Chapter 30: 30 Nowhere Shines, Part One

In the afternoon Jin found himself heading back to the cafeteria so he could be with people again instead of uselessly floating about, made buoyant by the strength of his conversation with Freya. When he entered, everything was back in its place, though there were still marks left by the party. Literal marks on the concrete floor from moving the tables, for one. One of the robots still wearing a party hat, for another.

Jin reached toward it and it swerved away.

"Okay, keep living that party life. I won't stop you."

The centre table was populated with a group of girls: Angharad, Sophie, Gemma, Mac. Angharad looked unfocused, one hand restless over the cover of a paperback, as everyone else talked and laughed. As he watched, she closed her eyes and started to braid her hair then carefully wind it into a low bun. Sensible.

Last night all the girls together had looked intimidating, but at that moment he figured he could manage to butt in on their conversation without feeling weird. He didn't know Mac that well, but Gemma was cool, and Sophie and Angharad had already learned to put up with him. He pushed himself onto the seat at the end of the table, and Angharad finished winding her hair into shape and looked up.

"You didn't grace us with your presence for long last night," Gemma said.

Angharad looked at him side on, amused. "He was busy."

"And what were you busy doing together?" Mac asked. Her inflection was strangely flat like she wasn't really asking.

"We were busy separately," Angharad said. She sat up straight and folded her hands on her book.

"I don't know what she was doing," he said, trying to stay as far away from whatever conversational minefield the girls were setting up. Everything girls said seemed to have a double meaning. They were worse than High Command.

"I was talking to Josephine," she said, and looked back down on her book.

"Oh!" Sophie said, voice high, and clapped. "She and Elly got back together again! I didn't actually know they'd broken up, but I don't think it lasted long this time, so now I see why they don't always tell everyone. I think it's sweet."

"I think it's a disaster," Gemma said. "What? They keep breaking up because they can't actually make it work. I've been in a relationship like that. It's not great."

"Whatever," Angharad said. "If they got back together, then I succeeded admirably. I have interfered in two people's love lives and done very well."

Mac looked confused. "Two people?"

Angharad plastered on a smile that surely everyone could see was insincere. "Josephine and Eleanor. I talked to them both." Oh, that was smooth. Now he got why she said she was usually good at keeping secrets. "It's nice to be surrounded by love."

"Should I talk about my date with Darren again?" Sophie asked. "He's so cute and so respectful."

"You talked about Darren for an hour," Gemma said.

"He better be respectful," Jin muttered. Which was greeted by a chorus of laughter.

When the laughter died down, Mac looked straight at him and said, "Angharad won't tell us about her book."

"What do you want me to do about it?" Jin asked.

"It's just a book," Angharad said, and dragged it closer to herself.

He looked at the spine: Basic Electromagnetic Theory. He couldn't imagine Mackenzie actually found that interesting.

"But why are you using photos as bookmarks?" Sophie said.

Angharad raised her eyebrows like it was the stupidest thing she'd heard all day. "Because I don't have actual bookmarks to use as bookmarks."

She raised her hands to gesture as she spoke, and Mac took the opportunity to grab the book from under her, spinning it across the table so that she and Gemma could paw at it.

"Give her back her book," Jin said.

"Who is this?" Mac asked, pulling one of the photos out. Was there anything more annoying than someone who pulled the bookmarks out of a book you were reading? Jin was about ready to shoot them all on Angharad's behalf.

Angharad rubbed at one eye. "That's daddy with my mother and Moshe when they were setting up the company."

It was a slightly blown out Polaroid-style selfie of three people in their prime of youth, smiling and hugging and holding fading glasses of wine, warping at the edges of the picture.

"That's right," Mac said. "Your multi million dollar company."

"Your local pharmacist is a multi million dollar company," Angharad said. "It's not that exciting."

"I bet you have a trust fund," Mac said.

"It's all money left over from my Bat Mitzvah that daddy wouldn't let me spend on shoes."

"And who's this?" Mac asked, pulling out another photo. A print out of a tall, narrow-bodied guy, square-jawed and Hollywood handsome, smile a little too wide as he sat next to someone Jin knew had to be Angharad, but somehow didn't look like her at all.

"Put the bookmarks back," Gemma said, trying to grab the book from Mac's hands. "She's still reading it."

"That's James," Angharad said. "Obviously."

Mac looked at the photo again and deflated. Placed it on top of the book that Gemma had finally wrestled from her hands. "I should have known you'd be with someone that hot. People like you always end up with people like that."

Angharad raised both her eyebrows. "People like me?"

Jin seized his moment to rescue what he could of the conversation. "She meant good looking people. Mac's sad that you're out of her league."

"Jin's so mean!" Sophie said, voice somehow more distant than five minutes ago.

Angharad turned to him, lip gloss smile looking like stiff plastic. "Jin, the doctor was looking for you earlier. We should go find her and help out. Like, now."

"Sure," he said.

He grabbed the book from Gemma's hands as they passed.

*

Outside, Angharad didn't seem in a hurry to take her book back. Jin folded her bookmarks into the contents page, and walked beside her in their slow meander toward the hospital.

"Did the doctor really ask for me?" he asked.

"Yes. I mean, she didn't say it was urgent, but she definitely said she had a task for us. And it was a good excuse."

She had good posture when she wasn't letting people's opinions weigh her down. A good long stride. He admired that.

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"I don't get why Mac is angry at you," he said.

She looked at the book in his hands, then up to his face, then away again in the direction of the hospital doors. "I don't think she's angry at me. I think she's just angry, maybe. Like, okay, we're all kind of tense here. It's kind of hard not to let it get to you."

"But you don't."

"If you want to pretend we didn't argue over a burned out craft that's cool, Jin, but, like, we totally did that. We're tense, too." She breathed out deep, like an exclamation mark. "Only I guess you and I are trying to do something about it, and Mac doesn't have that to distract herself. She only has tension and gossip. It's a tough life."

Over a table with friends she'd seemed distant, distracted, but in the hospital she moved like she had some kind of purpose and everyone else would have to keep up. Maybe it shouldn't have been a surprise that she seemed less diminished in the building she'd rested in for months than in the outside world, but it was still a little strange to him that she looked so strong in this near empty building with its strange dark places, its endless hidden traps. He had to trust that she would guide him to the right place without getting them stuck anywhere.

But, what the hell, they were already trapped: what difference did the size of the trap make?

She directed him to a tiny little nook she claimed was the doctor's office. Dramatically lit, as if there was a shortage of decent light bulbs, and containing little more than a small table, several folding chairs, and a metal filing cabinet that looked like it had come out the loser in a fight with a bear.

He didn't even notice the doctor, standing, arms crossed, in a dark corner, until she stepped forward and said, "Oh, good. You managed what I asked expediently. Sit down."

Angharad sat, so he sat. What else was he going to do?

"I've prepared files on every person on this side of the barrier that was alive when I did check ups in the first month, both of you included. What I've copied onto these sheets of paper – in English, because I accept this is the only language all three of us can read – does not contain information about any person's medical health, so do not think you'll be learning anything exciting or sneaky."

"Then what's this for?" Jin asked. He leaned back in the chair, arms crossed tight, unimpressed with Dr Yeoh's dramatic entrance.

"Names, places people arrived from, anything that stuck out to me I've noted down. Please add anything you can and look for patterns," Dr Yeoh said.

"Oh, to see if there might be a reason we were sent here on purpose, right? Or some kind of clue that would help us figure out a cause or something? I get it!" Angharad said. She smiled wide, and started sorting through the piles of paper.

"Note pads. Pens. Have at it," the doctor said.

"All you have here is information on people who were alive on this side of the barrier one month in. That's nothing. We're missing everything about people on the other side," Jin said.

"Oh, and in the middle," Angharad said, but she didn't look up.

"Absolutely. Don't contaminate my data with what you know about people on the other side of the barrier. That can wait until we can fix the barrier issue, retrieve any and all remaining corpses, and so and so forth."

"This won't tell us anything," he insisted.

Angharad looked at him side on. "People make conclusions from incomplete data sets all the time. At least we know the limits of what we know now. Right?"

"Exactly." The doctor seemed way too impressed by Angharad sharing her reasoning. She was such a doctor's pet.

"Whatever," he said. "I'll do it, I guess."

Angharad started through all the piles first, discarding them as soon as she looked them over, so Jin relied on looking at her off pile. Not that that worked very well.

"How can I look through this if you make it this hard for me?" he asked.

"I won't coddle you, Jin. It's up to you to keep up," Angharad said, and kept putting the bits of paper in her own confusing piles.

"Brat," he said.

Her handwriting wasn't that neat, either, so he couldn't even read over her shoulder easily.

"I don't know what I'm supposed to be looking for," he said.

"Well, you could think about how everyone got here. Start there," Angharad said. She sounded annoyed. She furrowed her eyebrows over her piles and then pushed them all back into one pile to start over.

"I was evacuated from Point Rosemary. I don't know which gate Tabitha took," he said.

"I don't know, either. She doesn't really talk about that much," Angharad said.

"So, that's a bust," he said. What was she doing with the bits of paper? He found it really annoying.

"No, keep going," the doctor said. She sounded almost bored but there was something about the way she looked at them that reminded him of vaguely indulgent teachers. Why couldn't they ever just tell him what the answers were?

Angharad looked up at the doctor, her smile somehow both winsome and sly. "Did you come from Doctor-topia? The land of all the doctors?"

Dr Yeoh uncrossed her arms. "No, I came in with your friend Okada."

"And diet NATO. Okay, cool."

"This kid," Jin said, pointing to one of the slips of paper. "Where is he staying?"

"Your Colonel Huppert moved Tony closer to his room so nobody could attack the boy again," the doctor said.

"He's not my Colonel," Jin said. "He's from, um..."

"France. He came via Rod Spark's fancy craft from Sophie's dad's wedding. He knows her new step-mother, apparently." Angharad leaned her head against one hand and pushed her pile of paper bits toward him. "And talking about Sophie leads me to this: look through this pile of names and tell me what's missing."

He picked through the pile, quickly as he could, and re-piled the pieces much more neatly than Angharad had managed.

When he looked up at the doctor, she smirked. So there was a specific reason she brought them here.

"Where's Darren in this list?" he asked.

"Right!" Angharad said. "Because the only person who wasn't awake to get a check up on this side of the barrier one month in was me, and I'm in this list, anyway. He can't have been, like, under the other dome. Because they don't really so much touch."

"There's no way he was in the middle. Everything out there is dead. It's just corpses. There's no food. It sucked the oxygen out to end the fires. How could—?"

"Maybe there's a deep secret tunnel between the two camps, and he travelled here from the other one?" Angharad said. From the look on her face he could tell she knew she was grasping at dry grass.

"I would suggest finding out for yourselves how he got here," Dr Yeoh said.

"Let's ask Freya what she knows," Angharad said, voice low.

He shoved himself out of his chair, and she followed.

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