Part X.

March 5th, 2248
Over the North Atlantic

 

The pain was a vice; there was no release of pressure, just a half turn of the crank tighter every so often, shattering his ability to think clearly until he became as acclimated to it as anyone ever could be and was able to put two thoughts together in more than shards again.

Or until he was able to try to, anyway.

The North Atlantic showed through the barest breaks of clouds as the shuttle hurtled above it, the water wind-tossed and streaked with foam and colored like iron in the early morning light; it looked cold and hard and mean, and even in the climate controlled shuttle, Scotty shivered and burrowed deeper into the heavy coat he'd stolen from Cor.

He’d been under that water before.  He’d been drowning then, too.

There had been some half-sane thought when he'd taken the coat about biometrics and not wanting to be tracked -- he also had Corry's ID and physical credit chips in the coat’s right pocket -- and another thought about knowing how cold it was outside, but neither of those were necessarily the complete truth.  And all of those thoughts were in fragments anyway, pieces honed sharp on a whetstone made of disbelief and fear and the overriding instinct to run.

It rolled in and then ebbed like the tide, that panic; now, it was trying to pull him too deep to get back to the surface.  He'd managed to hold it down long enough to get a shower and lay down, but after failing to sleep and getting more and more anxious as he did, finally something snapped in his head and he'd left.

He hadn't intended to just ditch Corry like that, he hadn’t planned it; even as he was taking the coat and reasoning out why he was, and even as he was dragging his damaged self onto the bus and riding to the Trenton transfer station, Scotty hadn't actually known he was going to go until he already had.  Every action existed as a singular thing unto itself, with little connection to the one before it or after.

He kept coming back to the date; kept circling back to it in his mind, creeping around this new hole in his existence, his only frame of reference for it the last hole that had been ripped into it, now half of his lifetime ago.

That’s two, he thought, hysteria catching on the edge of each word as he ground his teeth together. Two.

Two birthdays he had lost now.  His twenty-sixth, to go with his thirteenth.

Even half-sane thought had been thought, at least, when he'd grabbed Cor's coat and left his own behind. The public-access transporter system would have required him to use his own biometric ID -- a mandatory law in case of an accident, so whatever was left could be identified before being mopped up -- and the mere thought of being tracked was more than he could cope with; the transatlantic shuttle, though, that was an easy enough trick.  Cor was taller’n him, but with the coat’s hood up, the cameras weren’t that good.  Even barely able to walk, he’d wasted no time using Corry’s ID to board the shuttle in Trenton that would go to London via New York City.

From London, he could go to-- to--

The first automatic answer was Aberdeen, but even out of his bloody, miserable mind, Scotty knew that wasn't the answer he was looking for.  Not yet, anyway.

And when even was the funeral?  He'd been on the Sun, they hadn't had the-- the funeral yet by the time he'd--

What did they think of him missing it?  Did it matter that he did?

Did they even notice that he did?

A whole month of his life had vanished.  Did they notice then?   How long did it take them to?

Stop. It's March 5th, he told himself, pressing his palms against his eyes hard enough to see sparks, breathing as carefully as he could through his nose and still not getting enough air, because it was that or screaming right now. It's the year 2248.  I just turned twenty-six.

They had to have had the funeral by now.  It wouldn't be decent to have delayed it any longer than they already had, and the appearance of decency and propriety were often more important than the reality when it came to his immediate family.

There were so many rules to enforce that, too.  There were so bloody many of them, and for all his damned life, he’d thought that everyone’s families had the same basic rules as his did; that while there were surface variations, there weren’t necessarily any big structural differences underpinning ‘em.  He figured that-- that most mothers left their children with caretakers, that the rules were always enforced differently between sons and daughters, that no one ever wanted to deal with unpleasantness -- that was the word, unpleasantness -- that--

That he was the unpleasantness.

He just didn’t question it.  Not even when somewhere, buried under all of the other things he had to think about or worry about or consider, he had started to know better, learning as he sat listening in quiet bafflement when his squadmates in Basic, and then later on Corry, would recount some childhood story, recalling details that seemed impossible.

They’d sounded like storybooks.  Tales of family vacations or dressed up cats or first driving lessons (or sailing lessons); tales where even the bad things -- the inevitable scraped knees or youthful heartbreaks -- could be looked back on with either wisdom or humor.  As if they belonged in some reality with different fundamental rules than his own.

It was so hard to grasp that Cor could even remember that much of his childhood, enough to put together whole narratives about it.  Or that Cor could remember all his birthdays, for that matter, starting with age four.  He could remember what kinds of cakes he had, where the parties were held, what his favorite gift was, what golden happiness he lived every year in mid-August.

Scotty never once grudged that, but it stunned him that anyone could do that.  Whenever he tried to remember those milestones, all he had was a quiet sense of dread and some vague impressions for some of his earlier birthdays, and not much to remember about later ones, not until he was almost an adult.  Never mind the empty spaces between.

Though, at least all but his thirteenth birthday had existed somewhere back there, he was reasonably sure.

It wasn't really until his seventeenth that any of his birthdays stood out; that one did, not because of anything his family had done, but because it was right around then that he got back the formal copy of the Aberdeen Solution, bound neatly and published in various formats, with his name on the inside title page.  And because Mister Winslow had given him a proper thermos for his coffee, a rugged thing he still owned, or at least thought he did.  And then some of his coworkers had ordered enough Thai red vegetable curry for the whole lot of them to have dinner together, occupying the yard's main office, which had about knocked him on his rear because he hadn’t been expecting it.

They'd all given him a fine eighteenth, too; about the same thing, just good takeout and a bunch of junkyard dogs hanging around together for a bit, nothing exciting, but warm in memory.

By then, all he had been waiting on was the date he was to report for Basic.  To get out.

And-- once he left Aberdeen, he was careful about where or how far he let himself look backwards.  He couldn’t see any purpose to doing any deep dives into it, with his future ahead of him.

But even when he did glance back, when he tried to cast back to whatever time period could nebulously be described as childhood, so many large spans of time were missing altogether; a blur, at best.  An emptiness, more often, but for the dread and the old echoes of heartsickness.

As if none of it had mattered.

I should be used to it by now, aye? he asked himself, trying to breathe past the invisible, serrated blade in his chest and shockingly aware of how lonely he was at that moment.

It was ultimately a thought too far, though; unable to find any other quarter, he hid under the hood of his brother's coat, as deep into it as he could get, and he cried as hard as it hurt, and tried even then to attract no notice.

 

 

 

The London transfer hub offered a number of optional destinations, but it came down to only two.  And, in truth, he knew even before he wanted to know which one of those he would take.

He stood balanced between one leg and two crutches, pain a red hot coal in his left hip and a solid, if lower-level, pressure in his right, and he stared up at the board that listed the departure for Edinburgh in twenty-two minutes and wondered whose definition of reality he fell under now.