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As soon as the airlock door opens, vacuum sucks Rachel out into space. Levitating feels so unreal, so unexpected: the view from her helmet may as well have been a kaleidoscope. A flock of asteroids passes above her, illuminating the mounds of corpses below in shifting, dancing lights. Nothing has any meaning, except for the enigma, sitting in the back of her mind, of why she isn’t dead yet. Dina’s said that she knows for a fact that people are thrown out to die, so what gives? She lands on her feet on the first try, and sees a woman held in some metal confinement. She starts towards the woman, sleep-walking on the rock, to examine her, as if she were an artifact of her own mind. She’s middle-aged, and beautiful; strong, even in defeat.

Rachel almost falls back when the woman’s eyes open.

“Don’t stay here,” says the woman. “Just run.” A white light flashes from the airlock, illuminating the blueish steel of her binding. The only reason this woman is still trapped is because no one could be bothered to help. Shouldn’t steel be fragile, in these temperature? Rachel picks up a sharp stone from the ground, takes a step forward.

“Is your comm broken or something? I told you to get the hell away.”

“Why?” Rachel hears a voice ask, a voice that might just be her own.

“Because there are people here that are out to kill you. Go as far away as you can, and don’t let anyone see you. Please. As soon as you get out of the greater crater, you should be safe.”

“But…” Rachel looks at the stone in her hand, and back at the metal structure. “I…”

“Go!” Rachel can see the woman’s white teeth as she shouts. “Move!”

Rachel turns and tries to run away, but running doesn’t work here, she stumbles into a series of jump. She hasn’t made even ten leaps when she hears the woman, yelling at her to hide.

Rachel fumbles to a stop and rolls behind some rocks. No way she hasn’t been seen, she thinks. But seen by whom?

She hears a new voice that sounds like the smile of a cannibal with filed teeth. “That’s not right,” the voice says, joyful and vicious. “That’s not right at all. Have you forgotten the speech I made for you? After all of the time I wasted drilling it into you?”

Rachel lies motionless behind the rock, not knowing who she’s hiding from, or why. She looks at the violet digits at the side of her visor and listens very, very hard.

“The only way this place can run properly is if everyone does their part, and you’re not doing yours. I have to make sure you remember it next time.”

Metal slides on metal, heard through someone’s radio transmitter.

“No, please don’t,” the woman cries, and then turns assertive. “Hey, don’t. I’m a human being. I’m here. I’m real. Don’t do this.”

“Well, you should have thought about that before you told her to run, shouldn’t you?”

Another metallic sound, this one a disconnection. An oxygen tank screwed off. Then a swallowing; a breath panted through clenched teeth, and a grunt of panic. Rachel counts the seconds; she’s at nine when she hears the sliding of metal on metal again, and the woman breathes freely.

The grinning voice speaks again. “If you betray me again, I might not feel like plugging you back in.”

“I understand,” the woman gasps. “It won’t happen again, I swear.”

“Good. Now—you!” Rachel shakes as the voice addresses her. “I know you’re out there, hiding. I hope you’re listening carefully, for your own sake. Because the fucking Welcoming Committee,” she hears a grunt of effort, a thud, a groan of pain, “didn’t do their job, and you don’t know what you’re in for. First of all, welcome to Last Day Town! My name is Vempress, and here are my rules: One - If I see you outside the little crater, I’ll take your oxygen. Not right away, mind you, I’m not a savage: I’ll give you a head start. Two - anyone else here can kill you if they wish. For example, if you come back inside, these two assholes hiding under the corpses will get you, just for the heck of it. What?” Her tone changes, as if she’s talking to someone else. “You thought I didn’t see you there? It’s clever, but anyone not in shock would see it.” Rachel almost feels the cannibal’s attention shifting back to her. “Three - if you have a tank with more than twenty hours of oxygen on it, I’ll spare you once, even if that tank is connected to a body. That’s more or less everything you need to know. Run as far away as you can, and you might survive, whatever that means to you.”

Rachel listens to the silence for thirty seconds, then sets off. She runs, though you can’t really call that running, until she reaches the crater wall. She struggles against it, charges it again and again until she figures out how to gain enough momentum to scale all of it in one go. A series of kicks takes her higher and she finally pulls herself out. She stands, panting, and faces the grand plateau beyond the crater and sees how vacant it is. There’s nothing but more rock, more distance to cover. It stupefies her. She’s already wasted hours of her life. What for? To curl up like a coward and die?

A band of asteroids that lit everything sets, and everything slowly falls into darkness. She feels a cold fall over, not knowing if it is real or just her imagination. It doesn’t matter. She wants to get that woman out of the trap she was welded into. If she tries, there will be people in her way, trying to hurt her. But they can’t hurt her, she posits a hypothetical, if she hurt them first.

Will you fight? She clenches her fist, and jumps back down into the crater.

The way back is easier. Just before she reaches the airlock, she hears people talking—the grinning voice from before, Vempress, and someone else, sounding perfectly subdued and servile. She hesitates, crouching fifty meters or so from the lip of the small crater—and something hits her shoulder. Something hard, which nudges her off balance. She puts a foot forward to stabilize herself and watches a rock a little larger than her fist fall past her. She turns around and sees a figure peeking from a hiding place among the rocks. The figure waves a hand and presses the other to their visor. One finger pointing up. Though Rachel can’t see their lips through the light reflecting on the glass, she understands the gesture.

When her eyes adjust, she recognizes the woman. She must have escaped the contraption, somehow. She moves towards her without thinking and the other woman reciprocates, and without a word pulls Rachel into her hiding spot among the rocks.

Vempress, still hidden, spits a furious “Fuck!” and then turns collected again, commanding. “Grab on,” it says to someone Rachel can’t see. “Let go, and I’ll noose you by the neck.” Whoever that is, Rachel’s glad she’s not in their place.

The woman presses a button on the front of Rachel’s suit, and the world falls into silence. She didn’t even notice how loud space was until it was shut off. The woman grabs Rachel’s helmet and puts her visor to Rachel’s, so close Rachel can see the sweat in the folds around the woman’s wise eyes. What a terrifying thing, she thinks, to look into someone’s eyes when there’s no society to tell you how you should feel about it and what you should do next.

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

“You can relax,” the woman says. “They’re gone. What’s your name?”

“Rachel.”

“Ah,” she smiles, and recites:

Not nebulous tomorrow but today: solid, warm, mighty,

Today materialized in the hand:

Of this single, short day to drink deep

Here in our own land.

“What is that?” Rachel asks.

“Really? You don’t know Rachel the Poet?”

“I guess I never got around to it. Who are you? Why…” She shakes her head.

“I’m Nina.”

“Hi Nina.” Every word seems so pretentious, so theatrical, and not just because this stranger is holding Rachel’s helmet with both hands. Who are they pretending for? “What the hell is going on?”

“I’ll explain on the way.”

“Where are we going?”

“Anywhere else.”

“How did you get out?”

She chuckles. “I got lucky.”

They hop a couple hundred meters and lie there, hidden in a shallow crater, watching an asteroid pass.

“I didn’t know if you would make it,” Nina says. “You shouldn’t have come back here. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that you did, but why?”

“Why not? What else would I do?”

Nina’s expression is even more somber than before. “I didn’t even get my twenty-four hours. Vempress used me. Not manipulated like you do to another human being, but used me like you would a toilet. Input/output, nothing more. No humanity to take into consideration, but that isn’t too different from my life on the inside, is it?” Her voice is calm as she laments herself. She stares at the sky, lying flat on her back on a patch of dust, her outreached hand in both of Rachel’s. She turns to look at Rachel, and Rachel once again marvels at her eyes. “I want you to have it better than I did. I’m sorry,” she says, and for the first time a hint of breathlessness sneaks between her words, “that I have to leave.”

“I’ll manage.”

Nina bursts with laughter, and for the first time since Rachel had met her, she cries. Rachel laughs too, but she doesn’t cry—not yet.

“I have to ask you something,” Nina says. “I’m sorry, but it would really help.”

“What is it?”

“I need you to deliver a message to someone.”

Rachel is walking alone, now. She listens to the sound of her own breathing, the sound of the life support reacting, and dust crunching under her weight. She doesn’t know how to process that she’s killed someone. One person. One person who asked to die. And yet the shock is taking her apart. Would she even survive the aftermath, if Dina and her actually pulled through with their plan? Was that the best she could do for this person? After all that Nina had done for her, all that Rachel could do was kill her. That’s not true, is it? Someone better than her would swear to avenge, to find Vempress and make her pay for all the things she took from Nina.

But she is so alone. So helpless. She walks. She would go anywhere, but there is only one place that she knows and she finds herself walking back. Walks and walks, fearing that if she stops walking, she won’t be able to start again.

Her legs tangle in something, an iron chain, each link as wide as her wrist. Could she use it as a weapon, or is she too weak to even do that?

She falls to her knees and cries for help, not knowing for whom.

#

Estimated oxygen time: 17:28:57

Rachel opened her eyes, moved back, turned on her comm. She had kept her eyes closed throughout the confession, as if offering it to herself, and it made sense. She had laid her weaknesses bare, and even if I didn’t agree with her methods, I couldn’t help but feel for her, for the repeated abandonment she’d been through. I turned my own comm, as well. She stood in a patch of yellow light, her face half-hidden in shadow, but her expression clear—nose wrinkled in disgust when she looked at me; eyes narrow.

“What?” I asked.

“There’s a face that you make.”

“Am I making it now?”

“Not anymore.”

“What kind of face?”

“As if you’re anticipating something. After you do something, you look to gauge the reaction around you, as if to see if it worked. The way a baby stops crying to check if anyone’s listening.”

“Is that bad?” I asked.

“It makes me wonder if you’re a snake.”

“Do you think I’m trying to manipulate you?”

“Aren’t you?”

“I told you nothing but the truth.” I was surprised to hear anger in my voice.

She looked at me sideways, as if to say that some things are too obvious to waste precious breath on.

“Fine then. Let me be entirely honest with you,” I said. Just like when I’d dropped my bowl on Gil’s foot, I felt a surge of exhilaration. I walked over to The Egg and took hold of a brittle piece of steel protruding from its frame, about the length of a finger but thinner then one, pointy. I broke it off and made a makeshift handle using a piece of bag lying on the floor. I examined it in the light. Even for shiv, that’s shoddy work, I thought as I handed it to her.

She approached slowly but stopped on the verge of taking the thing from me, as if she were a monkey reaching of a banana that might get it punished. I waited for a long moment, until she finally yanked it out of my grip. “Yeah,” she said, as she examined the crude weapon. “You know exactly what you’re doing. Don’t look so surprised. I know what you think—that you don’t feel like a manipulator. The thing is...” she looked at the shiv closely, checking the grip on it. “Most manipulators don’t know that’s what they are. So we should consider ourselves lucky that you’re trying to help.” She practiced a stabbing motion with her wrist, then let her eyes meet mine again. “If that’s what you’re doing.”

Frustrated, I brought my hands up, as if they could help me articulate, what my mouth couldn’t. But they couldn’t, and I found myself pressing the button to turn off my comm.

She almost said something, but caught her tongue, sighed, and turned of her comm as well. We put our helmets together, and I couldn’t help but notice how close she held the shiv at my side.

“You have to be the one doing this.”

“I can’t lie to him. Not like you can.”

“Think whatever you want of me,” I said. “But if we capture her, and she starts offering people oxygen, we don’t know who’s going to turn on whom. Even if they aren’t thinking about it now, they will when the offer is in front of them.”

“Is that what you’re afraid of?” Her eyes, up very close, looked at me, unflinching.

“Yes. And the only way to stop that is to kill her first, then destroy her tools.”

“I agree. But why me, and not you?”

“I’ll be on the inside. If I come out after you’ve captured her, it will like cold blooded murder. If you do it in the middle of a fight, it might look like you thought she would kill you, and defended yourself.”

“Don’t lie to me, Yossi.”

“Rachel, you’re the only one who can organize this. David is too soft, Alex doesn’t care, and Shaul… well, you’ll see. But if someone is going to actually pull an ambush together, that’s going to be you. And that puts you in the perfect position to kill her by accident.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “I really can’t lie to him. He’ll see through it in a second. And I should just accept that he’ll hate me for breaking my promise?” She’ll die before the die is done. And still, yet, here she was, worried about one person’s opinion of her. Living a life.

“He’ll forgive you.”

“Tell me the truth, Yossi. Why me?” Her brown eyes were piercing. Looking into them meant looking at a reflection of myself, and it’s hard to see yourself through the eyes of someone who hates you, but I didn’t turn away.

“Because I’m too much of a coward to do it myself.”

She scoffed. “That doesn’t mean I should have to do this.”.

“No, but you will.”

I might as well have thrown up in my helmet for the expression she made at that, pulling away, turning away from me, and going to tend to another one of the piles. I didn’t move aside from my hand turning my comm back on.

“Go to hell,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it. “I didn’t mean—”

“Let’s just get to it, okay?”

There was nothing to say. I left.