Chapter 17: : Chapter 17

Lily holds me in her arms. I’m sobbing like a child, gasping, shaking with every breath, face blotchy and wet.

“It’s okay,” she says. “It’s gonna be okay.”

Her words have always been a comfort, her touch a soothing balm. But my pain is unending now. I can’t fill my lungs; my heart is blown open and oozing, the shrapnel of its broken shell lodging sharp inside me. The sanitized lighting in Pioneer hurts my eyes. It smells wrong here. I feel wrong here.

“Let her be, Lills,” says Mahdi. “You’ll only upset yourself.”

We’re in the med bay. Mahdi comes to stand over us, where Lily and I are crowded together on one of the cots. He crouches so his eyes are level with mine. I’m sniffling now, no longer sobbing. I meet his gaze. There’s something strangely hard in his expression, almost defensive.

“Listen, Ami.” I can tell he’s trying to be calm, but his tense jaw betrays him. “Whatever you’re going through, it’ll pass. Okay? It’s just some kind of weird space madness. You know this, right? He’s not—” Mahdi’s expression twists, and he looks away. “That thing on the ship,” he continues at last, “it wasn’t human.”

“She knows that,” Lily snaps.

I say nothing, but a black and seething rage boils up inside me. That thing on the ship. It doesn’t matter what he is, whether he’s human, alien, or something else entirely. They made me leave him. I had been desperate to stay, to know him, to be enveloped by him. He was everything to me. And they forced me to leave.

I remember now.

I refused to leave him. So my crew drugged me and carried me back to Pioneer. I woke up here. Dorian was gone. We left him far behind us, and I was alone. I’m still alone, even with Lily’s arms around me.

Because I no longer hear the thrum.

“There, see?” Mahdi says, patting me on the shoulder, like I’m a broken-hearted teenager and he’s my dad. “You’ll be fine. Pretty fucked up though, if you think about it. What if we’d stayed longer? Who knows what that thing might have made us do, or feel, or forget.”

More tears stream hotly down my face. I can’t stop them. I’m alone. I left him. I’ll never see him again.

“Go away,” insists Lily, clicking her tongue at Mahdi. “You’ll just make it worse.”

Mahdi shrugs. “Just saying,” he grumbles, getting to his feet. “You’ve seen her Psych Eval. I’d keep her under watch if I were you.”

I’m descending the ramp from Pioneer. Mahdi, Lily, and Vasilissa flank me, and I feel the vibration of their anticipation all around me. We’ve just docked on an alien ship. This is our moment, the first contact. Our energy is palpable, our excitement like a drug. My heart flutters.

“How strange,” says Vasilissa, slowly. “Does anyone feel like…”

“Deja vu?” Lily finishes for her.

Mahdi says nothing, but when I turn to look at him, his expression is miles away, his brow furrowed. I know what he’s thinking: Have I been here before? Because I’m thinking the same.

Then a figure appears, emerging from the shadowy edges of the vast room. A pale man with black hair and even blacker eyes.

I’m on Pioneer. I’m shaking, blood-wet and sick. I try to make sense of what’s coming back to me, these memories. They can’t be real. It’s another trick. My crew was never here. They died in stasis.

They died in stasis.

Bile rises in my throat as I make my way through Pioneer, leaving bloody footprints as I go, red streaks on the walls where I lose my balance and right myself.

“You’re fine, Ami,” I whisper, and know I’m lying.

No matter how many times you try to go, you always come back.

His words circle in my brain until they’re a cacophony, razor-sharp agony, cutting at the tissue of my consciousness. My hands shake as I settle into the cockpit, shutting off the viewscreen as soon as I do. I don’t want to look out there. I don’t want to see him. I flip all the right switches, check the readouts.

“Pioneer.”

Yes, Ms. Selwyn.

“Do we have enough fuel, to…” I’m so shaken I can barely speak. I clench my fists and grit my teeth. “Do we have enough fuel to get out of this docking bay? Away from this ship?”

Affirmative. But the fuel supply will—

“Do it,” I snap, cutting her off, even though the words are heavy on my tongue, resisting me. “Get me as far away from here as you can. I don’t care if it depletes our remaining fuel.”

Affirmative.

Empty, ghostlike, I stand. The sound of Pioneer’s engine coming to life, the warm rumbling below me, should fill me with relief. Instead, my head swims, and I’m caught up in thoughts of him, of the thrum. There’s a gaping wound in my mind in the shape of Dorian’s voice. Will distance make a difference, or will he always be with me?

I won’t know when Pioneer begins her departure. Her inertia dampeners and the artificial grav make everything smooth and easy. But I can’t sit around and wait for the engines to fire up; there’s something I need to see. Just to be sure.

I climb down the ladder to the med bay. It’s sterile and white, just as I remember. Cramped, claustrophobic, too clean. I enter the room, and glaring lights flicker on around me. Part of me had wondered if I would come here and find them gone, but they are just as I left them: Mahdi, Vasilissa, and Lily. Their faces are peaceful, as if sleeping. Zipped up tight, sealed in their stasis pods. They boarded Pioneer, and they never left. They never saw Dorian; they never entered his ship.

“Pioneer.”

Yes, Ms. Selwyn?

I swallow hard, and it tastes like blood and bile. “Have we been here before?”

Clarification required.

“Have we docked on this ship before?”

Affirmative.

My gut turns to stone. “How many times?”

Three times.

“Three times we’ve been here?”

Affirmative.

I grip the edge of Mahdi’s stasis pod. His gaunt face holds me in a death grip; I can’t look away. “Pioneer, what happened to the comms array?”

Unknown.

“You do know!” I shout, looking wildly around, as if the ship’s computer, a series of electrical impulses on a motherboard, will react to my fear and desperation. “Did someone tell you to lie?”

Negative. I cannot lie.

“Pioneer, did someone reprogram you?”

Affirmative.

I know the answer before I ask. “Who?”

Unknown.

I let out a guttural scream of frustration, and the med bay blurs around me, a thousand white lights flashing behind my eyelids, and I’m suddenly drowning in an onslaught of memories, back to back, crashing against me all at once:

A tiny, sharp knife. A scalpel in my hand. I know I should be afraid, that I don’t know how to use one of these, where to slice and how, but I’m not. I’ve never been more sure of myself.

Dorian, holding me. We’re naked, tangled together in my bed, back on his ship. “I don’t want to go,” I breathe, burying my face in his neck. He kisses my head. “You don’t have to.”

I’m suited up, outside Pioneer. Blackness surrounds me. I cling to the comms array with one hand. In the other, I hold an electrical saw.

I’m tethered outside the ship, still suited up. I’m at the fuel tank, meticulously opening it up. I’m watching as the fuel drifts out, brown-black globules fading into darkness, and I smile.