Page 3 of Spread Me
“Boss,” Domino says. At the sound of their voice, Kinsey feels the research station slam back into place around her. “Hey. Boss. We need to walk out of this room now, okay?”
Kinsey nods. “Yeah. Okay.” She doesn’t take her eyes off the specimen.
“Kinsey,” Mads adds. “Now.”
She doesn’t make them drag her out of the room. She turns away on her own steam. As she opens the exam room door, she can feel the weight of the specimen’s eyeless gaze on her back.
Once the exam room door is shut behind them, Mads lets out a shaky breath. “Holy shit.”
“That thing’s alive,” Domino breathes. “How the hell is it alive?”
“Where did you find it again?”
“Like a hundred meters from the survey grid,” Domino answers. “Under, I don’t know, two feet of sand? I started digging and the ground just kind of collapsed under me, and—Boss? Are you okay?” They might as well be on the other side of the world, talking to Kinsey through a tin can. “She doesn’t look okay.”
Kinsey doesn’t answer. She brushes at a tickle on her neck and feels something small and damp roll beneath the weight of her touch. She catches it between her fingers and when she brings her hand in front of her face, she realizes that she’s holding the half-mangled body of a harvester ant. Maybe the same one that came out of the specimen’s eye socket, maybe not—there are always ants around the station. Its antennae wave slowly, tasting her breath on the air.
Kinsey licks her lips, then tucks the ant into the pocket of her jeans.
“Team meeting,” she says at last. “Now.”
“I’m so glad you’re here.” Kinsey opens the passenger door of the Jeep for Nkrumah, but doesn’t offer to help with either of the large duffel bags at her feet. In the four hours it took to drive from the airstrip to the research base, Kinsey came to understand one thing quite clearly: Nkrumah prefers to haul her own load.
“Glad to be here,” Nkrumah replies. She scuffs her boots in the sand, getting the toecaps dusty. “That’s better. Hate the look of a new boot.”
Kinsey grins and pulls out two keycards. “Don’t worry. It won’t last long. This is for you,” she adds, flashing one of the keycards before tucking it into the side pocket of one of the duffels. “You’ll need it to get in and out of the airlock.”
Nkrumah’s chin tilts upward, her brows dropping. This is something Kinsey noticed during the interview process:Nkrumah tends to ask questions with an air of authority. “Airlock?”
“Come see.” She scans her own keycard against the pad on the outside of the exterior door, waiting for it to let out a beep before turning the handle. “This place was originally supposed to house astronauts-in-training. They were still building it when that budget massacre hit NASA. You remember the—?”
“Yes.” The answer carries the weight of what it felt like to be a research scientist during that particular presidential administration. What it’s felt like ever since.
They walk into the dim airlock. It’s a narrow hallway, wider at the far end. It does a so-so job of keeping the outside out and the inside in. The floor is permanently blanketed with desert sand, the walls ornamented with the tiny pissed-off lizards that always manage to find their way in. Still, it’s better than nothing, and it’s good to have two locking doors between the lab and the intense indifference of the desert.
“Yeah, so. The base was originally supposed to be a circle. Kind of bicycle-wheel shaped, with a recreation area in the middle where that cement pad out front is now. This airlock system was put in place for the baby astronauts to practice secure entry and egress from each spoke of the wheel. But then funding got vaporized, and they had to abandon construction partway in.”
“Ah.” Nkrumah looks around, taking in the near-triangular dimensions of the airlock. “They just connected the spokes? So we have a… pie slice?”
“Got it in one. Twenty-five hundred square feet, tons of dead space between hallways,” Kinsey adds, crossing the airlock to scan her keycard at the interior door. “It’s not a lot of breathing room for six people, but we’ll make it work.”
“I’ve lived in smaller apartments with more roommates.”
Kinsey hesitates at the door. “I’d wager those apartments had reliable cell service and Wi-Fi. Ours gets knocked out by dust storms half the time. Hell, in the bad sandstorms even the emergency landline goes down, and repairs on that can take months. Phone company’s not exactly prioritizing line repairs in the middle of nowhere.”
The only sound for a moment is the creak of Nkrumah’s new boots as she shifts her weight from foot to foot. “Are you trying to get me to turn around? Head back to the airstrip? Miss out on the opportunity to put Kangas Station on my resume?”
“No. No, sorry. I just—I want you to know what you’re getting into here. That’s all. Hope you’re ready to get cozy with some strangers.”
She looks back to see a wicked sparkle in Nkrumah’s eyes. “Oh, I don’t think that will be a problem.” Her mouth slowly spreads into a Cheshire-cat grin. “The real question is—aretheyready to get cozy withme?”
The keycard scanner beeps. Kinsey opens the door. “Let’s find out.”
The meeting starts with all the usual formalities. Nkrumah yells about safety protocols and asks Domino whether they are or are not “a fucking idiot”; Saskia asks Nkrumah not to swear; Nkrumah swears again, more pointedly this time. Mads asks everyone to calm down. Domino sits silently with their arms folded, their eyes half-shut, their mouth pressed into a tight line. Jacques vomits into a trash can.
Kinsey knows how these things go. It’s all predictable, all self-contained. This part doesn’t require her intervention. Nkrumah always snaps at whoever she feels most recently rejected by. Saskia latches on to everyone’s tone, and acts wounded by all but the softest verbal caresses. Mads is infuriatingly, antagonistically reasonable. Domino seethes. Jacques vomits into a trash can.
She half listens to them, her forehead pressed to theglass of the little window that looks into the exam room, her skin tacky with half-dried sweat. Her gaze is fixed on the wire mesh that’s embedded in the glass. She wonders how they got it in there. Did the wire get sandwiched between two layers of glass, like a specimen being prepared for study? Or did the glass get poured over the wire, sealing it inside?
