He rose, a little unsteadily. “I have to go. I’m being called. I’m being… I’m learning… I’m becoming… but I think I have a little time.” He reached out to touch her face, and she steeled herself not to flinch away. His fingertips were hot. “I can get you out of here, Elena. I can get you home. You’ll be safe.”

“Home? To Earth? Sebastien, it would take hundreds of years–”

“Not anymore. Not now. They thought our ship was broken. They thought we were broken. They fixed it. They fixed us. They’re trying… look.”

He pointed into the torn-open panel, and she looked through the nest of tangled conduits to see a foreign object wired into the system: a greasy-looking black cube, about half a meter on each side. “That’s your way home.” Sebastien went to the navigation panel and tapped out a rapid series of commands. The cube began to hum, a deep atonal rumble. “There. When the repairs are done, the ship will take you home. Or, close to home, I can’t quite see the math, it wavers at the edges, I’m still changing.”

“Sebastien, I don’t understand–”

His head snapped around, like he’d heard something. “They’re coming. They want to fix you, too… the spiders are simple. Thermal, I think. If we get you back in cryosleep, they won’t register you as something they need to repair.” He blinked and rubbed at his good eye. “We have to hurry.”

“Sebastien, you can go into cryosleep too, they won’t see you–”

“Too late. It’s in me. They know me as their own. I can’t hide. But let me save you, Elena.” Without waiting for her to answer, he lurched down the corridor, stumbling against walls like a drunk, and she followed.

Sebastien opened her cryopod and gestured, and Elena climbed inside, because what else could she do? If there was any chance at all to make it home, even if it took hundreds of years, she had to take it, didn’t she? She had to let people know what dangers lurked here, beyond the back of the stars.

Sebastien hooked her up to the pod’s life support systems, then leaned in and kissed her brow. His lips were so hot she flinched away, but he didn’t notice. His left eye was filmed over now, too, but not yet glowing. “I wish we’d found a new world together, Elena. A better world than this one.”

“Sebastien…” she began, but he pressed her firmly down into the pod as it filled with swirls of cold vapor, and the needles pierced her skin to deliver the drugs that would slow her metabolic rate. He sealed the lid, and looked down at her, a blurry form behind the glass for a moment, before he vanished.