Page 13 of Spread Me
Jacques and Saskia come with them, Jacques ahead and Saskia behind. Kinsey can hear Saskia murmuring a prayer under her breath. She lets herself be guided away from the exam room, too stunned to fight her team. “What the fuck,” she hisses. “Are you guys for real right now? You didn’t see that?”
“Of course we saw it,” Mads sighs.
Jacques, walking a step ahead, drops his head into his hands. “I don’t know what I saw,” he mumbles. “I don’t—I don’t think I saw anything.”
Nkrumah reaches out an arm and rubs his back briskly, like she’s trying to restore circulation to his entire spine. “C’mon,” she says. “You did so.”
“Yeah, I did,” he agrees. “I just wish I didn’t. I—you know how I feel about them, and I don’t want…” He doesn’t find an end to his sentence.
Saskia keeps praying.
Kinsey could weep with relief. That she isn’t alone—thather team is with her—that Domino didn’t manage to fool anyone. “So you saw it too. All of you. It’s not just me.” She knows she’s saying the same thing over and over again, but she can’t seem to stop. Nobody answers her until after they’ve made their way down the hall and into the canteen, in the center spoke of the wedge. The second they walk into the canteen, Mads and Nkrumah release Kinsey’s elbows. She wheels around on them. “Say it,” she says desperately. “Say you saw it.”
“They weren’t mouths,” Nkrumah points out.
Jacques groans. “Worse than mouths, I think. Eyes are worse than mouths.”
Mads shakes their head. “Not eyes,” they say. They don’t sound shaken at all—but then again, they never do. “Just eyelids.”
That’s what had been under Domino’s shirt. Not on their chest—that was normal again, a smooth expanse of skin slashed by dark scars below each nipple, a scattering of freckles and hair running down the centerline of their sternum. There was no sign that there had ever been a cluster of open, inviting mouths there. For a moment, Kinsey had worried that Saskia had been right—that it had all been a hallucination.
But then Domino had let their shirt drop, and Kinsey had felt the terrible weight of certainty land in her stomach. There was their belly—a sweet curve of soft skin, usually broken only by their navel and the glint of the jeweled piercing they wore in it.
But now the belly ring was gone, replaced by a perfectly formed, long-lashed eyelid.
There were two more navels flanking the original. All three were shuttered by identical eyelids. As Kinsey had watched, they’d winked slowly, one by one. When Dominohad raised their arms, they’d revealed smaller ones, follicular and close-clustered. Each underarm was a lotus pod of empty eyelashed sockets.
Kinsey had stared into those eyes, and she had felt it. She didn’t know how, but she was certain.
They’d been staring right back at her.
The end of the team’s first full week at the research station coincides with their first sandstorm. Weatherman fills the lab with warm red light, which Domino translates into news of incoming danger. The wind outside screams against the walls of the station. The lab wing and the residential wing both feel exposed, thanks to their exterior walls. Over the course of the day, the entire team has drifted into the canteen, where the outside world feels a little more removed.
Jacques is the last to enter. He arrived at the station the same time as Saskia, the two of them joining the rest of the team the day before the storm. He shivers as he walks into the canteen. It’s eternally chilly in here, since there aren’t any exterior walls letting in heat. The air conditioner is always working overtime to keep the residential wingand the lab wing cool, but the canteen has an entire storage room between it and the elements outside, so it gets refrigerated by the overactive cooling system.
“Hope you’re nearly done with that blanket,” he says, nodding to Saskia as he passes through the canteen. She’s sitting on one of the beat-up secondhand sofas and armchairs that form a rash around the scarred coffee table. The first few inches of a knitted blanket hang between her fingers.
“Oh, sure. Just a few more minutes,” she murmurs. Domino is the only one who catches the joke. The laugh they let out is loud and sudden enough that it startles Mads into dropping their pristine copy ofTropic of Cancer.
Nothing in the canteen is fully attached to the walls, not even the sink. Bulk-bought shelf-stable food is stacked on wire shelves lining the walls. Jacques bypasses them and opens the storage closet at the back of the canteen. “What’s in here?”
The sound of the wind outside invades the room. “Sandstorm. Don’t let it out,” Nkrumah calls. She’s sitting next to the coffee table, laying out cards for a complicated version of solitaire that she refuses to explain to the others.
Jacques disappears into the closet. He emerges again a moment later with a handle of dark rum in one hand and a bag of limes in the other. “Jackpot.”
“Jaques-pot,” Domino corrects. “Where you headed with all those limes?”
Jacques kicks the storage closet door shut behind him, dropping the room back into relative peace. “We’re all stuck in here tonight. Tomorrow morning too, probably. So I figure we should have a good time while we’re at it. Tomorrow, I think we should see about knocking out some of the walls between things. So much wasted space. But not tonight. What do you say, Boss? Cocktails?”
Kinsey stands up, walks to the stack of heavy-duty plastic bins that hold the team’s dishware. She pops the lid off the bin that holds the mugs, pulls one out, uses the tail of her shirt to wipe dust out of it.
“That seems like a yes?” he says, using his thumb to break the seal on top of the handle of rum.
Kinsey holds her mug out to him. “Let’s fucking party.”
He takes it with an approving nod and starts to pour as the others rummage for their own mugs. Once everyone has a full pour, a healthy squeeze of lime, and a splash of the watery ginger ale Mads pulls out of the storage closet, Jacques raises his mug for a toast. “To sandstorms.”
The rest of them follow suit. “To sandstorms!”
