"Probably jettisoned out the waste chute with the rest of the trash," Mekkra says with a snarl.
"As he deserves," I mutter as Mekkra grabs my hand and leads me down the hall. "Where are we going?"
"I wanted to show you this before—" he says as we round the corner into the wing of the station that he's long left abandoned. He frowns as he runs his fingers along the damage from Quldo's attack in the hall, but doesn't stop until we're in the room that used to hold his brother's bones.
The formerly dark and spooky air that overwhelmed this room is gone. It's clean and relatively unscathed from the battle. In the center of the room lies a pod not dissimilar from the one I arrived in.
The transparent capsule cradleshis brother's bones, and a living arrangement has grown up all around it. Leaves and tendrils emerge from the long-dead alien's chest, spiraling around his ribs.
It's like his grief allowed them to take root.
The plants don't crush or displace anything but look almost as if they're cradling the bones inside. One larger bloom has opened behind the skull, its wide petals framing it like a halo.
The entire ecosystem exists within the sealed capsule, self-contained and self-sustaining. There's no soil I can see, or a source of water. Just bone and bloom and death becoming something alive again.
"It's beautiful," I breathe. "Beautiful and a little spooky, but in like a Catholic relic way?" I cock my head and wonder what saint Mekkra's dead brother might be most similar to before shaking the thought away. "How did you get those plants to grow so quickly?"
He smiles. "I've been alone, except for the vines and blooms for a long time. We understand each other. Even when I slipped into the dark places of my mind, they were there."
Mekkra, big scary alien, is aproud plant dad.
I catch him from the corner of my eye, looking at the bones of his sibling with a kind of profound grief that I don't think ever really goes away. Like the vines, it just kind of takes root in your soul. Always there, but slowly just becoming part of the scenery.
"Are you okay?" I wrap my arm around his back.
"With you here, always." He pauses, his gaze drifting downward as his expression softens, a quiet heaviness settling in. "But I think now that my mind is clearer, thishurtsmore than it did before. Just being here and knowing what this station was built on…"
"So let's leave."
Mekkra blinks rapidly, looking between me and his brother’s grave a few times before finally responding.
"Leave?"
"Yeah, let's fucking blow this Popsicle stand." I almost laugh at how hard his face screws up in confusion of the phrase.
"But the trade route…" It's clear that just leaving this place, what feels like a prison he's built for power, has never occurred to him.
"What good has it brought you?"
His expression softens. "It brought me you."
"Okay fair, but like, aren't we both filthy rich? How many more credits could we need? What's keeping us from having our own adventures somewhere out there in the great wide expanse of space just outside the pod bay doors?" My arms fly up in a big gesture.
"I don't think I could leave the station?—"
He catches my face dropping.
"—Intact. I wouldn't want to leave a resource for someone even worse than me to control the trade route."
Now I'm the one who is confused.
"So, what do we do with it? Tow it behind my ship like some giant fifth wheel?"
"The station has no wheels, let alone five. What I'm discussing is a bit more destructive."
A slow smile creeps up on his face, and he turns back to the grim terrarium.
"I think Gessik would like the idea," he says conspiratorially.
