Chapter 2
TWO
The female walked away.
Jarran glanced up from where he knelt in the dirt, his hands still buried in the warm, dark soil.
He couldn’t read her expression, but her movements were tense, making him think she wanted to be somewhere else.
Most people gave that impression, though he wasn’t sure why.
Her shoes made soft impressions in the dirt, and her bag swung against her hip with each step.
She stopped at the lift doors and he quickly looked down before she could see him watching her.
Then she was gone, and the doors sealed shut behind her with that quiet hiss he heard a hundred times a day.
He looked down at his hands. Soil packed under his fingernails and into the creases of his knuckles.
He flexed them, watching the tendons move.
His hands were large. He knew this because they dwarfed the seedlings he worked with, and because the Baylan-issued tools were too small for his grip and he’d stopped using them many cycles ago.
His hands knew things. They knew how deep to push a seed.
They knew how to separate tangled roots without tearing them.
They knew the difference between soil that could nurture a plant and soil that was deficient.
It was his mind that gave him trouble.
He turned back to the row of broad-leafed plants he’d been tending before the female arrived.
One of them was leaning, its stem bowing under the weight of new growth.
He reached for it, cupped the base gently, adjusted the stake, and pressed more soil around the roots to steady it.
The plant was fine. It just needed support.
Most living things did, when they were growing.
A sharp, clean scent lingered in the air where the female had stood. He breathed it in before it faded and felt an odd pull in his chest, low and dull. Not pain. He knew pain. This was different. More like reaching for something on a shelf just beyond his reach.
She had talked to him. Not at him, the way some researchers had when they ran their scans, narrating his responses into recording devices as though he were a crop yield report. She had talked to him like he might have something to say back. He hadn’t, really. But she’d waited anyway.
Doc-tor. She’d said the word. He’d said it back, pulling it apart carefully because the sounds in this language didn’t always come when he called them.
Some words lived close to the surface. “Good.” “Soil.” “Water.” “Yes.” “No.” Others hid deeper down, and by the time he dragged them up, the moment for speaking had passed.
He’d gotten used to silence. Silence was easier than the frustration of fumbling for words that scattered like seeds dropped in wind.
He finished steadying the leaning plant and moved to the next one in the row.
He scooped out enough soil for the roots to have room, then tucked it into the hole and gently secured it to a stake.
He checked the moisture in the soil with his fingers.
Good. Not too wet. He’d learned the balance without anyone teaching him.
Or maybe someone had taught him, once, and he’d forgotten who.
That happened sometimes. Knowledge without origin. He could identify crops he had no memory of planting. He could feel the humidity shift in a hydroponic bay when the climate controls went off balance. His body carried information his brain had lost the index for.
Footsteps behind him. Two sets, steady and measured. The guards.
Jarran’s shoulders tightened, just slightly, before he recognized the rhythm.
He knew these two guards, who walked him between the plant bay and his room.
These were the ones he thought of as Left and Right, because they always took the same positions flanking him in the corridor.
Left was taller and quieter. Right talked more, though he never said much of importance.
“Patient Nine.” Left’s voice, calm and unhurried. “Shift’s done.”
Jarran looked at the row in front of him. Three seedlings left to plant. They sat in their starter cups on the edge of the bed, roots beginning to curl against the walls of the containers. If he left them until tomorrow, the roots would dry out. They’d be weak.
He didn’t get up. He reached for the next seedling and began loosening its roots from the cup.
The guards didn’t move. They didn’t bark orders. They just waited, standing a few paces behind him with their hands at their sides and their hair catching the grow lights in dull metallic flashes.
Baylans were patient. Jarran had noticed this early on, though he couldn’t remember what “early on” meant in any specific way.
They didn’t shout. They didn’t threaten.
When he’d broken the scanning table in the medical wing, which he only half remembered doing, they hadn’t punished him.
They’d moved him to the agricultural bay and let him put his hands in the dirt, and the noise in his head had gone quiet.
He planted the second seedling. Pressed the soil firm. Reached for the third.
“Very well. Finish up,” Right said. Not warmly. Baylans didn’t do warm. But there was something steady in it. Professional decency. They treated him like a job they took seriously and did well, not like a thing they wanted to get rid of.
He pushed the last seedling into the soil, packed it down, and checked the lean on its stem. Straight. Good. He stood up slowly, unfolding to his full height, and the guards’ eyes tracked upward. He was slightly taller and more muscular than both of them.
Jarran wiped his hands on his work pants and nodded once. Ready.
They walked. Left on his left, Right on his right, through the double doors and into the corridor.
The lighting shifted from amber back to that cool, flat Baylan blue-white.
He blinked to adjust. His eyes preferred dimmer light.
He preferred the plant bay to anywhere else, actually.
Outside of it, the air lost its moist, rich fragrance and went crisp and filtered.
The transition always made him feel a little sad.
If he had a choice, and he didn’t, he’d stay in the plant bay all the time.
His boots were too heavy on the smooth floor. The guards’ footsteps were nearly silent. Baylan males moved like the metal they controlled, precise and frictionless. Jarran moved like what he was: too slow and clumsy for most spaces outside of the plant bay.
They passed a small researcher with enormous yellow eyes, who was of a species that didn’t look familiar, carrying a data tablet.
She looked up at Jarran and looked away quickly, walking a little faster as they passed.
He was used to that. Most of the non-Baylan researchers on board gave him a wide berth.
He didn’t take it personally. A male his size with dark tattoo-like marks running the length of both forearms probably deserved a wide berth.
He didn’t know where the marks came from.
They were just there, inked into his skin, part of a story he’d forgotten.
An implant sat at the base of his skull, a small disc of Baylan-forged metal pressed against bone.
He couldn’t feel it most of the time. It was just there, the way his teeth were there, or his heartbeat.
But sometimes, when dark, chaotic thoughts rose up in his mind and he couldn’t control his body, he felt it hum.
A low vibration, barely perceptible, and then the shapes dissolved.
The tight feeling in his chest unwound. His thoughts, which were…
horrible, settled back into their usual quiet.
He didn’t know exactly what the implant did. He knew the Baylans could activate it with their minds. That was what Baylans did. They controlled metal the way he controlled his hands: by thinking about it. The disc in his skull was just another piece of metal in their field of influence.
He was grateful for it.
That was the part he suspected most people wouldn’t understand.
But the alternative was worse. Sometimes strange, fragmented memories surfaced without warning.
A room with no windows. A voice giving orders in a language he used to speak.
The smell of chemicals that made his stomach lurch.
His hand holding a weapon like an extension of his own body.
And with the fragments came impulses that didn’t belong to the person he was now. Cold impulses. Calculating.
Those moments terrified him. It was like having a second mind flickering to life behind his eyes, looking out through them, assessing exits and weaknesses and threats. The second mind knew exactly what it was doing. It had done these things before, many times, and had been good at them.
When the second mind overcame him, and he lost himself to it, the implant hummed and the second mind went dark. He became himself again. Patient Nine. A male who grew plants and slept in a white room. He’d take that. He’d take a hundred implants if it meant the second mind stayed buried.
They passed a junction in the corridor, and Right keyed open a door. “Your meal is in your quarters.”
Jarran stepped through into his room. It was small, simple, everything white or pale gray.
A bed. A table bolted to the wall. A chair.
A narrow doorway to a washroom. No windows, but a light panel in the ceiling that he could dim when he wanted to sleep.
A tray of food sat on the table. It was a generous portion of protein cubes, sweet grain mash, and some sliced vegetables and fruits from the agricultural bay.
He recognized the fruit and vegetables. He’d helped grow them, and pulled the early fruit so the later ones could ripen fuller.
Growing food and then eating it felt like closing a circle.
Start to finish. One complete thing in a life full of broken pieces.
“Have a good rest,” Right said.
“Thank you,” Jarran said. The words came out easily. Small words were easy.
The door closed. The lock engaged. He didn’t mind the lock any more than he did the implant. Locks meant the boundary between him and the rest of the ship was clear. Inside this room, he was contained. Whatever lived in the dark parts of his mind was contained too.
He ate standing up, because he had been bent over enough today and his body preferred to stretch out.
He washed in the small shower, water warm but not hot.
The Baylans kept everything at precisely regulated temperatures.
Even the towels felt engineered. He dried off, changed into the clean sleep clothes folded on the shelf, and sat on the edge of the bed for a while with his hands on his knees, looking at nothing.
His tail curled around one ankle. It did that on its own sometimes, wrapping around the nearest solid thing. He’d stopped being surprised by it. The tail had its own opinions about comfort.
Eventually, he lay on his back. The bed was the correct size for him, and it was comfortable. He stared at the ceiling and let his thoughts drift to the one interesting thing in his life. The female.
Her hair was brown. But no. It was more nuanced than that.
It was the color of rich soil, and the grow lights had revealed red highlights when she’d bent to look at his plants.
Freckles dusted across her nose, small and scattered, like tossed seeds.
She had light brown eyes, and she had smelled nice.
She’d said her name was Evie and that she would come back tomorrow.
People said things to him all the time. The researchers told him to hold still, extend his arm, look at the light. The guards told him when to walk and when to stop. The Baylan who ran the plant bay told him which crops to tend and which to harvest.
Evie had told him his plants looked wonderful. She’d said it like she meant it. He didn’t know why that mattered, but it sat in his chest beside the clean smell of her and the image of freckles on her skin, and the three things together made the quiet of his room feel slightly less empty.
He closed his eyes. Tomorrow she would come back, or she wouldn’t. People came and went on this ship. Researchers rotated in and out. New patients arrived in the bay and old ones were transferred. Nothing stayed.
But she’d said she would come back. And his plants still needed tending. And both of those things, small as they were, were enough to fall asleep to.