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“Please,” Eva whispers, her voice shaking, “don’t make this harder.”
Grace would be more shocked by that show of emotion if he weren’t currently standing on a countertop, attempting to fend off two suit-wearing goons with a ballpoint pen. His daemon told him they were goons from the start, but he didn’t want to believe her. And now look where they are: betrayed by a friend, and menaced by goons.
A dog daemon lunges for Grace’s daemon and she leaps from the countertop, claws skidding on the floor as she dives for the door. Eva’s snow leopard bounds onto her desk, his piercing eyes fixed on Grace’s daemon as she scratches frantically at the door jam.
“You don’t have to do this,” Grace stutters, sidling down the countertop, knees bent and free hand pawing at the cabinets at his back just as fruitlessly as his daemon’s paws scrape at the door. “Please, I don’t want to die!”
Eva opens her mouth, then closes it and presses her trembling lips tightly together. One hand is fisted in the snow leopard’s ruff. The second dog daemon, something huge and fluffy, lunges toward the door just as a guard outside responds to the scratching and opens it.
Grace’s daemon takes the chance and darts past his legs. He staggers back to avoid touching her and Grace scrambles inelegantly off the countertop, shoving the closest goon in the shoulder and somehow avoiding his grasping hands. And then he’s off, sprinting after the russet streak of his soul dashing ahead, weaving between exclaiming people until they’re outside and making a break for the fenceline.
He knows they won’t make it. Human and daemon voices rise behind them, a cacophony of shouting and barking and squawking and yelling and howling. But they have to try, and they do, racing for their life and their freedom, Grace’s yellow raincoat flapping against his ribs as the chain-link fence gets closer with every pounding footstep through the dry grass.
There’s a rainbow overhead in the overcast sky, and that should be some kind of an omen – but instead it’s a cruel dichotomy as a dark shape streaks past Grace and bowls his daemon right over. He falls with her, and a moment later there is weight on his back as the greyhound’s person catches him, pinning him facedown in the grass while the other goons catch up.
They’re meters away from the fence. They almost made it.
(They never would have made it.)
Grace spits dirt and yells for his daemon. She shrieks back, pinned just as tightly as he is, her ears flat against her head, white teeth flashing under the rainbow. One of the bigger dogs has her paws on her shoulders, holding her tight against the ground even as her tail whips violently against her captors’ legs. Grace kicks just as uselessly until more people come to hold him down.
Silver paws cross his field of view and Grace turns his head, tears blurring his vision. It doesn’t help that his glasses are crooked on his face, mashed between his cheek and the grass. He wheezes out another plea, but Eva’s expression is resolute. Whatever moment of emotion she’d had back in her office is gone, now. They’re three days from launch, and she is doing what she has to do. She is always doing what she has to do.
Grace admired her a lot more for that when he wasn’t on the receiving end.
“I can’t,” he gasps. “Please, don’t – please –”
Carl stands a little in front of Eva, as if shielding her from the sight of Grace’s cowardice. His cinnamon-furred black bear daemon huffs next to him, lowering her head to nudge the snow leopard, who simply flicks an ear at her and wraps his immense bushy tail tighter around his feet where he sits at Eva’s side. His discomfort is still visible, even if Eva has hidden hers behind her professional mask.
The doctor kneels next to Grace, syringe glinting in the sunlight. Grace chokes out a garbled plea, still begging for his life even as he sees the refusal in their faces.
“You know who you are,” Carl says. “You’ll do great.”
The needle slides into Grace’s neck with a pinch of pain, and the last glimpse he gets of Earth is the backs of people he thought he could call friends as they turn and walk away from him.
“Merce,” he whispers. “Mercy...”
“No chance, lad,” the doctor says, rising to his feet – but Grace wasn’t talking to them. He was calling for his daemon.
Even cornered and pinned and trapped as she was, his fox never closed her jaws to bite. It’s just not in their nature.
When he wakes up in the sterile room with years of hair and beard growth and two dead crewmates, he doesn’t remember her name.
He doesn’t remember his own name, either, but somehow it’s more distressing to not recall the name of the little red fox he knows is a part of him. If he can’t remember her, how is he ever supposed to remember himself?
It takes time; time they don’t have. Time that costs them, later, when they barely know enough about the ship to attempt to escape the alien vessel that pursues them, and then even less about the spacesuits and EVAs, knowledge they need to reach the capsule tossed toward them across the black void of space. There’s a structure on the back of the EVA suit like a backpack that the fox can fit into, and Grace remembers Stratt talking about optimal daemon sizes when choosing her ideal crew.
His fox is in the same size bracket. He really was always the backup.
There are windows in the backpack, so his fox warns him when their line gets caught on projections on the hull, or when it’s starting to run out. She still gets thrown around when the line tangles and he loses his grip on the capsule, then laughs right along with him when he catches it again at the very edge of his fingertips’ reach. He holds it aloft in triumph, then returns carefully to the airlock.
The next capsule tumbles directly into the airlock itself, and contains, among other things, a tiny doll-like figure – a humanoid, with a small creature attached to its back.
“They could see me,” the fox says breathlessly. “Even inside the suit, they could see me. What kind of technology do they have?”
Of course, they find out later, it’s not technology at all. It’s simply alien senses.
“Grace,” Grace says in the tunnel, pointing to himself. The living boulder points at him. “Grace,” he repeats, confused as the pointing becomes more agitated.
“Mercy,” the fox says over his shoulder, and the alien relaxes, then makes a noise and movement that, hopefully, is it introducing itself.
They call it Rocky, and it is brilliantly clever, and it has no daemon.
This makes sense. Humans are the only creatures on Earth that have daemons. Most sci-fi stories that contain aliens depict them without daemons. It was a scandal when Star Trek first aired to have Mr. Spock appear daemonless, and only possible because the whole set was elevated to allow the actor’s daemon to keep pace with him under his feet. For a main character, someone who was supposed to be sympathetic, it was nearly unheard of.
And now Grace can confirm that it was also scientifically accurate. Rocky has no daemon, and doesn’t seem to understand Mercy’s significance at first. Grace tries to explain, and over time they add enough words to their shared language database that he thinks he gets his point across.
It means Rocky knows what to do when they nearly die skimming Adrian’s atmosphere. When Grace wakes up with a mask on his face and a trail of black soot and silver mercury dragged across the floor panels below, Mercy is tucked against him. Rocky grabbed them both to keep them close to each other, and they’ve got matching burn scars to prove it.
Somehow, it doesn’t feel violating at all. It feels like salvation.
Mercy takes it upon herself to watch Rocky sleep as he recovers, while Grace throws himself into studying the taumoeba. He cracks it after two weeks of work, and has no one to celebrate the breakthrough with – not even his exhausted daemon, white chin on her black paws and yellow gaze fixed on the jumbled pile of their motionless best friend.
As it turns out, they’re asleep when Rocky finally wakes up. Mercy is the first one to lunge for him from their blanket nest, winding in circles around the xenonite ball as Grace plasters himself to it in the only kind of hug he can give his friend safely.
<Grace Mercy find solution, question?> Rocky asks, and Grace can’t help but smile.
Of course, it can’t be that easy. Not that any of this has been easy, but it felt like they finally caught a break when they found out that Rocky had more than enough astrophage fuel to return to his planet and could give them enough to get back to Earth. Mercy paces the width of the tunnel as Grace says their goodbyes. He’d felt her breath panting hot against the back of his neck as they had walked the halls of Rocky’s ship and knew she was coming to a conclusion about something, but couldn’t tell what.
Now, she stops and faces Rocky behind the clear panel he built for them, so they could see him. A sense his people never knew existed, and yet he had adjusted and accommodated to their sight far better than they had found ways to accommodate his own senses.
“It’s the xenonite, isn’t it?” Mercy asks. “You build with it, but you imbue it with yourselves. It’s like the armored bears of legend. It’s a noble gas; it shouldn’t be able to react with anything, bond with anything, or be a solid, but you make it do so. That’s your daemon. That’s your soul.”
<Grace Mercy smart,> Rocky says. He always combines their names like that, even if he’s only speaking to one of them, like now. He understands they’re two halves of a whole. <Eridian daemons unknown. Maybe Rocky study once home.>
“I’m right,” Mercy says. “I know I’m right. And you used some of it to patch our ship. You’re sending it with us. Doesn’t that hurt?”
<Grace Mercy friend,> Rocky tells her. <Helping friends never hurt.>
Grace begs to differ, as the ships detach from their shared tunnel and begin to head off in their separate directions. He should be happy, going home at last. But it feels like he’s leaving a piece of his soul behind on that glittering ship.
“I feel it too,” Mercy tells him, and Grace wonders what that might mean.
And then, of course, the taumoeba escapes.
In the end, the decision is shockingly easy. Yao had said something about finding someone worth dying for – and the thing is, Grace has already done that, almost without realizing it. He nearly burned up in the atmosphere of an alien planet, and he can’t say it was for Earth. It hasn’t been for Earth for a long time. He says as much in the recordings to Eva, hoping against hope that she’s the one who finds them, or they make their way to her eventually, at least. Half his ramblings won’t make sense to anyone else, anyone who wasn’t there during the mad dash of Project Hail Mary, months spent living cheek to jowl on aircraft carriers and cargo ships and remote military bases. Still, anyone else should be able to get the gist of his message. He’s not coming back. He was never supposed to in the first place. He’s got something more important to do, instead.
And so, wrapped in patches of gleaming xenonite that Rocky wove to repair the Hail Mary’s stricken hull, Grace and his fox daemon turn around to look for the one being in the universe who needs them, the one being in the universe that they can save.
They don’t bring the translation computer when they dock with the powerless ship’s tunnel. They know enough of his language by ear now to hear what Rocky says when they knock on the clear panel built for their alien senses.
<Grace Mercy come back for me, question?>
Of course they did. He’s their best friend in the universe.
“We’ve saved Earth, buddy,” Grace says, his helmet pressed to the xenonite, palm flat against the panel. Rocky presses one limb to his palm, and another to where Mercy has her nose touching the clear surface. “Now it’s time to save Erid.”
And, together, they do.