Maddy fell to her knees at the wall and ran her hand over it.
“It has to be here somewhere,” she said. “It has to be…”
I slipped on my shorts and tee and crossed to her.
“Hey, hey,” I said.
She was too upset and didn’t hear me. She kept scrambling at that section of wall, searching frantically for what she knew had to be there.
But it wasn’t.
I grabbed her hands. She was going to hurt herself at this rate.
“Hey,” I said. “Calm down. It’s okay.”
“No!” she said, struggling against me. “It’s not okay! It’s many things but it’s not okay! This was supposed to be our ticket out of here! This was supposed to be our way out!”
I folded her arms against her chest and wrapped my own around her in a protective cocoon.
“It’s gone,” I said. “It’s okay. We’ll find another way out of here.”
“We’re never getting out of here!” she cried. “We’re never getting out!”
She wept, the tears rolling down her face.
I hope you’re happy, Changelings, I bellowed in my mind. I hope you’re damn happy.
Maddy was distraught. Nothing I did brought her around. We sat on the floor as I rocked her back and forth. Without warning, she got up and wandered across the room. My ass had been growing numb for a while but I didn’t like to complain. I wanted to be there for her.
She lay on the bed and stared at the wall, not moving.
I got up and dusted imaginary lint from my hands.
“Are you hungry?” I said. “How about breakfast? Or something to drink?”
She didn’t stir.
“I guess it’ll just be me then,” I said.
I tucked into a delicious jellyfish sandwich with mint sauce. None of those ingredients were what I was eating but it was a close enough translation for aliens to know the delicacy they’d be treated to.
“Mm,” I said. “Super tasty.”
I sat on her side of the dining table so I could watch her. Still, she didn’t get up. She just lay there.
I licked my fingers and placed the dish in the replicator. The dish would be broken down and dissolved, its atoms reused for future dishes and other ingredients.
I went into the bathroom and washed my hands. I came out. She still hadn’t moved. Was she asleep?
I moved around her and found her eyes still open. She blinked but otherwise didn’t move a single muscle.
“If you keep lying there like that I’m going to have to turn you over so you don’t get bedsores,” I said.
“Go away,” she said.
I sat on the edge of the bed, so close to her I could almost feel her heart beating.
“Come on,” I said. “We can’t let something like this keep us down. We can think of a new way to get out of here. You’re the engineer. I bet you’ve got lots of ideas.”
“We’re never getting out of here,” she said. “Never.”
“Don’t say that,” I said. “We can. We just need to believe in ourselves.”
Where was the endless hope she harbored last night? Where was the desire to rage against the Changelings and beat them at their own game?
Disappeared, like the hole in the wall.
I was wrong about her body not moving. There was one part of her—other than her eyelids when she blinked—that did.
The index finger on her right hand tapped at the bedsheet in a repetitive pattern over and over again.
“You keep doing that,” I said, nodding to her fingers. “Is it some sort of game you play?”
“No,” she said. “It’s not a game.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s something my teachers showed us once. It’s a signal system. A way to communicate without the enemy knowing what you’re doing.”
I sensed talking about it was something that might help her get out of the funk she was in.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“Go on,” I said. “Tell me. How does it work? Or is it too complicated to understand?”
“It’s called tap code. It’s not complicated. It’s very simple.”
“So show it to me.”
She lay there a moment. Then she placed her hand on my leg.
I was beginning to enjoy this communication system already.
“The English alphabet consists of twenty-six letters,” Maddy said. “C and K are doubled up to create one letter. That leaves twenty-five letters. Then we divide up each set of five letters into a horizontal row, one on top of the other. That makes five rows. To identify each letter we give two taps. The first tap refers to the row and the second number to the column. So, one tap followed by a pause, then another tap, means A. Two taps followed by a pause, then three taps, means H. The letter X is used to break up sentences.”
“Cool,” I said. “Computer. Create a new language file. Title: tap code.”
Now I could tap code fluently the way she could.
“You know, we could never have anything like that with the Titian language,” I said. “It’s too complicated. Why did your teacher show it to you?”
“It was done as part of my engineering course,” Maddy said. “In case we were working on a building that collapsed in on us and some people were sent to come and dig us out.”
“Did that ever happen to you?”
“No. I’m a very good engineer.”
“I bet.”
I looked her over again with newfound respect. She wasn’t only beautiful. She had brains too.
“So what were you tapping earlier?” I said.
She tapped her finger on my leg.
“S. O. S?” I said. “Sos? What does that mean?”
“People think it stands for Save Our Souls or Save Our Ship but it doesn’t. It actually doesn’t mean anything, except for someone to come save you.”
“Huh,” I said. “That’s interesting.”
“No, it’s not. But thanks for pretending.”
For the first time that day, she smiled up at me. Even upset and depressed as she was, she was a marvel to look at.
Then a serious look came to her eye. She pushed herself up onto her elbows. She leaned forward and was about to press her lips to mine but
