There was another thump from the bathroom. The door shook, and as I watched, frozen in momentary terror, it began to slide open. My heart was racing and my mind was a constant refrain of no no no, but a part of me, the small shameful child hidden beneath the fear, was pleading: It might be.

Ten years. It was not possible. The door was grinding open. Fingers pressed through the widening gap, fingers shriveled and dark, stiff, unable to curl around the edge of the door. Moving with agonizing slowness, the door opened a few centimeters, a few more. I saw the edge of a sleeve, the jut of a wrist. The hand twisted, and the motion tore at the flesh with a soft, wet noise, like meat halfway thawed.

More of the arm emerged. Along the forearm were three deep gashes caked with dried blood, the skin and fat and muscle frozen but slowly thawing. It was my father’s arm. I had watched from the doorway to my bedroom as he made the first frightened cut, shouting frantically, Get it out, get it out, it’s in my veins, Amita, help me get it out get it out get it out. He had fallen quiet only when my mother slapped him. He had fumbled to shut the door, his hands bloodied and clumsy. Only when he fell silent did I hear the screams from outside our quarters. He made no sound as he opened his own veins. He had known what he was doing.

There was a hand on my elbow. All I could hear was the thump of the impossible knock, the rasp of the opening door. Baqir pulled me into the corridor and took Xiomara’s helmet from my hands. The cold was shocking; I hadn’t realized how much the quarters had warmed.

The rattle of the bathroom door stopped abruptly. I turned to look through the open doorway, hope and fear and nausea twisting together in my gut. I could still see the narrow gap into the bathroom, the smudged stains of my father’s bloody fingerprints, and the frozen hand, now unmoving. I watched it without blinking, my eyes stinging with cold and tears, willing the fingers to bend, and terrified they would. There was no sound in the corridor except our fast, ragged breaths.

Then Xiomara gasped. “Ariana.”

I spun around, swinging my helmet and headlamp as I turned. Ariana rounded a corner down the corridor, her space suit brilliantly pale in the crossing beams of light. Her short hair was stiff with ice, and there was a layer of frost over her exposed skin. She did not blink. There were frozen crystals on her eyelashes.

“Ariana,” Xiomara said again. “Are you okay?”

Ariana still had Henke’s gun, but it dangled uselessly by her side, as though she had forgotten she was holding it.

“Ari, say something.” Xiomara started to move forward, but Baqir stopped her. “Ariana? Say something.”