My dream abruptly ended when I felt something ice cold pressed against my neck. One moment I was stomping on a zombie’s head on a mountain. The next I was looking up at Ileane as she removed a small device from my neck.

She had bags under her eyes. Lime green bandages poked out from under her suit’s collar, but otherwise there were few signs that she had been at death’s door just a day ago. As she caught my gaze she shied away, almost fleeing. A moment later I spotted Doctor Delveccio looking up from the lab’s main diagnostic terminal.

“Sleep well?”

“I am refreshed enough to face another day.” I checked the time. “Or evening, as it were.”

“You slept a solid eighteen hours. Not even Raspberry smacking you over the head with an empty bottle was enough to wake you.”

I looked around for the little fuzzball. It took me a moment to find her. She looked to be fast asleep in the crook of Ileane’s arm as evidenced by a fluffy tail dangling over her left elbow.

“She bounced around the lab for a couple of hours, then napped, then got up to do it all over again. The facilities in the cafeteria were sufficient to refill her bottles, but we had to manually clean them first. The main dish sanitizers are still crammed full of zombie gunk.

“Sam and Vera have been working on the local substations but according to Sam we’re at a standstill. We really need to clear out the upper Engineering section so we can get access to the tools and spares they need to finish the job.

Something else was missing. Or rather someone. Doctor Delveccio noted my interest.

“Hank’s up and about, though still less mobile. He’s helping Quenton.”

“So we need to clear out and seal off Engineering next then.”

“Not so fast there, Z. I think everybody needs a little down time first.”

The catgirl’s eyes narrowed and her lips thinned.

“And that includes you in particular. You’ve been taking some rather unnecessary risks lately. Other people have been noticing that about you, too.”

Her eyes flicked back to Ileane surreptitiously.

“I’m not even talking about the stunt you pulled when we first met either, practically pushing us out the door while you made sure the horde was good and focused on you alone. That bit with the grenade before the rest of the team was ready may have turned out okay, but it was still a needless risk.”

Her features softened a bit towards the end.

“You need to take better care of yourself, Z. Body and mind. I can’t really tell what’s going on in that head of yours, but whatever it is that’s pushing you so hard- let it rest for a day. Just for one day, okay?”

I shook my head, but she interrupted me first.

“Nuh uh. No arguments. I already talked it over with Vera and Sam. The station will not fall apart if we all take a down day. The accommodations here might not be the best, but they’ll do for another night.”

“What about the stasis pods? The faster we get the station secure and the power systems back in shape the safer they will be, and the quicker we can get to waking up more people-”

“We can’t save them if we’re not there to do the saving, Z,” she said sternly. “This rushing from crisis to crisis is wearing everyone down, especially you. I’ve been looking at your injuries in more detail with the imaging equipment here. They’re worse than you’ve been letting on.”

She pulled up an pad and showed me what looked appeared to be a section of bone and flesh that I vaguely recognized.

“This is where you stitched your thigh together after something pierced all the way through it. See here?”

She pointed to a spot where I could see a small handful of nanites clustered.

“That’s part of your anterior femoral nerve. Your nanites are keeping it from functioning properly. Because when I do this,” she poked me hard in the thigh. “You don’t feel it, do you?”

She was right. There was a vague sense of pressure from the area surrounding where she poked, but nothing at that specific spot. I shook my head.

“That’s not the only thing we found. Notice the scaling along the femur here? Those are your nanites. At least I think those are nanites. They’re all over your bones now, doing something, but we’re not yet sure what it is. I think it might be the cause of those aches and pains you’ve been reporting for a while now.

“The lacerations up here,” she poked my chest where a zombie had clawed me once before, “are healing up nicely. Much better than I expected, actually. But when we look closer at the skin, well, it looks like this.”

The next image showed a cross section of skin cells. But the outer layer of skin cells looked strange. Instead of the standard thin layer of flattened, dead keratinocytes there was a thicker layer that looked more like thorny vines woven together.

That made me think of a particular nanite expression that I’d seen in my labs before.

One of my patients had been exposed to a particularly nasty nanite virus that was trying to skin him alive. His own colony managed to partially subdue the invading nanites, but the end result was his skin effectively separating from his body and becoming its own independant entity.

The man died before the other doctors and I could save him, the infections and blood loss outrunning even the efforts of modern medicine and technology. At the time, one of the attending physicians remarked that at least the man had not had to wake up and experience the pain all at once.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

Privately I disagreed. Dying while asleep seemed like the very definition of a real nightmare to me.

I kept working on the problem for months after his death. If one were able to rebind the skin as a sort of symbiotic joining that would keep the patient alive. Binding a foreign colony without completely wiping the existing instruction set was theoretically possible.

Blank nanites were rather simple to train. Too simple, in my opinion- that was the main reason that lead to conflicting instructions and poor execution. Wild nanites with corrupt hardware coding were what lead to the sort of patients that I saw too many of back before the collapse.

But if one were able to link the wild nanites safely, then you could get the benefit of whatever strange thing they did without them doing the things that would end in your death.

The nanites were woven into just the upper two layers of the epidermis, where the dead and dying cells were. They didn’t appear to be active at the moment.

A hand waved in front of my face, breaking my concentration.

“Hello? Earth to Doctor Zolnikov? Can I take it you recognize what we’re looking at here?”

“I- yes. This appears to be at least superficially like something I’ve seen before. One moment.”

My notes and records from that patient were still in my files. It only took a moment to bring them back up.

“Here. See the woven lattice structure?”

“It looks similar. But this one runs deeper, the nanite threads dipping down into the dermis and- wait, how in the?”

“The patient in question here did not survive being skinned alive. But the wild nanites here did manage to keep the skin cells at least partially alive for a time afterwards.”

She jerked back, her mouth dropping open as her eyes went wide.

“That’s horrible!”

“Yes. It does not appear that my own skin will be leaving my body any time soon, though.”

“Well that’s fortunate at least. But how in the world did you get this on your own body is the question. That and what’s going on with your bones, and the nanites keeping your nerves deadened.”

“Of that, I am not yet certain. My current theory is that when I drain zombies, some portion of the wild nanites that are consumed retain some of their earlier instruction sets.”

Doctor Delveccio frowned at me. She seemed to be doing a lot of that today.

“That does not sound safe.”

“It is not.”

A few hundred patient files came to mind, more supporting evidence of just how bad an idea that was.

“So stop doing that.”

“That may not be possible. We still need to secure the station and save as many people as we can. There is also the issue of the rogue nanite power nodes. Converting them seems to be the only way to make them safe. Draining zombies helps make that possible.”

“It also might be killing you.”

This time I was the one frowning.

“There is insufficient evidence to prove that theory as yet. But if my eventual death saves lives then that would be satisfactory.”

Doctor Delveccio threw up her hands and stomped her foot with an audible huff. I had not seen that combination of actions in an adult before.

“Z! Seriously! Did we not just talk about this?”

“What?”

“You taking too many risks? The team needing some downtime?”

I blinked.

“If the team in need of downtime then they should rest. Working past a certain point leads to inefficiency and the increasing probability of error.”

“Exactly! I’m, glad you finally agree. And the team includes you. Now let’s go and get the others. It’s almost time to eat.”

The fact that I’d been talking about the others and not myself appeared to be lost on her. Either that or she ignored it.

Ileane followed along quietly with her eyes down. As we passed Doctor Sorle’s lab Quenton and Hank stepped out. The former was covered in dirt and sweat. Hank looked pale but offered up a smile as he joined us. Quenton had a scowl on his face.

“He’s mad at the trees.”

“What for?” Doctor Delveccio asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Sap!” Quenton burst out. He waved his filthy hands in the air.

“It’s sticky and gross and it gets on everything!”

“Welcome to the wonderful world of physical labor, Q. If it’s dirty, difficult, or dangerous that means it pays better. Mostly because no one wants to do it!”

Her laughter could have been mocking, but didn’t appear to be so. Quenton just sighed and hung his head.

“I’m sure we’ll find you something to clean that off with. We wouldn’t want you anywhere near food looking like that,” she added. Quenton’s look of horrified realization brought forth more laughter. Ileane still remained silent and withdrawn, though.

From the look of the cafeteria, Sam and Vera had not been idle. The welded covers over the elevators looked cleaner and there even appeared to be a door on the bulkhead leading to engineering now.

“We haven’t opened it yet, if that’s what you’re wondering. There’s no latch. We’ll have to use bars to hold it shut from inside if we have to retreat. Not that zombies will be pulling it open from the other side, though.”

The two looked less rough than Quenton. They did look tired, though. Doctor Delveccio was right. They probably needed a break.

“There were two stasis units that survived the zombies. I managed to get one of the industrial prep units up and running in the mean time, so we can actually cook something while we’re down here.”

“We found some good stuff in the second stasis unit. Burrito wraps, ground meat, beans, and spices. We can make burritos!”

Sam’s face lit up as he said this.

“I can make burritos, you mean?”

He deflated a bit.

“Well, if you wouldn’t mind-”

“Show of hands, burritos or nah?”

Quenton, Hank, Sam and Vera all put their hands up. I didn’t care.

“Alright, burritos it is.”

Quenton went to wash up while Vera and Doctor Delveccio prepared dinner. The food had a familiar smell. Several of the lab assistants that ate in the cafeteria tended to argue over whether the one vendor’s Tex Mex was better than the curry stall. The argument, and the smell that accompanied it, happened on my way to the lab to start work in the morning.

I never had the burritos before the collapse. They appeared to be something like meal bars, but messier. Meal bars and nutrient paste was more efficient.

Doctor Delveccio glared at me as if she already knew what I was thinking. I took a bite of the burrito. It wasn’t a meal bar, but my body craved the calories. The two more after it were also, as expected, messy.

“So for tomorrow we’re taking back engineering right?” Sam wiped some of the bean juice off his chin with a napkin. Where had he gotten a napkin from?

“No, tomorrow is going to be a rest day. I already got Doc Z to agree.”

“Thank God!” Quenton burst out.

“Amen. Everyone’s getting a little ragged here. Rest up, heal up, and clean up. I know the privacy situation isn’t ideal, but right now there’s every reason to make sure we’re well rested and prepared. No zombies can get to us in here, and especially not through all the layers of turret defenses the lab has.”

“Now if only we had a proper shower!” Vera fluttered her eyelashes and swooned. The facilities in Security had been efficient and functional sonic wash stations. Without gravity, normal bathing facilities would not work properly.

The evening meal ended shortly after that. I disposed of my trash and cleaned up as well. The exam tables in my lab were not especially comfortable for everyone else. Doctor Delveccio recommended that I should rest, even if I wasn’t tired.

Two and a half hours later everyone was asleep. I’d rested, but sleep eluded me.

Raspberry woke up as I left the lab and clumsily leapt at me with a soft “Mrrp!” After a few seconds of repositioning she latched onto my shoulder. She’d slept enough, too, carried around like a teddy bear when she wasn’t bouncing around the lab.

My goal was Doctor Sorle’s lab, but there was something else I needed to do first. Ever since seeing that first warning message it had nagged at me. What if the containment breach could threaten the only people left alive on the station?

I just couldn’t take that risk.

There was a faster way to get in there than just hacking away at vines and saplings. The door that Sam and Vera installed swung open silently to reveal an empty corridor. No zombies prowled beyond, or floated deep in torpor. Only shredded bodies and rags of flesh.