Chapter Text
Footsteps and shuffling outside the door break Grace out of the uneasy doze he’d fallen into after being shoved into the cell. If he’d known he was going to be detained, he never would have steered the Hail Mary toward the mysterious cobbled-together-looking station hanging in loose orbit above the tiny dark planet, no matter how interested he and Rocky were in it.
Blinking to bring himself to full alertness, he stares dully forward as bodies approach. He knows by now that he can't understand these people. What's the point in saying anything?
“Hey,” a voice says, low and rough. It’s a new voice, different from the ones who chased him down and threw him in a cell. Grace ignores it. So they're mimicking him now? Great.
The new person clears their throat, then coughs like it was painful. He hears them muttering something, and a more familiar voice – one of the guards – growls back. Grace listens with everything he has, tuning all the xenolinguistic skills he's learned working with Rocky into the problem, and he still can't tell what the heck they're saying.
“Hey,” the new voice says again. “Ai, uh...ai herdjer talkin' oldstyle.”
“...What?” Grace tumbles to his feet and stumbles forward. “What did you say?”
The walls and floor are flat metal, unpainted and oxidized at the corners, but the door is a classic prison cell door complete with vertical bars. It’s almost cartoonish. Once he gets to it, Grace can see out into the hall, which is dimly lit, but brighter than his own dark room.
The man who spoke has the general appearance of a late-stage cancer patient, except for the physical bulk. His face is pale with dark bruised shadows under his red-rimmed eyes, lank black hair hanging loose and tangled around his cheeks. He's got a scruffy beard and a diagonal slash of rosy skin across his face that looks like a whip mark. When he raises his head a little to look at Grace, his hair falls back to reveal more red scarring on the left side of his face from forehead to chin, the beard patchy on that jaw and a mess of pulpy scabbing and fresh scar tissue across his cheek. His left eye has no white – the entire sclera is red with blown capillaries, and his pupil is pinned to a tiny dot in the middle of a yellowish iris. The iris of his right eye is dark brown. Grace wonders if he's wearing a contact lens, and if so, which eye color is really his.
There's a guard on each side of him, one holding his right arm twisted behind his back and the other holding onto...is that a harness? Did they put him in a harness like a dog? It doesn't look like he can stand on his own, so maybe it's some kind of mobility accessory.
“Ye git may?” the man rasps.
Grace blinks, gaping, his brain recalibrating rapidly to this unexpected development. “I'm – what? I can't –”
The man's head falls forward, his hair swinging to curtain his face. “Ugh,” he mutters. The guard holding his harness uses it to shake him roughly, and he groans again.
“Stop it!” Grace snaps. “What are you doing – he's hurt! Leave him alone!”
The guard looks taken aback at the outburst, then shrugs and says something incomprehensible to the other guard, who scoffs. Movement behind them suggests there are more guards further down the hall – or maybe scientists, again. Grace wishes the sight of white labcoats was more comforting right now.
“S'okay,” the injured man says, raising his head slowly. “M'okay.”
“Okay – you're okay?” Grace grabs the bars and leans forward. “I got that word.”
“Git it?”
“Got it,” Grace replies automatically, then takes a sharp breath as the man grins lopsidedly at him.
“Good.”
“Oh my god,” Grace whispers. “You speak English.”
The man jerks his head and winces, then gestures more slowly with his chin in a circular motion. “All talk Aenglish.”
Grace shakes his head. “No, no, whatever they're saying, it's – it's not English. It's a creole, maybe, a dialect, a local – something. Where are we?”
The man squints at him for a moment, then sighs. “Two much. Y'gwan two phast.”
“I'm going too fast,” Grace repeats, taking a breath. “Okay. Okay. I'm sorry.”
One of the guards says something, then turns his head and yells down the corridor. Grace and the new man both wince at the volume, Grace's head still pounding from where it was smashed against the floor panels when they'd grabbed him.
“Fuck,” the man mutters, and Grace huffs out a laugh. Of course swear words would still be the same.
“Where are we?” he asks again. “What is this place?”
Before the man can answer, a new set of footsteps approach the door. It's a woman with light-colored hair braided over the crest of her head to hang down her back, displaying a lumpy pink scar disfiguring the left side of her face. Her left eye is white and sightless. What is it with these people and their half-scarred faces? At least her injury looks long healed, as opposed to the guy still being held up by guards, who looks like he's about to keel over at any moment and has fresh blood spotting his skin and clothing.
The woman folds her arms, her bulky military-style jacket rustling, and stares flatly at Grace. He straightens unconsciously, picking at his sleeve and wondering if she's the warden or the executioner.
She says something, and Grace listens as hard as he can, but he only picks out a few familiar sounds in a foreign soup of jigsawed phonemes. It's like every word is chopped in half and twisted around, mangled beyond recognition.
“I don't understand,” he says, and she tries again, speaking more slowly, more loudly.
“Am I...what?” he stammers. “I – I don't – please, I don't know what you're saying.”
She sighs and closes her eyes, rubbing a hand across her mouth. Then she opens her eyes and turns to look at the injured man, saying something short and sharp that rises in tone at the end. A question.
The injured man nods. She asks something else.
“Naw,” he says, then continues in the same language, or dialect, or whatever it is. Grace is lost. His head is spinning and he's vaguely nauseated and he doesn't remember exactly what happened; he doesn't know what they've done with his ship or with Rocky, and he's scared.
“Please,” he interrupts them. “My friend – is he okay? He looks scary, but he won't hurt you. He was on the ship, too, behind – behind something that looks like glass. His name is Rocky. He's an alien.” His gaze darts to the injured man, then to the woman who seems more and more like she's the one in charge. Everyone is watching her.
She looks at the injured man, his weight hanging between the two guards, and asks something, gesturing at Grace. The injured man looks at Grace for a long moment, then turns back to her and replies, his voice low and rough.
The woman turns to Grace and speaks for what sounds like several sentences. He watches her blankly, then waits for the injured man to translate when she's done.
He does, after a moment. “Yer bro's okay. Safe. Loud.”
Grace's shoulders slump and he sags against the door. “Thank you,” he says on an exhale. “Please – can I see him?”
The injured man must repeat this request, because the woman gives Grace a calculating look. She turns away from the door and gestures down the corridor, calling for something. Several voices answer, then a single person hurries forward, pulling a notepad out of a labcoat pocket and holding it out. The woman takes it and the pen they hand her, gesturing for another person behind to also step forward.
The space in front of the door is getting crowded, but the guards don't seem to mind that the injured man gets jostled as they shift themselves to make room. The man himself winces, his mouth drawn tight with pain, but he doesn't say anything. Grace wonders who the heck he is that they would have him here in the condition he's in. Shouldn't he be in a hospital bed, recovering from whatever caused his wounds?
A piece of paper is thrust in front of Grace's face and he recoils. The woman sighs and holds it steady, pointing at the printed text on the page. Without his glasses, the lines are blurry, so Grace takes a step back and squints. He has no idea where his glasses are, but he's used to putting them down somewhere and forgetting where, so he can handle reading without them for a little while.
“C-O-I-T-O-P-S Operators Manual,” he reads out loud, and several people murmur behind the scarred woman. The words look fairly normal for the most part, except for some odd spellings. Why do these people speak so differently? “COI model SM-8 he-hemorover – what the heck? – issued by authority of the, um, the chief of –”
The page is yanked away and Grace blinks into the dim hallway before the woman hands the page off to a white-coated figure and scribbles something on the notepad before shoving it through the bars and wiggling it at Grace. He fumbles it from her fingers, then struggles to pluck the pen from her hand as well, tilting the notepad and peering at the rough paper. It looks homemade. The pen is more like a compressed charcoal stick, leaving dark lines across the page that Grace fights to decipher in the light from the corridor.
He reads the words, then reads them again. “Oh, come on,” he mutters, placing the pad flat against the door and narrating out loud as he presses the pen against the paper. “Yes...I...can...write.”
The injured man snorts quietly, more a huff of amusement than anything else. The woman looks at him sharply and says something. He just shakes his head. A drop of blood hits the floor at his feet, and Grace can't tell if it came from his face or his clothing. He notices the guard closest to it shuffling his boots away, as if even being near the injured man's blood is distasteful. Or – Grace tries to be charitable – maybe he's just squeamish.
The woman – the leader – takes the notepad and pen back, glances at it, and nods resolutely. She says something to the people behind her, who murmur in reply. Grace leans against the door again and tries to keep his breathing steady as some sort of discussion goes on two feet from his face and two hundred miles away.
“What are they saying?” he asks the injured man, who tilts his head at the guards and raises his brow. Oh. Right. Maybe he's only supposed to translate what's approved. For being the only person who can talk to Grace, and therefore being someone with specialized knowledge, they don't seem to respect him very much.
The man's head snaps up. He says a single word in a confused tone, but at the same time the woman is stepping forward, a guard at her back who pokes a long stick through the bars over her shoulder. It looks like a cattle prod. The end sparks and Grace yelps, stumbling backward. It is a cattle prod. Why do they have that? Why are they threatening him with it?
Keys jingle and a keypad beeps before the door swings open. The guards step forward and shoulder through the doorway, cattle prod guy first. Grace retreats until his back hits the far wall, hands up.
“You don't need to do this,” he babbles. “I don't know who you are; I don't know how I got here. Please, please, just tell me what you want!”
The two guards holding the injured man up drag him inside, then let him drop. His knees hit the metal floor with a ringing crack and Grace yelps, but the man himself just grunts and falls forward, one hand swinging out to catch himself before he faceplants. Grace wonders why he didn't catch himself with his other hand as well, then realizes with a burst of shock that the man doesn't have another hand. His left arm ends in a wet stump just below his shoulder, the dark-stained fabric of his sleeve tied off with brutal efficiency.
Instinctively, Grace darts forward to support him, but the first guard gestures with the cattle prod and he stops in his tracks. One of the white-coated people steps just inside the door and hangs a plastic bag on the bars, which is attached to a line running under the injured man's intact sleeve. Oh, great, at least they have him on an IV. That’s something, even though Grace is pretty sure IV fluid is supposed to be clear, not red. Maybe it's some kind of antibiotic.
“Okay,” the woman says from the doorway as the guards leave the room. Grace looks at her in surprise, but she says another string of unintelligible words and points at him.
“What?”
She frowns, then points at the injured man. “Simon,” she says. She points at herself. “Ava.”
That rocks him. What are the chances of that? Are women with that name just destined to be authoritarian leaders? She says something else, and he realizes she's pointing at him again.
“Grace,” he says, gesturing at his own chest. “My name is Ryland Grace.”
“Grace,” she repeats, and points once more at the injured man, who's dragged himself to a more upright position on the floor. “Simon,” she says again, then looks down at him and continues speaking. He stares silently at her. Shrugging, she turns away and raises a hand as she steps out of the cell. The guards close the door with a clang, and Grace listens to the group of people move away down the corridor.
“What is going on?” he asks the injured man – Simon – once he can no longer hear voices.
Simon sighs and shuffles himself so his back is against the wall that the IV pack is on. It looks like a wobbly speech bubble on a long thin tail over his head. Grace swallows and hopes they'll give him some water at some point. He’s very quickly losing the last of his marbles, here.
“They wanna sent y’dwan in thar,” he says.
Grace boggles at him. “They want to send me where in what?”
“T'paper,” Simon says. “Y’ken...y’reddit. Seen t’pitcher?”
The picture. Grace did see the picture, though it was a horrible copy-of-a-copy that reminded him of poorly-scanned academic resources. The page he’d been asked to read looked like the cover sheet to a manual for a ‘hemorover,’ whatever that was. From what he could see of the picture, it appeared to be a cross between an off-road vehicle and a submarine.
“Where do they want to send me in that thing?”
Simon points down, and Grace looks at the floor.
“Naw,” Simon says, then grimaces. “No. Sorry. It’sa moun.”
“A...a moun?” Grace repeats, trying to sound it out in his head. “A noun? A person, place, or thing?”
“Too fast.” Simon leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes. Blood dribbles down his neck from the mess of raw tissue on his cheek. “Moun. Bitty plan it.”
Grace bites his lip. “Bitty plan it...planet – oh, a moon!”
Simon snaps his fingers and points at Grace without opening his eyes. “Got it,” he says.
They’re both quiet for a moment. Grace still doesn’t know why ‘they’ want to send him to a moon on a ‘hemorover,’ but he has another question, first. “How come you’re the only one who can understand me?”
“From...was a kid,” Simon says. “Bros lookin’ up stuff on’t wew.”
“Looking up stuff on the...woo?” Grace is a middle school teacher. He’s not surprised that ‘stuff’ made it through that translation unscathed.
“T’wew,” Simon says again, sketching a series of lazy up and down motions in the air with his finger. Grace’s gaze follows as Simon stops, swings his hand back, and starts again. “Wew,” he repeats, and his finger points up, down, up, down, up, over...
It’s three W’s in a row, Grace realizes. “The world-wide web,” he blurts, then laughs breathlessly. “You learned to speak English from the internet?”
Simon cracks one eye open. It’s the brown one. “Oldstyle,” he corrects. “Learnt talkin’ oldstyle on t’wew. The...uh...t’net.”
“Well, that’s traditional,” Grace chuckles. “God, half the kids in my classes had friends in Russia or Japan or wherever, and they’d all be talking to each other through translation apps online...” But his smile dims as he recalls Simon telling him the others were, in fact, speaking English. “Why do you call it oldstyle?”
Simon shrugs and closes his eye again. “T’s old,” he says.
Grace swallows, his heart thudding against his ribs. “How...how old?”
Simon raises his hand and wiggles his flat palm from side to side. “Few hunnert yers. T’s Old Erth stuff.”
Grace sits down on the floor, his back still against the far wall from the door. Simon opens his eyes at the thump, then closes them when Grace does nothing more than stare straight ahead and try to control his breathing as his brain spins through the implications packed into that statement. A few hundred years have passed since people here spoke English like Grace’s. Relativity can’t account for that, can it? And calling it “Old Earth”...that suggests all kinds of things.
It had been strange to see a space station floating in loose orbit around a dark microplanet, but Grace just kind of assumed it was under the control of more aliens. He’d never expected to see humans when he stepped through the airlock. He wishes Rocky were here – then quickly decides that he's glad he's not.
Then again, Rocky would have picked up on these peoples’ language much faster than Grace’s addled mind can. He’d be translating for Grace by now for sure – if they let them stay together, that is. If they even kept Rocky alive. No, it was far better for him to be on the Hail Mary, especially if he’d locked it to any entry. He’s been listed as crew for months, so he can give verbal orders that Mary will follow as long as the translation software is running. Hopefully that’s what he did. Grace can’t quite remember. Wherever he is, Grace can’t imagine how much he must be panicking right now – probably almost as much as Grace himself is.
“Um,” he says, to take his mind away from spiraling over his best friend. “Where’s...where are you from? Are you from Earth?”
“Naw,” Simon scoffs. “Marse.”
Marse? Morse? Grace frowns, then his eyes widen. Not Marse; Mars. He scrambles forward and ends up on his knees, leaning toward Simon. “Mars? You’re from Mars? Mars the planet? Amaze, amaze, amaze!”
Simon flinches away from Grace’s rapid movement and gives him a wild-eyed look before forcibly relaxing again, his hand clenched in a fist at his side. Grace leans back and holds both hands up, palms out in a silent apology.
“Aye,” Simon says after a moment of stillness. “From Mars.”
“That’s incredible,” Grace gushes. “What’s it like? Is it terraformed, or are you in domed cities? Can you grow crops there? Oh, of course you must be able to, that’s a silly question. What about water? What do you do for –”
“Grace.” Simon holds up his hand, palm out. “T’s gone.”
“It’s...gone?”
“It’s gone,” Simon confirms. “Same’s Old Erth. Same’s all planets, and t’stars.”
“All the planets and stars are...gone?” Grace asks, sure he’s misunderstood something. The ship scanners had been throwing error messages as they’d approached the station, but he’d disregarded them, because they couldn’t be right. That can’t be right.
Simon nods. “Aye. All gone.”
“But...” Grace’s gaze darts around the dim room. “But – there’s a planet here! This station is orbiting it!”
Simon shakes his head. “Moon,” he says, pointing at the floor again. “T’morrow, they wanna sent you down thar.”
“To the moon?”
“Aye.”
“Why?” Grace nearly wails.
“T’seek cause.”
“To seek the cause of what?”
Simon raises one eyebrow in judgment. “T’s...uh...” he trails off, his gaze dropping to the side, clearly looking for the necessary words. “T’Quiet Rapture.”
“The Quiet Rapture,” Grace repeats, and Simon nods. “That’s what you call all the planets and stars...disappearing?”
“Aye.”
“When did that happen? How long ago?”
“Way back when,” Simon says, and Grace hysterically wonders why he didn't say 'once upon a time' instead. “When I’s a kid,” he adds. He doesn’t look very old – he’s likely younger than Grace himself. No wonder this station seemed so cobbled together; it was probably built in a panic.
“So why do they think this moon will help figure that out?”
Simon’s mouth twists and he glances away. “Dunno,” he says, and for a moment Grace is catapulted violently back to the classroom, staring down a stubborn preteen who he’s fully aware has the answer and is just refusing to give it to him. Simon used that exact same sullen tone of voice. He does know.
“Simon,” Grace says, and Simon’s head jerks up. He seems shocked to hear his own name. “Why do they think the moon will help them understand the Quiet Rapture?”
With a ragged sigh, Simon leans back against the wall again. The IV bag over his head is half empty, rivulets of red staining the plastic as the liquid inside drains. “Cause t’s once has done,” he says. His brow pinches in thought, and he tries again. “Because t’s already did.”
“So...why do they need me, then?”
“They don’t,” Simon shrugs his good shoulder. His grasp of ‘oldstyle’ seems to be coming back in leaps and bounds. “Greedy barstuds. Buncha duds. Wanna ken more.”
“Why?” That seems to be Grace’s favorite word now. “Why do they want to know more if they already have their answer?”
Simon shakes his head. “Naw answer. Naw...not all offit.” He raises the stump of his left arm, wincing. “Trip got cut short.”
That was the clearest sentence yet, but Grace is too busy staring in horror at Simon to praise him. “That's from – you were – how did that happen?”
“Got caught,” Simon says. “Snap...naw, trap. Trapped.”
“You got trapped?” Grace tries not to stare at the too-tight knot tied in the sleeve fabric at the end of the stump. It’s saturated with blood, enough to drip intermittently to the floor. “Trapped in what?”
Simon opens his mouth, then closes it. His jaw works like he’s clenching his teeth. He shakes his head. “No worry ‘bout thar,” he says. “They wanna I on t’radio.”
Grace frowns. “They want you on the radio?”
“Aye.” Simon gives a half-smile – probably all he can manage with the mess of pulped tissue on his cheek. “I’m t’only one ken talk t’ye.”
Grace nods slowly. “Will...if I help them – if I let them send me down there in this...hemorover. Will they let me go, after?” He crosses his legs, settling into a more comfortable position. “I need to get back to my friend, and my ship. We were on our way somewhere. Two planets are relying on us to save them, to save their stars. We only detoured because we kept getting flashes of signal, like a pulsar, and then we found your station.” He decides not to mention the weird light that blazed around the ship as they got closer to the signal, or how all the instruments glitched just before the moon and its orbiting station popped up on screen, like they’d just come into existence. Or like the Hail Mary had just popped into existence for them. That makes him wonder what their instruments said – but complex scientific information is a bit difficult to transmit right now.
Several feet away, Simon sighs, tipping his head back against the wall and giving Grace a half-lidded stare. “Maybe,” he says. “Wi’t’right data.”
“What kind of data do I need to find?”
“They wanna ken more ‘bout t’blood.”
Grace blinks. “The what?”
He realizes partway through the nearly incomprehensible explanation that he needs to give Simon more to work with, so they take a break to hash out the common linguistics necessary for quick communication. The skills are still at the top of Grace’s mind after dealing with Rocky’s translation software, and then only talking to him for months. If he hadn’t been watching as many movies and TV shows as they have, his own English would probably have atrophied. Simon seems exhausted, but he never drifts off, repeating words and phrases until Grace doesn’t have to hunt through his sentences for sense. He’s also quicker at responding to Grace after their ad-hoc lesson; he said something about understanding “oldstyle” better than speaking it, which makes sense if kids were finding old videos and audio files online and listening to the language. At one point, a frustrated Simon dissolves into something that is definitely not any form of English in a fit of pique, and Grace realizes they never even tried other languages. However, his rudimentary attempts at Spanish and French are met with mild bafflement, so they go back to using the so-called 'oldstyle' English.
It does feel weird for Grace to think of it as old when it’s the language he grew up speaking, but it seems like this place – pocket universe, parallel universe, future, wherever they are – runs at a different rate of time than what Grace is familiar with. Simon is able to communicate that humans have been spacefaring for three hundred years, which boggles the mind. Grace goes back to asking about the moon after that little revelation.
But discussing the moon isn’t much better. It had been dark when the Hail Mary approached the station, which makes sense if this system has no sun. Simon tells him it’s covered in seas of blood. It seems impossible, but Grace has been experiencing a lot of impossible things lately, so he bites his tongue and lets Simon continue. Apparently, the group of people running the station – the COI, or Coalition of Iron – have been sending expedition after expedition under the surface of the oceans in hopes of getting answers. Grace isn’t sure how a blood ocean could contain astrophysical information, but stranger things have happened.
When he says as much, Simon asks for an example, so Grace finds himself relating his own story and how he came to be piloting his version of humanity’s most advanced ship through deep space with an alien as his only companion. Simon’s gaze is soft as he listens, interjecting now and then to ask questions, and all the time his vocabulary improves. Grace is confronted with the possibility that, despite a harsh upbringing in a dying universe, Simon may be as smart as or smarter than he is. Grace feels the middle school teacher in his soul yearning to know what he could have accomplished if he’d been given one iota of support by actual educators, instead of searching through whatever dregs of instruction the last of humanity had left.
Eventually, his jaw cracks on a yawn and Simon huffs a laugh. “You need sleep,” he says.
“No, I’m okay,” Grace says automatically. “I still just don’t understand what they hope to learn.”
Simon eyes him and kicks a leg out, nudging Grace’s shin with his boot. “Tha’s on them t’figure out,” he says. “You need sleep.”
Grace shakes his head numbly. How can he sleep?
“Grace,” Simon says, and Grace looks up. Somehow, the skin on the left side of his face looks better, though his cheek is still dribbling blood. He’d refused to let Grace do anything to treat it – not that he had anything to treat it with. “You, don’t worry. I will tell you where to go.”
“But what if whatever they want isn’t there?”
“I know where,” Simon says. “I know where they wan t’go. I was there, before.”
“Right,” Grace sighs. He hadn’t been very detailed, but that was probably the language barrier. Grace flicks a glance at Simon’s arm, or lack thereof, and rubs his hands together. “Um...do I have to lose a limb, too, or...”
Simon snorts and shakes his head, dark hair waving in lank strings around his face. “Naw,” he chuckles, then corrects himself. “No. I won’ leddit happen. I tell you where t’go.”
That seems to be all Grace is going to get out of him, so he gives up and curls on his side on the metal floor. There are no blankets, no bed of any kind. This room is clearly not meant for long-term storage of people. At least, Grace hopes it isn’t, for the sake of those poor people.
It takes him a surprisingly short time to settle. Apparently he was more exhausted than he thought, or maybe more injured. His side still aches from where someone landed a kick, and there's blood crusting his hairline from when they smashed his face into the floor. It itches, but he leaves it alone. Better for it to stay clotted than for him to scratch it and start bleeding everywhere.
But he must scratch it at some point, because some indeterminate time later, he's roused by the feeling of a featherlight touch on his forehead, like a tiny runnel of blood dribbling across his skin. It doesn't really wake him up, just brings him to the edge of sleep where nothing makes sense and everything feels like a dream.
It must be a dream, because when he cracks his eyes open, he sees Simon silhouetted against the hall's dim light, much closer than he was when Grace laid down. As he watches through his lashes, Simon shifts away, shuffling himself until he can prop his back up against the wall again, where he brings his hand up to his face. Something glistens on his fingertip when it catches the light from the hall, then he slips the finger into his mouth with a near-silent breath.
Grace's eyes are so heavy. This dream is weird, because when he forces his eyes open again, they only go to slits, and it looks like there are tiny bolts of lightning flickering across the left side of Simon's face. His own eyes are closed, but when he opens them, they glitter in the electric light, his right eye dark, his left eye a bright, hot crimson.
His eyes meet Grace's. Grace blinks sleepily at him. After a moment, Simon withdraws the finger from his mouth and gives Grace a half smile as his throat moves in a swallow. He holds his index finger up in front of his lips in a shushing motion before his hand falls to his chest, where it looks like he touches something tucked into a pocket, something that clinks like glass against a metal button.
This dream is so weird, but at least it's not the running nightmare again – shoelaces coming undone, dry grass under his cheek, tears on his tongue. Anything's better than that, no matter how strange. Grace lets his heavy eyes close, and this time he only sees the comforting darkness of the inside of his eyelids before he drifts back under.