As for a single coin, so for a hundred.

- Babylonian Talmud, Mask of Sanhedrin.

#

When Dov Katkop is thrown out of the airlock, he cannot think. He cannot breathe. When he does breathe, each breath brings even more terror with it. The sound of the pumps readjusting the pressure, the faint condensation on his visor - all evidence of his need to breathe.

He looks up. The sky itself would have been enough to overwhelm him; he has never seen it before. He holds up his gloved hand, looks at it. It’s dark, but he can see the outline of his fingers against the stars. Such a thin layer separating him, a chunk of warm life, from the eternal, nameless night, an entity the size of the entire universe. Infinitely patient, tireless, inescapable. It will find a way to reach him, sooner or later, and it is so very close.

Death. If there ever was a time to accept it, it is now, but when Dov trawls the deep, dark pools of his mind for a source of solace, he finds nothing. Nothing that would bring him comfort, at least. There’s terror, which hurts to look at directly, and there’s immense, helpless sadness that threatens to crush everything under its weight.

Thinking about it blurs his vision; makes his ears hot. The fury is a relief from being helpless in the darkness. It holds him firm. He decides against punching the rock, concluding that it would only serve to break his hand, and focuses on looking around.

Someone’s talking to him—hardly audible over the ringing in his ears and the loud beating of his heart—has been talking for a while now, though he hasn’t been listening. Some of the words he can make out.

“…Vempress, the first, to welcome and…”

He can’t see where the sound is coming from—it goes straight to his helmet speaker— and he can’t choose whether to listen. He looks around and soon finds the source of the voice: a silhouette against the sky, at the edge of the crater. A woman, holding onto some metal structure, her feet dangling high above the rock.

“…Oxygen is hers; your suit is hers…”

The climb out of the crater is confusing. Too dark to see what his boots are on , kicking off from odd, misshapen rocks that roll away as he goes for longer and longer leaps. He barely avoids tripping up into the rubble slide he is causing.

He can’t make sense of her words, but it doesn’t matter. At the sight of another human being, his only desire is to get closer, to make alliance.

An asteroid moves over the horizon, dark on one side but sunlit on the other, and the light is enough to illuminate the woman’s large, brown eyes, crooked nose, and smooth skin, which is covered in a sheen of dried sweat. A middle-aged woman, short, strong, slightly overweight. Both of her hands are by her side, her neck vised between two metal rods, the gap too narrow for both her helmet or the rest of her body to go through. Someone put her there. Did she fight, or did she just let them?

“Stop,” she says. “Come any closer and you’ll end up like the rest.”

“What rest?” he says. It feels dream-like, to have a civil conversation, any conversation, in a place like this. Anything but screaming and crying seems absurd. He looks at his visor again, and feels grief rise in him and turn, in a split second, into more rage.

She raises a hand and points back to the crater. He sees what he’s been stepping on: bodies. Dozens and dozens of human bodies, frozen solid, with either their visors or limbs broken; their faces, whether dried or frozen, solidified in expressions of suffering.

Hope he didn’t know he had dies as this proof of imminent disaster is laid bare before him. He holds onto the fury like a lifeline. It always has been. Will he just fall to his knees and weep and die? No. Not Dov Katkop. He’ll fight. If someone’s going to try and do that to him, Dov’s going to make sure they must work hard for it.

“Who,” he says. “Did this?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Now shut up and listen.”

He tries to, but he can’t focus on what she’s saying. There’s still oxygen on her back. He’s going to run out of his own at some point, and should be prepared. His mind is running through the options he doesn’t have – even if he can screw off her oxygen tank without any tools, which he doubts, he can’t replace the tank with the one on his back. He can’t switch their suits without having to step out into space, and even if that doesn’t kill him in a second, there’s the problem of different sizes of suits. In conclusion, he’s fucked.

“The crater surrounding the airlock, where we are now, is a haven…”

She’s trying to say he’ll be safer staying put, and even in his confusion he recognizes that for a trick—that staying in the crater is the last thing he should do. Not waiting for her to finish, Dov starts running, as fast as he can. It’s not a spectacular revenge, but it’s a start.

It doesn’t take a lot of effort – every couple of seconds the ground comes up to meet him, and he kicks it down again. He’s grown fat and slow. Strong, too, but just enough to carry himself in one standard gee. Between kicks he floats in space, completely weightless, thinking about what he’s missed by avoiding space all these years, sticking to the safety of the inside. What good was that safety, in the end?

How did he get here, again? Behold, I have taught you laws and judgments, even as the Lord my God commanded me, said Moses to his mob of renegade slaves in a desert Dov imagined was a lot like this one. The laws were intended to stop the brutal killing and stealing and coveting. But even with them the game has continued as before, and a man to a man is a wolf still, albeit a sophisticated one. It was never fair, but they pretended it was. They had to. Otherwise, how could anyone agree to play? But a game where the laws themselves were determined by the strongest players could never be anything but infuriatingly unfair.

Knowing this, he still played to the best of his abilities, but not well enough to win. And that is the only true sin, above any other judgment. As Dov goes over his last moves, it seems, from the outside, like a needlessly elaborate tale. But life is not a concise storyteller. It tends to complicate.

He had let the suspicions stew in him for a long time before doing something about it. One night, after putting Michal to sleep with three read-throughs of the same story, he went to talk to his wife. He told her that he knew, even though he didn’t. That the girl’s nose was neither his nor hers. That her eyes were too dark. That she acted nothing like him. He demanded they do a paternity test.

She responded by yelling, and slapping him on the face six times, which he managed to take well, counting and gathering ammo for the argument that was bound to follow. She caught him in the eye on the seventh slap, though, and something in the surprising pain of it jolted a reaction out of him. He slapped her back. Just once, open handed, just to make her snap out of it, but as soon as his fingers touched her chin her body turned liquid and her head crashed into the corner of a wooden dresser. She lay there and didn’t move. Michal hadn’t even woken up.

The police didn’t help him dispose of the body, he had to do so himself, but they ignored the cameras and didn’t interrogate the neighbors. They even explain how to file the missing person’s report reliably. Dov had offered to pay them, but they refused. As a high ranking official in the Ministry of Life Support, a role he had climbed to with skills more technical than interpersonal, he got a visit from the Minister of Life Support herself, which used the opportunity to warn Dov that his ass will not be covered the next time he fucks up like that. The minister would rather avoid a scandal, but not at all costs. Dov never thanked the woman. She had her own game to play, and she played it to the best of her own abilities.

He had not allowed himself to fall apart. Not even at the bitterness of lying to the person he loves most in the world, because he still did love her, and it hurt to tell her that mommy has gone on a trip and it’s not certain when she will come back.

A couple of days later, another player joined the game.

The kindergarten teacher sent him a video of Michal crying, said that she was worried about how the girl was handling her mother’s absence. Apparently, the teacher said, the girl had come up with a story about how mommy was not missing at all, but in fact dead, because daddy killed her. The teacher sent him a video of Michal telling that story, and expressed wonder over how bad it could become for him if it came out.

He offered money. She declined. Instead, to his surprise, she demanded the keys to the air purification plant. He knew it couldn’t be for anything less than terrorist action, some activist cell aiming to either cripple Ceres’s air supply or poison it, but he couldn’t say no, nor ask the police for help. So he got the keys and left them where she told him, hoping to buy time, then contacted the mafia. It wasn’t a good play, but it was the only one he had left.

Hiring a contract killer was even easier than he thought, filling out an online form and providing secure payment in advance. He paid extra for the express option, three days or less, and hoped they would get her in time. When the police knocked on his door, three nerve wrecking days later, he knew for certain they had not.

He spent seven days in prison, terrified to find out what the terrorists had done with the keys he had given them. At the trial, he was surprised to find that was tried for the murder of his wife. Did the judge know what it was really about? Dov doesn’t know.

The verdict is obvious. Dov was deep enough in the ministry to know that Earth had long stopped accepting Ceresians. It used to pay well for that, usually in the form of heavy metals of the kind that didn’t explode. That in itself bore worrying implications, that Earth, which could grow humans naturally, paid so much for new ones. Whatever the reason, the fact that it had stopped was a bad sign for Ceres, a harbinger of the day Earth started sending heavy metals of the kind that did explode.

With nowhere to send him to, he expected to be thrown out. He did not however, expect to be given twenty-four hours of oxygen. It was confusing. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do with that time. Still doesn’t.

How will the game go on without him? There is only one player that he cares about. His daughter still, despite everything. Michal will be thrown in some orphanage, and hopefully the bastards will leave some of his money to her. Even if they did, she will grow up an orphan, just like he did, and he hopes that she will grow fast enough, smart enough to leave Ceres before it collapses.

He spots a piece of construction rebar, glad to have something concrete bring him back from his pointless musings. He struggles to bring himself to a stop, and picks it up. The cold hurts his hand, even through the glove, but he feels safer with it. He acknowledges how crazy that thought is. He keeps moving.

After a time, he hears desperate sobbing and begging. In the faint light of an asteroid shower, he sees two figures running up and out of a crater. One can be recognized as a man by the thin, sharp features Dov can see thanks to the thin, tight suit. The other’s form is hidden beneath layers of material, and their helmet under a hood.

Is that Vempress, taking away the last of someone’s oxygen? Perhaps he could get the drop on her while she’s focused on her victim. Dov jolts farther ahead, faster than before, slipping on patches of dust but pushing himself quickly up with his free hand, swinging the weapon for balance. Before he can reach them the one covered in the overlarge suit seizes the man running away, and strikes at him with a long pole. The awful sound of metal landing on flesh comes through his helmet speaker, as well as a scream as the victim is thrown forward into space. The pursuer strikes again, smashing the pole down so hard that it lifts them into space. They pull a lasso from their belt, skillfully loop it around a rock, and haul themself back down and towards their victim. The man’s begging stops as they strike him across the helmet once, twice. When he bounces off the rocky ground, his head lolling, they strike one last time at the exposed neck.

Dov forgets to breathe, but his legs keep moving. He roars his rage and intent, hardly hearing it himself

The darkness under the hood turns to him, takes in Dov’s size, and runs away. Even out here, some rules are the same. Dov takes the greatest leap, so quick and low that he’d have feared his suit being torn open, if there were anything to fear for.

The instant he commits to a leap, the figure lets loose a lasso from the suit to snag on a nearby rock, and comes a stop even quicker than they began. The ground running far below the reach of his boots, he is locked in the trajectory, right towards his enemy. Even as he flies, his eyes keep searching for any weakness. The attacker’s armor seems to be made of an inner suit of bundled cloth and cylinders, covered with an outer suit, sewn of the same material. As he flies towards them, the weapon already in place to swing, he feels their glare on him even though their eyes are hidden. He sees in the body language neither fear nor determination, but boredom. He strikes anyway.

But the figure reaches him first, leaning against the loop like a tether, jousting him right at the thigh, twisting him around. The world around him turns into a kaleidoscope of stars, but even lost Dov still catches a glimpse of a helmet visor and swings for it.

The figure blocks with one arm, and instead of it breaking like he expected the arm absorbs the impact as if it were steel. Harder than steel, in fact, because Dov’s weapon is what shatters.

He loses sight of the figure again, rolling around in space, and when he stops he is held overhead by his life support on his back, the hands out of his reach. There is nothing in front of him but stars, and he is completely exposed.

“Hey!” a female voice shouts through comm. “Are you out there? I have one body with twenty-plus hours of oxygen and another live one. They’re yours if you want them. Come on! Please!”

Dov swings his legs around, trying to generate enough rotation to force himself out of her grip and almost succeeds. The hands carrying him, perhaps in response, pull him down and drive him into the rock, right unto his back.

The impact drives the air out of his lungs, but thankfully not out of his suit. He coils into a ball, the pains so sharp he thinks something may have broken. A scapular blade, or maybe a vertebra. He checks if he can still feel his legs and is relieved that they hurt just as much as the rest of him. Breathing through clenched teeth, he brings an arm up to protect his exposed neck. The attack should be coming any second.

He looks up and watches a hand pull back the hood, exposing two large, blue eyes, a delicate nose, thin, pink lips on a wide face. “You done?” she asks, looking down, and when he doesn’t answer she picks up the weapon he’d dropped and throws it out of sight with a flick of the wrist. “I’m not going to kill you. Not right now, at least. What’s your name?”

Dov coughs up two words.

“Nice to meet you, Dov. My name is Lea, but you can call me Lev. That’s what my friends call me, and I’d like us to be that, in the little…” Her eyes dart sideways to the oxygen gauge, and she winces. “Time I have left. “

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Dov looks at her, then at the body lying next to her. “Fuck you, Vempress.”

“Vempress?” She asks. “Did I give you a concussion? The first clue that I’m not her is that we’re still talking— or more accurately that you are. The second should be that, as I said, my time here is limited. Hers isn’t.”

“Why kill him?” Dov spits.

She shakes her head. “Here’s what’s going to happen. I’ll tell you a story, and once I’m done you can ask me anything you want. If Vempress doesn’t show up soon…” She pauses, only for a second. “… You can take my weapon and armor, the body in case you meet her and, if you’re feeling generous, stab me in the heart and spare me the discomfort of choking to death. How does that sound?”

Dov stands up slowly, confused and hurt, but he hears the key concepts. To understand a little more about what’s going on, to kill her, to have her armor. What is that armor?

As if she heard his thoughts, Lea throws down her outer robe and exposes her smaller form—smaller, but still large for a woman; tall, with wide hips and shoulders, and breasts pressed flat against the tight space suit. She’s got cylinders of some hard material strapped to each arm, wrapped in torn suit-matter; each leg’s got a couple of them. As long as a forearm and about as thick. What kind of raw material did she find that’s harder than steel? By her right shin, one of the wrappings is torn off, exposing grayish pink rods, with fingertips at the end.

Her armor, Dov realizes, is made of human limbs. “Not interested,” he says.

She points the weapon at him with a swift motion, and he notices a glint of a sharpened edge at the end. She could have pierced his suit easily. “Sit down and listen,” she says quietly.

He sighs, the way men always do when accepting that someone else decides how they spend their time, and lets his weight drop.

Keeping the edge of her weapon only a jab away from piercing his suit open, she sits on the rock beside him. “Good,” she says. “How do I start? My dad always used to say that there’s no God. Not as a theological statement, but a practical one. It’s not like any of us thought that there was a god, and needed convincing. We’d play chess, and I’d ask him if I could make a particular move, and he’d say, ‘there’s no god here, you can do whatever you want’. Should I put more pepper in the sauce? ‘There’s no god’. And I never got his point, not really. Not until I got here. You’ve seen the airlock, and you’ve probably seen it empty, except for corpses. When I got there, it was frighteningly full of people, living people, circling around the outside of it. I’d just gotten out, and I didn’t understand who those people were and why they were there and when was I going to die, and someone placed a piece of rebar in my hands, just like you had a moment ago, and pointed at another guy, with a similar weapon. He said to me – if you want to live long enough to use all that oxygen in your tank, you better kill him, because he sure is going to try and kill you. But don’t open his bag, they warned me – because if he leaks, you’ll get killed, too. I wasn’t sure I was capable of attacking another human being, but he sure was. There was no hesitation in him when he tried to kill me. He failed, though,” she says, and her chin rises only the smallest bit as she does, “and afterwards they all cheered. It was exactly how I imagined it would be. Not the scenery, obviously, but the chill it brought, that… specific silence.” She looks at her own fingers gripping a weapon.

Dov’s eyes dart between his own oxygen timer and the man, dead or dying, with his face down against the rock.

“Hey, are you listening to me? I’m not talking to the rocks here.”

He raises his eyes to her, surprised to find a real need in them. “Yes.”

“Then be comforting. Say – that must have been very hard for you.”

“That must have been very hard for you.”

“Mean it,” she says, shaking the edge of her spear at him.

Dov sighs and repeats the words, trying to sound supportive. How quickly he has adapted to this madness.

She sighs, perhaps unsatisfied with his performance. “Anyway,” she continues, her voice steady, “there was a sort of tiered system. After winning a duel you rose through the ranks, got a while to rest, and had to participate in another, against someone of the same tier as you. An endless tournament.”

“What for?” Dov asks.

It’s not exactly the kind of participation she is after, but she accepts it. “I did it because I thought, at the time, that killing was better than dying. But in hindsight… He who lives by the sword dies by the sword, you know? We don’t talk enough about how acting changes us more than anything else. But it’s not like I had a choice. If you refused to fight, you were killed by the person in your own tier. If you tried to run anyone was allowed to kill you, and it’s important to note that higher standing brought better gear.” She taps her fingers against the knuckles of a petrified hand that acts as a shield for her own. “I had to earn these.”

“What did the highest tier get?”

“Oxygen.” She scowls when she says the word, but her eyes shine with an awful hunger.

“How?”

“Vempress would only come every couple of hours, and even then, she would stay high above us. She’d take the bodies of the lowest tier, tier zero, the freshest oxygen tanks for herself. The rest, those who got killed later, would have their oxygen given to the regent, usually tier seven or eight. The second-highest tier would have been offered oxygen too, if they chose to be hauled up into space where Vempress could make sure they weren’t any danger to her, and unplug their oxygen to give them a new supply. I had that done to me more than once, adding more than ten hours to my natural time.”

“Natural?”

“A figure of speech. The twenty-four hours you came with.”

“There’s a way to live longer,” Dov concludes. “A tool.”

“There is, but the rest of us don’t have access. It lets her unplug the oxygen cleanly. The rest of us have to make do with hunting for her – hoping that she gives us some of her oxygen if she finds our sacrifice worthy.”

“Is there another?”

“Maybe. I heard rumors, when I was a part of the tournament—stories whispered between gladiators that if you go to the southmost edge of the crater, you can find a statue that some people built, on top of a crashed spacecraft. Proof of their cooperation—something so large and intricate no one could make it in one day, even if they had the luxury of no one interfering with them. Perhaps there was a time when people did something else besides killing each other, here.” She taps the dead man’s helmet with the tip of her weapon, and Dov swallows a grimace.

“Times pass.”

“I bet they held as long as the ability to take each other’s oxygen wasn’t available. But they must have developed it, somehow, and as soon as one of them had such immense power over the others… what other way could things have gone?”

“You could have taken it.”

“If we all tried together, yes. But that’s a big if. We couldn’t coordinate—if you said anything about mutiny, the tier above you had to put you down. If they didn’t, the tier above them had to put them down, and so on, all the way up to the regent.”

There’s no need to explain further. At the top of the tournament stood the most hardened gladiator, with the biggest incentive to take Vempress’s side. And the freshest gladiator? They probably figured that they’d have a better chance climbing the pyramid than toppling it alone.

“Play by her rules, and pray for mercy. Don’t think of fighting her, unless you’ve given up.” She looks at the stars for a second. “God, I wanted off of this rock so bad. And now all I want is to be back in the office, drinking tea in front of a screen.”

Dov’s grimace softens by a single degree. “Yeah.”

“You don’t talk much, do you?”

“One hundred words a day, they say. Used to.”

“Not a bad number. My friends used to call me The Jellyfish, because I more or less floated where life took me. It seems so weird now, how I assumed that no matter what I did, nothing would change, so I didn’t even try. They tried so hard to convince me otherwise. I wonder what they’d say if they saw me now.”

Dov’s couldn’t care less what his “friends” would think if the saw him here. But what would Michal? What Does she think? He is too distracted by the sudden ache in him to think. The great alchemist within him turns that ache into more fury, more aggression.

“At my dad’s memorial service,” she continues, “one year after he died, I started crying in front of one of his pictures, because I realized I didn’t remember him as clearly anymore, that he was beginning to fade. My brothers, in a rare display of not being total shitheads, sat me down and resurrected every memory they could – how he used to say that there’s no god, and reminisced about the pet cats he had as a child, Gustave and Pushkin; how he used to replace the words in old songs one word at a time until not a single word was left of the original. And for a moment, I felt like he was alive again. As long as we remembered him, he wasn’t really dead. And I felt that when I died, as long as somebody remembered, I wouldn’t really be dead. Hey, look at me; I’m not keeping you alive to stargaze. This is the part I need you to understand. Even if someone remembers, they remember the person I was inside. The person I am become out here... This Shiva… None of my friends have ever met this Lea that threatens to kill a man just to make sure he’s listening. So, what happens when she, meaning I, dies? The people we are here are shadows of what we were, shadows that no one will get to see but other shadows. But even shadows want to be remembered.”

It's not worth Dov’s time. He wants to be out there, jury-rig a way to survive, but if he gets up and walks, she would just kill him. There’s a pool of acid at the bottom of Dov’s chest, and when he speaks, it bubbles out through his mouth. “You didn’t change.”

The words hurt, he can see in her eyes that they do, but still she smiles, shrugging. “You’re right, you know. Inside-Lea was a coward who was being told what to do, and outside-Lea is in many ways the same. I thought that if I kept cooperating, if I kept killing, Vempress would let me live. But she stopped coming. It was time for her to come and take the sacrifices, redistribute the oxygen, but she just didn’t show up. You should have seen the regent, growing more and more restless, holding the sacrifice above his head and crying like a child who’d lost his mother. When it became clear there was no one to wait for, the fucking dam broke. I didn’t know who swung first, but we went from a tense wait to an all-out knife party in less than a second. I managed to escape mostly by luck. The next time she saw me, flying above me as fast as a long-range shuttle, I survived only by offering her a sacrifice, like this one.” She taps the helmet again, and Dov makes sure not to let her see how his teeth clench.

“Did she give you oxygen?”

“She did. But not from sacrifice - she gave me another balloon, one with only seven hours and seventeen minutes in it. And if she won’t come back soon, that time will run out.”

“OK. I listened to your story. Do you want me to kill you now?”

“I want you to try. I want you to remember me; even if all you remember is how to fight, my purpose when I can’t carry it anymore.”

Dov rises, mostly because his ass is freezing but also because he’s angry. “What purpose?”

She stands up. “To keep fighting. When you kill, when you hunt and get hunted, you can endure. Don’t fight this madness, ride it. It’s better to spend your life chasing and swinging than to sit alone on a rock and watch the digits counting down your hours. Not just for yourself, but for them.” She looks at the body beside her as if she forgot it was there, forgetting it was her who killed him, and strikes the helmet with enough force that the head bounces off the rock and the entire body rises. “Would he have been better off if he never met me?”

“Stop that,” Dov says through his teeth.

“Why?” She strikes again, as if to convince herself of something. “There is no god. No watching eye. Nothing’s stopping you from doing whatever you want.”

“Stop.” Dov hates himself for considering using the word ‘please’.

She throws the weapon to him, and he grabs it. “Make me,” she says, leering, and Dov glimpses who she was before: one of those girls, just attractive enough to try to seduce a high ranking official but not enough to have true confidence, who could spend half a night at a bar subtly berating him for his receding hairline and age and weight only to end up in a tiny box for hourly rent, begging him to choke her harder so she could forget who she is for ten minutes. Not anymore, though. Now she’s beautiful in the same way a nocturnal predator or a planet-shattering asteroid is. He was wrong. She did change.

He attacks, and she counters him easily, sweeping his leg and sending him flying, sprawled. “Come on,” she howls, “what’s the point of getting into my range if you’re useless while you’re there?” He gets up, attacks a second time, and she steps forward to catch his arm, pivoting effortlessly, and slams him into the rock. It knocks the wind out of him, though not as devastatingly as the first time. “Do you expect me to just stand there?” She taunts as he waits for his breath to return. He gets up again and attacks a third time, noting not only to stay out of her range but also prepare for her counterattack, but she leaps above the swinging weapon, letting him pass beneath her, and he looks up just in time to see her boot coming down on him. He tries to block the strike but he’s too slow, and for an instant the world disappears, and all he sees is pitch blackness divided in the middle by crooked, white lightning. He’s still floating when his vision returns, so he knows he was out for only a second. There are tears in his eyes now, that somehow slipped out when he wasn’t there to maintain control.

She looks at him as she floats down, and laughs. “I’m sorry, I tricked you. I let you think you had an advantage. But the weapon doesn’t help much if you don’t know how to use it, does it? Now: It’s going to be time soon. Go to that statue, after you kill me. You owe me that much.”

“I owe nothing,” he says, humiliated but not yielding.

“Fair enough. Then I’ll die in your debt. Will you do the honors? I won’t resist, this time,” she says, and pulls from a hidden pocket a piece of shattered steel, wrapped in nylon. She throws it over to him and he grabs it, notices that the metal looks like it was broken from a longer, more useful blade. He shakes away the aching by the previous impact, wills it away. The rock feels more reliable against his soles; he trusts his own movements a little more, now. He crouches, leaning forward, ready to plunge the knife into her heart. It won’t be as satisfying as taking it by force, but he’ll take what he can get.

“Goodbye, Dov Katkop. Thank you. For remembering me, that is. Let this be your final lesson.”

He says nothing. What would it matter, when there will soon be no one to remember the words?

She stands there, her arms spread, looking into his eyes without fear. He takes one lunging step forward, then another, and another, faster and faster, until finally he is close enough to her to stab, here it comes –

Dov feels the pain in his wrist before he understands what’s going on. His fingers spasm open and he is thrown into space, upside down once more. The knife is no longer in his hands. She laughs, a horrible, shrill sound as he floats above her; as she brandishes the weapon she’s just taken from him. “Never stop fighting, until your very last breath,” she declares, bringing the knife to her throat with both hands, frozen. Her teeth clench and her eyes widen with excruciating effort. Something in her visor flashes red. She screams when her hands finally move.

Dov lands heavily. He walks back to where she cut her suit open, takes the knife from her dead hands and the armor off her stiff body, and goes south.

#

The first sign of the statue is a glint of reflected starlight against the backdrop of dark, rocky cliffs. Dov uses the lasso to stop his momentum. With each floating step, more details are revealed – the pseudo helmet, made of broken visors; the seams where many suits were glued or sewn to create the illusion of one large one; the beams of the skeleton beneath the suit rests on.

After a frustratingly challenging climb, he comes to a stop under the statue and tries to estimate how many hours had been wasted on the work. One of the statue’s feet rests on top of a crashed shuttle. Besides its open hatch, a fat, bearded man lies on his back in an undamaged suit, his face frozen, literally, in the middle of choking. His stiff hands are holding on to those of two other bodies, one at each side: One is a young man, his expression stern and resolute as if he was ready to die in great pain. His suit is cut from groin to helmet. The other, a woman, is holding both hands against a gash just under her neck. Only suit was cut, not skin, but it's obvious from her expression that she didn’t agree to have the cut made. Her hands are clawing – but the fat man’s fingers are wrapped around one anyway.

Dov is even angrier at Lea now, though he can’t say why. He’s angry at the statue for being put there as a message of delusional hope, a misleading lie that only a fool would believe, in a place like this. The decision almost makes itself. If nothing else, he’ll make sure that no one else sees it.

He puts himself on a collision course with the statue, compensating with the inaccurateness of his movements with raw fury. For a second, he’s floating in space; like Lea, he’s a shattering asteroid, unrestrained.

The armor makes first contact with the metal, and one of the straps slips and winds around his leg. His shin bone meets a piece of angled, frozen metal, and his leg erupts in pain. He falls slowly down, curled up into a ball—though the pain doesn’t bother him as much as he expected.

The statue and shuttle pitch, still in one piece, but not enough to topple. By the time he reaches the start of the runway the pain is forgotten completely as Dov is overtaken by thoughts of momentum and torque and leverage arms. He collides with the head of the statue once, twice, until he finally succeeds in hitting it with his boots, kicking away, delivering enough energy to tip it over. Still in space, he watches as the shuttle rolls over; watches the statue above it careen until it crashes against the rock and reverts to fractured, lonely pieces of steel.

He feels clearer now. He manipulates his own body to make sure he lands on his feet, and wonders how these people managed to weld the metal together in the first place.

After a moment, he goes to the corpses and searches through their capes. He finds no welding torch, no long-range weapons—only a short knife. He doesn’t have any pockets, so he puts it aside. When he looks at the bodies again it sets a motion in him and without knowing why he separates them and tosses them one by one into the crater. No one gets to escape.

Dov picks up the knife and finds himself compelled to admire the work: the shaping of the metal; the precise wrapping of the handle in suit material. It’s far superior to what Lea gave him. He cannot imagine how someone could spend hours on such delicate, useless work. He hides the weapon in his armor and looks over the edge, into the hole in the ground from which he came.