Over the past couple months, Corey Vash had learned to sleep just about anywhere. It was a necessary skill for spending as much time in hospital wards as he did.
No amount of practice could ever make him a heavy sleeper, though. His mom had ingrained a “healthy” alertness in him, which meant he woke up at the sound of any suspicious noise. In this case, his mom starting to cough. She’d been doing better lately, which was half the reason the doctors were letting Corey sleep in the chair near her hospital bed. He woke with a start, and kept an eye on the button that would summon the nurses, until the brief coughing fit subsided. He stayed awake a while longer, watching his mother to make sure she was still breathing, before trying to go back to sleep.
This time, Corey made it all the way to sunrise. He stretched out aching legs and stood up to adjust the blinds before the sunlight got in.
“Don’t you have to go to school?”
Corey snapped the blinds shut and shook his head.
“I’ve got a friend recording the lectures for me.”
He’d dropped out two weeks ago. He wasn’t happy about it, but he’d been on the road to getting expelled anyway. Even when he did show up, he wasn’t doing any worthwhile work or note-taking.
Corey returned to his seat and settled in. His mother barely moved. Awake and asleep weren’t much different for her. It took all her energy just to breathe nowadays. She laid back and spent time mustering her strength just to be able to speak again.
“You should go to class.”
“I’m not missing anything.”
Another long pause, as Corey’s mother struggled to catch her breath enough to speak. Every second felt like a knife twisting a little deeper in Corey’s heart.
“Go to the beach, then.”
“I don’t really want to go swimming.”
He sat and waited for his mom to speak again. The rest of the hospital was starting to spring to life.
“Go somewhere, Corey. Don’t just sit here and watch me die.”
“You’re not going to die,” Corey insisted, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. He latched on to every slim hope he could, and ignored everything else. He clung to the doctor’s assurances she was doing well right now, and disregarded their repeated warnings that recovery was still unlikely.
Corey’s mother managed to tilt her head to look at him, and he almost wished she’d been too weak to do so. Looking at her emaciated face disturbed him. If he hadn’t watched the lung cancer slowly change his mom into what she was now, he might not even recognize the face looking at him. Her fingers twitched as if she was trying to reach out, but she could not muster the strength to move her arm.
“Corey Amad-,” she said. She coughed even as she spoke, muddling her words. “You have to-”
The cough that cut her off was short and quiet, but it was not alone. Corey stood back and waited through the first few, hoping the fit would pass. Only when he saw small specks of blood dot the hospital bed did he slam his fist down on the button to call the nurses. They were there in moments, fussing, rearranging—and escorting Corey out of the room.
After that, everything turned on its head. The world started to slow down, Corey’s vision started to blur—the world became nothing more than a tangle of chaos and noise, centered on Corey’s mother. In the midst of the maelstrom, only a few scarce details found any clarity: the respirator they placed over her mouth, the doctor’s calling for more help, and one of the approaching medics talking to his companions, casually saying the worst thing Corey had ever heard.
Do Not Resuscitate.
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Weeks later, Corey was still a light sleeper, and he woke from the nightmare with a start. Unlike the hospital chair, his bed on the Hermit was quite small, and his sudden waking sent him tumbling right out of bed. The discarded spear he’d taken from the battle with Khem narrowly avoided cutting Corey’s ear off as his rude awakening knocked it off the wall he’d leaned it against.
“Fuck,” Corey mumbled to himself. “Maybe I do need to talk to someone.”
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Corey didn’t know where to find a therapist in space, so he did the next best thing and took Tooley’s advice. Before anyone else but Corey was even awake, To Vo was doing her usual routine of compulsively cleaning and organizing everything she could get her hands on. Corey wasn’t sure the ship had been this clean since it had been built.
“Hey To Vo.”
“Good morning Corey Vash, you- your face is bruised.”
Corey reached up and touched the spot on his cheek where he’d landed on his face. It felt tender, but he hadn’t checked himself out in a mirror yet, so he hadn’t realized.
“Huh.”
“Corey, are you suffering from domestic violence?”
“I—what? No. Well, maybe,” Corey mumbled. “That’s not important right now. I just had a nightmare.”
“Ah. I’m sorry, I wish there was something I could do to help,” To Vo said. “But given the unavoidable stresses of our situation, nightmares seem all but inevitable. I have had a few myself.”
“Yeah. Figures. Hearing about my uncle didn’t help anything.”
The already difficult task of asking for help was made all the harder by the fact Corey was too stubborn to just ask directly. Trying to backdoor his way into a productive conversation felt almost as dumb as asking to talk plainly. To Vo was at least sympathetic, and sat down at the kitchen table with him to talk.
“I understand the feeling,” To Vo said. Corey had had to recount his entire tragic history while they scouted out his uncle’s presence on Paga For, so she knew the unfortunate details. “I was in a similar situation, only a few solar years ago.”
“Really?”
Corey had been expecting sympathy, but not quite so directly. To Vo nodded, and when she spoke again, it was quiet and reserved, even moreso than her usual demure tone.
“I have mentioned that my homeworld was a harsh environment, yes? So much so that there were often not enough resources to sustain our communities,” To Vo said. “When populations became unsustainable...older generations would be culled, to preserve resources for the younger.”
To Vo didn’t expand on the thought. She didn’t need to.
“I’m sorry, To Vo,” Corey said. “That must’ve been hard.”
“It was normal, in a way,” To Vo said. “I’d seen older community members, even other family members go before. But when it was my parents…”
To Vo La Su shrank in on herself for a moment, but recovered. Unlike Corey, her tragedy was several years past. It had never stopped hurting, but it did hurt less.
“The real pain of it all is that the Galactic Council showed up just a few weeks later. Their Grand Uplifting campaign brought supplies, agricultural techniques, electricity and computers,” To Vo said. “Within a few swaps we could support millions instead of just thousands.”
She seemed as much proud as she did sad. Corey quietly resolved to never again make fun of To Vo’s apparent obsession with structure and efficiency. If the Galactic Council had been just a little quicker, just a little better organized, then her family might still be alive.
“Is that why you signed on with them?”
“Mostly, yes,” To Vo said. “But I also wanted the distraction. A change of scenery.”
“I know what you mean,” Corey mumbled.
“It helps, at first. There’s so much information out here, so much to learn, it gives you a million things to focus on instead of your grief,” To Vo said. “But then you learn. You get used to it. And the grief is still there, as strong as it ever was.”
“Standing on a street corner screaming about wheels,” Corey sighed. “Shouting at the top of his lungs when my mom couldn’t even say my name.”
She’d barely been able to speak, at the end. Barely able to say his name.
His name.
To Vo had just been about to offer more sympathy when Corey slammed his fists down on the table as hard as he could. The whole room rattled under the impact, and continued to shake as he let out a bellowing scream of sheer, unfocused rage.
“Corey, what-”
She didn’t even get to finished her question before Corey stood up and stormed off. He kicked Tooley’s door open and dragged her out of bed, much to her chagrin, before walking to the rest of the crew’s door and pounding on the until they woke up. Kamak was the first to awake, and he came very close to stabbing Corey for waking him up this early, but then he took a good look at him and thought better of it. Corey was red in the face, and had harsh, bitter tears welling up in his eyes. Kamak had been alive a long time, and even he had rarely seen that kind of unbridled hatred.
“What’s this about, Corey?”
“It’s fucking Morrakesh,” Corey snapped. “I know what he’s doing. I know why he can outsmart everyone.”
Corey took a deep breath to calm himself down. It didn’t work. He knew he was moments away from turning into a sobbing wreck.
“It’s dead people,” Corey said. “He’s doing something, getting inside their heads, taking memories and thoughts from their brains.”
Kamak suppressed his knee jerk reaction to call Corey a lunatic. If Morrakesh really was a Hakkidian Worm, anything was possible. The Worms could pull words right out of a persons thoughts while they were alive, and that was a secondhand observation. If they could dig their tendrils inside a person’s head, thread their sensory nodes through a person’s nervous system…
“Where’s this coming from, Corey?”
No matter how plausible it sounded, Kamak wanted to know the underlying logic. He could only pin so many hopes on bold assumptions and leaps of faith.
“It’s how he knows about me. My uncle, the cult, my middle name. It’s- he-”
Corey failed to hold back the tide of tears any longer. Morrakesh knew his name -mostly. If he had gotten it from a document, or abducted someone else who knew it, he would’ve been able to say the name right. But he said “Anathedus” instead of Amadeus. Because the source he’d used was partially decayed.
“It’s my mom,” Corey sobbed. “He’s got my mom.”