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Something is wrong. Dan Heng knows it as soon as he opens his eyes in the space equivalent of “early morning.” The archive room is dark, the only light coming from the wavy blue flooring that covers the inside half of the room. Over the usual sounds of the Express’s engine humming, the assorted creaks and clatters characteristic of space travel and its required machinery, he can just make out another person’s breathing, in addition to his own.
Out here in space, that isn’t really cause for alarm. Dan Heng would’ve woken easily if there had been an invasion, and the Express’s security is hard to breach besides. So the possibilities are few and predictable.
Or they should be. He can’t help the muted prick of fear he feels as his eyes adjust and he can just make out the blurry, humanoid figure sitting in his desk chair.
“Oh, you’re awake.” The raspy voice that greets him isn’t yet familiar, and takes him a moment to place—Stelle, a new member of the Express. Armed with no memories and a penchant for chaos, Dan Heng and March found her alone and unconscious in a peculiar room above Herta’s space station with nothing but a vague recollection of her name and a metal bat.
“What are you doing here?” Dan Heng asks. His voice is still scratchy from a killer combination of sleep deprivation and having just slept.
“Nothing,” Stelle says. “I don’t have a room yet.”
“Oh.” Dan Heng watches her for a moment, through the dimness—now that his eyes have adjusted more, he can make out the way her eyes practically shine in the darkness, amber and burning, the way a cat stares at the unseen.
She cocks her head slightly, watching him watch her.
“These are the archives,” Dan Heng says unhelpfully.
“I figured as much.”
Another beat of silence, then he says, “Why didn’t you stay with March?”
Stelle’s eyes leave him, finding interest somewhere on the desktop made invisible in the dimness. “Didn’t feel right,” she manages. “It’s a bedroom.”
“Well, people must sleep somewhere,” Dan Heng says dryly.
“Yeah,” Stelle says. She picks at something on the table—a book, maybe, or one of his many scattered pens. Saying without saying the source of her discomfort.
“You can stay here, for now,” Dan Heng says. “ Just for now. Until you have your own room.”
“Does the Express do that?” she asks. “Make new rooms out of thin air?”
Dan Heng frowns. “I think so. I suppose I wouldn’t know.”
Stelle doesn’t say anything further about the matter, finding herself absorbed with the clicking and unclicking of a pen.
“I’m going back to sleep,” Dan Heng murmurs. His companion hums in response, and her rhythmic clicking lulls him back to sleep.
Things are peaceful aboard the Express. It takes time, getting from place to place—though some theories posit space travel causes lag in the passage of time for some individuals. Dan Heng wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve all aged thousands of years on technicalities. Theories can claim anything, really. It’s up to him to record them.
Outside of that one night, Stelle is ever-chaotic. She takes out all the cushions from the couches in the common space searching for coins. She listens to every song on the jukebox once through, then hits shuffle and listens to them all again. She downs three cups of Himeko’s coffee and spends the duration of the next few light-hours bouncing off the pristine walls.
Himeko and Welt theorize that Stelle, in her state of amnesia, is attempting to acquire as many new experiences as possible to fill the space in her hippocampus where memories should be, but privately, Dan Heng thinks this is just who she is: a force of nature, an inscrutable being. He wonders if there is any understanding her.
At some point, Dan Heng takes to archiving the strange things she does on a day-to-day basis, as close to days as the lot of them get. Hard to evaluate time in space without precise measurement, and none of them care enough to calculate it. They go to bed when Welt tells them to, and wake up to the acrid smell of Himeko’s brewing coffee.
Either way, the point is that sometimes—often—Dan Heng will leave the archives early for the sole purpose of seeking out Stelle, cataloging what she’s doing. This is the only instance in which he makes exacting calculations for time, recording when and where things happen: the parlor car at 0500/2400 light-hours, inspecting and collecting every stray pillow feather; the hallway in the passenger car at 1900/2400 light-hours, stacking chairs one on top of another until the whole tower came crashing down in a flurry of metal and cushion; the conductor’s car at 1200/2400 light-hours, just sitting and sniffing, taking in the smell of smooth metal and whirring machinery. It’s fascinating. Dan Heng can’t possibly hope to understand.
Perhaps there’s some merit in Himeko and Welt’s theory, that Stelle is akin to a blank slate searching for something to occupy the emptiness. But there’s that strange look in her eyes—the one that implies some sort of scheming, that knows on all levels exactly what she’s doing, that these are conscious choices made with the consequences in mind—and he thinks maybe she’s more unknowable than any of them could possibly imagine.
This is what compels him to chase her around the many cars of the express, recording her comings and goings in the hopes that somehow her behavior will come together in a way that makes sense to him. He is an archivist first and foremost; this is what he does. Make sense of history. Piece together parts that don’t fit neatly.
On this specific day (or the space equivalent thereof), he finds her in the storage car throwing Thief’s Instincts into the air and shattering them with her bat. The little glass pieces of memory made solid fracture into a million tiny pieces that hail down like very dangerous rain.
“Are you crazy?” Dan Heng asks. He kneels to inspect all the shattered glass around her, careful not to touch any. His hands are delicate and precious, after all. “This could hurt you.”
“It hasn’t yet,” Stelle says, and though he knows she’s joking, probably, her voice is so monotone that it’s hard to tell.
“This isn’t funny,” Dan Heng snaps. He’s not used to losing his temper like this; even when he snaps, his voice is carefully controlled, the irritation wound tight and dispersing itself across every syllable. “If you get hurt, what are the rest of us supposed to do? Just patch you up like nothing happened?”
“You don’t have to,” Stelle says. “It’s just glass.”
Dan Heng can’t say anything to that, his fists balling at his sides. Stay cool. Breathe in, and out. There’s no reason for this to get him as worked up as it does, but for some reason the prospect of her getting hurt—no, of any of them getting hurt, he reasons, because why would she be the only one he cares about—infuriates him.
“I’m probably crazy,” Stelle says. “There’s probably something wrong with me. And I don’t think it’ll change. I think this is just how I am.”
There’s a furious pause in which Dan Heng searches desperately for something to say. He doesn’t know how to tell her that being crazy and being self-injurious do not have to go hand-in-hand.
“I don’t care if you’re crazy,” he manages. “That’s fine. That’s you. Just don’t… hurt yourself.”
Stelle looks down at the shattered glass all around her, half-lidded eyes vacant but searching, looking for something. She crouches in the circle of glass that hasn’t fallen on her—a perfect circle, like the shards avoided her on purpose—and looks down at the remnants of the materials she’d shattered.
“So these can hurt me, huh,” she murmurs. “I didn’t think they could. After all, if there’s a weapon of mass destruction living inside of me, how could I not deserve a little bit?”
“That’s stupid,” Dan Heng says.
“Is it?”
“I don’t recall you choosing to have a Stellaron in you.”
“I wouldn’t know. Maybe I chose it before losing my memories. Maybe they did experiments on me.”
“Let’s operate under the assumption that you didn’t choose it, then. And even if you did, that doesn’t mean you deserve to get hurt. It just means you’re a little more… special than others.”
Stelle looks up at him. Her expression is indecipherable, as per usual, but Dan Heng likes to think he sees a little bit of understanding in there, somewhere. A little bit of gratitude. At the very least, something that means he can get up and put ten feet between them to quell the strange heat spider-webbing through his chest.
So that’s exactly what he does. He leaves.
Stelle stares after him, wistful. She does not know what for.
A few nights later (or the space equivalent of such), Dan Heng wakes after a fitful tussle with sleep to find glow-in-the-dark amber eyes staring back at him from his desk chair once again. He jumps, pulling his blankets up to his chest, leaning back on his elbows. The slat rack of his futon pokes and prods at him.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
“Nothing,” Stelle says. “Just sitting.”
“In the archives, because…?”
“Because I wanted to.” She does not offer more information than this, staring at him intently. Her gaze is unsettling, like it sees into the deepest parts of him—the parts he takes such pains to keep hidden. The parts he hasn’t told anyone yet.
“Oh.” Dan Heng’s eyes adjust, finding the slight furrow between her brows, absorbing the dimness tinged with light blue. There’s a word for how she looks like this, in this strange, distant lighting: ethereal, maybe, or otherworldly. Something not of this spacecraft or any of the worlds it’s been to. Something Dan Heng wants to peel back the layers of until he understands it in full.
That’s not a thought he needs to pursue for now.
“Pom-Pom tells me we’re jumping soon,” Stelle says. “Probably tomorrow.”
“Okay,” says Dan Heng. “Thanks for telling me—”
“I get the feeling,” Stelle interrupts, cutting off the tail end of his sentence, “that we’ll stop after the jump. There’s something there.”
“Okay,” Dan Heng says again. Strangely, he believes her, this strange person he’s met and shared living quarters with for a week or so, at this point.
“Okay.” Stelle shifts in the desk chair; it creaks minutely. Should probably get that oiled up. “I started playing games, by the way.”
“You what?”
“Games. Video games. On my phone.”
“That’s, ah, good.”
Stelle averts her gaze from him. “Since I don’t have any memories, I figure it’ll help me understand you—the rest of you—better.” When she looks back at him, she seems desperate—for something. Dan Heng’s not sure what. He’s afraid to find out.
“I’m sure it will help,” he says.
“Thanks.” She breathes out, a relieved sigh. Like she’d been seeking his approval—but why would she be? She hardly knows him.
A beat passes. Stelle’s eyes flutter closed before springing open again; the action makes Dan Heng want to laugh, though he’s never been much of a laugher. He supposes his desk chair could use some variety in its occupant from time to time.
“Are you going to sleep there?” Dan Heng asks.
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“Are you going to sleep at all?”
Stelle’s silence speaks volumes. She still doesn’t have a room, Dan Heng remembers. It’s only been a few days, really—a week, at most. He’s seen her passed out in odd places in the parlor and storage cars.
“Sleep there, then,” he says. “Just for tonight.”
He can just barely see it—he might be imagining it—but the corners of Stelle’s mouth quirk up, just a bit. Gratitude, he wonders, or something else.
“Okay,” Stelle says, “good night.”
“Night,” Dan Heng says, burying himself into his covers, fighting back the suffocating drop in the pit of his stomach. He probably won’t sleep much tonight. Not that he ever sleeps much any night.
Stelle’s breathing softens out after a few moments, and Dan Heng falls asleep to it, a broken, tumultuous sleep that leaves him waking often to his heart hammering behind his ribcage. In his bookshelves across the room, his personal archive seems to burn with want.
But this is not something to bear much mind. He’ll be fine.
And the next day, when they reach Jarilo-VI, there are very different things to worry about.