershirt pulls as high as the beginnings of his shoulders before falling back down, the red nylon overshirt heaping to the floor.
He returns to the chair, goes about wrapping the elastic around his elbow. He flails with the syringe, like an amateur junkie.
“Here, let me,” I say.
“You are trained in phlebotomy?” he asks sternly.
“Yes, Kodiak, I know how to extract blood,” I say. “We don’t just study poems and queer theory in Fédération. Look away if you need to.”
He snorts, clenching his fingers, the veins standing out along his thick forearms. I insert the syringe, extract his blood. His flesh is warm under my hand.
He watches while I prepare his slide. My fingers are less steady than his were, but as I place the polycarb overlay on his blood sample, the two crimson circles look indistinguishable.
My blood and Kodiak’s, next to each other.
Why does that bring me near tears? Maybe I haven’t been sleeping enough.
The screen lights up. My blood is A-positive, just as I remembered. Kodiak comes out O-negative. “You’re a universal donor,” I say. “I guess I’m the lucky one.”
“Let’s try not to need any blood transfusions at all,” Kodiak says.
“Agreed.”
He holds the panel over a fresh slide and taps it, as gently as a spoon against a soft-boiled egg, until a single flake of the dried blood falls. He places the sample in the machine.
We watch the numbers on the display circulate. I take the moment to live in the warmth of Kodiak, the memory of that flash of lower back. I want to place my hand over his. I want more than that.
The numbers continue to tick over, but then the screen glitches and returns to my results. The DNA map is just the same.
“What happened?” I say. “Where are the new numbers?”
For a moment Kodiak is silent and still, scrolling up the information and back down. Then he taps the screen and looks at me with those long-lashed topaz eyes. “Ambrose, this is not your result. This is the blood from the corner of the panel.”
He flips back and forth between the screens, passing through his different numbers on the way between my blood and the dried blood on the panel. There’s some variation, but the DNA mostly matches up.
“Well, that makes zero sense,” I say.
“I agree with you there,” Kodiak says, leaning back and stretching his arms, making a net of his fingers to cradle his head. “By most accounts, this doesn’t make sense. The only way it can start to make sense is if we assume that this is your blood.”
“I never hit my head on that panel. I’d never even been behind the yellow portal until today.”
“Perhaps hitting it was what caused your early memory loss.”
“No chance.”
Kodiak’s eyes narrow. “There’s no reason to fight me, Cusk. We’re on the same side here.”
My ribs knit tight. Instinct tells me we are not on the same side. That the ship itself is not on my side. That Minerva is the only one on my side, and she’s still millions of miles away. I wait for the walls to slam closed, for outer space to rip the parts of me that remain into nothingness.
Whatever regal bearing I have left vanishes. My head drops into my hands.
“Ambrose,” Kodiak barks. “Man up.”
Man up. “Let’s not pretend that something terrible isn’t going on here, okay?” I say. “You don’t get to treat me as inferior because I happen to be freaked out.”
Though most of my vision is blocked by my knees, I can sense Kodiak standing close, his fingers drumming against his thighs. I figure he has no words to say in the face of my pathetic weakness, my unmanly display. Ugh. Is “man up” some Dimokratía phrase?
“You said ‘we’ are on the same side just now,” I say to the fabric over my knees, moist from my shallow breathing. “You don’t remember the launch either.”
I blearily peer up to see that Kodiak’s shut his eyes, his jaw clenched.