Estimated oxygen timer: 20:42:28

When I opened the door, David was waiting on a rock, gazing up at the stars. His eyes were glinting in the light, lonely, and I understood why the old Pythia had worn robes with hoods.

He turned to me slowly, and froze when he saw Vempress emerging from the corpse of the shuttle in her blackened suit. She looked at him for a long moment, then descended into a crouch and burst dozens of meters into the air in one leap and jetted away, leaving us behind and below.

His gaze followed her up. “You OK?”

I took a moment before responding. I remembered a video I’d once watched of a little egret devouring a chubby lizard, tossing it upwards and catching it in her beak again, repeating the process until it stops fighting. It seems like the bird takes real pleasure in playing with her pray, but in fact, the narrator announces, she isn’t doing it for fun: if she lets go of the lizard, it would run, but without opening her beak she can’t put it in a position to slide into her gullet. The best thing the lizard can do is buy time, hoping that in one those throws the bird will fail to catch. It could figure out what to do after that.

There was no gravity out here, but Vempress used another force in her attempt to control my trajectory – my desire to survive. I hadn’t given myself the time to even acknowledge that I’d been pretending to be excited about Vempress’s offer. That’s what good liars do, reacting naturally, ignoring the one detail that makes the pretense false in the first place – that there was nothing I wanted less than spending another day out here, least of all as Vempress’s pet. And that lie bought me some time, some trust. I had to utilize those as soon as possible. “Yeah. She agreed to a wager,” I told David. “If we managed to convince four people, including you, to take the roles of the old lines, she would let that hold.”

“And what if we don’t?”

“The Town remains as it is, and she gets to laugh at me for trying.”

“So, what are you going to do?” There was softness in his voice, as if he was more interested in my process than inquiring for himself.

“I want to go check up on Anaxagoras’s cave, see what happened there.” I looked over the crater, trying to assess how long it would take to fly all the way to the airlock, and then the same distance again. “Are you okay to stay here and wait for somebody to show up?”

“No, I don’t think I am.”

“It wasn’t easy being alone here, was it? I could be back as soon as -.”

He shook his head. The look in his blue eyes was stern, his jaws clenched. “That’s not it. I don’t think anyone will come out here. It’s too remote.”

Wouldn’t they? I’d thought that because of the statue, those wondering could see it from a far, but perhaps I was too reliant on my own memory, and needed to see this with new eyes. “What are you thinking?”

“I want to wait by the airlock. Maybe no one will come around here until the end of the day, but no one can avoid visiting the airlock, at least once.”

It seemed obvious, now. I must not have been as clear minded as I thought, to miss that. If we waited by the airlock, we could catch people earlier in their day, like I caught David. I looked at my timer. It had been about fifty-three minutes since I met him. “It’ll be an hour or so before anyone else comes out.”

“So there’s more than enough time to walk back, this time.”

“I’m sorry, but there are a lot of things I need to do with this time, so - ”

“That’s fine, actually. I think I want to be alone for a while. I got the rest of the day ahead of me, and I wanna use this time to clear my head, first.” He seemed solemn somehow, but determined, in his own non-threatening way. “Is there anything else that I should know about it? Someone else like Vempress that might be waiting along the way?”

“Not that I know of. But you might encounter other residents, and most have seen nothing but violence since they got here. They might be dangerous.”

“That’s fine. Meeting them here or there doesn’t make much of a difference.”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to just give you a ride to the airlock?” As if that was somehow safer.

He nodded.

“Ok, then, I’ll meet you there. Be careful, ok?”

He placed a hand on the blade at his side. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll see you later.”

“Yeah. Good luck.”

I watched him walk away. Something had gotten to him. What had Vempress said? It takes time for the shock to reach you.

He walked over to the edge and let himself drop slowly into the crater.

I set off in the same direction, but faster, and higher – straight to the other side, to Anaxagoras. I launched myself high above the crater, the little canister struggling to escape my grip. The little craters within Last Day Town, and the sharp edges left from old excavations, were much more beautiful when you didn’t have to worry about crashing into them, a hundred meters up. Vertigo hit me, and the surface didn’t seem to be beneath me so much as in front of me; Anaxagoras not in front, but above. I looked at the crater floor, to see if I could spot David, but he was already hidden in the shadow of the crater wall. I wondered what changes were going on inside of him. What impression I had left on him.

Far from him, and from Vempress, A sense of submersion, sudden and offensive, struck me. An empty silence. Submersion in the night itself, the loneliness and cold of it, a beauty so sharp it threatened to paralyze me. This was what Anaxagoras had to deal with, every single day. What they chose to endure.

What had happened to them, in the end? Vempress had said that they’d killed the Second Diocletian out of spite. But I knew them, and they weren’t killers. Maybe they’d thought it was worth it to prevent Last Day Town from becoming exactly what Vempress had made it. And here I was, trying to deal with her, trying to entertain and placate her. What would it even matter if I won this wager? She wouldn’t weaken herself. At best, I could hope for some oxygen. But why the hell would I want to spend another day as a pet?

Against the rock of the crater floor, I saw a body shattered, their helmet nowhere to be seen. A pool of metal shards where something had broken, perhaps one of Ctesibius’s old rockets. In one rock, flat and filed smooth, I thought I saw an etching of letters. And I saw the airlock, with its strobing light, and its bowl full of human corpses. Yahushua was too far away for me to hear whether he was still breathing. Nina should have still been there somewhere, hiding out of sight. No deal could be made with someone who was right with that kind of horror. The only way to save Last Day Town, I had slowly allowed myself to realize, is to kill Vempress.

The airlock slowly disappeared behind and beneath me, and the lip of the crater grew nearer. An asteroid was slicing the sky from north to south, first throwing the rise of the crater into shadow, and then, as it passed above, illuminating the wall itself.

Someone was on the wall, climbing slowly out of the crater: taking a step, pausing, and then taking another one. I remembered how hard it had been to climb out of the crater on Pythia’s side; how I’d had to push through hard sprints and grab with my hands. I pumped the jet to slow me down, to take a closer look at the guy and whatever contraption he’d found to help him climb so naturally. But the closer I got, the clearer it became that there was no contraption. He was just walking up the hill on his own, taking his time, his long arms at his side, stepping delicately from one foothold to another. Perhaps it was easier than I realized, and I just hadn’t approached it correctly.

I killed the jet and landed on the crater’s wall, above him and to his side. I immediately started sliding down, not finding any hold on the rock. I scraped against the rock until I finally found a hold and placed a hand in it, gripping the jet in the other. It took me a moment to find him again, still walking up that hill. Either he hadn’t noticed me, or he’d chosen to ignore my presence. I could throw myself up, even with just one hand, but I wouldn’t, as I couldn’t see the next foothold. I kicked off the wall anyway, hoping to find the next hold mid-leap, but instead of throwing myself upwards I found that I’d kicked myself away, setting myself in a trajectory to tumble further down.

I fumbled for the little jet and thrust myself back towards the wall. I had to kill the thrust using two hands, which meant that by the time I reached the wall, I didn’t have a free one. I bumped into the wall, closed the valve, and clung to the jagged rock. My legs dangled beneath me.

“You’re trying too hard,” a pleasant baritone said, into the quiet.

“Excuse me?” I asked, looking up at the man. He had bright brown eyes, almost green, and curls of light brown hair, almost blond, sticking to his forehead and stubble of the same color. He reminded me of Tsur, if he’d let himself age to early forties, or perhaps tired mid-thirties. But there was something unique about the way his eyes moved, a sort of deliberate slowness.

“Walk lighter, not harder,” he said, his voice lazy and vaguely sympathetic.

“I expected this to be easier, because of the low gee and everything,” I said as I tried to find a foothold so I could stand properly.

“No reason it would. Gravity is on the both side of the equation.”

I only half-remembered what he meant, certainly not enough for it to be useful. I pulled my body up, contorting so I could put both of my feet where my hand had been, both legs tight together. I looked up at him again. While he stood naturally on two legs, I had my belly against the rock, afraid to make any motion that would make me slip down again.

“Peace,” I said. He just looked at me, amused but also impassive. “I don’t mean you any harm,” I added awkwardly.

“I imagine that I wouldn’t have seen you, if you had.” I heard a half-smile in his voice.

“True. Where are you headed?”

“Outside of this crater.”

“Do you want me to give you a lift to the top?” I tilted the canister.

“Not really. I’m almost enjoying this.”

“What are you going to do, after you reach the top?”

He shrugged, and looked up the hill. “I thought I’d jump down, see how far into the crater I could make it.”

“That would definitely kill you.”

He looked at me again, smirking in surprise. “Yes, I am well aware.”

I swallowed a lump. There was something about that quiet, unflinching determination, that had me frozen, confused. “Would you rather I leave? Let you have this peace…”

“I don’t mind the company, just don’t try to slow me down.” He returned to his climb, balancing on a protruding rock-tooth with one foot and placing the other on the next hold.

I tried to follow, but slipped, and again found myself relying on the jet, pushing myself up and against just to keep traction. “You make it look easy,” I said.

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“It is,” he said, his tone just a bit impatient.

For a moment we were quiet, climbing slowly. Was this man even worth my time? I had work to do, and I didn’t know if I could even convince this man to stay alive. At least this time I got a warning, I thought bitterly.

“Come on, out with it. Whatever it is,” he said. “You don’t have time to be shy.”

I still didn’t know where to start. Above us, the edge of the wall slowly descended.

He gave me a long look, and decided to talk, anyway. “You struggle just to keep up. And you find that you’ve committed yourself to a race, and that stresses you out. But one day you’re taken out of that race, and find that only when you have nothing to lose can you finally relax. Somehow, losing the race isn’t half as bad as being in it. Funny, isn’t it?”

“I know what you mean,” I said,

“Perhaps you do.”

I let the silence stretch over a couple of steps – cycles of reaching, gripping, and pulling – before admitting that I’m not going to come up with something good to say. “I’m not going to slow you down. But what could I say to stop you from jumping?”

“No one’s going to tell me what to do today. Whatever I please, I will do,” he said, and something in his tone told me that it was a quote, a reference.

“How can you be so calm? Out of all of the residents I met today, nobody seemed so... free.”

“Residents?” he said. He looked down, saw how far behind I was, and with even greater grace than before took a couple of steps down the wall, pushing the countdown back, if only a little. “What do you mean?”

“This place is a town,” I said, stopping for a moment to focus as I flung myself up to the next hold. “It’s called Last Day Town, and though its residents don’t know it, they may soon become a cohesive community again.”

“You ask me I can be so calm, but how can you still care about something? here you are, at the edge of the death, still making plans and worrying about them,” he said with a chuckle. “How can you stay so anxious, even here, even now? These words will change nothing. Our actions change nothing. We have nothing to do but relax and let go!” He sighed. “I feel like I’m on the last day of a job I hate.” He raised his hands to the stars, still keeping his balance. “Why would you even stop me from jumping off?”

“Because I need your help.”

That had him pause. He gave me a long, hard look. “I’m sorry my friend, but I won’t stay alive just to keep you company.”

“It’s not that. There’s a specific job I need you to agree to do.”

He burst into a long laugh. “How incredible. Here I thought I’d figured what your deal was, and you surprise me again. What would I want a job for? What job could you even offer me? How would you pay me?”

“Your job will be to do more or less what you do now: to wander this part of the asteroid, and bring back anything that will be of value. For now, it’s people, but at some point it’s going to be materials. The reward will be time with a listening ear, and protection.”

“You’d imagine I could take one day without venting. And besides, you’re listening to me right now.”

“I am, but I have my own job to do, and I’ll leave soon. The hardest thing to find in Last Day Town is someone to tell your story to. Everybody wants to talk, but nobody wants to listen.”

“And you expect me to work and bring something just to have someone sit and listen to me, because it’s their job, and you devised a system where you get something out of it?” The ease in his face was gone, and his nose crinkled with disgust.

I stopped, grabbed another handhold, then looked at him. “Hey, I didn’t devise this system. It worked before.”

“I see,” he said as he watched me struggle to flatten myself against the wall. When he spoke again, there was sadness in his tone. “Trying to change the world rarely ever does anyone any good. The world is what it is. Let it happen.”

“And what are you doing, by telling me this?”

He took a step closer, placing his boot on a rock-tooth I had determined earlier as impossible to stand on, not conveying threat, but a sense of intimacy. “I’m doing whatever I feel like. Tell me – right now, are you doing what you actually want, or do you imagine some outcome that will make it all worth it? Some reward?” A cluster of asteroids passed above us, lighting the wheat-colored stubble on his face, exposing an expression that was surprisingly kind.

“We can’t all just jump off a cliff.”

“Can’t we?” He took two steps upwards, light as a feather. We must have climbed half of the way up. “If we were all to drop dead, what would happen? Would the stars care? Would the rock?” He turned around, gesturing towards the dark horizons of the dwarf planet.

“You’re just being selfish,” I said.

He chuckled. “Maybe I am. I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m having a bit of a difficult day.”

“Who doesn’t? But people are suffering here, and we can change that.”

“By listening to their stories?”

“By building something. By making Last Day Town a place where you can do things other than getting murdered and squabbling for air. Are you fine with the way things are? To just wander out here in silence?”

“Every single day of my life, I wondered if I should do this or that; thinking that this thing was thing was right and another was wrong, and somehow it never came out right. I’m done. Whatever I do with this day, I’m not going to waste it on the things I supposedly ‘must’ do. I warmly suggest you do the same.”

I took a deep breath, getting a hold of the sudden feeling of frustration. “There’s a woman called Vempress, who’s flying around here and taking people’s oxygen.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“You met Nina?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t ask her name. Two gentlemen started chasing me, and by the time I lost them I wasn’t interested in coming back.”

“So you already know that she’s out here, taking people’s oxygen.”

“If she’s so slick, why let people know she’s coming? She obviously planned this out. I won’t say it’s the reason I decided to make the climb, but it certainly didn’t dissuade me. Sitting around and waiting for her to kill me or scare others into killing me didn’t sound like a very nice way to spend the day. And I bet you’re about to tell me that if we set up the ordered system, I’d somehow be safe from her...What is it? You look worried.”

“I’m wondering if she’s listening to us. She has radio relays that let her hear what’s going on from her cave. But I don’t think she’d put the resources to put this place in her range.” If I were Vempress, where would I listen? The airlock, obviously, Pythia’s Shuttle, because the statue might draw in people that would be very easy to snatch from above, and perhaps Ctesibius and Anaxagoras, in case someone was arming themselves.

“Why do you mind so much if she listens or not? Who cares?”

“Because,” I whispered. “I want you to help me kill her.”

He shook his head, as if hearing some bitter joke, and turned to look at the sky. The dense swarm of rocks was passing above us now. Each rock twisted in space separately, revealing different faces, illuminating others near it in constantly shifting ways.

“Why would I? If she’s so good at killing people, I’d be safer if I kept going as far away from the airlock as I could, and safer still if I were dead.”

If you knew what to listen for, you could hear the fear in that statement, the hidden need for security. “She gave me this,” I said, presenting the modified canister. “As well as a blade like hers, which I lent to a friend. A proof of a modicum of trust. We set up a meeting in,” I paused for a moment, looking at my visor’s display and quickly subtracting the times, “one hundred and forty-three minutes.” The plan emerged fully formed. With the time and tools I had, there was only one way to approach this.

“There’s a lot we could do before then. If you accepted a role,” I said, “you’d be as safe as I am with her. Safer, because there’d be more of us.”

“Until we went along and tried killing her,” he countered, his voice not as lowered as I would have liked.

“We’ll have surprise on our side.”

He laughed again. “Sounds like a complicated plan. A lot of things could go wrong.”

“Yes, but a lot of things could go right, and this effort might just be enough to shape us into something resembling a group.” Just like the lines united while dethroning King. “I don’t have as much time as I would have liked. I need to move this thing along.”

“It’s as if you don’t have enough on your plate already; you have to make up more problems to solve.”

His friendliness was more irritating than his indifference. “Can you take a break from the Buddhism lecture for one second and tell me if you’re going to help me or not?”

“It’s not Buddhism,” he said, gentle frustration showing in his face for the first time. “It’s common sense. From what you’re telling me, you’re playing this game with someone with more experience and drive than you, relying on allies you’ve known for hours at best. Seems like you’re setting yourself up for failure.”

I clenched the hand that wasn’t leaning against the wall into a fist, but kept my tone level. “What do you have to lose?”

He was unmoved by my anger. “A single peaceful moment in the quiet—whatever quiet I can hope to hold at the edge of the world. It’s more precious than it sounds like, and you want me to give that up just to try something that’ll probably fail? You have to admit, it sounds a little…” He put a palm in front of him, twisting it from side to side, sketching something shaky. “You ask what I have to lose, but what do I have to gain?”

“What about being remembered?”

“Well, if things change when I’m gone, I won’t be here to enjoy it. But if people do remember me… I want them to remember that I had a huge dick. Like, ridiculously big, that you could actually spot it through the suit…” he said, and laughed but his laughter wasn’t mocking, as if he was just laughing at the way things are.

“Don’t laugh at that, please. People spent their final hours keeping these ideas. They fought and sacrificed to bring them into being.”

He raised an eyebrow, still smiling. “And you would know this how?”

“Oral tradition. People used to spend their time here learning these traditions and passing them on, as well as their roles and titles, but most of them must have been lost. I heard only a little, and not more than once each, but I might remember one.” I shut my eyes hard, trying to remember. I recited:

Here lies king of hellhole,

I see him as he dies,

I hear… something… fuck.

I bit my lip. How had I forgotten it?

He chuckled. “Not saying that I don’t believe you, and I sure appreciate the entertainment, but it doesn’t change anything.”

“I’d rather you didn’t jump, but if you made up your mind, I can’t change it. It was nice talking to you,” I said, and propped the canister into my hands. I found the valve and prepared to throw myself off of that wall. “I truly hope you find some peace, even for a moment.”

“Wait a second. I didn’t say that I wouldn’t join,” he said, and smiled, enjoying the act.

I turned back to him. “Why would you join?”

He raised a finger and waggled it, like an enthusiastic teacher. “You made me curious. Now I wanna know how it would turn out, and I’m sure it would be at least somewhat entertaining.”

It was my turn to laugh. “And what about the peace of mind that you stand to lose?”

For the first time, exhilaration twinkled in his eyes. “What does it matter? It’s going to be lost anyway. But I have one condition. Aside from the dick thing.”

I chuckled. “What? I don’t have much to offer right now, but later on I could arrange for some sort of payment.”

“No payment. I want you to promise we won’t kill her.”

“Why not?” Why was nothing ever simple?

“Because,” he enunciated, “I don’t want to.”

“Ok, deal. Help me recruit others, and I’ll respect your condition.”

He offered me his hand. Not at all scared of contact, not wary of proximity. I grabbed it and shook it, and only then realized I too wasn’t afraid. His grip was effortlessly confident, firm without being crushing. I suddenly felt like I knew a lot about him.

“My name is Alex.”

“Yossi,” I replied.

He let go. “You’re a fucking idiot, Yossi. You’re aware of that, right?”

“I’ve had my suspicions. Anyway, we need to go. There’s a place I want to show you, but I’m going to have to give you a boost. It’s quite a distance, and I have some more things to take care of.”

“Nah, I’m not done with this climb.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah! I told myself that I’d climb this wall, so I’m going to keep climbing this wall.”

“Do know how little time we have?”

“Yes, I do, and I have no intention of spending that time in a hurry. Just tell me where you want me to go, and I’ll get there eventually.”

“At the end of this wall there’s a plateau, and on the plateau, if you keep walking away from the airlock, you’re going to find a cave, at the bottom of a cliff, a vertical wall face.” He nodded, and I continued. “There’s a warehouse there, where people used to store useful trash that might have been useful, but it has been blown up ever since, so I don’t how useful the stuff that is there is going to be.”

“Who the hell blew it up?”

“Anaxagoras did.”

“A person named Anaxagoras?”

“Not a person, a line of people, each doing a little work and passing it on. If you take on this role, you will be given the name Anaxagoras’s First.”

He gave me a look. “I don’t really care what creepy space cult was here before, so please just call me Alex.”

I shrugged. “Fine, but if you meet Vempress, present yourself by that name. It makes it more likely that she won’t kill you. I think.”

“That’s lovely. So what am I going up there for?”

“They might have rockets there, as well, and at the very least long beams you can use to move faster against the rock, like they have.”

“It could work,” he mused. ‘Like a ferryman, pushing at the bottom of the river.”

“When you get there, pick up whatever you think might be useful. And if you meet any more people, tell them what we’re up to, if it isn’t dangerous. Wait for me at the junkyard, or walk the line back to the airlock. I’ll come looking for you.”

“Whatever you say.”

“You’re not going to jump as soon I fly away, are you?”

“I said I won’t, didn’t I?” He sighed. “If I promise I won’t jump, will you go? I have a feeling I won’t have much time for myself after this.”

I nodded and took flight, and he continued climbing, humming as he did.