“Didn’t you hear me say on the wrist-comm that we found him?” Liana asks, her forehead creased in confusion.
“No. I…” It dawns on Ophelia in that moment that she never turned the volume back up on her own device. “I guess I was … distracted.” Pounding on the window and trying to get the attention of … who, exactly? Electric fear sizzles down the nerves in Ophelia’s arms, making her fingers tingle painfully.
Liana and the others are all still staring at her.
I saw someone. Outside. In the storm. The words are perched on Ophelia’s tongue, ready to leap off.
In the moment, it seemed so clear. She can still picture that pronounced left-right swaying of someone battling the storm to make forward progress.
But Birch is here. And so is everyone else.
Ophelia reviewed the pre-mission probe scans for herself—there’s nothing alive on this planet except for them. Claim jumpers are always a (remote) possibility, but it seems unlikely that jumpers would wait for them to be settled in at the hab. Plus, the figure she saw, if she’d seen anything at all, was heading away from their facility, toward the city ruins.
So … a shadow, an optical illusion. The snow and wind creating odd patterns and the suggestion of movement. Plus, the team’s obvious anxiety that Birch was outside probably planted the suggestion in her own sleep-deprived—and therefore highly suggestible—mind. You see what you expect to see and all that.
That has to be it.
Ophelia swallows hard. “It just occurred to me that the airlock was the one place we hadn’t searched,” she says.
That answer seems to satisfy them. Most of them, anyway. Birch is staring at her with open hostility, and even Kate is eyeing her, head cocked sideways with curiosity.
“Hell of a place to fall asleep, man,” Suresh says to Birch, stepping forward and offering him a hand up.
“Yes. It is,” Severin says, arms folded across his chest, stance wide again. “Explain it to me again.”
Birch glowers as he pulls himself up with Suresh’s help. “It’s not that big of a deal. You know how it is the first night after cold sleep. I was awake, couldn’t fall back asleep, so I thought I’d get up and check on the status of the storm.”
Get up? Birch’s words distract Ophelia from her own worries. He didn’t get up last night. Not from what Ophelia saw on the iVR control tablet this morning. Wakefulness is one thing, but physical activity on that level would have registered with elevated heart rate and a change in breathing. No one was out of bed last night, based on the numbers. As far as those were concerned, Birch was asleep in his bunk—or, to be fair, wherever he initially dozed off—all night long.
“I sat down for a few minutes, and I must have fallen asleep,” Birch finishes with a shrug.
“Inside the airlock?” Kate asks Birch mildly. Now that Ophe- lia is closer, she can see the outline of the gun tucked inside the oversize utility pocket on the side of her jumpsuit. “There are plenty of other windows to choose from.”
Birch lifts his hands with an exasperated noise. “I don’t know. I was feeling restless, okay?” His gaze slips past them, meeting Ophelia’s for a fraction of a second before skittering away.
No matter how often it happens, it always strikes Ophelia as so strange how you can hear a lie sometimes. It’s the fractional pause before the response. The thinness of the words, as if they’re brittle ice, holding the shape of an answer but not strong enough to sustain thorough examination.
“It’s no different than that time Liana passed out under her bunk,” Birch points out.
Suresh snickers.
“Hey, that’s not fair,” Liana protests, her cheeks flushing pink. “You guys didn’t tell me it was spiked.”
“Liana, love. It wasn’t spiked. It was called grog and just the smell of it incinerated my nose hairs,” Kate says wryly.
“Why didn’t we get an alert that the airlock was opened?” Severin directs this question to Kate.
Her mouth tightens. “I turned off the trip for the interior door. One less power draw. I didn’t think I needed to worry about anyone wandering around in there for funsies.” She glares at Birch.
“Okay, okay, got it.” Birch rolls his eyes, scratching at his arm through his jumpsuit sleeve. The edge of the fabric near his wrist rides up, revealing a patch of angry red skin. Contact dermatitis, probably. “But you can’t blame me for being a little stressed.”
He sends a pointed look at Ophelia. It’s a classic redirect, but it works.
The last of the tension of drains away from the group, their questions answered, their problem resolved. Almost as one, they step back and away from Birch, a precursor to breaking off and returning to whatever they were doing before.
But Ophelia steps closer. “I’m sure it’s as you said, the remaining effects of cold sleep,” she says, choosing not to call Birch out on his lie. Hard to do otherwise, when she doesn’t have more information. “But I would still like to have a chat. Make sure everything is okay. Maybe we could run a couple tests through the med-scanner in the medikit.”
She looks to Kate, who gives an uncomfortable nod after a beat. “Sure.”
“No!” Birch says too sharply, at the same time. Then, with a frustrated exhale through his nose, he shakes his head. “No,” he says again in a calmer voice. “I’m fine. Let’s just get day one in the books.”
Ophelia holds her hands up, palms out, in the classic “I mean no harm” gesture. “I’m just concerned, that’s all,” she says to Birch, but just as much to Severin. “We’ve found that disrupted sleep is not just a contributor but can also be a symptom of—”
“I don’t have disrupted anything!” Birch snaps. “Just a headache that’s as much from you as anything else. And that fucking thing.” He points to the ground, where a discarded iVR band rests near his feet. Along with his wrist-comm.
Liana darts forward and picks up his wrist-comm, handing it to him by the thick black band. He nods his thanks, pausing in his scratching to loop the band—loosely this time—around his wrist.
Ophelia can’t help but notice that Liana does not do the same for the iVR band. Part of her wants to scoop it off the ground herself before its delicate framework is damaged, but she resists the urge.
“What are we doing today?” Birch asks Severin. “Core samples? Updated surface scans with the drones?”
Silence holds for a long moment. Everyone, including Ophelia, waits for Severin to answer.
“We don’t have a huge window between storms,” Severin says finally. “Priority will be documenting the ruins, taking a few samples, and a couple other housekeeping items.”
He’s not going to do it. Disappointment swells in her, followed immediately by irritation flickering to life inside her chest, like flame caused by friction. Severin will not force—or hell, even encourage, apparently—Birch to get help. She should have expected nothing less. He warned her that he would not support her efforts.
She could push it. Demand that Birch submit to a session and a blood panel to check for low iron and T3 levels, both of which are known to exacerbate conditions leading to ERS, or be benched.
But that would only make Birch hate her more, if that’s possible, and destroy any chance of him accepting her help when and if he really needs it, not to mention casting her firmly as the enemy with the others. Any progress she made toward trust with Liana this morning would be gone, if it isn’t already.
Birch nods once at Severin, seemingly in gruff satisfaction.
“Suresh, you’re on pod duty,” Severin continues.
Suresh’s mouth falls open in protest.
“But in this storm, no one goes anywhere alone. Birch, you’re with him.”
Suresh’s protest turns into laughter.
Severin’s glance briefly pauses on Ophelia, eyebrows raised, as if to ask, Happy?
That will keep Birch closer to the hab, which is probably safer, but nothing like an actual assessment.
Birch’s mouth thins into a line. “Commander, I don’t need to be babied because of—”
“Kate, Liana, you’ll head into the city with me,” Severin says, ignoring him. “The two of you will take samples from the towers; that’s listed as our top priority on the mission brief. I’ll handle the scan of the former excavation site, documenting what Pinnacle was up to. That’s second on our list.”
Leaving Ophelia to sit in the hab and twiddle her thumbs, apparently.
“If the storm gets worse, at all, if you even think that conditions might be deteriorating, head back immediately.” The sternness in Severin’s voice reminds Ophelia that this piece of common sense is not simply a nicety but a necessity among risk-seeking R&E teams, which most R&E personnel are, simply by the nature of the job. “If you get lost, stay where you are, we will find you. Be ready in twenty. We’ll go out together.”
Birch shoves past Ophelia on his way out, stomping across the airlock into the corridor. Suresh drifts after him. “Hey, it’s not that big of a deal,” he calls after Birch, but his gleeful tone is not going to help his case.
Birch is too far for Ophelia to hear his response, if he gives one at all.
Ophelia bends down to retrieve the iVR band, as Kate and Severin, discussing equipment needs, move to exit the airlock as well.
A quiet voice stops them in their tracks. “That plan leaves you going into the excavation site by yourself,” Liana says. She’s still standing where she was, rubbing her arms up and down with her hands, as if she’s suddenly cold. “You don’t know what the conditions are like there. You don’t know if there’s been a cave-in. Or if the support structure will hold. It’s been six years.”
“I’ll be fine,” Severin says, gently but firmly.
Liana shakes her head, mouth a stubborn line. “You said no one goes anywhere alone. It’s an unnecessary risk. You could fall, get hurt, become trapped under a mountain of snow so thick you can’t breathe and—” She cuts herself off, visibly steeling herself against the wave of emotion. But her eyes are shiny with unshed tears.
Ophelia lobs her own silent conversation starter at Severin. See? Trauma. I told you.
His jaw goes tight, the muscle jumping at the back corner of it. An acknowledgment of sorts.
“You could just wait,” Liana continues. “Kate and I will finish at the towers and then one of us will—”
“We don’t have the time for that, Liana,” Severin says with patience, no evidence of the exasperation that Ophelia would have expected from him if he were dealing with anyone else, especially with the shortened timeline they’re facing with the weather. Points to him for recognizing Liana’s vulnerability. That also means Ophelia was right in her assessment of Liana’s role on the team—she matters to them.
“I’m sorry,” he continues. “But I promise, nothing is going to happen.”
Ophelia raises her eyebrows. A bold statement, given the uncertainty of, well, everything in this place.
He leaves Kate and crosses back to the airlock to stand in front of Liana, forcing her to meet his gaze. “I’ll stay in contact,” he says calmly. “The team will know exactly where I am at all times.”
He’s good. Very good. Deep voice, soothing, reassuring, like a weighted blanket pressing tight over you.
Ophelia’s resistance to him—a tension in her chest—softens. She finds herself wanting to believe him.
Until she catches herself, squaring her shoulders against the onslaught. He might mean it, but it’s also a tactic, she’s sure of it. He’s just trying to keep all of his team members on task and focused. Fair enough.
“It won’t be like before. And I don’t want you to be distracted, worrying about me,” Severin says to Liana. “This is the best solution, the only thing to be done. Unless you think the doctor wants to join me?” He cocks his head toward Ophelia.
Liana offers a cautious smile.
It’s a joke, to smooth over the tension, reuniting him and Liana on the same side once more, the side of “this woman is an outsider and slightly ridiculous.” Ophelia recognizes what he’s doing, even if she doesn’t like it.
But it’s his exaggerated expression, a humorous version of a smirk, aimed at Ophelia, that does it—digs in, right beneath her skin. It’s the tiniest up-flip in the right corner of his mouth, an expression that says how crazy an idea it is, that rich, useless Ophelia Bray might do some actual work.
Ophelia’s seen similar looks before, from colleagues, classmates, even her various mentors. And she knows better than to be goaded by it. She absolutely has no business pretending to be a full-fledged R&E team member. Especially in a group that would, if not enjoy, be utterly entertained by her fumbling and stumbling around. Amused by her failure.
But Ophelia meets his gaze without flinching and lifts her chin, fury simmering just beneath the surface. “Ready when you are.”
“Enjoying the walk, Doctor?” Severin asks, as the wind forces Ophelia to stagger sideways once more.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, Ophelia castigates herself. Studying the human mind and how it affects behavior has certainly given her better awareness of her own foibles. It has not, however, made her any less prone to falling into the pitfalls of her own personality.
Yes, of course, taking this trip to the city ruins might help garner her more trust, more respect. And passing up the opportunity to have one-on-one conversation with the man in an environment he is probably far more comfortable in would have been shortsighted.
But neither of those reasons are why she said yes. And they both know it.
“It’s great,” Ophelia says, trying not to pant so overtly over the private channel that Severin has opened between them. “Bright, sunny day. Fresh air. Exercise. What more could I ask for?”
The blank, snowy sheet of their surroundings is as dull and eerie in the vague blue-gray light as it’s ever been. The only air is coming from the tank and recycler in her suit, and “fresh” would not be the word she’d use to describe it. Thick plastic, with rich metal overtones maybe. Or fume-y. Though obviously the air is clean enough to breathe or her suit would have been throwing an alarm.
The exercise part, at least, is true, though it feels a lot more like trying to chew through the thickened maple syrup filling in those weird cookies her sister liked to have shipped in from Independent Quebec. In other words, a lot of effort for very little reward. The walk to the outer edge of the city ruins might only have taken fifteen minutes in good conditions, but it’s twice that today. And they are only halfway there.
Severin—six or seven meters ahead of her in physical form but right in front of her face on her screen—snorts, shaking his head. But Ophelia is secretly pleased to see the flush of exertion on his cheeks as well, even if his steps, even and smooth, don’t show it.
Liana and Kate just broke off to head toward the towers, two spears jutting out of the snow. The towers look out of place, glossy and sharply angled at the ends, unlike the wind- and weatherworn edges of the rest of the ruins. Ophelia imagines that the Cloud Gate sculpture would look much the same to an outsider arriving to Old Chicago from another planet. Same with the tangled remains of the Calder sculpture, assuming any of it remained after the fire. Most of the former downtown has been permanently sealed off, cut off like a surgeon excising a margin of healthy skin around cancerous lesion.
“I don’t appreciate you using my team to manipulate me,” Severin says.
It’s Ophelia’s turn to snort. She did nothing of the sort. He’s the one who opened his mouth. Now, granted, she might have guessed that Liana would latch on to the idea, refusing to let go of it, if Ophelia volunteered to accompany him. But that’s his fault, too.
“And I don’t appreciate you refusing to take advantage of the assistance I can offer for the betterment of your team,” Ophelia says back. “So we’re both full of nonappreciation, I guess, Commander. What would you like to do about that?”
Being categorized as baggage, useless, tainted, garbage—they’re all tangled threads in her mind, leading to one giant hot button that she can’t resist reacting to when it’s pressed. Granted, plenty of people want to give her too much value, fawning over her, but that’s because of her last name, not in spite of it, and she’s never been tempted to believe in it.
Ophelia suspects Ethan Severin has a similar sensitivity, only his is about his team and people thinking he’s not doing enough.
He glares at her, and she can practically see him puffing up with the urge to defend himself. But he stops, his gaze darting to the side.
Ophelia freezes, her heart stumbles in her chest, and she automatically scans the horizon around them. But there’s nothing except the city ruins growing larger in the distance as they approach.
Then it clicks. He’s not looking out at anything.
The common channel remains open on the other side of her helmet screen, showing tiny images of Liana, Kate, Suresh, and Birch, though with the private channel open with Severin, she can’t hear them, only read their transcribed words below their faces.
Suresh:—completely disgusting! There’s still shit in here from however many years ago. This is not what I signed on for.
Birch: It’ll go faster if you … try the shovel.
Suresh: You try it!
Kate: Keep scooping, pod boy.
Liana: We’re supposed to keep this channel clear!
Birch: It’ll go faster if you … try the shovel.
Suresh: Bro, you said that already.
Ophelia frowns. Birch’s gaze seems distant and unfocused.
Severin sighs on their open line, sounding tired, as he starts forward again.
She follows, struggling for a moment to pull her booted feet free from the icy layer of snow.
“You’re genuinely concerned about him,” Severin says, but it sounds more like a question.
Ophelia resists the urge to shoot back, “As opposed to falsely being concerned about him to amplify my own importance?” Step away from the button, Ophelia. Instead, she takes a calming breath and answers the question, ignoring the possible subtextual jab.
“I am,” she says. And not just because the apparent response to someone’s possible disorientation within the hab is to search for them with a weapon, though, frankly, she doesn’t love that. It means the negative narrative about ERS and mental health in space in general is winning. “I don’t know him as well as you do, obviously. But he seems a bit … disconnected. More so than before we left the ship.”
“Do you think he was lying?” Severin asks, but she can’t quite read his tone. There’s something guarded in it. “About why he was in the airlock?”
She hesitates, and the only sound on their channel is their breathing, hers louder and far more ragged than his. “Yes,” she says after a moment. “His iVR numbers don’t match his story. But I think it would be a mistake to assume we know why. Trauma makes people do strange things.”
She expects Severin to immediately protest the idea that his team is experiencing any aftereffects from Ava’s untimely death. But he simply grunts an acknowledgment.
Ophelia sees an opening to continue. “I know you were concerned that he was trying to leave the hab, or that he was thinking about leaving,” she says cautiously. Like Ava. “But we need to keep in mind that it might be something else entirely. I don’t think he’s progressed to the point that she … to that point. Maybe he was sleeping in there to guard the door, to prevent someone else on the team from leaving.”
Severin’s gaze jolts to back to hers abruptly.
“Just to help himself feel certain that it wasn’t happening,” she adds quickly. “Or it could be something as simple as needing to be close to an exit, to feel like he could leave, if necessary. Claustrophobia isn’t unheard of as a reaction, even for an R&E team member.” Particularly because Ava died, as far as Ophelia could tell, from running out of air. Leaving the hab to walk on a planet where the air is not breathable seems a contrary reaction, but it’s instinctive in humans. Outside means more air. Period.
She stops, waiting to see if Severin will take the opening to ask another question or continue the conversation. But he doesn’t.
Instead he gives her a curt nod and closes the private channel, switching them back automatically to the common one and Suresh’s moaning about getting calluses.
Disappointment pings through her, but she pushes back against it. Building a therapeutic relationship takes time; she knows that. At least this is a start. That’s enough for now. They have weeks to go yet.