When Ophelia reaches the hub, just behind Kate and Liana, Severin and Suresh are standing together, near the long table, talking quietly. Suresh is explaining something, his hands shooting out wildly to either side in large gestures.
“What happened? What’s going on?” Ophelia asks as she approaches.
“We’re trying to work that out, Doctor,” Severin says, without looking at her. He sounds calm, unconcerned, but the tension in his shoulders and arms, folded across his chest, is screaming, loudly. “Go on.” He nods for Suresh to continue.
Suresh, after a sideways look toward Ophelia, shakes his head. “Not there. But I checked both bunk rooms, and all the permanent suits are accounted for.” His usual teasing tone has flattened into something sharper around the edges.
Ophelia’s heart plummets; they think he’s outside. That he’s left the hab.
Just like Ava.
“He wouldn’t do that,” Liana says, standing with Kate on Ophelia’s left side. An odd beat of silence holds among the four of them. “He wouldn’t,” she insists.
Unless it’s not a matter of choice, of Birch choosing to do anything. Or, rather, that rational thinking and logic would have anything to do with his choices. The drumbeat of fear that began with Kate’s declaration of Birch as missing grows louder inside her.
“Did he say anything to anyone before—” Ophelia begins.
“No one has seen him since last night, and we can’t reach him on comms,” Severin says.
“What about the temp suits?” Kate asks.
Suresh hesitates, turning toward her. “That’s a little more complicated.”
“What the fuck?” Kate demands. “You’re the inventory guy.”
“Yeah, but I inventoried for a team of five during prep,” he argues. “Temporaries are usually packed as a set of six.”
“You don’t know if Montrose left one out because we weren’t at that point anticipating the doctor, or if one is missing,” Severin says flatly.
“Correct,” Suresh says.
Strange, but not impossible that an afflicted Birch would bypass his regular suit to dig out a temporary from the crates. Ophelia had an ERS patient once who was convinced that Montrose was intermittently screening his private QuickQ conversations (likely) and that it was triggered every time he used a word starting with the letter M (definitely not). So many sessions involving the awkward phrasing “your parent who is not your father.”
Perhaps Birch’s paranoia extended somehow to his regular suit and the tracking connected to it. It’s hard to predict how someone, caught in loops of irrational thinking, would behave.
He cut them open; it’s like he was looking for something …
Ophelia flinches but forces herself to remain focused, in the moment. Not the past.
“If he’s out there, we should go look for him.” Ophelia takes a half step toward the airlock.
“No,” Severin says. “Conditions are improving, but I’m not risking the rest of my team. We won’t have any way of knowing which way he went, if he’s even out there.”
“He wouldn’t—” Liana begins again.
Kate cuts her off with a sharp look. “It could have been forty-five minutes ago or hours,” Kate adds. “Any trace of his path would probably be wiped clean from the storm. We’d just be wandering around, gormless.” She shrugs tightly. “Maybe fall into a crevasse.”
“But we can’t just stand around here and wait,” Ophelia protests. And wait for what? The storm to clear so they can find his body?
In her mind, Rueben Monterra, smashed and broken on the garden terrace below her office, blinks up at her, his bloodied mouth moving. Ophelia shudders.
“Protocol says a thorough sweep of the hab,” Severin says.
“You’re joking,” Ophelia says in disbelief. “You’ve looked for him in here already, haven’t you?”
“A preliminary search isn’t the same as—” Liana says.
“This isn’t a cozy little Grant Park gated mansion, Doctor,” Severin says. As always, his voice is mild while his words are cutting. “While the hab is meant to keep us alive, it’s far from a perfect system.”
“He could have fallen and struck his head in a far corner of some hab unit,” Kate says. “Or come up with an embolism, run into a slow leak, and tucked himself away in a hypoxic delusion, or fucking choked on a meal-pak.”
All true, theoretically. But clearly there’s a reason why they’re worried about the suits and whether Birch might have taken one.
Or maybe she is once again focusing too much on her worst fear—another patient with ERS that she was not able to help. She has to concede that is at least a possibility.
Ophelia nods curtly in acknowledgment.
“We need to go,” Liana says. She’s shifting her weight from foot to foot, like an impatient runner at the starting line. “Now. We need to find him.”
Severin nods. “Liana, Suresh, search the C side again. Make sure you check every space large enough to fit a person, and even the ones you think might be too small. He could be disoriented. Hiding.”
If someone fails to respond to comms, you treat it as if they’re completely incapacitated and incapable of behaving rationally. Ophelia knows that. And yet she had never considered exactly how frustratingly difficult acting on that principle might be in a live environment. It’s impossible to predict what Birch might have done, where he might be, when all the logical options have been eliminated.
“Kate will take the A side, and I’ll handle syscon, the galley, and the central hub,” Severin finishes. “Keep the common channel open, and call for help if you need it.”
Based on her previous experiences, Ophelia half expects an argument about who is going where, doing what.
But Liana immediately hurries off, with Suresh at her heels.
Kate lingers, though, her gaze caught with Severin’s in another of their silent exchanges.
After a moment, Severin’s mouth tightens and he jerks his chin toward the table, off to the side.
Ophelia follows the motion to see a familiar case on the table; she missed it before. It’s not the medikit, though, which would have made more sense. No, it’s the thin gray case with the bright red markings and the code lock. The gun.
As she watches, Kate crosses the space in a few efficient steps and unlocks the case, removing the weapon.
“Whoa, whoa! What are you doing?” Ophelia steps forward, arms stretched out to block her path. “This isn’t necessary. If he’s ill or hurt, he’s not a threat. Even if it’s ERS, most patients are absolutely no danger to anyone other than themselves.” With a few … notable exceptions.
“Plenty of ways to lose your grip out here that have nothing to do with ERS,” Kate says grimly, stepping around her to head toward the A side.
What is that supposed to mean? Ophelia’s arms sink slowly to her sides, then she turns on Severin. “You’re seriously going to let her do that?”
He doesn’t look happy, but he lifts a shoulder in a minute shrug. “It’s self-defense only. Kate knows that.”
Ophelia stares at him, then shakes her head, neck so tight the muscles creak with the movement. “Fuck that. Now I’m judging you.”
Then she takes off after Kate.
This unit is one of those that Ophelia checked with Severin yesterday, on the same side of the hab as her now-office but closer to the central hub. It looks virtually the same as it did then, except for the piles of swept-up debris.
Kate doesn’t bother to look back at her, pushing farther in to check under the lab tables and associated desk.
When Kate’s finished—a quick, efficient search, only made threatening by the weapon in her hand—she pivots and heads back toward the door, forcing Ophelia to step back out into the corridor to get out of her way.
This happens twice more before Kate stops at the threshold of the next unit.
She turns to face Ophelia. “If you’re going to follow me, Doctor, you might as well make yourself useful and check the other hab units on this side.”
Ophelia doesn’t move.
Kate sighs. “Think of it this way: the sooner we find him, the better off he’ll be. And if you find him before I do, you don’t have to worry about this.” She waggles the gun in a way that is disturbingly nonchalant.
Without waiting for an answer, Kate pivots and heads into the next unit.
As much as Ophelia hates to admit it, Kate has a point. It’s not as if she’ll be able to stop Kate from doing, well, anything. And if Birch is in trouble, they need to find him, fast. Tailing Kate is not exactly increasing their odds of finding him, which is the first—and primary—problem. The more time ticks away, the greater the chances that he’ll be in real trouble when—and if—they find him.
Ophelia turns on her heels and heads to the next hab unit. The closed door is heavy but manageable.
This unit is another lab; it blurs with all the others on this side. Except it’s clearly been closed off since their initial walk-through yesterday. Whoever was going through with the broom skipped this unit, and there’s debris still piled up in the corners and scattered across the floor.
Ophelia shivers. Though the temperature in the hab is the same in each unit, a comfortable twenty degrees Celsius, it feels cooler in here. Darker, too. It doesn’t help that the lights aren’t on, part of Kate’s order to conserve energy by making them inoperable in the unnecessary spaces.
Ophelia’s cloth shoes grit across the shattered bits of glass and polymer. She hopes the pieces aren’t too sharp, or that her soles are thicker than they look.
“Birch?” she calls into the small space, even though she’s fairly sure she’s the only one here. It’s just an open-sided lab table, two desks, and a bunch of junk.
Ophelia bends down and checks beneath the first of the desks, one of the only conceivable hiding spots in the room. Nothing, of course.
But as she’s pulling back from the desk closest to the door, she stops. On the underside of the plasti-fab desk, deep gouges mar the otherwise smooth material in parallel lines. Four of them.
Ophelia squints in the dim light, trying to understand what she’s seeing. She kneels down and traces the lines, the rough edges of the grooves scraping her fingertips. What could have caused that?
Dark smudges are smeared along the desk’s edge, wrapping around to the top.
Frowning, she straightens up carefully until she can see the top of the desk. There, beneath a thick coating of dust, is a matching mark, with more of the dark smears.
One on the top, but in direct alignment with the four underneath.
She holds her hand above the marks, without touching them. Thumb on the top, fingers underneath.
A perfect fit.
Someone clawed at this desk, hard enough to make actual marks.
Why?
Her brain immediately summons images, memories of bloody streaks on the floor, left behind by hands grabbing for purchase as people were hauled out of their hiding spaces.
No. Ophelia shakes her head. Not here.
But the back of her neck prickles with a chill of awareness, as if someone is just behind her, looming in the threshold, breathing just hard enough to ruffle the tiny hairs there.
Goose bumps spring up on her arms, and she whips around, hands up to defend herself from … something.
But no one is there.
She lets out a sharp laugh at herself. Get a grip, Ophelia. What is wrong with you? A question for the ages.
Whatever happened to that desk, whatever caused those marks, that (maybe) blood doesn’t have anything to do with Birch. The smears were dry, the dust undisturbed until she touched it.
With a grimace, she starts for the door, and then she stops short, retreating to the other desk, the one under the window, to check it, just to be sure.
No marks on this desk. No dark smudges, either.
Motion outside the window catches her attention. Hard crystalline flakes, more ice than snow, click faintly against the window. Ophelia stares at them, watching them spin and move and collect against the rubber seal at the base of the window.
But then a swirl of darkness beyond pulls her gaze. The alien ruins loom, stark lines in the distance. This, however, is a person-size patch of darker gray, just above the frozen expanse of white, lurching awkwardly, first right and then left. As if fighting against the storm.
Horror curdles the coffee in her gut. Oh fuck.
Not person-size. That’s a person. In the storm. It’s one thing to talk about the possibility, entirely something else to witness it.
“Birch!” Ophelia pounds on the window. But he can’t hear her. He’s too far away already.
She rushes through the hab, out into the corridor, and races toward the central hub. Stumbling over the threshold, she rights herself and then bolts for the airlock at the opposite end.
It takes too long, so long. Even though it’s only seconds, she can feel every one of them ticking down, like Birch’s chances of being rescued before he’s lost in the storm.
The airlock door is already open, and she throws herself inside. Only to find Severin, Suresh, Liana, and even Kate—with no gun in sight—standing there, on the far side, near the corner. They don’t seem to be rushing into suits, though. They’re gathered in a half-circle, staring down at something.
“Birch is…” she begins, panting. She waves her hand at the outer door, as if they’ll understand that. “He’s—”
Four heads turn toward her at once, like a choreographed action. Suresh watches her with his eyes wide. Kate and Severin exchange another of their patented silent conversations, which are so irritating. Just say it out loud. We don’t have time for this! Then Liana steps toward her with a concerned frown.
“Ophelia?”
Ophelia opens her mouth to explain, but in the gap opened by Liana’s movement, she can now see what they were all looking at.
Birch. On the floor, in the corner between the outer wall and the mobile sample containment unit they hauled in from the lander yesterday.
Not outside. In here.
He’s sitting up, wrists resting on his knees, looking a little dazed and irritable but otherwise fine.
Suddenly, Ophelia feels like she’s the one being battered by the storm, twisted up and spun around.
“—right there,” she finishes weakly.