“Angie, I don’t know what you think is happening here, but I’m afraid you’re wrong. You can’t go home. Even if you could, it wouldn’t be the home you left. You’ve been frozen in that pod for nineteen years. While you were frozen, you were brought out here by a science tier team. For some reason, we’re not sure why, the base was abandoned by the team. You and all these other women were left behind. We found you, and we’ve been looking after you ever since. Guarding the base to keep you safe, trying to figure out a way to wake you up. And that won’t stop now you’re awake. We’re going to help you through this, and you’re going to be okay.”
There’s a lot to unpick in all of that, but one question jumps to the front of my tongue.
“Where’s here?”
The dark-haired woman hesitates a moment. “An alien planet.”
That line, delivered with such awkwardness, is just too much.
I can’t help it.
I burst out laughing.
CHAPTER FOUR
Angie
“You can’t be fucking serious,” I say, when I finally stop laughing enough to speak.
The dark-haired woman’s expression doesn’t shift.
“Deadly,” she says, folding her arms across the top of her rounded stomach. My eyes linger on it for a moment, my brain snagging on that detail. Something about it bothers me, but there’s too much else spinning through my mind to focus on why.
“An alien planet?” I nearly start laughing again. “We don’t have the capability. We can barely replicate the moon landings, interstellar travel…”
“Can be done,” Brooks interrupts. “I know. I was on the ship that brought you here. Nineteen years ago.”
I arch a brow at her. “You can’t be a day over twenty-five.”
She turns, pointing to another pod, this one upright, but open. Empty.
“That one was mine. I was part of the team that came out here, but once I’d outlived my usefulness, they froze me. Left me behind with the rest of you.”
I take a breath, trying to arrange the facts they’re telling me into a kind of order.
“So, you and I both ended up frozen out here twenty years ago. Then we were left behind, forgotten about for those twenty years, until these guys came and found us and woke us up?”
Brooks gives a little shrug of her shoulder. “Essentially.”
“Essentially?”
Nothing in her manner suggests she’s talking down to me, but the glossing over of the full truth - even when it absolutely isn’t the fucking truth - gets my hackles rising.
Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.
Baxter’s voice in my ears, clear as if he was in the room right now.
“How about you tell me everything?”
I don’t quite keep the sharpness out of my tone, and I don’t quite feel bad about it, either.
Brooks looks to the dark-haired woman again.
“My name is Liv,” she says. “I’m in charge here.”
There’s something about how she says ‘in charge’ - like she doesn’t think it’s quite the right descriptor. Not as good an actress as Brooks, this one.
Still, when she talks, her voice is low, full of authority.