Maria

At floordusk, Maria waits, Summer Diary in lap, butterflies in stomach.

All of the last few years have fallen away from her the way a bad dream falls upon waking—falls all at once, as if tumbling off a cliff. There was a time when she was just Maria N., quiet but well-liked student, surprise valedictorian. And then a time when she was just Maria, a carefree young woman spending her last summer before college with her aunt in a rural dreamland. At one of her aunt’s parties her eyes had met those of another guest, a young scientist working in the nearby National Lab. And she was Maria, and he was Martin, and they walked on the firm beautiful earth, above ground.

There were real sunrises, and real sunsets, and every day was twenty-four hours long, and this rhythm was the base which their own faster rhythms had joined in concert—their word games, their limb games. Martin could talk about books the way no one else could talk about books—not like the pretentious hand-raisers of her English classes, always searching for the brittle hidden meaning, but with a sense that language itself contained endless delights that were also the delights of the soil and the sunset. Anything could be combined with anything else, and this was the engine of humor just as it was the engine of beauty, and thus she and Martin could make jokes that depended upon other jokes that depended upon the curve of an arm, the odd barren look of a dead tree. If their jokes had been chess moves, each would have rated a (!).

Of course, this has never happened. She had never been that Maria. And when the cracks began to appear—when her aunt, again and again, professed never to have witnessed this or that, and began to wonder aloud if Maria was not altogether right in the head—that was when it all started. The people her aunt knew at the National Lab found her new species of madness quite interesting, quite relevant to their own research, and even claimed to have an experimental treatment for it, and the rest was—

—history? No. The scales have fallen from her eyes. What was lost can be regained. Who would believe this story, of people living on the ocean floor, of mousy but studious Maria N. becoming a submarine pilot (of all things!), of mad science, sci-fi monsters, a secret paramilitary? This isn’t the real story. That one was.

She knows the heteropneums are coming soon, because Martin had told her. She has told Ratio and Cecelia to build the engine. She wonders whether she was wrong to involve Cecelia—Martin had only mentioned Ratio, told her to trust no one else—but the two were inseparable, and he would have to be satisfied with the best she could do. He would be satisfied, she knew. He had always been.

And so when the alarm goes off, shrill and insistent, she does not feel afraid or resigned. This time is different. She has fought hundreds of heteropneums, but this time Martin is with her—not in memory but, somehow, somewhere, in flesh. She is going to return home.

Some part of her recognizes that the alarm is abnormal. In an ordinary attack situation, Miranda would be informed and would call her before everyone else was alerted. Many heteropneums could be easily dispatched, and there was no use warning everyone unless they posed a real threat. But here it is, the synth voice that talks when hiding the danger is no longer prudent:

Abnormal storm of Boltzmen detected near outer shell, amplitude 10.2 kCept. Boltzmen are non-human. All personnel are advised to presume that a heteropneum attack is imminent and proceed to shelter locations.

The sensors must be back online now. That’s funny. But then of course they would have to be: how else would they know the heteropneums were coming?

10.2 kCept is a lot. But she does not fear, because she knows she is going home.

She leaves her quarters and begins the run that is fixed in her muscle memory. The lights are dim, simulating the last moments of dusk. She can see in the half-light people running around her, rushing to shelters padded with heavy pneuma shielding. She bumps into a few people, on autopilot, making nothing of it.

She has reached the dock and seen her sub before it occurs to her: what about that new engine? She hasn’t heard back from R&C. It’s not like they would have installed it in the sub without telling her. Something about this is wrong.

There is a hand on her shoulder, and she turns.

Behold the man: eyes that know her, the way they knew her that first moment at her aunt’s table. Short blonde hair she remembers ruffling. The suit, an affectation she knows, worn on more occasions than strictly call for it. The hand, the physical hand—solid, like the earth, not some trick of slippery soul magic but solid flesh—on her shoulder. Long fingers she remembers, joints and knuckles she has touched.

“It’s good to see you, Maria,” Martin says.

“Good to see you too, Barrister For The Frogs,” she says, invoking an old injoke, feeling like she has just spoken an incantation for some powerful magic spell.

Martin smiles, a bit stiffly, and says nothing. Maria was expecting him to top it with some clever rejoinder. But it’s been a long time. There will be time to reconnect.

“You can’t fight these things with the sub. You’re going to need that engine.”

“I understand,” says Maria. “I’m ready.” She is ready.

“It’s in Free Pneumase Usage Room 1,” he says, because for some reason he knows. “Come with me.”

He extends his hand, palm up, revealing lines she remembers tracing. She takes it. And they run through the dusk, as they’d run once through the dusk back on solid ground, chasing the sun. She is home.