Chapter Text
Why in the world had Stratt allowed so many reflective surfaces on this ship?
Seriously. Who designs a spacecraft with this much accidental mirror technology?
I caught my reflection in a cabinet panel and stopped.
Oh.
That was me.
Month fourteen of the trip to Erid. Fourteen months of ration math, calorie math, body-mass math, and the increasingly depressing conclusion that my body was not, in fact, exempt from the most basic of thermodynamics.
To make the food last, I’d started cutting meals early. Small portions. Smaller than small. “Responsible mission planning,” I told myself.
My stomach, however, called it treason.
Fewer calories meant less energy. Less energy meant less muscle. Less muscle meant I now had the approximate upper-body presence of a damp noodle. I’d expected weight loss, of course. It was in the projections. It had graphs. I’d seen the graphs.
I had made so many graphs, in fact, that Rocky had to ban me from making more graphs.
The graphs had not prepared me for watching myself disappear in real time.
The first eight months had been manageable. My clothes loosened a little. Fine. Normal. A slow, dignified decline.
But now?
My white “Horseshoe Bend” shirt—the one I used to fill out pretty well—hung off one shoulder when I walked. Not slipped. Hung. Like it had given up on me as a structural support system.
And you know what?
That was totally fine.
I could deal with half rations. I could deal with being hungry. I could deal with my stomach making noises that sounded like a small animal trapped in an air vent. As long as I kept the hydroponics room producing food, the math worked.
Math was comforting.
Plants were not.
One problem.
I didn’t know how to keep plants alive.
This is embarrassing for several reasons. First, I am a scientist. Second, I am a scientist currently trying to depend on plants for survival. Third, I had spent most of my adult life after being laughed out of the academy world, teaching children about science and (by extension) biology. Usually this included phrases like “plants need water, light, and nutrients,” said with the confidence of a man who had never personally been responsible for the continued existence of anything other than the mushrooms that a student had found one year behind a pile of neglected decorative books in his room that hadn't been moved in years.
The sprouts came up just fine.
That was the cruel part.
Little green shoots poked out of the grow medium like tiny flags of victory. “Look at us,” they seemed to say. “Photosynthesis! Nature! Hope!”
Then, not even three days later, they all died.
Not all at once. That would have been too merciful. No, they died individually, each in its own special way, like they were trying to give me a diverse educational experience.
Some went yellow.
Some went limp.
Some developed spots.
Some simply fell over, which felt personal.
I checked the lights. I checked the water. I checked the nutrient solution. I checked the pH. I checked everything I knew how to check, which turned out to be a depressingly short list to me.
Rocky watched from the doorway while I had my face pushed into the steel metal table in exasperation as my latest three tomato plants just refused to grow for me. One even laughed at me with its moldy soil.
“Plant dead question?” he asked.
“Plant dead.” I grumbled back to Rocky, holding out one of them so he could hear it better.
The sprout sagged.
I sagged.
Great. Perfect. Wonderful.
I had crossed interstellar space, survived coma amnesia, negotiated with an alien, saved two civilizations from astrophage-induced extinction, and now I was being defeated by a baby tomato who refused to grow.
Veggietales doesn't teach you about the tomatoes that just refuse to grow, does it.
Damn, I really wanted spinach right now.
I really did have to thank Dubois, though.
About a month before launch, Stratt had cornered me with one of those tasks that sounded simple until you remembered everyone involved was doomed.
“Ask the crew what they want for their last meal,” she said.
Not “pre-launch celebration dinner.” Not “favorite comfort food.” Last meal. Stratt had a talent for taking any sentence and removing all emotional padding from it with a surgical laser.
So I asked.
Yáo requested some kind of pear dessert. Very elegant. Very commander-ish. Ilyukhina wanted fried chicken, because Ilyukhina understood civilization on a fundamental level.
I remembered both of those later.
Not when I was going through their personal items. Not when I started counting calories.
Later.
I remembered Yáo’s pear dessert when I ate it from a sealed meal pack labeled with his name.
I remembered Ilyukhina’s fried chicken when I heated it up and sat alone in the pilot’s seat, chewing food meant for a woman who should have been there complaining that it wasn’t crispy enough.
That was the thing about being the only survivor. You inherit everything.
Their jobs.
Their bunks.
Their mission.
Their food.
Not out loud. That would be weird. Also, Dubois was dead, and I was alone on a spaceship with an alien, several thousand light-years from Earth, slowly losing a war against lettuce. So, yes, “weird” had a lot of competition.
Still.
Thanks, Dubois.
At the time, I thought that was insane.
A salad? For your last meal? Humanity is ending, you’re flying to another star, you will never see Earth again, and your big culinary finale is leaves?
Yáo asked for a pear dessert. Some beautifully precise thing I couldn’t pronounce properly, even after he corrected me twice. Ilyukhina wanted fried chicken. Very specific fried chicken. Crispy skin, lots of seasoning, the kind of meal that declared war on arteries and won.
I wrote them down.
I didn’t think about it too much.
That was the trick back then. Don’t think about what “final” means. Don’t think about why Stratt needed the list. Don’t think about how a meal can become a memorial before anyone is even gone.
Later, after launch, I found them in storage.
Yáo’s pear dessert.
Ilyukhina’s fried chicken.
Preserved, labeled, cataloged, and waiting for people who would never open them.
ate them.
Of course I ate them. I was hungry, and food was food, and sentiment has terrible caloric value.
But I remembered.
I remembered Yáo when I ate the pear dessert. I remembered how he had said the name of it like the words mattered. I remembered Ilyukhina when I ate the fried chicken. I remembered her grin when she requested it, like she was daring Stratt herself to say no to grease in space.
Then there was Dubois.
Dubois had asked for a salad.
At the time, I thought that was ridiculous.
A salad. For your final meal. Humanity is ending, you are climbing into a suicide mission disguised as a spacecraft, and you pick leaves.
But now?
Now, standing in front of a hydroponics tray full of pathetic little green failures, I understood.
Dubois hadn’t asked for a salad because he liked salad.
Well. Maybe he did. I don’t know. People contain multitudes. Some of those multitudes apparently involve arugula.
But the important thing was this: Dubois had left me notes.
Not dramatic notes. Not farewell notes. Plant notes.
The man had requested a salad and then, because he was Dubois, included enough comments about varieties, nutrient balance, root rot, humidity, and light cycles to turn his meal preference into a
miniature agricultural survival guide.
So Dubois, thank you for being the most important farmer in all of interstellar history.
Also, your final meal choice was still weird.
“Tomato batch four: failure,” Mary chimed in. “Thirty-seven tomato seeds remaining.”
I closed my eyes.
Of course.
Of course the ship computer had chosen that exact moment to provide an agricultural obituary.
“Thank you, Mary,” I said.
“You are welcome.”
“I was being sarcastic.”
“No sarcasm detected.”
“Yeah. That tracks.”
I looked back at the hydroponics tray. The tomato sprouts had done the same thing the lettuce had done: emerged bravely, existed briefly, and then collapsed like tiny green drama students.
Rocky leaned closer to the tray. His carapace ticked against the doorway.
“Tomato is food question?”
“Tomato was food hope,” I said.
He paused. “Tomato now sad?”
“Tomato now compost.”
“Compost is food for plants.”
I pointed at him. “That is a dangerously positive attitude, and I don’t appreciate it right now.”
Rocky made a thoughtful clicking sound, which I had learned usually meant he was either processing new information or judging me. Possibly both.
I looked back at the sad little wilting stems of what would have been a tomato plant.
The green on them was mocking me.
Not literally. Plants don’t mock people. Plants don’t have brains. Or faces. Or motives.
But if they did, these plants would absolutely be smirking.
“Ryland Grace,” Mary chimed, “reminder: medical check-up is due soon. Please make your way to the dormitory for analysis. If not, please state what time you would like to reschedule.”
I stared at the ceiling.
“No.”
“Response not recognized. Please state what time you would like to reschedule.”
“I would like to reschedule for never.”
“Invalid time.”
“Put it in the calendar anyway.”
“Invalid time.”
Rocky shifted beside me. “Medical check is important question?”
“No. Medical check is betrayal.”
Mary chimed again. Calm. Pleasant. Absolutely merciless.
“Your last recorded body mass was below projected mission tolerance. Follow-up analysis required.”
I winced.
Rocky went very still.
Great.
There are some sentences you don’t want translated into Eridian. “Below projected mission tolerance” is one of them. It sounds bad in English. It sounds worse when your best friend is a five-limbed alien
who already worries about your stupid, squishy, high-maintenance body.
“Grace is sick question?” Rocky asked.
“I’m not sick.”
“Grace mass is low.”
“Mary is exaggerating.”
“Mary measures.”
“Mary is a snitch.”
“Snitch question?”
“Later.”
I rubbed my face. Bad idea. My cheekbones felt too sharp under my palms. I had noticed that lately. Hard not to. The ship had reflective surfaces everywhere, because apparently Stratt had looked at a vessel designed to carry traumatized astronauts across interstellar space and thought, You know what this needs? More opportunities for self-assessment.
Mary was still waiting.
“Please proceed to dormitory for analysis.”
The tomato sprout drooped another millimeter.
I pointed at it. “This is your fault somehow.”
“Tomato cannot schedule medical,” Rocky said.
“I know that.”
“Tomato is dead.”
“I also know that.”
“Tomato fault is unlikely.”
I sighed.
Wonderful.
I was starving, my plants were dying, my ship was tattling on me, and Rocky had discovered logic.
It wasn’t his fault.
That was the worst part. Rocky wasn’t being annoying. Mary wasn’t being dramatic. Even the dead tomato plant had a pretty solid case against me.
I had been getting worse.
Not “oops, forgot breakfast” worse. Not “teacher during finals week” worse. Actual worse.
The nosebleeds had started first. Little ones. Manageable ones. I’d wake up with dried blood under one nostril and tell myself it was the dry ship air. Perfectly reasonable. Spacecraft have dry air. Human noses are stupid. Case closed.
Then they got more frequent.
Then came the zoning out.
I would be halfway through a calculation and suddenly realize I’d been staring at the same number for five minutes. Or ten. Or however long Mary politely waited before asking if I was still alive.
Very helpful, Mary. Great bedside manner.
And then my scars started itching.
Old scars. Little ones. Lab accidents. Childhood scrapes. A thin line on my forearm from a broken beaker back on Earth. Places my body had repaired years ago and filed away under “done.”
Except now they itched.
Not a surface itch, either. A deep, crawling itch. Like my body had opened up the maintenance logs, found all the old repairs, and started questioning the workmanship.
That was when I stopped pretending.
Scurvy.
The word looked ridiculous in my head. It belonged in history books. Pirates got scurvy. Sailors with wooden teeth and bad maps got scurvy. People who said things like “arr” got scurvy.
Not me.
I was on a spaceship.
A spaceship with quantum computers, spin drives, xenonite, alien microorganisms, and a hydroponics bay specifically designed to prevent this exact problem.
And yet, here we were.
Because biology does not care about narrative irony.
Vitamin C deficiency. Collagen synthesis impairment. Fragile capillaries. Fatigue. Poor wound maintenance. Bleeding gums would probably be next, because apparently my body had decided to reenact an eighteenth-century naval disaster one symptom at a time.
Man, I was not looking forward to my wisdom teeth bleeding again.
Actually, wait. Could wisdom teeth bleed if they weren’t there anymore? I’d had mine removed in college. Miserable weekend. Lots of pudding. One deeply unhelpful roommate who kept eating chips in front of me.
But the gums were still there. The scar tissue was still there. My body had records. Apparently my body was now digging through the archives and reopening complaints.
Great.
I was going to get ghost wisdom-tooth bleeding.
That sounded fake.
It probably wasn’t.
“Ryland Grace,” Mary chimed, “medical check-up remains overdue.”
I held up one finger toward the ceiling. “Counterpoint: I don’t want to.”
“Counterpoint not accepted.”
I blinked.
Mary had learned counterpoints.
That was new and alarming.
But my nose chose that moment to bleed.
One drop. Then another.
It hit the back of my hand, bright red and rude.
I stared at it.
Rocky shifted beside me. “Grace must go.”
“I know.”
“Grace is bleeding.”
“It’s a nosebleed.”
“Grace bleeds often.”
“It’s a recurring theme.”
“Recurring blood is bad.”
I sighed. “Yes. Thank you, Doctor Rocky.”
“I am engineer.”
“You’re doing great.”
Mary chimed again, because apparently today was a group intervention.
“Medical analysis is required to assess continuing mission viability.”
There it was.
Continuing mission viability.
Not health. Not wellness. Not even survival.
Viability.
I hated Stratt for building that language into the ship. Or maybe I hated myself for understanding why she had.
A mission didn’t care how I felt. A mission cared whether I could still perform the tasks necessary to reach Erid, deploy taumoeba, and send the data home.
I mean, I already did, but Mary still acted upon the idea that it was still in progress and not the fact that I had already sent the beetles out little over a year ago.
And lately, I had been failing at a task called “grow lettuce.”
So, no. I did not particularly want to walk into the dormitory and let Mary quantify how badly my body was losing. I did not want charts. I did not want percentages. I did not want a calm computer voice explaining that I was now a worse astronaut than projected.
I especially did not want Rocky to hear it.
Rocky angled his carapace toward me. Quiet. Waiting.
Not pushing.
That was worse.
I wiped the blood from my upper lip with the back of my hand.
“Fine,” I said.
Mary chimed pleasantly. “Acknowledged. Proceed to dormitory.”
I pointed at the tomato sprout one last time. “This isn’t over.”
The tomato sprout remained dead.
“Strong silent type,” I muttered.
My legs wobbled when I stood.
That was new.
Or maybe it wasn’t.
Maybe I had just gotten very good at not noticing new things.