But The Stars Page 15

  Dante walks into the middle of the bridge, but the others are more cautious, hanging back by the engineering console. Vichy leans against the wall. Benson sits on a ledge, while Mac and Zoe sit in swiveling seats, turning them around to face the rest of the crew.

  “All right,” Cap says, sounding annoyed. He points at Mac and the bandage wrapped around his head. “That’s not okay. What’s going on?”

  Dante is conflicted. Physically, she’s standing between the two groups. The crew has split along entirely arbitrary lines, capturing how they left Mag’s cabin and not any actual, logical, rational grouping. At this point, there’s no reason to exclude anyone from suspicion other than Zoe, but Vichy, Mac and Benson clearly don’t think that way. Suspicion tears at the heart of the crew. Dante feels guilty about withholding information from Cap. He and the others seem to sense that, but they don’t understand why.

  Dante speaks on behalf of her newly formed tribe, saying, “He was attacked.”

  “By who?”

  “By what?” Angel asks, being a little more pointed with her question.

  Zoe raises her hand sheepishly and lowers her head without offering anything by way of explanation. She’s wearing a spare flight suit they grabbed from Dante’s cabin, but she still has Vichy’s jacket on over the top, which is clearly confusing Mags. Vichy and Zoe have never been that close. Mac, though, has always been close to Zoe—and yet she attacked him.

  “You attacked Mac?” Mags asks, sensing how the dynamic within the crew has shifted. “Wait,” she says, pointing at the bloodied bandage. “How is that even possible? If none of this is real, how is that real?”

  “Oh, we’re more fragile than you think,” Benson says.

  Cap walks over to Mac.

  All eyes are on Cap, staring him down from both sides. Although he seems genuine in his concern, he also senses the distrust in the quiet stares directed at him.

  “Are you okay?” he asks, turning his head to get a good look at the blood seeping through the bandage.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  No further explanation is offered by Mac, which has Cap furrow his brow.

  Angel is frustrated. She appeals to Dante. “I don’t understand. What’s changed? I thought we were going to meet up and figure this thing out together. What happened to you guys?”

  “Who died?” Dante asks, deciding to cut straight through to the heart of the issue.

  “What?” Cap replies, looking genuinely surprised, unsure why that one particular, disjointed question seemed to materialize out of thin air.

  “You told me someone died down there? Who was it?”

  “What are you talking about?” Cap asks.

  Dante points at herself. “I was down there, remember? You and me. We took the rescue shuttle after the explosion on the ice. We went down to get them.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never been on P4.”

  Dante’s frustrated. “Damn it, Cap. You were there.”

  “Dante,” he says, appealing to her with his hands out before him. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “You got us out of there,” she says. “Those things got inside our heads, but you kept us on track. You got us off P4. You must remember.”

  “I—I don’t remember,” he replies. “But why is this important?”

  “Because one of us isn’t real. One of us is one of them.”

  “What?” Mags says, marching across the bridge, wanting to be part of the discussion. “You cannot be serious.”

  Dante struggles to hold back her rising anxiety. She hates this shit. She doesn’t want to do this. She’d do anything to avoid this confrontation if she could, but there’s no other way. Everyone’s present. This might be the only opportunity they get to identify the intruder.

  It takes all her strength to say, “No more lies.”

  “Hang on,” Cap says, pointing at those that accompanied Dante. “So that’s what all this is about?” He gestures to the crew that remained with him, adding, “You think one of us is an imposter?”

  The lack of a reply is an answer in itself.

  “Why us?” he asks. “What makes you think one of us is a traitor and not Benson or Vee?”

  It’s a fair question, but Dante doesn’t want to give up any information that could be used against them.

  “They’re losing control,” she says. “I think we’ve overestimated their ability to determine what happens in here. We’re active. This is our illusion. At best, they’re observers. I have my doubts about how much they can direct what happens inside here.”

  “What makes you say that?” Angel asks.

  “What do you remember from the reboots?” Dante asks, gesturing around her at the crew at large. No one answers. “I remember things—situations they could have never known about. Standing on a beach in New York. Our training back in Florida. I don’t think any of that was intentional.”

  Vichy says, “They’ve been experimenting.”

  “Learning,” she replies. “But their control is imprecise. Even the reboots. Those points at which we break the membrane. I don’t think they intend us to reset the simulation.”

  Zoe asks, “So they’re not in control?”

  “Not entirely,” Dante replies. “They’re reacting to us.”

  “Just like we react to them.”

  Cap says, “And you think someone died and they replaced them?”

  “I know they did,” Dante says, looking him in the eye. “You told me so yourself—down on P4... If someone died down there, then someone up here is fake.”

  Cap purses his lips. Oh, how she’d love to be able to read his mind, to catch the thoughts ricocheting around inside his head. His eyes narrow as his jaw tightens.

  “Okay. Let’s say you’re right and for whatever reason, I’ve forgotten. How do we find this intruder?”

  “We ask about the past,” Zoe says. “They won’t know anything about that, right? I mean, anything that happened on Earth is out of reach. We can catch them out.”

  “Like who won the Super Bowl?” Vichy says.

  “They could have accessed our data banks,” Benson says. “We’re carrying historical, cultural and technical information in our computers, along with news clips. We’d have to be very careful to be sure any questions we asked couldn’t be answered by examining them.”

  Vichy says, “But we don’t know that they’ve looked at those.”

  “Yet,” Mac says. “What about stuff from our training? Anecdotes? Like hanging out at The Black Hole?”

  Dante shakes her head. “Shared memories are a good idea, but I don’t know if that’s enough. I mean, you could ask me about my sister, but they saw that memory play out on the beach, they could have gleaned enough information to bluff their way through.”

  “So who do we trust?” Vichy asks, looking around at the rest of the crew.

  “That’s the question,” Mags says. Her eyes dart around, looking for something—anything, but there are no clues. They all feel the weight of uncertainty in the moment.

  “We may have already blown this,” Benson says.

  “What do you mean?” Cap asks.

  “I mean, while just a few of us knew about the traitor, we could have smoked them out. But now, with this in the open, they can hide. Now they know they should hide.”

  Mags says, “You’re forgetting, this fucker could be one of those that already knew.”

  “I agree,” Angel says. “If we’ve been infiltrated we need to work together—not in isolation. We can’t give him or her a chance to divide us.”

  Dante is interested in hearing the crew talk. Their choice of terms is telling. Imposter is neutral. Intruder is more assertive. Traitor is emotive. As for this fucker, well, there’s no doubt about what Mags thinks.

  “So we’re all here,” Cap says. “What do we do? How can we tell who’s who? I mean, it’s not like we can just test someone’s blood, right? It’s not that simple, is
it?”

  “I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve,” Dante says, grabbing a flex tablet and typing in a few words. She adds, “I’m going to ask each of you what color you see. Ignore the word itself. I don’t care what it says. I want to know what color the word is, not the color it describes.”

  RED

  GREEN

  BLUE

  BLACK

  YELLOW

  The words she’s selected appear in different colors. Red has been written with green letters, while green is the reverse, using red letters. Blue is actually brown, while black is black and yellow is blue.

  Without letting the others see which word she’s pointing at, Dante moves around the crew, touching at one word and then another. Her finger touches at red and Mags says, “Green,” correctly picking the color rather than the name. Slowly, Dante works her way around the bridge.

  Before starting the second round, Dante changes a few of the colors, but not all of them, leaving some of them exactly as they were, wanting to confuse the imposter. After everyone has answered twice, Cap asks, “So?”

  “Everyone got it right,” she says, frustrated.

  “I don’t get it,” Mags says. “Why did you think that would work?”

  “Color is very specific,” Dante replies, feeling as though she’s failed, speaking as though she has to justify herself. “Even within terrestrial species, we see different colors depending on the cone cells in our eyes. Dogs see different colors than humans. Bees see in ultraviolet. Mosquitos in infrared. Colors are contrived, literally existing only in the eye of the beholder.”

  “And you thought they wouldn’t be able to differentiate between colors?” Angel asks, only she seems a little nervous, something that’s unlike her. It’s subtle, nothing Dante can identify specifically, but she can sense uneasiness. Perhaps it was the slight quiver in Angel’s voice, or the pained look on her face. She’s unsettled. Who isn’t?

  Dante focuses, wanting to talk herself through this. “I knew they wouldn’t be able to see in color,” she says, still sure of herself, confused as to why her strategy didn’t work. “Colors aren’t real.”

  Vichy holds his hands out, looking at each of them in turn, “Ah, in case you haven’t noticed—neither’s this.”

  “Maybe they’ve already figured colors out,” Benson says.

  “Maybe you were wrong,” Mags says, which hurts Dante more than she’d like to admit. Her closest friend doesn’t believe her. Dante swallows the lump rising in her throat. Mags probably feels offended at being caught on the wrong side of the divide. As Mags went with Cap to talk to Angel, she is part of the out-group as far as Vichy and the others are concerned. Cap notices the way Dante is stung by those few words.

  “Maybe there is no imposter,” he says. “Maybe we’re overthinking this.”

  “No,” Benson says. “I saw us.”

  “What do you mean?” Angel asks, turning her head sideways a little, perplexed by his comment and intuitively understanding he’s not describing something she’s seen personally.

  “What exactly did you see?” she asks.

  “There was a breach,” Benson says. Dante grits her teeth. She didn’t want to reveal this for fear of leaking too much information to the imposter. With all she’s experienced, she’s convinced their alien captors aren’t quite as in control as they would like them to think. She suspects they grabbed Zoe to interrogate her but never realized that whatever breach they formed remained open, connecting two realities. Now, though, that information is in the open.

  “What do you mean?” Cap asks. “Another membrane?”

  “It was different,” Dante says, trying to control the narrative and limit how much is said. “It was like a vision of the Acheron as it is and not as we see it. It was as though we could see what they’ve made of the ship.”

  Mags raises her eyebrows. “And you didn’t think this was important to share?”

  Vichy says, “There were bodies hanging from the ceiling—our bodies. They were twitching.”

  “But?” Cap asks, wanting more information.

  “But there weren’t nine of us,” Dante replies.

  Mac says, “Fuck.”

  “Yeah,” Zoe replies.

  “Meaning one of us,” Mags says, pointing between herself and the others in disbelief, but failing to complete her sentence.

  “One of us is fake,” Vichy says. “A mole.”

  “You should have told us,” Cap says. His face is flushed with anger. “I’m the goddamn commander! You should have told me!”

  Dante hangs her head.

  “So you think someone died down there and they’ve replaced them in here with us,” Cap says, apparently still not remembering his conversation with Dante on the surface of P4.

  “At least one of us is an impostor,” Benson says. “It was dark. I couldn’t see clearly, but I could make out the racks in the back of the medical bay. There weren’t nine of us.”

  Mags storms up to Dante, waving an angry finger in her face and swearing at her. “For fuck’s sake, Dee. We were hanging from the fucking ceiling and you couldn’t tell us about that? You didn’t think that was important? You didn’t think it was fair that we knew about that? We have a right to know. All of us. We’re all in this together.”

  “Easy,” Cap says, not wanting her to get any closer to Dante.

  Vichy claps his hands together, faking an applause and instantly changing the mood within the bridge. He smiles. “So—who is it? Anyone going to volunteer?”

  Mac shakes his head in disbelief, but regrets that almost instantly, raising his hand up and touching at his bandages.

  Zoe says, “We need to know who is real.”

  “Any other ideas?” Cap asks.

  Dante sighs. She feels as though she’s failed the crew. What seemed so simple, so clear and straightforward, has driven a wedge through the crew. She’s reluctant to suggest anything else, but Cap’s faith in her gets her thinking. She nods slowly, lifting the tablet.

  “There are a few possibilities, but I don’t want to say too much. I don’t want to tip my hand.”

  “Okay,” Cap says. “Let’s do this.”

  Dante ignores him for a moment, working away on her flex computer. It’s not deliberate, it’s more that she feels she needs to address the crew as a whole. It’s important to engage everyone at once to deprive the imposter of time and space. Dante’s acutely aware someone is acting, playing a role on a stage—and they’re doing a convincing job, not leaving any trace of doubt in anyone’s mind. Were it not for the body count, she’d have no inkling anything was amiss. Dante rises to the challenge, realizing this is a battle of wits. She holds her tablet in front of her chest, making sure it’s square, allowing everyone to see what’s displayed on the thin, semi-transparent surface.

  “Which of these arrows is longer?”

  < : : : : : : :

  : : : : : : : >

  Before anyone can reply, she clarifies. “Don’t tell me the obvious answer. None of us are stupid. We can all count the characters and see they’re technically the same—that’s not what I’m looking for. Tell me what you feel? Tell me your instinctive, gut reaction.”

  “And there’s a right answer?” Mags asks, raising an eyebrow.

  Dante nods.

  “This is stupid,” Mac says. “Why the hell are we playing games?”

  Dante is calm. “Because this is one game they can’t play.”

  No one volunteers so Dante brings up a second set of arrows, saying, “Mags. You’re up first.”

  <-=-=-=-=-=-

  -=-=-=-=-=->

  Mags is nervous. Whereas she was aggressive moments ago, now the spotlight has been turned on her and she doesn’t like it. Sweat beads on her forehead. Like Dante, she knows there’s no correct answer, not really, not when the choice is between identical arrows facing left or right. She’s feeling the uncertainty of not knowing precisely what Dante’s looking for.

  “They’re the same damn length,
” she says, refusing to commit to one or the other.

  “Which appears longer?” Dante says in a soft voice, trying to be patient. She watches Mags closely.

  Dante has deliberately brought up an illusion she’s sure no one will have seen before. They all know both arrows are the same. She can see the confusion on each face as she looks around at the crew, observing how they react to this particular challenge. Regardless of each individual answer, their choice only tells her part of the story. Dante’s looking at more than the answers offered by the crew. She’s looking for tells—tiny emotional responses that reveal the depth of reasoning behind each answer.

  “Left,” Mags says, having taken roughly ten seconds to decide.

  Dante is careful not to give anything away in her facial expression. She turns to Mac, nodding slightly to signal he should make his choice. His eyes narrow.

  He breathes deeply and says, “Left,” agreeing with Mags.

  Zoe squints, taking a good look at the first set of arrows.

  < : : : : : : :

  : : : : : : : >

  “So this depends on whether you’re—”

  Dante cuts her off. “Just make your choice.”

  Zoe screws up her nose. She wants more to work with. She was wanting Dante to confirm what she’s looking for. Doubts cause her eyebrows to twitch slightly.

  “One way seems easier than the other,” she says, although Dante would prefer she remained silent.

  “So which way seems more natural? And which seems forced?” Dante asks.

  Zoe shakes her head. “I want to say, they’re the same, but you’re not going to accept that, are you?”

  “Nope.”

  Zoe’s eyes reveal the anguish of a seemingly impossible decision. She knows what it might mean, but like Mags, ultimately, she’s decisive. If anything, after seeing her dark feminine body hanging from the ceiling within the breach, Zoe’s the one person Dante doesn’t suspect, but it’s important the crew go through this together.

  “Left.”

  Dante sets her face like a stone, keeping her expression blank. Not so much as a twitch escapes from her cheeks. Her eyes dart across to Angel, who’s been carefully observing the others. Although she answers quickly, her voice wavers slightly, betraying her doubts.