If anyone's searching at all.
I shoved that thought down deep, locked it away with all the other thoughts I couldn't afford to have. Like the memory of the wormhole opening in front of Liberty like a hungry mouth. Like the sound of the hull tearing apart, metal screaming as physics we didn't understand ripped our ship into pieces. Like watching escape pods scatter in every direction, knowing some of them were already tumbling toward the crushing gravity of stars we couldn't name.
"Do it," Bea said quietly. "Four days is better than none."
I nodded and got to work, my fingers finding the familiar rhythm of repair despite the tremor that had started living in them. Stress tremor, I told myself. Not fear. Engineers didn't get to be afraid. Engineers got to be focused, methodical, and utterly convinced that every problem had a solution if you just thought hard enough.
Even when the problem was being stranded on a planet where the ground would literally cook you alive.
"I've got it," Elena called from deeper in the cave, her voice echoing off stone walls. Our pilot, former pilot, now that we didn't have a ship, had been working on expanding our livable space, chipping away at the rock with salvaged tools. Pointless busy work, maybe, but it kept her from staring at the caveentrance like she could will a rescue ship into existence through sheer force of desire.
We all had our coping mechanisms. Mine was fixing things. Elena's was movement. Bea cataloged the local plant life during our nightly scavenging runs, as if understanding the ecosystem would somehow make it less hostile. Jalina, our medic, sketched in a salvaged notebook, the cave walls, the burning landscape, the faces of the women slowly losing hope.
And the others? The other twelve women whose names I'd forced myself to memorize, whose skills and quirks and fears I'd cataloged like spare parts in an inventory? They survived however they could.
"Power reroute complete," I announced, watching the beacon's indicators flicker back to something approaching stability. "We're broadcasting again."
A collective exhale rippled through the cave. Small victories. We lived on small victories now.
"How long until nightfall?" Harriet asked. I checked my salvaged chronometer, one of the few pieces of tech that didn't care what planet we were on. "Three hours. Then we can make another supply run."
Three hours until the temperature outside dropped enough that we could venture out without our skin blistering. Three hours until we could breathe the cooler air and feel rain on our faces, because of course this hellhole had rain at night, as if the universe was mocking us with the one thing that made this rock almost habitable, then snatching it away every sunrise.
I settled back against the cave wall, feeling the smooth stone against my spine. My hands were still shaking, so I curled them into fists in my lap where no one could see. Had to keep it together. They looked to me for solutions, for fixes, for the reassurance that someone had a plan.
I didn't have a plan. I had jury-rigged equipment and desperate hope.
"Dana." Jalina dropped down beside me, her dark hair escaping from its braid. She'd been beautiful once, back on Liberty. Hell, she was still beautiful, but now there was a hardness in her eyes that hadn't been there before. Survival did that. Filed away all your soft edges until you were nothing but angles and sharp corners.
"Yeah?"
"We need to talk about rationing."
Of course we did. We always needed to talk about rationing. Water, food, medical supplies, hope, everything was running out, and running out fast.
"How bad?"
"Three days of food. Maybe four if we stretch it." She glanced around, making sure no one else was listening. "And that's if we stop feeding the injured."
My stomach clenched. The injured. Five women with burns, broken bones, and internal injuries from the crash were slowly getting worse because we didn't have the medical equipment to properly treat them. We'd done what we could with the medkit and improvisation, but there were limits to what band-aids and prayer could accomplish.
"We're not doing that."
"Dana—"
"I said we're not doing that. We'll find more food."
"Where? We've scavenged everything in a safe range. Go farther, and we risk not making it back before sunrise."
She was right. I hated that she was right. But I also knew that the moment we started making those calculations with who deserved food, who was worth saving, was the moment we stopped being human.
"Then we take the risk," I said flatly. "Tonight. We go farther."
Jalina stared at me, and I could see her calculating, running the numbers in her head the way I ran power consumption calculations. "You're willing to bet our lives on maybe finding food?"
"I'm willing to bet on not starving to death while we sit on our asses waiting for a rescue that might never come."
The words hung in the air between us, sharp-edged and too honest. We didn't talk about that possibility. The possibility that no one was coming. That Liberty had been so thoroughly destroyed that we were nothing but a rounding error in a disaster tally, names on a memorial list, forgotten survivors in an unmapped corner of a galaxy no one had heard of.
