Planetfall (22 page)

Know what? I don't even know what he's said yet.

“I'll come back when I'm ready.” I say it without any idea when that will be, nor any desire to attempt to return.

I expect an immediate reply but there isn't one. Perhaps she's ignoring me and is coming anyway. I struggle to my knees so that I can peer across the top of the grass back at the colony. That's when my neural alarm sounds. Someone's heading toward my house. The second bang triggers seconds later and I open the data on who it is, expecting Mack's weight, or Sung-Soo's.

My stomach feels like it's dropped into the soil when I see the numbers. At least a dozen people are outside my house.

I STAND, MY
legs feeling like they're going to collapse from under me at any moment. The panic within me shifts into something with purpose: stopping those people from entering my house. Instead of destroying me from the inside, it focuses my body and mind and I run, desperate to return and put myself between them and my door.

But the shoulder pain caused by the sudden exertion is too much and I have to slow down to an uneven jog. It's been hours since my last dose of painkillers and I'm feeling the extra movement I've been putting it through. The colony is farther away than I appreciated, slowly growing larger as I hurry toward it, wincing with each step. It feels like one of hundreds of nightmares I've had over the years in which I'm trying to get somewhere and things keep slowing me down. The despair yawns wide within me and I open the first message from Mack, hoping that if I arm myself with knowledge of what has happened in my absence, I'll be able to handle it better once I arrive.

I select the link and there's a few minutes of footage recorded through his own LensCam by the look of it. Sung-Soo, Kay, Pasha and a handful of other people are there; Carmen too. Mack is one of the group of people clustered around Sung-Soo at the edge of the Dome. The music sounds muffled in the background, the LensCam software applying selective filters to the auditory data entering Mack's chip so Sung-Soo's voice can be heard more clearly.

“—if I thought I could do something but I can't. I've tried and she's just so . . . broken. And I've been standing here at this party and seeing how much you all care for one another here and I know how much you care for Ren and it feels wrong to stay quiet about it. I know you'd want to help her. But she keeps it all hidden from you, so how can you help if you don't know?”

I stumble, but I don't want to slow my pace.

“How bad is it?” Carmen asks.

“You can't walk in. You have to crawl through a tunnel made of garbage. She doesn't have a space to sleep. There's trash everywhere.”

“I don't think this is something that should be discussed in a public place,” Mack says.

“I didn't want to tell anyone—I don't want to break the trust she has in me—” Sung-Soo spreads his hands, the picture of the concerned friend, and I'm overwhelmed by a surge of hate-filled anger. “But I know I can't help her and it's going to kill her one day. It has to be public. Her problem is everyone's problem here.”

“Why?”
I mutter at the grass.

“It makes sense,” Kay says in the footage and she swings into view as Mack looks at her instead. Kay's eyes are closed and her hands are pressed against her cheeks. When she opens
her eyes again they are shining in a way that wrenches my heart. “She never let me into her house, even when we were so close.”

“But if it's as bad as this, how could we not know about it?” Mack asks.

“She's very clever,” Sung-Soo says. “And all of you are too polite to press her. You never even ask her anymore; you just leave her alone.”

“We have to go there and help her,” Carmen says.

“What about her privacy?” Mack asks.

“If it's as bad as Sung-Soo says, she's ill,” Kay says. “We may have to force an intervention. It sounds like it's part of the OCD spectrum. Dr. Lincoln knows much more about this than I do. I'll contact him and I'll check on Ren. Make sure she's okay.”

I close the recording as I reach the southern gate and veer toward my home. I open Mack's second message, now several minutes old. This time it's just one line.

I'm trying to stop them getting into your house.

The low dome of the house that is my sanctuary, my haven, comes into view and I can hear shouting. It's Mack.

“She has the right to her own space and what she does in there—”

There's the sound of scuffling and then grunts of effort as I round it to reach the front door, panting and sweating. I arrive as Sung-Soo and Nick are wrenching the door open between them, the sensor pad at the side of the door smashed.

Kay is there with Dr. Lincoln, having an intense discussion that pauses as the door opens. Pasha is there, Carmen, Mack and half a dozen other faces I can't bring myself to look at.

They are all staring into my house. Hands cover mouths and
noses, and tiny moans of disgust and distress slip through them. Carmen's eyes are wide with horror and blatant excitement.

I look at Kay, dreading what I'll see, but she's not looking at the house. She's looking at me. She stretches her hands toward me. I can't see any disgust, only . . . What is that? I don't—

“Ren . . . Ren, it's all going to be okay,” she says and I can't face her a moment longer.

I look away and stumble a few steps closer to my house, feeling as naked as if they'd torn the clothes off my body. Their words and sounds and movements fade into an awful backdrop as I stare at the sensor pad. They didn't have to do that. They could have just bypassed the lock through the network. Why be so violent?

“Ren—” Sung-Soo steps toward me and I twist away to keep air between us. I reach the edge of the doorway, aware of pairs of eyes flitting between the contents within and me. The contents within me. Me.

“I had to tell them,” Sung-Soo says and comes toward me again.

“Don't fucking touch me!” I scream at him and everyone draws in a breath sharply enough to be heard.

“You need help,” Sung-Soo says. “I can't help you. I tried but—” He waves a hand toward the stuff. “I couldn't get through to you.”

“Just don't—” I can't finish the sentence. There are too many words that need to fit into that space.

Dr. Lincoln takes a step forward. “Renata, you're suffering from a mental illness. I—we—can help you, but the first step is going to be the hardest for you. I understand that.”

“You don't understand anything! You bastards! You can't . . . You don't have the right to break my door and—”

“That's my picture frame!” Nick's voice is like a sword
through me. He stomps over from the gathering crowd and pulls it from the top of the tunnel. “I put this in my chute. It's cracked. What is it doing here?”

I reach for it but he steps back, holding it close to his chest as if reclaiming ownership. But it's mine now. “I was going to fix it.”

“It isn't yours to fix.”

“You didn't want it anymore!”

Another movement in the crowd. “That's my comb!”

“That's the cup I threw out a couple of months ago!”

“Shit—that's the folder I used to keep my notes in!”

A surge of people rush forward, jostling to reclaim discarded things, made valuable once more by the fact that I own them now. I try to push Nick away as he starts to poke about looking for more of his ex-belongings, and he shoves me aside.

“This all needs to be cleared out,” he says. “We need to just pull it all out and get this place sorted!” He looks at Sung-Soo, ignoring my distress. “Is it like this farther in?”

Sung-Soo nods. “Every room. It's been going on for years. You can hardly move in there.”

There are five of them now, three pulling things from the pile to pass back to the others, who stack them outside. The tunnel collapses and I cry out, now trapped outside my home. I make another attempt to pull Nick away from my stuff but hands grab my shoulders and pull me back.

I'm spun around and now I'm facing Mack, who has been silent up until now. He's terribly pale beneath the black of his beard and I can feel his hands shaking as they hold me in front of him. “Why didn't you tell me?”

There's no answer to that. I try to twist free, knowing they're going to break my things and take those objects back even though it's wrong. But Mack holds me tight and pulls me
farther away. “Why didn't you tell me!” It's almost a shout. There are tears in his eyes.

Why? I'm the one this is happening to!

“This isn't the way to handle this!” Dr. Lincoln's reedy voice calls out above the rabble, but nobody stops. I can hear comments filled with horror and loathing, the sounds of things falling and crunching underfoot, the din of my life being ripped open. “Renata needs to be a part of this process if we're going to help her!”

“We are helping her.” That was Carmen. “How can she get better with a house full of trash?”

“No, you don't understand.”

The argument fades into the background when I see a tear roll down Mack's cheek. I have never seen him cry. Not even after Planetfall. But there it is, sinking into the hair of his beard, another following it.

“I had no idea,” he says, his voice strained. “I thought you just liked your privacy. I had no idea.”

I look down at the buttons of his shirt, studying the pale plastic rather than his eyes. They're easier to stare at; they have nothing to say.

And then I'm outside of myself, detached from the storm of emotional shit raging through my body. There is an unspeakable calm. It's done now. They know. Sung-Soo no longer has any power over me. I don't have to be afraid of how bad the revelation of this secret life will be because it's happening now. I know that beast. I don't feel anything at all.

“Oh God, what's this?”

Nick's question pulls me back into my body like it's at the other end of a taut elastic band. I manage to turn to see him holding a cloth with blood on it, so old and dried out it's nothing more than a brown stain.

“I cut my hand. A while ago.”

“But why did you keep it?”

“I must insist!” Now Dr. Lincoln is putting himself between them and my house, even taking a shoe from Carmen's hands and putting it back over the threshold. “Please stop and listen to me. This is already getting out of hand. This is deeply traumatic for Renata and I know you want to help, but the most important person in this process is her, not all of you.”

I can't believe he's standing up for me. I can't believe I need him—or anyone else—to stand up for me. Who are these people tearing out my belongings, violating me and judging me? Have I really lived alongside them all these years? Did I really travel millions of miles with them, build their houses and construct the foundations of their colony?

“There's no ‘process' here,” I say. “I don't want your help. It's none of your business.”

“But the Pathfinder said there was still work to be done!” Carmen is flushed too, like she's excited. Like she's enjoying this. “She spoke through Marco and this is what she meant! Who found out? Sung-Soo! He came here and found this . . . this . . . canker and exposed it and we have to act now! She meant this is the work—not the experiments, not the other distractions—it's this! That's what Marco meant!”

“Bullshit!” I shout back. “That was nothing but—”

Mack pulls me back around and starts manhandling me away from them. “You need a time-out,” he says, loud enough for everyone else to hear. “Think about what you're saying,” he hisses into my ear.

“I'm not going to let that stupid, crazy woman convince everyone that doing this to me is God's work! She's just bored and if they knew—”

“Ren!” He's steered me over the colony boundary and into
the grasses, at a direction that rapidly puts the entrance to my house out of sight. “Think about what you're saying!”

“So it's better for that stupid woman to feel entitled to do this than me tell the truth?”

“Just . . . just please don't . . . I know this is hard but please don't say anything.”

The breath from his whisper is hot against my forehead. He's looking over the top of my head to my house, fearful someone will follow us and hear what he's saying.

“You don't give a fuck about anything but yourself, do you?”

“That's not true.” Now he's looking at me properly. “Whatever help you need, I'll give it, but please don't do anything that could break this colony. I promise, we'll work out the best way to sort all that stuff out, but now isn't the time.”

“I need you to get those people away from my house.”

He nods and we go back. This time his arm is around my shoulders and feels like a tree branch that I don't want to carry. Piles of my things are accumulating outside, as is a crowd at the edges. I can see little mountains of clothing, trinkets and unloved things I adopted, all divided up without any thought or care about what I want. Carmen, Nick and Sung-Soo have formed a human chain, taking things passed from someone inside who I can't see as everyone else watches. I can hear Dr. Lincoln's voice coming from inside, but from the tone it sounds like he's trying—and failing—to stop whoever it is in there from passing more stuff out.

“But it doesn't make any sense,” Pasha is saying. “How could so much be in there and not have an impact on the communal levels?”

“She changes the numbers,” Sung-Soo says and then notices I'm there.

Pasha looks horrified. “But . . . none of us are supposed to
take more than we need. There must have been points when supplies were far too low. If we'd had an emergency . . .”

“It's theft,” someone shouts from the crowd.

“How can it be theft when no one wanted it anymore?” I shout back in that direction.

“Stopping it from being recycled deprives the community,” Pasha says. I've never seen him look so stern. “The metals need to go to the Masher now.”

I realize they have been giving some thought to what goes into each pile; they've been dividing them up by base material. They've looked at my belongings with the eyes of recyclers without a second thought about what might have been thrown in there, nor its value to me.

I lurch forward as Pasha scoops up an armful of things from one of the piles, clanking and knocking against one another as they settle in his thieving embrace. I feel the scrape of Mack's hand down my back as he tries to grab me, but I'm too fast. As soon as Pasha is close enough, I reach for whatever I can grab in the hope of saving it or at least seeing what it is before he takes it from me. I catch his arm and pull it enough to open the cradle he's formed beneath my belongings, sending them crashing to the ground.