It was all her fault. If she hadn’t found that damned room, Alan and the others would still be alive and she wouldn’t have ended up infected by some sort of xeno.

The spikes.

Where were the spikes and tendrils that had torn through her skin? Kira looked down, and her heart skipped a beat.

Her hands were black when they shouldn’t have been. So too were her arms and her chest and everything else she could see of her body. A layer of glossy, fibrous material clung to her, tight as any skinsuit.

Horror welled up inside Kira.

She clawed at her forearms in a desperate attempt to rip off the alien organism. Even with their hard new veneer, her nails couldn’t cut or break the fibers. Frustrated, she brought her wrist to her mouth and bit.

The taste of stone and metal filled her mouth. She could feel the pressure from her teeth, but no matter how hard she bit down, it didn’t hurt.

Kira scrambled to her feet, heart pounding so fast it skipped beats, the edges of her vision going dark. “Get it off!” she shouted. “Get this fucking thing off me!” Through her panic, she wondered where everyone was, her one coherent thought amid the madness.

One of the robotic arms descended toward her. The manipulator at the end of the arm was holding a syringe. Before Kira could move, the machine reached around her head and injected her behind the ear, on a patch of still-bare skin.

Within seconds a heavy blanket seemed to press down upon her. Kira stumbled sideways, reaching out an arm to catch herself as she fell—

2.

The panic returned the moment Kira regained consciousness.

There was an alien creature bonded with her. She was contaminated, possibly infectious. It was the sort of situation every xenobiologist dreaded: a containment breach leading to fatalities.

Alan …

Kira shuddered and buried her face in the crook of her arm. Below her neck, her skin prickled with a million tiny fears. She wanted to look again, but she didn’t have the courage. Not yet.

Tears leaked from under her eyelids. She could feel Alan’s absence like a hole in her chest. It didn’t seem possible that he was dead. They’d had so many plans, so many hopes and dreams, and now none of them would come to fruition. She’d never get to see him build the house he’d talked about, nor go skiing with him in mountains in the far south of Adra, nor watch him become a father, nor any of the other things she’d imagined.

The knowledge hurt more than any physical pain.

She felt her finger. The band of polished iron set with tesserite was gone, and with it her only tangible reminder of him.

A memory came to her then, from years past: her father kneeling next to her in a greenhouse and bandaging a cut on her arm while saying, “The pain is of our own making, Kira.” He pressed a finger against her forehead. “It only hurts as much as we let it.”