Page 38 of Challenged

“This will make her more comfortable,” she says. “Mercenia clothes are not nice. The fabric is scratchy. Boots rub the feet. Hurt. Perhaps once she is comfortable, her heartspace will start to open.”

I think of the clothes that my Angie conjured for herself. A soft, loose fitting top. Bottoms that moulded to her legs but moved with her well, not constricting her. Yes, I think my Angie likes her comforts. Perhaps bringing her these things will be the first step to showing her that my actions will always be as my words promise. That I will always consider her needs, that her comfort and happiness is important to me.

That I would never seek to extinguish the flame that burns in her spirit, only nurture it.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Angie

Almost as soon as the desktop appears, a blizzard of pop-ups hits. Urgent updates, reset required, antiviral software hasn’t been run in six thousand days. They appear so fast, it’s impossible to click them away before the next one covers it up.

“Uh, what is all of that?” Brooks says, grabbing another chair from the corner of the room and pulling it up beside me.

“A computer that hasn’t been turned on for twenty years,” I say, waiting a moment for the last of the messages to appear before I start clicking them away one by one. “Looking at some of these, he must have been tapped into the whole base from this machine.”

I point out one of the messages - ‘Low level warning: Tank B’, whatever that means. There are others in the same vein. Power fluctuation alerts, machinery needing servicing alerts, monitoring alerts from the cryostasis pods. One is a warning tosay a pod has malfunctioned. I hover over it, not immediately clicking it away.

“That will be me,” Brooks says. “I wasn’t exactly woken up in the correct way.”

“So one of those machines isn’t housing a corpse, then?”

“I hope not.”

I wonder how much worse it was to be woken the incorrect way, given how fucking horrible my wake up was. But I recall what she said about her body getting used to the wake up over time and hope it wasn’t too horrendous for her. No one deserves that.

The desktop that starts emerging underneath is no better. A sea of icons clutters up the entire screen, documents and spreadsheets, note files and images saved indiscriminately, without any sort of folder hierarchy or structure. Part of me huffs in disgust at the disorganisation, but I don’t need the files. I need the network settings.

I open them up. Unlike the other computer, this one doesn’t just have an internal network. There’s an external one sitting there next to it. Hand trembling a little, I go to move the mouse to click on it, but Brooks’ hand comes down over the top of mine, stopping me.

“Angie, it’s been nearly twenty years. Even if somehow the network is still working, having had no maintenance, no use for that long, no one is going to be watching for messages from this place back home. It’s a dead base. A dead project. Mercenia will have moved on by now.”

“Probably,” I say, trying to move my hand, anyway. But her grip is too tight, too strong. “But like I said, I don’t belong here. I have to try. Maybe it comes to nothing. But at least I’ll know I’ve tried everything.”

Her grip doesn’t budge.

“Angie, you can’t, I’m sorry.”

“Why?” My voice is going high, tight again. I’m never going to beat her in a battle of strength. If she decides to stop me, there are so many ways she can do it.

“Because we don’t want Mercenia coming back here.” The voice comes from the doorway. We both look up, see Liv standing there. The furrow between her brows is deep, high colour dotting her cheeks, her lips pressed into a thin line. She looks at me, eyes hard. “We don’t want them coming back here ever.”

I stop trying to push the mouse, and Brooks’ grip loosens. I let go of it, sitting back in my chair, and she releases me. Folding my arms across my chest, I stare at Liv over the top of the computer so she knows I’m not intimidated by her little show of anger.

“I get that you’re happy here,” I say. “Good for you. But I won’t be. If there’s a shot at getting rescued, I have to take it.”

Liv’s scowl deepens. “You know you won’t be happy here? You haven’t even been outside. You haven’t seen anything of what this place has to offer beyond this basement.”

“A rainforest, right? Hunter-gatherer tribes. I’m just not built for that kind of life.”

“You think any of us thought we were? With the exception of Brooks, none of us had been in an environment like this one. You know what happened? We adapted.”

“That’s great for you. Well done. But why should I have to do that if I can go home? Home.”

I fill the word with all the longing I feel, even as part of me wonders exactly what I’m longing for. The long thankless hours of doing Baxter’s job for him? That job won’t have sat empty, waiting for my return, and whatever else I’m slotted in to won’t be any better. My physical home. The apartment that Rardek called ‘very white’ like the money I spent on interior design and expensive furniture was a joke? Could I make a space likethat for myself again without those words, spoken in his low, rumbling voice, mocking me from across the stars?

“Letting go of everything you knew isn’t going to be easy, we know that,” Brooks says, her tone vastly more sympathetic than Liv’s.

“It’s not just me, either,” I say, looking between the two of them. “You’ve got a load of other women back there in those cryostasis pods. Why is what you want more important than what all of us want, huh?”

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