Some Fine Day by Kat Ross Page A

occupied by a dingy steel toilet with no seat. Add the pitching of the ship and it’s like trying to thread a needle inside a urinal during an earthquake. Barefoot. I try not to touch anything or look too closely at the floor. God knows what kind of microscopic civilizations are thriving in here.
    When the unpleasantness is completed, I’m tossed back in the hold. As the guard’s footsteps recede overhead, I press my face against the porthole and this time I see stars and a sliver of moon. They keep me anchored in the darkness until the rocking of the ship eases me into unconsciousness once again.

Chapter Seven
    A decade in, it became clear that the superstorms were only growing stronger. There would be no return to the surface.

    The next six days are a miserable blur. I bang on the hatch when I need to use the head, and it’s either the redhead or another one, even taller with ebony skin and cornrows. Neither will speak to me or answer any questions. They give me one meal in the evenings, usually a cup of lumpy potatoes mixed with black seaweed. It’s stiflingly hot down here during the day, but cold at night. At least the fever hasn’t returned. I don’t know if I could survive it in my current state.
    The first day after discovering the stitches I spent hours trying to get the barrels open, hoping they might contain food or something that could be used as a weapon. It’s pointless, they’re made of stout wood and the tops are nailed shut. My nails are cracked and bleeding by the time I give up. After that, I fall into a kind of lethargy. I dream about my mother, and Jake. About food, and clean sheets, and mugs of hot tea. Term must be starting by now. It would have been my last.
    I scan the empty blue sky through my porthole, imagining there’s a satellite up there taking a picture of the ship and beaming it on to the ones searching for me. I know it’s unlikely; the whole thermosphere got screwed up by carbon dioxide, and many of the satellites that still work have erratic orbits.  Thousands are just space junk now, since we can’t send maintenance crews and have no launch capabilities. But enough still send signals that reach the meteorological substations.
    If there was a clear window above the ship at some point, and if a functioning satellite was passing over, and if military intelligence crunches the data in time. . .
    Well, it’s something. Otherwise, there’s no hope at all.
    On the seventh day, the hatch opens in the morning, which has never happened before, not without my banging on it. I expect to see one of the regular guards. But it’s someone new. A boy, a little older than me, somewhere between eighteen and twenty, I’d guess. Tall, with tan skin and a long, dark blonde braid. Jeans cut off at the knee and a clean white T-shirt. He has the high cheekbones and close-set blue eyes of a Northerner who’d probably be pale as milk if he didn’t spend half his life under the blazing sun. He takes in the dirt and the smell and his face hardens, but he doesn’t say anything, just offers me a hand. It’s much gentler than the usual. He seems to know where I hurt and makes an effort not to put too much strain on my arms.
    “This way, please,” he says, leading me down the passageway to a door just past the bathroom.
    I’ve never gotten a please either.
    The room beyond is small and plainly furnished: bed, table and chair, shelving with wooden rails to keep the contents from spilling when the ship rolls. There’s a sandwich on the table, and a bottle of water. My stomach rumbles.
    “Go ahead,” he says, in a faintly clipped accent I’ve never heard before. “I brought it for you.”
    I pick up the sandwich. It’s white bread with some kind of synth meat that doesn’t smell very fresh. Probably the contractors’ spam rations. We always ate well at the Academy. The accommodations were Spartan, sex-segregated dorms with standard issue metal cots and a three-drawer dresser to hold our