CHAPTER FIFTY THREE:

Sean Wren and the Incredible Hypoxia

Now that I knew what was going on it was weirdly easier to focus. The vent in the back of the room that I’d thought was removing the air to purify it was just removing the air. One of the ‘door’ buttons I’d had Tamara push had actually been the symbol to seal the door to this room so that the vacuum chamber could start vacuuming.

The thought made a little giggle bubble up in my throat, but I didn’t find it particularly funny anymore. I hadn’t died in the vacuum of space; it just wouldn’t be right to die in an oversized bell jar. Luckily, Tamara was right there, and if there was a way to start the process, there would be a way to end it, too.

I braced myself against the glass—I was starting to grow lightheaded. “Okay,” I said, and remembered a second later to actually reach out and touch the Talk button so she could hear me. “Okay. I want you to look at the screen that got us into this situation. I’m gonna try to read it from up here, and I’ll tell you what buttons to push, okay?”

She leaned back, bracing her hands over the screen, and nodded at me.

It was really hard to read. “Okay,” I said. “Not that… I think that screen just shows stats, all right.”

She waved a hand impatiently at me in a ‘go on’ manner. Right. If that screen showed, like pressure readout, or whatever, then Tamara was better able to read it than I was. That’s probably how she’d known I was in a vacuum chamber to begin with.

Something rapped the glass near my head, and I jolted up. Tamara was staring at me through the glass with weird intensity, like her look—like—like an electric plug, I thought. Like I was a lamp and the only way she could keep me on was by sending me electricity through her eyes, and if she blinked I’d go dark or something.

Maybe I was not concentrating as well as I’d thought.

“Look for something that says stop,” I said, then I remembered she couldn’t read Ameng. Ameng script was really absurd anyway; the Sister writing system was a lot more coherently phonetic, or at least it had been about fifty years ago, before the Republic won its independence from the Ministers and runaway dialectal expansion had followed, once free of the Ministers’ strict control over the official linguistics.

I pulled my brain back to the here and now. “It looks like this,” I said, and released the talk key in order to trace out the letters on the glass: S-T-O-P. Then I remembered it was backwards to her and did it again in reverse. My finger felt very heavy.

Tamara nodded at me, a soldier’s sharp efficiency, and bent over the screen, scanning it, carefully touching what looked like it was some kind of back button and ending up at a different menu.