Badlands. The word feels like a bruise. My mouth pulls to a smile that isn't a smile. The Badlands are where the Reapers sing and the stars choke on themselves. The sky there chews ships like bones. It’s where the dead don’t stay dead and where you learn quickly that space is not polite.
I should be angry. I should be roaring until the hull shakes. I should be cursing Meyer and his filthy grin and the way he looked at Isolde like a slot machine that had finally paid out.
But right now my body is a collection of immediate problems. Pain. Thirst. The fact that the back of my skull feels like someone placed a copper wire loop there and turned a dial.
I try to sit up, and the world rears. The deck tilts. The red light slices my vision. A sound like a metal horn buzzes somewhere in the corridor—an alarm, or the shudder of something massive shifting. I taste salt and rust and a memory so bright that for a moment I feel the ghost of a hand against my face and then it is gone and I am just falling forward.
“Do not attempt to rise without assistance,” Reflector orders, his voice a polite clamp. “You have third-degree burns across your dorsal plates. Your right mandible is fractured. There is also—” He pauses, and I can hear the calculation in the pauses, the way he rearranges syllables like spare parts. “You have a contusion consistent with blunt-force impact to the cranial dome.”
“Blunt-force,” I repeat, testing how the word sits in my mouth. It feels too small for the feeling in my bones.
“Your limbs are functional,” Reflector says. “But you will suffer if you move without analgesic stabilization.”
I laugh. It is a small, bitter sound that surprises me. “You speak like a medic-lizard. Thought you’d be an entertainment drone.”
“I was an entertainment drone,” Reflector answers. “Then you saved my prime directive.”
A memory lances me—heat, the smell of ozone, the taste of ash—and I feel the surge again at the edge of recollection: lights arcing, the world folding on itself like paper, the sound of a hull taking a last breath and something—someone—tossing me as if I am garbage and then: the weight of a small, frantic machineslamming into my chest, plugging itself into my collar, using whatever scraps it had to make a life wire.
“Reflector,” I say, each syllable a small victory, “you saved me.”
The little drone flickers. One of his manipulator arms trembles and he makes a sound like an amused cough. “I cannot claim sentiment, Garokk. However. You were—essential?—”
“You,” I correct. My throat bleeds a whisper, but I force it. “I wasme. Not essential. Not yet.”
Reflector hovers closer, and despite the smoke and his injuries and the buzzing alarms, there is a softness in the way his lens lingers. He doesn't have the grammar for human things like loyalty or love, but he has code. And the code is stubborn.
“You moved me toward your priority list,” he says. “Emergency directive: preserve human. Then: preserve vessel. Then: salvage reflective tape.”
“Nice to know I was second,” I mutter.
“Your vitals will fluctuate,” he says. “We must access medstore for analgesia, then address wound sealing. There is residual radiation in sector three due to containment breach. This complicates matter. Also—” He hesitates, which is something he almost never does. His tone has that thin edge data-voices take when they are simulating worry. “We register a signature consistent with holonet emission at the forward arc shortly after main detonation.”
“That mean anything?” I rasp.
“Possibly,” Reflector replies. “Possibly nothing. Possibly—someone in an escape pod. An individual presence recorded as: female. Transmissions ceased on launch vector. Identification matched to: Isolde Verrix frequency. But data stream terminated at ~T+00:01:13.”
Something hollows me out like a scoop. My jaw clenches. My fists curl. My memory threads insist on playing the scenein broken loops: the flash of a pod, a slamming hatch, a face pressed to polymer—brown eyes—then white.
“No,” I say. The word is a bone thrown against a door.
Reflector’s lens blinks slow, simulating sympathy. “I cannot make determinations outside of raw data, Garokk,” he says. “I am here—and functional enough to keep you and the hull from meeting the deep. But the mainframe is dead.”
I press my palms to my eyes because everything is bright and the shame of being alive while others burn is a cold current. The edges of my hearing ring with alarms and the distant groan of something vast and patient—this ship is an old thing, and she is not yet ready to be entirely quiet.
“How the hell are we moving?” I ask. The wordwerolls odd in my mouth. Maybe I say it because it is easier on the loneliness.
Reflector's outer shell hums. “Propulsion survived through emergency routing. Autonomous thrusters engaged by residual inertial mass to avoid engagement with external hazards. Our vector has us drifting toward the Badlands. The ship registers low course correction capacity. Probably not intentional.”
I let that sit, the way the air sits thick after a storm. Badlands. We are not out yet. We are not free. The ship that trapped me in its belly and then near-killed me is still afloat, still humming, still carrying scars that smell like the inside of a furnace.
“Get me to my boots,” I say.
Reflector blips, a little electrical laugh—a sound that always makes me think of the little drone trying to clear its throat before imparting something important. “You will not walk far unassisted.”
“I’m walking,” I promise. I will anything to stop the shaking in my limbs that isn't just physical.
He attempts to help me stand. His small manipulators fold into a kind of harness and loop under my arms. He is absurd and irreverently brave, tugging me upright with the sort of patiencethat only a machine reprogrammed by a stubborn human can have.
