I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies in my time on Persephone. They used to really bother me. But at some point the dead stop being people. I still like to bury them when I can and when there’s time. I’ve spent hours digging holes to hide the faces of people I never knew and for the first few months when I did it, I thought I did it for them. I thought that I was being kind by taking them, or sometimes just their pieces from their broken ships and placing them somewhere else, somewhere they’d be covered.

But eventually I realized that I couldn’t do anything for them. Which sounds dumb to me even now but it still took me a long time to understand it. To stop seeing the bodies as really people. And not long after that I realized who I was actually helping by burying those bodies. I was helping myself.

That’s the real purpose of funerals I think. It’s a way to let go. A way to stop seeing the eyes of dead men and women staring at you in the dark. A way to stop being haunted.

I hadn’t hurt those people, and putting them in a cold tomb of ice and frozen dirt couldn’t ease their suffering. But it eased mine. And if I couldn’t help them, at least I could help myself by pretending to.

And when I realized that, or maybe decided it, the corpses I found were finally at rest, in my mind at least. Their name tags, their pictures of loved ones, all the little pieces of lost lives, stopped haunting me. Digging graves stopped being something I dreaded but did so I could sleep at night. It became a ritual that some part of me looked forward to. I was doing something small to set a piece of the world as right as I could make it.

I’d wondered sometimes about what might happen if I came across an escape pod or wreck with people from my ship, The Reliant, inside. I’d thought that putting them to rest would be easy now with my new understanding. There were a few I’d thought it would be hard to know, really know, were dead. But I’d believed that I had conquered death with my graves, and I’d be as ready as anyone could be to see death on faces I knew.

I was so wrong.

The closest was Joe Nesbit. He’d been an asshole nine days out of ten, but on payday he liked to have a drink and it would mellow him out. He and Rip would sit together and watch ancient movies and see who could make the most inappropriate joke. Now he was blue grey and lay curled up next to long dead embers. God only knew what he’d found to burn for the last bit of warmth he ever felt.

Tammy Jones had been one of the mechanics working under Rip. She and Joe liked to experiment with the flavors in the food processors. They’d worked together to see who could make the hottest buffalo wings even though the wings were just synthetic protein packs. She laughed so hard I thought she would pass out when Joe went to the bathroom after one of their contests and forgot to wash the spicy sauce off his hands before handling his business. After that she’d waddled with her legs as far apart as she could any time she wanted to make fun of him.

And now she was curled up with her back against a makeshift shelter, her dark skin coated in a layer of frost.

A dozen more familiar faces were scattered about me. All frozen. All statues. All ugly, stupid mockeries of people. People who’d laughed and cried, and struggled day in and day out. Besides Rip, we hadn’t exactly been a family on the Reliant. Joe had smacked me in the back of the head for making mistakes repairing engines more times than I could count. Tammy had screamed at me, her face so close to mine that flecks of spit had hit me in the face, just for using her tools without asking.

They weren’t saints. They were just people. And now they weren’t even that. They were just empty, lifeless shells.

I didn’t even realize I’d started crying until the suit’s air vents kicked in to wipe away the moisture.

And the worst part, the very worst thing to me was that I couldn’t bury them. We were in a cave and whatever the suit could do for me, digging through solid stone just wasn’t an option. Even if the rational part of my mind insisted that we were already underground and putting them all inside a hole inside another hole was just redundant, the rest of my shrieking thoughts just wanted to hide it all and then hide myself as far away from any of it as it possibly could.

They had made a camp of sorts down here in the dark. Pieces of a ship or maybe multiple ships had been used to construct little huts. I wandered about, cataloguing the dead, dreading above all else seeing one particular figure, one particular face. But he wasn’t among the dead here. That should have brought me some comfort, left the possibility to me that he was alive. It just reminded me that I didn’t know what had happened to Rip and that his fate may have been even worse than these.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

It didn’t take me long to understand why they had come down here. It was warmer inside this cave than it was outside. I couldn’t explain why that would be. Maybe there was some kind of hot spring somewhere close by? It didn’t matter. They hadn’t been able to survive the milder cold down here any more than they would have up on the surface. It just took them longer to die.

In exploring, I found that the cave had other passages leading away from the large cavern they’d made their camp in. Every tunnel led downward though. The mouth of the cave I’d fallen through must’ve been more than a hundred feet up. It was night out but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to see any light from it when the sun did make its feeble presence known in the morning. I wondered at first how they had gotten the materials down here to make their little camp. Once I found the broken flyer, smashed beyond repair despite obvious efforts to fix it, it answered a few more questions.

They must’ve been using the small ship to transport things down into this hole but something had gone wrong and it had crashed down here, trapping them all. They’d probably tried a dozen or more ways to fix the thing from the way mangled parts were spread out around it in orderly patterns. Tools, the same ones Tammy had screamed at me for touching a million years ago, sat close by what had probably once been the engine. All it took was a glance for me to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that no amount of work could have fixed that ship.

But they’d tried. They’d had to. There’d been nothing else to do but freeze.

And now I was in the same position.

“At least I’m probably going to starve to death instead of freeze,” I said to no one. I wanted to sound flippant, the way Cyrus might if he could still talk to me. I needed Ai’s voice in my ear to calm me down.

I started going through the camp again, more thoroughly this time, to try and keep my mind off of the inevitable. Maybe I would find something useful. Maybe there was a way I could use something in the camp with the survival suit to escape. And maybe they had a jetpack they just hadn’t remembered and I could just fly away.

Searching that camp was hard. I hated it. I had to go through people’s pockets like a grave robber. I hated myself for that. But I had to find something. Anything. I had to get out. Ai and Cyrus were counting on me. If I didn’t escape he’d die and, unless some other poor bastard got stranded on this planet close enough for Ai to contact, her batteries would eventually run out and she’d die too. And that was if the yetis in the area didn’t find her ship first and rip it to pieces for scrap and kill her that way.

So I had to get out. But nothing I found could get me back to the top of that cave.

The only thing I found was an old data pad. I knew whose it was the moment I saw it. It was an ancient thing, weathered, scratched and dented. But that always felt appropriate to me. That little data pad had traveled all over the galaxy. It felt right that it should look like it had been to hell and back.

It had been Rip’s. He’d barely ever let the thing out of his sight. He watched his movies on it, played music while he worked with it. And it being here could only mean one thing.

I’d felt cold every day since the crash but I’d never felt anything like the chill that tore through me as I held that data pad. That chill stole the strength from my legs and I sank to the ground and just sat there for a long time, staring. My fingers eventually found the courage to press the power button but all that came up was a blinking symbol for a battery. It was dead. I couldn’t bring it back with my suit. Just like Rip.

All I could do was tuck it away, hide it so I couldn’t see it, wouldn’t think about it. That’s what I told myself, what I wanted to do. But my hands didn’t move and I just couldn’t put it away.

“What’s the point?” I whispered to myself. I couldn’t save Rip. I couldn’t save Ai or Cyrus. I couldn’t save anyone. I couldn’t decide if I hoped that there’d be an afterlife or not. I could apologize to everyone if there was. Everyone but Ai anyway.

And as I was sitting there, cold and crying, and having given up on everything, a tiny icon popped up on my screen. It looked like an ancient envelope. At least that’s what Rip had told me it was supposed to be. It took me a minute to even think to open it, I was so surprised.

Kid, don’t give up yet. There’s a way out of there.

Cyrus. Cyrus got a message to me. I wasn’t alone. Not yet.

Another message popped up a minute later.

If you’re seeing this, we can’t send audio. The signal is too weak. But text is small enough to make it through to you. Euclid, I believe in you.

Ai. Ai was always there for me. I had to tell her I was okay. But as I was typing out the message another one came from Cyrus.

Don’t bother sending anything back to us kid. It’ll just waste your suit’s power. It’s better at picking signals up than sending them. We can see you’ve read them. We know you’re there.

Before I had even finished reading another came from Ai.

You can do this Euclid. That cave mouth you fell through isn’t the only way in or out. There are more tunnels that lead out. You can get out. Come back to me, please.

I read those last words over and over again. I could feel my heart pounding in my ears. Those words drove me back to my feet.

Go, kid.

Run, Euclid.

I did.