Chapter Three
Alicia
I was better at being invisible than any of them thought. Even Joseph, who knew me best. At the moment, he didn’t see me on the floor across the room from him and Kayleen. They sat side by side, holding hands, lost in the other world of data where he sometimes became as invisible as me, even though I could still see his body. He’d grown as tall as Liam. Even with the slack-faced look he wore when the data fields took him, he still glowed with energy, like there was more of him than of anyone else. The muscles in his hands and calves twitched from time to time, as if he could leap up from whatever far place he’d gone to and chase me around the ship. We’d done that just this morning, me leaving my invisibility mod on low-res so it’d change too slowly from time to time and give him clues. I’d been grateful when he caught me in a maintenance tunnel with only the silent bots to see what we did after that.
He didn’t spend as much time with me anymore. He had become full of being a captain. I missed him, so I watched him when I could.
Kayleen, beside him, looked like me when she kept her eyes shut and her feet tucked under her. Her feet are huge. We’re both a head shorter than him. Right now, her dark curly hair fell in a mess down her shoulders, the split ends curling around her breasts.
They’d been down deep in the data for so long that my right foot had gone to sleep. I twisted it gently, feeling the pins and needles of blood rushing into cramped veins. It was important not to make a sound; me being invisible didn’t make them deaf. If Joseph woke and caught me, he’d think I was jealous of her, but I wasn’t really. Not much, anyway. Being invisible taught me how much she loved Liam, and Chelo, the little family they’d made. If I was jealous of her, it was for that.
I worked my foot back alive before Kayleen twitched and moaned, burying her face in his shoulder for a moment. He whispered to her. “Shhhh … you did well.”
“I crashed.”
He pulled her close to him and held her. “You’ll get it. You have to relax, to let go and trust your subconscious enough to let it handle the hard parts.”
Her voice reeked of trapped frustration. “I can’t. I get all tangled up.”
They had been flying a simulated version of Creator, which she crashed regularly. He had trouble teaching her things that came like breathing to him. But he stayed patient. “You’ll get it. If you ever have to fly a real ship, you’ll do fine.”
The look on her face suggested she didn’t believe him. Neither of them much liked these lessons. Sometimes I had to tease Joseph for hours afterward to get him laughing. Kayleen tried hard, but Reading the Wind scared her. At least, doing it deep like Joseph. I knew; I’d been an invisible fly on the wall by accident once, when she cried in Chelo’s arms and wished all her powers away.
A gentle warning beeped in my ear for the second time. I only had a few minutes before the mod failed for lack of power and needed me to move and charge it. I tried to stop everything but breathing to make it last.
Joseph pulled Kayleen up and held her to him, and though they didn’t say anything I’d have bet they were talking anyway. I wanted that; to be so close to him I could talk inside his head and hear him inside mine. At one point, he looked right at the bit of wall I leaned against, and I wondered what I often wondered: Did he always know where I was in spite of my invisibility? Did the data that made me invisible to the eye betray me to him and Kayleen?
He looked away quickly.
They went through the door before my mod gave out. I breathed a sigh of relief and leaned against the wall for a few long breaths before I stood and slipped through the door, rewarded with an empty corridor. Still, I walked, stepping quietly, turning and turning. I knew Creator like no one but Joseph did. I worked my way along two outer corridors, the slow movement enough to give some charge to the magic that transformed my skin to a mirror. As I went back and back, I grew lighter, approaching the half-gravity of the cargo area. Enough to hold everything in place, not much more.
I undogged the hatch of my favorite hold: the biggest one. Inside, the walls were lined with boxes and crates full of art made by the roving scientists called roamers. The art didn’t matter—nothing from Fremont did. I was glad to be rid of the place. What mattered was the space.
Creator was mostly corridors and small rooms or packed cargo holds. Or the shared workout room, where anyone might be. But this—this was a surfeit of space, a wealth of space, a private space.
I stood in the middle and bowed to the openness, fully visible. A ritual: me showing off for myself. Then I bounded onto a box, the lightness making me feel like I could fly. I leapt from box to shelf to wall to floor to stack of boxes, warming up. I let each jump take me a little higher, and then I leapt into the wall and pushed off, the thrust of my legs giving me enough height to reach the tallest pile of boxes.
I crouched there for a moment.
Like a butterfly might.
I went again, going up and down and across, extending my arms to touch the far wall. I had to push hard each time—even in half gravity it was possible to fall. I worked my way to the ceiling, finally breathing hard, and came back down the same way.
I imagined people watching me. Joseph clapping. The children. I imagined people liking my strength and my power instead of chastising me for it.
I didn’t want a real audience. But I wanted this one, the one in my head. It made me jump faster.
I did the whole routine two more times, still visible, Alicia the flying girl.
Then I turned on my mod, now more fully charged, and did the cargo dance again, up and up and up, pushing and extending and almost falling. Alicia the invisible girl.
At the top, every movement risked a fall.
I loved that feeling.