Young Writers Society

~1086

They soon reached Everen’s room. Everen keyed in her room access code into the pin pad and the door slid open, revealing an empty room. To the left of the door was the door to Everen’s personal bathroom, and to the right was her bed, desk, and dresser. It was the standard set-up for every cabin on the ship.

After they walked in, the door slid shut behind them, and Everen felt the tension in the room rise. The captain, almost absentmindedly, slipped on a pair of gloves that had been sitting in her pocket.

Unsure of what she was supposed to do, Everen defaulted to polite hostess mode and pulled out the chair by the desk for the captain to sit on. She then perched on the edge of her bed. No, that wouldn’t do. She had to look confident. She scooted back so she had a firmer base on the bed. She consciously uncrossed her legs and arm, trying to look open and not defensive.

“What is this about, Hope?” The captain glanced down at her. She looked wary.

“So, as I’ve been chatting with other crew members, I’ve noticed that departments are using different units of measurement. Clearly, that’s an issue. But I also noticed that a couple of the uh… recently departed crew had also noticed this inconsistency. I’m worried that the killer is related to this somehow and doesn’t want this secret to be found out.”

The captain still hadn’t sat down. Instead, she stood, surveying the room, even though there wasn’t much to see. The only interest in the room was scattered on Everen’s desk: books, papers, pens, and even a half-finished sketch Everen had started depicting what she imagined the Motes to look like based on their descriptions.

This was a problem. The captain not sitting down, not the sketch. “Why don’t you sit down?” Kerra said, gesturing to the desk’s seat. It was positioned in just such an angle that the captain wouldn’t be able to see the bathroom door.

It was as if the captain couldn’t hear her. She just continued to stare at Everen’s desk. She reached forward to pick up one of Everen’s metal pens. She turned it over and over again in her hand, as if feeling the heft of it.

Everen gritted her teeth. She didn’t like to give the captain orders. It just wasn’t done. But it had to be done this time. “Captain? Please, you’re making me nervous. Sit down.”

It worked. The captain sat in the chair facing Everen, and Everen sat facing the captain and the bathroom door. “Let me tell you how it all began,” she said, a little louder than usual, as if reciting a dramatic monologue.

The captain furrowed her brow, probably wondering why Everen was saying this when she’d already told her story. But Benji, who had been listening at the bathroom door knew what it meant. He opened the door just a crack so that he and Janna could see what was going on.

Everen didn’t know what to say after that, so she said nothing and hoped that the captain would write it off as an eccentricity of some kind.

Thankfully she did, because she said, “Yeah, that sounds really concerning. What do you think we should do about the issue?”

“Well, at first I thought you should just tell everyone to fix their units, but then the murderer would know that you know about it, and then you might be in danger. I figure we do a little look into who the murderer could be.”

The captain’s voice was quiet and steady, but her leg was bouncing with a nervous energy. “The forensic team has already investigated everything that they could. What more could you find?”

Everen shrugged. “I figured out the thing about the units. That means that there’s more to find. I bet there’s a lot more evidence out there that the forensic team just overlooked. They’re just novices anyway. Not that I’m any better, but I am pretty perceptive.”

“Yeah,” the captain murmured.

Everen looked at the captain. Her heart was still slamming against her ribs, but it seemed strange to her that the captain hadn’t attacked her already. She’d half-expected the captain to attack as soon as the door had closed. Then she’d fully expected the attack after Everen had explained all the way about the units. She’d even put on gloves and picked up a murder weapon! Why wasn’t she attacking?

Maybe Everen seemed like too difficult a target. She had to make herself less of a threat. Time to get way more casual in front of her captain than she’d ever been before. Everen threw herself down on the bed. She tried to make it look like she was just fed up with the whole problem and talking with a close friend. “I don’t know how we’re going to catch the killer, but I know that we have to. For the safety of the ship.”

Everen couldn’t see the Captain well from this point of view, so she had no idea what her facial expression was when she said, “You’re right. This is a major issue that we need to solve right away. I’m just as stumped as you are, Everen. It’s an understatement to say that this series of events has troubled me.”

Maybe the captain wasn’t the killer after all. It sounded like she was on Everen’s side. She sounded horrified by the murders, just like everyone else.

She’d have to push harder. “You know, maybe we should start with motive and opportunity. Who would know about the units? Who would have had the opportunity to mess them up in the first place? You’d need to be in a pretty high position of power. Over all the departments on the ship…” Everen let her voice trail off as if she were just thinking of the implications of her statement. “Captain… this is going to sound silly but… It wasn’t by chance you who–”

The captain exploded out of her seat, the pen raised.

At nearly the same moment, Benji burst from the bathroom shouting, “Stop!”

Everen tried to shield herself with her hands, but it was too late. The pen was already at her neck, there was a pop, and then Benji had the captain’s arm wrenched behind her back. Janna rushed over to Everen, and then, a clench of awful pain, almost as bad as when Shandi had died. Everen couldn’t breathe.