Glassborn

CHAPTER 1 – QUINTA – YEAR: 2179

“I know how much you were looking forward to conceiving,” Quinta Voss said, feeling awkward just standing there while a woman and her husband clutched each other on the exam table, both struggling to hold back tears.

Conversations like these were always the worst part of her job. As selfish as it was, sometimes she wished Valence would just submit the information to them through their overlays and spare her the emotional fallout. At least this one was about a denied pregnancy and not lab results that were predicting a change in a citizen’s lifespan.

“It could be worse,” Quinta said, trying her best to keep the tone of her voice low, professional, adult. She was three years into her apprenticeship but she had a baby face and a lot of people took one look at her and asked to see the ‘real’ doctor. “It could have been both of you with the genetic marker, but it’s only Brad,” she went on, turning to the wife. “You could try artificial insemination–”

“What, with someone else’s sperm?” the woman, Danita, asked, then shook her head so hard a curl popped out of her bun. “No way. Never.”

“Babe–” Brad started.

“I’m not having someone else’s baby just because I’m of child-bearing age!” Danita said, standing and snatching her satchel off the exam table.

“That wouldn’t be the reason,” Quinta tried to reassure her. “We have more than enough applicants to maintain the birthrate–”

“Is that all, or does Valence have any other bad news for us?”

“That’s all,” Quinta said, her treat-me-like-an-adult tone faltering as the woman brushed past her out of the treatment room.

Her husband lingered for just a second to say, “I understand why we were denied. It’s too dangerous.” He glanced toward the door, outside of which Quinta could hear Danita sniffling. “She’ll understand too, once she calms down. Thank you, doctor.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t have better news,” Quinta said, and then he was gone.

She pulled up her overlay and entered a few quick notes in Danita’s chart. Her intention was to stay in the room as long as she had to to be sure she wouldn’t run into Danita again in the waiting room, but then one of the nurses burst through the door, looking uncharacteristically flustered.

“Dr. Voss, there you are.”

Cydra Tavara was in her sixties, the most senior nurse in the sector one clinic, and nothing fazed her. Quinta had memories of shadowing her father when she was younger and watching Nurse Tavara debride infections, prep the entire OR for emergency surgery, and expertly stitch gaping wounds without ever once looking out of breath, but today she looked like she’d just seen a ghost.

“What’s wrong?” Quinta asked, dread already pooling in her stomach. She had six months left in her apprenticeship and today was her first day taking a shift without either her father or Dr. Liang on duty.

Please be something simple.

Cydra leaned her head further into the room and lowered her voice. “Possible Glass case.”

“What?” The words hit Quinta like a physical blow, and then her mind started racing through decontamination protocols and Glass drills and all the awful photos of the victims she’d seen. “I can’t… We need to get my dad.”

“There’s no time,” Cydra said. “Valence is going to sound the contamination alarms any minute and he’s a sector away.”

“Dr. Liang?”

Sector one’s second-in-command had never kept it much of a secret that she was no fan of Quinta, and the feeling was mutual, but right now Quinta wanted anyone in the entire hab who wasn’t her to run this protocol.

She was nineteen years old, not quite a doctor, despite what people called her, and she was about thirty seconds away from peeing her pants.

“You have to do this,” Cydra insisted, taking Quinta by the wrist like she was going to drag her through it.

Just then, the Glass drill alarm started to blare – three short bursts followed by a long, eardrum-piercing wail through the clinic speaker system. Quinta’s vision was blotted out by a massive pop-up:

ALL-COLONY ALERT: Contamination protocol initiated. Begin quarantine procedures. This is NOT a drill.

A cold understanding of the significance of those alarms settled over Quinta’s shoulders. The doors all over the hab would all be locked now, and they would stay locked until one of two things happened: one, Quinta verified that the patient did not have the most contagious, deadly infection humanity had ever encountered, or two… everyone who’d come in contact with the patient was dead.

And Quinta’s next job was to go into the room with them.

“Biosuits,” Quinta said, her training overtaking the adrenaline coursing through her veins.

"Already prepped," Cydra said, walking with her down the corridor toward the treatment room.

“Who’s the patient?”

"Female, thirty-two, works in atmospheric monitoring,” Cydra filled in. “Presented with fever, sweating, confusion... and her veins are visible."

Quinta's heart caught in her throat. She'd never seen a Glass victim in the flesh. There was an old rumor about a survivor of the second outbreak living in sector four, still looking like a see-through anatomical model, but that was just hab lore. If you got Glass, you got a fever. You became delirious. The bacteria sucked all the oxygen out of your cells and left your skin a sickly, cyanotic blue and clouded your eyes.

And then it killed you, one hundred percent of the time.

“Have you ever done this before?” Quinta asked as they stepped into their suits.

Cydra nodded. “Once or twice, always false alarms. We’ve both trained for this day, we’ve drilled it.”

Quinta didn’t feel prepared, but letting Cydra know she was moments away from a panic attack wasn’t going to help anyone. As she flipped the hood of the suit up over her jet-black ponytail, she opened the messages in her overlay and used eye gestures to send one to her father.

Possible Glass case. Why today of all days?

She didn’t expect an answer—he was teaching a new surgical technique to one of the doctors in sector three. But he’d be listening to the same alarms that were blaring in sector one.

“Check my seal?” Cydra asked.

Quinta’s overlay pinged with a message. For half a second, she felt normal – relieved, even – while she read her dad’s reply: Take a minute to breathe first. Then do what we practiced. Trust yourself, sugar beet. You’re prepared for this.

Her throat tightened. The nickname was one he never used here in the clinic, in front of colleagues. He’d even stopped calling her that at home since she became an adult.

She blinked the overlay closed and took a long, deep breath. Her hands weren’t shaking as much when she told Cydra to turn around.

“Seal’s good,” Quinta told her. “Let’s do this.”

CHAPTER 2 – LIRA – YEAR: 2083

Lira Salonga was portioning carrot greens for the rabbits when the module door slid open behind her. “Hey, Dana, you’re a few minutes early for your appoi–”

“Ada’s sick.”

It wasn’t Dana’s voice, and it short-circuited Lira’s brain. For a few seconds, her hands just kept untangling voluminous carrot greens and separating them into piles.

It was Jamila, and if she sounded rattled, it was bad. Jamila was one of the colony’s best botanists – poached from one of the most prestigious research organizations on Earth after she managed to wring record yields out of desert greenhouses. She was unflappable, but right now, she sounded panicked.

Lira spun on her heels. “What's wrong with her?”

“I don’t know, exactly. There was some kind of malfunction at the excavation site, the whole dig crew is sick.” Jamila’s eyes were big and her ordinarily neat curls were wild around her face. “She’s in med clinic two.”

Lira was already shoving her way past Jamila in the narrow doorway, her heart pounding. She and Ada had arrived at the colony together five months ago and a small, carefully guarded part of her had been expecting news like this every single one of those hundred and fifty days. There was a night four months ago when Lira sat bolt-upright in bed, listening to a hab-wide alarm blare through the speaker in her ceiling, and just knew in her gut that it was for Ada.

She’d been right, but Ada had survived it.

They’d jailed her, then after her sentence, Valence assigned her to the dig crew expanding the hab.

Lira had actually started to convince herself in the ensuing months that things were going to be okay. Nothing had happened to Ada in all this time, she hadn’t had any “mysterious accidents,” or been stuck in the torture chamber people here called therapy. VossCorp knew who she was and why she was here and they let all this time pass… Lira thought they were going to subject Ada to hard labor and call it even.

But now…

“I’ll watch the rabbits,” Jamila called to Lira’s back.

She’d had about ten of the growing warren out of their hutches, playing on the grass that grew across a good portion of the rabbit module’s floor. With the door open, they’d be free to hop all over sector one, and at this moment, Lira didn’t care if they binkied their way right out the nearest airlock.

“Great, thanks,” she called over her shoulder, running breathless through the white prefab hallways that wound through the sector like their own sort of warren.

The hab was made of modular sections, most of them shipped in parts to Mars and assembled by robots before the first human colonists arrived. Each sector was arranged in identical spoke patterns, with the most commonly used resources at the center and fanning out to residences further out. The rabbit module, which pretty much everyone referred to as the rabbitat, was in sector one, about a twenty-minute jog from the sector two med clinic.

Ten minutes if Lira ran full-out, using the low gravity to push off the walls and propel herself forward.

She slammed into two people on her way there, and knocked the wind out of herself once.

“Hey, watch it!” a fabrication tech in sector one had complained, rubbing his shoulder after she rounded a corner and hit him full-force.

“I’m sorry,” Lira had said, not slowing down. The second person she knocked into the wall didn’t even get an apology.

Lira arrived at med clinic two out of breath, dizzy from the exertion, and sweating so hard one of the nurses looked up from the absolute chaos going on in the clinic to ask if she was okay.

The med clinics were all normally pristine and quiet, their white walls and floors gleaming and their waiting areas wide-open and calm. Right now, it looked like a regolith bomb had gone off in here, the fine red dust of the planet’s surface coating everything, footsteps dragging through it in every direction.

There were patients in every treatment room, med staff clustered around them, and somewhere, Lira could hear someone retching violently. Two more people sat in the waiting area, and one of them was cradling his head, rocking and moaning. When he moved his hand, his face was beet-red.

Lira’s stomach sank. This wasn’t some bug, or food poisoning from the standard fare slop that was all Ada could afford.

She thought of the solar flare alert Valence had sent out this morning, warning everyone that the solar shields would be closed until further notice.

“Where’s Ada Bello?” she demanded of the nearest med staff.

“Treatment room four,” the nurse said, a sad look in her eyes that shot a fresh jolt of fear into Lira’s heart. “But you can’t go in. They’re–”

“Ada!” Lira shouted, wading through the carnage before the nurse could stop her.

She reached the door just as Dr. Ethan Kalb was stepping out of it. Lira’s jaw set and her nerves shot little jolts of electricity through her body as she looked over the shiny-domed doctor. Of course, he had to be Ada’s treating physician.

“How is she? What happened?” Lira demanded.

“Radiation exposure,” Dr. Kalb said, not deviating from his course toward the next treatment room. “From these symptoms, the solar flare must have been much worse than predicted. They shouldn't have been working.”

The hairs on the back of Lira’s neck stood on end. Radiation poisoning? This was bad.

Radiation on the surface of Mars was fifty times what it was on Earth, a constant threat if not for the expensive shielding technology that covered every window and skylight, and the regolith that the hab was mostly buried in. Lira always worried when Ada was doing a surface mission. The dig crew was so much more exposed than the rest of them, working in pressure suits in unfinished parts of the hab. It wasn’t fair that Ada was forced to dig, while some of the others did it because it was their job.

Lira had tried to convince Ada to make an excuse, play sick to get out of work this morning.

"Valence says it's just a C-class flare," Ada had tried to reassure her, showing Lira the message. She was one of only two colonists without a retinal implant, so she had to lug a tablet around in her coverall pocket to get alerts. "If we stopped for every small flare, we'd never get sector five built.”

Ada had been working on the dig crew for about three months, and the clock was ticking on the expansion. They had their first pregnant colonist and more would follow. They’d already expanded once, but the four existing sectors were at capacity.

Lira kept arguing that it was too dangerous, that Ada had already served her prison sentence and it wasn’t fair to make her dig too. But Ada never complained. Lira thought she secretly believed the colony would finally forgive her if she did this.

"The robots are the ones doing all the hard work anyway," she'd tried to reassure Lira on multiple occasions. "I'm just sweeping up behind them."

Maybe it’s not that bad, Lira thought now, even as she carefully avoided looking at the two guys with the reddened skin in the waiting room. She stepped into the doorframe of treatment room four and froze there.

Inside, her stubborn, brave, infuriating partner lay on a hospital bed, a nurse inserting an IV at her left side. Ada’s dark complexion was somehow both dull and clammy, her features tense, but when she saw Lira, she smiled. "Hey, babe."

“Oh, thank God,” Lira breathed, rushing to her bedside. “Are you okay?”

Hot tears streaked down Lira's face and she started to throw her arms around Ada when she lifted her hand to hold her back. “Don’t.”

Lira stopped. She looked down at Ada’s arms, which she noticed were bandaged from the elbows down to her wrists. Her hands were raw and pink and blistered. “Oh honey… how bad is it?”

“Bad,” Ada grimaced.

“What happened?”

“Radiation shield failed,” Ada said as the nurse stepped out of the room. “We were working in a pressurized module with a skylight, doing the final prep to connect it to the new sector. Everything was normal all morning, but then people started feeling sick. Complaining they were hot, nauseous. I had my sleeves rolled up and my arms started feeling tingly and numb. I was having trouble holding the broom I was using. Torres had his whole coverall unbuttoned and wrapped around his waist cuz he was sweating. He wasn’t even wearing a t-shirt underneath.”

“Is he…” The one who hasn't stopped retching since I got here? Lira wondered, but she didn’t want to interrupt Ada because it seemed like a struggle for her to talk. Ada got the implication, though, and she nodded. “Everyone got exposed?” Lira asked.

"Everyone working in the module," Ada said. “About ten of us, I think. Enough that they had to send us to two different clinics.”

Lira had begged Ada to flat-out disregard her dig assignments and just come back to work in the rabbitat with her. It wasn’t fair. Ada was being punished day after day, month after month, for a crime she’d already paid for.

But the colony AI only saw an able body without a permanent job assignment who was needed to build sector five.

“I knew this would happen,” Lira sniffed.

Ada gingerly took Lira’s hand. “No, you didn’t. No one did. This was just a freak accident.”

"That solar flare was supposed to be small," Lira shook her head. “How much radiation did you take?”

“Not sure yet. I wasn't wearing a dosimeter, but a couple of the others were. The number wouldn’t mean anything to me even if I knew it."

Lira moved to layer her hand on top of Ada’s, her skin was blistered and raw. She hesitated, then put her hand on Ada's shoulder. "You'll be okay."

“I’ll be okay,” Ada agreed. "Come here."

Lira perched on the side of the bed. "Sorry, I’m sweaty. I ran here.”

Ada laughed. “I don’t care.” And she kissed Lira’s salty lips, then nuzzled her forehead against Lira's cheek. Both of them were sticky with sweat for different reasons, but the touch was comforting nonetheless.

"Rest," Lira said, standing and pulling a chair over from one corner of the room. "I'm not going anywhere."