“We don’t have time for this.” Zahra, ever in a hurry.

I wanted to tell them I could hear them just fine. Every word throbbed in my skull like a hammer blow. They needn’t speak so loudly. It was too much, too many layers of fear and pain. The thorns of panic tore at the inside of my throat, the walls of my chest. The voices blended together into an unintelligible roar.

Then: a pressure on my arm.

“Jas,” Baqir said. “Jas, hey, come on.”

He gripped my elbow, slid his hand up my arm and around my shoulder, pulling me into a sidelong embrace.

“You’ve got to breathe. You’re going to pass out.”

“The suit,” I started to say, but my voice hitched, choking on the words. My vision blurred with tears. I raised my hand to wipe them away but tapped uselessly against the helmet instead. “Suit won’t let me.”

“Let’s not test it, okay?” Baqir said. He kept one arm around me, pressed his other hand to my chest; through his glove and my suit I could feel the metallic lines of his prosthetic fingers. “You need to breathe.”

I leaned my head toward him. Our helmets tapped together. “I am breathing.”

“You need to breathe and not talk,” he said.

His voice was so serious, so concerned, I sniffled and tried to do as he said, inhaling and exhaling. There was motion around me, and through the blur of tears I saw the others moving upward, upward. There were three levels to go.

Finally, Baqir said, “You okay now?”

“Do you remember,” I said, “that time you asked me what I was so afraid of all the time?”

He rubbed my arm lightly. “Yeah?”