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Her ears are still ringing when the report comes in through the radio, scarcely audible through the smog of static. The primary shaft has collapsed. They have to turn around.
Another deafening explosion shatters an earthquake’s tremor through the walls, sending her staggering to salvage her balance. One of the mechs spills onto its side, threatening to roll deeper into the mine, and she only just manages to smash the release valve before it careens out of reach. Everyone is looking at her. No one can hear her. She uses her body. Go, go, get out! she screams, sweeping her arms forward, exalting the faint speck of light ahead. Her team flees screaming with her, abandoning all plans of damage control. A field agent stumbles over the crumbling rock—she pulls him up by his elbow. The bulbs ahead threaten to crack open, to throw them into darkness, only a trail of dry powder from an escaping mech to guide them. All is dense with heat and bodies.
White-hot sound bursts from behind her, pitching her through the air. In those seconds of white, the mine shaft is a suspension bridge tossed about in a cyclone. Her vision returns just in time to see a young woman, bare face black with grit and dust, collapse onto the rock. She has no protective gear. She is choking. She is dying.
No time to think. Topaz throws herself down next to the woman and pulls off her mask, decapitating it from her oxygen pump. Screw it. What matters now is the industrial-grade filter, the best one of her team’s, and securing it over the woman’s nose and mouth.
The air, choked with escaped gases, is already burning its way to her lungs by the time she gets the woman upright. Her knee is on fire from the fall but she runs, as fast as she can, forcing the pain into the acid-bleached sewers of her childhood and running, just running, until she can see the light emerge from the shimmering haze of red-black rock and fire.
An armored hand pulls the woman from the maw, out of the jaws of death.
And Topaz collapses into hot, thick black.
She awakes somewhere far away, only murmurings of thought and sound brushing the reaches of her perception. The darkness is cotton: soft, dense, and insulated. There is a faint ringing in her ears, and in time a steady beep emerges, growing louder and more insistent until Topaz forces her exhausted eyes open.
For a moment, everything is bright and burning, but as her eyes adjust to the intensity of the waking world, the light retreats into something cloud-white and gentle. She’s in a private room of a hospital, maybe? The world around her is still indistinct, a facsimile of a mirage, and from that mirage emerges Madam Jade, speaking with a doctor outside the glass.
Madam Jade is her emergency contact, but to think she’d actually come. Topaz is suddenly aware of the overwhelming heaviness in her body, a gravitational exhaustion preventing her from seizing to her feet. To think she can’t even greet Madam Jade in this state… That mine shaft must have done a number on her.
Before Topaz passes into slumber, Madam Jade’s eyes flick towards her bed, and she smiles.
Her knee. It’s the pain that rouses her, a violent, wrathful gnashing that forces a sharp inhale through her teeth—through her teeth and the tube in her mouth, a snake of discomfort wedged deep in her throat. Breathing alone sends a dance of cinders through her chest. The damage to her lungs must have been significant. Still, Topaz takes all this as a good sign—they’re waning her off the pain medication, so she’s making a smooth recovery. Madam Jade will be pleased to hear it.
Aside from the rhythmic beep from the monitor, her private room is quiet, distant from the hustle and bustle that must populate the rest of the hospital. If the IPC didn’t have a stake in the hospital (though, granted, the IPC has a stake in most hospitals), she’d be down in the ICU with everyone else.
With everyone else. Even through the wailing of her knee, the singed stinging of her lungs, Topaz is glad she came. She had thought Yllox-V was in good hands after her departure, but it appears she’ll need to have a word with the man she left in charge.
…Had she missed something during her interviews? But no, she’d known the man for at least a year before handing over the project. She’d trawled every department, conducted an interview process so exhaustive that her betters in the Strategic Investment Department (though not Madam Jade, of course) had made it into something of a joke. What could have possibly gone wrong?
The sky beyond her window, scarlet-red and scored thick with smog-gray clouds, reveals no answers to her. It’s hard to keep a clear head through all the pain. Hopefully the nurse will be in soon.
If it were just her knee, she could bear it. Her pain tolerance is exceptional—something she shares with her senior Stonehearts, a gift bestowed by Qlipoth’s body. It’s not the pain that bothers her, but the awareness of her breath. Ever since her recruitment, the IPC has kept the greatest of her fears at a distance, providing her with ample safety equipment, access to medication, and regular full-body health exams. Not since her childhood has such malignant air been allowed to enter her lungs. She finds herself trembling in her bed like a child, anxieties she’d forgotten for nearly two decades resurfacing with a vengeance, driven like fetid gases to the surface of swamp-water.
It occurs to Topaz that up until now, she’s been living under the assumption that her past is well and truly behind her, but now, isolated, her reality has unmasked and revealed itself an illusion.
…Where is Numby?
Trotters are pure creatures with bodies highly prone to contamination. Surely they sensed the oncoming danger and escaped through a portal, seeking out cleaner pastures until they could safely reunite with her. But what if they didn’t? a voice in her mind whispers. What if they waited for you?
She calls Numby—tries to call Numby, but the words are bludgeoned into nonsense by the tube in her throat. Maybe one of her colleagues has seen them? Fighting the tube and the stiffness in her neck, she does her best to look around, but her phone isn’t anywhere in sight. For someone of her position, being caught without a means of communication is grounds for demotion. Was it broken during her escape from the mine? She can’t remember. She’ll have to ask the nurse.
And ask about Numby, too. It’s possible they tried to see her, only to be shooed or scared away by the hospital’s staff. Of course, that must be it. The more Topaz turns it over in her mind, the likelier it seems. They must have thought Numby was a regular stray Trotter, and they can’t have wild animals loose in a hospital. Numby’s fine, just a little spooked, and when she leaves the hospital, they’ll definitely return to her side.
And once Numby’s back with her, everything will be okay.
“Door opening.” The faintly electronic voice, too loud for the empty room, startles her, sending a shudder through her muscles. A moment later, she recognizes the words, and a strange sense of helplessness passes over her. She’s not one to be shaken by strange noises—when you live with cats, you get used to them.
“Oh, Miss Topaz, you’re awake! That’s good, that’s good.” Her nurse is a petite human woman, the majority of her face concealed behind a disposable mask and thick, round glasses. “You might not remember, since you’ve been sleeping so much, but we’re taking your tube out today!”
Somewhere, faintly, Topaz does remember being told that, but it’s like recalling a scene in a movie. Lacking the ability to speak, she gives the nurse a thumbs-up.
“Good, good, that’s good. Now, once I’ve got that out of the way, I’ll give you about half a system hour, just to make sure you’re handling the adjustment okay. After that, if you’re up to it, I’ll bring you some dinner.”
Dinner, even hospital food, sounds divine. It’s not that Topaz feels hungry, exactly, but she’s eager for food. Eager, for the span of a meal, to feel normal again.
The nurse laughs, a gentle, grandmotherly sound, and Topaz’s cheeks grow hot. “Soft foods only, Miss Topaz, and nothing too hot or spicy. Once your throat recovers, you’ll be able to eat whatever you want, so follow the doctor’s orders for now.”
Do you have ice cream? Topaz wants to ask, but for now, the tube is still in her throat.
Thankfully, the removal goes smoothly. In the aftermath, Topaz finds herself forming her lips into all kinds of expressions, almost in awe of the reality of her face. She’s not normally someone who cares for makeup, despite the fact that all high-ranking IPC employees should consider it a part of their uniform, but her fingers are suddenly eager for her lipstick and compact mirror. They would have been among her possessions when she arrived—are they still waiting at her hotel for her?
This question, and a litany of others, receive ready answers from her nurse. Yes, her things were delivered to the hotel, and her room is still reserved, though it’ll be a few days before she’s allowed to leave—have to make sure she’s doing well enough on her own, of course. Her phone was damaged in the explosion, but a replacement has been secured for her. No Warp Trotters were sighted on hospital grounds, not recently, but her colleague might know where her friend is. He’s been taking care of everything since he arrived.
“He?” Not Madam Jade, then. Not that Topaz expected her to, of course not, but still, she can’t repress a pang of disappointment. How presumptuous of her, and how childish.
But if not Madam Jade, who? Her mentor? But no, he’d have referred to himself as her former colleague, given his retirement. Topaz turns over every name in her brain, but she can’t think of anyone. She’s friendly with most of her coworkers, but not so friendly that they’d drop their own work to look after her. The IPC isn’t so accommodating as to allow that sort of thing.
“A blonde man, very flashy,” the nurse elaborates. She’s tidying the last of her things.
“No.” Topaz can’t help but voice her disbelief. Aventurine? It does make some sense (considering the circumstances, someone of higher rank than her must have been reassigned to Yllox-V), but Aventurine’s always hated projects like hers—they aren’t enough of a gamble for him. Had Madam Jade said something to him? But why?
The nurse’s voice cuts through her confusion. “What would you like to eat, Miss Topaz? Should I fetch anything in particular for you?”
Finally, a question she can answer. “Ice cream. Just ice cream.”
Her consummate experience with her ice cream—plain and unexceptional, but exactly what her raw and miserable throat needs—is interrupted by an alert: “Door opening.” On the other side of the glass wall, Aventurine makes a show of rolling his eyes, the tap of his foot counting off seconds to his unmoved audience. Topaz normally finds his impatient attitude distasteful, but instead, a trickle of relief warms her chest. Aventurine’s only like this with her when he’s bored; if he were plotting something, he’d put on a much better impression.
He breezes into the room without so much as looking at her, tossing her briefcase onto her bed with a flippant wave of his hand. Topaz, flailing with half-remembered limbs, only just manages to grab it before it falls to the floor.
“Have you seen Numby?” she pleads, too loud, and she flinches—ouch, she shouldn’t be straining her voice like that.
Aventurine looks up at her from the sole available armchair. Pulling down his glasses, he peers at her, thoroughly unimpressed, through pale, narrowed eyes. Suddenly ashamed of her outburst, Topaz’s throat clams up.
“What, no thank you? No ‘thanks so much for taking over my boring little project, Aventurine’? No ‘you really flew all the way over here from headquarters, Aventurine?’ No ‘you’re the best, Aventurine, I love you’?”
…She hates to admit it, but he does a pretty bang-up imitation of her tone. “Thank you, Aventurine,” she admits, reluctant, “but really, have you seen Numby?”
“They’re at the vet,” he answers, flatly. He’s already scrolling on his phone. “Showed up out of nowhere in the middle of the night, sneezing all over the goddamn place. Completely interrupted my beauty sleep. I told them to get lost, naturally, but they were very… insistent.”
Numby had waited for her, and they’d gone to Aventurine for help when she didn’t come back… They’d always liked Aventurine, now that Topaz thought about it. His luck must smell nice.
Though, speaking of smell… “You’re not wearing any cologne.”
Aventurine raises his eyes, giving her a vacant look. “Look around, Topaz, you think they’d let me in here if I was?”
Good point. “Thank you, for looking after Numby. They’re gonna be okay, right?”
“Yeah, yeah, just fine,” he assures, exasperated. “Happy now?”
“Yes. Thank you, really.”
“Don’t go getting the idea that I did all this out of the goodness of my heart,” Aventurine warns, a slight grumble to his voice. Is he… embarrassed? “You’re not relieved of your responsibility just because you’re stuck in bed.”
Surely he can’t expect her to be up on her feet so soon? In response to her expression, Aventurine heaves a sigh, rolling his eyes, and gestures broadly to the briefcase now settled on her lap.
“Starting now, you’re my underling. And I hate paperwork, so fill it out for me.”
“Your underling?” But Topaz is already opening her briefcase. Truthfully, given the trouble Aventurine has gone through on her account, it’s more than fair. She’s going to get pretty bored in bed, and she’s always done her own paperwork for projects like these—she’d be doing this anyway, if the mine hadn’t blown up.
To her delight, she finds not only the required forms, but a brand-new smartphone, complete with the custom case design she’d used on her last phone. How Aventurine had managed to procure a new case so quickly is entirely beyond her.
“This too,” Aventurine adds, fishing from his pocket a golden dictation machine and lobbing it onto her bed. Topaz recognizes the model: most of her fellow IPC higher-ups favor them over written notes on their operations, given the time and space they save.
“Syncs to your phone, right, so I’ll get updates?”
“And I expect you to check it eight times a day.” His tone is deadly serious, and though Topaz tries to bite it back, a small burble of laughter slips through her lips.
Aventurine just looks at her, eyes distant and strange, watching her laugh like she’s changed, unalterably, into someone unrecognizable. “Get some rest,” he says, finally, waving his hand dismissively.
“I can start now!” Topaz insists, but the moment it’s out of her mouth she realizes she can’t. Her pain medication is kicking in again, and the details of the room are swimming. With the last of her energy, she tidies the contents of her briefcase and sets it aside. A soft darkness settles over her, and from far away, she feels the blankets of her bed pulled up over her shoulders.
Topaz’s sleep is full, restful, and unplagued by anxieties—assured of Numby’s safety, she awakes after a full nine system hours to the early evening of Yllox-V. She expects Aventurine to be absent, but when she turns to look for him, he’s asleep in the armchair.
No, asleep is the wrong word, it’s too… peaceful. Aventurine is curled against the back of the chair, his legs hanging off one side and one hand clenched, white-knuckled, over the back. His eyelids are drawn tightly together, throwing tension into his brow, and the corners of his mouth twitch with unspoken words. It all looks so… painful.
Still, Topaz has the sense that he doesn’t want to be disturbed—she tries to open her mouth, to call out to him, but her body refuses.
Eventually, she decides to forgo calling for food (though she is pretty hungry) and get started on her work. The swaths of messages on her phone are too exhausting to reply to, at least so soon after waking up, and she doesn’t have anything else to do. Pen in hand, she quiets the dictation machine to just above a whisper.
Aventurine’s voice, when dictating, is short and uninterested, and his reports contain no unnecessary details—but as far as Topaz can tell, his work is flawless. He quickly roots out the source of the corruption, a team of power-hungry and resentful lower management who had ousted her replacement after catching the scent of distance and distraction. She doesn’t recognize any names or ID numbers, and their ranks are well below hers—the fear of her retribution was never concrete. Had they seen her as weak?
No, not her, Topaz realizes. Aventurine notes the respect the local employees had held for her, as well as her replacement, but that respect had begun to wane. Her replacement, who had once quickly and deftly responded to each complaint presented to him, became suddenly unresponsive.
“His eyes glazed over, like he had deserted his body,” Aventurine’s voice, clinical and unmoved, repeats from a witness.
The source of his misery? His wife, and their unborn child, had died in a virulent outbreak on a faraway planet. Their bodies were burned following the intergalactic standards of quarantine. He couldn’t even get away from work to attend the funeral. All this, Aventurine’s voice notes, was found within his digital personnel file. “Just a matter of putting the pieces together.”
It might be her own tears persuading her, but Topaz thinks he sounds almost… sad. But only almost, like “sadness” is its own faraway planet, somewhere eternally and forever out of his reach.
Beside her, Aventurine lets out a sharp gasp, and she hurriedly turns off the machine.
“Good morning, boss!” she forces, too cheerily, and Aventurine whips his head around like he’s heard a ghost call out to him. Through narrow, sleep-clouded eyes, he levels an unpleasant expression at her. Like a displeased cat, he keeps his eyes on her even as he fumbles, unseeing, for the pair of glasses he left on her bedside table.
Only once his glasses are suitably replaced does his face emerge from the fog, taking on a self-satisfied smirk. “Boss?”
Topaz has no excuse to give him. She can only hope she’s blushing red enough that he doesn’t look too closely at her eyes.
Whether he catches sight of her tears or not, Aventurine ignores her, taking the opportunity to stretch and bemoan the wrinkles in his clothing. He makes no comment on the fact that he fell asleep in her room, and Topaz doesn’t ask. With as much grace as she can muster, she returns all her work to her briefcase.
“Vet sent me a video,” Aventurine notes, with a faint hint of curiosity. He’s already held out his phone to her when Topaz seizes for it, nearly knocking it to the floor with her trembling hands.
The vet has discovered Numby’s taste for treasure—in the video, they nudge a glittering coin across the floor with their snout, guiding it back towards the camerawoman. “Good job, Numby!” a warm voice enthuses, when the coin is at last back in her hand. “Wanna say hi to Mr. Aventurine and Ms. Topaz?”
Numby clearly recognizes her name: they whirl around in a circle, letting out a chorus of gleeful oinks, snorts, and squeals. From the other side of the screen, Topaz notices with some dismay that Numby is a bit duller and quieter than usual, but all things considered, they could be a lot worse off.
She loops the video who knows how many times, cooing and squealing and kissing at the screen, until Aventurine clears his throat. “Can I have my phone back now?”
Topaz expects him to look bored, weary, displeased... anything but the clear affection plastered over his face, distinctly at odds with the dull, dry tone of his voice. She doesn’t think Aventurine himself is even aware of it, not from the way he insistently extends his hand.
This might be the first time she’s seen him express a genuine emotion. She finds herself reluctant to speak, to even move, lest she puncture some vulnerable part of him.
“What,” Aventurine demands, and only in speaking does he seem to become aware of his body. His other hand clamps over his mouth, and he looks down at himself with a kind of fear, an unsettling stillness overtaking him.
And then, abruptly, he smacks his leg, hard, and he’s back to normal. Almost. He snaps his fingers, ignoring that his gloves muffle the sound. “Phone, Topaz.”
She returns it to him.
Aventurine busies himself, pretending to look through his phone, but Topaz can’t look away. It’s almost mesmerizing, the way that nothing he does seems real, how each tap of his foot and twitch of his brow is just a hair’s-breadth away from natural. Like a corpse that pretends to possess life.
“Hey, boss,” she broaches, unwilling to take up the burden of his name. “why don’t you take on assignments like mine?”
She’s just trying to break the silence between them, but she realizes as she speaks that she wants to know. Still, Aventurine doesn’t answer. “Sometimes I wonder that, too, actually,” she continues, thinking back to the dirty, uncertain faces that greeted her when she arrived. People shrank back as she approached, like stray dogs taught to fear violence. That, she realizes abruptly, was distrust: it was not just the IPC they doubted, but her. “What am I working for, if I can never guarantee anyone’s safety?”
“Idiot.” Aventurine’s voice jerks her gaze in his direction. He looks up at her with something like disdain, or maybe desperation. His expression has gone dark; she can’t read his intention at all.
Still, she steels herself, and she challenges him. “Why?” she dares him. “Why am I an idiot? And if I’m not, then why don’t you do the kind of work that I do?”
“Because the rest of us are weak!” he bursts out, sudden, his eyes glazed over in the throes of madness. “Because the rest of us, we all live in a nightmare, and we’d rather carve ourselves into devils and monsters than think about it, really think about it, for a single. Goddamn. Second.”
Aventurine’s face from after his trial arises in her mind. She’d only seen his face for a second, thought she’d imagined it, but now, remembering it, she knows it must have been real: his horror, and his dismay. He had wanted to be sentenced to death.
“The kind of work you do? Only for dimwit zealots, the people who truly believe—who are just the right kind of smart enough, or idiot enough, to turn the snakes at their heels into blades of grass. No one who really thought through what they were doing could bear it.”
“Except me,” she answers, breathless. It’s what he wants her to say. “Except me.”
“Exactly! Because you’re special.” Nothing in this moment is real, not quite—but it sounds, to her ears, like Aventurine is about to cry. “You’re the only one who’s good, the only one of us worth a goddamn thing, so you can bear it. You have to bear it.”
Is he pleading with her? Is this his twisted form of encouragement?
“I will,” she assures him, if only to get him to quiet down. Having a nurse scurry in will only make things worse.
“Good girl,” he says, weakly.
And he collapses.
As if his body has become unspeakably heavy, Aventurine falls limp into the armchair, a rag-doll with human skin. The maddening, savage vulnerability which had so possessed him, only moments before, is swallowed up inside him, soundless, like rainwater vanishing through sewer grates. She can no longer see his face.
Topaz decides to let him be the first to speak, thinking it wise considering what just happened when she did. And if he tries to leave, she won’t stop him.
For a while, all she does is stare out the window, the dark of its red ripped through by black, dense clouds. At this height, the lights from smaller shops and houses leave the sky untouched. The view from her room at headquarters is so much brighter, pinpricked with the illuminated rooms in the opposite tower. At headquarters, there’s always someone awake, working into the night, coming home, leaving, and always, always, Numby and her cats are there.
She remembers, in her loneliness, the unspeakable death of her replacement’s wife.
“Madam Jade called in the environmental team herself.”
Aventurine’s voice startles her—he’d been so quiet, Topaz had forgotten he was even beside her. Like her, he’s looking out the window, his face turned away from her.
“Should be here by week’s end. Won’t look like this for much longer.”
“Really?”
“Would I lie?”
“Yes,” Topaz answers, immediately. “Yes, you would. You would, and you have, to me.”
Aventurine is quiet for a moment, and then he laughs, a derisive, haunting thing. “Suppose I deserve that one.”
“But not this time.” Topaz’s own words surprise her, an unfamiliar confidence blooming forth from her chest. “You’re not lying right now.”
“Not this time,” Aventurine echoes. “Not right now.”