The Melding

“Reset your password.”

I stare at the screen in bleary-eyed confusion. It’s too early for this, for my work email to invade what had been such a pleasant dream. The words, scrolled out in white text against a black screen, make me wince. A headache threatens behind my left eye and I shove the phone hard under my pillow. Two hours before my alarm clock goes off. Two more hours of hopefully peaceful sleep, though that’s been in rare supply here lately.

I don’t sleep well anymore. I’m not sure how it started or why. All I know is, one night I laid down to sleep and only tossed and turned. A fluke, I had thought, no more. But it had happened again, and again, until it all became one great blur. Fitful bursts of sleep, no more than fifteen minutes at a time with hours of angry alertness jammed in between. Every morning I wake up with hair snarled from twisting against the pillow, with headaches and dry eyes and frustration burning a hole in my chest.

Thick blackout curtains stave off the morning sun. A pair of ear plugs nestled in my skull block out the sounds of my ten cats as they rove through the house, chattering amongst themselves. I pull the white comforter up against my chin and let myself sink into the soft mattress. Fatigue pulls my eyelids shut, drags them down over burning eyes made weary from too much screen time and sleepless nights.

The phone buzzes again. I jolt awake with a bitter curse and haul the damned thing out from beneath my pillow. My arm comes back, mere seconds from launching the hateful brick of metal and glass across the room, then something catches my eye. Another email. But it’s different this time. The oddity of the phrase makes me sit up with the blanket puddled against my lap, accepting that sleep will just have to wait.

“Reset your eyes.”

I set one thumb on the message then swipe my phone open and wait for it to take me to my email app. Only it doesn’t. I have a split second to catch sight of my background image, a picture of three cats cuddled together, before the entire thing crashes. I stare down at it in surprise, even give it a little shake. Nothing. The power button doesn’t work, the touch screen is unresponsive. All I can do is watch as the screen turns grainy and pixelated like it’s trying to wake itself up and failing.

“Great,” I mutter to myself. “I broke it.”

I slip off the bed with an annoyed grunt. My bare feet meet the carpet and I instantly realize one of my cats must have had an upset tummy. Because I’m standing in a little puddle of vomit. Another curse escapes me, this one more weary than annoyed, and I wipe my wet foot against a dry spot of carpet. I’ll clean it up later. Right now, I need my phone, and the only person who can help me is my tech whiz sister.

“Logan,” I whisper as I creep down the dark hall to her room. “Logan, you up?”

The door to her bedroom hangs ajar. With this many cats, neither one of us can close a door without having to listen to claws against wood. It doesn’t really matter anyway. Neither one of us has had a boyfriend in well over two years and we have nothing to hide from each other. We’ve lived together for six years now, so all of our secrets are already out in the open. Not that there were many. Just enough for a few giggles over one of Logan’s complicated mixed drinks.

I lean into her doorway. It’s dark inside but I’m pretty sure I can see the glow of her cell phone somewhere in the pile of blankets on her bed. Three cats stare up at me from the bed. Nemesis with his stripy orange fur, black and brown Franccc, pure grey Obi-Wan. I make my way into the room, whispering her name the entire time. Does she really not hear me? Neither one of us has the best hearing but she usually answers.

That lump there should be her shoulder. I reach out, poke a finger into the blankets, and the lump collapses. Flat against the bed with no room to hide a body beneath. The suddenness of it makes me pull back with a startled yelp and my hand slams down on the switch of her bedside lamp. A golden glow suffuses the room, making my eyes water with pain. It takes a second for me to blink away the tears and even longer for me to make sense of the room.

The bed’s empty. Rumpled bed sheets shot through with old stains and riddled with holes stare up at me. The mattress is moldy, the wooden bedframe sagging in the middle. I drag my eyes up to find the rest of the room in a similar state of decay. The carpet is rotted through to the floorboards. The lamp I turned on flickers on and off with a whispering hiss. Her dresser is dilapidated and leaking fraying clothes out of its drawers. The T.V. mounted on the wall has sloughed off to lay face down on the floor amongst a pile of shattered glass.

This is not how this is supposed to look. I’d been in here just last night talking to her about her favorite new show and the room had looked how it had always looked. The same white and light blue comforter, white sheets. Bright white walls made dark by her curtains and the T.V. had displayed colorful images of the terrible reality show she’d made me watch with her. I’d done her laundry two days ago, folded it neatly and placed it in that very same dresser.

My phone buzzes in my hand. I look down to see a new message scrawled across its surface and I curse again. “Reset your world.” The screen dissolves into static once more before I can make sense of the strange message and I look up to see the cats staring at me.

“Everyone out,” I order, swinging my arms and herding them toward the door. “There’s glass in here, go on, get.”

They go with faint cries of annoyance. I make a quick round of her room, trying and failing to ignore the stench of rotted wood and cloth. Her closet is as destroyed as the rest of her room but I find one more cat, a chubby tabby named Leia, napping amongst a pile of damp, forlorn hoodies. She mews at me as I lift her up into my arms and we escape the room together, pulling the door firmly shut behind us.

The hallway is normal. White walls, light grey carpet, the bathroom just there to my right. It’s as though I left the rot and decay behind in Logan’s room, preventing its spread into the rest of the house. I peek back into the room to find that it’s still just a wreck and I slam the door shut. The floor feels slippery beneath my feet. My body goes light and I watch the world tilt around me in the heartbeat before my face meets the carpet.

Whiskers wake me up. My little black kitten Discord sniffs at my face with her dainty forepaws planted on my throat. I pick her up with one hand and drop a kiss against her head before setting her back down on the ground. My right cheek is sore and abraded, my shoulder and hip ache. I passed out. I never pass out. Maybe my iron levels are low. Or maybe the world has really turned upside down.

I’m at the top of the stairs. Lucky I didn’t fall backwards when I fainted or else I’d have woken up on the first floor with a bit more pain than a few sore spots. I roll over to force myself to my feet only to catch something strange through the windows on either side of my front door. Fog. It’s not the strangest sight up here in the mountains but I don’t think it’s ever been this thick before.

I feel too wobbly to stand up so I scoot down the stairs on my bottom. Cold vinyl flooring meets my feet as I reach the first floor and I pull myself up using the banister. I can’t see anything outside, not even the porch, and so I scrabble at the door. It opens with a painful groan of distressed hinges, as it always does, but this time it makes me wince. Too loud in all this silence. I slip outside before any cats can follow me and I’m suddenly shivering.

It's cold. Of course it’s cold, it’s January, but this feels different. It leeches into my bones almost immediately and I wrap my arms around my waist to hold in some of my body heat. Fog twines its way up my legs, brushes against my face with moist kisses. There’s no smell here, at least, and I force myself forward. Logan’s not here. Maybe she left, took her car and went somewhere.

The porch shudders with each step. I hop down onto the grass and hurry toward the driveway. It’s not a far walk but I make it slowly, with both hands held out in front of me. Grass turns into asphalt, gritty and cold beneath my feet. My hand brushes against something metallic and I pat my hands along its flank.

It's big. Bigger than my car. Logan’s Jeep. It doesn’t bode well that she’s gone and her car is still here, still jammed into the driveway alongside mine. She's not here. Panic floods my veins, pulls my skin down taut over my bones. There's nothing but the fog. I'm alone.

“Logan!” I cry.

My voice echoes weirdly in the dense fog. Some trick of the atmosphere turns it back against me so that I hear my own voice calling from the distance. Shivers run the length of my spine and I’ve turned on my heel before I realize it. This is my home. I have good neighbors, trustworthy, honest people. Yet I’m suddenly more terrified than I’ve ever been in my life. My skin prickles like it’s trying to crawl off my back and hide as my own voice chases me as I run blindly back to the house.

My shin slams into a step. I pitch forward, hands out to catch myself on the porch. Wood groans and cracks beneath my weight but I haul myself up, force my way through splinters. The cold metal door meets my hand and I drag it open. My voice echoes one last time as I launch myself back into the house, spinning on my bottom across the foyer. I kick the door shut with one foot then leap up to lock both locks.

I stare at the door for a long moment. A part of me knows for sure that it’s going to blast open any second, that something is going to force its way into my house. The minutes pass and I strain to listen over the sound of my racing heart. No footsteps outside, no nails scraping against the door. No hands rattling the doorknob and no feet kicking in the windows. I’m safe.

Something red catches my eye. I look down to find my feet shot through with splinters and oozing blood across the floor. The pain hits a second later, drawing a hissed curse from between my lips, and I sit down to pull one foot up into my lap. It’s not as bad as it could have been. I could’ve stepped on a nail. But there are a decent amount of wooden splinters shoved into the balls of my feet. That’ll need tending to.

It takes an immense amount of effort to turn my back on the door but I manage. I crawl up the stairs on all fours, head into my room toward where I’ve stashed my bug out bag behind my bed. I drag out the first aid kit and go to work. It’s painful, messy work but I eventually pull out every single splinter before dousing my feet in a hefty amount of peroxide. I’ll need to wash them in the tub, though, and I grab a roll of bandages before dragging myself out from behind my bed.

The carpet here is dry. I realize why that’s weird just as I hit the corner of my mattress and I turn back to inspect the spot just beside my bed. I’d stepped in kitty puke just a few minutes ago. Mushed it into the carpet and wiped it off right there. But it’s gone. There’s nothing here. I run my hand over the spot to find it completely dry and my heart flips in my chest.

“Nemesis!” I shout as I leap to my feet, ignoring the sting of my wounds. “Franccc, Obi, Nyxie! Moros?”

There’s nothing. Nemesis and Moros would have at least answered me and Obi-Wan would have come racing to my side. But there’s nothing. No movement, no aggravated meows, only a deep, yawning silence. Tears threaten in my eyes and I begin to run.

I tear my way through the house. I check every single hidey hole, every cat tower and bed. The litter boxes are empty, the space where Discord likes to tuck herself beneath my bed is abandoned. I charge into Logan’s room once more. It’s just as destroyed as it was before and I sift through piles of reeking clothes, flip over her rotted mattress, tear through her dresser. Nothing. No cats, no Logan. They’re my family. God, they’re the only things I love in this entire world and they’re gone.

I sit amongst the wreckage of Logan’s room. I don’t understand what’s happening. This feels like a nightmare but the bloody footprints I’ve left through the house lets me know that this is real. The tears come at last. I weep into my filthy hands, scream into the musty air. Am I alone here? Have I been left behind here while the entire world rots around me?

The phone buzzes in my hand. Have I really held onto it all this time? I must have repeatedly set it down only to pick it up again on some idiot instinct born of too much screen time and a dependence on social media. A part of me wants to break it. To launch it out the window, find something heavy and smash it to pieces. Instead, I lift it with a shaking hand, turn it over so that its bright face stares up at me.

“Reset your mind.”

A hysterical laugh burbles its way out from between my lips. “What does that mean?” I scream. “What do you want from me?”

There’s no response. The screen only blinks out of existence and this time I do throw it. It bounces off of the wall, knocks a fresh hole into the drywall. Pieces of glass from the shattered screen spray outward in a twinkling arc to join the fragments of the T.V. on the floor. Good riddance.

I pull myself to my feet. Logan’s door had swung shut behind me when I stormed in and I push it open to find that the rot has spread. It’s as though the entire house has aged a hundred years in a heartbeat. Holes in the ceiling through which I can see clear through to the sky above. Rotted carpet, rotted walls, rotted beds and cat toys and clothes.

I move through the house in a my own kind of fog. “Everything I love and held dear, all dead long before their time,” I whisper to myself as I pass my hand over the once-white kitchen island. “If I looked in the right place, would I find the cats’ bones? Logan, would yours be there, too?”

“No. They would not.”

The voice makes me jump out of my skin. After what seems like an eternity trapped in this hellhole all alone, the sound of another living creature sends me into a panic. “Who is—what do—where?” I shout in a jumble as I dive over the kitchen island and slam down onto the floor. “What!”

“Easy.” There’s a creak, a footstep on a loose board, and the sense of movement across the room. “I have not come to harm. Only to tell you that you should not be here.”

I hazard a glance over the kitchen island. There’s a woman standing by the massive windows at the far side of the kitchen with her hands held out at her sides. I duck back down then peek again. What’s she wearing? Some sort of impossibly black armor that looks for all the world as though she has shadows dancing around her ankles. But that can’t be right. Right? There’s a hood on her head. I can’t see her face and that makes my stomach tighten with anxiety.

“Who are you?” I shout as I scramble to find a weapon and at last come up with a dull, rusty knife. “What do you want?”

“I am Shaye,” she tells me and her voice sounds kind but tinged with grief. “Who are you?”

I tighten my hand around the hilt of the knife and crouch on my bleeding feet, ready to stab or slash if she so much as shows her face over the island. “Ripley Ford,” I tell her. “This is my house!”

“Oh, my dear girl. You are not Ripley.”

That makes me blink. “I am!”

“No. You were sent here to learn Ripley’s secrets, to see her life through her eyes. Do you not remember?”

There’s a niggling pain in the space between my eyes. I rub my forehead and shake my head hard. “You’re lying!”

“I can assure you, I am not. In the years before the hardships, your government tracked strange events from this house. An anomaly, a sudden influx of strange energy. That anomaly drove them here, to this house, where they found me.” Her voice hardens, turns bitter. “Where they took me.”

“Took you?” I raise myself up to peer over the island. “Why?”

There’s a fluttering sound, then something wraps itself around my hand. “Because of this,” Shaye says, her face inches from mine.

I can only gape up at her as she twists my arm hard. The knife falls from nerveless fingers and Shaye kicks it away before stepping back with a nod. “How?” I breathe.

Shaye motions at her armor. “This. My own personal curse. I came here in an attempt to shed this skin, to live a normal life. But it was in vain. I am no better off here than I was on my world.”

“Your…” My voice trails off as my throat tightens. “Your world?”

“The anomaly was a portal. Opened between our worlds, cutting a swathe through the Immaterium. Through space and time, as your people say.”

My ears buzz with shock. “I don’t understand.”

Shaye pulls her hood down. I’m suddenly staring up into the most vibrant eyes I’ve ever seen and I realize that they’re violet. Not some trick of the light on dark blue eyes, no, well and truly violet. A scar trails across her face, cutting a thin line through skin the color of the desert sands and her lips are turned downward in a concerned moue.

“I knew Ripley Ford personally,” she tells me in a soft voice. “She and her sister, Logan, and their mother, all died in sacrifice on my world hundreds of years ago. Ripley was the Champion, her sister the Ruin Storm, their mother the Healer. They fought for my people, pulled us back from the brink time and time again. I have missed them every single day since I left my home world behind.”

“How…”

“What you have seen here is a reconstruction. The Machine, powered by pieces of my armor, gathered up the sensory imprints she left here to give you a limited glimpse into her world.”

“What…”

“Your people found me. They spirited me away to one of their black sites. I am sorry to say that what they reverse engineered from my armor caused the hardships, created technology well beyond their ability to control.”

“Hardships?” I ask dumbly.

“My fault,” Shaye replies. “All my fault. It took months before I was strong enough to escape. But it was too late. The damage had been done.”

That twists my face up into a frown. “You can’t have been around that long.”

“That long and longer, my girl. I have lived for well over three hundred years. I have seen the worst and best of both your world and mine and I am wearied by it all.”

“But you—”

“No. No more questions.” Shaye straightens up away from me. “You were sent on a fact-gathering mission that has unfortunately gone quite awry. A bit of ill-timed coding that sent a request for a new password while you were still lodged here, in these sensory imprints.”

“Reset your password,” I whisper.

“Exactly. I was able to hijack the transmissions and give your mind the wake up call it needed. Without my intervention, the machine would have burned right through you.”

I shake my head. “But I still feel like Ripley.”

“It will pass. Your people are even now moments from freeing you from the Machine and you will be spit out into the real world once more.”

“This isn’t the real world?”

Shaye looks around us with a bitter smile. “This is but a reflection. You had a taste, however brief, of what it was like before. With a bit of luck, a lot of hard work, and my help, you can begin to work toward finding that again.”

She turns away and I reach for her arm. My fingers pass through her, right through her arm. “You’re not here,” I whisper.

“No. I am hundreds of miles away but I have wraiths planted among your ranks. I watched you as you led your people out of the ground, watched your efforts to start the rebellion. You are worthy. You are good.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will. I have avoided the war for far too long. I will be there when you wake up, Astra. I will be there to lend you my strength and powers.”

“Thank you?” I say, though confusion makes it come out more as a question than statement.

“It is no trouble,” she replies with an easy shrug. “I cannot die.”

She steps back. Shadows curl up around her body, pulling her back into the darkness. She vanishes before my very eyes and the ground once more feels unsteady beneath my feet. But it’s different this time. I’m not fainting. I’m being pulled away, spirited out of this hateful place and pushed toward something bright. It’s painful. Uncomfortable. Yet I welcome it, welcome the change no matter how unpleasant.

The floor is cold beneath me. My skin is soaked through with something that smells at once antiseptic and tangy with mildew. Bright white lights sting my eyes and there’s something wrapped around my shoulders. Warm, comforting. A pair of arms that pulls me in against a powerful chest. I can hear a steady heartbeat that’s so familiar it makes me want to cry.

“Astra.”

A deep voice, also familiar. I plant my hands on his chest and crane my head back to see his face. Graceful sweeps of high cheekbones and a sturdy jawline. Full lips beneath a broad nose. Kind brown eyes that shimmer in the light and reflect my face back at me. That’s familiar, too, and my head aches as my mind tries to set itself back to rights.

The Machine. The Home. My mother and her stories, poor dead Colt, the Director’s blood on my wrench. A shattered window and the dead world waiting outside. Weeks of walking, of searching for somewhere to call home. We’d found another place similar to the Home, one with its own little hierarchy and rules. But it was different here. No Caretakers or Workers or Menials, only a group of people working ceaselessly to undo what had gone wrong so long ago.

They were reaching into the past. Using technology created mere months before the Great Schism, technology that I now realize must have been amplified using the experiments done on Shaye. Did the ancestors of these people work on her? Whatever the case, we’re here now. They’d found the records about Ripley Ford’s family, records that led us to her past. Records that brought Shaye to us.

“Mason,” I whisper through a dry throat.

“Gods, I thought we had lost you.” He cuddles me against him and I let myself relax in his arms. “That damned bit of coding, always asking for a new password every twenty-four hours. We didn’t realize it would lock us out of the Machine entirely. We lost your feed, everything from visuals to life signs.”

He stands, lifting me as easily as one would lift a child. Our scientists descend on the Machine, on the pod that had cradled my body during the long hours of Melding. The people here had accepted us with welcome arms but it had taken days for me to convince them to use the old records buried in the Control Room. Even longer for them to agree to let us use this place as a base from which to build our rebellion. But they’re on board now.

Mason sets me down on a cot then sets to work undoing the clasps of my skin tight bodysuit. “We will have to reset it before you can go back in,” he tells me as he helps me pull the suit down over my hips.

“No need,” I reply as he sets the dripping suit aside and wraps a warm towel around my naked body. “I completed the mission.”

A bit of interest threads its way into his cautious eyes. “You know where to find it? The anomaly?”

“It’s not an anomaly.” I try to find the words to explain but I know that anything I say will be met with skepticism. “I found a woman.”

“A memory?”

“No. A real, live woman. She’d hacked the Melding, forced herself into the memory to speak with me. She saved me.” His eyes tighten with disbelief and I shake my head. “I know it’s hard to believe. But trust me when I say she has powers that none of us can imagine. I watched her move twenty feet in the blink of an eye, watched her vanish into darkness. She can help.”

“Astra,” Mason says and his voice is soft, as though he thinks I’ve lost my mind. “The Machine here is finicky. You may not have seen what you thought you saw.”

“No. I know what I saw.”

An alarm rings out overhead. Mason puts a protective arm out over me and I smile. We’re not together. All those years of longing and stolen touches were supplanted by this war, by the rebellion we’ve both thrown ourselves into heart and soul. Maybe one day. Maybe when it’s all over we can finally explore what might have been. But not yet. We are dear friends, though, and the de facto leaders of this little rebellion.

One scientist scurries over to a monitor. She chatters with someone on the other end then turns to face the room with wide eyes. “Someone just appeared in the control room,” she whispers. “Stepped out of the shadows and into the light, calm as can be. They are preparing defenses and—”

“No!” I cry, pushing past Mason to rush to the monitor, knocking the startled scientist aside. “She’s here to help.”

The man on the other side of the monitor gazes at me with wide, panicked eyes. “Astra, she—”

“Please, Kaspar! I’m calling in the debt you owe me. Stand down.”

Kaspar glowers at me. “Calling in the—well, I never! Fine, Astra, but if something goes wrong, it’s on you.”

“It won’t.” I whirl away from the monitor as the screen goes black to find Mason staring at me with a mixture of excitement and terror. “Come on. Let’s go up.”

We race up the stairs. My legs are cramped from having spent an entire day in the Machine but I can’t contain my own excitement. She was real. A part of me had doubted, thought that maybe it was just my hopeful imagination. But she’s here. It has to be her. We slam up the stairs, up four levels to the Control Room where the Clerks slave away over their records and logs. Mason opens the door, lets me in first, and a laugh escapes me.

The Clerks are huddled in the corner of the room. A woman in impossibly black armor stands in the center, her voice pitched low, cajoling them to come out. She glances over her shoulder at me and her hooded head cocks to the side.

“Astra,” she says and her voice is just how it was in the Melding. “Be a dear and tell them I mean no harm?”

A wide smile works its way across my face. We might never be able to end a war that has spanned the globe for over one hundred years. We might never be able to reverse the damage of nuclear fire and fallout. But, with Shaye, we have a chance. A chance to carve out a pocket of safety and security, to build a new home for ourselves at long last. It’s not much. But it’s more than we could ever have imagined when we first crawled out of the Home and left everything we knew behind. Much more.