The Widow Read online

  I pretended to go to sleep early, hoping they would take the opportunity to discuss me and I might learn something useful, but all they talked about was the weather. Although I’d spent a good deal of the day trying to find some change in the constant grey of the sky and seen nothing, Sebastian seemed sure that a major storm was looming. Julian’s voice sounded tense and worried. He never helped Sebastian and Quince with the sled and seemed as ignorant about the ice as I was, so I gathered his fear was more from inexperience than actually danger. As a doctor, I imagined he didn’t leave the city very often, if at all. Quince, on the other hand, usually seemed as comfortable out here as I imagined a person could be. That night, however, I listened to his tossing and turning and wondered what could have happened in his young life to give him such nightmares.

  In the morning, with only a few fitful hours of sleep behind me, I saw what I assumed was the reason for his concern. The sky, normally so bland, was boiling with great black clouds stretching in a distinct line across the horizon and moving toward us at an alarming clip. I expected us to go back inside to wait it out, a prospect that seemed horrible until I realized we weren’t going to.

  When we were all settled into the sled, Quince and Sebastian pulled sheeting from a storage area at the base of the mast and fastened it to either side of the hull, making a sort of half roof which probably would have done a better job of protecting us if we hadn’t been doubled up in the seats. As it stood, I was forced to hunker down between Sebastian’s legs, with only the top half of my face exposed. The wind was fierce and even colder than it had been and for once I was grateful for Sebastian’s looming bulk pressed up against my back. He was warm, at least, and I felt safe. He yelled some instruction to Quince and pulled free our anchor line, sending us forward with a jolt that knocked my breath away.

  In sharp contrast to the others, this ride was in no way monotonous. We raced along the ice as if pursued by the hounds of hell, cutting a hard tack and running right along the leading edge of the clouds. The storm pressed down on us, so that the tip of our sail seemed to slice a visible wake through the lower reaches of the clouds and it began to sleet.

  A large chuck of ice, more likely hail than sleet, clipped my forehead, stinging like a whip, and I flinched back. The whole sled seemed to flinch with me, sliding to the right. I could feel Sebastian lean the other way, compensating, and knew without being told that I’d almost flipped us. If the sled went over in this wind, would we be able to right it? Our craft suddenly seemed more like a bobsled than a boat and when Sebastian put his hand on top of my head and forced me completely under the sheeting, I didn’t even protest, though normally having my face forced into a man’s lap wasn’t something I’d tolerate.

  In a way, not being able to see the storm and our harrowing progress was worse. I felt every jolt as the sail was realigned and every dip and rise in the ice and imagined it to be some catastrophe. When our forward momentum shifted, and I felt us speeding up and angling down, I couldn’t resist poking my head up to see what was transpiring. I wished fervently that I hadn’t.

  We were rocketing down a long, smooth slope and in front of us, far too close for us to turn in time to avoid it, was the ocean.

  I’d known it was there. I’d actually done a lot of research about the place before coming. It was in the middle of an ice age, and the glaciers increased it’s land surface considerably, but it was still over ninety percent open water. The first human settlement had been right on the shore, taking advantage of some natural geothermal vents, but the colonists had chosen a site much farther inland for their first domed city and I’d assumed that was where we were heading. I reminded myself that all of my information was a hundred of years out of date and prepared to get very unpleasantly wet.

  Sebastian yelled something I couldn’t make out and from the front of the boat came an earsplitting wail in reply. It reminded me of an air raid siren I’d heard in a movie about World War II and I couldn’t fathom it’s purpose until the icy slope in front of us erupted in a frenzy of panicked motion.

  They were so well camouflaged that I hadn’t noticed them, but now, in their rush to get out of our way, they were jostling and rolling against each other in a mad dash to beat us to the waves. Huge, white, and tentacled, like some insane cross between a seal and a squid, they seemed entirely wrong. They had none of the bilateral symmetry that was so common on Earth and other worlds, but seemed instead to have a sort of radial symmetry that, to spite classes in both biology and astrobiology, I’d never seen before in a land animal.

  They parted before us like the Red Sea, still madly dashing toward the water but unable to outrun us. As we overtook one, I got a sense of its size, longer than our sled and considerably bulkier, with sinuous tentacles branching out from all its surfaces giving it no obvious front or back. It rolled, more than ran, like a giant beach ball covered in flexible spikes, and would have been comical if it wasn’t so large.

  I couldn’t see any eyes or a mouth until we passed so close to one that I could have reached out and touched its tentacle. I wasn’t even tempted though as its tip contained, not the suction cups I’d expected, but instead a round, fleshy opening studded with sharp little teeth. A proboscis then, rather than a true tentacle. Suddenly they seemed anything but laughable, and I was more than a little terrified to be heading into an ocean full of them.

  But head in we did, not even slowing when we left the ice and met the water with a shower of icy spray. The little sled made the transition to boat without so much as a hiccup and our progress actually became much smoother. The storm still loomed, but the ocean seemed unimpressed by it and surprisingly flat. We cut through it cleanly, rising and falling with the gentle swells, and I risked a look over the side to get a glimpse of the great creatures gliding along below us. They were less ungainly in the water, and all the more frightening for it.

  I watched them for a while, grateful that Sebastian didn’t force me back down against the hull, but they soon headed out to open sea and we hugged the coast. It changed gradually, from smooth slope to icy cliffs and then to black rock. I was eager to see my new home, but the excitement of the morning and lack of sleep the night before had left me exhausted and the gentle rocking of the boat quickly lulled me to sleep.

  I awoke to a crash of thunder and lightening splitting through sheets of blinding snow. The boat had gone from gently rocking to being tossed, and the sky between flashes was pitch black. I wanted to ask if we were close to our destination, but distracting the pilot seemed like a tremendously bad idea and I knew I would never be able to yell loud enough to get Julian’s attention, far in the front. My question was answered almost immediately anyway.

  The snow slacked off for a minute and a crash of lightening showed me the shore, shockingly close and directly in front of us. Black cliffs rose up and the face was studded with dozens of twinkling lights. Another burst of lightning, this one farther away and I managed to discern the source of the lights as lamps burning in the mouths of caves. The whole cliff was riddled with them and as elaborately carved as anything at Petra, the decorations highlighted against the dark stone by little piles of drifted snow clinging to every depression.

  The cliff itself must have been a promontory, because there were spots where, through the arched doorways of the largest caves, I could see the lightning crashing all the way through to the other side. It seemed a ridiculous place to build a city, with the ocean to one side and a glacier on the other, but I assumed they’d had good reason.

  To my dismay, we sailed straight up to the cliff. I could just make out Quince, balanced against the mast, working to bring down the sail and Sebastian rose up, braced his leg in front of me, and pulled a long, slender pole from the inner rim of the hull. As I watched, dumbfounded, a great net rose out of the water all around us and we began to rise into the sky. Someone above us must have been working a winch, but I could see nothing of whe
re the lines disappeared into the darkness.

  Sebastian used the pole to keep us from bumping the wall as the wind tried repeatedly to fling us against it, and Julian turned back, leaning around the mast and gave me a smiling thumbs up which might have been heartening if his face hadn’t had such an obvious green cast.

  This close, the carvings seemed magical. They were mainly composed of swirls and eddies, more reminiscent of celtic knots than anything else, but every once in a while we would pass an alarmingly realistic carving. Like grotesques adorning a cathedral, they were both monstrous and whimsical. There were men along with several of the creatures we’d seen earlier that day as well as a whole flock of bat-like things that seemed to have too many wings each. I wanted to slow down so I could get a better look at them all, though their features were a little unsettling, but the snow was starting to pile up on the sled and as interesting as it all was, I wanted to get inside and warm up.

  We ground to a halt eventually and I could see the lines that had carried us up as they turned around a set of pulleys and vanish into holes in the rock carved to resemble mouths. There was a narrow shelf, only a few feet wide, and a large arched entryway that seemed to hold nothing but darkness.

  Sebastian climbed out first and clamped something to the sled runners which arrested most of our swaying, but I still held my breath when I stepped out onto the ledge. It was caked with ice and the ocean was a long, long way down. I retreated into the arch with a sigh of relief and pressed my back against the wall. Julian joined me a moment later, looking as relieved as I was to have made it in one piece.

  “I wish I could go the rest of the way with you,” he told me, taking my gloved hand and squeezing it gently. I clung to it, refusing to let go.

  “What do you mean ‘the rest of the way’?” I asked, alarmed. “We aren’t there yet?”

  He shook his head.

  “Almost,” he promised. “But I have to go down into the city to check on the patients I left. I’ve been gone a long time and we’re very short of doctors.”

  “I’m not going to the city?” I tried to keep the panic out of my voice. I did not like the idea of going off alone with Sebastian.

  He shook his head again, smiling to soften the blow.

  “You have to go to quarantine,” he told me gently. “But I’ll come and check on you every day, I promise.”

  “I was quarantined before I left,” I protested. “For a whole month!”

  “That was to keep you from bringing anything here,” he explained. “Now we need to limit the things from here that you’re exposed to and monitor you closely. Pathogens can mutate a lot in a few hundred years, and if they all hit you at the same time, there won’t be much we can do. Our medical supplies are limited to what the Red Cross feels like sending and what the Colony Board feels like letting through. I’m afraid isolating you from the main population is very necessary.”

  I dropped his hand and he placed it on my shoulder, giving me a gentle pat.

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” he promised, then turned and disappeared into the blackness of the arch.

  Chapter Three

  Homecoming

  I stopped counting at two hundred. I had been telling myself ten more steps for what seemed to be forever and I couldn’t make myself believe it anymore. It was clearly not ten more steps. It might have been a thousand.

  Quince was above me, turning back to check on my progress every other set and making climbing an icy ladder anchored into the rock in the middle of a blizzard look infuriatingly easy. Sebastian climbed a single rung below me, his long arms easily reaching around my body to grasp the rungs. Normally I would have protested the sheer indignity of it, but his body blocked the worst of the wind and would at least slow my fall if I slipped, so I left him be.

  Eventually, when my hands were numb, my calves were on fire, and I had given up hope of ever being warm again, we reached the top. There, spread around us in various states of disrepair, were the original colony buildings. I recognized them easily, since nearly every colony had used the exact same compliment of prefab structures. I’d been to the museum on Mars, where duplicates of the buildings around me stood preserved for posterity, and seem pictures of other first landing sites on dozens of worlds. These looked sad and derelict in comparison, but given their age and the fact that they seemed largely intact, I chose to see them as a testament to the structure’s strength, especially since it seemed obvious I was going to have to live in one for a while.

  My guess proved accurate as Quince half-pulled, half-dragged me to a small, circular building uncomfortably close to the cliff edge. It had three distinct floors, each slightly larger than the last, and an array of snow encrusted dishes and antennae on its flat roof. It looked dark and vacant, but after the day I’d had, it seemed positively inviting.

  Quince heaved open the door and ushered me in silently, then waited until Sebastian was in before ducking in himself and letting it slam closed.

  “Better go get us some clean clothes,” Sebastian told him.

  My jaw dropped.

  “You can’t seriously send him back down now!” I protested, terrified for the boy all alone on the icy ladder.

  “Look lady,” he said, rounding on me. “We’re fellow prisoners here, not your servants. You don’t get to give any orders and you don’t get to question mine.”

  I chafed at the term prisoners, true though it might be, and didn’t like his tone at all. I stepped between Quince and the door.

  “You can give him as many orders as you want,” I told him, bracing myself against the door. “But I’m not letting him past. Not in the middle of the night with a storm raging. If you were any kind of a man you wouldn’t ask it of him.” I was all too aware that I had little to back up my brave words. If he was determined to move me, there wasn’t a lot I could do about it without one of us ending up seriously injured, and I didn’t like the odds that it wouldn’t be me.

  He laughed, surprising me more than anything else might have.

  Quince, who’d looked terribly embarrassed during my little speech, smiled at me, whether thankfully or apologetically I couldn’t tell, then bent down and pulled open a hatch in the floor, and disappeared down it.

  I looked at Sebastian, still chuckling to himself, and wanted to punch him.

  “Why didn’t we come up that way?” I demanded, peering down it. A tight spiral staircase, badly lit but dry and windless, was cut directly into the rock and vanished into the dark heart of the mountain.

  “Maybe because your pal Jules said taking you through the city might kill you,” he scoffed. “Trust me, if it had been up to me, we’d have risked it.”

  “Wash your hands before you come back and don’t stop to chat,” he called down after Quince, then slammed the hatch shut and glared at me.

  Chat? I wondered if the word had developed a different meaning here or if Quince’s mutism were less complete than I’d thought. Either way, I knew asking Sebastian would be pointless.

  The small anti-room we were in only held the door, the hatch in the floor, and a staircase leading up, so I stomped past him and up into the rest of the structure, eager to be out of his presence.

  If only it were that easy. He followed me of course, and made a show of closing and locking the door at the top as soon as he was through it. The room we were in was spartan, but nothing compared to the cargo containers we’d been sleeping in since I’d arrived and even seemed relatively spacious after months in a tiny cabin aboard the Gypsy Star.

  There were four actual beds, instead of just pallets on the floor, and I felt a sudden longing for Julian’s company or anyones really, to keep me from having to be alone with Sebastian.

  I sat on the edge of the closest bed and let my head sink down into my hands.

  “Don’t get too comfortable, lady,�
� he told me, motioning to a ladder leading to the top floor. “You’re in the penthouse.”

  “My name,” I told him frostily, rising reluctantly back to my feet, “is Chapel. I’d appreciate it if you’d start using it.”

  “Sure,” he said easily. “I’m Sebastian.”

  Had he really not known my name? I thought back over the last few days. I certainly hadn’t told him, but surely Julian or whoever it was who’d sent him to fetch me would have given it to him. Of course, I realized, it was likely he knew it already and he was just being a shit.

  “Is that a normal name?” He asked, seeming to be genuinely curious.

  “No,” I admitted. “But I’m not a normal person.”

  I climbed up the ladder, ridiculously thankful that it had a hatch at the top that I could slam.

  I awoke to too much light. The room at the top of the ladder was large, empty except for a single bed, and ringed by small round windows, too high up to provide a view but more than adequate to flood the place with light at the first hint of dawn.

  I rubbed my eyes and sat up, getting my first good look around. It had been dark when I’d come up the night before and I’d been to angry and proud to go back down and ask Sebastian to provide me with a light.

  There was a small square protrusion from one wall, it’s ceiling just below the line of the windows, and I opened the door to see what it contained. A bathroom, rudimentary but adequate with a small commode, sink and a shower nozzle in the ceiling that would douse the entire space if turned on.

  I slipped out of my filthy onesie gratefully and laid it on the sink. There was a bottle of something that smelled a little questionable but lathered well enough when I rubbed it in my hands under the sinks tap. I flipped on what I hoped was the showers hot water and plastered myself against the door in case it wasn’t.