His hand lingers on my shoulder, then drops away. “Back to the blind room,” he says. “Come on.”
“You must go to the infirmary, where Rover can properly help you,” OS says. We ignore it.
My limbs feel even heavier than the increasing gravity can account for. I wonder, and not for the first time, whether this could all be fake, whether we might be in an underground bunker still on Earth, or deep in some simulation, our brains floating in a vat. What can I do to prove otherwise? My exhausted mind protests:Kodiak did a spacewalk. You’ve felt zero gravity. You’re not in an underground bunker.But in my state it doesn’t matter what I tell myself. The truth, the physical reality of this world, still feels flimsy.
“You don’t look good at all. Here, sit,” Kodiak offers as we step over the polycarb lip into the blind room.
He removes a tube of some Dimokratía balm out of a medical kit. It’s yellow and lettered in an antique style. “Hold still,” he says, then starts dabbing at my woundedface with the pad of one pinkie, like a makeup artist.
“My face is ruined forever, isn’t it?” I sniff. “What will I do without my beautiful face?”
“Please. Your face will be fine,” Kodiak says. He moves on to my hand, laying it flat in his lap, straightening the good fingers. The busted one cocks out to one side. “Can you move that?”
I try. My joint explodes into infinite fire.
“It’s not broken. The tip moved,” Kodiak says. “We’ll still have to splint it.”
He starts to rig up a splint, using a depressor and fabric bandages. More fire.
I guess I make little gasps and shrieks while Kodiak’s working, because he says, “Don’t be so dramatic. You’ll be okay. In the meantime, tell me one more time exactly what you saw.”
I know he’s only trying to distract me, and that’s just fine. I could use a little distraction about now. “I don’t think it was alive, I’m not trying to claim that,” I say. “But there was a dead body, no doubt about it. Wrapped up like meat. I don’t know how else to phrase it. Ow.”
“Why do you think that would be?” Kodiak asks as he kneads the center of my palm.
“Neither you nor I have any memory of the beginning of the voyage, right?” I say. “What if there were three spacefarers on board originally? What if one died, and instead oftelling us about it, OS hid the body?”
“Why?”
“Because whatever killed the third spacefarer is still putting us at risk, and OS doesn’t want us to panic. Because it was, I don’t know, some crazy alien attack, and OS is worried that we’ll mutiny instead of continuing forward.”
“You said there might have been more bags and more bodies? So would that mean there aremanydead spacefarers? All wrapped up and tidied away?”
“I don’t know. It’s all so confusing. The radio you rigged up is telling us that it’s the future now, too.”
“And that your country destroyed mine.”
“I honestly don’t know what to do with that particular piece of info,” I say. My good hand lies limp on the table. Helpless as the rest of me.
“I know,” Kodiak says grimly. “I don’t, either.”
He’s avoiding my eyes.
“What?” I ask. “There’smore?”
He still doesn’t look at me. “I’ve uncovered something about the distress signal that’s... unusual, too.”
“What do you mean? Has Minerva contacted us again?”
“I’ll show you in a moment. For now, you just keep talking to distract yourself. Any words that come to mind. The most painful part is coming up.”
“What do you mean, the most—GAH!”
“There, the worst is over,” Kodiak says. He beginswrapping the finger against the splint.
“Gah, gah, gah! You lied!” Each jostle sets off new eddies of fire. I decide to take Kodiak’s advice and blabber through the pain. “I’m sorry my country destroyed yours, if that even happened, which I can’t really think it did, I can’t really think that anything happened, have I told you that I think maybe we’re still on Earth, underground somewhere, can you, ow, I mean all I know is this ship and those stupid meals and what OS tells us about the distress beacon and I wonder if I’ll ever be the fearsome scientist warrior Minerva was and I’m not nearly the star that you and the rest of the whole fucking Earth expect I am and you’d probably be so turned on if it was her here instead of me, Minerva here instead of me, Minerva serving you manicotti, and don’t kick me out of your life again okay, because we’re all we have, holy shit this hurts.”
“All done,” Kodiak says. He keeps his gaze studiously trained on the bandaged finger, and for a moment I can let myself hope that maybe he was concentrating too hard to hear anything I said. Then his mouth spreads into a grin. A spot in the middle of his chin stubble dimples.
