I'd been sent to the sick bay enough times to recognize the distinctive smell of old blood and disinfectant before becoming fully conscious. A woman was pulling the makeshift blinds over the first porthole. She hummed a song to herself as she moved between the rows of beds, bustling from one circle of sunlight to the next, cutting off the outside world one flick of her wrist at a time. My blood felt heavy, sluggish, weighed down by the opiates that reduced the pain to an annoying buzz that disappeared when I tried to listen too closely. Stitches tugged at my flesh as I groggily moved my head in an attempt to get my bearings. A line of spit trickled down my chin onto the clean white shirt that had at some point replaced my salvaging gear. Lazy shuffling drew closer and a smiling mass of wrinkles appeared at my side.

“Good morning, sweetheart,” she chimed with enough enthusiasm to make my skin crawl. Despite that, I couldn’t help but return her smile.

“Good morning, Mrs. Turner. How are you?”

“Oh I’m quite lovely actually,” she replied, bending to wipe away my drool with the corner of her apron. “How are you feeling?” I chuckled and my stitches dug in, chastising me for finding humor where none should exist.

“I feel like I got hit by a train and managed to stand up just in time to get hit by another train.”

“Well,” she chided, “perhaps you shouldn’t spend so much time playing by train tracks.” I rolled my eyes and accepted that I’d died and been sent into my own personal hell. Mrs. Turner had been an old, delirious woman when I first moved onto the Ascension and over a decade of mostly unsuccessful surgeries and weeping mothers had done little to preserve her mental standing. She limped off to get me a cup of water, her tightly wrapped bun bobbing awkwardly out of sight.

I sat up with a groan and looked around the sick bay. I was alone. An assortment of differently-sized beds, military cots, and hammocks lined the walls, each on flanked by a bedside table and makeshift IV stand. Unlike the rest of the holds, the sick bay looked as clean and serviceable as it had when the Ascension was an active cargo ship. A flotilla of rolling tables topped with surgical instruments and gauze waited against the back wall. My scavenging instincts refused to let me ignore the cabinets and dressers packed with supplies. A vase of sickly flowers on my bedside table caught my attention and I picked up the note taped to its side. It read, “Get well soon!” with hearts instead of o’s.

Looking around quickly grew tiresome. A noticeable chunk of my childhood had been spent within those four, well-scrubbed walls—the first time I dislocated my shoulder when my father tipped a shot down my throat and told me to stop being a bitch right before he popped it back in, the time I accidentally swallowed river water and almost died of excessive vomiting and dehydration, and who could forget when Phillip severed his pinky showing off a knife trick, and when he severed his ring finger while showing off the same knife trick. Mrs. Turner reappeared with water and I gratefully drank as much as I could before my stomach protested.

“I have to go check on Micah,” I said as I started to swing my legs off the bed.

“Sweetheart, I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” Mrs. Turner warned a moment before I discovered why. My left leg halted with a metallic clatter and I threw off my blanket to reveal a set of handcuffs securing my ankle to the baseboard.

“What the hell is this?” I demanded, turning to glare at her.

She picked up my cup and mumbled, “Why don’t you take a nice little nap while I get you some more water,” as she fled from the room. I tugged against the handcuffs several more times before accepting that I was more prisoner than patient. It made sense after all, we had returned days later than expected. But worse than that, we returned unsuccessful, and if there was one thing that I knew for certain, it was that death is infinitely preferable to failure. Footsteps, too steady to be Mrs. Turner, rang against the bulkhead and I turned to the door just as Captain Strevko entered. He wore a black suit, somehow still crisp despite the dirt on his pants, and a black tie, sharp and straight.

“I hear you were hit by a pair of trains,” he said. I ignored his halfhearted attempt at small talk,

“I’m sorry, Captain… I tried to save him, I tried to save them both, I promise I did. I did everything I could, everything anyone could possibly do.”

“I believe you, Silas,” he assured me in a soothing voice. “Pavel’s death was not your fault.” Hearing the blatant truth for the first time froze my blood.

“So I didn’t get him here in time,” I whispered to myself. Captain Strevko’s brow furrowed and he lifted my chin so I had no choice but to look him in the eye.

“Pavel died long before you came home, Silas. You understand that, yes?”

“Yes,” I lied. He nodded and took a deep breath, giving himself a moment to fully prepare his next question.

“Silas, tell me honestly, did my boy die well?”

“Yes,” I lied again. He removed his hand from my chin and sat on the foot of my bed.

“The Council will need a full report when you’re on your feet again, but as a father I have to know… what happened out there?”

‘It was going well,” I began. “We arrived at the hunting ground on schedule, I swept a building without incident, and then it was Pavel’s turn. Kroffman and I waited outside, like always, but when he didn’t check in we got worried. Kroffman said we should follow protocol, mark the building, and get the hell out, but I refused to leave. I went in after him and found one of those things. Pavel had been in hiding, but when I stumbled in like an idiot he yelled and got its attention. It… it gutted him like it was nothing, just ripped him apart. So I shot it, and it didn’t like that very much, so it tackled me through a fourth story wall and we hit the pavement.”

“Are you sure it was one of them?” Captain Strevko interrupted.

“Pretty damn sure,” I snapped.

“And that’s impossible,” he continued as though he hadn’t heard me. “A fall from that distance would have completely shattered your ribcage. You would not have been able to stand, let alone travel.”

“She saved me,” I blurted before I could stop myself. “She reached inside of me and fixed what she could. She told me that I would be okay, but that I must learn to be careful because she would not always be able to help when I needed her.”

“Who?” he asked, leaning in breathlessly. “Who said there things to you?” My eyes fell.

“I don’t know.” I felt his eyes boring into me, concern at war with disgust. Eventually, he patted my shoulder and said,

“I recommend leaving that part out when you speak to the council, yes?” I faked a smile to reward his effort and looked past him to the obscured circles of light.

“Captain?” I asked tentatively.

“Yes, Silas?”

“Why are the portholes covered?” He turned to follow my gaze and then released a sigh that he had been holding in for some time.

“They’re putting him in the ground as we speak, Silas. I dug his grave at first light and now I sit with you, the one who he gave his life for.”

“Don’t you want to be there to say goodbye?” I asked. His mouth twisted into an emotionless smirk and he subconsciously shook his head.

“I have said goodbye to two wives and twice as many daughters and I fear carving ‘Strevko’ into another headstone would break my heart beyond anything in this life’s ability to repair.”

“Well then…” I replied awkwardly, floundering to think of a way to console him. I could not hope to understand the sheer weight of his accumulated sorrow he carried every second of his life. Each step must have cost him greatly, a defiant continuance of his misery, his feet digging down through the soil and the rock to the molten core that would burn away his armor of scars and absolve him of his loss. Absolution was a concept with which I had a disgusting degree of familiarity, and as such, I didn’t believe it could still be found, at least not by those who searched for it. A kinship blossomed between my commander and I—he, the dedicated father who had been there at Pavel’s birth, and I, the loyal friend who had been there for his death. I tried to summon the perfect words, the words that would sooth his worries and allow him to begin to heal. The words were there, nuggets of gold locked at the back of my consciousness, just beyond my reach. And then the moment was gone, and we were once more Silas Connelly and Nikolai Strevko.

“Would you like to play some checkers?” he asked.

“Sure,” I answered quietly. “Would you mind getting the board? I’m a little attached to this particular bed.” He patted my leg with a wry chuckle and went to the game drawer. Checkers was one of the only board games we had we had that still contained both the complete set of pieces and the rulebook. Monopoly relied on a barter system because all the money was gone. Sorry became little more than a drinking game once the little colored avatars were replaced by shot glasses. We never bothered with Life since none of it was the least bit relatable. Captain Strevko sat back down and we set up the board. I always played as red.

He moved forward. I moved forward. He took my piece. I took his piece. He moved forward. I moved forward. Our hands jerked mechanically across the checkerboard, sending soldier after soldier to their death in a last ditch effort to keep our thoughts at bay. We played seven games over the course of the morning. I let him win every one of them. He packed up the game without a word and put it back into the cabinet. There was nothing left to talk about except all the things neither of us wanted to discuss. He walked over to one of the portholes and pulled the cloth aside.

“It seems the ceremony is already over,” he noted with obvious disappointment.

“I wish I could look for myself,” I shot back, jangling my shiny new ankle bracelet for effect. Captain Strevko sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Silas, you have been honest with me and so you deserve for me to be honest with you. For now, we would all feel a little better knowing where you are at all times. With your father’s history of coming back alone…”

“I am not my father,” I hissed.

“No, you are not, but people are scared that you are much more like him than you realize. Bitter memories walk hand in hand with your family name, and such misgivings always seem to manifest themselves at every opportunity, yes?”

“My father helped to make these people safer, devoted himself to them without complaint for almost a decade.” The words sounded strange as they left my mouth, as though spoken by someone else I had never met before. It had been years since I’d defended him.

“He was also a… unique man with many strange habits and a reputation for taking men out on patrol who never came back.”

“Yes, my father survived more than his fair share of scrapes. And now that I’ve done the same, everyone suddenly thinks that we have a dark family tradition of murdering our friends so we can make millions off of selling their organs to science?” Captain Strevko’s eyes narrowed at my sarcastic tone. He was not known for tolerating insolence. “You trusted him enough to make him your right hand on the Council. You made him the pastor of our church, the guardian of all our souls.”

“Did you ever consider that I made such arrangements so that I could watch him all the more closely? So that he would remain here, away from all the horrors and temptations of the world? Like it or not, your father was a secretive man, a man feared by many and trusted by very few.”

“But—”

“Look, Silas,” he pleaded, “even you can admit that people have a right to be concerned, yes?”

“Bad luck isn’t grounds for imprisonment,” I grumbled.

“No, my judgment is,” he snapped with every bit of the authority I remembered and respected.

“Yes, Sir,” I replied. He clapped my shoulder and nodded.

“Feel better, Silas. We’ll get this all sorted out as soon as we can.” For some reason his words failed to comfort me in the least.

After he left, I decided to take that nap Mrs. Turner had recommended. Gentle waves lapped at the shoreline, leaving dark bands across the sand as they carried bundles of flotsam to safety. Palm trees bent lazily back and forth, rooted children on upside-down swing sets, lovingly pushed by the same breeze that ran its fingers through my hair. The stray thought of a physical aspect spawned it into being and the rest of my body followed, beads of sweat dripping from my midnight locks to pool into my toes and feet and legs and bowels and heart and lungs and arms and all the muscles and bones therein. My face was left a blank slate of flesh, broken only by a single eye that never blinked. I walked along the beach without purpose, enjoying the sand that fell between my toes. The water was clear and mellow blue, reflecting sunlight into beams of color that waltzed above the surface. But below the surface, so close they almost broke through, were the ferocious predators that waited impatiently for me to say hello. Their danger was too blatant, too unrefined for me to take seriously, and so I dove into the surf. The ocean was without salt, pleasantly warm and even welcome as it surged against my iris. The predators were gone. I was alone as I floated down and farther down, to the tangles of coral that climbed over one another to suckle at the faded sunlight. As my feet settled into the fine sediment, billowing fronds unrolled from inside the coral. Jagged towers of orange and green and blue and purple stretched into trunks of muddy brown. The water drained away through hidden pipes and I found myself on the beach once again.

And then I woke up. The sun was setting and the room looked more like a red light district brothel than an infirmary. Sitting up caused my head to swim and sent plumes of fire coursing through my lungs. I lifted my shirt and was surprised to find far less damage than I’d expected. Angry, swollen lines dissected my entire chest, a mosaic of surgical cuts stitched together with fishing wire. Mottled yellow and purple bruises stretched down to my belt. Internal lakes of blood dotted the sickly landscape. I didn’t understand why everyone was making such a fuss. The human body was a resilient machine, built to withstand attacks by predators and harsh environments alike. I was unsure of what had constituted a “reasonable” cause of death before, but I wouldn’t expect to be remembered with anything but laughter if I died from one little tumble out a window. Suddenly I realized that I really had to pee.

“Hello?” I called. A head immediately swung into the doorway and said,

“Yeah, Silas?”

“Really, Benny?” I asked. “The Captain seriously has me under guard?” At least he was polite enough to keep his assault rifle slung over his shoulder. “I’m just following orders, Silas. It’s nothing personal.”

“Well then get this damn thing off my leg so I can go empty my bladder, unless you want to hand my yellow sheets to Mrs. Turner and deal with that disappointing look.” He laughed and fished around in his pocket for the key. Benny Kennedy was best known for his calm, almost indifferent demeanor, the handmade soda can lid bracelets that went almost to his elbow, and the handlebar mustache that he somehow kept oiled and curled to gentlemanly perfection. He unshackled me from the bed and helped me swing my legs over the side. The bulkhead was shockingly cold against my bare feet. Benny Kennedy wrapped one of his arms underneath my shoulders and bore the majority of my weight down the hallway to the latrine. And then he stood awkwardly at my side while I pulled my zipper down.

“Can I have some privacy, or would you like to watch?” Apparently he didn’t want to watch because he grumbled something about waiting in the hall and left. When I was done, I pulled my zipper back up and painfully stumbled to the mirror that hung crookedly above the sink. My eyes were brighter than before, rings of bubbling silver around dilated black holes. A jagged crack split my reflection in two. I pressed my hand against the glass and left fingerprints on my face so that I knew it was really mine.

“You done in there?” Benny Kennedy called from the hallway. I held my gaze for a few more seconds before I replied,

“Yeah, you can take me back to my cell now.” He lent me the stability of his body again.

“I see that you didn’t fail to inherit your father’s love of hyperbole,” he said as we made our way back to the sick bay.

Doctor Holliday was waiting for me. I didn’t know the doctor very well, he never went on patrol and much of his time was divided between caring for patients and his Council duties. He kept his blonde hair close and his narrow face shaven. His white lab coat was always clean, the twin .44 revolvers strapped to each leg always loaded. A woman I had seen around the ship but had never officially met leaned against one of the portholes. She never took her eyes off of me as Doctor Holliday shook my hand and relieved Benny Kennedy of my weight.

“Here’s our miracle boy,” he said as he helped me back to my bed. “How are you getting along?”

“Like I can’t walk on my own and my abdominal cavity is filled with knives,” I replied, sucking in a breath as I was lowered back onto my prison and shackled into place.

“Good to hear,” he responded seriously. “I’ll be honest with you, Silas, you should be dead. It’s a god damn miracle that you’re not dead, because you really should me. I mean, I physically cannot stress enough how dead you should be.”

“I get it,” I snapped. “When can I get scheduled for another patrol?”

“That’s the bit I still can’t believe,” he replied as he checked my breathing with a dented stethoscope. “Any other person who managed to survive a shattered ribcage would have serious respiratory issues for the rest of his life, but you, you look like you’re not only going to make a full recovery, but will pull it off in record time.”

“Well that’s good to hear,” I said cautiously.

“I’m sure it is. Unfortunately, it’s also completely impossible. When I cut you open, I expected to find a lost cause. Instead, it looked like you’d already gone through extensive reconstruction. It looked like someone had stuck theirs hands into your chest and put it back together like a gory little jigsaw puzzle.”

I wanted to tell him the truth. I wanted to tell him how absolutely right he was and explain how she had saved my life, how she had put me back together like a gory little jigsaw puzzle. I shrugged.

“I’m just lucky I guess.”

“Yes,” he said with obvious distrust. “I guess you are.” We stared at each other long enough for the moment to become uncomfortable and then he glanced at the sick bay’s third occupant. “How very rude of me!” He gestured the woman forward and she too shook my hand. “Silas, this is Katherine Vosner. If you don’t mind, she would like to speak with you.” I looked her up and down without subtlety—wrong side of middle age, streaks of grey in her hair, glossy black purse bulging with hidden contents, clothing like any other member of our colony—even with my injuries and bound ankle, I was sure I could kill her if the need arose.

“I suppose,” I said. Doctor Holliday bowed out of the room and Ms. Vosner pointed to the foot of my bed.

“May I sit down?” she asked politely.

“I’d prefer that you didn’t,” I answered coldly. She smiled and sat on the cot to my left. I didn’t like her voice, the way that every word prowled just at the edge of accusation.

“I came in earlier but you were asleep,” she continued as though she couldn’t detect my hostility.

“I was tired.”

“Well I can imagine, everything you’ve been through. Do you sleep well?” I felt my eyes narrow.

“You know I don’t.” Her smile broadened.

“Very true, I do know that you don’t sleep well. What else do you think I know about you?”

“I think you know that I don’t like meeting new people. I think you know that I don’t have the most stable temperament. And I think you assume, just like everyone else, that I am exactly like my father.” Her head cocked ever so slightly to the side.

“How quickly you push the focus from yourself to your father.”

“It sort of becomes force of habit when everyone around you makes the same comparisons time and time again.” She nodded slowly.

“I see… I performed your father’s psychological evaluation when the two of you first came aboard.”

“So you’re a psychologist?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” she conceded. “Just think of me as someone who has an above average ability to read people.”

“So this is my psychological evaluation?” She smiled again.

“Yes, yes it is. So how about I stop trying to keep this conversational and just get straight to the questions I’m required to ask you?”

“I’d like that,” I breathed, settling a bit more comfortably into the bed. She reached into her purse and pulled out a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen. Her voice became razor sharp, her tongue a scorpion tail that flicked with threatening grace.

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“When was the first time you killed someone?”

“Damn,” I replied with a smirk. “Not even dinner first, just right down to the nitty gritty.” She flashed me a wink and placed her pen at the start of the first line. “I was thirteen. It had snowed the night before so every footstep had a satisfying crunch to it. I was out with Earnhardt and Jeremy and we’d been following a set of footprints for a few blocks. They led back to a little flower shop with boarded-up windows and voices inside. There were a lot more people in the area back then, mostly families struggling to exist and groups of bandits. From what I can remember, no groups were as large as ours, and none of them had a home as easily defendable as the Ascension.

But anyway, Earnhardt and Jeremy took up positions on the other side of the street and I waited in the alley behind a dumpster. I remember that my legs ached from crouching for so long and my breath made little drops of water that ran down the metal side. Eventually, a man came out to smoke a cigarette. His pistol was shoved in his belt and he seemed a lot more relaxed than he should have been. I did it just like my father had taught me. I kicked out one of his knees, put my hand over his mouth, and slid my knife between the vertebrae at the base of his skull. He just… he just turned to mush. One second he was a solid body with thinning hair, and the next we was a puddle of flesh at my feet. He bled all over the snow. I never saw his face. After that, Earnhardt breached the door and I heard a man curse and a woman scream. He shot them both and we took everything worth taking.” I swore there was a tiny glint of pity in her eyes as she looked at me.

“So your first taste of conflict was as the aggressor?”

“Yes,” I answered without a hint of guilt. “Very rarely do I let a situation progress far enough for me to be trapped on the defensive.” Her pen scribbled away as she nodded a few times to herself.

“What do you want, Silas?”

“Pardon me?” I asked. She glanced up from her notebook.

“It’s an incredibly straightforward question. What do you want?” She’d caught me off guard and it took a minute for me to consider all the implications heaped upon her incredibly straightforward question.

“I want my brother to be able to sleep soundly through a night. I want him to get a real education, to have friends and someone who loves him. I want him to be happy, but more importantly, I want him to be safe.”

“I asked what you wanted, not what you wanted for Micah,” she corrected sternly. I blinked several times and answered,

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand the difference.” She made a notation and cleared her throat.

“How would you define the word fear?”

“Fear is the one emotion that will both save your life and get you killed. It’s what reminds us that, for all our technology and history, we are also just animals struggling to reproduce.”

“You speak very well for someone who has spent his early life as a nomadic scavenger,” she commented without inflection.

“My father believed that language is one of the most important skills someone can master. He’d have me read long, difficult poems like Paradise Lost and The Epic of Gilgamesh. And then he’d flick me on the head whenever I stumbled over a word or mispronounced a syllable.”

“It sounds like you had a very strict upbringing.” I shrugged and tried not to become lost in misplaced nostalgia.

“There’s a lot a boy has to learn if he wants to make it to adulthood.” She turned the page and continued to scribble.

“You seem to have a very casual attitude towards our predicament.” I laughed.

“Predicament? Maybe to you that’s what it is, but I was born into this. You look out that porthole and see hundreds of reminders of a life that you can never have back.”

“And what do you see?” she asked quickly.

“I see the world as it is, not how it should be. And that’s why I’ll still be eating cans of tomato paste long after you’ve completely decomposed into the ground.” She smiled and shook her head as though I’d just told a politically incorrect joke.

“You’re a very pessimistic young man, Silas Connelly.” She dropped her pad and paper back into her purse and then her hand reappeared with a stack of photographs. “I’m going to show you some images. When you see each one, I want you to say the first word that pops into your head.” I rolled my eyes and stretched my arms.

“That is the most stereotypical thing you could have possibly said.” It was her turn to roll her eyes.

“The sooner we get this over with, the sooner I can leave you alone.” She took my silence as permission to continue and showed me the first photograph.

A cardboard box of puppies sat on a sidewalk surrounded by squealing children. The pets were advertised at ten dollars each and a portly woman collected bills from uncertain-looking parents a short distance away.

“Adorable,” I said.

A fully-grown dog crouched low to the ground, lips pulled back and tail blurred as it prepared to bolt after the Frisbee that sailed over its head. I was immediately reminded of the savage canines that had taken Pavel’s legs.

“Ferocious,” I said. Her brow furrowed and she looked at the picture herself to make sure she had shown me the correct one.

A train raced through the countryside, an enormous plume of smoke billowing out from the pilot. Rusted compartments extended past the edge of the frame and I could not even begin to guess how long the contraption was.

“Complicated,” I said as my eyes moved from one interconnected metal shape to another, each piece insignificant and yet absolutely essential.

A crowded fairground spread into the distance, colorful tents and carnival rides surrounded by an endless horde of people moving every which way. Baseball caps hid their eyes from the sun. The thought of being surrounded on all sides by strangers made me queasy and the fact that the picture had been taken from a vantage point meant the entire area could easily be turned into a sniper’s playground.

“Exposed,” I said.

A man and woman lay on a tangle of sheets; sweat shining on their skin as the woman’s face contorted with pleasure.

“Secret,” I blurted. One corner of her mouth twitched and then the knowing smirk was gone.

A tank stared off to the side, all deflective angles and brutal power. A wreath of hanging dust made it clear that the war engine had just fired a shell. I had explored several tanks abandoned throughout the city at military checkpoints.

“Tomb,” I said.

She showed me the last photograph and I blinked a few times to make sure that I wasn’t seeing things. A man sat at the center, his sallow face split by a cheery grin, his eyes wide and almost manic. A chubby baby sat on the man’s knee. Garbed in bright red footsy pajamas that were several sizes too large, the infant reached gleefully toward something held by the photographer. A sultry teenager stood behind his elder’s shoulder, eyes pointed defiantly to the ground, hands stuffed deep within his pockets. I snatched the portrait from her hand and ripped it apart. Ruined scraps spiraled to the floor and my hands shook well after there was nothing left to destroy.

“Gone,” I said. Her face had remained stoic throughout my outburst and showed no signs that it was going to change.

“Well I think we’re done here,” she finally stated. “Thank you for your time, Silas.” She stood and gathered her things.

“Wait,” I said quietly. “What did you decide?” She looked puzzled.

“What did I decide about what?”

“About me.”

“I didn’t decide anything about you,” she replied in a softer tone. “I simply made some observations.”

“Well what did you observe?” She sat back down and glanced towards the door as though she expected someone to storm in and drag her away.

“You don’t know who you are,” she told me with absolute certainty. “You are highly educated and yet you will never be able to put that education to use. You are capable of great emotion and yet believe repression is almost always the best course of action. You are extremely distrustful of others and yet you have a driving need to be accepted and appreciated. The only person you have ever truly known is the one person that you strive to forget. You are a living paradox, a man who was never a child and a child who has no idea what kind of a man he wants to be.”

“Oh,” I replied with obvious disappointment. “I thought you were going to tell me something that I hadn’t already figured out on my own.” She stepped forward and gently touched my cheek.

“You’ve done far too much introspection for a boy your age, Silas. I’m glad I had the chance to meet you.” She walked away from my bed. The residual warmth of her fingers burned against my skin.

“Ms. Vosner,” I called after her. She turned and raised an eyebrow.

“Yes, Silas?”

“I’m sorry that I didn’t let you sit on my bed.” She smiled at me with genuine sincerity for the first time and replied,

“That’s okay, I’m sorry that you can’t let go of things you have no control over.”

She left and I was unsure of what to do with myself. It was unnerving to discover that even a professional was unable to see past the obvious layers of my personality to the horrors that lurked just below the surface. But to be fair, even I was unsure of where I ended and the ghosts began.

Five days of crushing boredom and assisted bathroom breaks trickled by before anyone else of note found time in their schedule to pay me a visit. I was about to take my afternoon nap when the door clanged open like it had been struck with a battering ram.

“Why am I not surprised to find you lounging about like a little bitch while the rest of us do all the work?” he said. I scoffed and strained to sit up.

“You’re just mad that you’re not the most crippled person on the ship anymore,” I shot back. Phillip flipped me off with his disfigured hand before throwing his arm around my shoulders.

“Good to see you back alive, brother,” he said without a trace of his earlier humor.

“Sorry that I came alone.” He removed his arm and said,

“You know the rules, Silas. No regret, no what if’s. You leave that shit behind and focus on what you can do tomorrow.” I nodded. “Thatta boy.”

Connor swept into the sick bay and crossed to the cabinets without bothering to glance at us. He opened one after the other, scanning each interior with the practiced eye of a career scavenger.

“Well it’s nice to see you too!” I yelled pointedly.

“Seriously,” Phillip laughed. “What the hell are you doing?” Connor continued rifling through boxes of latex gloves and bottles labeled in medical jargon for a palpably long time before answering.

“I’m looking for those little suckers that Mrs. Turner used to give us when we were kids.”

“What?” Phillip asked incredulously. “Everyone knows she ran out of those years ago, you idiot. Come see how shitty Silas looks.”

“Thanks,” I grumbled.

“Damn,” Connor remarked as he pushed my leg out of the way and sat on my bed. “You really do look like shit.”

“Well what happened to you?” I asked as I swept my hand across the mohawk he’d apparently decided was a good idea while I was gone. He knocked my hand away and replied,

“Hey, don’t hate on the hawk. You have no idea how hard it’s been to keep the ladies away since I got this thing.”

“Oh I believe it,” I said, leading with a verbal jab before coming at him with the haymaker. “I’m sure they swarm you all day long with razors in an attempt to shave that scraggly thing.” Judging by the sour look on his face, he hadn’t lifted his gloves in time to block.

“I look sexy as hell and you know it,” he stated with an overcompensating amount of bravado.

“You look like a giant douche,” I informed him with a smile. He smiled back and lifted my pack up off the floor. Someone had already removed everything of value, but my more personal finds were still inside.

“Get anything good?” he asked as he threw the blouse and butterfly journal onto my sheets.

“Not particularly,” I conceded. Phillip raised his eyebrows at the femininity of my loot and said,

“Silas, I know you’ve been spending a lot of time lately out in the radiation, and so as a friend I have to ask… are you secretly growing a vagina?”

“Yes,” I replied solemnly. “I’m glad that it’s all out in the open now so I can stop living a lie.” Connor lifted the prescription bottle I’d found and shook it. When nothing rattled inside, he unscrewed the cap and got visual confirmation of its emptiness. And then he shook it again.

“Why would you pick up an empty pill bottle?” he snapped with sudden aggression.

“It wasn’t empty when I found it,” I answered. “I kind of shattered my ribcage, Connor. If that’s not an excuse to take some painkillers than I don’t know what is.”

“Fair enough,” he said with a chuckle. “Well, Philly Three, we’d better get back before Mrs. Salburg realizes that we haven’t planted a single pea yet.”

“Alright,” Phillip sighed. “We’ll stop by again sometime soon,” he promised as they left. Honestly, I was thankful to be alone again.

My time in the sick bay was a droning, unending torture. I was tired of talking. Mrs. Turner would pull a chair up to my bedside and talk about the weather and her old house and what her thrilling career as a secretary had been like while she knitted the most hideous sweater I had ever seen for hours on end. I was tired of being shackled to a pole like some rabies-infested dog. I was tired of being a liability, tired of being completely dependent on others. I wanted to run somewhere, to climb something, to breathe the toxic air, to kick open a door, to shoot something in the face—anything besides just lying there helplessly as a discarded dissection project they had forgotten to put out of his misery. And then I got a roommate.

“Aren’t you a little young to be dying?” he’d asked.

“Aren’t you a little old to still be living?” I’d asked him in return. Then he cackled until blood spilled down his chin and we immediately became friends.

Apparently Frank had been living aboard the Ascension long before I stepped foot within her rusted hull, but I’d never seen him, never spoken to him, never heard him spoken of. It took Mrs. Turner changing his bedpan and asking how his day was to convince me that he was even real. But once that was all sorted out, I began to study him as I would a tiger in a zoo. Frank was exactly the kind of old man I would want to become if the odds of me surviving to that age weren’t astronomical. He spoke with an unquestionable arrogance that silenced any possible rebuttals before they could be thought of, his lumpy jowls quivering with every word. His hair was like a toupee of molded steel, the strands never breaking ranks as they stood defiantly against the ravages of time. But as much as I respected a commanding tone and a strong hairline, it was his unrelentingly grouchy demeanor that won me over. He described my vase of flowers as “something you send a floozy to butter her up before letting her know that she won’t be getting a single damn child support payment for a brat who doesn’t even look like you.” When I told him that my favorite book was The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, he spat on the floor and recommended that I “spend my time on books written for people besides dimwit housewives before my balls drop off.”

I couldn’t believe how old he was, how much his skin looked like a sun-beaten hide hanging loosely around a wire frame. But despite his frailty, his hands remained strong. They did not shake. They had not lost any of their grip. He liked to gesture when he talked, his hands flowing like water through the pauses in his sentences, his fingers like calloused hydras being charmed by the sound of his own voice. In short, he was a beautiful, crotchety unicorn hidden amongst a herd of malnourished donkeys.

He was a veteran of the Vietnam Conflict, a fact that he was immensely proud of and seemed to view as the ultimate evidence of manhood. He fondly recalled nights spent huddled in foxholes, days of trekking through tangled jungle, ferocious firefights with camouflaged enemies that taunted him from the shadows. He became hilariously frustrated whenever I pointed out that the harshest moments of his life were on par with an average day on patrol. From what I’d read, the United States military had never been particularly impressive. They were well-equipped, well-fed, paid, motivated—all things that, to my mind, coddled them to the point of laziness. It seemed to me that the best soldiers would be ones that were kept hungry and uncomfortable, men just waiting for something or someone upon which they could unleash their aggression, not pudgy delinquents who either felt removed from normal society or possessed a double helping of patriotism.

“Do you know why clocks make the best dictators?” he rasped one sunny afternoon.

“You know I don’t,” I replied as I thumbed through the crinkled pages of a department store magazine. Apparently everything was fifty percent off this week only.

“Because clocks are the most selfish bastards this world has ever seen. They don’t care if you overslept or got stuck in traffic, they just tick tick tick along.”

“Well what if you just break the clock?” I asked.

“There is always another clock, boy. If you break your clock, you don’t know what time it is. Time doesn’t stop moving, you just don’t know exactly how quickly it’s leaving you behind.

“Sounds like I need to get a clock,” I yawned.

“You don’t have a clock?” he yelped in horror. “How do you keep track of what time it is?”

“To be honest, I don’t give it much thought. The sun rises, and then it falls, and then it’s dark, and then it’s morning.” He chuckled and took a sip of brandy.

“I guess you never have to worry about time when you’re young. Just wait until you’ve got a few kidney stones under your belt and your balls hit your knees when you walk. The more time you see go by, the more you cling to the little that you have left.”

“That’s some depressing shit, Frank,” I said as he took another drink and then refilled his glass from the bottle at his side. Liquor was something that we never had to go without. Behind the welcome mat of every, and I do mean every, American household is a stockpile of enough booze to make Dionysus blush. The first few months of patrols, carried out long before my arrival, carted back so many boxes of liquor that Captain Strevko removed alcoholic beverages from the official list of approved salvage. “Should you really be drinking that?” I asked.

“Hey!” he growled, stabbing his glass at me with enough force to slosh some brandy onto the floor. “My heart is a whiney bitch. I’m not.”

“Speaking of,” I said as I swung myself off my bed and dropped to the floor. “I apologize for how much I’m about to make you feel like a frail old man.” A pained grunt informed me that I was the one who should feel like a frail old man as I extended my arms and lifted my body off the bulkhead. My daily regimen always began with pushups. There had not been much muscle on my bones to start with, but a month of mandatory bed rest had seen almost all of it cannibalized to help in the healing effort. My body was a Soviet Union of marrow and tendons, a driving conglomerate willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of the individual parts so long as the whole continued to lumber forward. I often feel that the Soviet Union would have been able to weather the end of the world incredibly well, such a pity that it collapsed so close to the finish line. If Captain Strevko was any indication of what the Red Army had at its disposal, they could have easily hammered the new world into submission. I rolled over and began lifting my torso until my elbows brushed against my knees.

It often surprised me how much I know about the old world compared to my peers. At the time, I had hated my father for forcing me to read at every spare opportunity, but as such child-parent conflicts usually go, I am now eternally grateful for the key that he provided. Ignorance is a cage. It cannot be broken, it cannot be escaped, it can only be unlocked, slowly and with great care, until you realize that the cage never truly existed. It also often surprised me how many different places my mind could visit when allowed to wander off. I finished my workout and crawled back into my bed. Pain throbbed down my ribcage as I breathed, but the discomfort was buried by the pride I felt at finally being able to function at an almost normal level.

“So when are you getting the hell out of here?” Frank asked.

“Mrs. Turner said that I can leave whenever I want.”

“So then why are you still here?” he pressed. I shrugged.

“I want to make sure that I’m in good enough health to get back out on patrol as soon as I go.”

“You want to head right back into that shit as soon as you’re done recovering from the last round?” he asked. I nodded.

“When I think I’m up to it, I’ll go see the Captain and volunteer for the next patrol.”

“Don’t you want to see that brother you’re always going on about as soon as you can? I don’t think I’ve ever seen him visit you.” The mention of Micah lodged a burning coal of guilt in my throat.

“I asked that he not be allowed in until I said so. I didn’t want him to see me like that.” Frank nodded and took another drink.

“Silas…” he said. “You’re being a pussy.” I blinked several times in shock and then glared at him across the sick bay. My hand subconsciously drifted towards my empty belt.

“Watch it, Frank.”

“I’m just saying, I’ve seen it before. Men who have escaped death by the skin of their teeth get addicted to the rush, to the pain, to the smell of blood. Tell me, can you even imagine going back to your daily chores?”

“No,” I answered honestly. I had become an expert at leading people to validate their own assumptions about me. He picked up his bottle and held it out.

“Then welcome to manhood, the special time in a boy’s life when he has to take fun behind the woodshed and blow its head off so that he can spend all his time doing shit he hates doing.” A smile tugged at my mouth like I’d been hooked by an impatient fisherman and I tipped a mouthful of fire down my throat.

“So how am I supposed to deal with this newfound, boring manhood?” I asked. He cackled and took his bottle back.

“Knowing you, you don’t. You suck it up, keep your belly full of good liquor, your bed full of easy women, and you ride it out until you finally get to die.” We both laughed and I didn’t have the heart to tell him how wrong he was, how much I had lied to him. He wanted to help, but it was not his help that I needed. I wasn’t addicted to pain, I was afraid of having time to think. I was fine with Micah seeing me weak, he’d helped me change the dressings on bullet holes multiple times before, but he had never seen me broken by our shared affliction. I would never again be able to promise him everything would be alright if he saw for himself that everything was not alright. But he had struck a nerve—I was being a pussy. And so, for the sake of my brother, I decided to do the one thing I had vowed to never do again on several previous occasions.

I suddenly became aware of how long I’d been staring off into nothingness and yawned in an attempt to feign tiredness.

“Well, if you’re so eager to get rid of me, I guess I’ll leave tomorrow morning.”

“Good,” he said. “All this sharing is bad for my heart.”

“Worse than all the drinking you’ve been doing?” I jibed.

“Much worse,” he answered. A long pause followed.

“Thanks, Frank,” I finally said.

“Don’t mention it, Silas. For some reason, I actually enjoy your scrawny little company. Come see me sometime when my ticker isn’t on the fritz, I’ll make you a clock.” For those long weeks, Frank was the only tether that kept me from being washed away by a storm of melancholy. He was my grouchy guardian angel. And even if his failing mind forgot, I planned on holding him to that promise of a clock.

That night I dreamt that I was standing in a blank room with blank walls and a floor that glowed with enough light for me to know that light still existed. Before me, cut into one of those blank walls, was a pane of glass, and through that pane of glass was a boy tied to a chair. His hair was long and tangled, white and shining like newly fallen snow. He looked at me through the glass and smiled. Then his smile opened wider and his tongue uncurled its spindly legs and crawled out from between his teeth. It disappeared beneath his clean white shirt and then the boy stopped smiling. He stopped looking at me. I blinked and he was on fire, flames erupting across his clothes and burnt skin flaking off to reveal stretches of muscle.

He screamed silently and thrashed against his bonds, shaking his head in terrified denial, kicking his feet even as the bones in his toes fell off and rolled across the floor. I beat against the glass and screamed for help until each collision left a red streak. The ropes that held him crackled and fell away. He crawled towards me, his beautiful face a mask of bubbling flesh and melting hair. “Help me” he mouthed as his steaming breath blurred the glass. I couldn’t help him and I knew it. He knew it. We both knew that he was doomed. His eyes popped and milky fluid ran down his cheeks a moment before he toppled to the floor and spasmed away the last of his life. I backed away from the window and stumbled as my foot struck something solid. I fell back into a chair and ropes slithered out from under my shirt to bind me tightly in place. A man in all white entered the room and cut out my tongue before forcing a grotesque creature into my mouth to replace it. He wiped the glass clean and then left. I looked through that glass, looked into the eyes of the boy with hair like snow that I saw there, and I smiled.

I woke up before the sun and pulled on the pair of clean socks that Mrs. Turner had laid across the foot of my bed. My boots were still crusted with mud as I laced them tight before collecting the rest of my gear. Frank’s snoring was nearly deafening as I opened the sick bay door and exited into the hallway. Rather than continuing to the latrine as I had countless times over the past month, I instead limped down the nearby set of stairs. Farther and farther down I went, past even the most remote living quarters and storage rooms, past compartments that had not been visited for years, past the darkest hollows children dared each other to enter, and still farther down until the soothing echo of water lapping against the hull was high above. Keeping my left hand against the wall, I strode forward into the pitch blackness past one doorway, another doorway, until I found the junction. I turned left and, at the distant end of the hallway, a single lantern fought to hold the dark at bay. A man in a wool cap sat on an old cargo crate beneath the light, clearly asleep, his head leaning against the wall as drool dangled from his chin. The clang of my approaching steps roused him however and he raised his gun.

“Who’s there?” he asked nervously.

“Calm down, Terence.” I laughed as I emerged from the gloom. “It’s just me.” He lowered the weapon and wiped his sleeve across his face.

“The prophet said you’d be coming,” he stated with disbelief. “I heard him say that he’d get to see you soon.”

“Don’t call him that,” I snapped.

“Sorry…”

“Does he talk to himself often?” I asked, running my eyes up and down the reinforced doorway behind him.

“More and more every day.” I nodded and clapped him on the shoulder.

“Why don’t you go get some coffee, I promise I’ll follow all the procedures.” He bit his lip and looked to the side.

“I don’t know, Silas… You know how Father Gregory feels about visitors.”

I looked Terence in the eye and said, “I’ll deal with the preacher. And you know that if anyone but me had caught you sleeping on duty you would have gotten the lash.”

“Maybe coffee is a good idea,” he conceded. “Alright, but don’t take too long.”

Terence walked off, casting one last uncertain look over his shoulder before disappearing. I took a deep breath, forced it down to the very bottom of my lungs, and exhaled slowly through my nose before twisting open both hatches and withdrawing all seven bolts. The door screamed its rusted metal scream as I pulled it open and I almost choked on the horrible smell within. He was reciting the alphabet. He was saying all twenty six letters of the alphabet in twenty six different voices.