Thrum

The memories end.

Mahdi’s lifeless countenance is beseeching in its silence. Not beseeching; accusing. I take a step back. Another. My heart hammers in my chest. I’m breathing too fast, too shallow; I know I’m hyperventilating. But there’s nowhere to go.

I don’t want to see them, the truth of what I know their bodies will show me. If I simply leave them here, all zipped up, the truth will remain: they died in stasis. I lost my mind on an alien ship. And soon, I’ll die with them, of starvation or thirst or — most likely — hypothermia, when Pioneer eventually runs out of fuel and shuts down. It could be worse, I tell myself. It isn’t such a bad way to go.

But, croons a traitorous part of myself, you’ll never see him again.

“Fuck him,” I say aloud, but it’s weak. Unconvincing.

Turning, I lean over Lily’s stasis pod. She is so beautiful there, so pristine. If I wanted to, I could open up the pod and press my fever-hot lips to her cold flesh. My chest aches. I miss her voice, her laugh, the way she saw how broken I was and loved me anyway.

I miss the way I loved her.

But maybe I’m only cut out for pain.

My thumb presses down on the stasis control panel, and with a soft hiss and a click, it unseals. I lift the glass slowly, almost reverent. Lily’s eyelids are papery, her long lashes still so captivating. Holding my breath, I take hold of the zipper at her chin and pull it down to the collarbone, revealing her throat.

I lean close, so close I can smell antiseptic and the faint tang of death. And there it is: a precise mark, right along the jugular vein. A scalpel incision.

It’s not surprise that renders me silent, or shock that keeps me from collapsing on the floor, that keeps me moving with slow determination. It’s the certainty of suddenly knowing, of being helpless in the hands of a fate I’ve constructed.

I open Mahdi’s stasis pod, lift the glass, and unzip the covering until his neck is revealed. His throat is open just like Lily’s, a crisp line in the skin. And when I come to Vasilissa, I almost wish there was something I could do to change this. But there it is, stark and real upon her flesh: the incision I made.

I did it while they slept. No one woke, not one of them knew they were dying. I contained the blood as best I could, and when each of them was gone, I turned off the artificial grav and carried them one by one to the med bay. I cleaned their bodies, the floors, their bunks. I changed their clothes. I zipped them up in the pods, nice and tight, and I lay them to rest.

And then, finally, I was free to return. They wouldn’t try to stop me again. They should have let me stay with him. If they’d only let me stay.

Mahdi was right. They should have locked me up.

Pioneer’s engines power down.

I press my palm to the control, and with a hiss, her outer door swings open. The ramp descends, and I make my way down with careful steps. I’m standing in a docking bay, watching a man approach. He’s strikingly beautiful, pale, with black hair framing a face that gleams with jet-black eyes.

He is painfully familiar, as achingly real and right as the breath in my lungs, the blood rushing through my veins.

He holds out a hand.

I go to him and take his fingers in mine, willingly, achingly. Finally.

He presses a soft kiss to my knuckles, his black eyes swirling with red haze. He smiles.

In the distance, a deep thrum, thrum, thrum sings through me, inside of me, filling my senses until I’m full of it, overflowing with it, overcome. But I welcome it, revel in it. And the sound responds in kind, caressing, soothing, soaking me in. I am part of it, made whole from it, completed by it. By him. And I am not afraid.

I am safe. I am home.