Read In Space No One Can Hear You Scream for Free Online Page B

more about Meebs now that I’d been on the ship for a year and seen the videos. At least I thought it was a year I’d been here. I figured I was about the size of an eleven-year-old, even though there were no mirrors, and if there had been, I would have avoided them. I hadn’t seen myself in a long time. I was kind of afraid to look, afraid to see what the mechs had done to my face. My skin was as gray as my pajamas. But at least, with the mechs in it, it was kind of shiny.
    I pushed into Aleria as deep as I could, because I knew if I didn’t, she would demand it of me anyway.
    “Is that good, Mother?”
    “You have no idea, dear. Replenishment is the greatest pleasure in life, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”
    Finally, after what seemed like hours and hours, but I knew was maybe thirty minutes—two Sponge Bob episodes, Da used to say, when I asked how long that was—a deep sigh came from the wall speakers.
    “Perfect. That will be all dear,” Aleria said.
    I pulled out my arms. They came out coated in her milky interior fluid. I had towels, the ship made them for me, but I knew not to rub my arms off just yet. My skin was blistered, and the skin mechs needed time to fix what they could of the damage before I went to dry myself. The mechs never really did a great job. I thought that, like a lot of the stuff on Aleria’s ship, they were kind of stale or something like that. I knew my arms would be red and hurt for at least a light cycle.
    When I first got on the ship, I used to call a light cycle a day, but pretty soon I figured out that they were exactly the same length every time. The light came from everywhere in the ship, and then didn’t. Nearly ten Earth hours on. A little over four off. I asked once, and Aleria explained this was the Meeb active-rest cycle. And when the lights went off, it became so pitch black I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face in the ship’s bridge or the recreation room or the waste room, which was where both Aleria and I went to the bathroom. It got sort of sucked dry and cleaned after we left. This was done with mech crawlies that looked like baby spiders, maybe. They clumped together while you were going, then swarmed the place after you left and carried off whatever.
    Anyway, there was one place where the faintest of light remained during lights-out. This was in the supply room. There were observation portals there. Each one was about as big as the windows used to be in my bedroom, but they were roundish, kind of egg-shaped. They were shaped to fit a Meeb optical stalk. There were four windows around the supply room, and I could always see the stars through them. We were traveling faster than light, but it was still slow enough so the stars didn’t look like they were moving. I usually slept floating near one of those portals. I pretended that I knew the one that was facing Earth, and I would look out and pretend I could see the sun, even if it was only a pinprick in the dark. I knew this wasn’t true, that I didn’t know which one was the sun, but I could sort of fake my way to sleep that way.
    So I let the mech work, and then I patted my arms and hands dry with an absorption towel, and was careful not to take off too much of my tenderized skin. Even though I was going easy with the towel, it still felt like I was rubbing sandpaper against myself. The towels were the same gray color as my pajamas, by the way, and not pretty the way Mom’s always were, with flowers on them and stuff. Everything in the ship was gray like that, and even I was now.
    This time when I dried off the milk, something felt different. My skin wasn’t just blistered; it was changing shape, too. It was kind of crunchy-lumpy. And it looked thinner. In fact, I touched it with a finger and it popped like a pear skin. Something oozed out, but it wasn’t red like blood. It was white and looked like puss.
    I felt the swollen nodes under my chin, the nodes in my neck. They were big and as