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There was a guy in Ryland’s undergrad cohort named Denny. Denny had been pre-med, which meant he was a neurotic, competitive liar. Before every major exam, he would stand outside the door yawning theatrically and insisting to anyone who would listen that he hadn’t studied at all because he’d been up late playing video games. Ryland had never believed him. He’d seen the thick, rubber-banded brick of blue flashcards stretching the pocket of his gray hoodie too many times.
Denny also didn’t go to parties. At first he blamed being under twenty-one, which Ryland found rich considering he’d watched him buy Adderall from Josh in the library basement. Once they were finally legal, Ryland tried dragging him out for his birthday. Denny cracked the dorm door open just long enough to explain he had a shadowing shift at six in the morning.
Senior year Ryland stopped inviting him and started telling him where the party was going to be, in case he changed his mind. Denny never did. He got into three medical schools, picked the one closest to his parents, and the last real conversation Ryland remembered having with him was outside a campus coffee shop. Denny had suggested, with total sincerity, that Ryland should consider applying to medical school too.
Ryland had said no so fast that Denny coughed into his coffee, laughing. He told him he’d change his mind once he realized a biology degree qualified him for exactly two things, teaching and unemployment. He wasn’t wrong about much, Denny, but he was wrong about that. Ryland had gone into xenobiology instead, which qualified him for even less. Unfortunately, it also meant he was about to learn one of medicine’s more basic skills the hard way.
He looked down at his left arm. He was sitting in the lab chair, a tourniquet pulled tight around his bicep. It was a thick band of black nylon webbing with a plastic buckle that looked like a seatbelt component. It probably had an official name, but Ryland didn’t know it.
On the lab table, his laptop was playing a sketchy video tutorial filmed in the early two thousands from a Russian guy who vaguely resembled Dimitri. Dimitri was currently explaining how to draw your own blood with unsettling nonchalance.
If he’d taken Denny’s advice, he’d already know how to do this. He couldn’t even bring himself to imagine it. He’d always been so sure he was headed for molecular biology, had never once wanted to be a doctor, but he tried anyway, because the ship was small and some days his memories were the only thing he had left to work with. Maybe all he’d have left of Earth, eventually. He flexed his fingers, watched the tendons move under his skin instead. If he had gone to medical school, Stratt would’ve never tapped him for the mission. He would be back on Earth with the rest of the doctors, starving at a slightly slower rate.
“Grace knows procedure now, question?” Rocky asked.
“Not yet,” Ryland wiped the sweat from his brow with his free forearm. “I want to watch it one more time.”
Rocky had been in his ball for the better part of half an hour. He’d watched the little sphere roll itself into three different positions against the floor. First he’d settled near the wall, patient. Then he’d drifted closer to the table between them, less patient. Now he was parked directly across from Ryland’s workstation, all arms visible through the curve of the ball, two of them tapping together in an impatient rhythm. Ryland suspected it meant that he should just get on with it and gore himself already.
“I’m getting to it, okay?” Ryland muttered and leaned forward to pause fake Dimitri.
Rocky’s ball rolled an inch closer. “Grace say ‘getting to it’ before.”
“That was, like, ten minutes ago.”
“Thirteen,” Rocky corrected.
He looked down at the tourniquet, then back up at the ball, offended on principle. “You’re timing me?”
“Yes.” A pause. Rocky’s carapace rotated a few degrees, as if tilting his head. “Rocky is counting.”
“Why?”
“Rocky try to calculate how much waiting is necessary.” One of his frontal claws pointed toward the frozen Russian on the laptop.
Ryland let out a breath. “It’s… not necessary.”
“Then eliminate step.”
Ryland stared at the glass, waiting for the punchline, but Rocky remained perfectly still inside the sphere. A dry laugh slipped out before he could stop it.
“Okay,” he said. “I hear you, big guy.”
“Rocky did not ask you to hear,” he clarified usefully. “Rocky ask you to stab.”
“That’s a… very bad way to put it,” Ryland said. “You have no bedside manner.”
“Bed is in bedroom,” Rocky countered. “This is lab table. Stab.”
“Fine, fine.” Ryland dragged the sterile tray closer with an exaggerated groan. “Stabbing myself. Fun.”
This was Rocky’s stupid fault anyway. Ever since Ryland had translated the medical files on human dietary deficiencies, Rocky spent days obsessing over scurvy and beriberi. He’d turned into a full-blown hypochondriac by proxy, interrupting perfectly normal conversations to inspect Ryland’s fingernails or ask whether his gums had always looked that color. Since Rocky couldn’t actually see color, they’d worked out a system of hexadecimal colors instead. It kept Rocky informed on what Pantone his mouth was at any given day.
It was a real possibility, long term, that Ryland would develop these conditions and eventually lose all his teeth, among other things. He just didn’t feel like adding it to the list of concerns right now. Rocky disagreed.
His right hand closed over the butterfly needle’s plastic wings. He brought it in toward the crook of his elbow, angled the way fake Dimitri kept insisting it needed to be, but his left hand twitched. Just enough that the tubing jerked and the angle went from thirty degrees to something closer to forty-five.
Ryland forced his right hand forward again, but his left arm seized. His muscles locked up, reflexively resisting the intrusion. His mouth went dry, then wet, and for an impossible second he could taste the drug again, years later, like his body had never stopped waiting for it. The needle shook so hard the plastic wings blurred.
Rocky’s ball rushed forward. “Grace okay, question?”
“Nope,” Ryland breathed. “Nope. No.”
He yanked his right hand back, the butterfly needle clattering onto the sterile tray. The buckle at his bicep took two tries before he snapped the tourniquet loose. The black strap fell away, and he slumped back into the lab chair, chest heaving.
“I can’t do it, buddy.” Ryland looked over at him. “I—I just can’t. Maybe another day.”
Rocky didn’t move for a moment. Then, “No. Grace say maybe another day, four days ago. Also three days ago. Also yesterday.”
“Okay, well, today makes five,” Ryland retorted, jerking his arm so hard the tourniquet slid off completely and hit the floor.
“Rocky did not say anything, four days,” he said. “Rocky did not say anything, three days. Rocky is saying something now.”
He dropped his head into his palms and let his breath out. He stayed like that for a moment longer than he needed to, hiding behind his fingers. When he finally dropped his hands, he’d arranged his face into something calm. Rocky’s ball didn’t so much as twitch, unconvinced.
“Explain,” Rocky said.
“There’s nothing to explain. I don’t love needles. Lots of people don’t love needles.”
“Grace afraid of needle, question?”
“I’m not—” He stopped himself, because the sentence didn’t have anywhere good to go. “It’s not that deep, Rock. Can we just, I don’t know, table this?”
“Table this means stop talking, question?”
“Yeah. Table this means stop talking.”
“Rocky does not want to table this.” Rocky’s ball rolled closer, and his voice had gone flatter, more insistent. “Grace cannot avoid forever.”
Ryland stared at the floor for a long moment. “I’m fine.”
“No. Grace is not fine. Grace has been trying for forty minutes. Leaking.”
“Okay, yes, I know!” Ryland threw his hands up, taking two quick steps away from the table before turning back to face the ball. “I am entirely aware of the clock, Rocky! You’ve made your point!”
For a moment Rocky didn’t respond at all. Then his arms drew in, one after another, until all five sat pulled close against his body, folded small in a way Ryland hadn’t seen from him before.
“Rocky has not made point.” There was a short pause before the translator caught up with him. “Rocky is worried, statement. Will not repeat.”
The anger drained out of Ryland so fast it made his knees feel weak. He lowered himself back into the lab chair. Through the window, the stars had started to thin into a smear of black. He tried to pick out one, just one, the way he used to find the Big Dipper from his childhood home, but the ship was moving too fast now to hold them still.
“I’m sorry.” His hands found each other in his lap. “I know you’re—you’re trying to help. I just—I don’t want to talk about it. It’s not something you can fix, it’s not, it’s just a thing that happened. A long time ago. It’s not even interesting, it’s just—”
“Rocky find many things interesting.” The words came out before Ryland had finished speaking. “Even bad things.” After a pause, his arms unfolded slightly from where they’d drawn in. “This also. Rocky will find interesting.”
The solemnity of it caught him off guard, and he laughed despite himself. “That’s one hell of a pitch, pal.”
“Is true pitch. Not hell pitch.”
“No, it’s—” Ryland snorted. “It’s an expression. Hell of a pitch means a good pitch. Really good.”
“Then why say hell, question? Hell is bad place.”
“I don’t know, bud, English doesn’t make sense. It means good. Trust me.”
“Yes. Rocky trusts Grace, statement.”
Ryland opened his mouth to offer another quick, sarcastic comeback, but the words died before they hit his teeth.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, me… me too, Rocky. I trust you.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Rocky stayed where he was, making no move to roll closer. Ryland looked down at the tray. The clear tubing coiled over the steel in a loose curve, waiting for something to move through it.
“Okay.” He let out a breath, and then another. “So. You know the part—the whole story, obviously, you know. When they took me. I told you that, that whole, that mess of a—you remember, right?”
Inside the ball, Rocky’s carapace shifted. “Yes.”
That was all he said, and Ryland was grateful for it. Every time this subject came up, even a little, Rocky would retreat to his side of the enclosure and spend hours in absolute silence. He would tinker with bits of xenonite, shaping them into strange little structures. Ryland never knew what they were for. When he did talk, it was to describe, unprompted and in escalating detail, all the ways Erid would treat Ryland better than Earth ever had. It was petty, probably, to hold a grudge against an entire planet he would never see, full of people he would never get to be angry at.
“They used needles,” Ryland said. “To… to put me under. So whenever I put it close to my arm, my body thinks it’s happening again.” He swallowed hard. “It thinks if I let that point touch my skin, I’m going back to sleep. And that’s… that’s why I’m so sweaty. Why my heart gets faster.”
Rocky didn’t say anything for a moment. His arms had gone still, just like before, and when he finally spoke it came out flat. “Stupid Earth doctors. Clumsy. Bad design.”
Ryland blinked at him. “Why… why do you say that?”
“Putting to sleep machine is same as health checking machine,” Rocky said.
“No, it’s not… it doesn’t really work like that.” Ryland rubbed the back of his neck, feeling a strange exhaustion. “You get things into blood by breaking skin, that’s it, it’s—it’s the only way in or out. It’s not really the doctor’s fault.”
“Grace said before, many people afraid of needles,” Rocky countered. His ball rolled a few inches sideways. “Many people, all afraid, all still using needle. Bad design.”
“I guess so. Most kids are scared of needles.” Ryland shrugged. “Eventually you stop making such a big deal out of it. Or… well, you’re expected to.”
“Stab human pebbles, question?” Rocky’s ball jerked backward, all five arms flaring out in obvious alarm. “Pebbles are small! Fragile! Not finished growing.”
“It’s for vaccines,” Ryland adjusted his glasses. “We actually talked about this a while back, right? Keeps us from catching nasty stuff when we’re older. The medicine goes right into the muscle, and the hole heals up very quickly. It’s safe.”
After a pause, his arms drew in slightly. “Grace got vaccine too, as pebble, question? Small Grace?”
“Yeah. Almost everyone does.”
“Small Grace afraid of needles too, question?”
“Oh, yeah.” Ryland’s smile came out crooked. “Terrified. My dad used to—” He had to picture his dad’s face to finish the sentence, and that took a second longer than it should have. Every year it seemed to take another second. “Right before the nurse came in, my dad would make this stupid face. Get me laughing so hard I never even felt the poke.” He smiled again, smaller this time. “Eventually I got over it.” He shrugged. “Guess I’m back to square one now.”
Rocky considered this for a moment. “Rocky does not have face,” he pointed out, like this was information Ryland might have overlooked.
“I noticed, yeah.”
“This is problem for the plan.”
“What plan?”
“Rocky’s plan. Rocky is making face replacement plan currently. Give Rocky two hundred seconds.”
“O—okay,” he said, watching Rocky roll away from the lab.
He sat there alone for a moment, needle abandoned on the tray. Fake Dimitri was still frozen on the laptop screen, paused mid-sentence. His eyebrows were raised at an angle that suggested deep personal disappointment in Ryland specifically. He reached over and closed the laptop. He could hear Rocky through the wall between rooms, some faint scraping, a series of clicks that didn’t match any pattern Ryland recognized, then a long pause. Then more scraping.
When Rocky finally rolled back into the room, he’d brought something with him, cradled in one of his arms. It was a curved piece of fresh xenonite, still soft around the edges, worked into a rough oval with two shallow dents pressed into it.
“What is that?”
“Is face!”
“That’s not a face, Rocky, you just made a plate with dents in it.”
“Is face now.” Rocky tilted it until the two dents lined up roughly where eyes might go. “This is Rocky’s happy face. For distraction. Grace should look at this instead of needle.”
Ryland stared at the xenonite, then at Rocky, then back at the xenonite. “You want me to stare at that while I stab myself.”
“Yes. Is very happy face. Look at happy dents.”
“I see them, buddy,” Ryland said. He realized with a weird jolt that this was probably how his own features looked through Rocky’s echolocation. A smooth surface with structural recessions. “But I actually need to look at my arm to find the vein.”
“Rocky will watch arm,” he countered.
“I really don’t think this is going to work.”
“Grace ungrateful, statement.”
“Okay, okay!” Ryland raised his hands in surrender. “We can try the happy face.”
It took a few minutes to get sorted, but Ryland finally got the tourniquet back around his bicep. He held his left arm straight against the metal table and rested the tip of the needle against his skin, carefully setting the correct angle. He forced his gaze away from his arm and looked straight into Rocky’s ball. Rocky had the plate pressed against his carapace, rolling gently from side to side. It was, admittedly, kind of funny. Ryland’s shirt was already sticking to his back, and he wasn’t convinced yet that funny was going to be enough.
His gaze dropped back to the metal point. “Just give me a second.”
“Grace is looking at needle again. Grace should look at face.”
“I’m trying.” He dragged his eyes up to the xenonite plate, to its two shallow indentations bobbing left and right with the roll of the ball, and it was working, a little, in the sense that it was deeply, profoundly stupid. Stupid was doing more for him than fake Dimitri had managed all afternoon.
“Face is happy,” Rocky said, the words lilting like a melody. “Face is very happy for Grace.”
“It doesn’t have a mouth. How am I supposed to know it’s happy?”
“Because Rocky says so.” He gave the xenonite plate a proud little wobble.
A short laugh cracked out of him. His grip tightened for just a moment, and his hand, without him consciously deciding to let it, finally pushed the needle the last half-inch home.
The sting was so brief he almost missed it. Ryland forced himself to look down at his forearm, expecting to find the needle sitting nowhere near the vein. Instead, blood was climbing steadily up the clear tubing, and the first plastic collection tube was already halfway full of dark red liquid.
He stared at the crimson line, waiting for the part where something went wrong.
“Amaze!” the translator burst out, the sudden noise making Ryland flinch. Rocky’s ball spun across the floor. “No leak error! Amaze, amaze, amaze!”
Ryland let out a shaky breath that turned into a genuine laugh. “Yeah. Yeah, we did it, buddy.”
He sat there a moment longer, watching the tube fill, listening to his own heartbeat. Rocky brought his ball to a sudden halt right against the table. He held the xenonite plate up proudly.
“Rocky is great doctor. Best design.”
“No—you’re not a doctor, Rocky.”
“Rocky is doctor of Grace now,” he chimed back. “No other options.”
Ryland huffed, too tired to argue the point, and honestly not sure he wanted to win it anyway. The relief was starting to make his limbs feel heavy. “Fine. You’re my doctor.”
“Yes. Rocky glad we agree.”
Ryland let out another soft laugh, his pulse finally starting to slow down. His fingers were still trembling. They made a faint plastic clicking sound against the tubing as he carefully popped the full vial out of the sleeve. He had to blink away a bit of lingering sweat to line up the second tube, sliding it into place until it clicked. The vacuum seal caught, and dark fluid rose along the line again, a small red thread finding its way home.