Ophelia’s throat locks up, a scream trapped between her mouth and lungs, with nowhere to go as it grows and grows until it feels as if her flesh will split with it. Like the scream will explode from her throat, leaving a ragged hole behind.
Her peripheral vision whites out. For a moment, the body on the floor is Rueben, her patient, his shattered mouth moving in words that she can’t understand, the metallic scent of fresh blood filling her nose as she kneels next to him. Warm blood on the cold terrace tiles, seeping into her pants as the distant wail of sirens fills the air.
Then—before she can stop it, before she can grab hold of her past and firmly wedge it back into the triple-locked vault where she keeps it—another memory surfaces.
Mari.
Marigold Trevor, just a few years older than she is, is curled up on her left side, half hidden under a mess hall table, though hiding had done nothing to save her. Her arm stretches out toward Ophelia, as if asking for help. But her face is shattered, concave where identifiable features used to be, one bright blue eye rolled up to look at her sightlessly from the sea of red and ruined flesh.
Mari watches over her sometimes when her mother has a shift at the mess hall and her father is out with his crew. Mari’s braid always has a new ribbon woven through it, snaking in and out of the smooth blond segments, making her the coolest person that Ophelia knows.
But now, Mari’s ribbon—a bright silvery spiderweb confection today—is stuck to a flap of scalp dangling from the top of her head, and Ophelia’s bare feet are tacky, sticky with Mari’s blood.
Run! The urgency throbs through Ophelia like an infected tooth.
“—Bray? Doctor, are you okay?”
She comes back to herself, arms rigid at her sides, her breath rasping in and out, fogging her faceplate in patches.
Severin is still across the room, device forgotten in his hand as he stares at her, the blue light inside his helmet highlighting his furrowed brow.
He steps closer. “You know it’s empty, right? Just an empty suit.”
Some part of her—a hard square of irrational terror in her gut—is convinced that if she looks, all she’s going to see is Mari’s empty, accusing eye staring back up at her. But after a moment, she forces herself to shift her gaze away from him toward that … thing.
Severin’s right; the white envirosuit—with the Pinnacle logo on the chest—is mostly flat. It’s just a fully assembled suit, lying on the floor in the shape of a person, one arm reaching toward anyone passing by.
“Right,” she manages. “Empty. Yeah, I know.” Now.
“What’s going on?” Birch demands.
“On my way,” Kate says.
“Negative, negative,” Severin says, closing the distance between them, his boot nudging the arm of the suit. “It’s just another stupid prank. Hazing for the next crew to find when they come in. A suit on the floor that looks like a person at a distance.” He eyes her but says nothing more.
Ophelia waits another beat, but he doesn’t out her as having fallen for it. Her immediate warm rush of gratitude instantly grates at the same time. She doesn’t need his help. Nor does she need the way he’s looking at her now, as if seeing her in a slightly different light.
“Damn, that’s a good one,” Suresh says in Ophelia’s ear, sounding both awed and disappointed. “All we’ve got is a bunch of empty bunk rooms on this side.”
“Nearly done here,” Severin says. “We’ll rejoin you in the central hub in a minute.”
Then Severin turns to Ophelia, shifting them to the private channel again, his face in miniature on her helmet screen, and then larger right in front of her in real life. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
His gaze pierces through her, as if he can see the memories so recently playing across her vision.
“Of course. I’m fine,” she says, as crisply as she can manage. The lump of unrealized scream is fading from her throat, but the lingering rawness is a painful reminder. As is the rising crest of embarrassment. “It just took me by surprise.”
Severin doesn’t respond right away, just looks at her.
He doesn’t believe her. Ophelia grits her teeth against the urge to explain, to babble justifications.
Instead she waits, her eyebrows raised in imperious question, as if daring him to ask—another classic Bray move … which she hates—until he finally nods.
“Back to work, everybody,” Severin says finally, back on the common channel, in a tone that brooks no argument. “That next storm is coming in hard. T-minus twenty-three minutes. We want to be locked down before that happens.”
“On it,” Liana says.
“Roger,” Kate says. “Environmentals are a go on your word.”
Severin turns and walks out into the corridor without another word.
Ophelia lets out a slow breath, her attention drawn unwillingly back to the suit on the floor. Looking at it now, she can’t even see how she thought there was a body inside. Yes, the positioning and the shape, but it’s clearly not inhabited. Any normal person would have recognized that almost immediately.
It’s this place. This fucking Pinnacle hab, unleashing shit in her head she absolutely does not need right now. Or ever. At this rate, she’ll be lucky if Severin and the others don’t report her to PBE.
But now that she’s aware of the trigger—the unconscious connection her brain is making between past and present—she’ll manage it. No problem. She will not allow the irrelevance of the past to fuck up her future.
Ophelia squares her shoulders and starts after Severin.
But, as she turns away from the suit, a flash of something bright catches her eye.
On the upper arm of the suit, a name patch is still in place, embroidered in shiny metallic thread that’s frayed from wear in several places: M. DELACROIX.
She frowns, bending down to take a closer look. The white Pinnacle suit is dirty at the elbows, banged and bashed up from use on the chest plate, and the heavy-duty material gleams with the safety scaling, designed to help prevent tears.
This is not one of the emergency-only temp suits, designed to be used for a short period of time and then discarded, if something happens to a wearer’s primary suit that can’t be repaired.
This is a primary suit. M. Delacroix’s, if the patch means anything. And there’s no obvious damage that would render it unusable.
Why would someone leave their primary suit behind? Where is Delacroix now? Did he or she really go back to Earth with a temp suit? Or even on to another assignment?
That doesn’t make any sense.
Then again, it didn’t make any sense to her to pretend to have a tank malfunction, either, but clearly some R&E teams operate on a whole other level of common understanding.
“Dr. Bray?” Severin calls.
“Yeah, I’m coming,” she says reluctantly, swallowing back her questions.
They’re nearly done unloading, carting crates of food, equipment, supplies, and their own personal items from the lander to the hab, when the wind picks up suddenly, from a slight breeze to a sheer blast. The icy flakes turn to a blinding wall of white. Right at the start of their work, Severin had attached a bright orange guide rope to the leg of the lander on one end and to a hook on the outer edge of the airlock frame on the other. At the time, it seemed a strikingly antiquated and unnecessary gesture. Not anymore.
Their in-helmet visuals are lost with the storm, the connection to the Resilience temporarily gone. Only local comms between their suits are functioning, and even then, just within a short range.
That stripe of color at Ophelia’s left shoulder is the only thing keeping her on track and reassuring her that she will make it back to the hab on this last trip. Eventually. The missing rover would have been really useful about now, but there’s still no sign of it.
Leaning forward into the wind, she focuses on planting her booted feet in the gritty, crunchy surface and not dropping the slim metallic case in her hands. She insisted on carrying this one herself, even though it meant an extra back-and-forth journey. She didn’t want to find it crushed between pallets of surveyor drones or “accidentally” lost in a drift somewhere along the way.
The case is not heavy; in fact, it might be easier if it were, less of a wind-catch. But the iVR bands inside are deliberately—and deceptively—lightweight for their power.
Her grip tightens on the case, both against the storm and in determination. By the time she’s done, team number 356 is going to be the most well-adjusted goddamned team in the—
The howl of wind around her rises to an unearthly shriek, an eerie, goose bump–inducing sound. From low to high, deep to shrill, like an animalistic moan of pain transforming into a scream. And it’s coming from the city ruins to her left.
Beyond those dark crystalline towers jutting out of the snow at an angle, Ophelia can’t see much. She gets only glimpses of the other shadowy structures when the storm takes a breath, holding back on the snow for a few seconds. But she knows what’s there, according to the mission file anyway. The first team here called them, the beings who built the city so far below, the Lyrians.
They were, by Earth terms and definitions, mammals. Not all that dissimilar from humans, with a different bend in the evolutionary tree. From drone scans of the structures hidden in the ice, the consensus was they’d been communal, perhaps even matriarchal. Artist renderings depicted them as tall, slender, sloth-like creatures with long, elegant fingers, large, expressive eyes, and a thin layer of fur in a variety of colors. And sharp teeth, with fang-like incisors at the front of the mouth.
Those details, though, were just best guesses by astro-bio archeologists, based on the one set of remains found—unintentionally mummified—on the next planet over, Lyria 393-D. A probe found one Lyrian dead, outside a rudimentary shelter, facing the direction of their home world, one arm outstretched as if trying to crawl home.
The Lyrians had been spacefaring, just not quite interstellar. They were advanced, building huge cities like the one beneath her feet and attempting to grow beyond their planet. But not fast enough.
They’d died horrifically. Likely starving or freezing or both. Millions of them, now crushed beneath the weight of snow, ice, and years.
More would probably be known about them and this planet except that once Bodhi 923-E was discovered, with more recent inhabitation and technology that might be adaptable to human use—meaning, weaponized—Lyria 393-C and others like it were knocked down to the bottom of corporate priority lists.
Planets like this one are now viewed as oddities, valuable only in the sense of their rarity and trophy status, interesting only in a vaguely scientific manner rather than anything that might be profitable.
This planet is a graveyard, forgotten and abandoned to the weeds and time. It should be sad. Or perhaps a warning that everything ends.
But standing here, rather than just reading about it, the eeriness is what rings through to Ophelia.
Her grandmother was on the board of a variety of foundations, including one advocating for the restoration of Pompeii after it was lost again to Vesuvius. Ophelia had seen the archival footage of the original site, after the twentieth-century excavation.
The plaster molds of the dead were made from the void where their flesh had rotted away in the ash, but their bones and teeth still showed through—ghosts that had physical form and shape. A burned loaf of bread still in the oven. Even a dog rolled up onto its back, exposing its belly in a grotesque mimicry of relaxation.
But more than that, it was that absence where there had once been life. Empty streets, abandoned baby cradles, kitchen tables with chairs still in place. Likely all of that and more—the Lyrian version, anyway—resides beneath her at this very moment.
The moaning grows louder, like vengeful voices rising in a chorus.
Ophelia doesn’t even realize she’s backed up, away from the ruins, away from the sound, until her shoulder smacks into something solid behind her.
She jolts and turns, stumbling over the ice, to find Severin behind her. “What—”
He reaches out to steady her. “It’s just the wind,” he says, his voice calm and even in her helmet. It drowns out the dreadful noise for a moment. “There’s nothing else out here to interrupt it. To make noise.”
As soon as he says it, she realizes he’s right, of course. It’s a flat plain of icy white nothingness, except for the jagged peaks of the former city.
“You need to stay on the line, Doctor.” He nods his head at something behind her. She turns to look, awkward in her helmet, and realizes the orange rope is gone, lost in the violent flurries.
She couldn’t have gone more than a step or three … but apparently that’s enough. Her heart lurches upward in instinctive panic.
Stupid, Ophelia. Really stupid. Talk about an unforced error.
It feels like a small eternity but is probably only a few seconds before she sees a flash of familiar orange in a temporary break from the wind.
Without waiting for another prompt from Severin, she hurries toward it, like the lifeline that it is. She shifts the case to one hand and grasps the line with the other.
Severin moves back into place behind her on the line—the cord bobs and then straightens with the additional pressure. He insisted on coming back with her on this final run, while the others remained in the hab, setting up and settling in. Ophelia’s (arrogant) assertion that she didn’t need the help seems incredibly foolish right about now. To be fair, at the time, she’d been trying to prove that she was useful, not a burden, and she’d still been able to see their lander.
Now, without the rope, she’d have no idea even which direction to go.
At least he’s not entirely empty-handed. He’s carrying a slim gray hard case, retrieved from the lander. It’s marked with bright red warnings and has a coded lock. Standard mission firearm, the only weapon allowed. Though it’s clear that they’re not in any danger from claim jumpers at the moment, Montrose protocol indicates that the case should remain in the custody of the mission commander at all times. Only he—and his second, probably Kate—have the code to open it. And Severin strikes her as a very by-the-book type.
“Thank you,” Ophelia says. She hears the edge of resentment in her voice but hopes he doesn’t. It’s not his fault. No matter how much she may dislike him, that doesn’t change the fact that he’s the one in his element here, not her. And it’s his job to keep her alive, whether he likes it or not.
“It’s all right, Doctor. The first on-planet assignment is always an adjustment. For everyone,” he says mildly. “Especially here. The storms seem to roll up fast and hit hard.”
She replays his words in her head, searching for the sneer, the superiority. But she can’t detect even a hint of it. Severin either seems to have mellowed, now that they’re finally on the surface, or he’s ceased to view her as a threat.
Probably right about the time she froze up at the sight of an empty envirosuit.
She grimaces. She doesn’t want an adversarial relationship with the mission commander; that would make accomplishing her objective here that much harder. Neither, however, does she want his … pity.
They both keep silent for the remainder of the journey to the hab. The only noise over the comms is their slightly labored breathing from the more strenuous effort required to return.
The lights are on when they enter the airlock this time. Whatever Kate is doing in syscon is working.
Ophelia follows Severin’s lead, stamping her feet against the textured floor (It’s just a floor. Get a good look at it, and maybe then you can stop obsessing.) to remove ice and snow while they wait for the airlock to run through its decon cycle.
A sideways glance at Severin, as much as is possible in her helmet, reveals that he is waiting patiently, staring straight ahead.
The impulse to fill the quiet with reminders about counseling sessions and what will be required, to piss him off and change the direction of his assumptions about her, thereby changing the imagined balance of power, is oppressive, almost a physical need.
Has it occurred to you that your issue is not with relationships but the mooch … much … mutual vulnerability that is occasionally required to connect with another human being?
Ophelia grimaces at the memory of Julius’s words. He’s lost friend status and all incumbent privileges, including telling her ugly truths about herself while they’re both intoxicated. But she can’t extract him from her memories so easily. And he wasn’t necessarily wrong.
A very drunken session after her most recent breakup had resulted in that gem.
“You’re more comfortable with patients than other people because you don’t have to share anything of yourself with them.” He’d patted her on the hand, eyes shining with unshed tears, as the bar around them continued to stomp and sing at the victory of a band she didn’t know in a competition she wasn’t familiar with. Maybe she was working too much—“too distant, too removed,” as Baran, her ex, claimed.
“Sometimes I feel like I don’t even know you that well,” Julius had added.
At the time, she’d thrown her arm around Julius’s shoulders, sloppily, reassuring him that he knew her best of all. Which was true. But it wasn’t saying as much as it should have been.
Her real answer, if she could have told the truth, is the same now as it would have been then. Her problem is not with being vulnerable around others. If anything, it’s the opposite. She’s been—and continues to be—too vulnerable. All the time.
The inner airlock door finally releases with a mechanical clank and a slight hiss.
“Commander, when you’ve got a second…” Kate sounds especially formal over the comm channel. And for no other reason beyond that, Ophelia’s stomach clenches up tight. That’s trouble, whatever it is.
“I’m going to check with Kate.” Severin nods at her, the gesture curt and perfunctory, but without the outward signs of hostility from before.
“Right,” Ophelia says, even as the need to push back grows stronger, urging her to rebalance the invisible—no, nonexistent—power scales between them. Drop it, Phe.
Severin steps over the threshold of the airlock, into the central hub, heading toward syscon. Leaving her behind.
“Don’t forget to see me later to set up your sleep settings for tonight.” The words, clipped and sharp, slip out before she can stop them.
The immediate surge of relief is heady, familiar—that of bad news suddenly turned to simple miscommunication, of unexpectedly canceled family dinners, of vomiting after a series of poor alcohol choices. But then it vanishes, replaced immediately by the heated flush of shame. She knows better.
Severin pauses, his posture stiffening visibly, even through his envirosuit.
“Understood, Doctor,” he says, without turning to face her. And the iciness outside has nothing on his tone in here.