Clare tried to smile in return, but it came out crooked. She’d learned to hate the darkness. Darkness meant danger. It meant being blind, being lost, and being hunted. The exit light was just enough to see her companions, the walls, and the shiny elevator doors at the hallway’s end, but it felt worse than having no light at all. Something inhuman a floor below them howled.
Peter stepped around them and followed the hallway past the bathrooms. His voice sounded unnaturally distant. “You guys probably want to share, right? This room’s the nicest. It has its own heater and a window. Not luxury, I know, but… well, we take what we can get, huh?”
The sensor pad beside the door beeped as he unlocked it and propped it open, then he reached inside to turn on its lights. The room was small but neat. A bunk bed stood against the left wall with a minimalistic plyboard cupboard and a desk opposite. The space showed signs of having been lived in at one point; a mug sat on the windowsill, and the wastebasket was half full.
Peter hesitated in the doorway. Clare thought he looked uncomfortable. She stopped by the desk and faced him. “Whose room was this?”
He dragged his thumb over his lower lip, his eyebrows tight. “Um. It was Ezra’s.”
“Oh.” Clare’s skin crawled. She looked over the space again. This time, she could pick out all of the artefacts Ezra had left behind. A shimmer of grease on the edge of the mug from where his lips had touched it. A poster of a diagram tacked onto one of the walls. A stress ball that had fissures running across its surface from months of abuse. Scraps of paper in the wastebasket scrawled with indecipherable equations in a painstakingly neat hand.
Peter hunched his shoulders and folded his arms across his chest. “Look, how about we swap? You’ll probably be more comfortable away from all of this.”
Clare glanced up at Dorran for his input. He gave a very small nod, indicating the decision was up to her. “We don’t mind sleeping here.”
“Are you sure?” Peter shuffled nervously. “I know today hasn’t been a great day for either of you…”
She forced a smile. It was just a room. The fact that Ezra had once slept in it shouldn’t have made any difference. And from the look of it, Peter was more uncomfortable there than she was. “Absolutely. I’m looking forward to trying out the heater.”
“Okay. Okay, good.” He nodded, glancing about the place. “There should be some spare blankets in the cupboard. You remember where the bathrooms are, right? If you need anything, I’ll be next door.”
As the door closed, Clare released her breath and unhooked the ID badge from around her neck. She hung it on a hook near the cupboard and approached the window. Very little was visible below. She turned her eyes up and was just in time to see a sliver of the moon before it was swallowed by clouds. They seemed to be moving quickly. Racing, even. She looked aside and saw the mug on the sill was still half full of coffee. “Are you sure you’re okay here, Dorran? We could probably sleep in the main office if we wanted.”
“I don’t mind.” He came up behind her and threaded one arm around her waist. “As long as you are comfortable.”
“Here’s good. Let’s get some rest.”
“Hm.” He dipped down to kiss the top of her head. “May I make a request?”
“Sure.”
“Stay close to me tonight.”
“Of course I will.”
They found a foot heater by the desk and turned it on. The beds were single and bunked, but Clare felt as though even that small gap was too much of a separation. Dorran seemed to share her feelings. He gently pulled her after himself into the bottom bunk and coiled around her as they settled in to sleep.
The bed was narrow, but they fit together well. Dorran’s arm curled protectively around her back. Clare’s head tucked into his throat. Their legs tangled. Clare tried to let her mind drift away. She was tired—she could feel it in every fibre of her body—but her mind wasn’t ready to relax. Ferocious winds created a high-pitched whistle outside their window. The storm spread crackling lightning around the tower, so close that it seemed to charge the air she breathed. No matter what she tried to think about, her mind kept turning back towards the thanites.
Peter had said the machines were too small to be detectable without a microscope. But Clare was sure she could feel them as each beat of her heart pulsed them deeper into her body. Scraping against her veins. Digging. Squirming. Alive, like a parasite she could never be free from. In her lungs. In her bones. In her brain.
Eyes staring blindly into the darkness, she whispered to Dorran, “I feel like I’m going crazy.”
He was silent for so long that Clare began to think he’d fallen asleep. The wind rattled a pipe outside their window, and it sounded like someone knocking to be let in. Then he pulled her tighter against himself, his breath ghosting across her ear. “It feels as though the whole world has.”
Her eyes were full, threatening to overflow as she stared at the mattress above them. “If you ever want to split up—”
“Never.”
“But if I’m becoming a burden—”
“You’re not.” The kiss on her cheekbone felt featherlight. “You are very precious to me. I know how you feel. Fractured. I wish I could do more to help; you deserve a better life than this.”
She found his hand and held it over her chest, close to her heart. “You’ve done so much. You deserve someone stronger.”
“I have known many
