Chapter Text
“아빠,” (”Appa,” )Nikki asked through tears. “우리는 무엇을 하나요?” (”What do we do?” )
“난 몰라, 애기야.” (”I don’t know, kid.” )Simon tried his best to keep his voice calm even though they both knew he was on the verge of a panic attack. Still, he cradled her close so she could hide her face in his chest. He didn’t want her to look at his face– or worse, his left stump. “We… We aren’t dead.”
‘We should be,’ went unsaid. For all intents and purposes, they were supposed to be dead. The damn eel was about to eat them. It had bit into their hull, blood was seeping in, and Simon was injured beyond saving.
And yet, there they were. Alive and in space.
Both Simon and Nikki couldn’t understand what happened. The last thing they remembered was screaming for their lives in the sub. Simon was in the middle of praying to his mother to protect the black box, and that death will be kind to Nikki, when they both saw Simon’s pendant burst open. It let out a blinding white light, followed by crooked branches and roots reaching for them. The light engulfed them and within seconds, they both found themselves in space.
Their hull was surprisingly intact, but the sub was not built for space travel. Even if Simon wanted to ignore how they got there, he could not ignore the fact that there was no logical reason to explain how they were still alive. The only explanation he could think of had to do with the eldritch God he must have encountered in the blood ocean – and, God, was he tired of religious bullshit.
The navigation panel and the screens were dead. The camera still worked, which was why they still had light. Even if the ‘pictures’ taken show… nothing.
“아빠, (”Appa, )your arm.”
Simon glanced down and noticed that Nikki had pulled away, now staring at his bleeding stump.
“It’s–,” he started to say but cut himself off. It was not fine. He was more than sure he had enough blood loss to kill him twice over– but he felt fine. In indescribable amounts of pain, sure, but he didn’t feel like he was dying.
The blood. The fucking ocean must have changed them.
“I’ll wrap it,” he settled on saying. “Stop the blood loss.”
“I’ll do it.” Nikki swallowed, stepping back and looking around the sub for something. She stopped after a few seconds and felt around her waist. “Oh, right!”
Simon watched as she quickly unbuckled her belt and yanked it off. ‘Belt’ was a loose term– it was a crudely cut piece of thick fabric that Simon turned into a belt. The COI didn’t care to give them proper clothes in prison, so she got stuck with a lot of loose pants and sweaters.
“Tell me if it hurts.”
“I will,” Simon lied. He focused on the blank pictures on the camera’s screen as Nikki tightened the belt around his upper arm.
“Woah–,” Nikki started to say before she sucked in a breath. “I think something weird is going on.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Your arm…” She said, carefully swiping the blood aside. “It’s healing.”
“What the fuck?”
Simon looked down and held up what was left of his arm. There was still a crap ton of blood covering both of them, but he could tell that his arm was no longer a gaping hole of hanging tendrils. It wasn’t completely healed, but it was not as fucked as he expected it to be.
“What the fuck. I– I’m gonna be sick,” Nikki muttered as she covered her mouth, dry heaving and turned her gaze away from his injury.
It was definitely the goddamn eldritch God he met in that bloody field.
He should have never accepted the retribution mission– he could have tried harder to reject it, or request for a different one. At the very least he should have fought harder to stop them from throwing Nikki in with him, but God knows that the COI would never separate their ‘Eden Convicts’.
“I don’t get it,” Nikki said once she was no longer gagging. “Does it want us dead or alive? Did the eel try to kill us, but something else in the blood wanted to save us? If it wanted to save us, why did it send us into fucking space?”
Before Simon could even begin to process anything, their radio cracked to life.
Both Simon and Nikki jumped. Nikki ran back into Simon’s hold. Simon held her tight and turned her around, shielding her with his body as if the radio was about to fire a blast at them.
They stood in silence for way too long, listening to the cracking noises coming from the radio– like someone was trying to connect to it.
It couldn’t be Ava or her team, Simon was confident about that. He heard them die, the eel got to them. There were no other COI bases on the blood moon, and the main COI space station was a week’s space travel away. This was something else.
“Hello?”
Nikki stayed silent but Simon could feel her shaking.
“Hello, we–” the voice started to say but Simon and Nikki could barely pick up on it in the midst of all the cracking noises. “Appeared on our radar–” Another crack. “From Earth–” Another crack, this time louder and longer lasting. “Damnit, Rocky, we can’t get a stable connection.”
Great. The one full sentence that managed to filter through wasn’t even directed to them.
Nikki looked like she was about to say something but Simon quickly put a finger to his lip, telling her to stay silent. If this wasn’t the COI, he didn’t want them to know she was in the sub unless absolutely necessary.
“Who are you?” He asked.
“Holy crap, there’s someone in there!”
Well, it sounded like they fixed their connectivity problem.
“No shit,” Simon couldn’t help but comment. “Who are you? The COI?”
“Wha–? Uhm, no. Sorry, I’ve never done this before, uhm.” The voice sounded stressed, even through a shitty radio like theirs. “I’m Dr. Ryland Grace, the pilot of the Hail Mary. Your… ship appeared on our radar out of nowhere. We’re trying to understand what’s going on.”
They didn’t sound like they were from the COI– Their voice was too kind. Still, Simon and Nikki didn’t survive prison by trusting people based on first impressions.
“We didn’t expect anyone to be inside the ship. Are you okay? Is your crew okay?”
That did surprise Simon. The COI and Eden worked in very similar ways, self-serving ways. Their first question wouldn’t have been to ask if the people onboard the mysterious ship were okay, it’d be about their purposes flying into COI/Eden airspace. Everyone was a threat until proven otherwise.
“It’s just me,” Simon lied, holding Nikki tighter. “I’m alive.”
“Oh God, you’re in space alone?” The voice– Dr. Grace– asked. “I– Okay,” he cut himself off and Simon could hear some noises in the background. “Sorry, it’s a little hectic here. Look, I don’t know how you’re alive. Your ship… It’s…” They heard him take a deep breath. “I don’t think your ship is going to last very long out here.”
Simon felt his heart drop. Just because he knew they weren’t supposed to be alive, doesn’t mean that he wanted to die. They survived the ocean, and now they may not survive space.
“We have a way to get you out,” Dr. Grace said and both Simon and Nikki visibly reacted to the news. “My crewmates are working on it right now. You’re speaking English, so I assume you’re human? It’s fine if you’re not! I just need to know so we know what atmosphere to set in the tunnel!”
Simon and Nikki exchanged a look.
That was fucking weird.
‘Alien?’ Nikki mouthed. Simon shook his head, both to remind her to stay quiet but also to grapple with the weirdness of the situation.
“Human,” he said, briefly. They may be offering them a way out, but he didn’t want to trust them with any additional information until he could understand their intentions better. After all, doing something out of kindness was unheard of. Not since the Quiet Rapture.
“Great! Wonderful! My crew’s half human, so our ship is set to an atmosphere that should work for you. Rocky’s already setting up the tunnel. Are you injured? I can get the med bay ready– I mean, I’ll get it ready regardless!”
Good Lord, this guy was chipper. If Simon wasn’t already sure he wasn’t a part of the COI, that would have sold it. Still, he could be a part of another Martian Space Station, and none of them are known to be kind.
“Blood loss,” Simon answered. He hesitated before he continued on. “Possible internal injuries… Limb amputation… Mutations.”
Nikki swallowed and looked up at him with her brown and red eyes, matching his own discoloured eyes. At least, in all that chaos, she came out of it with no other visible scars or changes– unlike him.
“Amputation?! Holy– You should have led with that! Oh my god,” Dr. Grace muttered as his voice started to sound faint, as though he had turned away from the mic. “Bryan, go help Rocky! Damnit, how long does it take for amputation to become fatal… I–,” he cut himself off and Simon could hear the sounds of him walking closer to the mic. “Uhm, hello. Hi, me again. Do you have a first aid kit, or a tourniquet? It’s, uhm, it’s to stop the bleeding.”
“I tied it,” Simon answered. “No med kit.”
The two of them shared another look with one another. Their situation had gotten a lot weirder, which was a hard thing to beat considering what they went through. This man sounded so genuinely concerned for Simon’s well-being. Simon found it hard to believe that this man was from any of the space stations, but what other options would there be?
“Okay, okay. Oh god, okay. Rocky said he can get the tunnel ready in less than an hour. If you have a spacesuit, we can get you once the tunnel is up. If you don’t, I’ll need an extra hour to get the atmosphere set up.”
“No spacesuits.”
“Oh good God, they sent you without–?!” Dr. Grace made a noise of frustration, sounding oddly harmonic despite the badly hidden panic. “Never mind, we’ll get back to that later. We’ll work on the rescue on our end. I don’t see any spin drives on your ship, but would you be able to manoeuvre it clockwise? So we can attach the end to your ship’s hatch.”
“The door’s welded shut,” Simon provided. “On the outside.”
“What the fuck?! How could they do that to you?!” Dr. Grace went silent for a moment. Simon and Nikki stared at the radio in bewilderment. This man, whom they never met, was angry for them. “Sorry,” he apologized after a few seconds. “I’m going to help my crew with the tunnel, which means I won’t be near the radio. I’ll check in every half an hour. How's your oxygen level?”
Simon glanced at the cracked up oxygen bar. It was stuck near the bottom, clearly broken and nonfunctional. It was clear that the crew of strangers was already going as fast as they could to help them, there was no need to add additional stress on top of that.
“It’s fine,” Simon lied. “Enough for a while.”
“Okay,” Dr. Grace said, “I’ll be back. I– Sit tight. We’ll get you out soon, I promise.”
“Copy that.”
Simon and Nikki stood frozen for nearly two minutes as they stared at the radio. The little red light remained on the whole time, but no sound came out of it.
“아빠,” (”Appa,” )Nikki whispered. “그들이 화성 출신이라고 생각하지는 않는다.” (”I don’t think they’re from Mars” )
Simon nodded. “그들은 완전한 인간이 아니다.” (”They aren’t fully human.” )
“당신은 생각하나요...” (”Do you think…” )Nikki started to wonder out loud. “그들이 우리와 비슷하다고 생각하나요? 나쁜 신이 그들을 우주로 순간이동시킨 희생자들인가요?” (”Do you think that they’re like us? Victims of a fucked up God that got teleported into space?” )
“어쩌면,” (”Maybe,” )Simon hummed. “아마 우리가 죽었고, 이게 지옥일지도 몰라.” (”Maybe we died and this is hell.” )
Nikki huffed. “이게 진짜 지옥이라면, Bear 가 여기 있을 거야,” (”If this is actually hell, Bear would be here,” )she said with disdain. “그것들은 다른 것들과 다를 수도 있습니다.” (”They might be different from the others.” )
“God,” Simon sighed out. “I really hope so.” He shook his head, stepped back, and looked around the sub. “I’ll let them know that you’re here so that they don’t start shooting if they see something moving behind me later. Considering that their crew isn’t fully human, they might have protocols for dealing with… contamination.”
Nikki looked down at the two of them in disgust. The blood on both of them was a mix of wet goop and brown crusted flakes. The smell was not doing her any favours either. If it weren’t for the fact that they both hadn’t eaten anything in days, she would have thrown up already– which wouldn’t have helped the smell problem.
“What do we do when we’re on the ship?” Nikki asked. “What if they try to take us back to the COI?”
“We negotiate,” Simon said. “We ask to be refugees on their station. If they insist on sending us back to our own, we tell them we’re from Eden.”
Nikki nodded, pulling the sleeves of her sweater over her hands to hide her shaking. Simon swallowed down his own panic and pulled her close, letting her hide her face in his chest as he smoothed down her hair.
“우리는 살아남을 거야, 애기야.” (”We’ll make it out of this, baby.” )Simon whispered, kissing her temple and holding her almost too tight. Now wasn’t the time to think about how he almost had to watch his daughter die alongside him. They made it out of the ocean. Simon would move the heavens to make sure his little girl survived space too. “나는 당신을 지키겠습니다.” (”I’ve got you.” )