13 Nights by Amara Wales
Sample: Chapter One
1
If there was one thing Ruby knew, it was that she was, and had always been, a stupid bitch.
She screamed every curse she could think of as her hands slipped over the rail, clutching desperately at the wet metal as the boat lurched in the punishing Arctic waves. They had hit a block of ice—or maybe a rock, she wasn’t sure—and it had sent their small research vessel see-sawing, rocking with the weight of the water swelling in its hull. Her eyes darted around the deck, searching for Patrick, and found him in the cockpit with his son: a Navigator whose name she had forgotten from this morning.
Another wave crashed against the boat, drenching her already soaked parka, and she lost her grip, falling, sliding across the deck, hands scrambling for purchase and finding none. A scream tore itself from her throat as she slammed into the back rail, her head colliding with the thick pipe of metal and sending her reeling. She tried to stand, but tripped, ropes tangling around her legs and pulling her back down.
She couldn’t see anything; her eyes stung with salty mist as she endured wave after wave of water cutting into her, legs weighed down by her heavy boots.
“Piece of shit,” she uttered through clenched teeth, pulling at the ropes. Finally, she managed to free one of her legs, but the other was held fast in the tangle. She collapsed, exhausted, as water began to flood the deck.
She screamed for help, her throat stripped dry by the frozen air, but if there was anyone around her, she couldn’t see them. Water pooled beneath her, and she willed herself to get up, get up, try again, you’re not going to die here. But it was useless. She couldn’t feel her legs, and as the ropes constricted around her leg, she realized with a choked sob that she wasn’t going anywhere. Tears clouded her vision and she tugged, desperately, one last time, against the rope. But it didn’t give.
Water splashed on her face and she sputtered, forcing her eyes open. A pair of boots stood in front of her, and it took every ounce of strength she had left to raise her head. She squinted at Patrick’s son—the Navigator—who was standing over her with a knife, and she closed her eyes against the rays of sunlight it reflected.
“Don’t move,” he said as he knelt beside her, cutting off the ropes wrapped around her leg, and she could have cried with relief at the feeling of blood flowing through her calf again. No, she already was crying, but she couldn’t feel her face or the tears running frozen trails down it. He grabbed her arm, yanking her up and running to the edge of the boat, dragging her along with him. She sloshed through the rising water, and someone was yelling, and then he was climbing over the side of the railing. She stepped on the rail and slipped, gasping as she landed on her ankle and twisted it under the water.
“Come on!” he yelled, lunging back over the rail to grab her arm, pulling her over the side.
She hit the ice like a dead fish, her muscles drained and her breaths coming in desperate gulps. Her right side was freezing, but her left side was on fire from slamming against the ice. Hard. That meant it was solid, she thought. Solid ground. She sent praise to a god she didn’t believe in.
“What were you thinking, Griffin?!” a woman shouted. Something crashed to her side, and she turned away from the sound.
“Are you alright?”
Ruby shielded her eyes against the frigid wind. The Navigator—Griffin, that’s right—was kneeling beside her, and two people stood behind him. The woman—was it Madison?—and a blond man whose name she couldn’t remember. He was staring at her, breathing deeply, and Ruby jumped when she looked at the woman and realized Madison was already watching her, her pale blue gaze piercing in the bleaching light of the Arctic sun. Patrick was sitting on the ice a few feet away, trying to catch his breath.
Ruby peered up at Griffin, his breathing ragged and his dark eyes focused on her and wait, shit, was he talking to me?
She opened her mouth to say yes, I’m alright, and thank you so much for risking your life to save me, a person you just met this morning, but all that came out was a sputtering cough.
Madison scoffed. “We need to go.”
“Where?” Ruby choked, and Madison threw a hand out to point behind them. She turned to look, barely able to make out the figures of the rest of their crew in the distance. “Where are we?” she asked between hard breaths. “Where are they going?”
“Luzardo,” Griffin said.
Luzardo? One of the primitive, defunct drifting ice stations, Luzardo? That couldn’t be right. No, they were on their way to a new station, one with resource stockpiles and an extensive Hydroponics system that she had been trained to operate. She shook her head. “What about Albane?”
He got to his feet, and she took it when he offered her his hand. “We’re nowhere near Albane.” He hiked her up. “You’re good?” he asked, looking over her leg, and Ruby decided she couldn’t ask him for anything more than what he had already done, which was already far more than he had needed to do.
“Yes,” she lied, her ankle searing as she shifted her weight over it. She kept walking. “Thank you, also, Griffin, you didn’t have to—”
“It’s fine,” he said curtly, his jaw tensing, “and it’s Finn.”
She swallowed, mumbling a quick apology, and they trudged in silence through the blinding ice and snow.
Before she died, Ruby thought, she should have done something with her last few months other than taking notes and stifling curses.
She had spent six months studying at Generation, on the accelerated track for exceptional recruits, after meeting Captain Patrick Foley at the 2032 New York Botany Conference. Or, more accurately, embarrassing herself in front of Patrick Foley at the 2032 New York Botany Conference. Stumbling drunk into an old man and cursing him out for his trouble at the 2032 New York Botany Conference.
She had been invited as a college senior to present a report on her renovation of her school’s produce garden. It was a modest improvement in quantity and quality of produce achieved through teamwork, if she was trying to seem humble. If she wasn’t, it was a one-woman, Herculean undertaking made possible only by her astonishing (and completely self-taught) botanical prowess. For the conference, she had presented the first version, but Patrick, shrewd man that he was, had seen the second.
That was before she hit the hotel bar and got trashed. Patrick had laughed off her bad behavior, telling her that her talents for botany could take her anywhere she wanted to go.
“Mars?” she had asked, drunk off her ass and delusional beyond measure.
“Anywhere,” he had said, humoring her.
And then, to her great surprise, he had said it again the next day, right before he offered her his Sponsorship to join Generation.
At the time, she had been thrilled. Generation was on the bleeding edge of technological innovation and notoriously difficult to get into. All of the most exciting technological advancements—quantum teleportation, hyperrealistic androids, Mars colonies, brain implants—were being done at the company. A Sponsorship was the envy of every young STEM professional that hadn’t had the luck of being born into a Generation family. But now, as she stepped through Luzardo’s entry hatch, she realized it was going to do as much good for her as a knife through the throat.
She wasn’t supposed to be here, on this Assignment, at Albane. She was supposed to be studying right now, to be spending a few more years learning at Generation’s campus before she would even be considered for placement on a crew. But when Patrick’s crew lost their Agriculturalist a few weeks before their mission, he came to her, and she couldn’t find it in herself to refuse him.
So, here she was.
The ceiling was low, but the room seemed large, a cavernous chamber lit only by the roaming eyes of the flashlights everyone except her had. She, naturally, had lost hers. The must was nearly as oppressive as the frigid wind, and she almost wished she was back outside. Finn was just ahead of her, and she wanted to hold onto the back of his coat so she didn’t lose him in the dark. But she thought better of it.
Someone turned wheel, sealing the door with a mechanical whine. She looked for Patrick and found him leaning over what she guessed was supposed to be the dining table. He switched on a lantern and sterile, dim light bathed the room. She breathed in, the air freezing but stale, and let it out, the warmth from her breath sending steam wisping through dust particles silhouetted by the lantern. The walls were bright even in the dark, a color that looked like red or orange, and the ceiling was covered in cobwebs and—
Was that a god damn popcorn ceiling?
“When was this even built?” she whispered in disbelief.
“1987,” said someone behind her.
“Take a seat, everyone,” said Patrick. “We need to have a meeting.”
She needed to change out of these clothes, maybe take a hot shower, and she definitely needed to eat something, she thought. But she sat down anyway. Patrick folded his hands on the table and let out a deep sigh, the low light catching on his wrinkles.
“This is Luzardo,” he said. “One of the original four Generation Arctic drifting ice stations. Its first crew lost contact after a month of their Assignment, and they were never recovered. It’s been off the map for 50 years.” He raked a hand over his face. “We’ve found it, haven’t we?” he muttered. Ruby looked around, expecting someone to respond, but the crew was silent, focused on their Captain. “Our only hope is that the next Albane crew comes from the same direction we did, and, if we haven’t drifted too much by that time, that we can intercept them.”
That was their only hope? Their equipment sank with the ship, so they couldn’t send a distress signal, but…
“Generation will be able to find the ship, though, right?” she asked, her voice hoarse from the salt water. A dozen eyes snapped to hers, and she swallowed, realizing with horror that she had spoken out of turn. “Its GPS would’ve transmitted its last location before we crashed?”
Her crewmates looked at her with varying levels of pity and annoyance, and she sucked in a breath, confused. Generation had…GPS, surely? What was she missing?
“Um…” The guy from earlier leaned towards her, his blond hair and ivory skin turned blue by the light of the lantern. “The Assignments are meant to be unforgiving,” he said softly. “We have to get back independently.”
She shook her head, sure she was mishearing him. “But what if there’s an emergency?” she whispered. “Won’t they rescue us?”
“They don’t send rescues.”
Ruby swallowed, and she considered, not for the first time since joining Generation, whether or not she had gone fucking crazy while no one was looking. The company was her—anyone’s—best chance at going to space, at flying, as they called it, but every day she spent with these people made Generation seem more and more like a cult: complete with a charismatic leader, archaic rules, and a demand of absolute loyalty.
But her only out was on its way to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.
“Intercepting that craft is our best shot,” Patrick repeated.
“Assuming they come in the next year,” said a man with a medical patch on his parka.
“Assuming they’ll stop,” muttered the woman next to him, her cropped, cherry hair gleaming as she whipped it over her shoulder. That was Elle, Ruby remembered, the Engineer whose story was common knowledge on the Generation campus. She had made her own prosthetic after losing her leg at the Siberian base. She was supposed to be on the lunar base this year, but was replaced at the last second.
Patrick shot her a look. “We need to treat this like any other Assignment. If we don’t stick to protocol, it’ll all go down the tubes. That means,” he looked around the room, “we do the surveys, the research, the weekly Enceph sessions with Madison, medical records with Kennedy. The only one who doesn’t follow the plan…” He looked at Ruby, tilting his head with a sad smile.
She shifted her weight as the crew looked her over.
“Agri is supposed to be supplemental, but Ruby,” his eyes softened, “now, it’s all we have.”
Albane would’ve had stocks of Blocks, they were called—dehydrated, nutritionally-complete squares resembling food only by the most generous estimation. It would’ve had live plants, held in stasis, ready to be transplanted into the Hydroponics system, ready to produce.
Luzardo had neither.
She steeled herself, shoving panic back down her throat before it could tell the whole crew that she had no idea how she could possibly pull enough food out of her ass to feed eight people for however long it took Generation to save them. Because she didn’t believe they weren’t going to. They had to: they only had about 500 employees. If they just let crews die whenever anything went wrong, they would have run out of people by now.
Maybe it was fake, she reasoned. Maybe personnel were trained to act like they wouldn’t receive any assistance in an emergency situation, and she wasn’t in on the roleplay. If she was being honest, she hadn’t paid as much attention in her classes as she probably should have. She was there to learn botany, she had thought to herself one day as she sat in a lecture hall the size of Yankee stadium listening to a two-hour address about the company code of conduct. Not the ins and outs of Generation culture.
“This is why we don’t bring Strangers on Assignments,” barked the guy with russet skin and close-shaved hair: the Second in Command. Ruby recognized ‘Stranger,’ the term that Generation personnel used to refer to people who didn’t work for the company. Even though she was an employee—had even spent six months on campus in order to come on this Assignment—they apparently still saw her as an outsider.
“Ruby is a brilliant botanist, and she’ll be a brilliant Agriculturalist, too. I know it,” Patrick said with a wink and a warm smile, and fuck if he wasn’t the dad she had always wished for.
Second place rolled his eyes.
“The real problem,” said Elle, her strident voice bouncing off the metal walls, “is that our Navigator navigated us into a rock.”
“I got us somewhere, didn’t I?” Finn said, his voice low. Ruby looked at him and found him staring daggers into the floor, his arms crossed over his chest. Elle was right, of course; getting them to Albane was his job, and he had failed.
“Elle’s right,” said Patrick, and Finn’s eyes snapped shut. Ouch. “But we can’t start throwing blame around. We need to stay calm and cordial, calm and cordial.” The motto was one of the first things she had learned at Generation. In isolated environments, it was the most important thing a crew could do. It was, they taught, the line between success and disaster. “Madison, you’ll help with that?”
“Of course, Captain,” said Madison, her voice as silky as her neat brown bob and her smooth porcelain skin, both somehow unmarred by their ordeal.
Patrick stood. “We’ll split up. Madison and Finn, take the East Hall. Aiden take the West, and Elle and Kennedy take the North.” The names flew too fast for Ruby to match them up with the people around her. “Carter, take the South, and show Ruby the Agri rooms,” he said, nodding to the blond guy next to her. Carter nodded back, shooting her a small smile, and if Ruby couldn’t go with Patrick or Finn, she was grateful to be going with the only other person here who seemed to want to help her. “We’re looking for supplies, breaches, weapons, anything.” Patrick flipped his wrist, checking his watch. “We’ll meet back here at 20:30. Dismissed.”
Ruby wished she had grabbed her flashlight off the boat before it sank.
She followed Carter down the South Hall at a snail’s pace, his dim, flickering flashlight their only guide. The popcorn ceilings unfortunately continued down this hall and, she assumed, the others, crawling out from the first room like asbestos-flocked moss.
But that was the least of her concerns.
Somewhere down this hallway, apparently, was the Agriculture room, which was sure to be a long way from the Hydroponics systems she trained with in preparing for Albane. Growing enough crops for eight people from whatever antiquated system they used back in 1987 was sure to be a walk in the park. She swallowed, trying not to think about what would happen when the others realized it wasn’t possible.
“It’s Ruby, right?” Carter asked, his smile flashing bright teeth that shined even in the darkness.
“Yeah. Carter?”
“Right.” He nodded warmly. “It’s nice to put a face to the name. Patrick’s been going on about you, how you’re perfect for this crew.”
He has?
“Hopefully he’s right,” she said, but she was beginning to doubt him. More than a few of them had seemed annoyed with her earlier, and the one guy had even called her a Stranger. “You seem like you’re handling things pretty well,” she said, and he flashed that easy grin again.
“I’m a Contact,” he shrugged. “All my equipment sank. It’s out of my hands at this point.” He was calm, calm and cordial and shit, Generation knew how to train personnel for crisis situations. “That frees up my time to help you with Agri, though!”
“That’d be great,” she said, trying to keep herself from visibly sagging with relief. She wouldn’t be able to pull this off, with or without help, but it’d be nice to have some company while the ship went down.
“Elle and Kennedy will pitch in if I ask them to, but the others…” He shook his head. “Patrick and Finn, Madison, even Kennedy’s brother probably won’t help. You know how Generation is about Roles.”
“Which one is his brother, again?”
“Aiden,” he said, and Ruby remembered the name of the Second in Command. Carter leaned in with a mischievous grin. “He doesn’t like me as much as Kenny does.” She barked out a laugh that caught her by surprise.
“Are Elle and Kennedy as nice as you?” she asked.
“Not at all,” he said fondly. She laughed again. He made it easy to forget their current reality. Carter lifted the flashlight as they came to a door with the word “AGRICULTURE” stamped across it in black letters.
“How did Patrick know where this was?” she asked.
“Part of our training is case studies. We’ve all studied the schematics of Luzardo.” Guess she had missed that lesson. “Here,” he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a tiny, second flashlight, “I’m gonna finish sweeping the hall, then I’ll meet you back here after. You’ll be okay by yourself?”
“Yeah,” she lied. She didn’t want to be alone in this place, less of a research station and more of a haunted house, but she wouldn’t be the reason Carter didn’t finish his job. He nodded and walked away, swallowed by the darkness in a matter of seconds. Ruby let out a shaky breath, switching on the flashlight. Would have been nice to have earlier. She felt slightly ridiculous as she turned the knob and cracked the door open an inch, pointing the flashlight and peeking inside carefully. There was clearly no one and nothing here, and yet her skin frosted over with goosebumps, a cold sweat coursing through her. Generation personnel were known for being tech geniuses, what if the old crew had survived, after all? They could’ve figured out how to grow food, how to live without food, shit, she’d only be a little bit surprised if they had cracked immortality.
Or not, she thought as she locked eyes with a skeleton.
There were seven more bodies by the time they had swept the base. That was everyone accounted for, according to Patrick. Eight original crew members, or their bones, at least. A few knives, a leak, and a shotgun.
And the crate of clothes Kennedy had managed to get off the boat before it sank.
And absolutely no food.
Aiden had torn into Kennedy when they opened the crate only to find nothing edible inside, and, for what was probably the first time, Ruby felt grateful to be an only child.
The contents of Ruby’s many jacket pockets were strewn across the table in front of her, and, like any good Agriculturist, they were mostly packets of seeds. Lettuces, beans, peppers, berries, radishes, all sat inside seeds in their little plastic baggies, staring up at the crew that was examining them.
“Can you grow these with what’s here?” Patrick asked.
Funny, Ruby thought. He had said ‘with what’s here’ when what he had meant was ‘with nothing.’
“So, there’s dirt, but it’s dead,” she said. “ There’s no fertilizer, no nutrient powders, no pH adjusters—”
“You need all that to grow a few plants?” said Aiden, one brow raised in condescension.
Ruby’s eyes narrowed. Managers. “I could grow plants on god damn concrete, if I had a few months,” she said. “But I only have a few weeks before we all starve, so yes.” Patrick cringed, and Ruby realized—but didn’t particularly care—that she wasn’t being very calm and cordial right now.
“Look,” Patrick said, “this needs to work. Because if it doesn’t,” his eyes settled on Ruby, “we’re going to need to make some decisions.” Yes, she thought, we’re going to need to decide who to eat. “There’s no point in sugarcoating it,” he continued, “so let me put it plainly. At the end of the month, if there’s not enough food to go around, we’ll elect someone.”
Elect someone for— Oh, shit.
“I can do it,” she said suddenly. “I— It’s within reason.” It was most certainly not within reason, but Ruby knew she couldn’t compete with seven Lifetimes, trained from birth to ensure their survival in this exact scenario, no matter the cost. Her only advantage was knowing exactly how far her seeds could take them, when the rest of them had no clue. She could prepare. She could forge relationships, endear herself to whichever clique seemed most likely to survive the bloodbath that would ensue when they finally realized how thoroughly fucked they all were.
This was real. This was actually happening. Her eyes darted around the room, examining her crewmates as the reality of their situation finally made its way through her waterlogged skull.
They were all going to die.
