Radon (Inmate Space Mates Book 1) Read online

Just as I had feared, seconds after the door slammed I heard glass breaking. I rolled my eyes, pulling myself out of bed and into the closest pair of trousers on the floor beside my bed. Without bothering to find a shirt, I padded into what passed as my kitchen area to see what kind of damage had been done. Not one, but two of my four glasses lay on the floor shattered, along with one of my two plates. Shaley had wanted to make an impression when she left, and she had done just that. I ran my hair through my course hair, surveying the damage and feeling myself grow more and more grumpy. I didn’t really need a whole lot of dishes, it wasn’t like I did a lot of entertaining, but it was the principal of the thing. Or something like that.

  “Oy! Hey, Radon! You in there? Open up the door!”

  Another sigh. Apparently, I was popular on that particular day. Some might have been pleased with that, but I was decidedly the opposite. I wasn’t a huge fan of company. Had I been, I would probably have invested in a bit more by the way of entertaining accoutrements.

  “Hey! I know you’re in there. I can see your feet moving!”

  “Gods, Petering, what are you, some sort of detective? Come on, get inside, will you? I don’t need you drawing attention to my hut, alright? Especially not right now.”

  I opened the door and practically shoved my friend Petering into the room, shutting the door quickly after him. I hesitated for a moment and then made the decision to bolt it. Just in case. When I turned back to Petering, he was looking at my floor with wide eyes, his green skin colored with surprise.

  “So that’s why Shaley left here looking so upset!” He was laughing now, kicking at the glass on my floor merrily, “I should have known it had something to do with you. Especially when she was coming from your direction. What’d you do, you old dog? Something terrible, I’d guess. By the look on her face it must have been something monstrous.”

  “Again with that word! What is it with that word today? It seems like everyone in town has chosen precisely that word today.”

  “Shaley?”

  “What about her?”

  “She called you a monster! I mean, right? That’s the other place you heard it today?”

  I chose to ignore him, instead crouching down to half-heartedly clean up the glass on my floor. I should have used some kind of a broom, but looking around the room I realized I didn’t have one. I was a bachelor, through and through, and my home was proof of it.

  “Aw, come on now. I’m just playing with you, Radon. You already know this kind of thing, don’t you? I mean, you must have known about your reputation all along.”

  “Sure I do. Do you think I mind it? Why would I?”

  I gave one more lame attempt at cleaning up before giving up and getting to my feet again. When I looked at Petering, he was looking right at me, a doubtful expression painted across his face. All of the sudden, I was beyond annoyed. I ran my hand quickly through my hair again, one of the surest signs that I was frustrated with something. Or with someone.

  “Ok, what is it, Petering? What do you want?”

  “Want? What makes you think I want something?”

  “Well, the fact that you’re here, for starters. Also, it’s written all over your face. You’ve come for a reason. Perhaps you should tell me what it is.”

  It’s tonight,” he blurted out, his whole body practically vibrating with excitement that had only built during his brief attempt at playing coy with me, “there’s to be a massive town hall meeting tonight.”

  “Is that all? From the looks of you I would have said it was something important.”

  “Seriously? How can you be that way, Radon? How can you honestly tell me you aren’t even a little bit curious about what they might say?”

  “Because.”

  “That’s a stupid answer.”

  “Because there’s no point, ok? What does it matter? Whatever’s going to happen, it doesn’t have anything to do with me. It doesn’t have anything to do with you, either, in case you were wondering.”

  “Of course it does. It has something to do with all of us. With every single one of us still living and breathing on Valmore. You should know that. You do know that. You just don’t want to admit it.”

  I was starting to feel like an animal trapped inside a cage, only the cage was my own home. I moved away from Petering, leaving my stifling, cramped excuse for a kitchen to return to my bedroom and look for a shirt. It was clear to me that my over eager friend wasn’t going anywhere, so there wasn’t any point in holding onto the idea of having a relaxing evening to myself. I was doing my best to keep a handle on myself, but even so I could feel my scales beginning to push their way out of my skin. For what had to be the millionth time in my life of only thirty rotations, I wondered why the gods would have created us with such an obvious indication of what we were feeling. Any time we got angry or seriously erotically excited, those scales made their appearance. Petering, seeing how agitated I was getting, took a small step backwards, out of the doorframe to my bedroom.

  “Look, I’m not trying to piss you off, Radon. I’m just saying. I don’t think we can afford to be blasé about this. About any of this. None of us can. Not if we’re going to survive.”

  “See? There. Right there.”

  I had tugged a rumpled linen shirt roughly over my head, trying to ignore it when it caught on my pearly gray scales. Now I stood staring at my boyhood friend, wondering how two people so close could be so completely different.

  “What?” Petering asked with concern and maybe a hint of nerves on his face, “What right where?”

  “That. The last bit you said. You’re trying to tell me that I have to take an interest if we’re going to survive. That’s where the two of us are different, ok? Because I don’t think we are going to survive. You and me, sure, and the rest of us who are already here. But once we’re all gone? Boom. That’s it. No more. When the last one of us dies, that’s just it. There won’t be anything else. The Valmorians will be no more. Eradicated. Poof. Get it? Get why I just don’t give a shit about the town hall meeting?”

  Petering’s face went through a whole host of emotions as I spoke, finally landing on a hard, stony reserve. I almost felt bad for making my little speech. Almost. He was such an optimistic fool, always believing any halfcocked story of salvation. Ever since it had become apparent to the Masters that it wasn’t a fluke, that my generation really was going to be the last of the Valmorians, Petering had believed every single solitary rumor in the streets about how we were going to fix it. I could remember a time when I had believed the hope hype myself, but those times were long past. All I had felt on the matter in recent memory was a dull, aching finality bleeding into a heartless indifference.

  “I hear you. The same way I always here you. It’s not like you ever say anything else. You’ve been spouting off this same angry shit for years. It’s getting old, if you want to know the truth, Radon.”

  “Oh yeah?” My voice sounding dark and angry in my ears and my scales standing ever more up and at attention, “You think so?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. We’re too old for this, ok? The fact is, it’s irresponsible.”

  “Sorry, Petering, but I just don’t follow you.”

  “Don’t you? You’ve got to be kidding me!”

  The shout that came out of Petering’s mouth surprised me, there was no doubt about that. From the look he wore on his face, I thought he may just have surprised himself, as well. I loved Petering like a brother, but he had never been the most assertive of men. His mother had been sickly while pregnant with him. She had been one of the very last to give birth, giving Petering a certain kind of unwanted notoriety he couldn’t seem to get rid of. She had died in childbirth, and he had grown from a sickly child to an undersized man. He wasn’t the sort of guy who was often taken seriously, and he had the kind of good nature that was a little too easy to take advantage of. To see him stand up to me, to see him take any kind of stand at all, was enough to make me take a mental step back. He wasn’t
just bullshitting me on this. This town hall thing, for whatever reason, was really, genuinely important to him.

  “Ok, man. Explain it to me.”

  “Ok, it’s like this,” he spoke with a slightly stricken look on his face, like he couldn’t believe what he had just done, “we’re the best chance our race has, right?”

  “Sure, I guess that’s right. I don’t really think about it.”

  “And that’s the problem. Not enough of us are thinking about it. We’re an endangered species, man! That’s no joke.”

  “Maybe it’s not, but that doesn’t mean we’re supposed to do something about it. Maybe we’re just supposed to let it end. Maybe we’re just supposed to bow out.”

  “No. Absolutely not. I refuse to believe that. Not when so many of our parents fought so hard. They have everything they had to get us here. We owe them to keep up the fight. We owe them at least that much.”

  And there it was. There was the missing piece I hadn’t ever thought about. Once I saw it, I couldn’t believe I had been so dense as to miss it for all of these years. We’d had some variation of this conversation many, many times, but I’d never seen the light I was seeing now. To say I felt like a grade-a jackass would have been an understatement. The bottom line was, I had been too busy thinking about myself to think about anything else.

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “No, don’t, ok man? I don’t want your apology. You didn’t do anything to me. Got it?”

  “Got it.” My throat felt thick with emotion, which was something I wasn’t used to experiencing, but I did my best to keep that to myself. No sense in making things feel more uncomfortable than they already were.

  “You know what I do want?”

  “For me to go to the town hall meeting?”

  “For you to go to the town hall meeting. You are one hundred percent correct.”

  And so I did. I raked my fingers through my hair, trying to make myself look less like a derelict and at least halfway presentable, and I went with him to the town hall meeting that was so important to him. What else was I going to do? Never mind that Shaley’s father was the head figure sitting for the Masters. Never mind that I honestly didn’t believe there was anything to be done aside from doing our best to live our lives with as much vivacity as we could muster before it was all over. I followed Petering to the meeting, and once there, listened as everything I thought I knew to be true about things was blown wide open.

  Chapter Five

  Becca Cross

  “Space. I’m in Space. They strapped me into a shuttle, and now I’m in space.”

  It was the only thing I could think to myself, the only thing my mind could conceive of, and therefore I thought it over and over again. And of course, to be fair, it was exactly what had happened. That was what the man who looked like an army general but also maybe not had come to tell us. It had been difficult to believe then, and it was difficult to believe still, even while I was actually in space. Nothing about it was normal, and consequently it had taken the number one primo spot in my mind. All I had to do was shut my eyes for a moment or two and I was right back there, right back in that break room listening to why we had been brought to the underground government facility with my mouth hanging open stupidly.

  “Here’s the god’s honest truth ladies, and I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but those movies you’ve seen on the big screen with the aliens running around and wreaking havoc, those aren’t so far off from the truth as you probably thought they were.”

  This comment was immediately followed by a low rumble of conversation amongst the other girls in the room. Alecia shot me a sideways glance, then made a little motion with her head for me to look across the room. She was motioning at Christine, the former badass, who had gone as white as a sheet. One of the other girls was fanning her, and finally got her to put her head between her knees. I just sat there, not really feeling anything at all. Maybe I was in shock, or maybe I just didn’t believe it yet. Either way, I was glad I wasn’t feeling the way Christine was.

  “That’s right, ladies. No bullshit. I can see by the looks on your faces that some of you believe me and some of you don’t. That’s ok. You will, soon enough. Soon enough all of you will believe me. For your sake, I hope you get there in time to listen to what I have to say. Before it’s too late.”

  “Ok, fine. So even if there are aliens, what’s that got to do with us?”

  Every face in the room turned to stare at Alecia. Every face except for mine, that was. I was sitting close enough to feel guilty by association and even thought people weren’t looking at me, it sure felt like they were. I hated that feeling. That feeling of being watched. It was one of the worst parts of being in prison. I was watched all of the time, no matter where I was or what I was doing.

  I waited, face turned down to my lap and looking intently at my own hands as if they had suddenly sprouted wings or something. I would have liked to go right on looking at my hands until everyone else got bored and went somewhere else, but I just couldn’t do it. The weight of what was happening around me was simply too much. When I looked up, the man at the front of the room was looking at Alecia with a look I couldn’t quite describe on his face. It appeared to me to be half annoyance and half admiration. Which made sense to me. There was something to be said for a woman who wasn’t afraid to say what she was thinking. I could definitely have done with a little bit more of that myself.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Alecia. What’s yours?”

  “My name is of no relevance to this mission. But, that being said, you ask a good question. It’s the right question. It’s what I would want to know if I were in your shoes.”

  “Which you aren’t.”

  “You’re right, ma’am,” the official looking man with no name replied amidst a chorus of murmurs over how completely brazen Alecia was being, “I’m not. Now. In terms of what all of this shit has to do with you. As I said, aliens aren’t some kind of bullshit dream cooked up by big bad Hollywood. They’re real, and they’re a threat. We need you to go and make that not true anymore.”

  “Us? And how the hell are we supposed to do a thing like that? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we aren’t exactly special ops or anything like that. We’re just a bunch of chicks who did some very bad things. What purpose are we going to serve?”

  “I’m afraid that’s classified. Even I’m not privy to the full scope of information on this. I’m just here to see that you lot are fit for flight.”

  “Flight? What do you mean, flight?”

  “I mean just what I said. Just as soon as we get the green light on you ladies, well, we’ll get the green light on the rest of it, too. You ladies are fixing to be airborne.”

  ***

  “Hello? Hello, is there anyone else there?”

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. At least I didn’t think it was how things were supposed to go. We had been briefed on the importance of following protocol, on the importance of doing exactly what we were told when we were told to do it. Our directions were to file into an odd little capsule, which was actually some new spaceship they had invented but hadn’t told anyone about. Once inside, we were each put into a little pod that closed tight as soon as our belts were fastened. These pods were the thing that was supposed to keep us safe. Once shut, they would begin to slowly lower in temperature while simultaneously letting loose a gaseous substance that would put us to sleep. With these two tool, our bodies would be altered into a state somewhere between life and death. The way I understood it was that we would basically be put on pause until our shuttle arrived where we were going and the shuttle’s computer let us out.

  “And what about the rest of you?”

  “I’m sorry?” The man asked curtly, clearly not enjoying being interrupted, “Did somebody have something to say?”

  “Yup, over here,” beside me Alecia was waving her hand back and forth, “me again. Your new favorite
person.”

  “Alright, fine. What is it now?”

  “I was just wondering. What’s going to happen to the rest of you? All of you who are still on earth? I mean, I don’t know much of anything about travelling through space, but if you’ve got to knock us out like that, I’m guessing we’re going to be in locked inside that floating tin can for a long time. What’ll be going on back here? Let’s say by the time we reach our final destination. You guys gonna communicate with us somehow?”

  “No,” he said with a furrowed brow, cautious about his next steps for the first time, “someone will, god willing, but it won’t be us.”

  “How come? You just gonna shoot us up there and then forget about us?”

  “No. I don’t think you understand, ma’am. You’ll be in stasis, right as rain. The rest of us? By the time you get to where you’re going, we’ll be long gone. It’ll be a hundred years our time for you to get there.”

  Awful. It was such an awful thing to comprehend. Even without having a person left on the planet who cared about me or wanted me around, it was terrible to conceive of the fact that I was going to go to sleep, and when I woke up everyone I knew would be dead. My sister, her beautiful children I would never have the opportunity to know; they would all be long gone and I would be on some planet the name of which nobody would even tell me.

  “What if we say no?”

  Everyone turned their heads again, wanting to get a glimpse of the speaker, and this time they were all looking directly at me. I hadn’t meant to say it. I hadn’t meant to say anything at all. It had just sort of slipped out, the stark question, and before I could do a thing about it my words were just out there in the atmosphere where I couldn’t get them back and tuck them away inside.

  “Excuse me miss? I don’t believe I heard you correctly.”

  “She said, what if we say no? Seems to me like a pretty damn good question. Seems like the best question any of us could be asking right about now.” Alecia gave me a “we’re in this together” kind of a look and nodded her head at me.