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“Graham’s dead.”
The words are static in my ears. I blink, trying to sort through them, trying to force the sounds into the right order so that they make sense. “I don’t understand.”
Captain Hawthorne takes a deep breath. It tears at the edges. “I said, Graham Bryant is dead.”
“I don’t…I see.” I don’t trust myself to say anything else. The revelation is too sudden, too soon, striking me in the solar plexus and winding me as surely as the butt of a rifle. It’s all I can do to remain upright.
She carries on talking, oblivious. “We found out about Amber Heights. He gave the outlaws the gate codes. He let them in. He’s responsible for what happened next.”
My hands are sticky. I have to tell myself that it’s not blood, it’s sweat, and that I am not going to drop the datapad and run for the bathroom and scrub at the skin until they’re raw and bleeding and the buzz in my head is finally sated. I’m just nervous.
I’m always nervous.
It’s exhausting.
I still don’t speak. I want to. I want to so badly that I have to bite my tongue to stop myself.
“You knew, didn’t you?” She asks softly, her question breaking through the gloom between us. “That’s why you hid yourself up here in the sky, surrounded by robots and mercenaries, not trusting anyone you hadn’t personally vetted a thousand times. You knew how dangerous Graham could be.”
I’m choking. It’s all there, in my heart, in my lungs, a dark bloody mass of knowing that I never asked for and can never rid myself of. I pretend to be reading the screen of the datapad but the words twist and smear under my gaze. All I can hear are her accusations.
“When I asked you about the targeting module,” she continues, my silence noted, “you told me Graham would be just as likely to attack as defend. That he was far gone enough to wipe out every single living thing on Monarch if he thought it was the right thing to do. Because he’d done it before. Because you knew he’d done it before.”
Sanjar’s pale face. His hands trembling as he rubbed them on his trousers. A broken voice. “They’re all dead, Hiram. Amber Heights…the guards are saying it was a massacre.”
Graham’s face behind him, over his shoulder. Flat. Unmoved.
But in his eyes…
Knowledge. Dangerous, agonising knowledge.
“I didn’t know.” The words break free before I can stop them. I don’t like the way they sound: guilty. I’m not on trial. I’m not guilty. I didn’t do anything wrong. I clear my throat and try again. “I didn’t know anything about it.”
She doesn’t let up. “Suspected, then.”
“No.”
“Liar.” The word spits at me like gunfire. I flinch. “You sat up here all safe and protected and you let Sanjar and Graham fight it out even though you knew Sanjar was vulnerable and Graham was dangerous. You washed your hands of both of them as soon as you got what you wanted, and to hell with what happens to Stellar Bay, right? So long as Devil’s Peak remains standing the entire planet could burn around you and you’d just shrug and say it’s not your problem.”
I scoff. Or - try to. It comes out wrong. “Graham always was good at getting what he wanted, yet I doubt you rolled into Amber Heights to give him a proper telling off.” The bitterness is metallic on my lips and I find myself learning for the bottle of wine on the console. I know just the right amount to down to make myself go numb, to banish the memories back where they belong. “And when Graham can’t get what he wants, he makes other people get it for him. You fell for it. Don’t come up here and lecture me when you were tramping all over Monarch on his say-so.”
I risk glancing at her, hoping that turning the tables will knock her off the track she’s so relentlessly following. But it’s no good. She’s staring at me with something like anger and pity all smashed together. It looks wrong on her face. Her next question doesn’t surprise me at all. “How did Graham know where to get the gate codes, Hiram?”
“Stop.”
“Who did he ask, Hiram?”
“I said, stop.”
“Who on Monarch had his sticky fingers in enough pies to know exactly where that data would be kept or who could be bribed to fetch it up, Hiram?”
She knew. Of course she knew; I’d been hearing stories of her exploits from all over the system the moment my tower came back online. Captain Hawthorne was a bloodhound on a stubborn crusade of her own creation, tearing her way across the colony and turning up all every single dirty little secret she could get her paws on. I’d hoped, I’d prayed to an Architect I didn’t believe in that she wouldn’t think to look for one of mine. That I was just the man in the tower who had what she needed, an object to be used and tossed aside when she was done.
But she isn’t like that.
She isn’t like Graham.
“Me.” It’s barely a whisper, but she hears it all the same over the whirring of my tower and the clicking of my automechanicals. “He asked me.” I have to put out a hand to catch myself as my knees weaken. I don’t want to talk about this. I need to talk about this.
“Did you even stop to ask why?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because…” The rustle of sheets. Laughter. Too much wine and too much time spent in Graham’s company. I can’t explain just how intoxicated I was with him. I thought my cleverness, my brilliant plan had finally tamed the fiery and brilliant Graham Bryant, that it was me who had coaxed him into my bed. But of course it wasn’t. The prey can never outwit the predator. I’d been seduced, used, tossed aside. He barely looked at me afterwards.
“They’re all dead, Hiram. Amber Heights…the guards are saying it was a massacre.”
Sanjar had looked so frightened, had been so frightened, thinking that outlaws were going to burst through the gates of Stellar Bay at any moment to slaughter us all as well. It never occurred to him to be scared of the man he trusted as his friend. Graham had used him, too. Perhaps not as thoroughly as he’d fucked me over, but Sanjar’s loneliness had made him a target just as much as my overconfidence had weakened me. Graham had strung us both along, but I was the one stupid enough to think I could impress him by telling him I knew how to get the information he wanted.
Sanjar only ever wanted to please him. I wanted him to be impressed with me.
I still want people to be impressed with me.
Pathetic, really.
This time the words come easily. “I didn’t hide up here because I was scared.” I swallow, fighting back the tears. I am done crying over this. I am done crying over the doom Graham fucking Bryant brought upon Monarch all those years ago. “I hid because I was ashamed.”
She nods. Of course she knows that too.
We stand in silence until I can’t stand it. “If you’re going to shoot me, just shoot me.”
“I’m not going to shoot you.” She sniffs, and I realise she is just as upset as I am. I wonder what Graham was to her. “I just needed to know.” She turns towards the door, duty discharged, havoc wrought, but pauses and looks back at me. “But I advise you to forgive yourself, Hiram Blythe of Devil’s Peak. Nobody else here can.”
Then she’s gone, and only the terrible knowledge remains.
“No,” I say softly to the dark room around me. “That’s because they’re all dead.”
I’m not sure what happens next. Wine, probably. My throat hurts - I often scream at people who aren’t there when I drink too much. When I next become aware of myself I’m standing at my console and Sanjar’s face is on my screen.
He’s suspicious. “Hiram? We’re not broadcasting. You’ve nothing to yell at me about.”
“I’m not calling to yell at you, Sanjar. I’m…” I struggle for words. It’s not the alcohol, it’s me. “Graham’s dead.”
“I know.” I am surprised when I see anger on his usually soft features. “I’ve met with his replacement - powerful woman. You should see her review! Zora, she’s called. Used to be Rizzo’s.” He shakes his head. “Graham killed those people, Hiram.”
“Hawthorne told you.”
“Yes.”
I’m anxious. I want to tell him. I don’t want to tell him. I don’t have anyone else and I’d always told myself I didn’t need anyone else. That people annoy me. That all I want is my tower, my haven, my work. That’s all I’d ever wanted before, wasn't it? That's why I gave MSI the power it now wields. So that I could live alone, unburdened by the problems of the people toiling away at the world around me. Who cares if Sanjar Nandi thinks less of me? Or never wants to speak to me again? I don’t need him.
I don’t need anyone.
But that’s not true, is it. I’d needed Graham Bryant. Perhaps if I’d never met him, none of this would ever have happened.
“I…” The words are stuck in my throat. “I gave him the codes. The gate codes. He…we were…” We weren’t. There was no word for what we had been because we hadn’t been anything: you can’t encapsulate a fantasy in a single term. Nobody else would understand it. “It’s my fault. I’m sorry.”
Sanjar didn’t lose anyone in Amber Heights, as far as I knew. But I want Hawthorne to be wrong. I want to apologise to someone, seek forgiveness from anyone. Maybe then I can sleep without drugs and stay awake without alcohol.
I wait for him to be angry, to call me names, to cut the call and block my transmissions once again. Sanjar Nandi, furious. That's a hoot.
He looks at me sadly. That’s worse. “You weren’t to know, Hiram. He fooled both of us.”
“No. He fooled you. I knew exactly who he was.”
Sanjar shrugs and I wonder at this change in him. He’s grown a backbone, somehow. Maybe that was Hawthorne’s doing too. “The past is the past, Hiram. And I for one am tired of living in its shadow.” Someone off-screen says something and he smiles at them. Celia, probably. Of course she’s listening in. He looks back at me. “Next time you’re out of your tower, come and see us in Stellar Bay. I’ll buy you a Zero Gee.”
“You’re not...you want to see me?”
“Of course, Hiram.” Sanjar smiles, the big, goofy one he used to reserve for product launches. “You’re more of a friend to me than Graham ever was to either of us.”
I promise to visit soon and cut the call. In reality we both know this won’t happen. The outside world is poison to me now; I don’t fit in it, and it holds no allure for me. I will be, as I ever am, just a man in a tower in the sky.
Alone with my work.
Alone with my ghosts.
But mostly, just alone.