The strangest thing had happened weeks ago, when they first noticed the effects of the Foxfire. A phantom flavor tickled across his tongue. Chocolate syrup. He didn’t have a sweet tooth, but his mouth was suddenly oozing with chocolate and he couldn’t explain it. A few hours later he opened the crew refrigerator to find a bottle of chocolate syrup hidden in the back, behind the more practical foods. A little piece of tape was over the label, reading M.I.

It was like he had been right there, squeezing the syrup into his mouth in a moment of late-night weakness. He understood it now, but at the time he had felt insane. Psychic. When he found the bottle he made sure nobody was around and then swiped an ice-cold, sluggish drop of syrup onto his finger before tasting it. Horrid. Pure sugar. He spat it out, wondering how he had been tricked into enjoying it during that odd moment of transference.

Edison stuffed the urge to take another swig of the whiskey. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the empty doorway. Was this just transference? If he saw those big hazel eyes up close, touched the light roughness of her shaved head, would he regret it? It could be just a trick of the Foxfire, some other heart in some other place skipping a beat, not his. Or it was the whiskey. Or the loneliness, or the certainty that any minute now he would lose the capacity for admiring another human altogether.

Was it someone else’s ache masquerading as his own?

Maybe, but he didn’t think so. He really didn’t think so.

36

The whiskey wore off and with it, her terrible urge to sleep. She tried to make a serviceable nest out of the two environmental suits and one of the cushions from a desk chair in cold storage, but the sticky material and the flat pillow only exacerbated how not cozy it all was. Anytime she shifted, the suits squeaked and stuck to her skin. Briefly, she considered kitting up again to get more of those alcohol injectors, but that felt like too much work.

She stared out at the corridor, daring something to come for her. Her mother used to tell her, when she came screaming into their bedroom, convinced of boogeymen, that the best way to banish a bad dream was to meet it head-on.

Imagine the worst thing that could happen and you’ll never be surprised.

“If only you could see me now, Mom,” she whispered to the ceiling, then softer, “Jesus, Dad, what did you get yourself into?”