Chapter Text
Grace is always feeling cold, these days. Sometimes, it’s bad enough that he gets the shakes and has to walk around the Hail Mary wrapped in a blanket to stave it off, but most of the time it’s just a consistent chill. Like winter in the classroom, when the school was pinching pennies by setting the thermostat slightly lower than anyone wanted it.
Those winter days must be so much worse now, he figures. He’s run the numbers more times than he can keep track of, and no matter how optimistic he’s being there’s no chance for the beetles to have arrived with their miracle solution yet. His kids—those of them who haven’t starved to death, though he tries not to think of that—are currently dealing with yearlong snow falls and constantly dwindling supplies. He can relate especially to the latter.
Grace sits on the floor, taking count of his pre-packaged food stuffs. The floor is cold and hard beneath him—he’s too bony by far these days to be sprawling about on the floor, but old habits die hard—and the supplies before him are dreadfully meagre. If it weren’t for him supplementing his diet with lab grown Taumoeba—somehow even grosser than coma slurry, by the way—they would’ve already run out ages ago. He’d been hoping to ration all the way to Erid, but the way it’s looking he’ll run out at least a couple of months before they arrive, and then it’s Taumoeba all the way. He doesn’t need to be a dietician to know that such an unvaried diet is going to wreak havoc on his system. He’s starting to seriously fear scurvy.
“You’re sure your pals will be able to figure this out when we arrive, Rock?” he says, trying not to sound too despondent. Scurvy. What a joke. Might as well get an eye patch and a wooden leg while he’s at it. His kids would’ve loved that.
“Yes. Eridian scientists very good. Will synthetize food for Grace. Can make all the vitamins.” Rocky, cooped up behind his xenonite wall and fidgeting with his latest project, turns slightly to indicate he’s paying attention to Grace’s predicament. “Grace not feeling good, question?”
“No no, I’m fine,” Grace assures. “Seriously, nothing to worry about.” He hoists the blanket further up his shoulders and suppresses a shiver.
“Grace talk very quickly. Grace lying, question?”
“What? No!”
Rocky pauses in his work, and though he has no eyes with which to give Grace a look of judgement, the impression is clear.
“Grace lying, statement.”
They’ve been doing without the translator for a while now. At the moment, Grace kind of misses it. With its flat affectation, tone doesn’t really come across. Before spending a few years immersed in Eridian, Grace would’ve said you can’t convey tone through whistles either, but he’s learned better. Whistles can be extremely scathing.
“Hey, no, come on,” he protests. “It’s really fine. We’ve got plenty of Taumoeba, it’s not like I’m going to starve.”
Rocky taps two of his hands together and sort squirms in place. “Grace lose lots weight. I can feel Grace bones.”
That’s a visceral enough image to make Grace wince. He’s seen himself in the mirror, and his ribs and hips and shoulders do in fact protrude unpleasantly; his collarbones look like they’re about to cut through the skin. He’d hoped Rocky hadn’t noticed, but it’s hard to hide from sonar.
“Those were fake muscles anyway,” he mutters. “I shouldn’t have gotten attached.” He’s absolutely missing the muscles.
Rocky keeps tapping anxiously. Grace is feeling kind of bad for bringing up the subject. They’ve talked this to death already; dragging it back up accomplishes nothing but to make Rocky fret. Grace has really got to learn to keep his mouth shut.
“How’s your project going?” he asks instead, doing his best to put on a chipper voice. “You’ve been at it for days.”
“Is finished. Only checking details.”
Despite the good news, Rocky still stands slumped and unhappy. Grace scoots closer to the xenonite barrier and gives it a gentle nudge as a stand in for touching his friend directly.
“Well, aren’t you going to try it on? Come on, I bet you’re going to be even worse at moving in it than I was.”
If there’s one thing that’ll always perk Rocky up, it’s the opportunity to show off, closely followed by the chance at making fun of Grace. He immediately straightens.
“I very good at move in suit! I will show Grace!”
With that said, he gathers up his project—a mishmash of small-ish connected xenonite plates—and scuttles off for the airlock. Grace spares a moment to chuckle to himself before using a counter as support to heave to his feet, joints creaking unhappily. He’s really got to stop sitting and sleeping on the floor.
By the time he makes it to the airlock to Rocky’s side of the ship, his friend has already stepped into his newly constructed suit and is waiting for the airlock to cycle. The suit is of the same design as the one he made for Grace when they went to visit the Eridian ship: transparent xenonite plates connected by golden seams in the general outline of its wearer’s body shape. It’s a clumsy construction compared to a human EVA suit, if infinitely more articulated than the space ball. Also, it reflects light very prettily. Very disco.
“Look at that,” Grace effuses. “The very first Eridian space suit! We’re gonna need to get you a patent.”
“No understand word,” Rocky says. The airlock hisses as it begins pumping in oxygen.
“Patent? I’m not sure it translates.” As far as Grace understands, Eridians don’t do ownership in the same way humans do, and they don’t do money or currency at all. The concept of owning an invention would be, well, alien. “Basically it means you invented it, so it’s yours.”
“Is all Eridians’,” Rocky says, proving Grace’s point. “I ready now. Grace prepare to be amaze.”
“I’m so prepared.”
The airlock opens, and Rocky immediately stumbles and falls over sideways, legs waving in the air. Grace bites the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing as he walks over. He’s already reaching down to help his friend up when he realizes what he’s doing, and then he stops, not sure if it’s okay. The only time they’ve been in a position to touch physically each other was when they had to save the other’s life. While he’s never had a second thought about touching the xenonite ball, the suit is different. Right now, he could lift Rocky up under the arms like an unruly child. Or at least he could if Rocky didn’t weigh as much as a small car. They could hug.
“Need help, buddy?”
Normally, Rocky’s excellent at orienting himself, especially in the relatively low Earth gravity, but he’s clearly having trouble coordinating within the suit. He waves his legs about for a few seconds more before giving a despondent whistle and sprawling on his back. “Yes.”
It’s a joint effort to get him right side up, Grace pushing and Rocky waggling and scrambling until he tips over and makes contact with the floor with all five legs. Grace steps back, hands held out to catch him if he falls again, but Rocky’s moving more carefully this time, one leg at a time like a child learning to walk.
Grace gives a thumbs up. “You’re doing it!”
“Grace being condescending,” Rocky grumbles.
“Grace has earned it,” Grace says. He crouches down and rests on his haunches, putting them at an almost even height. “How’s it feel?”
“Bad bad. Like I can’t feel what outside of body do.”
“Welcome to clothes. Here, try some balance exercises.”
Grace holds up both hands in front of him; Rocky copies the movement, balancing on three legs. They do a little impromptu dance off, leaning from side to side and waggling their hands, letting Rocky get used to navigating himself in the suit. Grace has only used his own xenonite suit the once, though he supposes he’ll get to bring it back out of storage once they reach Erid (darn, he should get back into practice wearing it), but he remembers how clumsy it was. It doesn’t move with the body the way clothing does. The closest comparison he can make is wearing a medieval suit of armor. Rocky acclimates a lot faster than he did.
“You’re a natural,” he says as Rocky does a little twirl, shifting his weight from leg to leg.
“I excellent at make and wear suit.”
“Okay, let’s not get too cocky.” Grace hesitates, hands still in the air in a jazz hands pose. “Can I, uh.” He gestures vaguely.
Rocky gives a half turn and places all but one leg on the floor before reaching out, hesitating in the same way Grace had. They meet halfway, Grace carefully grasping the articulated leg. The transparent material is warm but not hot against his palm and the pads of his fingers, the xenonite smooth like glass. It looks strangely fragile despite being sturdy enough to contain multiple Earth atmospheres. Rocky gives him a few moments, then drops his leg heavily against Grace’s grip, making him unexpectedly stagger under the weight.
“Woah-ha.” Grace laughs, struggling to hold up even this tiny part of Rocky. “I keep forgetting how heavy you are.”
Rocky trills a self-satisfied little melody. “Could lift Grace, easy.”
Using two of his hands, Rocky turns Grace’s arm over. The suit doesn’t have digits, so he does it clumsily, like a person wearing oven mitts. The motion exposes the scar on Grace’s lower arm, a three-pronged Y in the shape of one of Rocky’s hands. Rocky goes as if to touch it, then jerks back with an unhappy little trill.
“Still hurt, question?”
“Nah.” To prove it, Grace pokes the scar with his free hand. The skin there is a little numb, but otherwise hasn’t bothered him in ages. The chemical burns from getting blasted with ammonia took a lot longer to heal, and left a significantly uglier scar. That one does still hurt from time to time, though he’s not about to tell Rocky that. “Something to remember you by,” he says. “Besides, we kind of match.”
Rocky still has scorch marks on his carapace from all the smoke he spewed while in the oxygen rich atmosphere of the Hail Mary. It isn’t as noticeable on his darker, rocky “skin” as Grace’s scar, but it’s still an undeniable and lasting mark. Rocky still looks hesitant, though, arms sort of hanging in the air, so Grace sits back on his haunches and smiles.
“Really,” he says. “When I left for Earth, it made me feel like I was bringing a piece of you with me wherever I went. Made me feel less lonely.”
He’d found himself absently running his fingers over the scar more than once, especially after the Taumoeba leak, when he was hurrying back and not sure if he’d find his friend still alive.
Rocky places himself sturdily on the floor again, stretching himself up as tall as he can get. “Not lonely anymore.”
Great, now Grace is getting all choked up. He’s about to respond when Rocky suddenly jumps like a startled cat. His back hits the inside of the suit and he sort of rattles around in there.
“Woah!” Grace grabs him by both sides to keep him from toppling. “You alright? What was that about?”
“Hear noise! Big splash in airlock!”
Grace frowns down at him. “Splash? Why’d there be a–”
Abruptly, all the main lamps switch to blood red warning lights as Mary’s pleasantly calm voice announces, “Contaminant detected.”
There’s a lot of ways to die at the bottom of a blood ocean. You can get crushed by the depths, or eaten by a monster, or made into a monster, or driven out of your mind by horrific visions—or you can just straight up drown. All of these are making a serious bid for Simon at the moment, but it’s the last that’s getting him fast.
The intruding blood has risen almost all the way to the SM-13’s ceiling, and the eel shaking it about like a child with a toy makes it impossible for Simon to keep his head above the surface. He tries to grab for something, anything, to hold himself upright, but everything is slippery with viscera and he’s still clinging to the black box with his one remaining arm. Thick liquid is burning the inside of his nostrils as one especially vicious shake topples him over backward. He screams as he goes under, and hot blood floods down his throat.
There’s no real fear, in a moment like that, and certainly no thoughts. No real emotions at all, despite the anger and terror and plain desperation that’ve driven him the last few hours of his life. There is simply the purely physical sensations of dying. The pressure inside his chest as his lungs at once try to expel blood and suck in air that isn’t there; the blind flailing of his limbs; the spasms throughout his body as it begins to shut down. He makes no decision to struggle against it, no more than he makes a decision to give in. His mind is an animalistic, incoherent scream.
And then his mind is nothing. It’s shrinking, rapidly going dark, and in that brief moment, there is no body, only clarity. He failed. The black box is still in the sub, about to get crushed and scattered alongside his remains on the ocean floor. He’s dying for nothing.
It’s not fair.
Bright light pierces the void, and he’s falling.
He hits the ground hard, coughing and retching and gasping. Blood crawls reluctantly back up his throat and splatters the floor until he can finally suck in half a breath, and then he’s coughing again because some of the blood went back down. When he looks up everything’s blurry and tinted red, but he finds the precious, blocky shape of the black box just in front of him. He slips in gore as he reaches for it, then just curls up around it as he keeps shuddering and wheezing to get the blood out. He stays like that until he can draw an entire breath without breaking out into shakes.
He has to roll over onto his stomach and push himself up using his elbow to unplaster himself from the floor. Blackness is still creeping in at the edges of his vision as he frantically looks around, seeking threats, but there’s nothing. He’s in a room even smaller than the interior of the SM-13, most of it covered in blood and all of it in complete cacophony. At first he thinks it’s his ears ringing, but then he realizes there’s actual noise: a loud warning siren interspersed with a mild mannered voice from the ceiling. While he can’t make out its words, the general tone is near identical to the sub’s alert system, making his hackles rise.
Right in front of him is a wide-open, circular door. He scrambles up and tries to grab for the doorframe with his free hand, but there is only the one hand and it’s still busy clutching the black box. The sudden disorienting lack makes him lose his balance and he falls face first across the threshold, halfway in and halfway out of the small room. With a great push, he gets up and out, hunched over protectively around the black box. It’s shocking how little he hurts. Everything is numb.
Outside is a short corridor, clean and cramped with instruments and panels all over the walls. For a horrified beat he thinks it, too, is drenched in blood, but it’s just the red flash of warning lights. Now that he’s standing still for a moment, he can make out words between the blares of the siren: “Movement detected. Foreign body detected. Contaminant detected,” going on a loop.
He has no idea where he is. He doesn’t understand.
It has to be a trick, right? It’s like when he passed through the Light and the world dissolved around him, leaving him standing in an impossible, eternal void of storming red, only to moments later be returned to where he started out. Any moment now he’s going to be yanked back and find himself choking on blood.
It’s stupid, but he tries to run. Maybe if he stays in motion reality will somehow fail to catch up, and he’ll be okay.
He stumbles forward, trying for a straight line and staggering in a zig-zag instead, bouncing off the walls and smearing them with blood, but at least he’s moving. He shoulder checks the corner, all but falls around it—
—and collides smack dab with another person.
Instinct kicks in and he goes tense all over, responding as if this is a raid and the stranger a C.O.I. guard; he pushes his shoulder into the person’s chest, twists them around, and slams them into the wall. He’s still holding the black box, now pressed between them, so he can’t get actual hands on the person, and compensates by simply leaning all his weight into them. His legs can barely hold him upright on their own, so it’s more a help than a hindrance, really.
“What—” he tries, but his voice won’t cooperate. He has to snarl all the way from his chest to get the words out, and they still emerge gargled. “What is this?”
And then he has to actually stop—to wait for a response, to breathe—and the stranger comes into shape before him. It’s a man, face too flushed from the flashing lights to make out any exact features except for eyes open wide and terrified. His hands are up in surrender, his mouth gaping, and his body feels oddly fragile, as if about to snap.
“Ooh gosh,” he says, pressing himself backward as if trying to pass through the wall, away from Simon. His voice is high-pitched with fright. “How about we just—just calm down and—holy moly what is that—”
His eyes are on the left side of Simon’s face, expression so shocked and horrified that it actually makes Simon hesitate, wanting to touch his own cheek to see what all the fuss is about. He can barely feel his own body, but the way the man is staring, it’s clear something is very, very wrong with it.
“How about we just, uh, take a deep breath and count to ten—”
Condescending jackass. “Shut the fuck up,” Simon snarls. The man makes an eep sound and presses his eyes closed.
“Okay, okay!” He laughs nervously. “Please—please don’t eat me.”
Eat…? Simon frowns, but as he opens his mouth to speak, something grabs his leg and drags it out from under him. He has absolutely no chance of staying upright on only one leg, and something keeps pulling at him, and he’s on his ass on the floor before he knows it. The shock of impact makes the black box fly from his grip and he panics and throws himself after it. When he looks back up, the black box once again clutched tightly, the man has retreated several steps and looks about ready to bolt. There’s blood smeared all over his front. He looks transparently scared for his life.
“I’m—I—” The sharp edges of the box cuts into Simon’s arm but he only hugs it closer. He tries to swallow but there’s a lump in his throat. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
He didn’t mean to what? The man keeps backing up and Simon wants to grab for him, keep him from disappearing because if he does Simon might never see another human face again, but he doesn’t know if this stranger is C.O.I. or Eden or a hallucination or how to express any of this.
“Please don’t go,” he begs.
The man stops, one leg still hanging in the air from shying away. He puts it down slowly and then just stands like that, hesitating, while Simon sways even when sitting down, probably looking like a rat that’s been not only drowned but also stepped on. Blackness has started encroaching on his field of view again, and there’s this new weird whistling noise that won’t shut up.
The man clears his throat and visibly steels himself. “How did you—no, yes Rocky, I know, no, I’m not going to just leave him here. Well what do you think we should—”
He keeps talking but isn’t looking at Simon anymore, eyes instead trained on the floor between them. Simon blinks and follows his gaze and yeah, there’s something there, no bigger than a toddler and weirdly shiny, reflecting the flashing lights. It moves in a jerky, arrhythmic way and has way too many joints, like the surviving bugs you’ll still sometimes find crawling around in the corners of Eden as well as C.O.I. stations. It has to be a hallucination, but it’s neither scary nor alluring, just—weird. What’s the point of this trick?
“Wha—” he starts, but it’s suddenly hard to keep his eyes on anything because the world is tilting precariously, and his mouth won’t make the shapes he tells it to. The black box slips once again from his grip, and the last thing he sees is the man leaping toward him as everything goes dark.
It’s late August, and Stratt is winding a scarf around her head and pulling a hat down over her ears before going outside, because if she doesn’t she’ll risk frostbite. It’s been years and still she isn’t used to this incessant cold, but Stratt has always been a practical woman, and though she hates the need she has long since reworked her routine to always bundle up before going outside. Some of her more stubborn—not to mention sentimental—coworkers still insist on it not being that bad, and Stratt is as always the one forced to remind them that the Earth is dying and that they need to wear a damn hat.
“You don’t need to come with me, you know,” she says as she’s pulling on a pair of gloves. “I’m just getting some air.”
Carl, equally as bundled up, just gives her a blank look, as though she just talked a foreign language to him. It’s what he does whenever someone’s being stupid and he isn’t feeling up to acknowledging it out loud. Stratt shrugs.
“Suit yourself.”
Cold air hits her like a wall as she steps outside, but at least it isn’t snowing. The early dawn sky is a pale blue and completely clear, meaning it’ll probably only get colder as the day goes on. She pulls the scarf up higher to cover her nose—the air burns her nostrils with every breath—and walks over to lean on the railing while Carl takes a seat close to the door, where he can keep her in easy line of sight.
He’s always been protective—it comes with the job description—but ever since she went on the run with what remained of the Hail Mary team, he’s taken it up a notch. Technically, no one’s supposed to know she’s present at the research station, but it’s an open secret at best. At any time, some crumbling government or organization could decide to take out their frustrations out on her, even if it’d be a monumental waste of already dwindling resources. Stratt had once pointed out that it’s unlikely that someone will show up and try to shoot her in the middle of the ocean, and Carl had responded that they’re not the only people with access to a boat. Thus, he insists on accompanying her whenever she goes outside.
In a fair world, they’d both be nearing retirement age by now, busy not scrounging for food and equipment but planning bingo nights, or whatever old people used to do in the good old days. Well, Carl would; Stratt would probably always have found a way to turn herself into a scapegoat trying to save the world.
The sun has just started to peek over the horizon when, suddenly, there’s a flash of light so bright it blinds her. Stratt throws herself to the ground, expecting to hear gunshots or feel her skin shred from a bomb strike, but instead there’s just a loud noise of something heavy hitting metal. She blinks her eyes open, having to squint past bright dots of light still obscuring her vision, and sees a dark figure stagger upright a few meters away.
It must be said that her first thought is not one of empathy for a person clearly in distress, but rather the immediate, clear-cut notion that someone has airdropped a hitman practically on top of her. This is, of course, ridiculous, which she realizes once she takes a moment to actually analyze the situation. There’s no parachute, no plane, and the person looks like they’re about to drop dead on the spot.
Stratt holds out a hand at Carl, who’s stood up and drawn his weapon, urging him to wait while she herself slowly straightens and calls out, “Hey.”
The figure jolts like they just got an electric shock and zeroes in on Stratt with a predator’s intent. A cold chill runs down Stratt’s back, but she stays calm and keeps her hands out at her sides, trying to appear non-threatening. The newcomer has yet to notice Carl.
It’s a woman, Stratt notes, though it’s hard to tell: she’s entirely soaked in viscous red liquid, leaving both her clothing and her hair plastered to her skin. There’s at least a few square meters of the stuff surrounding her, as though she brought an entire tub of it with her when she appeared. Stratt’s still considering what it might be when she’s hit by the smell, metallic and pungent to the point that she nearly throws up. Blood.
“Please stay calm,” she says, the words aimed at herself as much as at the woman. Stratt hasn’t had to work this hard to keep a mask on since taking her goodbye of Ryland Grace, which she’d rather not think about. How did that much blood just—appear on their deck? It can’t possible all come from the woman; never mind that she’d be dead, a human being simply doesn’t have anywhere near that much blood to begin with.
The woman does not heed Stratt’s advice.
“What the fuck is going on?” she shouts. She too has her arms up, but it’s in a pose of aggressive readiness as opposed to one of non-confrontation. “Where the fuck am I? How—how…”
Her voice trails off as she looks around, her head tilting back and back and her mouth falling open as she takes in the sky as though she’s never seen it before. She appears to be shaking, droplets of blood falling off her, and is breathing more rapidly than a marathon runner.
Stratt takes a step closer, and the woman’s attention snaps back to her. Her expression shifts from horrified awe to cold resolution, and one of her hands drops to her belt. She draws a gun.
Stratt recoils, but Carl is faster. He lifts his weapon and fires—not a gun but a taser, hitting the woman square in the back. She makes a gurgling noise and goes stiff as a board before falling over. Carl steps over and kicks the gun away; she’d never had the chance to raise it, and Stratt isn’t sure whether she’d meant to fire it. Certainly she’d been prepared to—Stratt’s seen that particular expression before—but even under the terror and shock on her face, there’d been too much control. She wouldn’t have fired out fear, only necessity.
She’s groaning into the blood, now, nearly making Stratt retch again at the sight. Carl, meanwhile, is being the consummate professional and not caring one lick about getting gore on his clothes as gets on his knees and restrains the woman.
“Stay down,” he warns when she weakly attempts to buck him off.
Just then, the door into the ship proper swings open and a member of the science team steps outside, ratty clipboard in hand. He is, of course, not wearing his hat.
“Oh good, you’re here,” he says, glancing distractedly up at Stratt. “You should come inside, we just got some very strange readings on the…”
His voice trails off as he takes in the scene. Stratt can see it on him the moment he’s hit by the smell.
“Oh,” he says, covering his nose and mouth with one hand. “Oh dear.”