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Rachel is certain—mostly certain—that Mr. Cutter can’t read minds.
He can read body language, though, and he does it like it’s a blood sport. More than once, Rachel’s had a front seat to Cutter listening to someone with a faintly polite air before deconstructing everything the person has just said with the kind of craftsmanship that reminds Rachel of butchers taking apart an animal carcass. It’s breathtaking.
Rachel understands Mr. Cutter’s sharp edges better than almost anyone; believe her on that.
And at some point, after the thirtieth or the fiftieth or the hundredth such performance, Rachel starts to pick up on where Cutter’s targets go wrong. A certain lilt of the voice or a way of glancing anywhere but Cutter’s eyes. Rachel is very, very smart. Within a year, she has a mental protocol for how to look Cutter full in the face when accepting yet another sleepless night’s worth of work while at the same time envisioning in high definition surround sound what it would be like to grab the nearest heavy implement and bash his skull in. She’s sure he glimpses annoyance around her mouth, but the rest remains obscured beneath a carefully constructed voice and tilt of the head. She likes that she can do that.
It’s a useful skill. She hones it, though not because Cutter won’t tolerate her outbursts. Quite the opposite: because he likes them. She can see it around the eyes: every time a member of the board of directors starts cussing him out, it’s like a little home run for him.
Rachel hates that. A lot. Hence, learning how to—well, not outright lie, but tell a sideways lie. She can’t really lie to him, not yet anyways. But her skill is a small victory, and it’s gotten her through more than one week with her functions intact.
Dr. Pryce is another matter entirely.
***
Rachel first meets Dr. Pryce on a Wednesday morning when she’s half jogging down to Mr. Cutter’s office to grab a file on the Hermes mission he left on his desk. There’s an excellent chance that he left it there on purpose—if there’s one thing Rachel knows Cutter does not do, it’s casually forget about things—but he gave an order and it’s her job to say how high. So she jabs the PIN into the door’s lock with a slight pant and swings the door open, only to find someone sitting on Cutter’s desk, their legs crossed and one foot bobbing.
That right there makes Rachel’s brain stutter for a few seconds. Cutter’s desk is not the sort of thing one sits upon. Rachel once witnessed an especially stupid contractor try to put on a dominance display by idly leaning against Cutter’s desk and toying with a glass pyramid paperweight. Cutter had grinned at the contractor wide enough to show molars then, still smiling and keeping eye contact, gently pulled the paperweight from the man’s loose grasp and driven the pyramid’s point into the man’s hand. There had been horrible crunching noises and blood and swearing and screaming and Cutter’s smile not fading once, and Rachel had been the one to clean off the paperweight.
And now here is a woman—sloe-eyed, pale skinned, mousy brown hair pulled into a sleek ponytail, dressed in a simple pair of slacks and a dark gray button-up—perched on the edge of Cutter’s desk like she belongs there. And she’s reading the file Rachel is supposed to be retrieving. She doesn’t glance up at Rachel staring from the doorway, doesn’t so much as shift.
“Excuse me,” Rachel says in the most scathing tone she can manage. The woman’s eyebrows quirk up. Her eyes drag away from the file and onto Rachel. They’re light brown and flat as coins, and Rachel on instinct wants to take a step back. She ignores it by giving the woman a cold glower. “You have thirty seconds to give me a good explanation for who you are and what you think you’re doing.”
Then the woman smiles with her teeth and lips and not with her eyes at all, and Rachel’s heart leaps into her throat like a bird trying to escape.
“Rachel, right?” The woman’s voice causes a visceral reaction. Because Rachel knows this voice. She’s heard it countless times out of countless speakers and oh hell what is that supposed to—
“Pleased to finally meet you.” The woman lowers the file. “Dr. Miranda Pryce,” the woman says. “I’m here to see Marcus. He should be joining us shortly.”
It takes Rachel a full ten seconds to register who the hell Marcus is supposed to be. When it clicks into place, she takes another ten seconds to unstick her tongue from the roof of her mouth.
“He’s in a meeting,” she says like a raging idiot.
Dr. Pryce delicately lifts her eyebrows again. “I’m sure he was,” she says before she shifts her attention to the file. Rachel is left standing in the doorway wondering what, exactly, is happening.
The only sounds in the room are the softly ticking clock and Dr. Pryce turning pages of the file. Distantly, down the hall, comes the sound of shoes on a carpeted floor. Rachel turns slowly and finds her boss approaching the office. He’s not hurrying. Not outright. But he’s not taking his time, either. When he draws level with her, there’s a moment when his eyes meet hers. And it’s so strange because for the first time that Rachel can remember, he seems to be looking at her with something like genuine emotion. Only whatever that emotion is, it passes too fast to catch, and Rachel is left staring at the back of his head as he approaches the desk.
“Sorry about that,” he says. He glances at Rachel, and it’s back to the usual inscrutable mask. “Rachel, thank you.” Rachel nods dumbly and starts to back out of the room. Before she shuts the door, Dr. Pryce’s flat brown eyes meet her own. Rachel closes the door with a snap.
She straightens her blouse and walks down the hall to her own office. She flicks on the little desk lamp and eases herself into her chair. She examines the warm, yellow light splaying over her hands and realizes two things at once. One, she should probably be returning to the meeting except she doesn’t especially want to. Two, something warm is surging through her chest right now. It’s a cocktail of anger and fear and excitement and old-fashioned, killed-the-cat, burning curiosity.
***
Dr. Pryce does not have a file.
Usually, in Rachel’s experience, that merely means someone doesn’t have the security clearance to see the information they want to see. Everything is recorded in a place like Goddard; everything is retained. People have files; it’s just a matter of finding them.
Except Dr. Pryce does not have a file. Rachel knows this because after wasting a lot of time scouring her highest levels of clearance, she does something monumentally reckless and borrows Cutter’s clearance codes because if he can’t access something, then that means it’s in the black archives or doesn’t exist, which at the end of the day mean the same thing. And nothing so much as hints that the woman Rachel found perched on Cutter’s desk exists at all. And yet her voice comes out of every AI’s speakers and her name (if Rachel is drawing the right conclusions) is burned into every deep space officer’s brain. Hiding while in plain sight. Rachel would be an idiot not to be impressed.
***
The second time she meets Dr. Pryce, it’s in the Canaveral main campus cafeteria. Rachel spots her sitting at one of the small, formica tables perusing a spiral bound book and sipping at the cafeteria’s mediocre coffee. Rachel steps out of the line to the register and walks across the cafeteria to Dr. Pryce’s table. Dr. Pryce glances up, strands of hair falling out of her ponytail and into her eyes.
“Hello, Rachel,” she says pleasantly. Rachel nods. “I wanted to talk,” Dr. Pryce continues. “Do you have an hour for lunch?”
Rachel had been planning to grab a bagel and return to her office to finish sending various time sensitive reports. She nods again. “Of course,” she says.
They leave the campus behind them and walk several blocks south, to a small restaurant nestled between a barbershop and a second hand clothing store. Dr. Pryce ushers Rachel into a dim space filled with the muffled sounds of people talking and the clack of silverware and coffee cups hitting tabletops. They take a booth and put in their orders with the waiter. Rachel watches Dr. Pryce spread her napkin over her lap then slip a package of cigarettes from her jacket pocket.
“Do you mind?” she asks. Rachel shakes her head. “I was doing very well not smoking for, oh, three years.” Dr. Pryce pulls out a lighter and makes the butt of the cigarette flare orange. She slips the lighter back into her pocket and exhales a cloud. “But stress at work. You know how it can get. I’ll keep it to one so you don’t end up stinking like smoke.”
Rachel nods. She realizes she hasn’t said more than two words for this entire ordeal. Dr. Pryce crosses her arms lightly and perches her elbows on the table, the cigarette suspended between to fingers. She peers at Rachel like a bird. Sharp and bright and interested. The flat, brown eyes are gone.
“Rachel Young,” Dr. Pryce says. She lingers over the name, letting it roll from her mouth. Rachel is ready for what comes next; she’s done it herself to enough people. Dr. Pryce will lay out an abbreviated version of Rachel’s CV, taking care to include the valedictorian status at Northwestern, the glowing reviews from her time working with NASA, probably a tidbit about Cutter’s reviews of her. Classic dominance display.
“To be honest,” Dr. Pryce says casually, tapping the end of her cigarette against the glass ashtray. “I find rattling off knowledge to be posturing and boring.” Rachel starts. She can’t help it. She stares across the table at the woman smiling faintly at her. Rachel runs through a whole slew of possible replies. She settles with folding her hands in her lap and tilting up her chin.
“You like Sherlock Holmes, don’t you?” she says.
Dr. Pryce leans back and laughs. It’s not a warm laugh, but it also seems to come genuinely.
“Very much.” Dr. Pryce takes another drag from the cigarette, and her eyes glitter as she looks at Rachel with a definite air of amusement. Rachel looks back with the carefully molded expression of calm attentiveness she gives Cutter all the time. She should be annoyed right now. Rachel has very little tolerance for being the stupid one in the room, the only exception being Cutter. She’s starting to settle into the fact that she’s going to have to allow for two exceptions. It leaves her feeling intrigued more than anything else.
Dr. Pryce’s lips quirk as if she’s been reading Rachel’s thought process on her face, and she likes where Rachel ended up. She takes another drag of her cigarette and leans back in her seat.
“How long have you been working for Marcus?” she asks.
Marcus. God, this is a trip and a half. And if Dr. Pryce doesn’t know exactly when and how Rachel started to work for Cutter, then Rachel will saw off her foot with a butter knife. But she gives her blandest smile and says, “About three years.”
“Right from public space exploration to private,” Dr. Pryce says musingly. “What did he tell you to make you switch over?”
Rachel hesitates before she says, “It’s not so much what he told me as what he showed me.” Dr. Pryce tilts her head expectantly. Rachel glances around the restaurant. Sure it’s busy, but Rachel didn’t get this far by being cavalier about what she says in public spaces.
“You know how Madonna can make herself not look like Madonna?” Dr. Pryce asks. Rachel makes a face before she can help herself. Dr. Pryce shrugs smoothly. “Try it. It’s not that hard.”
“I um.” Rachel tangles her fingers. “Tiamet,” she says. She tries to give the word the same lilt she would give any other inane, everyday word.
“Mm.” Dr. Pryce taps at the cigarette rhythmically with her index finger, making a fine rain of ash fall into the tray. “I always liked that name. Mother figure of creation and chaos. Apt.” She focuses on Rachel again. “Relax those shoulders. You’re not in a spy thriller.” Sometimes Rachel feels like she is, but she lowers her shoulders obediently. Dr. Pryce continues tapping on her cigarette. “When you read the Tiamet overview. What did you feel then?”
“What did I feel?”
“Yes, Rachel. What did you feel?”
Rachel stares, waiting for this to become a joke. But Dr. Pryce gazes at her like a patient teacher who knows their student has promise and is merely waiting for the student to step up to the plate. Rachel exhales hard.
“Angry.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I’d dreamed of being in the room when contact happened, right? I wanted to be part of the team who found…them.” She shrugs one shoulder. “And then I learn it happened already. Before I was born. Suddenly I had to play catch up.”
“Not much to catch up on, unfortunately,” Dr. Pryce muses around an inhale of her cigarette.
“Right. And that’s what made me take the job. Once is a fluke. Once is luck. It doesn’t mean anything unless we take the second step ourselves, a second step toward whatever is out there. We have to do it no matter the cost. That’s when we prove what we are as a species.” She snaps her mouth shut. She hadn’t meant to climb on the soapbox.
Dr. Pryce nods slowly. “I can see why Marcus likes you so much.” Rachel almost laughs. Cutter does not like people. Cutter finds people useful. “Well, fine,” Dr. Pryce continues. “I can see why Marcus finds you so valuable.”
Dr. Pryce grinds her cigarette into the tray and does not look at Rachel’s expression. By the time Dr. Pryce lifts her head again, Rachel has hauled her face back into neutral territory. But she can feel her stomach twisting.
“He’s kept you hidden from me,” Dr. Pryce says.
“I’m sorry?”
“Just some bright young thing leading the special projects division. Nothing for me to worry about. That’s what he told me.” Dr. Pryce’s eyes go flat again, and Rachel has to refrain from pressing back against her seat. “But then I start getting news about what the special projects division is up to, and I think, that’s no ordinary bright young thing, is it?” Rachel doesn’t even bother to open her mouth. She waits, back straight, chin lifted. Dr. Pryce’s lips form a small smile. “I’m very glad we ran into each other in that office. We should have met years ago.”
Rachel wonders if finding Dr. Pryce in Cutter’s office was anything close to coincidence. She suspects it wasn’t. Before Rachel can answer, the server arrives with their lunch. Rachel stares down at the bowl of soup and small salad; she can’t remember whether she had ordered this.
“And,” Dr. Pryce continues, pulling Rachel’s attention back to her. “I was very flattered to find you poking around with Marcus’ security codes.”
Rachel nods once, slowly. “Does he know?” she asks.
“Oh, of course not.” Dr. Pryce picks up her fork and smiles with her teeth and lips. “It can be our little secret.”
***
Miranda Pryce slips herself into Rachel’s routine with such deftness that it takes a full week for Rachel to realize that it’s happened. After that, she thinks she better understands how someone with her voice and name splashed all over the deep space division can move through Goddard like she doesn’t exist.
The lunch dates happen every two weeks or so and rarely come with any forewarning. Usually, Rachel spots Dr. Pryce sitting somewhere not entirely innocuous, she’ll approach the doctor, and they’ll go to one of a handful of nearby cafés and restaurants. The conversations mostly involve Dr. Pryce asking Rachel’s opinion on a whole range of topics, from AI to the latest astrophysics research to the mundanities of Rachel’s work life. If Rachel didn’t know better, she’d say she’s being interviewed for something. She has a whole mental list of Dr. Pryce’s possible motives for these lunch dates; she’s not entirely sure she’s correct on any of them.
Rachel can’t imagine that Cutter doesn’t have some inkling of these new developments. But if he has an opinion on them, he keeps them to himself. Rachel keeps searching for new brusqueness or added work, but he’s as smiling and ruthless as before.
The one, glaring exception comes on a Thursday evening when Rachel hands over her final report of the day to Cutter. She’s already thinking about the hot shower waiting for her at home, so she’s caught off guard when she’s halfway out the door and hears, “One more thing, Rachel.”
“Yes?” She turns, face in its neutral pose. Cutter eyes her for a long minute; not for the first time, Rachel is struck with the niggling worry that he can see past her after all.
“You’re not stupid,” he says. Rachel raises her eyebrows.
“Your vote of confidence is stunning, sir,” she says.
“So take pains not to act stupid around her. That’s dangerous.”
Rachel blinks, and for a split second, she can feel the mask slip. She wrestles it back on. There’s no point in asking who ‘she’ is.
“Yes, sir,” she says. Cutter drops his gaze to his papers in a clear dismissal. Rachel exits the office swiftly. On her way down the hall, her brain offers her the notion that somehow, Cutter is trying to help her. Which suggests that he thinks Dr. Pryce is a threat. Which allows for the possibility that, on some level, Dr. Pryce frightens Cutter. The idea of Cutter being frightened of anyone is so absurd that Rachel has to flick it away, but just as promptly, her brain provides her with brown eyes flat as coins, a smile with only teeth and lips, and a moment of unidentifiable emotion from Cutter when he passed her into his office, months ago.
***
“He tried to warn you off, didn’t he?”
They sit across from one another at a small café today; each has a half eaten salad in front of them. Rachel picks up her fork and tosses her salad in an effort to shield her surprise. Another few seconds, and she’s able to look at a spot a little above Dr. Pryce’s head and say, “Should I take his advice?”
Dr. Pryce laughs. She does it rarely, in Rachel’s experience. But unlike Cutter, it doesn’t necessarily mean a whole load of shit is about to hit the proverbial fan. Sometimes, incredibly, it means she actually finds something funny. Given the context, though, this is not much of a comfort.
“You’re a big girl,” Dr. Pryce says. “You tell me.”
Rachel swirls her fork in the vinaigrette before setting it down with a clink. “I should be thanking you,” she says.
“Oh?”
“Our meetings are bothering him enough that he’s willing to say something. He’s starting to feel threatened. I don’t usually manage to get under his skin like that. So.” She smiles sweetly at Dr. Pryce. “Thank you.”
Dr. Pryce’s light brown eyes are definitely curious now; Rachel allows herself a flush of victory at managing it.
“He could be toying with you,” Dr. Pryce offers.
“Oh, definitely,” Rachel agrees. “But I also have a sense that if he didn’t care what happened, he’d lean back and enjoy the show and not bother expending his energy to warn me.” Rachel lifts her eyebrows. “You probably already know this, but Mr. Cutter doesn’t believe in wasting energy on things he doesn’t find important.”
Dr. Pryce’s lips twitch. “He does at that,” she muses. She peers at Rachel; Rachel has grown bold enough to look her back in the eye. “But you agree with him. That I’m dangerous.”
“Of course.”
Dr. Pryce leans back in her seat. She seems pleased, like Rachel has passed a test. Inside, Rachel is glowing.
***
Three weeks later, the blue star event crashes in like a tsunami wave, and for a solid week, Rachel snatches at sleeps on the couch in her office and passes out so many death threats that at some point they become a blur. Dr. Pryce doesn’t appear that week, for which Rachel is grateful.
And then, as is his way, Cutter dumps a completely separate, much more pressing emergency on her lap.
“But... an omega contingency?” Rachel manages. “Kepler has to be joking. “
“Yes, of course. If there's one thing we can always count on Warren for, it's his nutty sense of humor. No, this is it. It's finally happened.”
Rachel stands stock-still. She has a peculiar swooping sensation in the pit of her stomach. She’s been circling the idea of an omega contingency for…well. And she realizes, standing in the cool, recycled air of her office, that she hadn’t really believed it would happen. Tiamet aside, it had all felt so theoretical for so long. And now.
Rachel swallows. “What would you like me to retrieve from the black archives, sir?”
***
It’s the first time she’s accessed the black archives. It would be exciting if she weren’t so piss poor exhausted.
The black archives, appropriately enough, are kept in a sub-basement of a sub-basement in the heart of the Canaveral campus. When Rachel had first learned of this, she’d had to resist the urge to make a quip about how very evil corporation syndicate is all was.
The trip down to the archives is long, especially with the elevators, and it gives Rachel far too much time to think. She leans against the metal grating, arms crossed, and stares at the concrete blur past. The clacking of the elevator beats out: omega, contingency, omega, contingency. It’s real. Unless Kepler is mistaken. Unless Kepler is pulling something truly, monumentally stupid. Neither strikes her as likely. So. It’s real. They’re real.
The elevator creaks to a stop, and Rachel steps out. She walks down a short hallway to a metal door. She inputs her PIN and presses her thumb to a small pad, and it swings open.
The black archives aren’t nearly as intimidating as the name suggests. It better resembles the basement of any government bureaucratic office: ugly industrial carpet, rows of fluorescent lights, and absolute scads of file drawers. Nothing is computerized; computers can be hacked. Which, yes, Rachel understands the security concerns, but it also makes finding things down here a massive pain in the ass. It takes her almost half an hour to find the correct row to search, and another half hour to locate the previous Hephaestus crews’ files. She supposes this is either poor organization or an effort to make it harder for someone who’s not supposed to be here to find anything quickly. Probably both.
When Rachel pulls out Captain Lovelace’s file, she pauses. She flips it open to the profile picture: a military portrait from a few years before Lovelace began the mission. Rachel examines the stray flyaway hairs, the wrinkles emerging at the corners of her eyes, the slightly crooked teeth in the smile. She imagines something copying that perfectly. Rachel shivers and slaps the files shut.
She stows the files in the briefcase she brought and slowly makes the trip back up to the surface.
Rachel isn’t all that surprised to find that Dr. Pryce is waiting for her on Level D. She’s sitting on the bench across from the elevators, legs crossed, one foot bouncing gently, hunched over slightly and her folded arms resting on her thigh. She looks distracted, like she wishes she could pull out a cigarette. She looks utterly ordinary, and that throws Rachel off for half a second.
Dr. Pryce’s eyes dart up as Rachel steps out of the elevator. For a moment, the women watch one another. Dr. Pryce sighs and straightens, running a hand through her mousy brown hair to push it out of her face.
“You look like someone hit you with a semi,” she says dryly.
“It wasn’t a semi,” Rachel says. “It was a blue supernova.”
That almost pulls a smile from Dr. Pryce. She inclines her head at the briefcase. “Let’s see it.”
Rachel doesn’t think to argue. She crosses the hall and sits beside Dr. Pryce; she pulls out Lovelace’s file and hands it over. Level D has some security clearance, but not especially high. Anyone could walk by and glimpse them perusing documents that aren’t supposed to exist. But Rachel is starting to get the hang of hiding in view of everyone, and she’s only slightly jumpy as Dr. Pryce starts to flip through the file’s contents.
“The natural assumption is that the captain died when she fell into the star and that the doppelganger was what emerged a few years later,” Dr. Pryce says, and Rachel gets the sense she’s talking to herself more than anything else. “But we should double check that the event didn’t happen earlier, while she was still aboard the Hephaestus.”
Silence, save the quiet rustle of paper as Dr. Pryce skims sheet after sheet. It’s almost peaceful, and Rachel gets the absurd urge to lean her head against the wall and rest her eyes for just a few minutes, just enough to make the heaviness in her lids go away.
To keep herself from doing that, she murmurs, “Wouldn’t the crew have been able to tell?”
Dr. Pryce looks over sharply. “What?”
Rachel falters for an instant then straightens. Stupid. She can’t afford to be this tired, really.
“Would it be detectable?” Rachel says. “By someone like Selberg?”
“Selberg. The microbiologist?”
“Yes.”
“He’s highly intelligent.”
“As I’m led to believe.”
“He’d never guess a thing.” Dr. Pryce turns her attention to the file, seems to catch herself, then returns her attention to Rachel. “I thought you read the Tiamet overview.”
“I did,” Rachel says. “Multiple times.”
“I’m sure the description of the crew’s experience was quite clear.”
“It was.”
Dr. Pryce lifts her eyebrows. “Then why would you ask that? It’s been fairly well established that the average observer wouldn’t have a hope of picking out doppelgangers, not without outside clues.”
“Because…” Rachel unthinkingly smooths both hands down the fabric of her skirt. “Because I maintain a healthy dose of skepticism about the accuracy of the Tiamet report.” She keeps her eyes on her hands. “I mean, they were dealing with an intense situation, and it’s possible that damage to certain gas lines that could very well have led to a mass hallucinatory event.” She glances up at Dr. Pryce. “To be perfectly frank, I’m don’t understand why Cutter treats that account like gospel.”
Dr. Pryce tilts her head. Then she smiles, and it’s one of her genuine ones. Rachel isn’t sure how to react to that.
“Do you trust the audio file of the transmission they received?” Dr. Pryce asks.
“I…yes.” Rachel pauses, frowning. “I do believe that was first contact. I’ve seen the analysis of the transmission. Listened to it. Often. It’s genuine; the science holds out.”
“But the eyewitness accounts don’t.”
“Well, no. Like I said, they’re human accounts of an extraordinary event happening under extreme circumstances. Frankly, the average court of law wouldn’t accept those reports as legitimate evidence of anything.”
Dr. Pryce hums. “You sound like the review board when they first heard the account.”
“You were there?”
“Yes.”
“Were you on the board?”
Dr. Pryce flips idly at the corner of Lovelace’s file as she skims it. “I was the one giving the account.”
Rachel’s entire body feels as if it’s been dunked into a tub of cold water. Dr. Pryce is still reading Lovelace’s file. Rachel licks her lips; she inhales to speak.
“You’re not about to apologize, are you?” Dr. Pryce asks, not looking up.
She had. Rachel twists her fingers into the fabric of her skirt and almost immediately lets it go. She inhales again.
“I didn’t realize—“ She cuts herself off because that’s not right. There’s no way that could be right. Dr. Pryce looks like she’s in her mid-40s at most. The Tiamet mission was almost 60 years ago.
“I’ve aged well,” Dr. Pryce says in a voice barely tinted with humor. Rachel blinks.
“I’ve been trying to find you for years,” she blurts. Dr. Pryce glances at her. Rachel can feel her skin flushing hard red. “I mean I’ve read that file…too many times to even count. And could never find a way to get the names of the two surviving crewmembers—“
“If you’d searched in the black archives long enough, you’d have found my name,” Dr. Pryce interrupts.
“I don’t have the time or clearance to just peruse the black archives,” Rachel points out.
“Of course.”
“And your crewmember? The other survivor? Is he—?“
“Please, Rachel, you know this already.”
Rachel freezes, wracking her brain for the knowledge. She stutters to a halt when she finds it.
“Pryce and Carter,” Rachel says. “Oh.”
“Yes,” Dr. Pryce says. “Oh.”
“He can’t be older than 40.”
“Marcus also ages well.”
Rachel stares at the side of Dr. Pryce’s head, still bent over Lovelace’s file. Rachel scrutinizes the crows feet at the corner of Dr. Pryce’s eye, the fall of her hair, the way her fingers hover over the file before darting forward to flip a page. Rachel physically flinches when Dr. Pryce speaks.
“So?”
“Sorry?”
“Presumably you have questions. Ask.”
Rachel roughly runs a hand through her hair. “Give me a minute.”
“Of course,” Dr. Pryce says. Her voice is wry. “And, no.”
“What?”
“No, I’m not lying to you. I’m not sure what the point would be.”
“I’m sorry, but how on earth do I know that?” That, finally, gets Dr. Pryce to lift her head. Her eyebrows are raised. “I mean,” Rachel continues, “neither you nor Mr. Cutter are over 60. You simply aren’t.”
“Ah,” Dr. Pryce says. There’s something dangerous in that sound, like a pocketknife snicking open. Rachel gets a cold splash across her gut. “I understand,” Dr. Pryce continues. “You have a professional basis in science. Naturally, you want evidence.”
Rachel doesn’t say anything.
“What would satisfy your criteria for acceptable evidence?”
Rachel doesn’t say anything.
“A birth certificate? But those can be forged, of course. Lab tests, then. That can give you a decent estimate of age, can’t it?”
“Doctor Pryce—“
“No, please Rachel, tell me what I can do to persuade you. Your opinion is of tantamount importance.”
“I didn’t mean—“
“Maybe you want to cross-examine my memories of what happened on the Tiamet. Where should I start? Would you like more details on what it’s like watching someone die from a puncture in his spacesuit?” Dr. Pryce asks. “Bloody, Rachel. It’s very bloody.”
“Stop.”
“Or maybe you’re curious about what it’s like finding the that same dead crewmember inside the station two days later, whole and asking you why you’re looking at him like that.” Dr. Pryce smiles with her teeth and lips. “You think that either something fundamental about your worldview is wrong or that you’ve finally succumbed to the cabin fever, Rachel. It’s part of the reason why you kill him again.”
“Stop!”
Rachel is on her feet without remembering standing up. Dr. Pryce stares at her with eyes flat and blank as brown coins and Rachel wants to rip them out just to stop them from boring holes in her, and she’s shaking slightly, and she hates Dr. Pryce so passionately that her heart is threatening to ram a hole through her ribs.
She turns; she half runs down the hall to the elevator that will take her up to Level C, where her office is. She half expects Dr. Pryce to be waiting for her in the elevator when the doors slide open. Except the unit is empty, of course it is, because Dr. Pryce cannot do things like that. Rachel lurches into the unit and slams the button to move up.
It’s not until she’s in her office, seated in her familiar chair and staring unseeingly at her blank computer screen, that the shaking starts to subside. That’s when the realization of what has just happened has a chance to crawl in.
“Fuck,” Rachel whispers to her office. And then, with feeling, “Fuck.”
***
If Rachel were any other sort of woman, she might have pulled in her sick days and stayed the hell away from the office for a while. But there’s still a big blue star parked on special projects, and she didn’t get to this point by being easily intimidated. So she shows up at work the next morning after a perfunctory shower, a few hours of sleep, and a couple caffeine pills.
Her heart does get a little jump when she passes Cutter’s office, but she ignores it. The knowledge doesn’t change anything. It might not even be true.
The morning passes relatively quietly. She answers emails and pauses her typing for a split second every time footsteps pass her office. She’s wary to leave the room at all in case she finds someone lounging in her chair when she gets back. The fact that she’s acting like a skittish underling makes her want to smash something into very tiny pieces.
Cutter, to his credit, doesn’t leave her hanging for more than a day. It’s near afternoon when one of her assistants comes in with a memo from Cutter asking that Rachel come into his office as soon as she can. Which translates into immediately, or so help her.
She straightens her suit and makes the 10-yard journey with her face as blank as she can manage it. She’s unsure of whether she can pull off her usual act but she’s willing to try.
When Rachel enters the familiar, dim office, the first thing she registers is the black archives files splayed across Cutter’s desk. Given that, she really shouldn’t be surprised when the next thing she sees is Dr. Pryce perched on the edge of Cutter’s desk, legs crossed. Dr. Pryce’s attention is on Cutter, who’s hovering over one of the several file drawers lined up along the edge of his office.
“But that’s just my point,” Cutter is saying as Rachel enters. He extracts a file folder, flips it open, scowls, and replaces it. “What sentient group wouldn’t eventually devolve into factions?”
“You’re using the mirror fallacy again, Marcus,” Dr. Pryce sighs. “You’ve yet to give me a good reason for why we should assume sapien social patterns are in any way the norm.” She barely glances toward Rachel. “Take a seat.”
Rachel sinks into the small, uncomfortable chair that’s designed to sit just a bit lower than Cutter’s chair. Pryce returns her attention to Cutter.
“Well?” she presses.
“Waraich’s 1999 paper,” Cutter sings out. Dr. Pryce rolls her eyes.
“You can’t pull out Waraich every time we approach this idea.”
“And until you’ve completely debunked it, I will continue to pull it out.”
Dr. Pryce purses her lips but seems to decide that the argument isn’t worth pursuing. She looks to Rachel again. “Are you ready? Or did you need another day to emote?”
“She’s fine, Miranda.” Cutter taps the file drawer shut with his foot and moves to stand behind desk, a single slim file folder in one hand. They both tower over her, and Rachel would like to stand if she didn’t know any better. “I hired her for a reason,” Cutter adds.
“Without telling me.”
“For goodness sake, you’re not going to dwell over that, are you?” Cutter asks, raising his eyebrows in Dr. Pryce’s direction with a faintly amused air. “Of all the things to be brooding over.” Dr. Pryce looks back with a blank face, and for an extremely awkward several seconds, Rachel watches them stare at one another like they’re having a telepathic argument.
“Ah,” Cutter suddenly says with the tone of a man who’s just realized something. “Yes, I forgot about Donnie.”
“No you didn’t,” Dr. Pryce says in a deadpan voice.
“You’re right; I didn’t.” Cutter looks to Rachel and tosses the file folder in her direction. “Take a look.”
The file lands with a faint fwap a few inches from the edge of the desk. Rachel slowly reaches out and tugs it toward her. She flips it open and finds several photographs paper clipped in place. The topmost one has the graininess of film photography, as if it came from several decades ago. It shows two women and three men standing on metal grating in front of a structure that looks a bit like the base of a shuttle launch pad. They’re all grinning at the camera and wearing the navy blue jumpsuits of the old federal deep space program; Rachel can see the insignia on their sleeves. They’re crowded close together; a dark-haired woman and a blond, wiry man have their arms slung around one another’s shoulders.
Pryce is recognizable. She’s the second woman, standing at the edge of the group, hands behind her back and chin slightly lifted. Her hair is loose and splayed over her shoulders, and her smile reaches her eyes, but it looks constructed somehow. She seems tired.
It takes Rachel another moment to spot Cutter. He’s between the embracing couple and a tall, broad-shouldered man who makes Cutter look downright tiny. His smile is huge and toothy.
Rachel tugs the photo from the paperclip and flips it over. Tiamet I Crew, 1962 is scrawled on the back in faded blue ink. She looks down, and the next photo must have been taken on the Tiamet itself because it shows the dark-haired women from the first photo floating cross-legged in mid-air, hands held up in double peace signs.
“Ruth,” Dr. Pryce’s voice says. Rachel lifts her head sharply. “Ruth Tanaka,” Dr. Pryce continues. “Navigations.”
Rachel slides the first photo back into place and flips the file shut. She leans back in her chair and tosses her hair from her face. “Tell me what happened,” she says.
Cutter and Dr. Pryce share a brief glance.
“You’ve read the Tiamet file—“ Cutter starts.
“I’ve read the sanitized version of what the board at the time deemed acceptable,” Rachel interrupts. “I want to hear it from you.”
Another shared glance, and this time Cutter looks quietly smug. Dr. Pryce shrugs lightly.
“Fine,” she says. She leans back slightly. “Tiamet I mission; lasted from November 1962 to July 1963. A deep space science exploration mission; goal was to collect data from the AR-183 system and to test capabilities of the newly developed Babylon series stations.”
“5.3 light years from Earth,” Cutter says. “That was hot stuff at the time.”
“I know all this,” Rachel says.
“We were a five-person crew,” Dr. Pryce continues, acting as if the other hadn’t spoken. “Captain Jaycion Lewis was our commanding officer and our medical officer. Oliver Duval was chief science officer; specialized in particle physics. Lieutenant Ruth Tanaka was navigations and engineering. Marcus was the communications officer. I was the computer specialist.”
Dr. Pryce speaks in a low, steady voice, as if she’s reciting a well-memorized mantra. “Mission met with success for the initial seven months.” She pauses and eyes Rachel. “It started with small incidents. The station was new, but systems regularly failed at a higher rate than would be expected. Never enough to be dangerous, but enough to cause us problems.” She glances at Cutter. “Then the transmissions.”
“Barely earned the word,” Cutter says, waving his hand. “Packets of static and jumbled signals. Oliver told us they were created by AR-183’s gas giant planet.”
“Then the time lapses started,” Dr. Pryce says.
“Time lapses?” Rachel echoes. “That wasn’t in the report.”
“Because the board decided such a claim was out of the range of possibility,” Cutter says dryly.
“We would repeat hours, even whole days,” Dr. Pryce says. “Or we would skip them. It was hard to catch at first. There’s a certain mindset you need in order to process time lapses. Our brains are hardwired to assume time moves linearly. So even when time doesn’t move that way, our brains fill in the blanks and move on. But eventually, they happened often enough that we finally realized what we were experiencing. Dr. Duval’s theory was that the system sat in the middle of some time-space anomaly in that area. A wrinkle, if you will. Which was why he launched a new series of projects to investigate the phenomena. Which was why he and I were on a space walk together; I was helping him install a new sensor to collect more refined gravitational wave data.”
Rachel remains silent. She knows this part.
“There was an accident. His space suit punctured. He died in front of me.” Dr. Pryce shifts her position on the desk. “We detached his space suit. Jettisoned him into space. Mourned.” Dr. Pryce tilts her head. “Two days later, we went through an intense solar storm. Had to shut down several station functions until it passed. And when it was over, Duval was there. In the engineering room. He didn’t remember dying. He thought he had just come back in from the space walk. He had been trying to find us.”
“We thought it might be a miracle of the time lapses,” Cutter says. “Commander Lewis did a thorough physical and interrogation, and Duval passed with flying colors. Lewis and Tanaka were convinced Duval had somehow come back to us.”
“I wasn’t.” Dr. Pryce says. “Neither was Marcus. The lapses had never only affected one person like that. They had always been broadly occurring. It wasn’t him.”
“But you couldn’t convince the other two of that,” Rachel says.
“No, not at all. The Duval doppelganger was placed back into rotation and things continued business as usual.” Dr. Pryce looks to Cutter. “Any of our attempts to further study the doppelganger were met with…resistance.”
“Hard resistance.”
“When Lewis realized what we were trying to do, he disallowed any contact between me and Marcus and the doppelganger,” Dr. Pryce says.
“Did you realize you’d made first contact at that point?” Rachel asks.
“It was at the forefront of our minds,” Cutter says. “But we didn’t have enough data to confirm anything. It could still have been an especially strange natural phenomena.”
“I was thinking split timeline,” Dr. Pryce muses.
“What confirmed the alien origin?” Rachel presses.
“When it died,” Cutter says.
“Because you killed him,” Rachel says.
“I did,” Dr. Pryce agrees. “Cornered it in the med bay. Single shot to the head. The situation wasn’t going anywhere, and we needed some sort of data to figure out what this thing was. I hoped to examine the body, at least. But the plan was compromised, and Commander Lewis put us in the brig.” She suddenly breaks into a flat smile. “The body came back to life five hours later.”
Rachel crosses her legs slowly. “And then what?”
“Finally, by that point, the commander got it in his head that something was wrong,” Cutter says. “And, by that point, we decided that this was indeed alien. All very exciting stuff.”
“It’s hilarious in retrospect,” Dr. Pryce says. “We’d all imagined first contact would be so well defined. But we mucked about for weeks before we realized what we had. We missed the actual moment.”
“Completely,” Cutter agrees.
“What did you do with him at that point?” Rachel interjects.
“It.” Dr. Pryce tilts her head back in contemplation. “Well, we interrogated it again.”
“Asked it what it was,” Cutter says.
“What it wanted.”
“Where it came from.”
“Nothing.”
“Nada.”
“It thought it was Oliver Duval. Completely and utterly.” Dr. Pryce’s voice grows softer, almost reverent. “The imitation is perfect. You forget you’re not talking to another human. It’s astounding.”
“Eerie,” Cutter adds.
“Mostly astounding.”
“Miranda was in love as soon as she realized what we were looking at,” Cutter says to Rachel in a faux whisper. “She’s very biased.”
“I got my way this time,” Dr. Pryce says. “We restrained the doppelganger and we observed.”
“You experimented,” Rachel says.
“Well, yes,” Cutter agrees.
“And you killed it again.”
“The second time was an accident,” Cutter says. “We were seeing how much oxygen deprivation it could handle.”
“No more than a standard human, turns out,” Dr. Pryce says. She sounds vaguely disappointed. “Lewis and Takana were not pleased.”
“Incensed, maybe. But Lewis did agree to do the autopsy,” Cutter points out.
“Yes. Commander Lewis performed a frankly admirable autopsy of the body; most of the best data we have about the doppelgangers comes from his reports. He’s the one who found the subtle differences in the structure of the prefrontal cortex.”
Rachel looks between the two of them. Her heart is hammering against her ribcage, but she’s fairly sure her demeanor is composed.
“How long until it came back?”
“Twenty hours this time,” Dr. Pryce says. “And total body reconstruction took at least a day, wouldn’t you say?”
“The screaming got irritating after the 12 hour mark,” Cutter says.
“And you kept this up,” Rachel says. She’s faintly aware of bile in the back of her throat, but she doesn’t feel entirely connected to her body, either. “Experimenting until you killed it.”
“Yes.”
“How many times did you kill it?” Rachel asks.
“Eight.” Dr. Pryce purses her lips. “No need to be disgusted, Rachel. We were gathering reams of data.”
Rachel hesitates then says, “Of course.”
“Officer Tanaka died during the fourth iteration,” Dr. Pryce continues. “Ruth had…never liked our approach to the situation. She had been very close to Duval; I don’t think she ever quite accepted that he was gone. So, Tanaka and the doppelganger attempted a mutiny. They failed. When we captured them, we had to put the doppelganger down, but Ruth shielded it with her body and refused to move. We—I shot. I missed.” Dr. Pryce exhales. “We knew better than to send Tanaka’s body into space, though. We stored it in a cryo container.”
“And we kept going,” Cutter says.
“It stopped when the doppelganger managed to escape,” Dr. Pryce says. “It threw itself out of the aft airlock. And that was that.”
Silence fills the office. Rachel takes a hard inhale, exhales through her mouth. “Did you perform psych evals?”
“Of course,” Cutter says.
“And you didn’t see indications of depression? Suicidal tendencies?”
“It was essentially a human brain. Yes, we saw them.” Dr. Pryce shrugs. “But it wasn’t real. This thing wasn’t real, Rachel.”
Rachel lifts her chin slightly. “Okay.”
“Things stayed quiet for about a week after that,” Dr. Pryce continues. “Until we got a single pulse of stellar radiation. The entire station mainframe went down. No power. All systems critical. We managed to get enough suits and oxygen masks for the three of us, but those would only last a few hours. We couldn’t get anything running again. Nothing. By that point, we agreed, our only option was to somehow get the transport shuttle operational and leave that place. We had just managed to get some auxiliary power rerouted into the shuttle when the star’s solar radiation started up again. And it was high, higher than anything we’d ever seen.”
“The station began to quite literally fall apart,” Cutter says.
“An explosion sent a piece of shrapnel into Commander Lewis’ head,” Dr. Pryce says. “He died immediately.” She pauses. “We boarded the shuttle. Managed to successfully launch.”
“And then the transmission,” Cutter says.
“Yes,” Dr. Pryce says. She glances at Rachel. “What did you feel when you heard it the first time?”
“Feel,” Rachel echoes, voice faint. “I felt? I um.” She blinks and swallows. “Confused. It was a man’s voice. Speaking English.” She looks from Pryce to Cutter. “That was Oliver Duval’s voice, wasn’t it?”
“Something that sounded like Oliver,” Cutter agrees.
“It wasn’t pretending to be him anymore, at least,” Dr. Pryce says.
“He—it. It didn’t say much,” Rachel says.
“No.” Dr. Pryce shrugs. “The transmission itself wasn’t all that important.”
“More what happened after the transmission.”
“Which was?” Rachel asks.
Silence. Both Cutter and Dr. Pryce are looking into the near distance; Cutter has on an uncharacteristically thoughtful expression. Dr. Pryce is blank.
“We realized,” Dr. Pryce says at length. “That the doppelganger was not truly the alien. It was a rover, a probe, a tool sent out to gather information about us.”
“There was a mind behind it.”
“An engineer.”
“And at that moment, we got to meet the engineer.”
“Because something was in the shuttle with us.”
Rachel hesitates. “You mean it breached the—“
“No, not like that,” Dr. Pryce interrupts. “It hadn’t been there one minute. And then the next minute it was.”
“Did…did you see something?”
“No.”
“Hear—“
“We felt it,” Cutter says. “Sensed it. Whatever new age word you want. We had a third presence among us, and it was watching us.”
“Watching us closely,” Dr. Pryce adds.
“And what did you do?”
“Nothing.” Dr. Pryce’s expression is wry. “Nothing we could do. It wasn’t physically manifest. It didn’t say anything, didn’t do anything. It just watched us. So we watched it back.”
“For days,” Cutter says. “Or, the equivalent of days. Didn’t put the shuttle on a sub light arc. Didn’t adjust its course at all. We let the shuttle drift, and we watched this thing and we waited.”
“Did you think it was going to kill you?” Rachel asks.
“We didn’t know,” Dr. Pryce says. “I don’t think we cared. I didn’t.”
“I cared a little,” Cutter says wryly.
“Did you learn anything?”
“We understood it was large,” Dr. Pryce says. “And, for lack of a better term, alien. Nothing about it felt familiar.”
“It was as if a planet had started looking back at us,” Cutter muses.
“Or a chunk of space-time.” Dr. Pryce brushes hair back from her face. “It…hm. It absorbed us.”
“Or we absorbed it,” Cutter says.
“Something certainly happened.”
“The boundaries became…blurred.”
“Hard to tell where anyone started or stopped.”
“Where bodies started and stopped.”
“The difference between the space inside the shuttle and the space outside of it.”
“Time didn’t even try to go linearly at some point.”
“Watching the past happen right next to the future is disconcerting.”
“Sounds like a bad trip, doesn’t it?”
“That’s what the board said.”
“The board was a load of idiots.”
“We tried to explain.”
“But how do you explain something like that?”
“You don’t.”
“Not at all.”
Rachel has to heave herself back into focus when their voices die away. She can’t figure out who was saying what. When she blinks up at them, they’re not even paying attention to her. They’re looking at one another.
“And when it left, we felt that.”
“Like someone was peeling my intestine out slowly.”
“Digging my brain out through my nasal cavity.”
“Painful.”
“Not the right word.”
“I know, but what else is there?”
“Agonizing, excruciating, harrowing.”
“God, that’s pithy.”
“Unpleasant, then.”
“Fine. Unpleasant.”
Rachel feels as if she’s floating somewhere a little above and to the right of herself.
“Rachel.”
Rachel’s consciousness seeps back into herself like molasses. She stares, heavy-lidded, at the two figures. Like twin aspens rattling at her.
“And?” she hears her voice say, and it echoes like it’s coming down from several long, narrow tunnels.
“It left,” one of the aspens says. “We had nothing to do in that place anymore.”
“We left.”
“Sub-light arc back to Earth.”
“And well.”
“You know the rest.”
“Handed over the transmission.”
“Handed over our data from the previous two months.”
“Never were given either back.”
“Always good to keep multiple back ups.”
“Got questioned as nauseum by the board.”
“Waste of time.”
“They deemed us unfit for further space travel.”
“Problem.”
“Because we needed to go back.”
“We needed to meet it again.”
“It had taken something from us.”
“We wanted it back.”
“Or it had left something with us.”
“And we wanted to give it back.”
“Semantics.”
“At that time, the only people funding space travel were the federal government.”
“A hindrance.”
“But nothing major.”
“Just start our own space exploration corporation.”
“Just know the right people; get the right sponsors.”
“Persuade the best at NASA to come work for us instead.”
“You know something about that, don’t you Rachel?”
“Within eight years we had our first mission.”
“We returned, both of us, to the AR-183 system.”
“Except.”
“The presence was gone.”
“Not a trace of it.”
“Understandable, probably.”
“Why wouldn’t they move?”
“So.”
“It’s become a matter of finding them again.”
“Six missions together; Marcus completed three more on his own.”
“Always remote stars with unusual signals.”
“Always listening for a sign of them again.”
“Wrote a bible of deep space travel somewhere in there.”
“Ah yes.”
“At some point we knew we were more effective on the ground.”
“And so.”
“We’re still looking.”
“Still listening.”
“All we can do, in the meantime.”
They fall silent, and there’s a sense of finality in the silence this time. Rachel sluggishly moved her legs and is faintly surprised to realize that they’re still attached to her. She rests her hands on her thighs palms up, opens them, closes them, tries to reacquaint herself with the muscles and nerve endings. She drags her head up.
“Why am I here?”
The one named Cutter—Carter? No, Cutter—he grins like a wildcat.
“We're buying insurance,” he says.
Rachel stares.
“When we travel to Wolf 359,” Pryce says, “it would be best for someone here to know the entire sequence of events. To see all the puzzle pieces for what they are.”
“Ah,” Rachel says. “When are you going?”
“Once Warren has the situation secure,” Cutter says.
“If,” Pryce says in a flat voice.
Cutter flashes her a hard grin. “We agreed he was mine,” he says. “No need to be petulant about it, Miranda.”
“And then you tried to keep this one too. Greedy,” Pryce says.
“Opportunistic. Besides, I knew you’d sniff her out in the end.”
Pryce purses her lips and returns her attention to Rachel. “It’s the first confirmed contact since Tiamet itself,” she says. "We don't have a choice."
“And what would I do here?” Rachel asks.
“Replace us,” Cutter says, folding his arms and leaning back slightly. “Keep the mission on track until we return, or continue it when we don’t return. Keep Goddard moving toward that next step of communication.”
Rachel thinks about this. It’s getting gradually easier to catch her thoughts before they disintegrate, to line them up in coherent rows. She gazes at Cutter, then Pryce, then Cutter again.
“What if I want to look them in the face, too?” she asks.
Pryce’s face splits into something similar to but not quite like a smile. “You’d have to pay your dues first,” she says.
“Warren is up there right now,” Rachel says.
“And he’ll probably die for it,” Pryce replies.
Cutter is looking at Rachel with a considering air. “How badly do you want it?”
“You already know,” Rachel says.
Cutter’s eyes lighten. Rachel is struck with the absurd thought that Cutter might be feeling pride or, possibly, affection toward her. It makes her heart seize.
“You can want as badly as you like, but we need you here first,” Pryce says. She lifts her chin slightly. “So. Do you accept?”
“Do I have a choice?” Rachel asks.
“You always have choices,” Cutter says, and he glances at Pryce as if it’s some old inside joke. Her mouth twitches up on one side in response.
“Well.” Rachel splays her hands over her thighs. “Then. I guess you already know that, too.”
Pryce turns toward Cutter slightly. “Told you.”
“I never once uttered a word of doubt.”
“You uttered whole paragraphs.”
“Insignificant.”
“Stop talking.”
“No.” Cutter turns to Rachel. “I have a few documents you’ll need to memorize, and a couple things to sign. Really very small things.”
“I’m sure, sir.” It’s the most like her usual self she’s sounded in the last…however long she’s been here. Rachel exhales hard and waves stray hairs from her face as if waving away the last dredges of fog. “Am I dismissed?”
“You have one last question,” Pryce says. Rachel blinks heavily at her and, a second later, exhales a thin laugh.
“I’ll ask it later,” she says.
Cutter’s eyes have narrowed slightly, but Pryce has on that expression again, like the teacher whose student has finally shown the first truly significant progress, and there’s something else behind it, but Rachel can’t puzzle it out yet. She’ll have to work on it later.
For now, she stands and straightens her blouse. She considers them for a moment, then says, “Thank you for the consideration,” and turns toward the door. She thinks she hears a laugh, but she can’t decide who makes is. Then she’s being swallowed up by the livid fluorescent light of the hallway, and it’s like stepping out of a waking dream.
***
“What….” Kshhhhh. “What. Are. You?”
Silence.
“What. Are.” Kshhhh. “Y-you?”
Static.
“Please. Reply. What.” Kshhhh. “Are. You?”
The door opens before Rachel can pause the audio. The final you hangs in the air. Rachel turns slightly and releases a quiet, “Oh.”
Pryce examines her for a moment. “Never get into espionage work,” she says. “You’d be dismal at it.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Don’t ma’am me, either. I’m not Marcus; I don’t need preening every other hour.”
Rachel nods and considers that this is part of the reason why Pryce is so much more dangerous.
“That’s very flattering,” Pryce says. She crosses the small room and takes the seat beside Rachel’s. She examines the screen. “What are you hoping to glean this time?” she asks.
“Nothing,” Rachel admits. “But knowing the full context of the transmission changes it.” She looks at the screen too, at the jagged peaks of the audio file. It’s not long; only about three minutes, and it’s mostly silence. Oliver Duval’s voice is thin and drowned in static. Rachel thinks that even if the audio file did find its way out of Goddard’s high security storage and into the public, no one would take it as anything other than a strange recording. It would hide in plain sight.
“Was Oliver Duval a good man?” Rachel asks.
Pryce folds her hands in her lap. “An exceedingly ordinary man,” she says. “Which is to say, just fine for the most part.”
“He didn’t deserve to die.”
“No, not at all.”
“Did his doppelganger deserve to die?”
“Rachel, don’t be pedantic.”
Rachel nods, inhales and says, “I’m going to ask that question now.”
Pryce inclines her head to indicate she’s listening.
“How do you two know?” Rachel turns her head just enough to see Pryce’s profile. “How do you know you’re human?”
“And not perfect doppelgangers?” Pryce asks. Rachel nods. Pryce smiles with flat eyes. “We don’t. Not at all. You’d only find out if you killed us and waited. Or autopsied us.” Rachel feels the edge of her mouth twisting up. Pryce glances at her and seems amused at the expression she finds. “Does that prospect excite you?” she asks.
“Sure,” Rachel says. “I could climb you all the way to your engineer.” Pryce turns away from the computer screen completely, and Rachel meets her eyes, and her heart is hammering against the base of her throat. “You have to admit,” Rachel hears herself say. “You look too young for your age. You can essentially read minds.”
“I don’t know if that’s conclusive,” Pryce says.
“Okay.”
They watch one another for another several hard, wild heartbeats. Rachel broadcasts as best as she can. Pryce leans toward Rachel, and Rachel can see the dark flecks in her brown eyes, and then her mouth is on hers, and Pryce’s lips are full and her tongue is almost cool. She tastes like ozone.
Rachel inhales.