Estimated oxygen timer: 17:11:10

Ceres revolved slowly under me, the crater far below. From the direction of Anaxagoras’ cliff, I saw two figures gliding just above the rock. Even from afar, I recognized Alex by his carefree, fluid movements, and Shaul by the tightness of his. They were swinging long metal rods beneath them, pushing at the rock, and propelling themselves faster than they could with their legs alone. They had more rods tied at their backs, either as weapons or extras for others. They weren’t nearly as fast as real Anaxagoras had been, but they were getting there. They’d have time to redevelop the technique, if a new line were to be formed.

Our respective positions shifted, making it so a hill appeared to have moved between us, and they were out of my view. I absentmindedly tried to scratch the itch at my nose and got blocked by the visor in front of my face. I inhaled a lungful of canned oxygen and exhaled slowly. There are irritations in this life that you have to accept you’ll suffer until your last breath.

The fallen statue rolled into view, and the shuttle beneath it.

A particularly large asteroid crossed the sky, its face porous, full of crags and chasms—the remains of extensive excavations that had sucked out every possible chunk of dirty ice. Massive haulers had landed on it, dug into it, sucked it dry, and headed back home, to Ceres. The light it reflected made the cliffs shine with what seemed, compared to the usual starlit darkness, like natural sunlight. I put a hand over my visor to protect my eyes.

In that light I spotted Vempress: a dark mass shooting across the town towards the shuttle in a descending arc. I didn’t think she could have seen Alex and Shaul from that low, but even if she did they should seem like they were just going to the airlock—not to Pythia’s chamber. I glanced at my timer; she was going to arrive slightly late, according to my clock. Was she getting sloppy, or was I running down my oxygen by hurrying from one engagement to the next?

A small figure, their bag hanging loosely around them, was kneeling by the rows of initials scratched into the shuttle, tracing them with a careful hand, unaware of our approach. I decided not to call out to them—if I wanted to appear to be Vempress’s loyal servant, it wouldn’t make sense to warn this person, and take her natural advantage away.

Without my intention, my shadow passed over him, letting him know that he wasn’t alone anymore. He tensed like a rabbit hearing an eagle screech and turned to look at me. A man, his eyes wide, his eyebrows raised, his mouth open. He gave a short, terrified holler. His voice was surprisingly low.

Don’t scream, you idiot, I thought. Move.

Somehow, in the short time after he entered her view, Vempress managed to complete the series of actions that it took to take someone off their feet. She changed her course, drew her lasso out, calculated the right angle of approach, seized it, and pulled up so they both revolved around each other. She let go at the height of his spin and he was thrown far into the crater, shouting with more confusion than terror. Perhaps he hadn’t even seen her coming. She nailed the maneuver so accurately that when she let him go she had no momentum left, and just floated idly in space, pulled slowly down by gravity. She roared with laughter as she watched him fly away.

I landed as my trajectory reached its end, skidding forward until I stopped myself against the shuttle. I looked back at the man. He was still flying, his trajectory still ascending towards its peak, moving away as fast as Vempress had approached. When he finally lands, there’ll be one hell of an impact. What a shame. Whoever that was, we could have used another pair of hands.

Vempress landed beside me, one hand on the controls of her jet, the other on the blade’s handle, the wrench, torch, and spear gun tied or clasped to her by the side, while I had not a single weapon. After her laughter subsided enough that she could talk, she said, “What are you mad about? I didn’t kill that one. Be happy.” Her grin stretched wide under her bloodshot eyes. “Anyway, why isn’t Pythia here?” She asked, her eyes following the fleeing resident, controlled by some predatory instinct.

“It didn’t work for us, waiting out here, so we spread out.”

“Well, you missed that one.” She made a face like she wanted to spit.

“True,” I said as I lifted the door open for her, bowing my head slightly, as if unconsciously. “But we found another by the airlock, that we would have otherwise missed. I’m still hopeful about this wager.”

She entered the shuttle and I followed, placing the broken door back behind us. Once again, the radio noise went silent.

In the darkness, Vempress’s violet-lit visor slid in one fluid motion to the far side of the chamber, and stopped, as if she had found a spot to sit. “Well, confess me.”

“What would you like to talk about?”

“I imagined you would have learned the comforting ways of Pythia, lure me into talking about my deepest secrets, but it seems I overestimated you again. Last time we talked it only made me more annoyed.” And yet, there she was.

“Line Pythia wasn’t built just to give comfort, but to be a contained space to talk about the life people had before. Did you ever tell anyone, here, what your former life was like?”

“No point,” she said. “I’m here now. That’s all that’s real. You haven’t learned that.”

“That’s the point,” I said. “To gain perspective. To reach back and see how different things were, to better understand where we are now. You told me what it’s like out here; about what it’s like to survive. But you didn’t tell me anything about where you came from, or how you got here. Can we be where we are without remembering how we got there?”

“I don’t see any point in telling you when I was born, or what my parents were like.”

Not a no. “That’s not what Pythia does at all. This isn’t psychotherapy, where you dive into your deep traumas. Pythia’s ritual is about the basic, driest detail.” I wasn’t exactly lying. There was some chance that what I was saying was true. “You don’t speak of what you think your life has been: you tell it as it was. The boring stuff.”

“And what is that good for?”

“You’ll see; I promise.”

“Eager, aren’t you? If you weren’t so pathetic, I’d be afraid that you were thinking of a way to use the story of my life against me, learn my weaknesses.”

“Pythia never shared the details of a confession, not even with other Pythia.” That too, wasn’t a lie. The truth was, I didn’t expect her to live long enough for it to be of any use.

“But you’re not really Pythia, are you?” A note of gloating sneaked into her tone, as if she’d found a new way to hurt me.

Of all the things I’d given up, all the ways I’d let her step on me, that one I could not abide. “I memorized the words. I sat in the chamber and listened, and when the time came, I cut First out of his suit. In every sense of the word, I am now Pythia’s First.”

“Really? Where’s your robe, then?”

“It’s not fair,” I said. “None of this is fair—you gave us too little time, and I can’t undo all the damage you’ve done in just a couple of hours, let alone worry about attire.”

Her tone was chilly. “Do you want to cancel the operation, then? Should I go back to hunting?”

“No, that’s not what I meant—”

“You forgot,” she said quietly, “whose oxygen it is you’re breathing. If you want to keep breathing it, you’ll mind how you speak to me.”

A part of me was tempted. If I kept arguing, she just might unplug my oxygen and be done with it. But if she did, she’d get out of the shuttle before the others were done setting up the ambush, and they’d lose whatever little advantage they had. Not to mention Keren. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“Good.” She chuckled, and her tone relaxed. “You know what, Pythia? I’ll play along. Let’s do this confession thing.”

I recalled something in that instant, a real family dispute, long forgotten. Ayelet, Tsur, and I, sitting in the living room. I want Ayelet to help Tsur with an extracurricular project. She refuses, saying she is too tired from work, and we should just pay a tutor. I agreed that she has been working hard, and we go on to another subject. Tsur mentions that one’s parents bring a number of advantages, and I agree that his talent for science comes not only from his mother’s genes, but also from the times she’d sat down with him and answered his surprisingly sophisticated questions. She mocks me, reminding me of the times that I’d made up answers that turned out to be entirely false. We all laugh at my expense, and in the end she’d changes her mind, and says that she’d work with Tsur on the project. After she leaves, he turns to look at me, eyes barely visible under his awkwardly long hair, and says, in the tone of a smart adolescent that is just figuring out who he is, “That was impressive.”

“What was?” I ask, as I bring up an ornithology documentary I haven’t finished on the screen. I look back at him, and his eye are narrow, curious.

“Wait, that wasn’t on purpose?”

“What wasn’t?” I ask again, flattered but confused.

“You don’t know,” he says, a sort of scientific wonder in his voice.

“What?”

“You don’t even know that you’re doing it.”

Looking at Vempress, at the way applying a bit of power over me made her feel just a little bit more at ease, I thought I understood what he’d meant.

“In the name of Line Pythia,” I said, ceremonially, “I am your confessor.”

#

Yael Kornikov twists a lock of curly hair as the screen in front of her displays a three-dimensional model of a needlessly complicated assembly. She’s trying to put together a hermetic casing for a weapon meant to operate at low temperature and atmospheric pressure, and resilient to chlorine-based, corrosive compounds. Her contractor hasn’t said that they’re designing weapons to be printed and used on Mars’ surface, but he doesn’t need to. She didn’t even ask which of the Martian armies her contractor’s working for—it simply doesn’t matter. She knows she’s helping people murder each other, but those people would have murdered each other anyway. To her, this job could mean the difference between making all of her payments, and none. It's a matter of survival, and ethics are something to discuss only after survival stops being an issue, not a second before. It’s not like her refusal would stop the Martian skirmish in its tracks.

A horn blares, startling her out of her contemplation. Why does it have to be so loud? She’s right here, dammit.

Yael’s working two jobs, but luckily for her she’s working both of them at the same time. She’s an on-site technician in an air purification hub. If nothing breaks down, she gets paid to just sit there, and has time to do the time-independent weapons engineering. If something does, like now, she springs into action to save the company’s leaking money.

She recognizes the specific pressure-loss siren: one of the pipes has started leaking. In the micro-gee environment (unlike other facilities, there is an inherent difficulty in rotating the entire compound to create pseudo-gravity with so many pipes going in and out) she has to throw herself from pipe to pipe, allowing the computer (pseudo-intelligence, of course) guide her to the source of the high-pressure whistle. She’s perfected the movement, turning and pivoting gracefully as she floats through the damp air, screen in hand.

It’s a decent job. Sure, a robot could do it, but that’s exactly the reason AI is illegal: to safeguard the economy. If robots were legal, Earth would probably give them for free, just to destabilize Ceres.

Earth would probably offer weapons’ design for much cheaper than she or her contractor could offer - The fact that this Martian army chose the expensive option says something about their values—that they had spent their limited resources just to avoid cooperating with the menace from Earth while they should be focused on their own survival and nothing else. If anything, Yael feels bad for spending her time helping the losing side.

Nah, she’s just overthinking. Here she is, in her comfortable job—in her comfortable life. When there are problems to be solved, she solves them. When there aren’t, she just chills, playing games and reading books. And sleeps. God, how she loves to sleep. No need to feel sorry for anyone. No need to feel sorry for herself, either. It isn’t a bad life; she’s always comfortable and often engaged, never bored, and rarely stressed. She doesn’t need more. She has always thought that people’s incessant need for approval, whether through relationship or career, comes from a deep, nameless anxiety. But what does Yael have to be anxious about?

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The only thing she can’t give herself is a good lay, every once in a while, and that Dimi provides. Young and enthusiastic (five years older than her, and still), he comes when told, even when she’s at work. She hopes that the leak she’s tracking is the last of the day, as he’s supposed to visit her later in her shift, and she’d hate for them to be interrupted by a pressure-loss siren.

He’s a journalist of some sort, an aspiring author. She loves listening to him talk, sweaty and exhausted after a session of aerobatics in the dead of a night shift (fucking in zero gee isn’t instantly intuitive, but he’d learned quickly. The important part is to choose the hand and foot-holds in advance). She doesn’t listen to the things he says as much as to the sound of his voice, his enthusiasm. He always compliments her, letting her know how beautiful her legs and back and eyes are. She doesn’t compliment him back. She’s there, isn’t she? What else does he need to know?

She’s amused by his concern when he makes sure she knows her that his wife knows, and that she’s ok with what’s happening between them. Yael doesn’t have the heart to tell him that it wouldn’t bother her either way.

But what she loves most is the way he whistles. That escape of air through a narrow slit, vibrating with emotion and freedom, going off on all scales and forms, from early Baroque to post-bebop. “Don’t whistle inside; it’s back luck,” she tells him.

“Where the hell am I supposed to whistle, then?” He laughs.

In essence, what fascinates them is how different they are. Like mirror images of each other.

“Everybody around me cares so much,” he says. “I care so much, all the time. I get tired of it sometimes. I like it that you don’t make a big deal about anything.” And she’s glad, too. If the dark world she’s built for herself can be a refuge for others, why not?

“I can’t find my bag,” he texts her one day, a couple of hours after he left.

“Did you turn over a glass?” the computer types the words for her, knowing her. She nods quickly and the words are sent.

“Why? Is that another superstition?”

“It’s not a superstition,” the machine writes after she shakes her head, all the while flipping a model of a bullet cartridge, on another screen, “it’s about training your mind to enter a certain mental—”

His next message comes in before she gets to send. “Can you see if it’s at your place? It’s really important.”

When she gets back to the corridor leading to her own home, her door is open and there are strangers in uniform going in and out. She suddenly recalls how in elementary school they were made watch a video about cows, in history class, and how they’d walked down metal corridors to their own slaughter. Yael didn’t know if they knew, as they walked down the corridor, what waited in the end. Now she knows - they’d walk the same, even if they did.

She takes one shaky step after another, promising herself that it can’t be that bad, can it. She can’t turn and run—running would make it real, and where would she run to, anyway?

They find the bag hanging from a chair, full of documents he’s gathered about things they don’t want anyone to know (she’ll find this out later), but they still feel the need to search her entire apartment, and she stands, helpless, as foreign hands rummage through her haven. Did he tell them? Did they break his fingers for it, or did he talk on his own? When he told them, did he know it would get her in trouble? When she’s out of jail, she’ll slap him right in his handsome face.

Prison is boring, but safe and predictable. She’s strangely tranquil through her trial, clinging to the promise she made to herself that it will all be over and forgotten quickly, and she’ll be able to return to her old life.

The judge doesn’t even mention her job as a weapons engineer. All he talks about is Dmitry and the presence of the documents in her apartment, as if that’s a crime. One of the attorneys asks if there’s something, anything she could give them, that will put her in a more favorable light, and an interesting process happens in her mind. She’d forgotten when she needed to forget and now, when survival demands she remembers, it pops back up.

She speaks for the first time, telling the judge how a stranger contacted her online only a few weeks ago, trying to enquire, in very elusive language, whether or not she could bribe Yael to get access to the air purification facility she works in. Yael ignored it, blocked their communication, deleted the message and forgot the whole thing almost overnight. But now she can’t remember the name. She’s thinking of one of the famous Hebrew poets, but she can’t remember which one.

“You can find it,” Yael says, “if you’ve seized all of my communications. It might be a lead.”

The judge notes it down, thanks her politely, and proceeds to give the verdict. Yael is certain that she didn’t hear correctly. She asks the judge to repeat himself, and watches his lips move as her ears pop with a sudden internal pressure.

…Exiled. To. Earth.

She is not big on politics, but she knows that it’s nothing but a euphemism for an execution, and for the first in her adult life she loses control. She screams and kicks and spits at them, her fury knowing no end, for they have taken from her the one thing she had: the comfortable life she’s built, and the survival she’s earned.

#

Estimated oxygen time: 16:53:32

Her blue eyes inspected me, vulnerable, but still hostile. “What are you making that face for? Are you that surprised? You thought I was born like this, did you?” There was bitter amusement in her voice.

“Of course not. It’s just… I can sympathize.” And I could. Even as I thought of Alex and Rachel, David and Shaul, wondering how close they were, I still couldn’t help but sympathize.

She gave me a look, skeptical, and continued.

#

After her tantrum passes, she goes limp. She’s so small and fragile that they don’t even tase her. She’s shoved into a space suit and tossed out like a piece of trash. When the air pressure gradient propels her to the outside, she tumbles out like a ragdoll.

She can’t take her eyes off the stars, but the bedrock finds its way under her feet, without her meaning to, and she collapses on to it. Someone’s talking to her, but she doesn’t process what she’s being told. She doesn’t look at them, but shifts her unfocused gaze to include them in it.

Two men in cheap grey spacesuits, makeshift weapons in their hands, standing as if they still have responsibility, as if the world still makes sense. Yael doesn’t have the clarity to regard them as real, let alone communicate with them. Only when one gives the other a command does she manage to translate the words into meaning.

“Do it. She’s gone.”

The man who says it, small, with cold, black eyes, does so with a gravity that’s unmistakable, and it’s that gravity that jolts her back to life. Her eyes refocus and her muscles tense. Her posture shifts—she crouches like an animal, her fingers gripping at the rock, the toes of her boots finding fissures to wedge into. Ready to push or pull in any direction.

The other man is lanky and nervous. He holds the blade in shaky hands, breathing quickly. He starts walking towards her, so slowly and clumsily that Yael doesn’t understand at first that he’s charging her.

She doesn’t think—she moves, sticking low, keeping hold of the ground so she doesn’t float away as she circles around him. He swings at her once, twice: desperate motions, each one putting him more off balance. His back is wide open, and she leaps towards it with enough momentum to take them both off the rock. She quickly climbs onto him, holding on to his oxygen tank, where he can’t reach her, but she doesn’t wait for him to figure out how to shake her off. She kicks him with both legs, getting him in the side of helmet. Not giving him a second to recuperate, she finds a grip against the rocks, and pulls. He dropped the blade when she concussed him, and she reaches it before he even gets up. She holds the rock with one hand while the other drives the blade against his back.

Blood sprays her suit, marking her, as she would later find out, as a member of Line Diocletian. The tear in his suit is large enough that there can be no mitigation of the pressure loss, no chance for him to save himself. It takes only a couple of seconds for him to stop moving.

She folds back to a crouch, ready to pounce at the other one. The way he stands, erect and frozen solid, his weapon in its clasp instead of in his hand, is enough to shake her out of the killing mindset she’s in. She looks at the blade in her hand and thrusts it away, not even throwing it properly. As if putting distance between her and it will disconnect her from the act itself.

She’s a killer, now. So what? How many people kill for the first time and think, ‘This is the first time I’ve killed someone’? Probably millions. Probably billions. She isn’t special. This is what human beings have always done.

When he speaks, she keeps her eyes on his lips, on the movements of the muscles in his clean-shaven cheeks, learning to understand language again.

“The first time is hard,” he says. “But you’ll learn to enjoy it.”

“What?”

“Killing.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t want to enjoy it.” She just wants to not die.

“You should. Not too much; just a little bit.” He picks up her blade from the ground.

“Why?”

“To keep sane.”

“What does it matter, if I’m going to die anyway?”

“If you stay sane,” he says, offering her the blade handle first, holding the blunt edge of it between thumb and index finger, “you might not have to die.”

She knows it’s bad luck to pass a knife from hand to hand, but she takes a step forward, reaching. His expression is impassive. She understands why, sees the practicality of it, but she doesn’t enjoy this expression. When her fingers wrap around the handle, she chooses to smile.

Once the bubble is finished, they agree that they need to test it. Neither of them wants to go in alone while the other is outside, and she’s reluctant to be alone in the bubble with him. He considers that for a moment, then retrieves a sharpened screwdriver from some hidden compartment in the cave.

He hands it to her. “Point it towards me when we’re in the bubble. So you can trust me.”

She chuckles at his definition of trust, but doesn’t argue, and the edge of his lips minutely curves upwards, a twitch so small someone less keen would have missed it. “You know what I meant,” he says, a little softly, and to her surprise, Yael feels a measure of companionship.

He climbs into the bubble, bending himself into the loose folds. She follows him into the darkness, where she has to get close enough to him to touch him, or the bubble won’t close. Her hand, the one holding the weapon, finds a relatively safe place by his ribs, and she’s almost as afraid of killing him by accident as she is of him hurting her. She feels his hands moving as he closes the bubble behind her, locking them in a kind of hug.

“Are you ready?” he asks, his voice calmer than usual, an indication of how tense he really is.

She realizes how far she’s gone in the last few hours. How bizarre this all is. Each decision she’s made since being thrown out has been rational, but each has led her to this weird place. “Ready,” she says.

“Three, two, one…” They open their zippers a fraction, and the bubble expands surprisingly quickly as the inside pressure rises. The folds flatten. They’re very close together in the small, dark enclosure, touching each other without trying to. Carefully, gradually, they open up their suits, exposing themselves to this limbo that is neither inside nor out. They listen for the sound of oxygen leaking. Aside from the background noise of space, though, there’s only silence. As they decided in advance, he strips her of her suit, while she holds the screwdriver, switching hands as he takes off one sleeve and then another. His hands aren’t gentle, but she feels that they would have been if they could. She barely notices that she’s naked, or the way he’s looking at her nakedness; she just holds the weapon and watches him struggle to slip out of his suit. His smell, which already filled the bubble, becomes stronger. The stink of a man, but somehow not unpleasant. She looks at the tattoo on his bare chest—she thinks she can trace the branches of a tree, or maybe the horns of a running elk—and doesn’t notice that he has stopped taking his suit off, as if waiting.

He places a hand on her hip, gently but without hesitation, and leaves it there. His gaze is steady. Against all reason, there’s a question in his eyes. Against all reason, her answer is yes.

They fuck like wild, rabid animals—pulling and pushing into each other, scratching and biting. They fuck like their lives depend on it. Which, perhaps, they do. It hurts, but that’s a good thing—the more it hurts, the easier it is to forget where she is.

He climaxes with a grunt, sweating, his teeth clenched. She’s not even close, but she squeezes him with her legs, as if she’s trying to get every last drop out of him. She doesn’t worry about pregnancy—why should she?

They crawl back into their suits. They’re going to have to hurt a lot of people, he says, and they need to remember what they’re doing it for. She has no idea what he’s talking about, but she nods. As long as she survives, none of it matters.

#

Estimated oxygen time: 16:48:24

For a while Vempress said nothing, staring at the rock, her face barely visible under the light of her visor. Her expression was inquisitive, as if she was trying to see what effect her words had had on the color of darkness.

I felt my chest become heavy, even in the micro-gee. Not because her story had made her seem innocent; it hadn’t. But because she’d opened up to me at all. She had let me see something of herself, and instinctively, primally, that made me wish her no harm.

For a moment I thought about saying something, holding her back, calling the whole thing off. I couldn’t forgive her, but I didn’t want her killed, either.

Not that I had any choice. That was the whole point. Somebody had to die, and it was up to me to choose who. Remember, I begged myself. Think of all the people she hurt. Nina, face contorting in despair; Ctesibius’s Third screaming as she died; Pythia singing alongside Diocletian, even though she knew what violent death awaited her; Yahushua begging as she hurt him for no reason other than her own enjoyment, his voice expressing a kind of clear and undiluted terror I hadn’t known was possible. And Vempress, dancing around them with the experience she’d gained working in micro-gee, making us stumbling toddlers in comparison.

I didn’t know how Keren would sound screaming, and prayed that I’d never find out. That she could at least die peacefully, among friends. But that could only happen if I let Vempress die.

“We’re done here. I’m bored,” she said, and went to the shuttle door.

“Wait,” I said. “The ceremony isn’t over yet.” I put my hands together. “There’s another poem that I need to recite, to finish the confession.” She raised an eyebrow, noting my urgency, but didn’t stop me. I continued, making it up on the spot.

“In the name of Line Pythia, I was you confessor.” Goodbye, Yael, Diocletian, Vempress. I’m sorry.

She put her fingers to the door. “That was…” for the first time, I saw her struggling to find the right word. “Not like I had expected.”

I shrugged. “Things get set in stone for a reason.”

She shook her head, a genuine smile on her face. She looked so… human. “Fucking Pythia.” She pushed the door, and as soon as it opened a crack, my helmet was filled with the sound of someone yelling on comm.

“Your head is too high, dumbass! She’ll see you!”

Vempress’s body froze for a fraction of second. Then she turned to me, her face distorted into something ugly. She drew her spear gun, pointed it at me, and shot.