Flying is freaking terrifying.

But holy shit is it fun.

I soared over the landscape like a falling star, my stomach and my heart fighting over which one would leap out of my mouth first every time I looked down. I wanted to scream and I did at first but after the initial terror of takeoff, I found that I just wanted to know why Ai wasn’t responding to my calls. The suit told me that it could tell that the calls were reaching the ship but that there was no response. It also was able to tell me Cyrus’ location and he was still almost a full day’s journey out from the Ariel. The suit would have me there in a matter of hours. The fear of what I would find, constantly growing in my chest quickly grew to outweigh what I felt about being in the air.

Being comfortably warm was almost as strange to me as flying. Everything about this new suit was leaps and bounds better than the previous one. As soon as we were in the air the suit had given me a stronger painkiller and, if it hadn’t been for the strange view of the ground rolling away beneath me, I’d have fallen asleep. Not only that but it also had given me a full readout of my physical condition. It wasn’t great. Shocking, I know.

I was malnourished, had layers of dead skin buildup, and my immune system was beginning to lose the fight against some kind of infection. The suit had injected me with a variety of immune boosters and vitamins. Apparently, l wasn’t far off from having a case of scurvy. Whatever the hell scurvy is. The suit wanted me to sleep through the flight. I wanted to oblige it. But the best I could do while hurtling through the sky at a respectable fraction of the speed of sound was lightly doze from time to time.

Every time I dreamed I was falling out of the sky and about to splatter across the ice like a watermelon hurled against a frozen lake. Or that Cyrus in his gigantic metal form had snatched me out of the air and was preparing to twist my head off. The time passed in a strange, endless blur punctuated by those moments of pure terror.

So I said flying was terrifying. And it is. But it has nothing on landing.

In fact, landing and falling out of the sky at a couple hundred miles per hour look pretty freaking similar when you get right down to it. When I spotted the Ariel fireworks of emotions ranging from worry to joy to dread to homesickness hit me. And they all did it on the backdrop of the thunderstorm clouds of absolute pee-in-your-survival-suit terror. Not that I did pee. And no one can prove otherwise.

Despite my horror, the suit’s air jets took me in for a gentle and basically pleasant landing. The moment my feet touched snow I tried to send Ai a message, but I was no longer really surprised that she didn’t answer. It still drove a spike into my guts when she didn’t. I walked in through the familiar snowbound entrance and called out to her. Each unanswered echo of my voice twisted the spike.

Everyone knows the difference between an empty place and one with people in it. It’s not easy to consciously put a finger on what that difference is, but it’s there all the same. After so much time spent in ships occupied only by the dead, I knew it the instant I felt it. The Ariel felt empty.

And yet, I couldn’t see why. As I made my way toward the room that had been the command center of the ship, I couldn’t see any sign that someone or something else had been here since I left. Sure, the ship was still a mess, but it was the familiar mess that I knew. The thing that really had me worried was that the lights were not coming on as I passed. Even without the ability to transmit to the suit, Ai should have been able to see that I was there and to light the way for me.

As I crawled through the winding path that might take me to Ai, a terrible thought struck me. What if Cyrus had done something to her while he was on the ship? He was some sort of computer virus. Could he have left behind some kind of program that would shut Ai down or worse yet, delete her? I told myself he wouldn’t be on his way here to destroy the ship if he’d already erased her. That last was the only thought that gave me any hope as I moved up the final levels onto the floor with the only working door to the command center. But a voice in my head wouldn’t stop whispering that Cyrus was a liar. I couldn’t believe anything he’d told me, even the things that he’d only said to hurt me.

The door to the command center wouldn’t open. Just as with the lights, there could only be one reason. Ai wasn’t in control of them. It felt like there was a stone in the pit of my stomach as I forced open the door but the moment I did, I saw Ai. Or at least, something that looked like her.

She stood on top of the holographic table with her hands folded in front of her. She looked the same as she always did. Same face, same dress, same hair. But the eyes were different. Ai didn’t look at me. And when I stood in a spot that approximated where her gaze was, I had the same sense of her that I had of the ship. This wasn’t Ai. This was an empty shell.

“Euclid,” the hologram said, startling me. “I hope this message finds you well.”

That was her voice. That sounded like her. But it was prerecorded. She wasn’t in the hologram.

“I believe that Cyrus has done something either to my systems or to your suit that is preventing me from contacting you. However, you should know that, at the time of this message, I am aware that he has taken over some sort of robotic form and is heading here with the intention of destroying me. I hope that you are able to get here before he does so that you have a chance to hear this message. There is something I want you to do for me.”

There was a pause then and, though it wasn’t reflected in the hologram’s still, doll-like face, I could hear the hesitance in her voice. I sat down, unable to bear her looking at me without seeing me. I wasn’t sure if it was the exhaustion, the painkillers, or fear that was making my head swim but all the same, I didn’t think I could be on my feet much longer.

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“Please take the ship we have made and leave Persephone-4. I have used what remains of the Ariel’s power sources to charge the remaining ship batteries. It should be sufficient to let you escape.”

I nearly fell out of my seat. That was perfect! Why hadn’t she done that before?

“Unfortunately, I will not be able to accompany you.”

Oh.

“The process of putting me on the ship was always going to be…¦ arduous. But with Cyrus on his way here to destroy the ship, it has become impossible in the time left. That is why I have used the power that was sustaining me to power the escape ship. I do not wish to give him the satisfaction of seeing me afraid, so I will be in a low powered sleep mode when he arrives. I can only hope that you find a way to get here first so that you can see this message and escape.”

Silence hung in the air after that. I couldn’t escape. I couldn’t run away and leave her. She was the only friend I had left. Which was what made her next words hurt so much more.

“Before you go, I want to tell you that I’m sorry I have been selfish. As you can tell, I could have powered the ship for your escape months ago. But… the time I spent with you here was… very nice. I am grateful to you for showing me the music and movies that you were able to salvage from other ships. I am indebted to you for your humor, for your hard work and, most of all, for your friendship. I’ve never known another person like you, Euclid. I’m so happy that I got to know you for a time. Thank you.”

“Ai, no,” I said, the words slipping from my mouth.

“I know this will be hard for you but you have to go. You can’t save me any more than you already have. Please don’t waste any more time here. Go. Goodbye, Euclid. And thank you.”

She whispered those last words, and then the room went dark. The hologram disappeared, and I was alone. There in the darkness, without my only friend, my only companion, I felt something inside me teeter close to the edge of an endless abyss.

I was still sitting but I wanted to fall back, to lie on the floor and just go to sleep. And if Cyrus came while I slept, it wasn’t as if there would be anyone left who cared if he crushed me. Why should I?

“Euclid, the journey here has taxed the suit’s battery. I recommend recharging.”

I didn’t answer. Charging the suit would require getting up. It would require using up the energy that Ai had left me or using up whatever meager supply she’d left over. I didn’t think I could do either. Not after hearing the emotion in her voice, the fear and the gratitude.

“Euclid, I recommend recharging soon.” the suit said again in my ear, it’s completely emotionless tone terribly at odds with the storm inside me and dissonant as a falling toolbox in comparison with Ai’s voice.

A thought struck me like a hammerblow.

“No…” I said, my eyes drifting to the back of the command center, to the one room in the entire ship that I’d never gone into. Ai had asked me never to go back there. She said it was where her computer bank was held. She’d said that it was delicate and she didn’t want to risk anything happening that could compromise her systems. I’d respected her wishes and never tried to open it but now… Even if I did break something in there, she couldn’t be in much of a worse position.

And I suspected I’d find more than just computers back there.

So I went to the back of the room and put my hand to the door. There was a seam running through the middle of it and I could pry it open if I had to. That was my first thought, to just force it open, but I held back.

“Suit, can you power this door and override the security system keeping it closed?”

“Very well,” the suit answered. From my right hand, the suit extended itself and something like a dark wire or a pseudopod of suit material quested out to the control panel. It latched on and I heard the servos in the door whir.

The door opened and I stepped into Ai’s room for the first time. My suit shed light on a dusty, dark room that wasn’t much bigger than a closet. I’d always imagined banks of computers and terminals but there was only one, sitting in front of a tank.

Inside that tank, suspended in some sort of green-blue liquid was Ai. She didn’t look like her holographic counterpart. She was tiny, emaciated, her skin close to inhumanly pale. I could see the blue veins running just under the paper-thin flesh that clung close to protruding bones. But I knew her face. Even with her eyes closed, her hair tucked beneath a brown cap that protruded wires like an anemone, and her face so sunken that it was nearly just a skull, I knew her.

I don’t know how long I stood there. It felt like a very long time.

I glanced down at the console. It showed her heartbeat. In the corner of one screen there was a power gauge. It had enough for another couple of weeks in “rest mode,” before “shut down” came.

Quietly, as though I might wake her, I turned and walked out of that room. I must have asked the suit to shut the door behind me though I don’t remember doing it because, at some point, those servos whirred to life and closed the door.

There in the dark I stood still, not knowing what to feel. It wasn’t a desolate sensation. It was more like standing on the beach and watching a tsunami coming for me. There would be no escape from what was about to hit me, and I wouldn’t have run from it if I could.

A week ago, this might have felt like betrayal. She had been lying to me after all. But I understood her lie. I knew what it was like to need to hide myself. I knew the fear of rejection as well as anyone alive.

After the last few days, it would have made sense for me to feel anguish to only understand her for who she was now that I was almost certainly going to lose her. Despair should have come with the insurmountable obstacle that was coming to destroy her. Bitter, empty, loneliness was what I thought that oncoming wave would hit me with.

None of that came. Instead, my teeth gritted together so hard that I could have bitten through a rock. My hands, true flesh and phantom sensation, clenched into fists, so tight that I could feel the material of the survival suit creaking.

“No.”

The word was unbidden. I did not need to decide to say it. It came from the very rock-bottom depths of my soul.

“No?” the suit asked. I’d left the room without consciously deciding to. My feet were carrying me out, back the way I’d come, back to the hanger where the ship I’d cobbled together waited. Where the power that Ai had given me was. In what felt like only moments I stood before the ships bank of batteries.

“Suit, use this to charge yourself.”

“Very well sir.”

This wasn’t what Ai had asked me to use this power for but I couldn’t run, couldn’t leave her behind to face Cyrus alone. I had been kind to Cyrus when I didn’t have to be. I had risked my life and Ai’s existence to save his. That was not how this story was going to end.

Fire surged through my brain just as the stored electricity flowed into the suit. I knew what I had to do. I was going to stop Cyrus. Or die trying.