Chapter 33
As the habitat slept, blissfully unaware of the turmoil within our walls, I snuck to the storage room.
The candy box remained, but about a third of another vial lay empty.
Moira was nasty shit. Addictive in a way that left its victims willing to lick the substance off grimy streets if one dared to drop a vial.
When Roys learned the moira was missing, he would go through the vid footage.
If I dumped the synthetic down the drain, I feared what he might do to retrieve even a drop of what he perceived to be the synthetic.
I had to incinerate this shit. The incinerator was outside. Once I left the habitat, Roys’ commlink would go off. He would come looking for me. I had to get to the incinerator before—
Roys stood in the doorway to the barracks.
The first time I entered the storage room, he hadn’t been notified.
He either set an alarm, or he wanted a bigger hit.
His too-wide smile spoke enough. He had taken some of the vial earlier, because he had a giddy look about him, but the high wasn’t what it could be.
“Lucky.” That name from his lips didn’t sit right. He raised a trembling hand. “Let’s put that back. I was going to dispose—”
“Don’t lie.” I opened the pack, revealing the empty spaces.
Roys’ smile didn’t relent, but his eyes had a wild look.
Nothing existed except the vials. He had the same expression so many at the Colony had.
Hunger that ate them away from the inside out.
He had a taste and would do anything to get more.
He was already scratching his arm so fervently that the arm band bunched in the crook of his elbow, revealing the freshly dark veins.
“I delivered this shit. I know what it does, what to look for, the itching, the unusually good moods…” I inched toward the exit. “The viz game, you were high, weren’t you?”
He flinched. “I… I hardly took any… hours before.”
I almost wished he would have lied. Not only because he shouldn’t be on this shit but also we had fun. He had fun with all of us, laughing, messing around, and I thought I saw a new side of him. I suppose I had, but it wasn’t entirely him.
“I should have known,” I growled, holding the pack close to my chest. “I should have seen it. Maybe I did, but I didn’t think you’d actually… I thought you were clean.”
“The number of jokes you made about it says otherwise.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Yes, you did,” he laughed, sounding somewhere between delirious and annoyed.
He had a blaster on him that I kept a wary eye on.
“I’m a junkie, have been for most of my life and will be for the rest of my life.
You knew it from the start, so hand that over and let’s pretend you saw nothing.
I’m not taking it all at once. I know what I’m doing. ”
I had no doubt about that, but…
I went for the doors. His harsh footsteps followed. I could have yelled, could have sent out a message, woken the whole habitat, but that would ruin him. I could ruin him. I should. It was the best option.
I kept running.
Outside the habitat, I sprinted for the incinerator.
The suns had set. My eyes didn’t adjust to the dark, and I tripped.
Roys was there. He had his hands on me, no longer in the way we caught one another at night, a fierceness took him, a desperation unlike any other, that could destroy us.
I got the vials out of the pack as soon as he snatched it.
“Lucky,” he growled. The name never sounded so brutal.
I shoved my elbow into his gut. Roys doubled over, coughing. I got free and bolted, hoping he was too out of it to think of stunning me with that blaster. The incinerator was ahead. Just a little further.
“Stop! I need them. Lucky, please. You don’t understand.
” His pleading didn’t last with us rounding the habitat to see the incinerator.
His voice went low, sinister, menacing. “Fucking stop! It’s none of your business.
You’re maddening, you know that? Seeming to care one minute and telling me off the next. Stop fucking around!”
Roys threw his body forward. His hands grabbed my ankles.
I hit the ground. He was on top of me in an instant.
He reached for the vials, pressing his full weight on my back.
I rolled us, and his legs wrapped around my waist, and an arm around my shoulders.
I pushed off the ground. His weight nearly sent us back down, but I needed a moment.
Just one before he remembered the blaster.
I threw the vials on the ground and shattered them with the heel of my boot. Roys’ hold slackened.
“What did you do?” He fell to his knees. “What the fuck did you do? Why… I… I need that. Lucky, Lucky, I need that.”
I grabbed him under the shoulders at the same moment he dug his hands into the soil.
“Let go. Let me go,” he muttered, yanking out of my grasp. His fingers dug into the earth before I grabbed him again. “What gives you the right? I was going to take two more. Just a few more little hits and I would have been good. You ruined it. You asshole!”
My heart twisted, agonized and screaming.
Roys pivoted, eyes blazing. They weren’t his.
They were of rage and desperation. Standing, he drew back his fist. I should have expected it.
His fist cracked against my nose. There was a horrifying crunch.
Blood poured over my lips into my mouth.
My sight blurred, searing pain and head spinning.
I slumped to my knees, as did Roys, the glass cutting his fingers as he tried to drink what he could as if that would give him the same hit.
I grabbed the blaster from his waist. He didn’t even react. Putting it on stun, my hands trembled as I shot him in the back. Roys collapsed, and all went still. Silent. Like nothing happened. The universe witnessed this catastrophe and kept moving, uncaring of all.
I knelt there, unsure if the tears came from my broken nose or having to see him hunched over in the dirt, glass embedded in his fingers, grief on his face for something that ravaged him. I wanted to fix it all, to tape up his fingers and wipe the grief away with a swipe of my thumb.
“Idiot,” I whispered, unsure of whom I spoke to.
I sank forward to press my lips against the earth and screamed.
The soil muffled the sounds ripping through my aching throat until I couldn’t make them anymore.
Staggering to my feet, I spat blood onto the grass.
My muscles ached as if we had run for ten clicks.
I flexed my fingers, willing them and my tense muscles to unwind, but nothing could fix this drowning sensation.
Lifting Roys onto my back, I lugged him to his room where he had left the door open. I laid him on the bed and went to the bathroom to glimpse my ruin in the mirror. Eyes bloodshot and nose broken, blood stained my face, mixed with dirt and saliva. A mess.
“Idiot,” I whispered.
After using tissues to clog my nose, I returned to Roys where I picked glass from fingers I had come to know well.
Never had they caused me this kind of harm, never had I expected to see them like this, never had I expected to be sitting on Roys’ bed packaging away his secrets like our shared trinkets.
I didn’t think of what would happen tomorrow or the days after.
If I did, I feared I would combust, that all the thoughts and feelings bubbling inside of me would explode and ruin me completely.
Afterward, I wandered into the med bay for healing spray.
“Med spray won’t heal a broken nose, you know that.”
I spun around, stomach sinking at the sight of Arana, her eyes half open and arms hugging her torso. She wore gray boxer shorts and a shirt one size too big. Her hair was a mess. She must have tried and failed to wipe the dried drool from her mouth.
“What happened?” She turned on the cradle. That was the only way I would heal my broken nose entirely, but I hadn’t wanted to risk turning it on. It didn’t make much noise, but the survey team was nearby. Maddy was nearby.
“Got into a little tussle,” I answered.
“With the captain?” She waited for a response I never gave. If that upset her, she said nothing, choosing to point at the cradle. “Get in. That nose will heal in three minutes, tops, and I’m assuming you want to keep this quiet.”
I glanced at the entrance, half expecting Elado to appear and say he saw everything, that Roys would be reassigned, and then I may never see him again…
“What did you see?” I asked, chest tight and palms sweating.
“I saw you dragging the captain to his bedroom… he hit you?” She had a dangerous look about her, as if she would bolt to Roys’ room at any moment to beat the truth out of him. Then beat him more for putting blood on my face.
“It wasn’t…” I couldn’t find the words. Either I told her the truth, or she would make up her own that painted Roys in a poor light. “I can’t explain. It’s personal.”
“Since when did you care about that?” She gave a smile, somehow teasing and kind all at once. Saying that showed too much, to her and me, but I kept ignoring because I already felt like I walked with the weight of the sky on my shoulders.
“It’s not that I care… he’s good in bed and I want to keep him around.”
She laughed, then threw a hand over her mouth to silence the sound. We watched the door. No one came, and we shared a relieved sigh.
“When did the sex start?” she asked.
“I sucked him off in the caves.”
Another laugh, but that one was stifled behind the back of her hand. “You’re okay with sharing that but not what happened tonight?”
I should have been okay with sharing. Telling her the story should have been as easy as admitting to what happened in the caves. But I couldn’t bring myself to utter a word. Roys had his secrets, and now they were mine, too.
She dropped her arms and swung them. “Okay. I trust your judgement.”
“Why? It could be serious, something that could fuck us all over,” I said, half wishing she would change her mind because she should watch out for herself. We all should. Trust broke easier than glass. It was like the tide, coming in to drown when one least expected it.
She knocked her fist against the cradle and said, “Get in, Lucky.”
I hadn’t felt like anyone would ever be on my side in so long that I missed how many people actually were.
After stripping, I threw my clothes at her.
She laid them on the counter while I slid into the cradle.
The healing remedy was thick, like what I expected stepping into jello would feel like, and a peculiar green color.
Why I couldn’t just shove my face in, I never understood because Tareik never dumbed down the answers enough.
Arana gave me a breathing tube. “I’ll clean up the blood.”
“I can get it.”
She left before I could say more. It felt strange trusting her to keep this secret.
My secrets had been my own for too long that they tangled within me like old roots.
Gnarled and convoluted, they had been so unmovable until now, and now that they were loosening, unraveling, coiling in ways I had never imagined, I didn’t know what to do.
I dropped into the cradle, where the world went silent and my thoughts screamed.
I hated being in there, surrounded, suspended in what felt like endless space.
My nose burned. The sound of cracking bones bounced through my skull.
When I resurfaced, my broken nose had healed, and Arana hadn’t returned.
After drying off, I got dressed and saw the habitat cleaned. Arana made sure there was no proof of what transpired, though I had to venture outside and cover the broken glass with soil. When I returned to Roys’ room carrying med spray, he was moving.
Roys’ commlink beeped on his wrist. That noise ruffled the sleeping man enough for him to grumble and swat at it. He accidentally answered the call. I stumbled to the bed, snatched his wrist, and pointed it toward me so whoever was on the line wouldn’t see him passed out in bed.
There was a child, a boy, staring back at me with Roys’ eyes and dark-brown hair curled around his ears.
He held a bear that had seen better days, so worn that it needed to be put out of its misery.
When the boy spoke, there was confusion in his tone, but he used earth speak.
He kept talking, and I didn’t move. Simply stood there a moment longer until the boy called over his shoulder and a woman walked in from another room.
“Hello?” she said, having used an option on her end to translate.
“Hi,” I muttered, flicking my attention between her and the boy. Her hair was dark too, and he had her nose, slightly upturned and round. Her cool white skin contrasted with her black hair falling in waves over her shoulders.
“Where’s my dad?” the boy asked, and that title hit me in the core.
“Malwin,” the woman whispered. Malwin slumped in his chair. “You must be one of Roys’ officers.”
“I am. He’s…“ Still unconscious, and would remain that way for a while based on the times I had been stunned. “Not feeling so great. We had a long day. He didn’t keep himself hydrated. I was in here checking on him when you called. Sorry, I shouldn’t have answered.”
Malwin frowned at the mention of Roys… his father being ill.
He gave the woman, his mother I guessed, a worried look.
She tugged him to her side and gave a calming smile.
Holo frames on the wall behind them were out of focus, but I thought I saw one containing Roys, his bulky form huge compared to them.
“Thank you for letting us know. Have him call when he wakes up, regardless of the time,” she said.
“Will do.”
Malwin was utterly dejected; his bottom lip jutted out in a cute pout. The woman smiled before saying goodnight. The call shut off.
I dropped Roys’ wrist. My stomach twisted into a knot that had me stumbling to the bathroom, where I threw up.