Darkness. Total, impenetrable darkness.
Anca struggled to sit up and tried to recognize something around her.
Next to her she felt a clammy wall and a grimy, cold metal floor beneath her.
Where the hell was she?
Groaning, she held her head. She... hadn't been alone. Something exciting had happened, something special. Something she had waited for a long time for.
Her head hurt more now. Remembering... there had been something, but she couldn't remember...
Bharos. It had something to do with Bharos.
But... what was Bharos?
She didn't know. But Bharos was friendly, her... friend? Yes, that was it. Bharos was her friend.
Searching, she groped for him in the darkness. In her nearer surroundings she couldn't find anything. She tried to stand up, but quickly sank back down to hands and knees when everything started to swirl around her in the darkness. A sickening experience. When her stomach had calmed down again she started to listen.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
She could not estimate the size of this darkness, if she was in a room or on the surface of a planet or inside a spaceship. No. Stop. There where the wall and the floor. A room, then. A cell? The deck of a spaceship?
Spaceship. The “Eucalyptus”. Their spaceship. The Children's Spaceship.
Slowly the memories came back to her. Earth: burned, exploited, almost dead but over-populated. She and her friends had been patients on a huge spaceship. Something went wrong and the ship had torn itself off the orbit around Earth and had reappeared somewhere else entirely, in unknown space. All the adults had left the ship and abandoned the children.
But that had been long ago. She had been twelve then. Now she turned 18 in a few weeks.
Now... she was alone.
She thought about her older brother. Good that Harpo wasn't here. He was terribly afraid of small places and of being alone. Where was he now? And where were the others?
The longer Anca sat motionless in the darkness, the more she believed to feel a quiet humming around her. Machines? Then perhaps she was on board of the Eucalyptus?
The spaceship had many huge decks, partly full of strange plants, some artificial, installed by the adults years ago to calm the children, some real, collected on the various planets the crew had visited during their journey. Other decks were filled with labs and machines, but most of them were empty. The ship had not been completed when that accident took place.
“Chatterbox?”
If she was on board of the Eucalyptus, the gabby main computer would hear her and either answer her or sent down some of his robots, called “Greens” because of their green plush covering, to pick her up.
Nothing happened.
Slowly she became frightened.
If she wasn't on board of the Eucalyptus, where was she?
Bharos came back into her mind.
He was no human, but a delicate, elf-like being from the planet Akkai. Centuries ago he had stranded with a crew of explorers in a waste part of the galaxy. His crewmembers had developed into a kind of space-nomads, but Bharos was different. Cursed with the gift of long-life and endowed with telepathic and teleporting abilities he had dissociated himself from the offspring of his former crewmembers. He searched for a way to see his homeworld again before he would finally die. The children had volunteered to accompany him on his long journey.
Now Anca remembered. Bharos had taught her how to operate his tiny ship. And today had been the day she had been allowed to fly it in reality, and not only in the simulations Chatterbox had computed for her.
She had left the Eucalyptus together with Bharos and had flown ahead of her friends. Two solar systems further, where Chatterbox had made out an inhabitable planet, they had wanted to meet again.
The something had happened. But she couldn't remember what it was.
“Bharos? Are you there?”
No answer.
*Bharos?* she asked in her mind, slowly and clearly. If the telepath was near her, he would hear her. And if there was a possibility he would teleport to her and get her out. No. Perhaps not. Bharos could only teleport to places he could see, with his eyes or through other's, or to places he had been before. She wasn't sure he could jump to her in this darkness. But perhaps he would find another way.
She waited. Nothing happened.
Perhaps he was unconscious?
Slowly and carefully she started to crawl. The floor was disgustingly greasy and dusty. As if nobody had been here for a long time.
With her left hand she groped for the wall, not wanting to lose orientation in the darkness.
After about ten meters she touched something strange, something long and hart.
Although she had expected to find something she jumped. Carefully she felt for what she had touched.
There it was. Dry and dusty, like the rest of this... room.
Anca started to feel uneasy. What she held in her hands reminded her strongly of...
“Bones!”