“Space infection. Yes. No. That would be no good,” I stammer. I’m living inside the pressure of Kodiak’s fingerson the soft inner side of my forearm.
“Luckily we have automated systems to do most of the work,” Kodiak says. He prepares a slide with my blood and inserts it into a slot, tapping at a console until the tests are underway.
He takes out another syringe and raises his own sleeve. Unlike my uniform, his acrylic jumpsuit doesn’t bunch up loosely. He tries twice, and then stands up, facing away from me while he removes the jacket. He’s wearing an undershirt, but it rides up with the jacket, and I have a view of his lower back, from pelvis up along the spine, surrounded by two rises of muscle. The undershirt pulls as high as the beginnings of his shoulders before falling back down, the red nylon overshirt heaping to the floor.
He returns to the chair, goes about wrapping the elastic around his elbow. He flails with the syringe, like an amateur junkie.
“Here, let me,” I say.
“You are trained in phlebotomy?” he asks sternly.
“Yes, Kodiak, I know how to extract blood,” I say. “We don’t just study poems and queer theory in Fédération. Look away if you need to.”
He snorts, clenching his fingers, the veins standing out along his thick forearms. I insert the syringe, extract his blood. His flesh is warm under my hand.
He watches while I prepare his slide. My fingers are lesssteady than his were, but as I place the polycarb overlay on his blood sample, the two crimson circles look indistinguishable. My blood and Kodiak’s, next to each other. Why does that bring me near tears? Maybe I haven’t been sleeping enough.
The screen lights up. My blood is A-positive, just as I remembered. Kodiak comes out O-negative. “You’re a universal donor,” I say. “I guess I’m the lucky one.”
“Let’s try not to need any blood transfusions at all,” Kodiak says.
“Agreed.”
He holds the panel over a fresh slide and taps it, as gently as a spoon against a soft-boiled egg, until a single flake of the dried blood falls. He places the sample in the machine.
We watch the numbers on the display circulate. I take the moment to live in the warmth of Kodiak, the memory of that flash of lower back. I want to place my hand over his. I want more than that.
The numbers continue to tick over, but then the screen glitches and returns to my results. The DNA map is just the same.
“What happened?” I say. “Where are the new numbers?”
For a moment Kodiak is silent and still, scrolling up the information and back down. Then he taps the screen and looks at me with those long-lashed topaz eyes. “Ambrose,this is not your result. This is the blood from the corner of the panel.”
He flips back and forth between the screens, passing through his different numbers on the way between my blood and the dried blood on the panel. There’s some variation, but the DNA mostly matches up.
“Well, that makes zero sense,” I say.
“I agree with you there,” Kodiak says, leaning back and stretching his arms, making a net of his fingers to cradle his head. “By most accounts, this doesn’t make sense. The only way it can start to make sense is if we assume that thisisyour blood.”
“I never hit my head on that panel. I’d never even been behind the yellow portal until today.”
“Perhaps hitting it was what caused your early memory loss.”
“No chance.”
Kodiak’s eyes narrow. “There’s no reason to fight me, Cusk. We’re on the same side here.”
My ribs knit tight. Instinct tells me we arenoton the same side. That the ship itself is not on my side. That Minerva is the only one on my side, and she’s still millions of miles away. I wait for the walls to slam closed, for outer space to rip the parts of me that remain into nothingness.
Whatever regal bearing I have left vanishes. My head drops into my hands.
“Ambrose,” Kodiak barks. “Man up.”
Man up.“Let’s not pretend that something terrible isn’t going on here, okay?” I say. “You don’t get to treat me as inferior because I happen to be freaked out.”
Though most of my vision is blocked by my knees, I can sense Kodiak standing close, his fingers drumming against his thighs. I figure he has no words to say in the face of my pathetic weakness, my unmanly display.Ugh. Is “man up” some Dimokratía phrase?
“You said ‘we’ are on the same side just now,” I say to the fabric over my knees, moist from my shallow breathing. “You don’t remember the launch either.”
