Nicholas Smith - Ghosts

Something had to give. There weren’t many green-zone locations left, and Jordan was going to have to start making some tough choices.

A sharp jolt rocked the Hive, throwing both of them against the side of Layla’s drop tube. He steadied himself and helped her back to her feet.

“What the hell was that?” Layla huffed.

The room lit up with a cool blue radiance that answered her question. Outside the porthole windows, lightning jagged across the sky. A massive storm was brewing.

“At least we can see now,” Michael said.

An emergency alarm barked from the public-address speakers in the corner of the room. The recorded female voice Michael had listened to his entire life repeated a message he had heard a thousand times.

He turned to watch the portholes.

“It never lasts, does it?” Layla whispered, leaning against him.

He didn’t ask her what she meant. He already knew. The silence, the sense of peace—they never lasted long. On the Hive , calm was an illusion.

Magnolia Katib twirled her favorite knife, ignoring the annoying message on the public-address system as she watched the cards being dealt across the table. The game, a version of old-world poker, had evolved over the years. It was cutthroat and fast paced, much like diving. The only noticeable difference was that the high-stakes game couldn’t kill her—unless one of the other players got mad…

The first dog-eared card glided over to Rick Weaver, commander of Team Angel. The second went to the commander of Team Apollo, Andrew “Pipe” Bolden. The third went to Raptor Diver Rodger “Dodger” Mintel, and the fourth came to her.

Despite the size of the blade, the knife spun effortlessly in her hand. Then the ship lurched, and she almost lost a finger. The metal bulkheads groaned as the Hive changed course, but none of her opponents seemed to notice. Storms were part of everyday life on the ship.

Magnolia sank her blade into the head of the Raptor logo someone had engraved long ago onto the faded wooden table. She formed a fort around her cards with her hands. Her mind was only halfway on the game.

“Yo, Mags,” the dealer said. “You with us? The bet’s twenty.”

She shook away her troubling thoughts and focused on the dealer, a longtime dive technician named Ty. He looked at the knife and raised an eyebrow as if to say, Don’t mess with my table. He was chewing vigorously on a calorie-infused stick—a habit he had picked up years ago and had never been able to break.

“Anyone ever tell you that you look like a horse eating straw?” Magnolia quipped.

That got a laugh from Andrew, but Ty just kept chewing.

Magnolia’s eyes flitted to the other players, hunting for tells as they looked at their three cards. Andrew peeled the edge of his card up with a grimy fingernail. He wrinkled his beak of a nose and hunched his wide shoulders so that he loomed over the table. Magnolia considered cracking a joke about his thinning hair, but she would leave the snide humor up to Rodger.

Her eyes flitted to the skinny bearded man with black-rimmed glasses taped together in the middle. The frames accentuated his unusually large brown eyes. He was the newest addition to Team Raptor, chosen not for his fighting skills but for his keen intelligence and ability to cobble together useful tech from bits of scrap. Magnolia suspected that he was smarter than anyone else on the ship.

“Andrew, you look at me like you look at your food,” Rodger said. “Please, don’t eat me. I’d give you really bad gas, and these people have suffered enough.”

“Whatever, man,” Andrew said, scowling. “I heard you shat yourself in the launch tube on your first dive.”

Ty chuckled, and Commander Weaver almost choked on a gulp of shine.

Rodger glanced at her, his cheeks reddening, then looked down at the table. Magnolia glared at Andrew.

“Shut it, Pipe,” she said. She really hated that nickname. Layla had been the one to assign it to Andrew, because of his muscles. Tacky, to Magnolia’s thinking. “Neanderthal” would have fit much better.

Her eyes flitted to Rodger. He gave her a brief smile that revealed a missing front tooth. He had lost it on their last dive, when he tripped after wasting half an hour loading pieces of wood into the supply crate. He was smart, but he was clumsy. She also suspected he was nursing a crush on her, but she didn’t have time for a boyfriend, and he didn’t seem like the one-night-stand type. If she wasn’t training or diving, she was in her quarters, going through the archives. Her main relationship was with history.

“Hurry this shit up,” she said. She was anxious to get back to her latest find, an article about the farms that humans once cultivated on the surface. Maybe she could figure out a way to save the next corn harvest before they all starved.

Andrew checked his cards again, as if they were somehow going to change, and Magnolia used the moment to scratch at the newest tattoo on her forearm. For a while now, she had been working on a full sleeve of the extinct animals that fascinated her.

“What’s a girl like you want with all that ink?” Andrew asked. “What is that gray thing, anyway?

She pulled her shirtsleeve down to cover her tattoos. “Something you’d never be able to recognize.”

Rodger leaned forward. “That’s a baby elephant, right?”

Magnolia tilted her head slightly, amused that Rodger could identify the image on her arm. Maybe he was more interesting than she gave him credit for. He was certainly more interesting than the Neanderthal sitting next to him.

“How’d you know?” she asked.

“My dad made an elephant clock once. It was beautiful.”

Magnolia was intrigued. “Where is it now?”

“Are we going to play or talk about furry creatures all night?” Andrew asked.

“They aren’t furry,” Rodger and Magnolia both said at the same time. She chuckled at that.

“You kids are somethin’ else,” Weaver said. He shook his head and glanced at his cards. His hair and handlebar mustache seemed more salt than pepper these days, and his forehead was a maze of wrinkles. After losing his family a decade ago during the crash of the Hive ’s sister ship, Ares , Weaver had dedicated himself to diving—and cards. He had mastered the game, but luckily, Magnolia had discovered the aging commander’s tell. He lifted the edges of each card, one by one, and then squinted with his right eye when he looked at the final card.

Shit, he has a hand. She needed to shut her mouth and pay attention. She checked her credits to make sure she hadn’t miscounted. Two hundred left. The blinds were chipping away at her stack. If she didn’t make something happen, she was going to be begging Ty for some of those calorie sticks until her next payday.

Andrew folded, but Rodger ran a hand over his beard and said, “Ten credits.”

Another rattle shook the aluminum bones of the Hive.

“Sounds like we’re hitting some bad weather,” Ty said. “Maybe we should—”

“Don’t even think about it,” Weaver said. “I call your ten credits and raise you ten.”

Magnolia finally looked down at her cards and tried not to react when she saw they were all suited connectors: seven, eight, and nine of hearts.

She was on her way to a straight flush. Only one hand could beat that, but the odds against securing a ten and six of hearts were astronomical. Worse, if she wanted to play the hand, she would have to commit twenty chips just to see another card. She looked down at the faded, cracked chips in front of her. That was an entire week’s pay on the line.

It was a risk, but it was only credits. The real risk was diving into the black abyss through an electrical storm, which Magnolia hadn’t done for months. She missed the thrill of the dive. But for now, poker would have to do.