Chapter Text
It was bright, and everything hurt. Simon attempted to scramble up onto his elbows and discovered that one of his arms was haphazardly tied to a metal railing and the other—
The other. Right. Of course.
He blinked, trying to clear the spots from his eyes. The light felt like an icepick in his skull. He breathed. Tried to breathe. Nothing but air rushed in to fill his lungs.
A noise. Shuffling, a rustle of clothing off to his right.
Simon turned, the contents of his head falling just a second behind, bruising themselves as they hit bone.
There was a person. A man. Sitting in a chair a couple of feet away.
Simon shot up and back, pushing with his legs until his back was pressed to the wall. His vision went momentarily black, his temples pounded, his organs groaned. The impact jarred what remained of his left arm, and he swallowed a whine.
"Hey, hey, hey." The man was standing up.
Simon bared his teeth, pressing further back into the wall. No. No. Whatever he wanted, the answer was no.
The man stopped and put his hands up. "Okay, I'm not getting any closer. See? I'm staying over here. I'm not going to hurt you."
Simon tugged at the binding on his wrist. The railing wasn't attached too securely, it had give. If he could get it off the bed and into his hand, even tied to it, then—
He felt like he was going to puke. His blood was loud in his ears.
"Hey, hey, stop that, you're going to hurt yourself. You're not finished healing yet. Just lie back down and—" Simon looked at him, and the man startled back a step. "Or— or keep sitting up. That works, too. Jut stop what you're doing. You're just gonna break the wrist you still have."
Simon paused, breathing hard. His lungs felt oddly raw and delicate, like he'd been screaming. Had he been screaming? He could feel his pulse in his forehead.
"Let's start over," the man said. "Alright? I'm sorry you're scared, but you're not in any danger."
"Where—" his voice was raw. Whether used too much or too little, it was impossible to tell. His throat felt the same as his lungs. "Where am I?"
"You're on board the Hail Mary. It's a spaceship. We're a little more than two lightyears from the Tau Ceti system, on our way to 40-Eridiani."
Simon blinked. Even the fear faltered in his chest. "What?"
"I know it's far from home, so it might be difficult to accept if you…I don't know, if you'd been drifting for a while, or something. Even then— I don't know. I don't know where you intended to end up. But I can explain to you how I got here, if that would help."
It hit him. It did. He heard it, he understood the words and the order they were placed in. He had no fucking idea what to say to it, though.
There were a lot of possible responses in his head. Fragments of responses, at least. The most his mouth could manage was, "No."
"I get it, it's hard to accept. But I promise you, it's true."
Simon looked around, like maybe there was a trick here that he wasn't seeing, something that would make it sensical, at least. Something, anything, that would bring some part of the situation into the realm of possibility. There was nothing. He said again, "No."
"Alright. Um. Point is, you're safe. You're stuck with us for a while, that's the bad news. The good news is that we've got enough food and fuel to last a good, long time, not to mention Armando here," he patted a many-limbed robot which hovered nearby, "who can provide the best medical care an unconscious person could ask for. You're still pretty sick, but I think you're through the worst of it, so that's…something, I guess." He fell silent, clearly waiting for Simon to react, somehow.
Simon's reaction time was delayed by about six sentences. It was too much information, most of it nonsense. He had nothing but questions and no words with which to ask them.
The broad strokes were too broad. It was real or it wasn't, it was a cruel joke or the C.O.I. had pulled him out or he was trapped in some happy delusion. It would try to kill him or it wouldn't.
He didn't know. He couldn't know. He sure as hell couldn't ask.
Focus on the immediate. He was good at that. Small bites.
"Who's 'us?'"
"Beg pardon?"
"You said I'm stuck with 'us.' Who's 'us?'"
"Oh. Me and Rocky, my friend-slash-crewmate. He's a great guy. You'll meet him after you've had the chance to get your bearings."
"Right. My bearings." That could mean any of several things, almost none of which Simon liked.
The man shifted his weight, scratched the back of his neck. "So, um…What's your name?"
Simon paused. It knew his name. It was one of the only consistent things, one of the only things he could rely on. The monster always knew and the people never cared.
Unless it had changed tack. It did that sometimes.
"Simon."
"Simon. Alright. Nice to meet you, Simon. I'm Grace. Well, Ryland. Ryland Grace. But everyone just calls me by my last name."
There had been an emotion in Simon's chest, building up gradually over the course of the conversation like a silt deposit. At this new piece of information, finally, it became too big and slipped out through his mouth. He was distantly surprised to find that it was laughter.
It gripped him by the lungs, gaspy and hollow. His whole respiratory system burned with it, his ribs ached, his insides churned as he tried to get his breathing back under control. Tears slipped from the corners of his eyes, and with no hand to cover his mouth, he tilted his head back into the wall in a bid to get air down his windpipe. It was a sensation akin to hyperventilating, with none of the catharsis of open panic.
His head was oddly clear. He knew that nothing about this was funny. It was absolutely fucking hilarious how not-funny all of this was.
Several minutes later, with black spots forming at the corners of his vision, he finally got enough control of himself to say, "Hail Mary," he giggled again, gulped air, started over, "Hail Mary, full of Grace? Are you fucking kidding me?"
"Uh," the man, Grace, chuckled nervously. "Yeah, I guess it's pretty ironic if you think about it that way."
For a moment, Simon was overcome again. "Come on. It's a little heavy-handed, don't you think?"
"I don't. Understand the question?"
Simon's head fell against the wall with a satisfyingly painful thunk. "Okay. Sure. I'm in the Hail Mary with a man named Grace on our way from Tau Ceti to 40-Eridiani. Why not? Let's go with that."
"Look, I'm sorry if…" Grace evidently had no more idea where that sentence was headed than Simon did.
"No, it's fine. This is better than the last one, so. Don't ruin it yet. I mean, if you're going to then I guess there's nothing I can do, but what else is new? I'll play. That's what I'm saying. If that's what it takes to get a fucking break, I'll play."
"O…kay? I think I'm going to let you get some rest now."
"You do that."
"Right. Um. Get some sleep. Shout if you need anything."
A moment later, he was gone. Simon lay back down.
"Is dangerous, question?"
"I don't know. He's really hard to read." Grace tossed the beanbag Earth, caught it, tossed it again. He was sitting on the floor, back propped against the xenonite barrier of Rocky's habitat.
"Will not have him if he hurts you."
"He didn't do anything aggressive when I was talking to him. He was just scared. I mean, really scared. And even if he did get violent, what do you suggest we do? Push him out of the airlock?"
"Don't care what we do. Coma medicine still on board, question?"
The very thought of doing that to someone made Grace feel ill. "Out of the question."
"Could be best way."
"Don't care," Grace echoed. "I can't, Rock. You know why I can't."
"Know why. Does not make you right."
"It's— Look, if he like, attacks one of us or something, then we can consider maybe doing something like that. But only as an absolute last resort, okay?"
"Okay. Deal. Do not like lack of…need word."
"A word for what?"
Rocky chimed a word Grace hadn't heard before. "Means…making effort to prepare in case something bad happens."
"Ah. Precautions. The English is 'precautions.'"
"Yes. Do not like lack of precautions, but is your species, you make rules."
Grace laughed. "No pressure, I guess."
But No pressure, I guess had more or less become a way of life for him. He went back down a couple of hours later.
Simon was just lying there, eyes closed, so still that Grace thought he'd fallen asleep again. But when Grace stepped within two feet of the cot, they shot open, clear and alert enough that he could only have been awake.
"What?"
Grace stepped back. "I just wanted to talk more. There aren't a lot of people out here, you know?"
Simon regarded him out of the corner of his eye, not bothering to turn his head. He looked wary and exhausted, a certain resignation warring with the obvious tension in his shoulders.
He asked, "The robot keeps trying to get me to swallow pills. What are they?"
Thank God, an easy question. "I don't know your schedule by heart, but depending on how many you were given, it would have been antibiotics, medications to flush the radiation out of your system, painkillers, or antinausea. That's all you're on right now."
His face did something complicated. He did not reply.
Grace sat in his usual chair, a respectful distance from the bedside. "You had radiation poisoning. Have. I don't know when you officially stop having it. Obviously, it wasn't a severe enough case to kill you, but it was more than enough to leave a mark. And an infection in your severed limb, not to mention, you know, a severed limb. You were unconscious for four days, maybe a little more, since you were already out when we found you. Your fever broke about halfway through day three."
Grace had been a mandatory reporter on Earth. He'd gone through training for it. He'd used his training for it on more than one occasion (this was a side effect of making children feel important, intelligent, and listened-to—it made them trust you, and sometimes they exercised that trust). So he knew, at least in theory, how to talk to a traumatized person. Or at least, he knew, in theory, how to talk to a traumatized middleschooler who had not recently been discovered floating in a cloud of someone else's blood. How different could it be?
"I know all of this must be confusing. You're welcome to ask me any other questions you might have, and I'll do my best to answer them."
Simon scoffed. "Okay. Why am I tied up?"
He asked it like he didn't expect Grace to answer. Or like the answer was bound to be so horrible, it would ruin the credibility Grace was trying to build.
Grace said, "Because, when we found you, your craft was full of…blood? Like, a lot of blood. Like, a lot. And I have a very strong suspicion that only some of it was yours."
Simon swallowed, Adam's apple bobbing. "Right."
Grace waited for him to elaborate. Instead, he changed the subject.
"Where are my clothes?"
"They were also covered in blood, so we burned them. Because they were covered in blood."
That had been before they'd known about the radiation, of course. Thankfully, none of the fumes had been released into the ship.
Simon looked down at the soft pants and cardigan he was wearing, different ones than Grace had dressed him in initially—the clothes and sheets had needed to be changed every twelve hours or so during the worst of the fever.
"And these are…?"
"Mine."
"Right."
"Can I have a turn to ask a question now?"
Simon's face scrunched momentarily, and Grace figured that was all the assent he was going to get. They both knew what it was going to be, anyway.
"Whose blood was it, Simon?"
Simon laughed. Only once, a little tearily. He wasn't crying, but it sounded like he was going to. "Would you believe me if I said no one's?"
"Respectfully, no. Blood usually comes from somewhere."
"Look, I didn't— It wasn't— It wasn't like that. It came from somewhere, but it wasn't like that."
"What was it like, then?"
"And what happens if I don't tell you?"
"Uh." Massive red flag? Yes. Delivered with that same damp, hollowly amused ferocity, heavily implying that he expected the answer to be beaten out of him? Also yes. "Nothing, I suppose. I mean, we have to keep being careful, if it's still possible that you hurt someone, which among other things means that you stay tied up. That's about the worst I'm going to threaten you with."
Simon seemed at a loss. At length, he said again, "It wasn't anyone's blood. I promise you that. You don't have any reason to trust me, I know, but I promise you that the blood you found didn't come from a person."
Grace took a deep breath, uncrossed and recrossed his legs. "Okay. We can talk more about that later. Can you tell me anything else about how you ended up out here? Maybe where you're from originally?"
Simon pursed his lips, seemed to make a decision. "Eden." The word was like a blunt knife in his mouth. "I'm from Eden."
"Oh. Where's that?"
Simon looked at him blankly. "The space station. Near Mars."
Grace returned the full force of Simon's blank look. "I wasn't aware that we…had one of those."
They stared at each other for a moment longer, and then Simon said, "Course. Forgot for a second. Hail Mary, full of Grace, two lightyears from Tau Ceti. Why would you have heard of Eden? Makes perfect sense."
"I'm sorry?"
"No, you're not."
He rolled to face the wall. Grace had no further success in speaking to him.
For all his commitment to letting this situation play out in its own time, Simon could not help prodding at the edges.
It really wasn't so bad, all of this. He felt better now than when he'd first woken, the water was clean and tasted fine, and the bed he'd been tied to was comfortable enough. The drugs didn't hurt, either—the painkiller was the strongest he'd ever been given, and it left him feeling very loose and unconcerned for a couple of hours every time.
The clothes were impractical, to say the least, but admittedly comfortable. Everything he'd worn since coming aboard, apparently, belonged to Grace. Many of them featured cartoon animals or science puns. Simon could not imagine the sort of person who would waste resources on decorating their clothing with cartoon animals and science puns.
The food was a bitter, chalky paste, but that was fine. He'd eaten nutrient-rich paste before and been grateful.
Grace came and went every hour or two, made faltering attempts at conversation and never stayed long. He had not made any aggressive moves. He did not, frankly, seem like the aggressive type. He seemed awkward, socially unpracticed—not that Simon could judge—and very insistent that there was nothing to fear. Of course, for a person to be outwardly nonthreatening did not necessarily mean that they were not a threat. It didn't matter that Simon could usually take him in a fight, if Simon was restrained, doped up, and had not fully recovered his strength. Not to mention that they were in the middle of God-knew-where in a ship which Simon would have no idea how to pilot, and even if he could, where would he go?
Then there was the matter of the other crew member. Rocky. Just a first name, no title, no honorific. Someone Simon was assured he would meet when the time was right, whatever that could possibly mean.
Even on a surface level, Simon could be fairly confident that he was being lied to. Nothing in the universe was two lightyears from Tau Ceti anymore, least of all him. Still, it was a perplexing lie. It was so easily, verifiably false.
Assuming that the situation was real in the first place, here was what Simon could be fairly certain was true:
-
He was on a ship called the Hail Mary.
-
There were two other people aboard the Hail Mary. One was named Rocky. The other called himself Grace, though Simon still struggled to believe that that was the guy's real name.
-
They had found him in the remains of the SM-13, dying but not dead.
-
They had rescued him and provided him with food, water, shelter, and medical care.
-
They were neither Eden nor C.O.I..
And all of that was all well and good, but it didn't answer any of his questions about who they were, where they were, or what they wanted with him.
The room he was being kept in looked residential. He counted three beds, but only one of them looked recently used, besides the one Simon was tied to. There were personal effects scattered around it. A crumpled piece of clothing abandoned on the floor next to some kind of wrapper, a laptop lying closed on top of the bed.
The third bed was undisturbed, neatly made, no sign of life around it.
Maybe one of them was just conscientious like that. But then, why did they need a third bed, when there were only two of them?
One part of the room was encased in a barrier which Simon couldn't fathom the purpose of. Quarantine, maybe? But a harsh one, if so. Neither of the unoccupied beds were inside of it. It was either glass or plastic, probably, and on the other side of it was a low worktable scattered with tools and miscellaneous machine parts. Simon was no engineer, but something about the setup seemed…weird. The table was too low to comfortably sit at, and he couldn't identify all the tools and parts.
All things considered, he could probably assume that he wasn't hallucinating. It was too detailed, too immersive, too strange and alien, too unlike anything he'd ever known or wanted.
What possibilities did that leave? He was alive or he was dead. That was about it.
Until he knew for certain, he had resolved not to tell them anything. If he was dead, then they probably already knew, and if he was alive, then, Oh, by the by, the person you've allowed into a confined space with you is a convicted mass-murderer was probably not the best way to begin an acquaintance. Might be a great way to end one, though, if it came to it.
If he was alive, then whoever these people might be, they were unfathomably wealthy. Disgustingly wealthy.
If he was dead, then this was either heaven, or a rug-pull waiting to happen.
Strike that. Even if he'd died trying to get the blackbox to the surface, it couldn't possibly be heaven. Not for him.
So he was alive or he was in hell. At least those possibilities were familiar to him.
He was given his second meal since waking, another tube of the nutrient paste presented to him by the robot, which compensated for his lack of usable hands. He drank it slowly, swilling the bitter stuff around his mouth, because it was something to think about. He was good at coping with boredom. When you have no idea when it's going to end, you take what you can get.
Grace came in about halfway through the tube, already saying, "Oh, good, you're awake. Look—"
He stopped, furrowing his brow and cocking his head at the tube. "Why are you eating that?"
Simon sat back on instinct, putting himself as far from it as possible. "The robot gave it to me. Said to eat. I assumed it had your approval." It made him feel like a child. But stealing was not a crime to be trifled with. "I'll repay you. I mean, I don't have any money, but when I'm physically able again—"
"Oh! No, that's not what I meant. It's fine that you were eating. Better than fine."
Simon paused.
"It's just. Hang on a second. Armando?"
The robot turned its attention towards him. "Yes, Dr. Grace?"
Doctor?
"Is the patient allowed to have solid food yet?"
"Patient is advised to begin eating soft foods and carbohydrates, avoiding red meat and dairy."
"Thought so. You like ramen?"
This last was directed at Simon.
"I don't…know what that is."
"Are you allergic to anything?"
"Not that I know of."
"Armando. Ramen."
A couple of minutes later, Simon was presented with a steaming bowl of noodle soup. Grace went back into the upper parts of the ship to fetch a makeshift tray, and then untied Simon's good hand to allow him to eat it.
And then he apologized. He apologized to Simon.
"With everything going on, I forgot to check Armando's work. I mean, it's better work than I could ever do, but it's not really for this specific set of circumstances. I got too used to trusting it while you were unconscious. That's much more Armando's wheelhouse. I think it got confused because it knows you aren't a crew member, so it just never stopped giving you the food for unconscious people. I just need to play around in settings to make sure you keep getting awake-people food."
Horribly, terrifyingly wealthy. What the fuck was awake-people food? It was food or it wasn't.
Simon picked up the fork. Dropped it. "What do you want for it?"
"What? Nothing."
Simon shook his head. "Cut the shit, alright? I wasn't born yesterday. Tell me what you want. What happens when I can get out of bed? I don't have anything, you know. Whatever you salvaged from the sub wasn't even mine. I have no money, no connections, no power, no resources, nothing. What do you want from me?"
"Nothing," Grace said. "Rocky and I saw a person in distress, and it had been a long time since we—since I had seen another human, so we saved you. We saved you because we wanted to save you, nothing more."
"Please don't lie to me."
Grace made a small, helpless motion with his hands. "I don't know how to convince you."
Simon stared at the bowl.
Grace said, "It's really not an issue. We have plenty, and that slurry will keep you alive, but I don't know how good it actually is for you if you have better options. I know from experience that it doesn't taste great." When Simon still said nothing, Grace tacked on, "Please eat. It would really suck to pull you through infection, blood loss, and radiation poisoning just to have your health relapse because you weren't eating well enough."
A transparent manipulation, but an effective one. Simon picked up the fork.