Chapter 5
Chapter five
Anna
Anna jolted up in bed, gasping for air. “Nory? Tilly? Run!” She flailed her arms, screaming. "NOW! Paul is coming!"
Her eyes flew open to an empty, silent room.
Where was the danger? Every part of her was on edge.
Breathing heavily, she pulled herself up.
Her belly was still, for once. Her baby girl must be asleep inside.
Nothing was happening. Quiet pressed in all around her.
A nightmare. She pressed a palm to her cheeks. There wasn’t any real danger.
The lights were turned low, designed to mimic nighttime, but they retained enough illumination to see.
The room given to her in the spaceship was small, only containing the bed, a nightstand, and white, indifferent walls.
Half-finished baby outfits were strewn around the room, attempting to add color and coziness to the space.
The blankets were twisted around her torso. She kicked them off. Too dang hot.
Sweat rolled down her back. There was a slight humming in the sterile room. The sound raced across her skin as she breathed deep. “Well, I’m awake now. What time is it?”
She glanced at the electronic clock on the nightstand. Three a.m.? Her body slumped back down. Time was irrelevant on a spaceship, anyways.
She leaned back against the headboard, still shaking. That nightmare felt so real. Reliving one of the worst days of her life.
Paul, lying dead after Simon shot him, his vacant eyes staring at the ceiling.
“No. No.” Anna shuddered. “That is all in the past.”
The worst part was in the nightmare, it felt like Paul was blaming her, somehow, for winding up dead, even though it was he who decided to attack Nora. Which was nonsense, but she still felt guilty.
Probably because, deep down, a very big part of her was grateful to Simon.
Did that make her a bad person?
The image of Paul’s dead body flashed across her mind. Anna whispered to the wall, “No more, Paul. You did it to yourself.”
Inside her belly, her baby girl woke up and started kicking.
Anna pressed in on the kicks, mumbling. “Ow, baby girl. Knock it off. That’s not nice.
Kicking me . . .” Her hand hovered over her stomach.
Paul’s dead eyes flashed in her mind again, along with the times that his foot had connected with her legs if she was moving too slow in the bakery.
Anna frowned further. With Paul dead . . . am I a widow? Technically she was. That’s what happened when your husband died, right? Regardless of the cause?
Regardless of if you loved him.
She pressed her head back and closed her eyes, feeling her baby flip-flop in her stomach.
Keeping busy was the answer. Her hands itched to do something. Anything. Anna attempted to pull her legs up to her torso, but the baby girl got in the way. She soon gave up, leaning against the wall instead.
Who, really, was going to tell her no if she wanted to bake? Even at three a.m.? Paul’s face flashed in front of her again. Not him. Not for damn sure. Her hands balled up in her lap. “No one’s gonna tell me no like that again.”
That, more than anything else, made her get up. She reached out to touch the impossibly smooth wall, which was vibrating slightly from the engines powering the spaceship. Nausea tugged at her as she got up and waddled to the edge of the room before walking out the door to the main hall.
Outside her room, the hall lighting on the ship was also turned low, designed to mimic the nighttime cycles of the planet. Across the white hall, Nora and Simon would be asleep, with Tilly in a connecting room right beside them.
Well, Simon wouldn’t be asleep, but he never left Nora’s side during the sleeping hours, even if androids didn’t need to sleep.
Anna walked carefully, awkwardly stepping so she wouldn’t wake them up. The window in the hallway before the common room was outside their doors. Out the window, the stars and the sun were the brightest thing in the room, even with a darkening film applied.
After a moment of looking outside, she walked the hall to the kitchen.
The lights came on as she entered, cameras overhead still lit up and turned on.
It was as empty as she expected. No one really seemed to ever bake in here; the food the androids consumed was mostly reheated meals from the facilities back on Mars.
Ten minutes later, she was humming. Her hands were thick in dough and flour was on her cheek.
On the wall, she put the feed to Mars and stared at the terraformed surface while she kneaded the dough.
The familiar movements felt good. Her shoulders dropped as she kneaded.
She tried to space her experiments in between what she knew the androids liked.
There was a particular sugar cookie that went faster than anything when she made it.
After the crackers, she would make a batch of that as well.
She sang a nursery rhyme to the dough, “Pat the cake. Pat the cake. Baking my cake.” Then she smiled. “I got my baby girl. Baby girl. Baby girl.”
She had her baby girl and no Paul telling her what to do.
Soon, cookies and crackers lined the counter. Anna smiled. She made enough dough to feed the whole ship for tomorrow. She probably wouldn’t sleep, or attempt to, until the next sleep cycle but . . . she picked one of the cookies up and arranged it artfully on the tray. “This looks great.”
Next she started on some brownies. Her steps tapped on the floor, swaying in place. “Baby girl, baby girl. I’ll make you a . . . oh!”
Anna bumped into a glass bowl, half filled with dough.
It slid off the counter, tumbling toward the floor.
She lunged, but not before the bowl shattered on the floor.
A sharp, slicing pain shot through her as she grasped broken glass.
Immediately she started to bleed, hot blood against the cold floor.
She turned her palm over and saw a piece of glass embedded deep in inside. “Oh no!”
Immediately nausea rose up. Stars in her vision followed. She was bleeding. A lot.
The room felt woozy staring at the deep cut. She looked away, feeling around the cut with her other hand and pulled the shard out. Blood dripped down her hand and on the floor. It bled everywhere as she grabbed a rag and wrapped it around her palm, dirtying the white countertop.
Anna reached for another towel. She needed to clean this, quickly, before the cameras noticed. But she felt so woozy, and red was already coming through the towel. Then the nausea came on even stronger. She hunched over. “Oh, no. Oh, no.” She tossed down the blood-soaked rag and ran to the sink.
She glanced up at the cameras overhead. Knowing they were there didn’t matter, as a second later, the nausea won and she threw up in the sink, dirtying the kitchen she had tried so hard to keep clean.