Ophelia stumbles backward, buzzing loud in her head. A chair leg catches at her ankle, and she goes down hard on her backside. It knocks the mug out of her hand, the air out of her lungs, and for a moment it feels as if she’s going to be stuck here forever. Just frozen in this hellscape with blood and a body and—
Scooting backward on her hands, she frees herself from the thorny chair appendages, and then she turns over and scrabbles to her feet, bolting for the corridor.
She runs, not sure if she’s running from or to, until she smacks straight into a solid body at the threshold to the central hub.
Ethan. He grabs her shoulders, pushing her back carefully, holding her steady. His mouth moves, but Ophelia can’t hear him. The roaring sound is so loud in her ears, dark spots dancing in her vision.
Breathe, Ophelia. Breathe. She recognizes the shape of the words first, his lips forming the sounds in slow motion. Her first attempt at an inhale hurts with its shallowness. She tries again, and this time, air floods her lungs in cool, clean relief.
“What’s wrong? Ophelia, what happened?” Ethan’s urgency is conveyed in his firm grasp and the intensity of his gaze on her, but his voice is calm, level. That’s why he’s in charge.
Ophelia swallows hard and manages to croak out a single syllable. “Birch.” Her hand flaps in the direction of the office before she can stop it.
Ethan nudges her back against the wall. “Stay here.”
As soon as he releases her, she sinks to the floor, pulling her knees up to her chest. She can’t stop shaking. Trauma response. Come on, Bray. You know this.
Ethan sees it faster than she did, with a sharp intake of breath that she can hear even from around the curved corridor.
“Birch.” The loud sounds of crunching glass and crashing furniture marks his progress across the room and then his search for something.
The PMU has a defibrillator function.
Fuck. She closes her eyes. She should have tried, she should have looked.
That much blood, already drying? It’s too late.
Yes, but it would have been better to try.
Better for whom?
“Come on, Birch! Come on!” A distinct thump, one that can only belong to the defibrillator on a limp body, signals that Ethan’s found and applied the device.
“What the hell is going on?” Kate appears at the doorway from the central hub a moment later, a streak of grease on her cheek. “I’m trying to fix the generator, which is hard enough without all the shouting and commo—” She pauses long enough to look at Ophelia, taking in her posture for the first time, it seems.
“Come on! Come on! Breathe!” Ethan’s voice carries clearly down the corridor, now containing the first hint of furious panic.
Kate’s eyes go wide. “No.” She darts down the hall. A second later, her voice joins Ethan’s, urging Birch to breathe, to come back to them.
But Ophelia already knows how this is going to end. Outside, the wind screeches in delight. Another permanent resident to keep all the others company.
“I don’t understand. What … what happened?” Liana, seated next to Ophelia, asks again. Liana’s breathing sounds ragged, on the edge of hyperventilating, but she’s not crying. Not yet. She is focused on the few centimeters of amber in the bottom of her coffee cup.
When Ethan called the meeting in the central hub, Kate arrived with a bottle of highly questionable alcohol in hand. Not even a label on the bottle, just a sticker with “engine cleaner” scrawled in an uneven hand. Without a word, she slammed the bottle on the table and then gathered five mugs from the galley.
Ethan shakes his head. “I don’t know. Bled to death is my best guess.” He looks to Ophelia for confirmation.
“I think so.” Her voice sounds rusty.
Liana takes a sip from her cup and coughs. “From what?”
He hesitates. “A wound to his arm.”
Wound. That is an understatement, to say the least. It looked more like a dissection, with … gnawing. Ophelia presses the back of her hand against her mouth, against the fresh rebellion of her stomach.
It resembled what her father had done. Not what he’s most infamous for—the rampage through Goliath with the power wrench and pickax, bashing in heads and faces of anyone who didn’t scramble away fast enough. But the less talked-about deaths of his crew, before their transport even docked at the space station. Based on intraship security recordings from the mining transport, it seemed he was convinced that they were possessed by some unknown entity, something he called the Devourer. He broke into their cold sleep tanks and cut into them, trying to “save” them by digging into their chests, their arms and legs, searching for signs of it.
He thought Ophelia had been infected too. It’s what he would have done to her, if he’d caught her.
She shudders. The memory is always chilling, but in this case, so is the coincidence. It rests uneasily on her, like a tower of rocks that have been stacked precariously.
“It might also have been the eye trauma,” Kate says with a grimace.
Ophelia jerks to look at her. “Wait, what?”
Ethan and Kate both stare at her. “You missed the pair of scissors jammed into his skull through his right eye?” Kate demands.
“I didn’t … I saw his arm,” Ophelia begins. How had she missed that? His right eye was facing away from her, but still. Why the right instead of the left? Hard to guess the logic when he was clearly not acting on anything that would make sense to the rest of it. His QuickQ implant was in that eye. A symbolic severing of communication?
“It, uh, likely entered his brain,” Ethan says, scrubbing his hands on his jumpsuit. He’s not drinking. “Best guess.”
“Oh my God,” Liana whispers before shooting the rest of her drink. She puts the cup down, wheezing and sputtering.
Scissors he took from the medikit. The medikit that Ophelia had not secured.
In that moment, her memory flashes back to that small, warm security office on Goliath.
What did he say to you? What did you know? Why didn’t you tell someone?
Suresh stands, toppling his chair. The clatter echoes through the empty space. “I want to see him,” he says.
Kate shakes her head. “Not a good idea.” She pours herself another drink. “I wish I hadn’t.”
“I don’t care,” Suresh snaps. “I don’t believe it. Birch wouldn’t do that to himself. He just wouldn’t.”
Before Ethan can respond, Suresh turns on Ophelia. “He said he was going to you for help with his headache. What did you do to him?”
Ophelia lurches back, stung. “He came to my office yesterday, not long after we came back inside. But I didn’t do anything. He wouldn’t even let me give him painkillers for his head.”
“Why not?” Suresh demands.
She takes a deep breath. “He was … I thought he was talking to himself. I was concerned, and I tried to ask him about what I’d heard, but he refused. He claimed I’d … misheard. And he left without letting me help him.”
Ethan frowns at her. “This is the first I’m hearing of it.”
“What the fuck are you even here for?” Suresh asks, throwing his hands up. “Aren’t you supposed to stop this?”
“Someone talking to themselves doesn’t indicate suicidal ideation, or even mental illness,” Ophelia shoots back. “And I wasn’t sure. You can’t restrain someone just because—”
“You weren’t sure?” Suresh overenunciates the words, as if he can’t believe what he’s hearing. Then he turns on Ethan. “Seriously, why is she here?”
A roiling mix of humiliation and nausea churn in her. Because he’s right, but also not.
“Enough,” Ethan says. “This isn’t productive.”
“This is bullshit.” Suresh turns and stalks off toward the A side.
This is it. Put or up or shut up.
“The damage to Birch’s arm.” Ophelia hesitates. “I’ve seen something like it before. Once.” She chooses her words carefully. “With Bloody Bledsoe.”
The silence in the intervening moment seems to make the name hang in the air, like toxic smoke.
“No, he smashed heads, remember? That’s what Suresh said,” Liana says, sounding small and younger than her years, someone relying on the details of a campfire legend to convince herself that the strange sounds in the woods are nothing to worry about.
“Not with his team. On the mining transport. He thought they were infected with … something. He cut them open, looking for it.” Ophelia’s voice is cool, distant, as if reciting from a textbook.
“Wait.” Kate holds up an unsteady hand. “Are you saying he was about to go Bloody Bledsoe on us?” she asks with a disbelieving laugh.
“No. I’m not.” Her father certainly never inflicted any harm on himself, not until the end. “But I don’t understand why—”
“You know what I don’t get?” Kate sits forward, reaching for the bottle. “Why didn’t he scream? He did that, to himself, and we never heard a thing. How is that possible? It had to hurt, what he was doing. What he did.” She pours herself another healthy dose, then slides the bottle down to Liana, who fumbles to catch it, stopping it at the edge of the table. “And how did he stay conscious during that? I mean, he was either bleeding out when he stabbed scissors in his eye or he had scissors in his eye while performing surgery on his arm.”
Liana’s breath hitches and she pours herself more to drink, or tries to. The bottle wobbles in her hand, spilling around her cup, until Ophelia reaches out and steadies the neck of it. Liana nods in thanks.
“You’re not suggesting that someone here is responsible,” Ethan says to Kate. It’s a question hidden inside a statement.
She gives a shrug. “If Birch was unconscious, that would keep him quiet, yeah?”
“Who? Who would do that?” Liana asks, eyes glassy with unshed tears.
Ophelia’s mind immediately flashes to the shadowy figure that she—and possibly Birch—saw outside the hab. Maybe. But that’s not possible. Even setting aside obvious issues with survivability on Lyria 393-C, there’s no way anyone could sneak inside the hab without being heard or seen. She shakes her head to dismiss the thought, but it gives rise to another.
“I don’t think we can make any assumptions about what Birch could or could not do,” Ophelia says. “He was … not himself, and that means…” She stops, the words curling up and dying in her throat.
Blood on her face this morning. On her hands.
Instantly she pictures her reflection in the mirror earlier, blood smears from one side of her face to the other. Her stained hands beneath the shower water, turning the weak soapsuds pink.
Her head swirls in a vortex of dizziness. Suddenly she can feel the cool press of the scalpel in her hand, the warm spray against her cheek, and the thick metallic scent of fresh blood.