Read Online The Dying of the Light: Interval by Jason Kristopher - Free Book Online

once had. Some distant part of her knew that she must be getting over his loss, but right now, she didn’t care. If she wasn’t careful, Doc Stirling would just want to put her on meds again, and that had just been a bad time all around. Especially with what little meds they had already restricted to the most urgent cases.
    She remembered the good times that they’d had, their little mini-vacations that Jackson would arrange, snagging a heat lamp from storage and somehow finding some fruit juice to go with the rapidly dwindling supplies of rum. That, too, was tightly controlled, for obvious reasons, but it never seemed to stop him. He’d transform her quarters or his into a reasonable facsimile of the beach, or as close as anyone could get from here, and they’d pretend they were in Acapulco, or Tahiti, or Fiji, sipping cocktails.
    He always knew exactly what to do, exactly what to say, to make her smile, to forget that they were all entombed with no escape and nowhere to go even if they could. For a little while, he made life worth living.
    And then, one day, for no reason anyone could find, he just walked out into the snow and ice, without a coat or gloves or goggles.
    He wasn’t the first. That had been that asshole Colonel Burke, much to everyone’s surprise, and several who not-so-secretly cheered his departure. It seemed likely that Monroe wouldn’t be the last, either. The survivors who remained called them ‘The Lost.’ Those poor souls who, for whatever reason, couldn’t take living anymore. Or, at least, living in Antarctica.
    If you can call this living , thought Sabrina.
    The Lost simply gave up, let go of life. Some became catatonic, unable or unwilling to move, think or even eat. Others had to feed them, to clothe and bathe them, meaning they were a constant and consistent drag on the resources of the group as a whole. But the alternative was unthinkable.
    Still, not all of the Lost chose the same manner in which to check out. Nearly a quarter of them simply… disappeared, starting with Burke. Since there was nowhere to go on the base that wasn’t, at least at some point, regularly visited by other personnel, the prevailing theory was that they just walked out into the snow. Only once or twice had anyone actually seen it happen, and it was over and done before they knew what was going on.
    Dr. Jackson Monroe wasn’t one of these. He had left no witnesses. All they found was a note, printed from his computer, telling Sabrina how sorry he was to leave her but that he just couldn’t bear it one more day. For her, that was the worst part: knowing that the solace she had found in him was something she hadn’t been able to return. And now he was dead because of it.
    Because of her.
    She would get past this, she knew. She’d had other loves, in the past, and knew that this was a temporary thing. She would move on, and figure out the damn commsat problem, and find a way to keep going. Eventually. But not tonight.
    Tonight was for remembering.

     
    Dr. Reuben Hacker puttered around the hydroponic tray, humming along with the music coming from his iPod’s earphones. The strains of an Italian opera filtered out across the lab.
    “Reuben!” his Scottish assistant, Marcie Thompson, called.
    He jumped, startled, and looked around, seeing her looking at him from where she was working at a microscope. He hit pause on the iPod and took the earbuds from his ears. “Yes, Marcie, what is it?”
    “I was about to ask you the same question.”
    “What?”
    She pointed at the iPod. “What’s that, then??”
    “That?” Hacker glanced down at the MP3 player in his pocket and back up. “That was ‘Duettino Sull’aria,’ from Le nozze di Figaro .”
    “Reuben, I dinnae speak Italian.”
    “Sorry, of course. It’s an aria from The Marriage of Figaro .’ Sung by two masters—or, in this case, mistresses—of their craft: Edith Mathis and Gundula Janowitz.”
    Marcie sighed. “It’s