Chapter Text
“What’s two plus two?”
I’m roused from a deep sleep, immediately irritated that someone is talking to me. Can’t they see I’m tired?
“What’s two plus two?”
Whoever is talking to me has a feminine voice, and it's so perfect it’s almost robotic-sounding. Wait. Nope. It’s just a robot.
“Hmmmf,” I mumble.
“Incorrect,” says the computer. “What’s two plus two?”
I try to say ‘four’ but it comes out more as a breathy “Fuh”
“Incorrect. What is two plus two?”
Okay. Something is off here. I can’t hear anything other than the computer. I can’t really feel much either, now that I think about it. I know I’m lying down on something soft, probably a bed. My eyes are closed so obviously I can’t see anything. I try to open my eyes.
Nothing.
That’s not supposed to happen. I put more effort into it, and eventually I can tell that one of my eyelids is opening. The light in the room is blinding, and I immediately cry out, instantly regretting my decision to try and open my eyes. At the sound of my agony, the computer asks again.
“What is two plus two?”
I swear to God if I hear this question one more time I’m going to lose my mind.
“Fffff.. Fffoururr” I finally managed to get out.
“Correct!”
Oh thank the lord.
I take a deep breath through my nose, and exhale out my mouth. My breathing is controlled. If I was intubated for whatever reason, it was thankfully removed before I was conscious. My throat is sore and dry, I can tell that much. I can feel a cannula sticking into my nostrils. Why do I know it’s called a cannula? I try not to think about that too much.
I try to move the rest of my body. I can move my head a little, but thats about it. I slowly open both my eyes, taking time to adjust to the light, and look down at myself. I’m butt booty naked. I’m connected to about a million tubes. I can tell there is a peripheral IV catheter in both arms for fluids and any medications I’ve been given, a femoral arterial line in each of my legs as well as femoral central venous catheters. I can also tell I have a foley catheter inserted up my exit ramp, as well as a rectal tube up my butt, nasogastric tube up my nose, and I can see that I’m covered head to two in electrodes. They don’t look like typical electrodes we’d use for an EKG, more like neuromuscular electrical stimulation electrodes, which would probably explain why I am ripped. Like SUPER ripped! I don’t remember much at the moment, but I know for a fact that I definitely have not always had abs like that.
“Wh–” I wheeze. I try again. “Where… am… I?”
“What’s the cube root of eight?” the computer asks.
“What– no! Where the hell am I?” I ask again, ignoring the stupid computer.
“Incorrect. What is the cube root of eight?”
I sigh.
“Two.”
“Correct.”
I listen for follow-up questions from this God-forsaken robot, but none come. I fight the urge to fall back asleep. I wiggle my fingers and toes, trying to consciously regain movement.
“Hand movement detected,” the computer says. “Remain still.”
“What the hell– Why?”
The robot arms come for me. I try not to freak out as they start removing all of the tubes from my body. I can’t feel anything, but my skin is weirdly kind of numb to begin with. By the time it’s done, only three tubes are left. An IV in my left arm, my rectal tube, and my foley catheter. Honestly, I don’t even mind their presence. None of the tubes are painful, and I know from past experience that not having to worry about pissing or shitting is kind of nice. Why do I know that? I don’t know how I know that.
I push myself up off of my bed and sit up slowly, careful not to go too quickly so my blood pressure doesn’t drop. I’m still naked. Nice. I can tell now that my hair is long. Like really long. It covers the entirety of my back, draping all the way down to where my butt hits the seat of the bed. I’m not mad about it, to be honest. Now that I’m seated, I have a better view of my surroundings. There are three more hammock-like beds mounted to the walls, each with their own patient. We are arranged in a square and the roof-mounted arms of the robot are in the center of the ceiling. I assume it’s so that it can easily access all of us. I can’t see much of the other patients around me. I make to stand.
“Full body motion detected,” the computer says. “What’s your name?”
“Really? How stupid are these questions?” I ask.
“Incorrect. Attempt number two: what’s your name?”
It occurs to me: I don’t actually know my name. I don’t know what I do. I don’t remember anything at all.
“I…”
“Incorrect. Attempt number three: What’s your name?”
A wave of fatigue grips me. It’s kind of pleasant, actually. The computer must have sedated me through the IV line.
“Wait… No…” I slur.
The robot arms lay me gently back into my bed.
I wake up again. I sit up.
“Consciousness detected,” the computer says. “What’s your name?”
“I have no clue.”
“Incorrect. Attempt number two: What’s your name?”
I’m a white woman, I speak english. That’s pretty much all I’ve got.
“Mary?”
“Incorrect. Attempt number three: What’s your name?”
This time, I don’t respond. I look around at my surroundings. I know that if I respond, this damn computer is going to sedate me again. I decide to eliminate this issue, by simply removing my IV. I don’t rip it out like people do in the movies. I take it out slowly. I can tell I’ve done this before many times. But again, how do I know that?
The computer is not a fan of the fact that I’ve taken out my IV. I stand up slowly, careful of the tube up my lady parts and the one up my butt. I stand just out of reach of the robot arms, and at the very end of both of my tubes. I straight up just pull my butt tube out. Usually you’re supposed to suck out all fluid with a syringe, blah blah blah, but I knew enough to know it wouldn’t hurt at all to just yank that sucker out. Now the foley catheter? That’s a different story. I look around. There’s a set of drawers on the wall nearest to me, and I immediately open all of them, digging around for what I’m looking for. I find the syringe I’m looking for. I insert the empty syringe into the balloon inflation port and drain out the remaining water. Then I take a deep breath, and pull the catheter out. It isn’t exactly fun, but it’s a LOT less painful than it would’ve been if I had yanked the catheter out while it was still inflated. Yikes. I don’t even want to think about that one.
I sit there for a second, catching my breath, staring at the ladder leading up to a hatch in the ceiling. Clothes. I need clothes before I do anything else that requires dignity.
Problem is, there's nothing in this room. No lockers, no drawers, nothing but three hammock-beds bolted to the walls and a few naked roommates I’m trying my hardest not to look at. Whatever storage I'm hoping for, it's not here.
"Alright," I mutter, hauling myself up. "Guess we're doing this the hard way."
The ladder's rough going—my arms feel like overcooked noodles, despite them being toned, and by the time I reach the hatch I'm breathing like I just ran a 5k. I crank the wheel handle, feel it give with a satisfying click, and haul myself up into whatever's next.
Turns out it's a lab. A genuinely impressive one—microscopes, an honest-to-God autoclave, drawers upon drawers of neatly labeled supplies, all of it bolted down like the whole room is expecting an earthquake. I clock all of it in about two seconds flat and file it away as "later problem," because right now I've got one priority.
There's another ladder at the far end, leading to another hatch. Of course there is.
I climb it, curse under my breath the whole way, and finally push through into a narrow room that looks less like a laboratory and more like a closet aisle at a very minimalist Ikea. Storage compartments line the walls, small doors set flush into the surface, each one labeled with a strip of printed text I don't have the energy to parse yet.
I find one with a proper printed nameplate, not handwritten like some of the others nearby—DR. KENNEDY stamped in clean block letters. Last name only, no first, but something about it feels right the second I read it. I pop the latch and recognize the bag inside as mine before I even open it. I don't know how I know. I just do.
I pull out some clothes first. Underwear, grey sweatpants, soft with wear, and a long-sleeve shirt striped navy and white. I get dressed slowly, savoring every single second of not being naked in a room full of robotic arms and dead bodies. When I finally tug the sweatpants up over my hips, I let out a long breath, like I've just put on armor instead of loungewear.
Then I turn to the bag itself.
It's heavier than I expect. I sit down right there on the floor, cross-legged, back against the storage wall, and start pulling things out one at a time like I'm afraid rushing it will make the contents disappear.
The first thing my hand closes around is a photograph. Actual paper, worn soft at the corners the way photos get when someone's held them a hundred times. An older couple stands in front of a house with wood paneling, a yellow lab mid-blur at their feet, tail caught in permanent motion. The woman has her arms crossed and an expression like she's two seconds from telling someone to knock it off, but there's a smile underneath it, easy and real. The man beside her is laughing outright, big and unselfconscious, one hand raised like he'd been mid-gesture when the photo was snapped.
I don't know their names. I don't know their voices. But something low in my chest twists tight looking at them, an ache that doesn't have a name yet either.
"Are y'all my parents?" I ask out loud, to no one, because apparently that's a thing I do now—narrate my own investigation like there's an audience. My voice comes out thick. I clear my throat and blink hard, annoyed at myself for how close I am to crying over two strangers in a photograph.
I flip to the next one. Same couple, a little older, more gray threaded through both their hair. The man's got his arm slung easy around the woman's shoulders, and there's a comfort between them, the kind that only comes from decades of practice. I find myself smiling without meaning to.
The next photo: two people younger than the couple, clearly siblings from the shape of their faces, laughing at something outside the frame. The guy's got his arm slung over the girl's shoulders, casual, the kind of easy affection you only get with people you've known your whole life. I search the photo for something familiar—my own reflection in their features, maybe—and there it is, faintly, around the eyes.
"My brother and sister," I say slowly, testing the words. They don't feel wrong. They don't feel entirely right either. Just—unfinished. Like trying to remember the ending of a joke you only half-heard.
A few more, and the siblings-photo cast grows: the guy now has a woman beside him I don't recognize, and a toddler perched on his hip, dark curls and a gap-toothed grin aimed right at the camera. My niece, maybe. Or nephew. God, I don't even know that much about my own family.
Then there's a photo that stops me cold in the best way—three dogs, piled together on a porch like a single fuzzy organism. A yellow lab, the same one from the first picture, now with some gray around her muzzle. A chocolate lab sprawled half on top of her, tongue lolling. And a black lab wedged into the gap between them, head resting on the yellow one's back like they'd negotiated the arrangement for hours before settling.
I laugh—a wet, surprised sound—because something about three dogs just existing in a heap is objectively the funniest and sweetest thing I've encountered since I woke up an hour ago having forgotten my own name.
"Okay, so wherever home is," I say, "it's got dogs. Lots of dogs. I can work with that."
I keep going. There's a photo of me—or, well, I assume it's me, distant as it feels, like looking at a stranger who happens to share my face. Dark hair, green eyes, laughing outside what's clearly a hospital, dressed in scrubs, leaned into another woman who's laughing just as hard at something outside the frame. Whatever the joke was, it looks like it was a good one. I stare at that photo the longest. Whoever she is, we look like the kind of friends who show up at 2 a.m. without being asked twice.
"Who are you," I whisper, thumb brushing over her face like that'll conjure a name. It doesn't. Of course it doesn't.
I set the photos down gently, like they're more fragile than paper actually is, and reach back into the bag. My hand closes around something soft, and I pull out a stuffed polar bear, small, a little matted at the ears, clearly ancient by stuffed-animal standards.
I don't even think about it. I just hold it against my chest, the way you'd hold something you've held a thousand times before, muscle memory doing what my brain can't. It smells like nothing—sterile, freshly packed, whatever this is—but something in me insists it should smell like home. Like a specific pillow. Like safety.
"Okay," I say, voice cracking a little, hugging a stuffed animal like an idiot in a room I don't recognize on a ship I don't understand. "So I have people. Somewhere. People who love dogs, and take a hundred pictures, and apparently think grown women need emotional support polar bears. That's—that's actually really sweet. I hope I told y'all I loved you. I hope I said it enough."
I sit there another minute, just breathing, cataloguing the ache in my chest that has nowhere to go because I don't have names to put to any of it. It's the strangest kind of grief—missing people I can't remember, homesick for a home I can't picture.
I'm still holding the bear when the sound reaches me—a crash, distant but sharp, followed by a garbled, panicked yell rattling back down through the hatch I climbed up through.
My spine goes straight. Every ounce of soft, sentimental fog burns off instantly, replaced by something colder and sharper—old instinct, apparently, the kind that doesn't wait for permission.
I shove the photos and the bear back into the bag, sling it over my shoulder, and I'm moving before I've even fully decided to.
I move faster than my body probably wants me to, bag thumping against my hip as I half-climb, half-fall back down through the lab and toward the ladder to the dormitory. My arms burn in protest with every rung, muscles that look strong but apparently haven't done actual work in who-knows-how-long.
The yelling hasn't stopped. If anything it's gotten louder, more panicked, laced with words I can't quite make out from up here—something that sounds like a garbled string of consonants, followed by an honest-to-God whimper.
"Okay, okay, I'm coming," I mutter, dropping the last few feet instead of taking the rungs, landing hard enough that my knees buckle.
The dormitory comes into view, and there he is—a man, tangled in a mess of tubes and wires, the robotic arms retracting away from him one by one just like they had with me. He's got the same wild, disoriented look I probably had ten minutes ago, eyes wide, breathing ragged, clearly running on pure adrenaline and zero information.
"Hey—hey, don't move too fast," I call out, dropping the bag and crossing the room toward him without even deciding to. Something in me recognizes this. Patient. Disoriented. Post-sedation. Flight risk. I don't know how I know the protocol. I just know it, the way I knew how to pull my own catheter without flinching.
He doesn't hear me. Or he hears me and it doesn't register, one of the two. He's already moving, thrashing against the last few tubes with the kind of clumsy desperation of someone who just wants to be free, consequences be damned.
"Wait—don't—"
Too late.
He rolls off the side of the bed in one uncoordinated motion, and I watch it happen in horrible, slow-motion detail: his Foley catheter, still fully inflated, rips free as he hits the floor.
"OH MY GOSH—" He screams, a high, awful sound, curling instantly into a fetal position, both hands flying to cradle himself like that'll undo what just happened.
"Yeah," I say, wincing hard from a few feet away, arms crossed over my chest. "Yeah. That's gonna do it."
He doesn't respond. He's too busy making a sound like a wounded animal, rocking slightly on the floor, one word tumbling out of him over and over. "Ow ow ow ow ow—"
"Breathe," I say, crouching down but staying just out of his personal space, giving him a second. "In through your nose. It'll pass. I promise it's worse in the moment than it actually is long-term."
"How—" he wheezes, cracking one eye open to glare at me, "how would you possibly know that?"
There’s a red line of blood on the floor from where his catheter ripped out. It reminds me of something.
"You're kidding me," Callie says, setting her wine glass down so hard I'm surprised it doesn't shatter. "The sun is what?"
We're at her place, the one with the ugly floral couch she refuses to replace because her grandmother gave it to her, a bottle of cheap pinot grigio between us and a true crime documentary paused on the TV. My phone had buzzed twenty minutes ago with a headline that made no sense, and I'd made the mistake of reading it out loud.
"Dimming," I say again, scrolling through the article like rereading it will make it less insane. "Some kind of anomaly. They're saying it's already measurable."
"That's not possible," Callie says, in the exact tone she uses when a scan comes back wrong and she needs it to be a technical error instead of what it actually is. "Stars don't just — do that. Not on a human timescale."
"I know." My own voice sounds far away to me, even in the memory. "I know, that's what I keep thinking, but—" I hold my phone out to her, showing her the graph embedded in the article, exponential and merciless. "Look at this."
She stares at it a long moment. Takes a slow sip of wine. "Okay," she says finally. "So hypothetically. If the sun's dying. What happens to us?"
"Ice age," I say. "Fast one. Crop failure. Mass extinction-level stuff, probably, if the trend holds."
"Cool," Callie says, deadpan, refilling her glass to the very brim. "Cool cool cool. Love that for us."
I laugh, but it comes out wrong, thin and nervous, because some part of me — some quiet, insistent part I can't explain — already knows this isn't a headline I get to just read and move past. Some part of me already knows I'm going to be pulled into this, somehow, some way, whether I want to be or not.
"Why do I feel like this is going to ruin my year?" I mutter.
Callie snorts. "Girl, it's going to ruin everyone's year."
"Who are you?" he manages, voice hoarse, eyes tracking over me with obvious confusion. "Where—what is this place?"
"Working on it," I say. "You want some clothes first, or you want to keep having this conversation while your bare ass is on full display?"
He blinks at me. Looks down at himself. His face goes through about four different expressions in rapid succession—confusion, horror, something that might be embarrassment fighting through the pain—before he grabs at the edge of the bedsheet still hanging off his hammock-bed and yanks it over his lap.
"Right. Yes. Clothes. Good plan," he says, voice cracking slightly. "Do you—do you know your name? Because I don't know mine. I don't know anything. I woke up and there was a robot asking me math questions and now I'm on the floor and I think I just tore something vital—"
"You didn't tear anything vital," I say, more gently now, settling onto the floor near him, careful to keep some distance. "Trust me, I'd know. I'm apparently a doctor. Or I was. I don't know if past tense applies here."
"You're a doctor," he repeats, like he's testing the words the same way I'd tested my brother and sister out loud twenty minutes ago. "How do you know that?"
"Same way you probably know things about yourself you can't explain. It's just—there. Like muscle memory, except for facts." I gesture vaguely at his midsection. "For instance, I know that thing hurts like hell right now but you're not bleeding out. Give it a few minutes."
He laughs—a short, disbelieving huff of air—and immediately winces like laughing hurt too. "This is insane. This is completely insane. I don't know my name, I don't know where I am, and I just had a—a—" He gestures helplessly toward his crotch.
"Foley catheter," I supply.
"I don't want the word. I want to forget the incident, not learn vocabulary for it."
That startles a laugh out of me, sharp and surprised. "Fair enough."
He looks at me properly for the first time, some of the panic in his face settling into something else entirely—something that flickers across his features before he seems to catch himself and look away, cheeks going faintly pink. "You don't know your name either?"
"Nope. Woke up not that long before you did. Found a room with lockers, found some clothes, found a bag full of pictures of people I apparently love and cannot for the life of me name." I hold up the bag like evidence. "You want to get dressed, or you want to keep flashing me?"
"I—right. Yes." He glances down at the sheet bunched in his lap, then back up at me, then very deliberately at a point somewhere over my left shoulder instead. "Is there—do I have a locker too? Please tell me I have a locker."
"There's a lab up through that hatch, and past that, a room full of storage compartments. Yours should be labeled, assuming whoever set this up was organized." I stand, offering him a hand, which he eyes warily before taking it. His grip is stronger than I expect, even shaking as badly as it is. "C'mon. Sheet-toga it is for now. Let's get you decent before we figure out where the hell we are."
He hauls himself up, sheet wrapped awkwardly around his waist, wobbling like a newborn deer. "This is the weirdest first conversation I think I've ever had," he mutters, not quite meeting my eyes. "Not that I'd know. Since, you know. Memory situation."
"Could be worse," I say, steering him gently toward the ladder. "You could still have the catheter in."
He makes a strangled noise that's half laugh, half genuine trauma response, and follows me toward the hatch.
We climb back through the hatch into the lab, my legs protesting with every rung. My roommate shuffles behind me, one hand clutching his sheet-toga like his life depends on it, muttering something under his breath that sounds suspiciously like never trusting gravity again — which, fair, considering the introduction he just had.
"Storage room's this way," I say, pointing to the second hatch across the lab. "Assuming your locker's labeled the same way mine was."
"Assuming I have a name to match a label to," he mutters, but follows.
We find his locker three doors down from where mine had been — a smudged, handwritten label taped over the door, half-illegible. He doesn't linger on it. Just yanks the door open, grabs the folded clothes inside, and turns his back to me with a speed that might be modesty, might just be sheer motivation to never be naked in front of a stranger again if he can help it.
I busy myself pretending to examine the lab equipment while he dresses, though I don't miss the little relieved noise he makes once actual pants are involved.
"Okay," he says, voice steadier now, though still a little hoarse. "Okay. I have pants. This is objectively a better day than five minutes ago."
"Low bar," I say, "but I respect it."
He huffs something that might be a laugh, then goes quiet, looking around the lab properly for the first time. I watch him take it in — the scanning electron microscope, the 3-D printer, the bank of drawers — his eyes narrowing slightly like he's cataloguing without meaning to.
"You know what all this is," I say. Not a question.
"...Yeah," he says slowly, frowning at his own hands like they might explain something. "I don't know how. But yeah. I know what every piece of equipment in this room does." He looks up at me. "Do you?"
"Some of it," I admit. "The medical stuff, definitely. The rest is a little blurrier."
"So I'm a scientist," he says, testing the words the same way I'd tested my brother and sister not too long ago. "Great. Fantastic. Add it to the list of things I know without knowing why I know them."
"Welcome to the club," I say. "Membership's involuntary."
"You should be the president of the club, then," he says. "You're—I mean, you've clearly got this whole thing more handled than I do." He gestures vaguely at me, then seems to realize how that sounded, and adds, too quickly, "Which is—that's a good thing. You seem like you'd have things handled. In general. As a—as a person."
I raise an eyebrow at him. "Thanks?"
"That's not—I just mean you're..." He stops himself, jaw working, like he's trying to physically swallow the rest of the sentence. "Never mind. Forget it. Ignore me. I clearly don't have full command of my faculties right now."
I file that away with an amused sort of curiosity and let it go, mostly because he looks like he might actually combust if I push on it.
He almost smiles at that — a small, crooked thing, still a little pink around the ears — before his attention snags on something across the room. "Wait." He crosses to the ladder at the far end, the one leading to another hatch above. "Where's this go?"
"No idea. Wasn't in the mood to find out on an empty stomach and a raw urethra, personally."
He winces. "Please never say that sentence again."
"No promises."
He grabs the ladder, testing his grip, and I notice the way his hands shake slightly — whether from the earlier ordeal or just plain exhaustion, hard to say. He climbs anyway, determined, and I follow a few rungs behind, ready to catch him if gravity decides to be cruel again.
The hatch above doesn't budge when he reaches it.
"Locked," he says, jiggling the handle. "Or—wait." He tilts his head, listening to something I can't hear from my position. "It wants a name."
"Course it does." I climb up next to him, peering at a small display panel beside the hatch handle I hadn't noticed from below. To unlock hatch, state your name.
"Well, that's a problem," he says. "Considering neither of us has one."
"Guess we're stuck down here being nameless idiots a little longer." I nod toward the lab below. "Come on. Let's see what we can figure out with what we've got."
We climb back down. I watch him gravitate toward the drawers, opening them one after another with the kind of unconscious competence that tells me this isn't the first lab he's ever stood in, memory or no memory. I do the same on instinct, though my hands know medical supplies better than his do — I find bandages, a suture kit, a small stash of what look like painkillers, filing it all away without really thinking about why I'm doing inventory.
"Hey," he says suddenly, straightening up with a test tube in one hand and an odd look on his face. "Something's bothering me."
"Besides everything?"
"No, I mean — " He tosses the test tube up and catches it, frowning as it falls back into his palm. "That felt wrong."
"It landed in your hand. That's generally how gravity works."
"No, I know, it's just—" He does it again, watching the tube's fall with unnerving focus. "It felt fast."
I raise an eyebrow. "You're timing a falling test tube with your gut?"
"I have a better idea." He starts rifling through the drawers again, more purposeful now, and comes up with a length of string, a stopwatch, a tape measure. "Help me find something heavy. Actually — wait, I've got it."
I watch him rig up an honest-to-God pendulum with the kind of unselfconscious focus of someone who's done this exact experiment in his sleep, hanging it from the hatch handle above, timing its swing with the stopwatch, murmuring formulas under his breath that I only half-follow. Something about periods and lengths and gravitational constants. I catch words like acceleration and centripetal floating past, and somewhere in the back of my mind, a rusty gear turns — I recognize the math, distantly, the way you recognize a song you haven't heard in years.
"Okay," he says, after long minutes of muttering and scribbling numbers onto his own arm with a stray pen, "I've got bad news."
"Worse than the catheter?"
"Different bad. Structural bad." He looks up at me, eyes wide, a little wild. "Gravity in here is off. Like — significantly off. Fifteen meters per second squared instead of 9.8."
"Huh." I turn that over in my head, waiting for the alarm to hit. It doesn't, not really — instead there's just a strange, settling certainty, like a puzzle piece easing into a slot that had been waiting for it. "Yeah. Yeah, that tracks."
He blinks at me. "That tracks?" He gestures at me vaguely, like he's reaching for a name that isn't there. "See, this is exactly the problem — I don't even have a word for you yet, and you're just casually 'yeah that tracks'-ing your way through the collapse of everything I thought I knew about physics." He shakes his head, waving the tangent away for the more pressing one."Gravity doesn't just track. Gravity doesn't change. Earth's gravity is a constant. Which means—"
"Which means we're not on Earth," I finish for him, and it comes out steady, almost matter-of-fact, like I'm agreeing to something I already halfway knew. "Yeah. I think some part of me's known that since I woke up."
"You knew?" His voice climbs a full octave. "You knew and you didn't say anything?!"
"I didn't know-know. It was more of a — a feeling. The muscles, the recovery bed, the way none of this looks like any hospital I've ever pictured." I shrug, though my pulse has picked up more than I'm letting on. "Doesn't feel like new information so much as confirmation."
"Well, it's information to me," he says, running both hands through his hair, pacing the length of the lab in three short strides before the room forces him to turn around. "We are apparently not on the one planet specifically designed to keep us alive, and you're taking this with the emotional intensity of someone being told their coffee order is ready."
"Would you rather I scream?"
"I might, on your behalf, if you're not going to!"
That startles a laugh out of me despite everything, small and a little wild around the edges. "Duly noted. Feel free."
He drags both hands down his face instead, muttering something that might be a prayer or might just be static panic, and I let him have his moment, because honestly, someone in this room should be allowed to react like a normal person.