Chapter Text
It probably should’ve been obvious that the new guy I picked up out of a submarine in the middle of empty interstellar space wasn’t gonna be normal, but this guy was weird. It wasn’t bad to be around him, at least after the first couple weeks once he realized all the stars out the window were actually real and not just weird 3D wall decor. He’d been… tetchy for a while there, sure, but who could blame him?
I think I should clarify what I mean by that: He broke Armando’s arms off the second he woke up, punched a hole in the wall, and tried to jump out the nearest airlock. He then spent a couple days in a corner refusing to eat, dry blood still flaking off him with every movement. That only stopped once he got the idea that neither of us wanted to literally kill him, because why would we do that?
At that point he’d started asking questions, ones I was more than happy to answer now that he wasn’t accusing me of being a prison warden or an executioner or… a giant eel. We hadn’t unpacked the eel thing yet. He didn’t seem to want to talk about it once he realized I was just a guy and Rocky couldn’t really do much other than verbally boss him around, so I didn’t bring it up. He told me his name was Simon once he figured that out, too. It’s a good name, Simon. Apparently it means either ‘listen’ or ‘flat-nosed’, which I looked up later that day. Rocky liked that it meant ‘listen’, probably because he didn’t have a word for ‘nose’, but I liked to give the guy wins where I can so we plugged that into the translator.
What Simon also told me was that he’d ripped his own arm off. I try not to think about that part too much, since it makes me want to gag and also feels like my brain is gonna explode. Armando cleaned up the stump pretty well before he woke up, so it looked like it was gonna heal well, but it was still pretty recent.
He was still adjusting, though he hid it pretty well. He struggled with the ladders a lot. I think he might’ve been embarrassed about it, because he’d refused to use them while I was in the same room as him. He was really muscular, so maybe it was a masculinity thing, or he just wasn’t used to not being able to do things. He hid his face, too, always on my left side so I would be looking at the unscarred half of him. I’m not sure he was doing that part on purpose, though. It didn’t bother me, really, at least the scarring didn’t, and I got over the teeth growing out of the side of his face before he woke up.
All of that was weird, yes, but there’s an extra layer to this that I’m still not allowed to hear about. There’s some kinda subtext behind some of his questions, a flicker of recognition that he’d quickly hide when I brought up some of the stuff from Earth. He doesn’t seem to think he was from Earth, apparently, but he sure knows a whole lot about the Hail Mary for someone who claims to be from three hundred years in the future and also born on Mars.
I’ve had to deal with a lot of unlikely stuff since the Petrova Line was discovered and especially since I got out here, but everything so far has had an explanation. This stuff has nothing going for it. I tested the dried blood bits that had flaked off of him as soon as I could, and it looked to be human, but I couldn’t test whether or not it was his. The Hail Mary’s lab was nice, but it wasn’t DNA sequencer nice. He said the blood wasn’t his, ‘mostly’, which both didn’t help and also made me nauseous.
When I asked follow-up questions he said he didn’t know whose it was (oh joy) and that there was enough of it to fill an ocean. I don’t think that he’s super into poetic language, he seems fairly pragmatic and literal, but I have to treat the phrase ‘blood ocean’ as a metaphor or my brain just short-circuits.
I keep running into stuff like this since Simon got here, stuff that can’t be sorted into a neat little pile of possible or impossible. It makes the scientist part of my brain scream in agony. It’s gotten to the point that I have to physically stop myself from trying to think about it too much, because I don’t have any way to corroborate anything that he says. I don’t have anything that I can use to disprove it either, other than common sense, which I might as well just throw out the window at this point.
Okay, yes, the easiest and simplest explanation for a man covered in blood talking about giant god eels and oceans of blood in a normal situation is that he’s insane and highly dangerous. But we’re not in a normal situation. I dragged this man out of a submarine, in deep empty space, that was so covered in blood it was freezing into crystalline structures around the outside. I didn’t even know it was a submarine until Simon told me. It was barely bigger than a speed boat, for gosh’s sake, with barely an engine to speak of, and it was just floating there! Alone! With no way to have gotten there! Again, dare I remind myself, covered in human blood.
Common sense has been completely abandoned. Yeah, once I throw out what I think about things that should happen, it makes a kind of sense. How do you get a submarine covered in blood? Well, of course, you put it in an ocean of blood. Simple. That doesn’t explain how he left the ocean, or how he thought he was from the future, but it was something.
On somewhere approaching the fourth week after we took Simon in, I managed to sit him down in the lab by bribing him with food. He’s clearly annoyed by the tactics I’m using to get him to communicate, but he’s never tried candy before, and this man is extremely food-driven.
Once he sits with me, clearly on edge, I pour a couple of Skittles out from their bag and slide them across the table. He eyes them, his dark hair falling over his face and his brow furrowed.
“They’re gonna be sour at first, and chewy, but they’re also sweet and kind of fruity. Fruit-flavored, I mean.” To show him I’m not trying to poison him or anything I take a few of my own and pop them into my mouth. My eye twitches at the sourness, it’s been a while since I had these, and Simon’s gaze locks onto that movement. Once I’ve finished chewing, I say, “They’ve got a bit of a kick. But they’re not gonna hurt you unless you eat like a giant bag of them all at once.”
“So they can hurt me?” His voice is a little raspy from disuse, but it’s deep in a way that I kind of forgot voices can be. In a different situation, I’d find it soothing. It’s also kinda familiar.
“Only if you have a lot of them. The stuff that makes it sour is a very mild acid,” he moves his head back and I lift a hand to pause him, “but humans need at least a little bit of it to survive. It’s citric acid. You’ve heard of scurvy?”
“Yeah.”
“If the coma slurry didn’t have a little bit of citric acid in it, we’d both have scurvy right now. And I’m sure you know, we really don’t want to have scurvy.”
He nods. He’s got the face that comes up whenever I say something he doesn’t quite know whether he should believe.
“So it’s not good for you in large amounts, it kinda burns your tongue, but a little bit is gonna be perfectly fine.” To really hammer in the point, I pour out a handful and pop them all in my mouth at once. That is a mistake. My face puckers up and I lower my head, catching a glimpse of Simon’s frowning on my way down. I hold up a finger, chewing through the unimaginably strong sourness, and when I’m done I say, “Don’t do that, though. Bad idea. Really intense. Wow.”
The side of his mouth quirks in what I think is the beginning of a smile but it’s gone as soon as it arrived.
He picks one of the skittles up, holding it between his thumb and forefinger, the citric acid crystals sticking to his fingertips. Without looking away from it, he says, “What did you want?”
“I had more questions.”
He nods, almost imperceptibly. “You’re not gonna try and poke me with any needles again, are you?”
“No. I learned my lesson the first time.” I jerk my head towards the dormitory, where Armando is still half-disassembled in my and Rocky’s attempt to repair it. “I’ll only ask you for stuff that you’re comfortable with. All I want is information. No needles.” I hold up my hands to show that they’re empty, waggling my fingers.
“Alright,” he says, and very slowly, like it’s gonna jump him or something, places the candy in his mouth. His face stays carefully neutral but I’m still watching him in that way people do when we’re looking to see if they like something we do. He shifts it around in his mouth, letting it dissolve like a pill.
After a second he just slightly recoils, his upper lip curling and nose scrunching as he frowns. He’s thinking so clearly that I can almost hear him tell himself not to spit it out, and he starts chewing. He finishes it, and looks down at the other skittle on the table in front of him like it’s personally offended him.
“You don’t have to eat it.”
“Nope. I’m going to.” Right, the food insecurity. It was kinda funny at first, like those videos I’ve seen of people giving their dogs a lemon, but I may have unlocked some kind of Sisyphean nightmare for him, giving him food that hurts.
“I think you can brush off the crystals, that should make it less sour.”
He nods, taking the candy and brushing it over the pant leg of the flight suit I lended him. “What was the question?”
I sigh. “As many as you’re willing to answer, really.”
“Just ask me the first one.”
“Okay.” I lean to the side, looking over Simon’s shoulder at the whiteboard I spent a while on with Rocky a few days ago. It’s mostly covered in separate words and badly drawn cartoon images of things to keep me up to speed. “Uh… The future thing.”
“The future thing,” he repeats, his tone bordering on sarcastic. He quits brushing the skittle against his pant leg and looks at it, rolling it over. “That’s not specific.”
“No, it’s not. I mean, it’s kind of… all of it. We’re not theoretical physicists, so I’m gonna put aside the time travel thing for now, no matter how badly I want to figure that out. Can you, I don’t know. Just tell me what it’s like, I guess.”
He pops the skittle in his mouth and chews immediately, non-reactive to it this time. I guess it worked. “I don’t think it’s your future.”
Somewhere in the scrambled recesses of my brain, the scientist part of me kicks back to life. “Oh?”
“I was looking on the computers. History’s all wrong past a certain point, in the last third of the twentieth century.” He clears his throat. He hasn’t said a sentence this long since he got here, basically, it’s probably uncomfortable. “For me, the first Mars colonizers launched in the nineties. The nineteen-nineties, I mean. You haven’t even sent one person there yet.”
My face is scrunching not unlike it was when I had all that candy in my mouth. “What?”
Simon nods. “Also.” His gaze drops to the table. “Project Hail Mary never happened. Astrophage, the Petrova Line, all the stuff you mentioned…” he waved his hand. “None of that happened.” He opens his mouth like he’s gonna say something, but he stops himself. “Not really.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s, uh. It’s weird.”
I cut myself off before I can laugh. He looks uncomfortable, like I’m intruding on a secret, a personal one. He picks at the remaining citric acid crystals on the table.
“It’s not… real. Someone thought of it, the name ‘Project Hail Mary’ exists, but it’s… Made up. It’s a book. It was written around now, or when you say now is, and it’s science fiction that takes place in an alternate reality where we didn’t colonize Mars.”
My jaw is hanging open. I want to go talk to Rocky, but he’s busy working on designs for Armando’s replacement parts and he promised not to intrude unless things got violent.
Simon clears his throat again, almost laughing in awkward discomfort. “I said it was weird.”
“I’m not real?”
He shrugs. “Where I’m from, no. But maybe I’m somewhere else.” He ducks his head, lowering his voice. “You seem pretty real to me.”
I can’t even focus on that part, my brain fixating on something that’s right in front of me that doesn’t click right. “You’re leaving something out.”
He stills, his eyes flicking up towards me. “What?”
“Do you know something I don’t?” Immediately I start thinking of every thing that could possibly be wrong, but I need to clarify this somehow, see how deep this goes. “Tell me something about myself you couldn’t have learned from the ship. Something I haven’t told you. You read it, right? If it’s a book.”
He thinks for a second, still clearly uncomfortable. I guess I’d be pretty weirded out if I got saved from dying alone in space by someone I thought was a fictional character. It’s friggin’ nonsense, but either this guy is way better at acting than I thought, or he really truly believes what he’s saying.
“When you were on Earth, before the project, you met with your friend Marissa every week for a meal. You’d known each other since you were young adults, I think. You ate steak.”
I’m getting a little lightheaded. My jaw’s back to hanging open, and the walls are swaying a little in the corners of my vision.
Blood oceans are real, so are giant man-eating eels, and this man is from another universe.
“Would you excuse me for a second?” I don’t give him time to respond before I slide out of my seat and walk so quick I’m almost running up to the ladder that’ll lead me to the dormitory. I look back down at Simon before I escape through the hatch. “You’re not in trouble, by the way.”
——
I’ve definitely lost my fucking mind.
It’s not possible this place is Heaven, or anything like it, and I’ve never heard once of a ship with only one human on it. What the fuck would even be the point? I spent a few days holed up in here, one of the robot’s snapped off needle-arms as a weapon whenever the man came back. I’m not close enough to read the patches on his uniform, but it looks new. It’s bright, not fraying at all, and he has multiple undershirts he swaps between. He’s got glasses, too, so he’s got access to an unfathomably large store of resources if he’s able to get his hands on those.
Twice a day he comes into the room with me, staying as far as he can, and slides a packet of something to me, followed by a pouch of water. I haven’t touched them. I think I sleep, but it’s in short bursts that I constantly have to wake myself from to keep guard against approaching noise. Most of the time it’s nothing, just the air cycler kicking up a notch, or footsteps on the floor above me. Regardless, I know better than to trust the relative peace.
Every so often I can hear soft music emanating from the floor above me, and the man’s speaking voice. He’s barely spoken over a soft tone with me, and he’s muffled through the ceiling, but his voice is bright and happy and full when he’s up there. It emanates through the cracks in the hatch, mocking me. Tempting me, maybe.
The setup in here, something I’ve become intimately familiar with, is beginning to knock at parts of my memory that haven’t been relevant for a while. The three beds is the main thing, as well as the pouches of food and water that lay untouched at my feet. Why three beds, if there’s only one person meant to be here? Why pre-sealed pouches and not recycler paste?
It’s like someone took bits from a book and decided to build a ship based on it. I don’t know why they would’ve done that, but I guess it’s not impossible. Eden is named after another place, so why couldn’t you take the design of a ship from a book?
It’s a specific book, actually. Pretty much the only upside to the COI prison was the occasional access to books, digital files copied onto plastic display tablets that were too flimsy to use as a weapon. I got through my isolation on those alone, by reading as much as I could during the once monthly “recreational hour” and replaying it over and over in my head until I could come back and read the next part.
The books they gave access to tended to fit a few criteria. Obviously you couldn’t make books after the Quiet Rapture, no one had the time or resources, let alone the will to send it between stations. But they barely had books from the last century or two, most of them from the 21st or before. I guess it was easier to get them somehow? They were all hopeful, too, probably something to discourage violence by not introducing the idea into our heads more than they already did. Mostly, that left me with dramas, a few romances, and the occasional children’s picture book.
The specific book I’m thinking of, though, is one of the two or three books that significantly diverged from real life. All the others seemed historical, largely grounded, but this one explored an alternate history. Or, I guess, an alternate present, given that it was both published and took place in the early 21st century. Project Hail Mary. I think I fixated on that one, partially out of novelty and partially due to the isolation. The main character was alone in space. I was isolated on a space station, in their prison. The connections drew themselves.
The lack of other entertainment made things… intense, once I got interested in something. I had very few ways to escape my situation, besides picturing being somewhere else.
I’d lay in my cot, hard scratchy fabric under my head, pretending it was one of those giant ovular beds that I could sink into, so far I wouldn’t be visible from the outside. I’d listen to the sounds of my own breath, replicating it in my mind to imagine there was a person, someone safe and kind, resting only a few feet away from me.
I hated how much it helped, but I couldn’t stop myself from sinking into it. It was a fantasy, I knew that, an ego-bloating unrealistic daydream where I wasn’t violent, I was capable and gently protective, and someone felt safe enough to sleep in the same room as me.
In the same bed, even. I knew closeness even less than I knew peace, but I still reached out for scraps of memories of warmth and poured them all in one place. I scrounged for the vague blurry images of the fellow isolated astronaut my mind conjured and squeezed my eyes shut for the vision of a man, his back turned in silent trust, laying beside me in the same bed.
It kept me at some semblance of sanity through my isolation, I think. The imagined man, Ryland, and his friend Rocky. I wanted to befriend the alien, too, wanted to prove I was safe to as many creatures as possible. Friendship was a rarer commodity than having someone to share a bed with. I wanted silent trust and camaraderie from both of them, but the man, Ryland, brought me a different additional ache.
I learned a lot of things about myself and what I wanted from that isolation. I wasn’t ever going to be one of the ones who was allowed into a relationship, and even then it wouldn’t have been what I wanted. This, the silent warm image I wrapped myself in, couldn’t be taken from me. No one knew it existed, why would they?
I found a sick and slightly shameful enjoyment in it. I don’t know how I even managed shame, given I was alone, but it stayed with me. It stayed even when I was sick and shivering, a curled tense ball on the unforgiving surface of my cot. I was halfway through the book at that point, and had pretty much nothing to do other than lie there and think about being somewhere else. Somewhere that was able to treat me, ideally, but I would take a softer bed.
There weren’t medical resources to be wasted on prisoners here, and food was rare. The guard at my cell, I never learned her name, laughed once when she saw me like that. She said either I’d get better, or I’d make a good meal for someone who deserved more than me. I did get better. I don’t think they liked that I lived.
Once I recovered, the other source of entertainment was the fact that I managed to get myself access to exercise equipment. No one else wanted it, it was a vestigial remainder of the days before artificial gravity, but none of it could be used to get myself out. That and my memories of the books kept me busy enough.
At the height of my interest, just after the first time I finished the book, I started mentally estimating how much the man in the book, Ryland, would weigh. The alien Rocky was around four hundred pounds, at least, I couldn’t go and check, but Ryland was a more feasible goal. I didn’t picture him as particularly short or tall, and the electrodes in his coma made him muscular, so he was probably somewhere between 150 and 200 pounds. I could do that no problem, eventually. Rocky’s weight was harder, but I could get there eventually, for brief periods.
I thought of being there to help when they were in orbit over Adrian, spinning out in a blind panic. Could I have helped, if I was there? If I did, Rocky wouldn’t have had to be hurt. Ryland’s injuries were mostly due to the crash and I didn’t have any way to practice piloting from my cell, but I could get strong enough to carry him. I could help. I could save someone instead of hurting them.
The romances I’d read didn’t help my situation. It tangled things, made my want to help more complicated. I could see some things that were reserved for couples, but I couldn’t help but picture them anyway. Sometimes a character would save another and they’d fall for each other after. I tried not to think about that too much, but the heady giddy feeling that flooded me whenever I thought of it was addictive.
Once the idea occurred to me, I couldn’t stop thinking of it. I latched onto whatever source of joy I could squeeze out of my situation and took all it would give. Lifting Ryland’s weight came to mean more than just helping. Could I lift him for fun? To fluster him? Could I pick him up off the floor and toss him so he landed lightly on one of the beds? I think he’d laugh, if I did that. He was a nervous person, so I thought it’d be pretty easy to mess with.
I’d climb into the bed after him, gently pushing him further into the mattress, feigning competitiveness until he started laughing from the absurdity of it, leaning up to kiss me and pulling me back down with him.
I figured out I could lift his weight with my hips, as well, eventually. It wasn’t difficult.
Anyway. The beds in here reminded me of that book.
The arm thing, before I broke it, probably would’ve reminded me of the nanny-bot if I had the time to get a better look at it.
The next time the man came back, I was able to see the face he made when he noticed the stockpile of food I’d made next to me. I’d been drinking the water on and off, but the food was too risky to waste.
He frowned, his shoulders drooping. “You’re not eating,” he said, his voice soft. “You’re not on an IV anymore. You need to eat.”
I stared at him. He knew I knew that.
He tilted his head, staring over his glasses at me. “It’s good, I promise. I had some before, when I was adjusting to solid food.”
Is he trying to convince me it’s not poisoned, or just that it tastes good? It barely matters how it tastes. I’m not a child.
He thinks for a second, then puts down the water and opens the tube of paste and squeezes a bit out onto his finger, then licks it off. “See? It’s fine.” He shows me his empty hand. He closes the tube and skids it across the floor like he did with the rest of them. “Please. I don’t want you to starve. Okay?”
He keeps looking at me, pleading with his eyes. He’s upset, I think. Couldn’t say why he’s upset that food is left over, but if it’s gonna bother him that much, fine. I pick up the tube.
His face brightens but he doesn’t move, watching me intently as I drink the flavored paste out of the pouch. It’s meat and vegetables, I think. It’s not bad. He keeps staring, so intently I just let him have it, finishing the tube and tossing the empty container back over to him when I’m done.
He smiles so hard his eyes scrunch a little. “Thank you. I’ll come back with more water later, please keep eating. Don’t overdo it, but three of those per day is the minimum for the amount of nutrients. Okay?” I don’t say anything. “Okay.” He takes the empty container with him and receding back up the ladder.
When he reaches the hatch, I call after him, my voice cracking from disuse. “Are there other people here?”
He looks down at me, slightly shadowed in the lack of light by the hatch.
“I hear you talking.” I point to the ceiling.
“Uh… yeah. I’m sharing the ship with someone else.”
That’s interesting phrasing. He’s talking around something. Is it an animal? Another robot?
“Are they… busy?” The way I say it sounds almost needy, and I mentally kick myself for it. “Is something wrong with them?”
“Oh, uh.” He adjusts his hold on the ladder. “I didn’t want to scare you. He’s not… what you would’ve expected.”
I’m leaning towards robot.
“You can meet him, but only if you promise not to freak out.”
Freaking out could mean a lot of things. I guess he means ‘don’t break anything else’. It depends on what’s up there, I guess. Or if his robotic crewmate plans on trying to poke me with any more needles. “Alright.”
“You sure?”
I peer up at him. I can’t make out his face from here. “It’s worse if you don’t show me.”
“I guess that’s fair.” He disappears into the hatch, and I hear him talking. The music turns on for a second, then there’s loud thunking, and something comes in through the hole in the ceiling that’s behind the clear barrier. It’s still in shadow. The robot, I guess it’s not an android, clambers down on what I now recognize as handholds. It’s got five legs and an uneven pentagonal middle. Like a thorax? Is that what it is? I have to crane my neck. Maybe it’s supposed to look like the alien Rocky from the book, matching the rest of the ship’s theming. It’s stockier than it is in the book, but texturally it’s pretty close.
It gets closer to me, its movement slowing as it approaches the overhang by the beds. It pauses. A formation on the top of its thorax lifts.
“♫.”
If I hadn’t just days ago been through the most terrifying thing a human being could possibly experience, I would have screamed.
I still flinch back, and it copies me, scurrying to the far wall, speaking in more musical notes.
I open my mouth, and close it again. That can’t be Rocky. It has to be him. I’ve never seen a robot that looks like that. Why would you make a robot out of rocks? Why would it speak in musical notes? I’m staring, bug-eyed, at the creature, and it stays still in its place against the wall.
The man is coming back down the ladder, holding something. He’s been talking, but I only remember I’m supposed to be listening to him in the middle of his sentence.
“…laptop, hopefully it still works.” He holds up the item. It’s old Earth tech. Why the fuck would he have old Earth tech? It looks brand new, if I ignore the tape on the side.
He reaches the bottom of the ladder and looks between me and not-Rocky. “Did you freak out?”
I choke out, “No.”
“He’s friendly, I promise.” He opens the laptop and sits in a chair by the ladder, still a good distance away from me. “Rock, you’re gonna have to start babytalking again.”
“♫♩♪♪♪♩♪♫♪♪♫♫.” It taps against the barrier with a finger, one of three for each claw-hand-leg. Holy shit.
“Yeah, I’m sorry, man. It’s a temporary thing, I’m sure he’ll learn.” The man clicks something on the computer, and a voice streams out of the speakers.
“Is stupid stupid stupid idiot bad machine hate hate hate talk like this.”
I’ve gone insane. I need to start praying. They’re gonna look at me weird if I start praying. It’s the fucking alien from the fucking book. How did the author know about this shit? We never discovered aliens. I thought the eel was the only one. That wouldn’t even explain it if we had discovered aliens in the 21st century and someone wrote about them because if “Rock” is a nickname, not only is it that kind of alien it’s that exact alien. It’s Rocky.
My head swivels towards the man. “You didn’t tell me your name.”
“Oh. I did, but I guess you might have missed it, you were still waking up. I’m Ryland Grace.”
I’ve definitely gone insane. The eel drove me so far I couldn’t come back into reality and I’m hallucinating this, my mind dragging a comforting situation out of the recesses of my memory and playing it for me. I’m not sure how much of this is showing on my face but there’s at least a little, since the man is frowning at me.
I point, dumbly, at the alien. “What about him?”
“That’s Rocky.”
Surreptitiously, I reach up to my neck with my hand and pinch. Hard. Nothing changes.
“Why do that?”
It does get worse.
By worse, I more so mean that the delusion gains more detail. I sit with my head against the wall as “Ryland” explains where we are, how we got here, the name of the ship, everything. “Rocky” adds details now and then, but he’s spending most of the time observing me, I think. I don’t know how else to interpret the tilt of his thorax. Carapace? It’s been years since I read the book, but literally every individual thing he says strikes as familiar. I can’t show it on my face, though I don’t know how that would be visible, but I keep my expression as close to neutral as I can manage.
There’s another problem.
Now that this man has introduced him as Ryland I can’t help of thinking of him as the book character. The book character I spent several years of prison time obsessing over. The character that I developed a fucked-up one-sided crush on, because, obviously, at the time he wasn’t real. But now he is maybe ten feet away from me. Talking to me. On purpose. I think I might throw up.
“New human in distress.”
Ryland pauses in the middle of an explanation of astrophage’s use as fuel. “Oh. Are you good?”
“I’m fine.” My face feels hot. I think if I stood up I’d be lightheaded. I scoot a little farther towards the corner.
Ryland frowns. “Well, the robot’s broken, so it can’t help you. Are you gonna freak out if I come over there?”
I shake my head, blood roaring in my ears.
“Okay.” He puts the laptop down and approaches slowly, hands out like I’m a feral animal he’s trying not to startle.
My eyes keep widening, lifting my head to maintain eye contact as he approaches. I keep a hand on the robot arm I stole, but my grasp on it is barely there. He’s getting very close.
Up this close I can see the small text on his undershirt, mostly cut off by the flight suit over it. He’s got subtle wrinkles, too, smile lines and slight eyebags. He’s in his thirties, or early forties, I think. I knew he was blonde, but his eyes are brighter up close. His brow is furrowed in concern, his hands still raised.
His mouth is slightly open. I shouldn’t be looking at his mouth, but eye contact feels too intimate when he’s maybe two feet away from me.
He says something but I don’t hear it the first time. He repeats, “Can I check your pulse?”
I twist around and stick my arm out towards him.
He presses two fingers to the vein, his other hand cradling my wrist.
His hands are soft, almost entirely lacking calluses, and they’re warm. My face is getting hotter.
“It’s a little elevated, but it’s nothing too dangerous. Rocky, what did you notice?” He turns his head away from me, towards Rocky, and I can finally take a breath.
“Heart and breathing fast fast fast.”
“Okay. That can be a lot of things.” Ryland lets go of my hand. “You’re a bit warm. You shouldn’t have anything infected, we would’ve spotted that sooner, but maybe you’re just sick?”
“I run hot,” I say.
His hand lifts to my forehead, his face ever closer, his glasses slid halfway down his nose. “It doesn’t seem like a fever.” He backs off, scratching his head. “I’m stressing you out, aren’t I? This is way too much at once.”
“It’s fine,” I lie.