Nothing helps. They’re in so much pain. Another group escaped custody and fled into the ruins. Every time we think we have [data corruption] the people up in the ship don’t know what to do with the samples we sent to them. It’s not safe for them to come down, and it’s not safe for us to return. I always knew I’d die here, but not like this. Not this soon. I was supposed to have decades. We were supposed to have a lifetime.

—FRAGMENT 4, MOURNFUL EVENING SONG VIA UC33-X

JAS

And she was gone. In the fraction of a second between the ripple beneath her skin and our gasps of shock, Ariana had whirled away and propelled herself down the corridor.

“Wait!” I shouted. Driven more by wild instinct than logical thought, I followed.

She was outrageously, impossibly fast. She moved as though she had lived in space her entire life, kicking from one wall to angle off another, gliding so smoothly it was difficult to see how she anticipated each necessary motion and planned each action and reaction. She didn’t look back. If she heard us shouting, she chose not to react.

My heart was pounding, my mind racing. My mother’s words from Ariana’s mouth. The rattle and thump of the bathroom door. It wasn’t him. It couldn’t be him. That terrible grasping hand.

The thing beneath her skin.

I wasn’t as fast as Ariana, being ten years out of practice, but I was faster than Baqir and Xiomara. Soon their shouts were well behind me. I didn’t stop. She had spoken my mother’s words. I was not going to lose her.

I held my helmet in one hand, the headlamp lighting every turn. My breath formed whirling clouds in the cold. The hallways burrowing through Level 7 were short, rarely straight, interrupted by common areas and alcoves: the shipbuilders’ attempt at softening the engineered precision of living spaces. What had made the hallways fun to play in as a child made them frustrating now. I caught the edge of a doorway to change direction, kicked with both feet to propel myself around a bend. A few meters ahead the passage opened into a large chamber.

Ariana had paused in the doorway. She was a silhouette in the low red light. Her rainbow hair shone in stiff streaks of light and dark. Unmoving, her back to me, she did not turn. I stopped only a couple of meters behind her.

Beyond Ariana, visible over her right shoulder, was the Earth.