The Secret

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

I may be on a spaceship but I am not in space. Rather, I am on a spaceship at the bottom of the ocean. So when Lander screams, when his mouth opens wide and reveals an “O” blacker than the water outside, I hear it.

“Stop!” I shout, lunging forward. As if the thing torturing my friend is something that I can fight. As if the thing torturing my friend is something I have any kind of a chance against at all.

She is small. Her skin is cerulean. She can’t be more than four feet tall. Her hair falls in loose garnet waves down to her waist. Her cheekbones are so high it must hurt when she rests her face on her hand and are dusted with large, star-shaped copper freckles. Her eyes are the same color as a field of heliotropes. She holds one small, webbed hand over Lander’s body, which is on the ground, writhing. Her eyes shift from him to me. She smiles playfully.

Then she raises her other hand.

It is not a kind of pain I have experienced anywhere other than here, ten miles below sea level, trapped on a spaceship I never should have gone looking for.

The pain tremors through my whole body as if my every nerve, every atom, has gone to war with itself. My skin and bones and blood and organs wail. I can hardly hear my own scream over the simple wish that I was already dead.

When it stops, I am crying.

I turn my head enough to the right to see if Lander is still alive. He’s laying six feet away from me, gasping at the ceiling. She stands between us. My gaze travels from her webbed feet up her slender body to her horrifically alluring face. She meets my eyes and parts of myself begin to melt away: the part that is angry, the part that is scared, the part that wishes I was dead because if I was dead I never would have gotten to lay eyes on her.

She bends down. Gently, her touch nothing more than the breath before a whisper, she brushes my hair off of my sweat-slicked forehead. Her hand hovers behind my left ear. It is cruel to taunt with such a touch.

“Where,” she speaks, and her voice is an orchestra of enigmas soaked in honey, “is she?”

I laugh. The sound barely creeps out in-between stumbling breaths, but it does. “We’re not telling you.”

She blinks slowly. Tilts her head like a confused puppy. Her heart-shaped lips part. Again, I begin to melt, to loose every part of myself that does not suit her.

I close my eyes.

“We’re not telling you,” I repeat, more to convince myself than her.

“You are interesting,” she states. Her hand lifts from my ear. I miss the presence of it there more than I miss fresh air and it has been two years since I have tasted fresh air.

She stands, rolling her sharp shoulders gracefully. Then she bends down to brush Lander’s hair away.

“Lander,” I beg, because I already know what is going to happen, and it is the one thing I cannot bear.

“Lander,” she echoes, "where is she?”

“Lander,” I beg again, and try to start to stand.

“Lander,” she sings.

The words rush out of him like they are being chased. “The Marina Trench.”

I need to find a way to get out of here.

“How?”

“Don’t,” I cry.

“We have a—”

A single cyan drop lands on Lander’s cracked lips, shushing him.

Another lands on his eyelash. It hangs there like a held breath or the beginning of a romance, threatening to fall, certain it will, but waiting.

Waiting.

I look up slowly. The ceiling of the spaceship is black. But with each passing nanosecond, more bright drops of cyan begin to take form, until the entire ceiling is aglow.

“Damn,” she whispers, and they fall like rain.

I sit up.

The cyan liquid is thicker than milk and as sticky as molasses. It clings to my flesh. When a drop lands on my index finger, I flick it off casually, like one would a nat, and it seems to leap away from me, almost……angry.

I know what this is.

“Damn,” she whispers again. I look at her. The cyan is wrapping around each strand of her hair like an alive, almost serpentine thing.

I know why she looks afraid.

It’s pouring now. “You,” I chuckle right before the first cyan drop lands on my own lip, “are so screwed.”

I know that I am too. But at least I’ll be taking this secret to the grave with me.

****

I remember you.

I remember you sitting on a swing in summer Georgia air, a book in your lap, a lock of black hair falling into a pair of hazel eyes. I remember the way you smiled at stories then, back when you still looked at books like they held secrets you wanted to know, back before you wished every night that you could go back in time and bury those same secrets deeper and deeper and deeper but even then you would still dig, you always had to, why did you have to—

She is standing in front of you.

She’s wearing grey sweats and her hair is a bird’s nest made of golden brown straw but she is still so perfect she almost does not look real. She smiles, and you know that you would bear arms or shed yourself or burn down the whole fucking world to protect those indents that form in her cheeks.

You knew when you saw her. You knew when you heard her laugh. But when you touched her—the first time you touched her….

I remember pink sheets and silk and seeing colors.

She made you see color.

I am that little boy on a swing in summer Georgia air. I am watching myself from somewhere else — from a thick pool of cyan at the bottom of the ocean. A part of me remembers that, still. The part that researches. The part that reads. The part that knows what is real and what is not.

But the other part is watching her standing in front of you, laughing. Watching as that little boy on a swing in summer Georgia air, as you, as we stand up and she holds us.

She holds us and we are growing now. I watch us shift from boyhood to manhood, watch my bones lengthen and my shoulders broaden and my stance widen. It is only when I am a man, when I am fully grown, that I drive the knife into her chest.

I hear the crack of her ribs.

The crumbling of those indents — those perfect, perfect dimples. Little pockets of happiness tucked into the corners of the love of my life’s face.

“You always had to dig,” she says to you when the blood starts to drip down her chin.

It’s staining your fingers.

It’s all over your hands.

It’s merging with cyan.

***

The cyan bubble bursts and I am back on the spaceship.

Around me, the liquid cyan is pooling together, each drop seeking out the others. It rushes between my fingers on the ground, flooding, desperate to be whole. When I blink, drops of it fly off my eyelashes. It slithers down the walls until finally merging together in the center of the room, a giant, thick pool of nearly neon green-blue.

I push myself to my feet, slipping on the remnants of the cyan still rushing to be a part of the bigger pool. Lander is struggling to do the same. The girl—the alien—is the one laying on the ground now. While the cyan rushed off of Landers and I it still clings to her like a candy-coating.

“Samuel,” Lander says, forcing me to look away from her and at what is happening in front of me. The pool of cyan is morphing, rising and thrashing, until, slowly, it forms the shape of a man’s body.

He has the same cerulean skin as the alien still laying on the ground but his hair is alabaster, not garnet, and his eyes are polished gold, and he is much taller.

He is bewitching.

“You had one job,” he says, kneeling over the girl’s body. “Keep—the—secret.”

He taps on the candy-coating.

When it cracks, so does she. Her cyan-cemented arm flies across the room and hits my foot.

The alien stands, his alabaster hair a halo around his face. “I am sorry,” he says. “This should not have taken this long. Lander, walk towards the door. Samuel, where is Marty?”

“The Marina Trench,” I say. I don’t even feel my tongue moving. “We have a research base there.”

Lander is walking slowly towards the single door in the room. He has to step over a fragmented part of the girl’s face to reach it. Outside, there is nothing but ocean. Outside, the pressure is enough that my brain will burst.

“How many of you know, Samuel?”

“Nine.”

“Thank you. You can open the door now, Lander.”

***

“Damn it,” I swear, taking the headset off of my face and throwing it across the room.

“Hey!” Marty yells, running after it, her golden-brown braid bouncing against her back. “If you wanna hit something hit Lander but that is a several million dollar piece of tech you just treated like a baseball!”

Lander swings his legs over the side of the couch to stand, grinning. He looks far too happy for someone who just died. “You can hit me if you want, dude, but it won’t change the fact that simulation—shit, which one is this now, Mart?”

“362.”

“That simulation 362 failed.”

I sigh and sit up, clasping my elbows behind my knees and then resting my forehead on my arms. “This isn’t going to work.”

I feel Marty’s hands on my shoulders. “We’ll figure it out.”

I shake my head. “I don’t—”

She bends down, a strand of her hair that is loose from her braid brushing my cheek. “You do know,” she says, her lips against my ear so Lander can’t hear, “that when I die in those simulations, it’s just the aliens getting in your head. You know the males make you imagine what you fear when they’re in their true form. I’m not even dying in the simulation, I’m dying in a simulation in a simulation that your own head created.” She pulls on my biceps, urging me to sit up. I do, turning to face her. “It’s a mental game,” she says. “Which is really why I should be in there with you two idiots.”

Lander crosses the room to the fridge to take out a bottle of water. He tosses one to me, nearly hitting Marty in the head, but I catch it before it can.

Marty swears at him.

“Dying makes you dehydrated,” Lander laughs. “And it wasn’t that bad.” He closes the fridge to lean against it. Behind him to his right, there is a small, circular window. At the bottom of the Marina Trench it is too dark to make out the blue of the ocean, and the sight of that bottomless black makes me remember the feeling of Lander opening the door, remember the feeling of dying. “Although, I would like to get off of this shoebox of a research base at some point, so if we could get this down soon, that’d be dope.”

“We only have thirty more days until they leave,” I say. “Thirty days and we loose our chance.”

Marty frowns. “You guys aren’t as far away as you think you are. Samuel didn’t fold with the female. Lander, on the other hand….”

Lander raises a hand, stopping her. “Hey, now. That one was exceptionally pretty.”

“They are all exceptionally pretty. That’s the point. They get in your head. You have to keep them out.”

“The men aren’t pretty,” Lander protests.

Marty raises her eyebrows. “Yes. They are.”

I cough. She smiles at me, all dimples. “Sorry.”

“Thirty days,” I repeat. “Thirty days to figure out how to keep the females and the males out of our heads, to actually find the spaceship, and to steal the book.”

Lander sighs. “Please don’t say that we’re running it again.”

Marty is already handing me back my headset.

"Run it again.”