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running along the edges of the mask, along super-sensitized
skin. “I’m here.”
    Alice grips the walker tight in her mittened
hands, every part of her body warm and shivery. She clenches around
the seat/body interface and lets a hard breath out through her
chest tube.
    She feels a light kiss on her scalp, and Marika
whispers, “They’re watching.”
    “ I know,” Alice types back. “I don’t
care.”
    Marika pulls off Alice’s mittens, takes her
nailless hands in hers, and says, “My beautiful captive
girl.”
    Behind her mask, Alice swoons.
    She hears the rude buzz of the intercom, and
over it, Dr. Qureshi says, “That was a good shift,
Alice.”
    “ Thank you,” she types.
    “ Dr. DeVeaux, I’d like to have a
word with you.”
    “ I’m busy with Alice,” Marika
replies, and gently kneads Alice’s shoulders through her thin
cotton gown. Alice’s head swims, and she rocks the mask back and
forth across the bar. Why won’t they just leave the two of them
alone?
    “ We need to discuss Selene’s
readings,” Dr. Qureshi says.
    “ I want Marika to stay.”
    “ I really do need her
help.”
    Marika leans in and whispers, “I’ll be back as
soon as I can.” She gives Alice’s shoulders a squeeze, and when she
lets them go, the shock of absence makes Alice draw in a pained
gasp through her chest tube.
    And then she is alone, a woman behind a solid
metal mask, with ears calibrated for the solar winds, and eyes that
can only see the stars.
    *
    Marika is kept away all night. Alice has to
amuse herself by watching feeds and vids, because her only other
options are music, which is too passive to keep her input-starved
brain occupied for long, and conversation, which is currently
impossible. Jayna is on shift right now, Selene is sleeping, and
the caretakers are all busy discussing how to keep her from going
even more insane.
    They are a shift of three. There can be no
replacements.
    Alice briefly scans the news feeds, hoping for
distraction, and finds that as usual, nothing has changed. The
relief convoy from Earth is still on hold, the rebuilding continues
to go slowly, and there is still no real information on the
mysterious black ships that nearly destroyed their colony ten years
ago. The talking heads just keep rehashing all their old theories —
that it was aliens trying to drive humans from their first and only
extra-solar colony, that United Earth sent the ships to punish the
colonists for forming an independent government, that it was the
wrath of some angry god, that it was a natural phenomenon that only
looked like spaceships, that the colony government bombed its own
domes to cover up some unspeakable crime. She’s heard it all
before. None of it makes any difference to her. None of it changes
her job.
    No, the news is no real distraction. Alice
pulls up some chamber music and a slideshow of images of happy
families that she has made over the years, culling pictures from
news stories, from magazines, from movies. Some are real families,
some fictional, but she cherishes each and every image just the
same — the pigtailed blonde laughing on her father’s shoulder, the
teenagers tossing a ball back and forth under the lights of the
main colony dome, the little baby curled up in its mother’s
arms.
    She touches the mask. It’s worth it. For
them.
    And then she sneaks a peek at the tiny,
pixelated picture that Marika doesn’t know she has. It’s the only
image she’s been able to find of her. She’s young in the picture,
in high school, posing with the rest of the track team under an
undomed sky that can only be on Earth. Marika is in the back row,
so all Alice can make out are broad, tanned shoulders, a mane of
dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, and a brilliant smile. But
it’s enough. It’s something.
    She can never tell Marika that she has this.
They’re supposed to be faceless for each other. Marika insists on
it.
    Marika.
    She shudders.
    No, this isn’t helping either. A movie