“Good.” Levi pressed a last kiss to his forehead. “Now help me with the helmet.”
Levi put the helmet over his head and sealed the collar ring and the HUD inside lit up, and Asher’s face through the visor was still his face — still the wide eyes, the strange frightened thing underneath — but the seal was done and the suit was on and he was ready.
They walked back out of the alcove together.
“Okay,” Jasper was at the console, radio rig ready. “Let’s get you in the airlock.”
The vibration in Levi’s sternum peaked so hard it took his breath away as the maintenance panel above them groaned.
NO. We are too close—
The grate was already deforming, bolts shearing, and the creature dropped into the room, its head whipping back and forth, apertures cycling the fastest he’d ever heard them.
The room was too small. The creature between the terminal and the airlock, between Jasper and Asher, the metal fingertips already reaching.
Asher lunged at it anyway, grabbing the creature’s arm as he tried to wrench it sideways. The creature swept him aside, like batting at a fly, and Asher hit the wall. He went down hard, the sealed gloves scrabbling on the floor, trying to get back up, trying to get between the creature and Levi.
“Jasper, get him in the airlock!” Levi pulled the small gun from his pocket and fired. The bolt hit the creature’s translucent skin, rippling across its surface, doing nothing. “Get him outside!”
Jasper moved surprisingly fast for someone who was stoned in every scenario, grabbing a downed Asher by the collar and yanking him towards the airlock. Asher fought him, his feet kicking as they failed to find purchase on the worn metal flooring. “Let go of me — LEVI —!”
The creature’s arm shot out and grabbed Levi as he kept firing, and Levi had only a moment to register a thought:This one is going to hurt.
But it didn’t turn him like the others. Its fingers reached for his face and froze, its head tilting as the metal tips extended into thin wire-like filaments, feeling along his face and temples, cold enough to burn. They pressed in and Levi heard something on his skin pop and felt a strange cracking as they pushed further, into the bone beneath, and through the bone into whatever was on the other side.
His knees gave out and he was staring at the ceiling and somewhere beyond all of it was Asher screaming his name.Why…?
Something happened in his head.
He was standing in Ethan’s apartment.
The door was open behind him. It was a late afternoon day, there was light through the kitchen window — golden, dust-moted, the kind of light that existed before anything went wrong and would exist after. His keys were still in his hand. He was bringing Ethan groceries. The smell of the apartment filled his lungs: Ethan’s coffee, the detergent he used, the particular staleness of windows that hadn’t been opened in days.
He called Ethan’s name.
No answer.
Ethan was on the floor, slumped against his couch. There was vomit down the front of his shirt, his face turned sideways, eyes half-open, and his lips blue. Levi dropped the groceries, his phone dialing 9-1-1 before he hit the ground beside Ethanto shake him. He bought oranges that day to make Ethan fresh orange juice, because orange juice always cheered him up.
It was always odd to him how long those oranges rolled after he dropped them. One of them hit his knee as the operator asked for the apartment’s address.
He was back on the ship. The creature’s dish was close enough that the apertures filled his vision, cycling, and the filaments in his skull were deep and he could feel them moving, branching, reaching into places that held things he didn’t look at. Behind the creature — through the blur — Asher was twisting Jasper’s head too far around, but Levi couldn’t hear it.
The filaments pressed deeper.
Levi’s body started to come apart. Not with pain, exactly — the sensation had moved past where pain lived and into a colder register, like a machine being disassembled while it was still running. His fingers went numb. His tongue went numb.
The ambulance. The hallway of the hospital. Fluorescent lights and linoleum and the smell of antiseptic that didn’t quite cover the smell underneath it. The coffee from the machine near the nurses’ station that tasted like nothing, but Levi held the cup because holding something warm was better than holding nothing. A plastic chair. His hands in his lap. His hands rolling an orange that he didn’t remember grabbing…waiting for information that had already been decided by events he wasn’t present for.
The doctor. A man whose face carried the kindness of someone who had done this before and would do it again. Scan results on a screen. The words arriving in pieces, each one landing separately before rearranging into a sentence: brain activity... minimal... not compatible with life... multiple organ failure…
He could hear it in the ship —tck... tck... tck— and the vibration in his chest changed. Not a proximity warning anymore.
Asher was still fighting, Levi could hear blows landing…the shape of Asher yelling, and then a heavier sound: Asher hitting the wall again.
Ethan’s hospital room. There were wires and tubes all over Ethan, running from a hole in his throat, IV’s, sensors…machines blinked and beeped and hummed in patterns that were supposed to mean alive and didn’t. The ventilator made the sound of breathing for someone who wasn’t breathing and Levi watched a chest rising and falling in a machine’s rhythm, not Ethan’s rhythm, not anyone’s. The light from the window fell across Ethan’s cheek the way light falls across a table or a chair or anything that doesn’t know it’s being touched.
Nobody’s home.
