Archive of Our Own

Anya wakes in perfect pitch-black to the hum of the engine, nestled deep in the bowels of the Tulpar—a sort of incandescent thrumming that she can feel vibrating even through the thin mattress and bedframe. It is the constant heartbeat of a giant—like listening to check if a patient is still alive. It said: you are still rocketing at a million miles an hour to some distant planetoid. It said: you are still millions of miles from everything you have ever known or loved. It said: you are still trapped on this tin can with your rapist.

And then, she vomits.

She’d gotten quite good at it, staggering in her underwear into the head and kneeling onto the cold metal deck to retch into the basin, nothing more audible than the sound of mostly-digested Pony Express chicken noodle soup splashing placidly into the bowl. She wipes her mouth, flushes, and then meets her tired gaze in the mirror, myopic and bleary. 

She washes her hands, and then opens the lids of her contact case and pops them on, blinking with the sudden clarity as the translucent lenses slide into place. In her training, she’d been told that contacts were considered a hazard and strictly forbidden; in the case of a fire, the plastic would melt onto her eyeballs and then she’d have bigger problems. Everyone, they reminded her, was a firefighter onboard a Pony Express ship. 

She figured the vacuum of space would kill them first, and wore them anyway. 

She shrugs into her coveralls, vaguely musty against her skin. The ship’s dryer worked only on its own terms, no matter how much Swansea tinkered with it, and they were only allotted three sets of coveralls for the trip. Extra pairs cost extra credits, which she did not possess. She’d even gone so far as to mend the little tears and holes over the years of wear and tear. She wore a full set of clothes underneath, not only to extend their cleanliness but to combat the chill, which only seemed to worsen each day. She brushes her hair, tries to arrange her face into something pleasant and docile, moves the chair lodged beneath the doorhandle, and heads starboard for the lounge.

She knew Jimmy was on watch in the cockpit, so she made her way through the passageways without much concern. Despite the size of the cargo ship, only a small section had been allotted to the four—incidentally five—man crew. Her dad always said he couldn’t believe she didn’t get claustrophobic, but Anya didn’t mind doing the same exact thing every day. On any other trip the time slid by, undemanding and painless, simple routines beaten into her ceaselessly. Wake up. Get ready. Eat breakfast. Check medical supplies. Attend to any appointments. Take logs. Perform maintenance. Read two to three chapters in her medical textbook. Take a practice exam. Eat dinner. Go for a run. Shower. Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat.

Daisuke doesn’t look up from the Trouble board as she pads into the kitchen, taking a water packet and giving it a good shake until it grows hot in her hands; she pours the contents into a chipped mug with a small spoonful of artificial sweetener and an orange teabag before sitting down next to him. 

He grunts. “You’re kind of smart, Anya.” 

She hides a smile. “It’s not that kind of game.”

“Don’t tell him I said this, but I think Swansea is cheating.” 

She shakes her head. “Jimmy is,” she nods to the three green pawns. She draws a card—Sorry! Daisuke groans as she knocks his pink pawn aside, dropping it back home and sliding her own into place. She takes a sip of her tea. 

“You feeling any better?” Daisuke says, casually. 

She sighs. “I’m fine, but thanks for asking.”

“Well, you gotta!” He’s so young ; sometimes it makes her a little sad. Did she look like this, all shiny and new, when she first came onboard the Tulpar five years ago? “Someone has to look out for our favorite nurse. Who nurses the nurse, y’know.” 

“Your only nurse.” 

“Yeah, well. Hey, I got my Glaceon to level forty.” 

“Oh yeah?” 

Daisuke fishes his Gameboy from inside his shirt, switching on the screen to show her the black pixels named anyaaa. “Still gotta get Curly up there. Then I can challenge the next gym.”

Anya takes her tea to medical, settling down at the familiar formica desk before opening her log sheets. April 20th, Day 137, she writes, methodically copying out the same paragraph she’d written one-hundred-and-thirty-six times before. Then she opens the cabinets, checking all of the medical supplies—the bottles of isopropyl, neat plastic sheafs of pre-packaged surgical equipment, white cotton bandages lined up in each row. She notes that someone’d gotten into the bandaids; there are two missing. She remembers the skin-colored plastic on Curly’s chin, like he must have nicked himself shaving. He’s got a five o’clock shadow at three o’clock, Swansea would joke.

She is halfway through ticking the neat little rows of numbers when she twists her wrist to check her wristwatch, the neon green lights flickering.

9:06. Jimmy had gotten off watch in the cockpit, and now it was Curly’s turn.

Her stomach wrenches; she takes a steadying sip of lukewarm tea, closes her eyes, and turns back to the log.

She finishes her inventory, flips the page, checking for any maintenance to be performed. It was always simple tasks; checking the insulation in the bulkheads for any leakage, the fire suppression system, the medical computer. Sometimes she’d get a task that took her out into the ship, like checking on the cryo pods or the medical supply kits stashed around the ship. Swansea would watch her like a guard dog when she’d come into Utilities, but never minded when she overstayed her welcome, eager to kill company time.

Today she was to inventory the first aid kit in the cockpit; Anya finishes her tea and sets off. She can feel the whir of the engine reverberate even through her sandals; something harsh and metallic clangs off the deck, and Swansea shouts, “Fuck this stupid goddamn pump—!” before another thump rattles through the bulkheads.

Anya pushes open the door with a whoosh, and Jimmy stares back at her, halting her in her tracks. His face is hard and unfriendly—but it would be strange if it were any different.

She’d been trying. God give her some credit, she was trying. Trying to stare at those cold eyes, the impassive features, the curl of his lip, and convince herself that it would be fine. He hadn’t meant to hurt her. She must have mislead him, said something, did something, laughed in a certain way. Maybe he’d been inebriated. He certainly didn’t like her; if he was fond of anyone, it was Curly. 

“Anya!” Curly’s southern California smile is slow and easy. He fumbles with some dials on the navigational dashboard. “Just talking about you.”

“Oh?” she says, feigning disinterest. 

“Jimmy doesn’t think you can run a mile and a half in under nine minutes.” 

She could do it in eight after a panic attack. “Jimmy doesn’t think I can do anything,” she says, and it’s out of her mouth before she can take it back. His eyes narrow on her. 

“Can’t pass medical school,” Jimmy snaps. An old, half-assed insult; it passes through her painlessly. Worse is the insult that even now, Jimmy would spare her no sympathy. 

“Alright,” she says mildly, denying him the satisfaction, turning to pop open the white plastic container on the wall. Jimmy sighs, brushes past her, and the door to the cockpit closes, leaving only the faint trace of stale cigarettes that clung to his coveralls. Smoking was strictly disallowed on the ship, but somehow the smell always clung to Jimmy like a cologne. 

The air becomes much more breathable, and she checks the bandages and disinfectant, writes a note on the back of her hand, and slides into the still-warm co-pilot’s chair beside Curly. There’s no bandaid on his right cheek anymore, only a little red cut impressed into the stubble. 

He eyes her sidelong, his features washed away in the emerald glow of the navigation charts. He’d explained it to her, once, when she’d asked; the way each square represented a quadrant of astronomical units,, the little black dots the potential hazards in the way, even went so far to try to explain how the autopilot course-corrected. She liked to listen to Curly’s voice, the long, slow drawl that spoke of long days on the beach in blazing sunlight. He seemed like he’d smell of ocean salt and the fried pickles they served on the boardwalk, instead of hot dust and aftershave.

“How you hanging in there?” he says casually.

She groans. “Why does everyone ask me that? There must be something wrong with my face.” She rubs her cheeks with her palms. 

“You haven’t been acting right,” Curly says. Factual, as if it’d been an abnormality on his logs. A captain’s sixth sense, he’d sometimes remark.

She shrugs. “This trip doesn’t feel right,” she says.

“You always say that.”

It was true. She never felt right until the halfway mark. Then it was easier to count down, to plan her offshore days, to pick up the shiny catalogs in the lounge advertising the delights of Pelagia-II. 

The future fuzzed and blurred in front of her now; unable to visualize it at all. No sense of what outfits she might cobble together or how she would stretch her meager funds into a cheap vacation before heading back to Earth.

“How long have you known Jimmy?” Anya asks, keeping her voice light and innocent.

Curly whistles through his teeth. “Ran into him back in San Diego about… ten years ago, now? That was after that haul to the Chairon Station. You musta been in high school, back then. Jimmy had it real rough. Real rough.” he always said it like that—like it was supposed to smooth over any edges that Jimmy might have left in his wake. “He doesn’t like to talk about it, and it’s not my secret to tell. But I felt bad for him. We lifted weights together. Spotted each other. Got him an interview with my supervisor at the time. Had him on the crew in six months. Hell of a hard worker.” 

She pulls her knees up to her chest, setting her chin on her kneecap, folded in comfortably. “He’s your best friend.” 

“He’s my co-pilot.” As if it were the same thing. 

“I haven’t seen you writing any letters this time, Cap’n.” 

Curly sighs. “Broke up with my ex the day before we left.”

“There’s always family.” 

“Yeah but, they know.” he shrugs. “I get the holo-messages. I send mine back. All they need to know is we’ll be home for Christmas.” 

“Easter was last week,” Anya says softly. “I miss the eggs.” 

“The deviled ones?”

She shakes her head. “The Cadbury creme eggs,” she says. 

He shivers. “Too sweet,” he says, reaching over for his mug of black coffee, and taking a long, slow sip. “I was thinking, corporate is so worried about our psych evals, but who gives you yours?” 

She shrugs. “I answer mine,” she says. 

“But it’s different, when a flesh-and-blood person is asking you.”

“Doesn’t stop any of you from lying to me,” Anya replies. Curly’s brow furrows, and she adds, “oh, don’t give me that, Captain.” 

“I try to be honest,” he says. “But… well, you know how it is. Something goes wrong on the ship, drop a wrench down into the bilge—oh fuck it, might as well kill myself. Doesn’t mean any of us are really going to.” 

“You shouldn’t say it if you don’t mean it,” she says. Eight years of retaking the MCAT propelling her answer, the little placard on her desk that says Nurse Anya, the heart on her chest that said let me heal you. “And if you do mean it, you should talk to me.” 

“Alright, Anya. Have you had any thoughts of harming yourself or others in the last week?” He says the question with perfect memorization.

Anya stares into the neon-green navigational charts, the little arrow of the Tulpar hurtling through deep space, the tiny black flecks of asteroids or space debris, and imagines two-hundred-and-forty-five more days of this.

She tilts her head back and sighs.

“Does it matter?” 

“Over the last week,” Anya fights against a yawn, “have you felt bad about yourself, or that you are a failure, or have let yourself or your family down?” She stretches her wool-socked feet towards an naked metal pipe along the bulkhead, treasuring the warmth as she hovers her toes a few inches away from it. Any closer, and her socks could very well catch on fire. The deep space cold felt like it was seeping into her bones. 

Daisuke says, “Well, uh—I guess—in the sense that—”

Anya reaches into her candy dish, fishes out two peppermints and drops one in front of Daisuke’s splayed hands. He unwraps it gleefully. “Thanks, dude,” he sighs, sucking on it with relish. “I mean—who doesn’t feel like a failure to their family, y’know?”

“But the question is directed towards you.” She unwinds the cellophane from the mint before dropping it onto her tongue. The cool menthol helps chase away the ever-rising gorge in her throat. 

“I mean I know they love me and stuff,” Daisuke says, “But like—I’m not a doctor, y’know.” He blanches apologetically. “Not like that, I mean.” 

“You don’t have to remind me of my own career failures,” Anya says, and smiles. She marks sometimes on his sheet. 

“Anya with three As is at level 76,” he says. “She’s totally gonna kick ass. Oh, can I say ass?” 

“Sure.” She looks to the next question. “Um, okay—what’s your sexual drive been like?”

“Oh, gross.” Daisuke says, looking over at her paper. “Can I just write it down?” 

“I am a medical professional, Dai. And it’s nothing I haven’t heard from the crew before.” 

“Yeah but you’re like.” His nose wrinkles. “Like my sister or something.” He startles at once. “Not like that, I mean! Not to be too familiar. God, this wasn’t this awkward last time. Yikes” 

She passes him the clipboard. “Go ahead. You can fill in the rest.” 

She watches him fill in each of the bubbles with the lead pencil, and then he doodles a stylized S on the corner, followed by a surprisingly accurate rendering of a Chikorita. She couldn’t quite bring herself to shoosh him back to work—after all, whatever Swansea was working on couldn’t be that important—so she pretends to read her paperback as Daisuke goes through her sticky notes and doodles on them, and she pins them up on the little corkboard with thumb-tacks, almost slipping on a lost pink zolpidem pill under her desk. She kicks it under the medical supply cabinet. Jimmy had been popping them like candy, stealing into her supplies whenever she was asleep. She’d told Curly about it, and he’d just shrugged it off—like he did with all of Jimmy’s mistakes.

She lets herself sink into First Aid on the Frontline, a medical textbook that she found verged on the autobiographical. She reaches over and turns on the beleaguered radio with a plastic clack, letting the cassette play from the start before sinking into her book.

Daisuke loiters for another thirty minutes before the intercom in the medical bay crackles to life; “I know you’re in there, kid,” Swansea grumbles from the other side. 

Anya swipes the radio from the wall. “Swan Song, this is Overlooker,” she says. “Hibiscus is taking logs on the,” she scans around the room, “out of commission starboard ventilation shaft. Over.” 

“Kick him out,” Swansea barks with no bite. “You’re a log-blazing enabler, Anya. I’ll tell the Captain. Get you written up and scrubbing the bilge, hah!” 

He wouldn’t tell Curly; it would mean admitting that he’d bored Daisuke into leaving. She cast her eyes over to Daisuke, who had covered his mouth with his hands as if he’d be overheard. 

Anya sighs, unclicks the receiver.  “Go on.” She shoos him with her hand.

Daisuke shuffles away, and when he was out of earshot, Anya said, “Swan Song, Overlooker in, Hibiscus has left the popsicle stand.”

“Affirm-a-fucking-tive.” the line goes flat with a series of pops. Then Anya says, quietly, “What’s for dinner tonight?” 

She can hear Swansea’s smile as he says, “chicken pot pie.” 

She mostly eats the crust and soggy carrots, not for Swansea’s lack of trying to get her to eat a few more bites. “You’re going to wither away into nothing, Anya. I know space sickness ain’t fun, but you gotta keep something down.” After, Curly clears the table and they pull out Settlers of Europa, arguing for cargo ships terraformed rivers, farmlands, and meteorites. Swansea pulls victory from the jaws of defeat, but it wasn’t for lack of Curly trying. “You might be a captain,” Swansea said smugly, swirling his decaf as if it were a snifter of cognac, “but experience will teach you life’s most valuable lessons. Hah!” 

“My mountains,” Daisuke says glumly, staring at his cards.

She’d been feeling dinner churn in her stomach most of the match; her decisions had been snap judgements that didn’t always pan out. Swansea stands, then drops something in front of her before moving into the kitchen, washing his mug in the sink.

He’d left a golden cellophane-wrapped candy. When she lifted it to her nose, she smelled ginger. 

A week later, when she came down to Utilities for a maintenance check, he gave her the bag. “I had these for getting spacesick,” Swansea said with forced casualness, “maybe you’ll like them.”

And then he told her she was tightening the flange on the firehose wrong and made her do it all over again, but that was simply Swansea’s way. Whenever she came by to do Swansea’s psychological eval, he always responded with a surprising candor, though he did sometimes mutter about how Corporate’s gotta hold everyone’s hands even as they cut our pay, and it always went better if she met him in Utilities rather than in the medical bay. Familiar territory, she suspected privately.

She’d worked with Swansea the longest; her very first voyage, a six month stint to a Plutonian satellite station bearing ninety-seven pallets of industrial fans for terraformed farmland, had been with Swansea. He treated her much the same way he treated Daisuke now, and grilled her thoroughly over her failed MCATs. He’d only shook his head when she’d came back after their shore leave with her fifth failure, the second of the year.

After his eval this week, he’d asked her again about the MCAT. “You’re smart, Anya. I know you are. You aren’t doing all that studying for nothing. You want to help people. And you’re good at it. Maybe this just isn’t what you’re made for.” 

“Were you born to be an engineer, then?” 

He barks a laugh. “This is just to keep the missus and the dog happy. I just also happen to be good at it. My dad used to work on these things, the Type-F freighters. Back before robots built fuckin’ everything. They’ve cut down these crews past skeleton crews. We’re ghost crews now. We used to have ten engineers in the machinery room when I enlisted, and now I’ve got one half-assed intern.” 

“Even having a fifth,” Anya says, “feels crowded.” 

That night, as Anya reads her battered detective paperback in the warm glow of the halogen light, she hears the latch to the door twitch. The hull might as well have been breached, with how immediately the air in her berth turned into a vacuum. With numb, trembling fingers, she reached over for the small metal pipe she’d stolen from Utilities when Swansea wasn’t looking, clutching it in her hands.

It jiggled, twice, thrice, catching on the back of the door. The person—Jimmy, almost certainly—gave up. She heard his tell-tale heavy footsteps echo down the passageway, the way he’d drag his feet against the grates as if he never wanted to be anywhere that wasn’t next to Curly.

After that, she couldn’t sleep at all.

She switches her orange blossom tea her mom gave her for a packet of matcha Daisuke’s mom packed for him. The taste was overwhelmingly plant matter, but it kept her awake. She stayed awake for three days straight before she fell asleep, forehead planted into the hard cover of Up or Down? The Illusion of Choice before Swansea barked at her. She nearly startled out of his seat, and Swansea gave her a steely, father-like glare before asking her to pass along a note to their captain—THE VENTS ARE FUCKED, FOREVER!—and she used the pretense to curl into the co-pilot’s chair again, watching the tiny minute movements of the ship’s wheel as the autopilot course corrected. 

Curly takes one look at the note, groans, and shoves it into his coveralls. “Psych eval time,” Curly says, grinning at her. The way the skin crinkles around his eyes unknots something in her stomach. “Have you had difficulty sleeping too little, sleeping too much, or falling asleep?” 

“Falling asleep,” she carefully lies.

Curly purses his lips, miming writing on his imaginary clipboard. “I see. And how often a week does this phenomenon occur?”

“Daily,” she sighs.

“I see, I see.” he nods with faux professionalism. “And has the patient tried counting sheep?”

Anya smiles. “The patient has tried,” she says, “but I just imagine sitting through a training powerpoint and that takes care of it.” 

“Don’t let me forget—we’ve all got a new set due by the end of the month.”

“You’d think they’d catch on that we just click through them—”

“Anya.” Curly sighs. “What the captain doesn’t know won’t hurt him. So don’t tell me shit.”

She rotates the chair idly. Her eyes feel very hot and ready to close again. “What are you doing on Pelagia-II?” 

“Climbing the Issyk Mound.” 

“That’s on Pelagia-II?”

“Sure it is. Best snow resort in the Milky Way. Perfect powder.” he sighs fondly. “Come with me, Anya.”

She blanches. “Absolutely not, no.”

“Oh, come on, I have two tickets, Jimmy won’t go with me.”

“That’s unusual of him.”

“He says snowboarding is a rich people hobby.”

She thinks about the three digit credit balance in her account. Even with the flush of cash after the trip, she had her parents and debts to pay.  “It is a rich people hobby.” 

“Ticket’s paid for. All-inclusive.” he wiggles his eyebrows. “You’d look so cute on the slopes.” 

“I’ll look even cuter getting airlifted off a mountain after dislocating my kneecaps,” she says. “I’d probably just read in the lodge all day.” 

“Just think about it,” Curly says, casually. 

She does that night; turns it over in her mind’s eye like a bedtime story, trying to distract herself from thinking about the engine’s distant roar beneath the deck, the small creaks of the cargo ship hurtling through spacetime, thousands of pounds of precious cargo stowed away in the hold. Tries not to think about the sound of footsteps outside, checking the chair three times before squeezing her eyelids shut. 

Snow like there used to be in the movies, thick white puffs that would cling to her hair, snowdrifts past her hips, bundled in a gigantic parka and scarf and mittens. Curly’s sunbleached hair peeking out from a toboggan, saying things like, “oh, it’s puking loads, the hill’s going to be so buttery, Anya,” and, “Remember what I said, pizza and french fries, yeah?” looking unimaginably cool underneath the blazing sun reflecting off the snowbanks. 

She imagines watching the skiers and snowboarders far below, tucked away in some comfortable, warm cabin, with hot chocolate, and whatever junk food she wanted to order from room service. And she wouldn’t even throw any of it up. 

Curly says, “Have you moved or spoken so slowly that other people could have noticed? Or the opposite,” he leans back, bracing his hands behind his head, “being so fidgety or restless that you were moving around a lot more than usual?” 

“I don’t know,” Anya says. “You tell me.” 

Curly’s body is rendered in cool, muted blues in the midnight screen, the moonlight flickering faintly on the simulated waters. There is no sound in the lounge save for her quiet breathing, his soft exhales. She burrows tighter into the itchy woolen blanket—Pony Express standard issue, a gray worn thing that gave her a rash if she held it to her skin for too long. 

“Of course,” Curly says, in that surfer-tinged drawl, “I can’t watch you all the time. Captain can’t play favorites.” She nods to this, picking at a bit of dark blue polish chipping off her thumbnail. “But,” he says, “you jump nearly out of your skin these days, Anya. First time I’ve ever seen you do it. Not the normal startle. You would’ve broken that plate today, if it wasn’t plastic.”

She falters at that; there’s still a dark spot on the carpet, despite her best efforts. She couldn’t shake off the way Jimmy had just stared at her as she’d cleaned on hands and knees with the orange-smelling soap and scrub brush. Stared at her openly, like she was an animal for his entertainment.

Curly meets her eyes, and doesn’t let her look away. She trembles beneath the blanket.

“I mean to find out why,” Curly says. And he does the strangest thing then—a strange thing that she will turn over in her mind, over and over, like a worry stone tucked into her pocket. Curly’s bare hand reaches beneath her blanket, and he gently finds her hand, and holds it tight in his.

He might be the warmest thing she’s touched the entire trip—the first physical contact she’d had since… Jimmy. She forgets to think about the Pony Express fraternization policy, or the fear of Jimmy wandering in from his watch for a cup of black coffee. Anya wraps both her frigid hands around Curly’s and keeps him there. 

She thought it would be very hard; that it would be impossible to tell anyone, let alone Curly, that the moment the words were on her tongue that her chest would seize and her jaw would lock up and her throat would convulse.

But holding his hand in both of hers, Anya says, “Jimmy came into my berthing, two months ago. After lights out. Did you know there isn’t a lock on any of the crew’s quarters, only the medical bay?”

Curly shakes his head, blinking at her, even the whites of his eyes dyed sapphire in the midnight reflection. 

“I didn’t think to ever check,” she says. Her eyes suddenly feel very hot. She stares at the screen instead, casting her gaze up, up, up—there. The littlest fleck, neon green and pink, an aberration in an otherwise beautiful scene. “He… Jimmy, he…”

“You…” Curly’s throat bobs. “You didn’t want him there, I gather.”

Anya shakes her head—it’s like it’s in reverse, her lock-up, but only now, after she’d said it, her throat tightens as if a noose was leashed around it, and she tries to swallow and can’t quite make it past the knot there—almost choking, the sob leaves her.

Curly reaches for her on automatic, folding her into the halo of his arms, settling her on his chest—aftershave and black coffee and the standard-issue detergent they all used. He cannot contain all of her pain, but he tries. 

They stay like that until something dries up inside her; all at once, Anya sits up, withdraws into the far corner of the couch. She wipes her face—snot and the salt of drying tears—with the scratchy blanket, leaving her cheeks red and stinging. 

“Jimmy, he—” Curly sighs. “I’ll… I’ll talk to him. Get it worked out. None of this needs to be on paper. Fuck, Anya.” He doesn’t say it like how Jimmy says it; it’s soft, in-drawn. Anguish rather than sheer frustration. “You can’t know how sorry I am.” 

She shakes her head, still robbed of the ability to speak. He sighs, staring at her. “We’ll fix this,” he promises, as if it were something that could be, a shattered bowl mended, a fixed aberrant pump, an asteroid to steer away from.

She shudders, buries her face in her hands, and nods. Willing it to be true. Her contact slides across her eye; she blinks it back into position, her vision so blurry the night screen may as well have been a window.

“Thank you, Curly,” she whispers.

 And the airtight door exhales. 

Anya froze; she was already very still. She heard a mug being drawn from a cupboard, a packet of water removed from the cupboard and shaken. Curly sits for a long moment before standing. 

She doesn’t hear the conversation, their voices pitched just below her hearing. The drone of the ship had a way of burying whispering, the whirr of ventilation drowning out everything else. 

And then Curly comes back, at once relieved and still frightened. 

“Shit,” he says softly. “Nevermind. Go to sleep.” He pats her shoulder. “Okay?” 

The rest of the wound is lanced, on that thin mattress tucked against the corner, that small, cold cocoon of imagined safety. The terror and desperation that existed on her periphery threatens to eclipse her entirely. Two hundred and thirty-nine days stretched out in front of her.

It was worst when he was nice. When her throat wasn’t raw from vomiting, when, as if she weren’t wearing her contacts, everything blurred together into a comforting amalgamation of fuzzing shapes and soft colors. 

She tried very hard to forget, in those preceding days. Focused only on her logs, on her three meals, on her books, the novel she’d compulsively reread not because she loved it, but because it was predictable. Comforting. While Swansea fussed, Daisuke opened a panel on the day screen, did some things with the wires before Swansea finally said, “let me do it, kid—” and proceeded to play a movie.

Curly had to leave early to stand watch, but the rest of the crew sat quietly there after dinner, watching the old thriller flick to its end. It was the first time in a very long time where Anya forgot herself. For the entire hour and a half she was immersed; and then it was over, and she was staring at the back of Jimmy’s head. He turned then, as if he could feel her stare on the nape of his neck, badly in need of a haircut. 

Their eyes meet; she freezes in place like prey, letting his cool gaze slide over her, not quite trusting herself to breathe. 

Jimmy smiles awkwardly; she returns it, if a bit stiff. He stands, clears his throat, and leaves for his berthing.

The next day Curly comes to medical, locks the door behind him, and hands her a small packet of papers. It was a formal HR complaint form. “Just wanted to give this to you,” Curly says, awkwardly. “If you want to. I’ll sign off on it. Don’t think we’ll be able to… to do much until we land, though. There’s not a satellite until—”

“Thank you, captain,” she murmurs, turning it over. “Thank you. It’s… something, at least.” 

Describe the incident in as much detail as you can. She stares at the question, at the fifteen rows of blank space available. The Pony Express horseshoe in the corner of the page.

She couldn’t bring herself to think about it, only the resulting consequences. But the incident —

It blurred until all she could hear was the quiet sound of her berthing door sliding open and no more. It was like water spilled over a written sheet of paper, blurring the words, the memory until it was only a distant miasma. Like someone recounted it to her, a half-remembered dream that happened to someone else. 

Her body remembered it in a way Anya could not.

She spends an hour calibrating the medical computer and testing the various sensors on herself. Pulse, 140 over 90. Slightly elevated; she takes long, calming breaths— in to a count of four, out to a count of six —and tries the blood pressure cuff again; 125 over 81. Acceptable. Her heartrate sinks into compliance. She turns the dial on the wand, changing the frequency, before waving it over her chest and lungs. Cardiac function normal; lung function slightly diminished. And then she gestures it over her abdomen—digestive tract functioning, no ulcers, no—

A little red marker flickers in the corner.

Anya stares at it.

Reads the two words—Patient pregnant! Over and over. 

Pregnant.

Pregnant. 

She presses the switch on the back of the machine, starts it all over from scratch. Pregnant. What must it have been, eight weeks? She hadn’t been intimate with anyone in almost a year before—

She sinks to her knees on the cold linoleum as she does the math.

First trimester. Eight weeks since conception.

There was still eight months left of the ship. She hyperventilates into her closed hands, her breath coming in a series of tight, fast little “ah, ah, ah” s.

“Hey.” 

Anya leaps nearly out of her own skin at the gravelly croak behind her, clumsily staggering to her feet. “J-Jimmy! I wasn’t—I wasn’t… I’m sorry, I was just—” she glances frantically at the medical computer, but it was only displaying the Pony Express screensaver. 

Jimmy hangs in the doorway awkwardly, not quite meeting her eyes. “I just needed to grab something,” he says, and strides forward to the medical supply cabinet and the stash of pills. 

“Well, you—” Anya hastily brushes her cheeks free of tears, swallowing down her terror, “j-just tell me what you need and I’ll get it for you.”

“I know what I need.” 

“Okay, well.” she clears her throat, trying to draw herself up. “I have to count the pills, so just let me prescribe you something, okay? I know you’ve been taking them, but—”

Jimmy’s scowl darkens. “I’m the co-pilot, Anya—”

“And I’m the ship’s medical officer—”

“You’re no better than a fucking school nurse, get real.” He snatches a bottle—zolpidem, 5mg, wrestling with the childproof cap before dropping it. “Fuck shit fuck,” he hisses as the little pink pills scatter over the linoleum.

“Don’t bother,” Anya snaps. “I’ll clean it up.” 

“Don’t take an attitude with me—”

“We need to talk.” It slips out of her before she can stop it. There’s no heat in it, only fear and resignation. This was going horribly—he was already pissed, and she was about to piss him off much more than she’d ever thought possible, and she’d seen him punch clean through three inches of insulation, the fiberglass leaving pinpricks of blood all over his fist. 

Jimmy looks at her for the first time—really looks at her. It’s not a comfortable feeling. “Fine,” he says, and reaches over to the door and slams it shut with a swing of his arm before sitting on the edge of the medical bed.

“I—I’m pregnant,” she blurts, all at once. Part of her wanted to believe the medical computer was on the fritz, but it made too much sense. The nausea. The cold. The soft little pains in her stomach. Her disappearing menstrual cycle.

Jimmy blinks hard. “It’s not mine, is it? That was just—that was—” He flounders like a child in the principal’s office, and the juvenile nature of it makes her want to smack him. 

“It wouldn’t be anyone else,” she says, not even angry anymore, just cold and tired and affrighted. “It—it’s just you, Jimmy.” 

“Why weren’t you on birth control?”

That, she muses, was probably the most Jimmy response she could have possibly anticipated. She’s too numb to feel insulted. “It makes me sick, so I wasn’t. And I haven’t exactly needed to be.” However much he must revile her for not anticipating the worst, she hated herself more for it. 

He opens his mouth, and shuts it. “Do you… do we have Plan B onboard?”

This was a relief; a small part of her feared that he might have been the type to insist she keep the damned thing. “We don’t,” she says calmly. 

“Well you’ve got to—you’ve got to do something,” Jimmy says through his teeth, “get rid of it, somehow. Deal with it. Fuck. Fuck!” he punches the mattress hard, once, twice. Anya holds her breath. “I can’t—I can’t deal with this, I can’t—”

“You can’t take responsibility,” she finishes for him, unable to keep the ice from her words.

Jimmy’s eyes narrow on her. She’d never known someone could hate her so thoroughly until him. He hated her like an inconvenience, the loathing of a screaming child, happy to remove it from his presence so long as it didn’t annoy him anymore. “I take responsibility for my life. I am self-made. I’m here for a reason. I made… I made a mistake. And we’ve got to deal with it.”

Before we land, rings unspoken.

“Figure out some way to… get rid of it. I don’t care how you do it. You’re a nurse, right? There’s got to be something you can take. Something you can do.”

Desperation piques in her. “I don’t—Jimmy, I don’t know what to do. Should I throw myself down a flight of stairs—?” 

“Yes.” It is swift and final.

Anya stares at him in the cool blue light of the artificial sky behind him, as if seeing him for the first time. “Oh,” she says softly.

Jimmy reaches down, snatches a handful of pink pills from the dirty floor, shoves them into his pocket, and leaves, the door clattering shut behind him. 

She stands, sandals skidding on the floor as she slides the deadbolt lock shut. And then she sits in front of the airtight door and sobs into her hands. 

Like vomiting, she’s very good at crying quietly.

Her captain lays upon the thin mattress, staring at her with a single, de-fleshed eyeball, the piercing blue staring into her soul, a being of abject misery. 

Anya wishes for miracles. She wishes for an entire trauma team. She wishes, staring at the sunset plexiglass, staining the entire world a soft blood red, that she possessed unlimited power, unlimited resources. That a drifting ship had found them, and they had six expertly trained surgeons ready and waiting to treat their poor, diminished captain.

She had treated Swansea’s burns from the scorching hot piping down in the engineering spaces. One of them, a first degree burn, had to be rebandaged every six hours. 

She did not know how to bandage… this. 

For as long as she lived, this brief, miserable life, the sounds of Curly crying as she cut the melted clothes off his body after they’d found him would haunt her days and nights. It was anguish upon anguish, pure, animalistic howls of clenched misery. The pain—airway, breathing, circulation, fix the pain —she floundered for the bottle of oxycodone, dropping two into her palm before opening his mouth with as soft a hand as she could muster and placing them on his tongue.

She takes a package of water, rips off the corner, and dribbles it into his open mouth. 

Curly coughs wetly, twisting his head to spittle blood and water onto the cot. 

He could not swallow.

“Oh—Okay,” she says faintly, taking the sticky pills from the cot, “let’s try this again, Curly. Bear with me.”

There was nothing for it. She takes the two pills and holds them between her fingers as she slides them down the burnt, blistered flesh of Curly’s throat. He chokes, convulsing around her; Anya’s gorge rises dangerously. She pushes deeper. Curly gurgles around her, biting the top of her hand. When he chokes again, she flees, desperately grabbing the small trash can and retching onto Curly’s burnt, blood-soaked clothes. 

“I’m so sorry,” she gasps wildly, “I’m so—” the tears stream down her cheeks. “Fuck,” she gasps, “ fuck.” 

Curly stares at her from the cot, that blue eye shivering. Even expression was lost to him; no lips to smile, no eyes to crinkle. “Oh, god, Captain,” Anya weeps. “Captain, captain—” 

He only stares at her as she cries for him, for herself, on the blood-streaked linoleum floor. It is quick and violent; exhaustion and terror willing it out of her in a sudden rush. She finds her feet, staring at her blood-soaked gloved hands.

It took her three hours to pack and apply the bandages to Curly after she successfully amputated each of his mutilated hands and feet. She did not know to ration, that first night; only blind from terror that her captain looked like a dead, burnt thing, and she had taken the MCAT eight times and failed each time. Her dad echoed kindly in her ears: you have more experience than most med school students. Patching Swansea’s burns and Daisuke’s bruises. Jimmy was right; he held no more qualification than a school nurse. 

She fell asleep in her chair that night, the door safely locked, curled in the corner beneath one of the aluminum foil blankets, waking to Curly’s soft, pained breaths, checking the glass vial of IV fluid hanging there, checking the needle in his arm, running him over desperately with the medical computer. It spoke to just how much in his prime Curly was; his body was fighting very badly to live. She did not know how much Curly wanted to live in this very moment. She already wanted to die looking at him.

It was in moments like these, that Anya suddenly remembered with a surge of clarity why Curly was like this. 

He’d crashed the ship. He’d tried to kill all of them. Why. Why — 

She could not make sense of it—when Jimmy left, she’d been so certain—so certain of what was going to happen, at least he didn’t have the gun, she said over and over to herself, like a prayer—

And then the world erupted.

It was a small miracle and a small testament to Pony Express spaceworthiness that she did not brain herself beyond repair; the entire world was a hissing, rushing sound, a horrific, echoing boom like a gunshot, and she’d been flung bodily upwards , colliding with the asbestos ceiling tiles with a shriek of terror before the gravity wells readjusted themselves.

And then she was on the floor, cradling her head, and Jimmy was screaming, and carrying this—this thing, and the blood—she’d never seen so much blood come out of a human being, so much it looked like an overturned can of bilge red paint.

There were still patches of it smeared all over the floor. Daisuke and Jimmy scrubbed for hours.

For the first three days after the crash, the only thing Anya could think about was the captain, those little beep-beeps from the ship’s computer, changing his bandages, administering his painkillers, and—

That task, she could not seem to do.

The longer they went without suddenly hearing an emergency distress signal or anything but the cold beyond of dead space, the higher the unmitigated terror seemed to rise in her. No one was coming. They were in the middle of nowhere, so far flung off-course. And Pony Express was shutting its doors. She was compartmentalizing her mind like the Tulpar itself with airtight doors—spraying fire-retardant foam into all the extra spaces. Thinking about anything too much made her have to breathe into a paper bag for a long time. 

She did not know how long she would have to treat Curly, and the medical bay had only ever been stocked for a short catastrophe. A fact that, now, seemed like an olympic feat of sheer stupidity. 

She had, wrongfully, assumed that someone would come looking for them. She’d heard about Pony Express crews getting stranded before, but they were stocked enough until the next refuel depot. 

Three months away. And getting further the longer they sat here.

Jimmy looked almost as much of a ghost as Curly; he stared at him with open revulsion and horror.

“How—” he swallowed. “How is he?” 

“He’s—stable,” she said slowly. “I…” What could she say to him to make him understand how tenuous a thread Curly hung by. “We are going to run out of supplies,” she finally said. “We weren’t… equipped for this. I… I wasn’t trained for this.” 

His eyes harden, a little, at that. “Of course,” Jimmy says, scratching the stubble growing on his chin. The berthing’s were all filled with foam thanks to the crash. Only one of the decontamination showers had been saved, and while it was clean, the water was absolutely frigid. Nothing Swansea had done had gotten the reboiler going again—sections of the piping had been entirely foamed over and calcified, the feed pump destroyed beyond any hope of repair. 

The engine and turbine generators had been largely unscathed—but with no navigation to speak of, no autopilot, they were dead in space, flotsam amidst the scatterings of the Polaris starsystem, drifting very slowly in the orbit of a distant star. 

Absolutely, unspeakably, definitely utterly fucked. 

“I’m trying, Jimmy,” Anya said, her voice wavering. “Believe me,” she said, staring at him very hard even as the hot, angry tears spilled down her cheek. “I am trying to keep Curly alive.” 

Jimmy said, “I know,” with more feeling than she’d ever heard from him. “We have to save him. I—”

“Did he—did he say why he did it?” she asks. A little desperate. “You were—you were right there—”

“He said he was taking responsibility,” Jimmy says distantly, staring at the wreck that had once been Curly. “Listen,” he says, “I need you to… you’re doing a good job, Anya.” That hit strangely; Jimmy paying a compliment really spoke to the desperation of their situation. “I need you to keep doing it. Okay? Until I can fix this. Keep the captain alive. Keep Curly alive. I’ll take care of everything else.” 

She wished, fervently, that she could believe him. 

She asks Jimmy one too many times to give Curly the oxycodone, and the fifth time, he nearly backhands her.

She flinches away in time, her hip knocking painfully into the lever of the airtight door as Jimmy’s elbow cracks back. He blinks, hard; as if he didn’t know what he was doing, how he got there. He glares down at her and sighs through clenched teeth, running that raised hand through sweat-slicked hair, stringy and falling into his eyes badly. 

“Tell me,” Jimmy says, “why you, our nurse, can’t do it yourself.” 

Anya swallows. “It just… the sounds. I… I change his bandages every six hours, I take blood samples, I put ointment on every single part of his body, I just—Jimmy, I just—”

“I know.” Curt, dismissive. Jimmy turns back to his clipboard of logs, scanning over the long rows of neat black tick marks. “I’ll take care of it.” 

“I’m sorry, I just—I don’t want him to be in pain, but I almost—almost threw up on him, last time.” 

His answering glare is withering. “Great,” he drawls. “Whatever. Go take logs or something.” He throws the clipboard back into her waiting arms, rough and careless, before stomping back up the stairs to the medical bay, muttering something indistinct under his breath. 

Anya’s heart rabbits in her chest as she unzips her coveralls, shoves the clipboard inside, then braces her hands on the railings of the stairwell—

And falls.

Slips on her ass for the first ten steps, and then tumbles forward for ten more, shouting as she bangs her head badly on the last step, careening to a stop as she blinks away bright white stars, the diamond-deck digging into her backside, cold and unrelenting as she stares above her at the piping.

Blood blossoms on her tongue. Mild concussion. Loose molar. She turns her head to spit out a cracked tooth in a small puddle of spittle and blood. 

Maybe—maybe—

Throw yourself down a flight of stairs, take care of it, I don’t care.

She slides her hands over the small curve of her stomach, the warm softness there. Three months pregnant. It might even have a heartbeat.

She’d never considered herself as a mother; like so much of her life, it had been relegated to after I pass the MCAT. After medical school. After her residency. After—

After. With the right person, the right time. She’d been an accidental baby, an unwanted third who was sweetly reassured that she was a surprise blessing, and she’d taken the hint to heart. 

She’d gone through all of her medical textbooks in the hopes of finding—something. Anything. But her options were horribly limited. Frightfully so. 

“Anya?” 

Daisuke’s head pops into view above her.

“Oh.” She blinks. “Dai. Sorry.” 

“You alright? I’ve fallen down the stairwell a couple times, too. Hurts like hell. Let me help you.” 

He holds out his hand, surprisingly strong as he pulls her to her feet. She leans against the bulkhead and spits out more blood. Daisuke makes a face.

“Oh, gross. Anya, why don’t you go take a nap, girl? You look beat.”

“I can’t, I’m doing logs.” 

“Oh, I can do that easy!” 

“I’m actually taking logs,” Anya says wryly. “Thanks, though.” 

“I mean it. I’ll tell Jimmy that you need to sleep. He can yell at me if he wants, I don’t care.”

“I… I usually sleep in medical. Jimmy’s there.”

Daisuke frowns. “Don’t you have a bed in the lounge with the rest of us?” 

She nods, and then, tentatively, “I… can’t sleep there.” 

“Just try really hard. For me, Anya. You look exhausted.” 

“I’ll try after,” She promises. “For you.” She gives Daisuke her winningest smile, and he ruffles her hair. 

If I could keep him like that forever, she thinks to herself as she writes down the small rows of unchanging numbers, I think I’d give just about anything. 

Anya stares at the millions of blue bottles. 

Daisuke mumbles to himself in the far corner, already well past drunk. Swansea is shouting at the top of his lungs; “Goddammit, you can’t fucking cheat like this, Jimmy! Make a man do something he might regret!” and in the far distance, beneath the ravenous pulse of electronic music from the hot-wired CD player to the intercom system, Anya swears she can hear Curly moaning.

She stares at the blue bottle, the neat white label. Dragonbreath X. Fire fresh. Her mom wouldn’t have bought this, taken one look at the sugar content and said “oh, goodness, what are they selling these days?” But she knew how it tasted on her boyfriend’s mouth in undergrad, the way by her 9 a.m. psych class it would take on the minty tang of gin. 

Jimmy’s head swivels like a watch-dog, looking hungry, pacing the kitchen as if he could open a cupboard and find the solution to all his problems. 

Anya retreats to medical, the bottle tucked into her back pocket. 

Thankfully, Curly is quiet. The radio hums, low enough he could fall asleep to it, because Curly always liked to fall asleep to the television in the lounge. She smooths the back of her hand over his bandaged forehead, and Curly’s wide blue eye stares up at her, unblinking and expressionless. He looked as easily terrified, agonized, or dazed, and she’d long since given up trying to read into any expression on the wrecked landscape of his features. 

She swallows hard, the saliva pooling in her mouth as she holds the last two oxycodone pills. “Okay, Curly,” she says. “I’ll try to make this easy.”

She found moistening her gloved fingers with saline solution was the most agreeable for both of them; she vomited after anyway, but at least it didn’t hurt Curly.  He only softly choked around her two fingers as she drove them inside his throat, the soft ridges of his esophagus gliding beneath her touch. Curly pants, staring up at her as she readjusts his IV drip, trying not to look too closely at the wet, browning bandages clinging to his burned flesh.

She didn’t know what to do. She thought about trying to boil water, disinfect, and reuse the bandages, but as continued to be a trend of their post-crash time, all Anya could think about was the cost effectiveness of each measure. Would it be worth it to waste water boiling the bandages if they sooner ran out of water, and could she even guarantee to any degree the bandages would be disinfected, and furthermore, would they even survive a washing? The only soap she had available was laundry detergent, and what remaining dermis Curly possessed was so highly irritated she couldn’t guarantee exacerbating his condition.

She was more worried of running out of painkillers than the bandages. Infection might kill him, but paracetamol could barely help her headaches, let alone assuage the agony from full body third degree burns.

She’d long since moved her mattress into the medical bay, claiming she needed to keep an eye on Curly. But tonight, she twisted open the cap of the Dragonbreath X and took a swallowful.

Artificial astringent mint explodes on her tongue. She stares at the perpetual scarlet sunset as she swigs it around her mouth, sluicing it between the gaps of her teeth. 

And then she swallows.

It burns the whole way down, and she briefly gags into her small trashcan. But then the most delirious light-headedness overtakes her all in one staggering breath; like taking a shot of everclear at a frat party, she’s drunk instantaneously and effortlessly. The red-hot cyst bursts.

She exhales, dropping down onto the mattress and staring at the growing watermarks in the asbestos ceiling tiles overhead.

“Would you really have taken me to that ski resort, Curly?” she whispered. “Or did you just feel bad for me?” 

Curly keeps his own counsel; she thinks it was pity, but staring at his bandaged arms, she wants to pretend he really meant it. 

Zero-zero-one. Zero-zero-two. Zero-zero-three.

Swansea’s haggard features are painted in blood in the dim scarlet light of the cockpit as he says, “There’s something I need to tell you, Anya.” and he doesn’t sound like the furious, beleaguered engineer that had been her crewmate for five years. His tone is painfully paternalistic, even as she can smell Dragonbreath X sweetening his exhale. 

Anya crosses her arms, staring at the cockpit door. They’d agreed not to lock it; Jimmy’s emotional state was quite fragile, and he’d be liable to try to break down the door if he thought he smelled a mutiny. “Before you say anything,” Anya says, “I need you to understand something. And I need you not to tell anyone.”

Swansea nods gravely, and she tells him.

She watches the emotions play across Swansea’s face like a vehicular accident; shock, concern, calculation, and finally, despair. “You don’t want to keep it,” Swansea says, the question hanging in the air.

She shakes her head. “I didn’t want this,” she says. Small and bitter. To Swansea’s credit, he only nods. She did not think she could take his pity at this moment. She yearned, most desperately, for something actionable to do. 

“I’ve been trying to keep Jimmy away from Utilities,” he says. There’d been a certain amount of a punchline at the end of all his sentences since the crash, especially in front of Jimmy and Daisuke. Anya didn’t often talk to Swansea alone, and now she wondered why she hadn’t spoken with him more, why she’d assumed he’d be just as angry at her as Jimmy, but all that rage she’d seen in him—

It was all directed towards one person, poisoning the remaining oxygen left in the ship. “There’s one cryo pod left,” Swansea tells her. He stares at her very intently. “I was… trying to save it for Daisuke. But you need it more.” 

Her heart pangs desperately. “Save it for Daisuke,” she begs. “I…” she laughs wildly, reaching up to fist her hair. “I’m a ticking time bomb,” she gasps. “He knows. God, Swansea, the look he gave me… I thought he’d kill me right then and there. Curly crashed the ship right after. Jimmy told me to end it by any means possible. I don’t want this. I never wanted this—not… not with him—” Hot tears tremble down her cheeks before she can stop them. “Sorry,” she gasps, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. “It’s just…”

“Are you sure, Anya? You’re not that much older than Daisuke. You… I don’t know what effects the cryostasis would have on… that.” He gestures curtly to her stomach. “But they’ve got to be able to at least deal with it then. You didn’t—god, you don’t deserve this. Is that why… Did Curly know?”

She nods. And Swansea sighs, and laughs. He leans back on the locker, titling his head back and laughing like a dying man at his funeral. “Captain, oh captain,” he gasps. “You couldn’t bear to see your kingdom burn.” He takes a swig of Dragonbreath X as if it were from a hipflask. “Couldn’t bear to see your golden boy reap his crops. Had to end the party early. What sick fucking joke.” 

“I feel like I died, since I found out.” Anya says in a daze. She reaches for the bottle of mouthwash, swishes it in her teeth, and swallows. The burn is getting easier. “We need a plan,” she says, finding the sticking point of her courage deep in the dregs of what remained in her soul. “For Jimmy. I hid the gun, and you have the axe. That a least gives us options.”

“Do you think he’ll kill you or Curly, if he gets ahold of one?” 

Anya snorts; the mouthwash burns in her sinuses. “He worships him,” she says. “He hates him and needs him. Make no mistake: he wants me dead. I’m the reason for all of this. He can’t even—he can’t even look me in the eyes, I disgust him so much.” 

“You’re one of the strongest people I’ve ever met, Anya,” Swansea says, so seriously she thinks he might actually not be kidding. “You amputated all of Curly’s limbs after three days of no sleep. And he lived.”

No one had ever thanked her for it. Daisuke, confused and terrified, had just said, “wow, gross!” when they’d all come to check in on Curly after hours and hours of screaming and sawing and suturing. Jimmy questioned her repeatedly about why she couldn’t have saved the limbs no matter how many times she explained until she just gave up completely. Swansea had been quiet—a silence she’d mistaken for judgment. 

The cockpit door swings open, and Jimmy’s there in the doorway, glaring at her, and Swansea bristles, as if he’s seeing this situation for the first time. Maybe he was. When she settles down onto the thin mattress that night in medical, she keeps thinking about Swansea’s worn face in the dim red light of the navigational warnings.

One single cryopod. It was more hope than they’d had, but she still felt a certain relief in knowing how slim the options were. Utilities had always been an open question mark, if they were brave enough to risk chopping up the foam with the axe; she’d been asking Jimmy to get antiseptic and painkillers out of all the still accessible first-aid kits on the ship, and it was the only thing keeping Curly alive. 

She felt a certain weightlessness, in knowing she wouldn’t leave the Tulpar alive. These freighter ships had always been death traps; half of her nursing school had just been studying hundreds of incident reports, how crewmembers died, how nurses failed or succeeded in keeping them alive. They even had a field medic come in to give them training one day, a woman with dark, haggard eyes who spoke with shocking frankness about holding together smashed skulls and shattered limbs, how quickly a single jolt of electricity could shock your heart into arrhythmia and soon after, death. 

I just want to get back alive, she’d think to herself late at night, staring at the small plastic glow-in-the-dark stars she’d glued onto the ceiling of her rack, losing fluorescence as she tried to sleep. She’d imagine the autopilot failing and careening into an unidentified body, of being suddenly sucked into the vast vacuum of space, of a fire breaking out and engulfing her in her sleep, dying of smoke inhalation, dying of electrocution, watching Swansea or Daisuke or Curly die of something terrible—

But maybe she’d known that this ship would be her tomb. She felt such a terrible quiet once she realized. She would never have to live to see this fetus born. She would never see the lights glimmering on the pier of her hometown again, never smell the seabreeze, never take another MCAT, never see the crinkled, kindly faces of her parents again.

And she sighs, so relieved to finally die.

Two-six-five. Two-six-six. Two-six-seven.

If she’d thought she would be able to depend on Swansea as a pillar of strength and solidarity, she was sorely mistaken; it is one more disappointment in a series of small, crushing condemnations that drive her to the edge. 

Standing on a bridge, feet in cement—that’s how Jimmy used to always describe Curly. She never understood the feeling he tried to describe, but now she did; but it was more like she’d realized that if she slipped her feet out of her cemented shoes, letting them dangle barefoot over the edge of the overpass…

… It wouldn’t be all that difficult to jump, would it?

Curly has proven to be the best conversationalist since Swansea and Daisuke had given themselves over completely to hedonistic alcoholism. She tried to join in, but largely she only ended up terrified, huddled up in medical with the door locked and praying for the room to stop swimming. Even still, she lived in terror that Jimmy would try to finish the job. Fix it, like he was always muttering under his breath in a stale-cigarette-and-mouthwash miasma.

“I just think it’s the only way,” Anya tells him, after she finishes cleaning and applying ointment to his bandages, scrubbing her hands thoroughly in the sink. “I can’t do it until we do something about Jimmy. Swansea wants Daisuke to have that pod. I want him to have that pod. But Jimmy… I don’t know what he’ll do. He just… paces the ship.  That’s all he does. You see the way he looks at you, the way he looks at me. Is he having a psychotic break? Delusions of grandeur, maybe? He talks to himself, but I think we all do, anymore.” She sighs down at him. “Does this count as talking to myself?” 

Curly only stares at her, with that single, lambent sapphire eye, starbursts of broken capillaries staining the whites pink. 

“Of course I’m not,” she says, smiling softly at him. As she stares at the bed, she looks down to the little white drawer beneath the bed. She kept the key tucked inside her bandeau. “How long,” she mutters, less to Curly and more to herself as if there were any difference, “would it take to guess three numbers? Ten times ten times ten…” 

A thousand tries. The case didn’t look particularly sophisticated, like something on a suitcase. 

Anya takes the key out of her shirt, still warm from her skin. She fits it into the lock, turns it—

“Anya?!” Jimmy roars, slamming his fist against the airtight door. “Goddammit, why do you keep this thing fuckin’ locked all the time? Get out here! Daisuke’s choking on his vomit again!” 

Anya startles very badly, nearly dropping the key as she gasps and cringes, slamming her head into the edge of the bed. Curly moans. 

“Just a second,” she gasps out, snatching the key and shoving it back into her shirt and stumbling over to the door. 

It would be all over her face; Jimmy would take one look at her and know. And then he would fix it, fix the problem that made Curly try to crash the ship. Fix her. 

But Jimmy doesn’t look at her at all. 

They walk wordlessly down the passageway to the lounge; Swansea was passed out in the corner, snoring audibly on his mattress. Daisuke lays on the couch, which had always been mysteriously stained but now was seeped with partially digested electric blue mouthwash. She turns him onto his side, pushing back his sweat-slicked hair from his forehead as he feebly heaves. 

“I can take it from here,” Anya says softly, and looks up, putting on her sweetest expression as she says, “thank you, Jimmy.”

She knew he wanted, very badly, to hear thank you, captain. But she couldn’t and wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

Jimmy grunts under his breath, “I don’t know why I bothered,” before shuffling away out the starboard door, heavy bootfalls echoing down to the cockpit. 

Dai was breathing very weakly, and that worried her. “You can’t die on me yet,” Anya murmurs. “You haven’t beat the Elite Four yet, have you?” The bile drips onto the floor. She goes to the kitchen, fetches a packet of sweetener from the cupboards, opens it, and mixes it with water before giving it a vigorous shake. For the next hour she gently pours the sugar water between his cracked lips, pulling him into her lap and stroking his soft black hair as she stares at the destroyed evening sky, fractaled into a thousand bloody shards. The dead pixel still stood out in the far right corner, right where she’d left it.

He was probably slowly dying from alcohol poisoning. Swansea’s skin had already began to jaundice; she realized it only when she passed him in the passageway, the yellowing of his sclera against his murky green-and-grey eyes. After some time, Daisuke’s breathing lightened; he rose, moaning and pressing his face into his hands. 

“Fuck me,” he moans, “oh, shit, sorry, nurse.” 

“Daisuke,” Anya sighs. “You can’t keep doing this.”

Daisuke’s face shivers as a wave of nausea passes through him; he reaches for the sweetener packet and finishes it by crushing the sugar water into his open mouth. “Yeah,” he sighs. “I know. But… what else is there to do?” he shrugs. “If I think about it, like, at all, I think I’ll actually go bananas. Like really this time, dude.” 

She wants, very badly, the bile still drying at the corners of his mouth, hair ruffled and stringy with sweat in the scarlet glow, to tell him, tell him everything. The impulse passes quickly. She’d already tested telling Daisuke smaller secrets, like showing him the spot above the vents and pipes where she’d take naps where Jimmy wouldn’t find her, and within a week Swansea was muttering about you fucking lazy kids, and Jimmy patrolling the space to the reboiler with particular vengeance. 

She loved him, as much as she could love anyone right now, but she could not trust him. It made her think about the exact amount of oxycodone and zolpidem she’d stashed away, tucked inside a ceiling panel that she’d had to stand on her desk to get to…

“I know,” Anya says. “I know.” 

She goes back to medical, gives Curly two paracetamol tablets, vomits, and takes the small, plastic wand of the medical scanner and waves it over her belly. 

There is a horrible thump-a-thump-a-thump-a-thump she’d never heard before, pulsing over the small speaker. The sound is so strange she’s convinced the machine was on the fritz, but—

Heartbeat. It was a heart. It had a heartbeat. 

“Oh god,” Anya gasps. “Oh god, oh god, oh god.” 

Curly does not make a sound, but only stares at her, and Anya wonders if he pities her more than himself.

She presses the large red button to the scanner, turning it off with a clack before sinking to her knees in front of the patient bed, and unlocks the door again.

Six-oh-six. Six-oh-seven. Six-oh-eight.

“Look,” Jimmy shouts through the door; the gun gleams in her hands. “You can’t go breaking down at every little hardship. “Open,” he slams his fist against the airtight door with each syllable, “the damn door!” 

Her fingers are frantic and trembling on the dials, the pads of her fingers worn down from spinning them all night long. Seven-four-seven. Seven-four-eight. Seven-four-nine—

There’s a metallic click deep inside the mechanism, and the glass case swings open. 

“You were right,” Anya sighs. “You were right all along. I should have done this from the beginning.” She’s never handled a gun before, but it’s a simple tool, designed for a single purpose. “I always believed,” She slides open the cylinder, sliding bullets into each chamber, “that our worst moments didn’t define us. Didn’t make us beyond repair.” 

She flicks her wrist; the cylinder slides into back into place and spins. “Did you think I wanted this either?!” she shouts shrilly, the loudest she’s ever allowed herself to be in front of Jimmy. She fits both hands on the grip, using the meat of her palm to draw back the hammer, meeting resistance before she realizes— the safety. She flicks it off with her thumb. “Make no mistake,” she gasps, “this isn’t my worst moment.” 

With a wild sob, she twists the gun to press into the soft skin beneath her jaw and holds her breath. Time dilates as she presses the metal very hard into her skin, aware of every shuddering breath, the tears streaming down her cheeks, hot and free. She gives a watery little laugh, hiccups, and slowly draws her index finger over the trigger. She should do it all at once, before she gave her animal hindbrain enough time to catch up, to kick in self-preservation instincts. She should have drank enough mouthwash to get herself decently drunk, but she was terrifyingly sober. She swallows, and tries to muster enough nerve to squeeze. 

Curly’s bandaged arm swings out, knocking over the IV drip; the glass shatters across the linoleum, saline solution splashing her sandals as she looks down at Curly, who moans rhythmically, like he was trying very hard to say something.

“Captain,” Anya gasps. “I—” she feels suddenly horribly embarrassed now, pulling the gun away with a quick jerk. “I don’t know what else to do,” she whispers. “I have to do this. I’ll die now or later. I can choose this, at least. Make it quick. I’ll fix it,” and she says it in Jimmy’s desperate tone, smiling sardonically to herself. “I’ll fix everything. At least this.” 

Curly is silent, staring up at her with his remaining eye. So many times she’d tried to imagine what he’d say to her—

But that was the problem, too. 

“Captain,” Anya whispers, resting her head on his cot and closing her eyes. “I wish I knew why you did what you did that day. I don’t know what Jimmy said to you—what you said to Jimmy. I don’t know. Sometimes I wish I could ask him—why he came into my room that night. If he’s done this before. Why he…” she shakes her head. “I just want to understand. Our worst moments don’t define us. I still want to believe that. But when I look at him, when I look at you —it’s all I can see anymore. The dead pixel in the upper-righthand corner.” The gun lays slack in her grip; she runs her thumb absent-mindedly over the plyleather grip. “Thank you for trying to stop me,” Anya murmurs, “but I don’t think I have any other choices left. At least this one will be mine.” 

She sighs, draws herself to sit, and presses the gun beneath her chin again—

—And the intercom crackles to life. 

“—Anya’s going to kill Curly if we don’t get in there,” Jimmy was saying; “As your captain, I am ordering you to stand down. Let Daisuke in the vent.”

“Oh captain, my schmaptain, you can suck my big fat dick—”

“Swansea,” Jimmy’s voice snarls, “you’ve been drinking yourself fucking stupid for five months. I’d almost think you were trying to kill yourself if I didn’t know you wanted that last pod.” He knew; oh, god, he knew. Anya’s palms sweat. She felt very dizzy all of a sudden.

“Heh! You think you know everything—”

Daisuke yells suddenly and then Jimmy commands, “Get away from the door, Swansea, I don’t want to have to do this—”

“Dude, you can’t—you can’t! Oh my god, Anya won’t kill Captain, dude, calm down, Jesus Christ, dude, just chill out—!” 

She can hear the sound of grunting, a physical struggle, Jimmy and Swansea inarticulately yelling and groaning. There’s a loud bang somewhere down in the bowels of the ship; the intercom doesn’t pick it up and Anya’s heart stills in her chest. For one instant, the ship is as silent as a tomb.

Then there’s Daisuke, “oh my god, no, no, no, Swansea, no—help me, help me p-pick it up, help me— help me take it out, Jimmy—” 

“He had it coming. Come on. We have to get to work—”

“He’s dead, he’s dead, oh my god, it’s everywhere, Swansea, please, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I was a horrible intern, I—”

“Get up. Get up, Daisuke. We have to save Curly. Your captain is ordering you. Get up.” 

Daisuke was sobbing distantly; she could hear it very clearly now; it was coming from the ventilation. “Daisuke,” Anya tries to shout, “don’t—don’t come here, I’ll open it from the other side—just wait, Daisuke—” but all she could hear was Daisuke’s frantic sobs and soft, rhythmic banging—the sobs grow closer, and there’s such a pained desperation in them that she almost wonders if it’s Curly crying, but all he does is stare and stare at her unblinking—

All at once there’s a terrific CRACK and the ship’s lights flicker, the hum of the remaining turbine generator winding down as Daisuke howls with pain, and there’s a horrible slamming against the metal vent. “Daisuke!” Anya screams. She can hear moaning from the other side; and Daisuke’s face comes into view down in the darkened vent. 

She rips off the vent at once; Swansea had never bothered to screw it back in, in case it needed to be accessed. Daisuke’s bloodied face stares up at her in pure animal terror. She doesn’t know how she does it, but with pure adrenaline she reaches down, her knees bracketing the metal lip of the vent, stretches until she can grab him by the collar, and yanks him up hard. 

She drags him like a drowning man to the medical bay floor, and Daisuke can’t stop screaming. There was so much blood—there’s a horrific slash in his stomach, torn down through the fascia, and he’s trying to hold himself together, put himself back in . She shushes him through her teeth, “Daisuke, why didn’t you listen—” and peels back the hibiscus print t-shirt and his yellowed Pony Express standard issue—airway, breathing, circulation—she didn’t think she could put him back together, not this time—it had been a very near thing when they’d pulled Curly screaming out of the wreck of the cockpit, covered in foam and burns and his skin sloughing off as she touched him—

She screams aloud when Jimmy bangs on the airtight door.

“I know you’re in there!” he roars. “Open up, Anya, I swear to God—”

Anya grabs the revolver from the floor with bloodied, trembling fingers, shoves it into her coveralls, grabs the opened case, throws it back in the drawer and slams it shut. Daisuke is very pale and sweating at her feet; she unlocks the door, and Jimmy bursts through. 

“Antiseptic,” he’s saying, “Don’t we have any isopropyl alcohol left—don’t tell me you wasted it all—”

“He’s going to bleed out before that,” Anya shouts, ripping the soiled shirt off of Daisuke’s shoulders, balling it up and pressing it frantically to his abdomen. She was racking her mind of her metal inventory of supplies, ransacking the drawers. “I don’t think—I don’t think I can save him—” No bandages. No clean surgical equipment. Not even floss to sew him up with. No saline solution. No alcohol. You have to try, she thinks desperately, you have to—

“Stand down, Anya.” 

“Let me try—I didn’t mean it, let me try—if we just—”

Again, louder, angrier, “I said stand down, Anya. That’s an order.” 

Daisuke’s panting feverishly, moaning inarticulately—hypovolemic shock, probably; she’s trying to hold together the frayed edges of his stomach, stretching the skin, straining to pinch it together; the blood gushes around her clenched fingers. 

Jimmy swings. 

She doesn’t catch the arc of the axe, only watches with diminished, quiet horror as the edge slams neatly into Daisuke’s agonized face. Blood and brain matter sprays in a terrific arc, across her open mouth, and Anya detachedly watches as Daisuke’s entire body goes slack and lifeless. 

Something in her finally breaks, and Anya howls like a caged animal.

“Stop screaming, Anya—”

“You killed him, oh my god, you killed them both—”

“Listen to me, listen to me, Jesus Christ, shut the fuck up, Curly—” Flesh on flesh thumps. A rib cracks. “Shut up. Shut up. Both of you. I’m your captain, you have to trust me—” 

“You killed him! You killed Swansea for hiding the cryopod—you killed Daisuke and now—oh my god, oh my god—” 

“I’ll kill you if you don’t shut up, stop screaming, god fucking damn it, Curly, shut up —”

Jimmy cracks the back of his hand across Curly’s skull, the way he’d threatened her with before. He whimpers once, a little blood dribbling from between his exposed teeth, and then falls silent. He brandishes the axe at her.

“We,” Jimmy says, breathing very hard, sweat dripping down his brow— “are going to fix everything. Starting with you.”

She shoves a hand inside her coveralls at the same time Jimmy swings; she drops to her knees, and the revolver goes skidding across the blood-slicked linoleum. Jimmy tracks it slowly, like a predator noticing a limping gazelle. 

And then he turns back to her, axe held high.

She has no choice; she dives for the gun, scrabbling for it with blood-slicked fingers. But Jimmy is faster, stronger; he wrenches his fist in her hair, drags her up, then slams her head into the linoleum. Stars burst and explode in front of her eyes. Again, again, again—fingers tangled in her hair, again, just like before, must have been going on seven months now—can’t extricate himself so he has to rip the hair from her skull. 

“Stay still, Anya, I’ll cut it out of you—stay still, bitch, stay fucking still.” 

She thrashes like a fish, his knees digging into her hips. He yanks down her coveralls, using the axe to cut open her turtleneck. Daisuke’s lifeless eyes stare upwards. Maybe he sees the stars beyond, that wild blue yonder. Maybe she’d see it soon too. 

She kicks and kicks; wrenches a hand free of her coveralls and shoves her thumb into Jimmy’s right eye, digs her thumbnail and feels the eye give way. Jimmy howls with pain, and swings the axe.

She watches, with a dull sort of fascination, as it cleanly lands into her bicep, separating bone and muscle and sinew with a single thud. 

Her arterial blood gushes over Jimmy’s rage-contorted features as she drops down into oblivion.

She wakes to the Atlantic ocean rocking her like a lullaby, the small fishing boat see-sawing to and fro on the midnight waves. The Earth’s moon is luminescent in the sky, moonbeams leaching her skin of any color, as if she were taken on a lithograph. The air smells of the salt breeze and burning diesel, and from her left, Curly smiles down at her.

He’s holding a fishing pole, fumbling with the spinning reel and faintly fluorescent fishing line between his fingers. He lashes a hook and bait to the end, then whips the pole back, then forwards; the bobber disappears into the dark waters, and Anya pushes herself up to sit beside Curly, their sides nearly touching. 

Curly says, “it’s my fault, Anya.” 

“You can’t take responsibility for everything Jimmy did—”

“It’s my fault,” he insists. “It’s my fault he’s on the ship in the first place. A long time ago… he’d been in a bad sort of way. It’s not an excuse. Fuck, I’m so tired of making excuses for him. Even now, even when he’s taken everything from me—but I’d tried to help him out. I’d been on the crew for five years then. You know how it is. Being a kid from a small, shitty town with no prospects, awful grades, parents can’t pay for shit. You either die in the shithole you were born in or you get out. So I got out. Got out to the stars. It seemed all very romantic, then. I thought I was doing him a favor, telling him to join up. And the referral fee didn’t hurt.”

Curly reaches into his thick canvas jacket, pulling out a crumbled pack of cigarettes and a small lighter. He lights a cigarette, the red cherry glowing in the dark. He inhales, then passes it to her. She takes it readily, inhaling on the filter hard—

But there’s no familiar buzz of nicotine, and Anya realizes with small sadness that she must be dreaming or dead after all.

“You know,” Anya says softly, holding the cigarette between her numb fingers, “even now—even after everything he’s done, to me, to you, to Daisuke, to Swansea—I don’t hate him.” 

“You’re a better person than most.”

She shakes her head. “I just can’t stop thinking—that maybe I could have done something. I feel like I can’t do anything. But maybe… if I’d locked the door all along. If I hadn’t smiled at him. If I hadn’t given him the wrong idea, you know? He wasn’t always like this. Jimmy used to be nice, in his own way.” 

“Anya,” Curly says, “I failed you. I failed you more than anyone.” 

“You didn’t, Captain, you really didn’t.” The waves splash gently against the fishing boat’s hull. She flicks ash into the ocean. “I’ve had five months to replay this in my mind, over and over and over. Even if you’d written the report—locked Jimmy in the brig—who would have helped me? What would I have done? The sin is already committed.” She touches his shoulder. “Just answer me this,” she says softly, “why—why did you crash the ship?” 

Curly smiles, and laughs. She wondered if she’d ever hear that laugh again, bitter and gentle at the same time.

“Anya,” he says, “I was too late to stop him.” 

And she surfaces.

Her mouth is dry and cracked as consciousness seeps back into her, like blood soaking into cloth. The pain —for a single blistering moment, she understands a small fraction of what Curly had suffered. Her detached forearm—she swears she can twitch her fingers, if only she tried hard enough. Could still feel the cold from the linoleum on her fingers. But she couldn’t. 

She’s too paralyzed by the agony of shredded nerve endings to move, but she realizes, through the haze of pain, that Curly was gone, only the bloody imprint of him remaining on the cotton blue sheets. 

Very slowly, she comes to her feet; she sways wildly, landing bodily onto the bed before vomiting nothing but bile onto the sheets. Her right arm. It was lucky that she was left-handed, the only one out of the crew. In a daze, she unwinds her belt from the loops on her coveralls, and using her teeth, lashes it across her bleeding stump until she passes out again, for a little while.

She comes to quickly; she couldn’t stop staring at the spot where Curly was. Bloodied and pale, she yanks the axe free from the floor, staring at her discarded right forearm. Wondering if she should take it with her. She leaves it, feeling strangely forlorn for it.

She staggers down the hall on jellied legs, stumbling into the port and starboard bulkheads, zig-zagging her way into the lounge. The ship is dark and quiet, save for Curly’s whimpers and Jimmy’s low, pleading voice.

“You have to eat, Curly. Your captain is ordering you.” Curly’s sobbing grows more desperate. “Come on, it’s like our birthday cake. Remember? The one we made you out of chocolate whey protein? Maybe a steak. Let’s pretend it’s steak. Alright, Curly, open wide.”

She could not have painted a more gruesome scene in her wildest imaginings; Jimmy had sat Daisuke and Swansea’s corpses at the table, Curly laid between them like the world’s most horrifying birthday cake. There was a very large knife, and blood, and Curly’s leg—

Her emptied out stomach threatens to try to invert itself again as she realizes exactly what the bloody piece of meat Jimmy was shoving into Curly’s mouth was. It was— Curly —

And then she sees it, glittering in the dull maroon light. SYSTEM FAILURE screams across the shattered lounge display. 

The revolver.

Curly tries to swallow the meat, and coughs it back up onto Jimmy’s shirt, who takes it as placidly as if he were feeding a fussy baby. “Come on, Curly,” he murmurs, stroking his bandaged head, “we can do this. We’ve got to live. We’ve got to survive. It’s not so bad.” She inches for the table, slowly, scarcely allowing herself to breathe.

When she’s within arm’s reach, she waits until Jimmy was shoving the regurgitated meat back into Curly’s half-open jaw before she reaches for the gun all at once. 

Jimmy whirls on her, and she catches one glimpse of the whites of his eyes before she fires. 

His body falls entirely limp, like an unstrung puppet, his chair falling as he collapses to the ground. Curly’s head turns in her direction, his mouth still half-open as he pants. 

“Captain,” Anya sobs. “Curly—Curly it’s over, I can—I can—”

She has to keep moving, before the exhaustion and the bloodloss and the sheer horror catches up with her. She cannot carry Curly in her arms; she tries to sling him over her arms, but it’s no good, and then over her back—finally, when she has him about the waist, Curly thrashes suddenly until she’s forced to let him go. 

He was staring to the right, moaning, his entire body shaking as if he were trying to communicate one single thing to her.

Anya  follows his gaze to the gun. 

“I—do you want me to—?” and at that, Curly nods, as much as he could with the wasted muscles, furious and hard. Yes. Yes. Yes. 

“We can both go in the pod,” she tries to compromise, “you can’t—Curly, you promised—you can’t—”

He shakes his head. It was the most emotion she had seen out of him since before the crash.

“I can’t do this,” she cries, “I can’t do this, I can’t—”

But Curly only holds her gaze. Begging. Pleading. 

She leans down to him in the chair and presses a kiss onto his bandaged forehead.

“I’m so sorry,” Anya whispers. “Thank you for everything. You were the best captain I’ve ever had.” 

She goes back to medical, takes the last of the oxycodone and zolpidem and, her gag reflex diminished, pushes them down Curly’s throat. She waits until she is all but certain he is asleep, and through tears, fires the gun. When Curly lies dead, the single bullet blown through his skull where she’d kissed it, she swears his expression is at peace.

Anya takes one last look at the abattoir of the Tulpar before moving down to the cryo pod, scanning the code with the code scanner she’d taken off Jimmy’s corpse. She punches in the code, and before she can think on it, drops inside the cryo pod.

The hatch sinks down slowly. For a long moment, she wonders if they’d all gotten it wrong. That she was going to starve to death instead inside this coffin. She stares at the stump where her right arm had been, and then the cryo begins to hiss, pumping freezing cold into the coffin.

She falls asleep, and does not dream at all.

Female, approximately aged 25 + 18 years cryostasis. Right arm missing. Spontaneous abortion due to cryostasis complications. Fetus approximately seven months old. Patient cannot sleep without medication. Patient experiences night terrors on a nightly basis and has been prescribed tranquillizers. Subject will require intensive therapy for the duration of her lifetime. Subject is being fitted for a prosthesis. 

Cause of crash: autopilot manually disabled. Due to Pony Express’s bankruptcy and expedited closure, no one began to search for the Tulpar until it missed its shipment date. Freighter was found orbiting Dominicus Prime. The rescue team found four deceased crewmembers. 

Subject cannot speak but can write. Subject asks for books on a daily basis. Subject seems to be tolerating therapy. Subject requested the blinds taken off the window so she can view the stars. 

Subject has requested updated medical textbooks in order to prepare to take the MCAT.