throat violently and spits, then hears the clink and clatter of her frozen saliva bouncing off the deck below. This is cold like she’s never experienced—and still, she can’t bring herself to care. She hits the switch on this side of the hatch. With the sound of tortured machinery, the warmth and light of the backbone above her are cut off.
She is shivering uncontrollably before she reaches the bottom, another five meters down, her hands already becoming remarkably lazy about obeying her commands. She steps off the ladder onto an airlock door set in the floor, the last barrier between her and the vacuum outside. Tunnels lead in both directions, gaps in the several thousand tons of water ice that reach to the ceiling. This is Watertower ice, maybe the last shipment ever. Apparently bounty hunting alone wasn’t enough to pay the bills. She reaches out and touches its glassy surface, but her hands are already too dead to feel anything.
If she could be affected by anything right now, she would be shocked by how little she cares about this, about anything at all. Her fingers are already bending more slowly, and that dark part of her brain is telling her that it doesn’t matter. Sure, some small part of her mind is concerned, but that’s natural, isn’t it? Anyway, you can ignore that, says the dark part. It doesn’t matter, because nothing matters. Stay.
Sarya lowers herself to the shockingly cold floor. She sits with her legs crossed and her hands in her lap, feeling the nerves in her lower extremities first burn and then fall to sleep. She feels some slight warmth from her suit heating elements, and she wonders how long that will last; they’re made for slight chills, not the crushing, killing type of cold she’s sitting in now.
So here she is in this crystalline silence, her own breaths deafening in her ears. She has no plan. She has no future. She watches each swirl of vapor emerge with a bit of her body heat and dissipate into the darkness. Her mind is empty, her body’s signals coming more quietly and farther apart.
It’s not quite silent here. There is still the rhythmic sound of her breaths. The deck still hums with the stunning power required to hurl even the most ramshackle of starships across a solar system. Somewhere between the two, a faint and brittle sound repeats every now and again, distantly. That sound is familiar, though she can’t quite place it. There it is again, louder now. What is it?
It doesn’t matter, says the dark part of her brain. Nothing matters. Stay.
The ice is changing color. It’s warming from a black-blue, diving down the spectrum into a purple and finally a dull red. Again comes the sound, and again. It’s louder now. She fights her own mind to analyze it. It’s—is it?
It’s her own name.
Deep within her, something awakens. A hot fury ignites, driving her to feet that respond like they’re already dead. Freezing muscles curl her into a hunch, but her mind is alive and well and absolutely furious. She has been betrayed by reality itself. She has lost her mother and her home. She has nothing but a Network unit to her name. Her own damn mind has betrayed her, leaving her here in a freezing cargo hold to die. But she has not died, not yet. Her heart still beats, her cells still metabolize, and she is breathing atmosphere. She may be exiled with no mother and no plan, trapped on a budget freighter with goddess knows what for a crew…but honestly, what more does a person need?
She is Sarya the Daughter, of Shenya the Widow. She will not die today.
And then she is on the floor again. Her knees rest on metal and one arm is hooked over a ladder rung. Something salty runs to the back of her throat and she tries to spit, but her lips don’t move. It occurs to her suddenly that there is nothing insurmountable in life, nothing she can’t fix…except for the fact that she has trapped herself in a freezing cargo hold and no one knows where she is. “Helper,” she whispers. But she’s left her Network unit up above, where she can’t reach it. The darker part of her mind has triumphed, and this is where it has left her.
She pushes off sideways, head down, onto hands and knees. The hot flame of her anger sputters but it doesn’t die. What happened