Estimated oxygen time: 23:32:44

I made my way towards the exit, from darkness to starlit rock. They went ahead, First dragging the body behind him, talking to each other in hushed voices I didn’t bother following, ignoring me for the rest of the stretch. Without the torch and jets, they could safely leave me behind.

The remote was still in my hand, and I pressed the button that was supposed to summon it. Instead of the reassuring green “vessel returning” I got a worrying orange: “Connection not found”. The walls of the caves must have been interfering with the signal just for the sheer mass of them. Hopefully, it would work as soon as I got outside.

I raised my eyes and saw a silhouette, dark against the starry sky, standing right outside.

“How goes it, Diocletian?” First called out to her as he stepped outside, his tone formal.

Closer now and with no one in the way, I could see more clearly. Her face, round, with big, green eyes, was illuminated by the light of her visor, counting back the time. She was looking up, her expression one of deep contemplation. A long steel blade was strapped to her side, the handle made of the same stuff as the suits. It looked sharp. She lowered her eyes from the stars and looked at First. “Any better and I’ll go mad,” she said, giving the impression of a joke worn smooth. She turned to Second and me as we exited the cave and looked me over, her eyebrow raised. “Who the fuck is that?”

“My name is Yossi,” I mumbled, as I pressed the remote again while trying to hide it from her.

“He’s not getting anyone out of here, if that’s what you’re thinking,” First said as he tossed the corpse at Diocletian.

She stopped the body’s momentum more than outright caught it, and let it fall to her side. “What’s he here for, then?”

“He’s a journalist, doing a piece on Last Day Town,” Second said.

“Really? I wish I’d read about this place before I got thrown out here, that would have helped so much.” There was something vicious in the way she laughed. She looked at me. “But seriously, how are you going to get back?”

I looked at the remote. The little screen still flashed those same concerning, orange words. If something had happened to my skipper, the only way out was through Last Day Town’s airlock—the same one they threw people out of. Which would mean giving Shadow-Man definite proof that I’d been here. We were eight-hundred kilometers away from the airlock where I boarded the skipper—hardly walking distance, particularly not with the amount of oxygen I carried.

“Do you guys hear how loud he’s breathing?” she said with a leer. “What’s wrong, warmblood?”

I opened my mouth to speak, but what was there to say? That I might be in the exact same situation as her? I brought the remote up, trying very hard not to let them see how hard my hands were shaking, and pressed it again. Connection not found. I couldn’t think clearly.

The sky exploded, then. There wasn’t a single point of light, but everything became bright, blinding. I looked away, covering my eyes with one arm, but the helmet kept my arm too far from my face for that to be actually helpful, and the light was searingly bright, even through my eyelids. The light died down an instant later, and I looked around, my vision obstructed by colorful blotches.

First was standing in the entrance of the cave where he’d taken cover from the explosion. He whistled appreciatively, and Second turned to him. “Was that…?”

“Hell if I know,” First answered.

Diocletian hadn’t moved, as if the explosion barely bothered her, and going by her stance it seemed she was still looking straight at me. “Was that your way out?” She laughed a hearty, mocking laugh. “Time for plan B, I guess.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t move. My mind struggled to find an explanation to what’d just happened that didn't mean I was stranded there.

“Wait, you do have a plan B, right?” she asked, laughing even harder now. “You come…” she gestured at Anaxagoras, at the dark crater below us. “Here, knowing something might happen, and your back up plan is to stay here and die?” My eyes slowly adjusted to the dark again, and I could see something wet and haunted in her eyes even as she laughed. She calmed down, and turned to Anaxagoras’s First. “I need to get to the airlock. The welcoming committee should already be in progress.”

“Should we join you? We have some stuff to fix up,” First answered, his tone practical. “But we can be there in twenty or so.” Beside him, Second fumbled with his bag. None of them looked at me. Didn’t he just say that they weren’t killers? Shouldn’t they care?

“Make it twenty-five, just to be sure Diocletian has some time to work him over.”

My skipper, I thought, still stunned, and pressed the remote control, again and again. Connection not found, connection not found, connection not found… Who the hell would’ve done this? It wasn’t Anaxagoras, who just forfeited it even though they could have it for themselves, and this Diocletian seemed too disinterested to be a part of anything. What the hell was going on?

I looked at First, who was busy mounting ‘old reliable’. He pressed a button, and with a puff of dust left the surface, accelerating very, very slowly. It was a rocket, I registered numbly. They had rockets. “Wait! Wait! The rockets, give me one of your rockets! Your… uh, old reliable!”

“I’m sorry,” First said, not looking very sorry at all. “These belong to Anaxagoras.”

“What? Are you serious with me right now? You have what, ten hours to live, and you give a shit about this rocket?” I went closer to him reaching to grab the tail of the rocket before he went out of reach. “I’m going to die here!”

Second pulled out the torch very quickly, as if he’d prepared, and pointed right at me, his arm straight. First spoke firmly, as if he was the one holding it. “Step back.”

I tried stopping, but slipped on some dust and fell slowly on my back, my boots in space. “Come on. Please. You still have blood in those veins, don’t you?”

“I have a duty to attend to. Don’t make me space you.”

I looked at Second, who looked back and shrugged as he took flight on his own rocket, slowly gaining speed. For a moment I lay there, watching them gaining speed and going higher and higher, further beyond my reach. “Are you sure she’s Diocletian?” Second asked First. “I thought they should have a mark.”

“She’s probably the Third,” he answered. “She hasn’t earned hers yet.” Their conversation faded into background noise as they picked up distance. Why had they even stayed here? They had these rockets all along. Even if the airlock won’t take them in, they could have flown to a busy dock, beg some ship to take them in. Not that it had much of a chance of working, but it would have been better than staying here. Wouldn’t it?

Diocletian turned her gaze to me, her hand resting on the handle of the blade, and I fought the urge to crawl away from her, choosing instead the more dignified option of rising to my feet. She might not kill me for the skipper, but she could just kill me for the heck of it. Her tone was only slightly warmer than before. “You need to see the welcoming committee. It’s Diocletian’s role to take care of everyone new that comes to Last Day Town, no matter how they get here.”

It should have been reassuring to learn that they had a protocol in place for visitors, but I doubted I could get any help. If these people had a way to get back to the interior, they would have used it already. “Does that mean you’re the welcoming committee?”

She shook her head at my failure to catch her meaning. “No. I’ll take you to them.”

Anaxagoras were by then tiny dots flying over the crater, and beside myself and Diocletian, who was picking up the body of old Anaxagoras from the ground, there was no soul around.

“Is it far?” I asked.

“Just by the airlock.” She grinned.

#

Estimated oxygen time: 23:26:44

We were standing at the edge of the large crater. Somewhere in the center of it should be another, smaller, crater, and, at its center, the airlock. That much was public knowledge. How I was going to make my way there, though, was less obvious.

Unlike Anaxagoras, Diocletian had no vehicle on which to cross the distance or make the drop, and now that they’d taken my jets I didn’t have one either. I looked down, trying to get a grasp of the descent I was supposed to manage with nothing but my two feet.

Letting Anaxagoras’s body drag behind her, Diocletian stepped confidently off the edge like a bird jumping off a branch, unwary of falling, gliding against the almost sheer wall of the crater. Realizing I had no choice, I followed.

The drop was painfully slow; the rugged rock surface inched closer as whole seconds passed before the first impact. It sent me on another flight, just beside the rock, dropping towards the second impact and so on. I had a lot of time to place my foot at the right angle, but also a lot of time to twist in space to dangerously difficult angles. One missed step and I’d start rolling down—A hundred-meter drop on the surface of Ceres was about as dangerous as a seven-meter drop in a single standard G, like I was used to having on the inside—enough to break a bone if I landed on flat rock, and worse if I hit a jagged one.

Unlike me, she didn’t bother stopping her own momentum each time her boot touched the rock, but instead propelled herself onwards, dangerously fast, as the inclination gradually decreased.

By the time I reached the point where I felt less like I was falling down and more like I was running down a hill, she’d already reached the bottom. She moved in a series of high, barely controlled leaps, holding the corpse as a counterweight in one hand, and securing her blade with the other. I did my best to catch up to her. Without the jet, every leap was a wild attempt to reach the next landing without twisting in space and falling over. She was slowly opening the gap between us; not running away, just not waiting. As I chased this woman on the deadly landscape, trying to find a way to survive, a part of me somberly admitted that it was the most alive I had felt in years.

“Listen,” each boot strike against the ground forced me to stop talking, punctuating my sentences. “Can you explain to me what’s the hierarchy here? Do you have any sort of vehicle at your disposal? Without my skipper, I won’t be able to get home—”

“Do I look like I care?” She didn’t turn her visor to look at me. I wasn’t sure how to answer, and she continued. “Do you know how much time I have left? You come here, practically immortal,” she stopped to strike with both legs against a relatively smooth patch of rock, “throw it away for some entertainment, and you expect me to run to your rescue?” There was no self-pity in her voice, just a dry frustration that she had to explain this to me.

“I’m not doing this for fun,” I said. “This is a crime against humanity. The only reason you are in this situation is because no one reported it before, and that’s what I’m here to do. We’re on the same side.” I wondered what I would sound like on the recording, if it was ever retrieved.

From behind her, you couldn’t see any difference as she spoke. “But it won’t help me, will it? I’ll still die here, one way or another.”

“It might,” I said, but I couldn’t think of a way that it would.

Her helmet turned to me. She was mid leap, floating in space. “Really?” she snarled. “You expect me to find some comfort while I’m dying here, that other people won’t suffer the same fate? I expected that much from them, but from you?”

Her anger was so bright, so sincere I was taken aback. A heavy silence hung as we leaped over the rocky ground, interrupted only by our grunts and the sounds of boots striking.

The bottom of the crater wasn’t entirely flat—there was a gentle slope leading down to the airlock at the center, and the closer we got to it the more pocked the rock became, and the bolder we had to be with each step. Perhaps it used to be rich in ice, back when there was still anything worth mining, but now mounds of dust waited for us to slip on them, and rock edges to tear my suit on them, like sharp, reaching fingers. I looked ahead at Diocletian as she made her way fearlessly forward, and wondered what it was like to so earnestly acknowledge how little time you had left that you had nothing to fear anymore.

From within the crater, the view of the sky was limited. I could see the light flooding the crater itself before the asteroid appeared over the wall, illuminating both of us from above.

“Do you regret it yet?” She said suddenly. She turned around again, and in the light I saw a look of indecision on her face, a flicker of honesty. “Coming here, that is.”

She had already turned her gaze forward by the time I answered. “Honestly? I can’t say. I guess I’ll only know when I’m on my way out of here.”

Her helmet turned from side to side, as if she was shaking her head. “If.” She chuckled, and her chuckle quickly grew into fully formed laughter.

I wanted to say something, if only to stop that obnoxious sound, but decided against it. Her reactions were unpredictable, understandably, and I didn’t want to accidently provoke her when it was just me and her out here, and that big knife. We went on in silence.

Finally, I heard a faint, intermittent whine over the comm. It grew in volume as we moved forward, and I realized it was a man, sobbing and screaming. We reached a valley: a smaller crater within the big one, roughly fifty meters across. The sound sharpened into clarity as soon as we got to the edge, looking into the crater.

Only then could I see it—the airlock itself. Every person I’d met here so far had to be thrown out through that ordinary looking, regulation pressurizing/depressurizing doorway: Two interlocking doors, set into the ground like the mouth of some great subterranean worm. Only this creature wasn’t eating people—it was spitting them out. Maybe ‘anus’ was more accurate than mouth.

Diocletian stopped and let the corpse drop. I hurried to stop as well, sliding on a puddle of dust and using one hand to grab a bulging rock.

The airlock was marked by four illuminators that emitted powerful strobes of light— only a fraction of a second each. These had been designed to guide small spacecrafts down here—another leftover from the days before this airlock had been closed to public use.

Near it a tall, heavy-set suited figure was kneeling with their back to us. A man stood above the figure, short but relatively broad-shouldered. A horizontal streak of black or dark red marked the chest part of his gray suit, and a blade, very similar to Diocletian’s, rested in his grip. When the light flashed again it revealed his stubbled face, his eyes dark and hard as they looked down. If he noticed us, he gave no indication.

We watched the scene from a distance. Before I could think of how to phrase the question, she turned to me and put her finger against her visor, just in front of her lips, mouthing a silent “shh”. I looked at the blade by her side, and chose to remain silent. We waited together for the sobbing to subside, and I wondered how strange this footage would look like when I got back inside. If.

“It can’t be,” said the kneeling figure. The voice was distinctly a man’s, and hoarse, like he’d just finished a bout of screaming. “They said a shuttle would take me to Earth...” He seemed completely unaware of the man standing above him.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“Do you see any shuttles?” the standing man asked, his voice too indifferent to be considered cruel.

The kneeling man raised his head. “Maybe they’re late?”

“If so, they’re also late for me, as well as everyone else who’s ever been thrown out here.”

“Who the hell are you? Are you here to save me?”

“Call me Diocletian. And not exactly, no.”

The kneeling man’s helmet shook violently. He was significantly larger than the other man, sporting a healthy girth that was visible even with the suit on, but his body language spoke of perfect defeat. “We could still get inside, right? Maybe if we tried hacking the airlock…”

“Try it and you will get a single warning, after which it will incinerate you so fast you won’t even know you died. I won’t stop you.”

“So they just… threw me out, to choke here?”

“Yes, they did.”

“I can’t think. I can’t breathe. The timer’s already below twenty-four hours. Were you thrown out too? How much time to do you have?”

“Yes, and that second question’s very personal. You shouldn’t ask people that.”

“How can you be so calm about this? Aren’t you also dying?”

“I am—and yet I spend a lot of my limited time on things I don’t like doing, like this, so I can afford to do the things I do like. I assume you’re familiar with the concept.” Another flicker of the strobing light illuminated the man’s unreadable expression, the metal in his hand shining blindingly.

“I’m sorry; I can’t wrap my head around this. It doesn’t feel real. It can’t be. I'll just talk to them. They must have accidently put me in the wrong airlock.”

Beside me, Diocletian snorted. “Try it,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’ve never seen anyone die that way before.”

The standing man must have noticed us before, because his gaze snapped to us in an instant. Even from a distance, his glare was daunting, judging.

The other one looked around wildly for a moment, before his eyes found us, as the comm didn’t give him any sense of direction. His face was fat and sweaty, his brown eyes wide. “Who the fuck are they?” he yelped, his plan to return forgotten.

“You should refer to her as Diocletian, as you will me. She’s supposed to be learning to do what I do here. You’ll understand later. The other one…” His eyes scanned me, unsure.

“He’s a visitor,” my chaperone reported, “coming from the inside to see what we’re up to. I think his ride exploded. Can you wrap it up? I wanna figure out what we’re going to do with this guy.” She tilted her head to indicate she was talking about me. By her feet, Anaxagoras’s freeze-dried body lay still.

His eyebrows lifted, but if he was surprised, there was no other indication for it. “It will take as long as it takes. Have you already forgotten that you too were terrified and lonely when you first got here?”

“I was never this pathetic,” she said, a cruel smile crawling up the side of her mouth. I turned away as soon as our eyes met.

“That’s more than enough,” he said. “Visitor, I’ll be with you shortly. I hope you’re not as pressed for time as we are.” I was, even more so, but chose to remain silent.

While they had spoken, the kneeling man found the strength to move himself. Stumbling in the microgravity, he went on his hands and his knees back to the airlock, calling out. “Is anyone there? Is anyone listening to this? There has been a mistake. I wasn’t supposed to be out here…”

There was no response, up until the point where he reached the metal door of the airlock with his gloved hand. Both Diocletian turned their helmets away just before the airlock was filled with blinding, white light. A voice boomed in my helmet.

“Welcome to airlock 83#. You are not recognized as a resident of Ceres, and you are not authorized to enter this airlock. Turn away now, or Ceres will be forced to defend itself.”

“No! listen, please, there was a mistake…”

“Defense measures will be deployed in ten, nine…”

He tried moving back, but was too clumsy, slipping on the dust. Crouching low and using the pocked rock as grips, Diocletian, the male one, came closer, grabbed the other man by the heel and pulled him back, away from the airlock.

The light died down; the voice silenced. My vision was once again stained by the aftermath of the blinded light. The large man was silent for a long moment, looking at his hands and the stars intermittently, before he turned his head to Diocletian, who had by then stood up above him again. “What do you do, exactly?” he asked. He brought himself back to his knees, as if unable to stand up on his legs. A flicker of white light strobed, no brighter or fainter than before, as if the airlock had forgotten about the incident entirely.

The senior Diocletian turned to him. “I screen. We have a little community here, and I need to figure out if you’re fit to be a part of it. If you’ll spend your last day doing something useful, or if you’re going to go on a violent rampage or slip into catatonic paralysis. If you pass the screening, you get to spend your last hours doing something you like in the company of people who are of the same mindset as you.” He said this dryly, without emotion or judgement.

“And… if I don’t?” The man’s voice almost broke.

“Then we get to cut your suit open,” she said and winked at me, as if I’d share in the joke.

“Third!” the other Diocletian barked. “Not one more word out of you, you understand?”

She folded her hands over her chest and grimaced. “Ok.”

“Are you going to kill me?” In Diocletian’s defense, the grown man’s whining truly was painful to hear.

“That depends. You have your remaining hours in your hand. What do you want to do with them?”

“Does it really work?” He waved a hand, gesturing at the man above him, the snickering woman, and me. “All of this.”

“If you mean the screening process, then yes, most of the time, though some people snap later. If you mean Last Day Town, then also yes. It’s been twenty-two days since the Four founded Last Day Town, and it did not fall apart. Now answer the question.”

He looked around with pleading eyes, at her, at me, and after realizing no help would come from us, turned his face to the stars. “What was the question again?”

“What do you want to do with your remaining hours?”

“I… Can you just tell me what to say?”

“I cannot.”

“Listen, I just…” He cast us a worried glance. “I don’t want anyone to crack my skull open, ok? Just tell me what I should say, and I’ll say it. I want to cooperate. I want to be a part of the community and have a job—all of that stuff. You know?”

“Noted,” he commented, in a way that wasn’t necessarily approving. “What are you good at?”

“Back inside, I used to—”

“Don’t talk about the past. What skills do you possess, now?”

“I can code.” He paused, interrupted by a harsh laugh from Diocletian’s third. “I’m in better shape than I look, physically. I’m good at cycling.”

She laughed again. “Not a lot of stationary bikes around here,” she said, quietly enough for just me to hear.

“Do you like endurance exercise?” the senior continued, ignoring her.

“Yeah, I used to—I mean–” the man paused in response to the smallest tilt of Diocletian’s head. “I can go for hours. I fou- I find it relaxing.”

“Good. Third,” he turned our way, “did Anaxagoras switch yet?”

She lifted the corpse of First Anaxagoras from where it had lain, out of sight in a shallow crater—just in time for it to be lit by the airlocks’ strobing light. For the first time, anger flared in the senior Diocletian’s face. The newcomer’s expression twisted to a new degree of terror, as if he’d forgotten his situation, and the cadaver had reminded him. Hell, it reminded me, too.

The senior Diocletian shook his head. “You are now a part of Line Anaxagoras; They will teach you about the role they play here, and when the time comes, you will teach others. As a part of Anaxagoras, as a part of Last Day Town, you are now subject to its laws, so listen carefully.”

The kneeling man’s hand jerked, as if he considered saying something, but remained silent.

“Refer to yourself or anyone else in any name but the line’s name, and Diocletian will kill you. You may also refer to other Anaxagoras by their order.”

“What does that mean? What’s order?”

“Ask them when they get here. Speak of your former life anywhere but inside Pythia’s Chamber, and Diocletian will kill you. That includes any talk of going back inside, as well.”

“What’s this chamber? Why can I talk about it there?”

Diocletian ignored him. “Conduct any form of secret communication, outside of Pythia’s chamber, and Diocletian will kill you.”

“Kill or steal oxygen from another Resident of Last Day town, or even talk about it—that is Vampire Law, which killing is too good a punishment for a breach of.”

“Then what is good enough punishment for it?”

“You don’t want to know. Do you understand these laws?”

“I think so.”

With the patience of a safety officer escorting a bunch of rookies to their first spacewalk, Diocletian made the new Anaxagoras repeat each of the laws several time. The whole thing took less than a minute. “Now get up from your knees before your legs freeze off,” he said finally, and turned again to the woman beside me. “Third, bring me the body. Make sure he gets to his line, and for the love of God, try not to talk so much. I’ll take the visitor to see First. Come back to the fault as soon as you can.”

“You got it, Second,” she said and made a great leap into the crater, holding the stiff corpse like a log. I expected her to toss the body over, but to my surprise she was very careful to place it in Diocletian’s Second arms, like one would pass a baby. Free of the corpse, she turned to the other man, who had risen to his feet by then, his posture so hunched he was almost as short as her. “Let’s get going. I don’t know if they’re coming to pick you up, and walking’s gonna take a while to get used to.”

He nodded silently and they set off towards Anaxagoras’ cave, only to stop when two figures descended in front of them, riding rockets. Both used the same maneuver to stop—letting a long loop of rope dangle under them, until it caught on to sharp rock heads; The loops tightened and sent them on quick quarter-turns that ended with them absorbing the energy with their legs. “Oy,” Anaxagoras’s Second muttered under his breath, rising slowly. “That would have hurt tomorrow.” Anaxagoras’s First looked at him and shook his head. Aside from the rocket he used to get here, he held another one in his other hand, and still he managed to land smoothly.

Both took a long moment to look at the newcomer. “Sorry we’re late,” Second said, smiling somberly under his white beard. “I’m Anaxagoras’ Second, and this is First, which means you’re Anaxagoras’ Third.” He reached out to the newcomer who hesitantly offered his hand to shake. But Second didn’t shake it—he just held it in his for a moment. First looked approvingly, and for a moment they were all silent. The newcomer said nothing, but something in his expression changed.

Second let go of the hand, and First came forward and held it for a moment, then handed him one of the rockets. “This is old reliable,” he said, his voice so tender I almost didn’t recognize it. “Jump as high as you can before you start it, then press that big button and point the tail where you don’t want to be. It’s not strong, but it will get you where you need to go.”

The newcomer nodded as he took the rocket in his arms, then turned to the woman beside them. “Is she coming with us?”

She nodded. “It’s in the job description,” she told Anaxagoras. “Making sure everyone behaves on their first walk. Come on, baby: let’s get you to see your new friends.”

Anaxagoras’ Third rose to his full height. Even through his suit I could see him filling his chest with canned oxygen. His face hardened as he spoke. “You know what? Fuck you.” He pointed at the woman. “We’re all going to die here, and it won’t kill you any sooner to stop being a whore’s-daughter for a couple of minutes, would it?”

“Whatever, warmblood,” she scoffed, but her expression was strangely approving. Anaxagoras looked at each other and said nothing more, as if some understanding had grown between them in that moment.

First turned to Diocletian’s Third. “I’ll give you a ride,” he said as he tied the long loop to a handle on his rocket, then handed the other side to her. She nodded, and at his command both jumped into space. Second jumped up with a grunt, starting the rocket as soon as his boots left the ground, looking back to see if their newest member followed. Anaxagoras’s Third threw his massive body into space and clumsily sat himself on the rocket, pressing the single button to propel himself after the others. Soon they were all more than a dozen meters above the rock, dark against the asteroid-lit sky, accelerating gradually in the weak thrust until they gained enough speed it was clear they weren’t coming back down.

“Let’s go,” Diocletian’s Second said, seizing my attention. The body was in his arms, cradled relatively gently considering it had to be as hard as rock by now. Has he been waiting for me to watch what had just happened, or was he watching his underling for his own reasons? I couldn’t know.

If Anaxagoras went north, the direction he set towards was west. I followed, hurrying to get closer to him. I wasn’t under the illusion that these people were my friends, but it’s hard to describe how strong the pull is towards anyone who isn’t overtly threatening, when you’re in a lonely place.

“I apologize for my underling’s behavior,” he said as I got closer, leaping by his side. “I imagine she wasn’t any more courteous to you than she was to Anaxagoras.”

“Not really, no,” I said, taken off guard by his courtesy. “Thanks.”

“It’s her way of dealing with stress. I hope you can find it in you to forgive her.”

“No problem,” I said. “Were you like that, at the start?”

His eyes were cold when he looked at me. “No.”

#

Estimated oxygen time: 23:06:15

We ran west. I was starting to remember how running was supposed to look like, but I still wasn’t anywhere near Diocletian’s Second level. While Diocletian’s Third movement were wild and fearless, his were precise, his boots tapping the rock more than kicking it, balanced even while carrying the corpse. I couldn’t believe that someone could move like that with less than a day of surface-time under their belt, but I had more important questions to ask.

“Ok, listen, do you know of a way I could get back? I came here in a skipper, but I think someone…”

“Not out here. We’ll talk about it in the fault.”

Another cold refusal to communicate. We ran in that bitter silence for a while. I still had to use my hands, falling on all fours like a rookie on the first day of mining training. He is also on his first day, I realized. But he doesn’t have any time to waste on being clumsy. I kept up. Barely.

“Get ready to stop. Chasm ahead,” he announced when the incline started rising. I stopped with a couple of skidding hops before I could even see it. He stopped with one decisive motion ahead of me, right at the edge, the corpse still cradled in his arms. I walked the last of the distance carefully. A fracture in the rock, stretching from horizon to horizon. It was only a dozen meters across, not so wide that I couldn’t make it in one leap, but it was so deep it seemed endless in the starlight, as if the fracture went all the way into the heart of the dwarf planet. If I had been running without guidance, I could have easily missed it in the dark.

Diocletian knelt, holding up the corpse with both hands as one would a sacrifice, presenting it to the stars, then reached forward to place it above the void, and pulled his hands back. The body floated in space, then began to drift downwards. He placed his palms against each other, and as the body descended into depths unknown, he recited:

We have gathered here, under star light rays,

Not sun,

To celebrate the end of all your days,

And one.

You weren’t, when burdened by those who died,

Undone,

Stranded in the dark and found, you were tried,

And won.

He’d recited quickly, for a lament. When he’d finished, Diocletian’s Second kept kneeling there, his hands together, his head bowed. In front of him was the rising wall of the crater’s end, taller than any man-made structure, a dark backdrop to his brighter suit.

“You pray for them,” I said to his back.

“Yes.”

“Why?” I asked, feeling even more awkward. I forgot how hard Real Journalism was.

His voice was flat. “Someone has to. This place holds together because everyone does their part, and this is Diocletian’s part. One of them.”

“Are all the bodies down there? Everyone who was ever here?”

“I wouldn’t know. But Diocletian have been protecting the dead for as long as we can remember.” He hadn’t moved yet. It was the first time anyone had talked to me in Last Day Town without also tending to some other activity.

“Protecting them from what?”

“You may have noticed that Last Day Town is constantly in need of raw construction material,” he said as he rose to his feet, watching the corpse as it faded into the infinite black. “Human bodies become very strong once they’ve cooled enough. Now watch,” he said, taking a step forward so that his toes were hanging over the chasm, “and follow.”

Knees bent, he let himself topple forward. Only when his weight was way over the edge did he leap, throwing himself straight forward in a shallow arc, almost horizontal, clearly not enough to make it to the other side. There was no way to correct his leap, nothing to push against. I watched in silence. Even if I had had any way to jump after him, without the jetpack I could do nothing to bring him up, only drop farther with him.

Finally, he collided with the wall on the other side, far below the edge, mostly hidden in shadow. He must have managed to grasp at some handhold, because he wasn’t falling further down. An asteroid shot through the sky above us, lit by the sunlight that never made it here, and its reflected light was enough to make out the shapes in the darkened chasm: a cave burrowed into the endless wall, where once someone had decided to follow a vein of ice. A cave now large enough to catch a man in flight.

From that hole in the wall, where he was sitting comfortably, he waved for me to follow. Encouraged by the better lighting I leaned over the fault line, one booted foot on the edge and another trailing behind me, holding onto land.

My limbs were frozen. As if my legs knew that I was supposed to get as far from Last Day Town as I could, confused that I chose instead to dive deeper into this place and its specific brand of insanity. But how was I supposed to get away without help from others?

I leaned even further, letting my weight pull me off balance, and finally jumped. I didn’t dive forward like he had, and as a result my trajectory was too high to reach the cave opening, but too low to make it to the flat surface above, neither here nor there. As I reached the leap’s apex the chasm started coming up to me, like a behemoth’s jaws. I looked down into the blackness as I floated above. If I fell, could he save me? Would he?

Finally, I hit the wall on the other side, just above the entrance; my back and shoulder the first to touch the rock. But the impact was too hard, and I bounced away, out of the wall’s reach. There was nothing to hold on to, nothing to keep myself from falling into darkness. Not fast, yet, but I was quickly gaining downward speed. Too quickly.

Something caught me—an iron vise of a grip around my wrist. I looked up and saw that he had thrown his entire body out of the hole and was holding both of us above the abyss, holding on to the rock with one hand. Diocletian’s eyes met mine with a frozen expression I couldn’t decipher. He didn’t seem as disturbed as I was, but that made sense—what difference would it have made to him, if either of us fell?

One handed, he climbed back into the safety of the hole, and only then pulled me inside.