The Shuttle

“Nobody is safe from me. When I’m done, they’ll wish they were dead.”

On screen, a healthy girl wearing heavy eyeliner and a black hoodie narrows her eyes, smirking.

Raesa flicks off the episode. Another edgy protagonist with a fat ego on a railroad for a reality check. Seen it before.

A boom rattles the shuttle. Echoes moan and gibber in the darkness like they were trained to do it.

Raesa scowls and rolls over in her section. Scuffed brown upholstery slithers beneath her. She wedges her head against the vibrating wall and curls round her screen, opening up some mindless game she’d transferred onto it days ago, before the journey began.

The game starts off all elegant poise as an animated lady with teal gloves and a silver candelabra promises justice and heroism. Soon, it’s just fighting insanely detailed household objects with a meat cleaver which never stops humming.

While Raesa mindlessly hacks at a virtual, white door inlaid with two scarlet bunnies, she feels a shift near her feet. She lifts her head up just enough to see a desperate echo pawing in her space, gnawing at his bottom lip. He must think she is asleep, and is no doubt starving. She squeezes her eyes shut. Grits her teeth. The dead thing won’t find anything. After all, she’s dead too.

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Raesa jolts awake. The shuttle isn’t moving, but no lights are on. Her heartbeat fills the waiting silence, a warning rhythm fleeing its fragile chamber.

She stares around at the stacked sections with their ratty curtains. She sees a few disembodied, ragged feet floating out from the higher ones. Diffused light here and there betrays screen users numbing themselves to oblivion, just like her. She strains her ears, thinks she feels a strange weight to the air. That weight seems to shift, becomes a low resonance. A hum.

Then a low roar.

Raesa leaps out into the narrow partition, yelping hoarsely, slapping seat sections in panic. A face looms out of the gloom, close by. Pale sad eyes, skin too thin. Its cracked lips open, but no sound comes out.

A warm amber glow suddenly lights up the face on one side. Grey eyes, head shaved, an ear missing. A young girl, younger than her. Too young to understand where this shuttle really leads.

Raesa turns her head towards the light, horror bubbling in her stomach. Only a metre away, a luminous sheet of blazing orange bisects the entire shuttle. Pathetic upholstery bursts into angry flame, plastic fittings blacken, metallic parts glow with extreme heat. A detonation staggers her, throwing her down the aisle in a bodily heap.

From the floor, Raesa gazes back at the beam in numb disbelief. She snorts involuntarily, incredulously. She feels sudden, absurd elation at not getting sliced in half.

The beam shuts off, revealing the separated half of the shuttle and a singed ring burnt clean through the shuttle’s shell. The air stinks of sulphur and ozone. Ragged screams rip through the stunned silence. Her eyes widen when she sees a skeletal waif staring alternately between his severed legs and cauterised stumps.

Raesa sobs, then tries to choke it down in a desperate attempt to keep control. Something booms outside, a victory cry of destruction. She scrabbles with a railing to pull herself up, stumbles forward, and meets eyes with the girl above again. Rabbit’s eyes, wide and empty.

Something switches in Raesa’s heart. It isn’t about her any more. She reaches a withered hand up to the girl, tries to talk but her words are lost in the clamour. She asks with her eyes instead. The girl looks at her. Then puts a small hand in hers.

Raesa helps the girl down to the floor, but loses her balance and falls awkwardly against the wall. Echoes push past in a vain effort to get nowhere, cramping the aisle. The shuttle still thrums so loud her vision shakes. The stench of urine bites through the air, sharp and unwelcome.

Suddenly she’s weightless, the trembling girl in her arms. Screens float up the aisle like glowing ghosts. Raesa shrieks, and kicks off the wall, shoving them both back into her section. She braces as best she can before the shuttle jolts horribly and the world ceases to make sense.

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Raesa tastes blood. A violent sob bursts from her throat. She raises herself tentatively and finds that she’s bitten through her lip. Her left arm sings with agony. The girl is still limp beneath her, gazing numbly. The roar has given way to distant booms. Raesa shoves her head against the still wall and screams.

She flinches as a light flickers on beneath her. The girl has found Raesa’s screen. She’s playing the game with the door and the cleaver, no expression on her face.

Raesa draws a shaky breath and heaves herself up, gently pulling the girl with her. The girl doesn’t resist, but continues staring mutely at the screen, her wan features lit up by the ghoulish glare.

Raesa coaxes her way through the aisle towards the bisection point. The second half of the shuttle beyond the cut has disappeared. She steps over broken bodies and flashing screens. Through deadened hearing, she hears vague moans of pain. She figures tens are dead, more injured and all too weak to do anything about it.

Her features slack, she makes her way to the shuttle opening and steps carefully off the threshold, bare feet moving from charred carpet to black sand.

Outside the shuttle, the two echoes stand in a midnight desert. A steaming railway sits atop the nearest dune, a mountain-high ridge of sand which stretches into the distance. Atop it, an obsidian colossus wields a greatsword, iridescent with volcanic light. In one great claw it grips the other half of the shuttle. It roars into the eternal night and hurls the huge shuttle into the darkness. More titans stalk the distant wasteland like tiny suns moving through deep space.

Her eyes fixed on the inky horizon, Raesa pulls the young girl close to her. She takes a deep, trembling breath. Then, whispering through cracked and bloody lips, she tells the last lie she will ever tell.

“I… I’m going to keep you safe. I promise.”