J reaches up, hands sliding across my elbows, both of us slippery with blood. I pull free, driving the knife into his chest.
Air explodes from his lungs in a thick, watery cough, and his hand comes up, fist pushing into the wound, trying to quench the blood. He drops his head back, making a sound that’s half-groan, half-frustrated laugh.
“I always told you that you were stronger than you realized, didn’t I, Romy Silvers?”
I stare down at him, my vision buzzing with spots of black. I can’t think of anything worth saying to him. Instead, I turn to my mother. She’s collapsed on the end of the hospital bed, looking down at the needle sticking out of her thigh. As soon as I read the resignation in her expression, I know it’s hopeless.
I pull out the needle and read the label on the syringe. It’s a lethal injection.
She sacrificed herself to protect me?
“I’m sorry, Romy,” she says.
“It’s not your fault. You … you tried your best. And I got him. He’s dying.”
She gasps, grimacing in pain. “That’s not what I meant.”
I know what she means. J is a tiny droplet in the ocean of issues between us.
“Why did you do it?” I whisper. “How could you just let Dad die like that, without even trying to save him? You just stood there.”
She opens her mouth to answer, but her eyes are already drifting shut. My mind replays the moment of his death, the look in her eyes when Dad fell into that smashed freezer door. But now I don’t see anger and murderous rage. I see pain, and fear, and helplessness. She was lost, and in agony.
Sobs rack my body. “You left me alone. You left me all on my own.”
I thought it was me. I thought she hated me so much that she couldn’t look at me, that she would rather die in stasis than be alone with me. But she wanted a child so desperately that she removed her birth control. She ignored NASA’s rules.
I was wanted. I was really, truly wanted.
She loved me so much, so deeply. That just wasn’t enough to stop the pain when her friends died because of that love.
“I didn’t want to hurt you,” she whispers. She looks so small and fragile. Nothing like the terrible version of her that exists in my memory.
She saved me. She left me alone so that she wouldn’t hurt me too.
I reach out to touch her neck, fingers pressed against her pulse. J lets out a long groan behind me, but I ignore him. He’s too injured to move, let alone find another way to hurt me.
There is nothing to fear here – just a sad woman who has been in pain for a long time. She would never hurt me intentionally. She never meant to hurt Dad.
“I forgive you,” I say finally, not sure it’s true yet, but knowing that one day it will be – and I need her to hear it, in her final moments.
Her mouth forms the word “sorry”, but she’s unconscious before she can make a sound.
It takes a long time for her heart to still. By the time her eyes have stopped darting back and forth beneath her lids, the tears have dried on my cheeks.
My mother is gone, at last. I wish things had been different. But part of me is glad that I got to say goodbye, instead of leaving her in stasis for the rest of my life, caught somewhere between life and death. Neither of us able to move on.
I stand up. My whole body screams in pain.
At some point while I was holding my mother, J went still and silent. He looks so small now, so underwhelming. When I touch my foot to his shoulder, he doesn’t react. He’s dead.
J is dead. My mother is dead. I’m alive.
It was the only way this could have ended.
HOURS SINCE THE ETERNITY CAUGHT UP:
41
I leave my mother and J lying in the sick bay and stagger out of the room, dropping onto my hands and knees in the corridor. My chest feels tight, and every time I breathe I think I’m about to start crying again, but the tears won’t come.
I’m in shock. I’m not having a heart attack, or a stroke, or dying. I’m just in shock.
I curl up on the floor, staring at the mint-green wall and shuddering, reliving the last few hours over and over. The dense sponginess of J’s stomach when I pushed the knife inside him. The smell of burnt flesh after he was electrocuted. The feeling of him dragging me down the corridor, squeezing my wrists. The utter, heart-stopping fear when I realized that he was on The Eternity with me.
I can’t focus on anything. Half-formed thoughts flicker through my mind, appearing and disappearing before I can process them.
I want to go back into the sick bay, to make sure J is really dead. I want to push his body out of the airlock so that he can never follow me again. I want to tear my brain out of my skull, so I never remember what happened, so I can get rid of this awful, aching feeling.
Finally, the only thing that gets me moving is the realization that I’m cold. My teeth are chattering. Shivering, clammy with sweat, I crawl down the corridor, searching for something. I’m not sure what.
A door on my left slides open when I approach, and I go inside. It’s a bathroom. I pull every towel out of the cupboard, wrapping them around me, layer after layer absorbing slick blood and salty sweat.
What do I do now? What is next?
They’re gone. They’re both gone.
I want my own bunk. I want to be back on my ship, in the rooms I know – not this alien, mint-green thing the size of a planet.
I walk out of the bathroom, moving down another corridor, taking myself further away from the sick bay.
The thud of my heartbeat in my ears when J tried to unlock the supply cupboard door. His breath, hot against my neck when he hissed into my ear. The shock wave of horror when he appeared in the stores, staring at me through the crack between packets.
I walk, following lines of red and blue that light up in the floor.
What do I do?
I find a habitation area and sit on a sofa, still wrapped in a thick swathe of blood-soaked towels.
J’s emails. J’s awful, wonderful emails. I shudder, swallowing against the sour taste at the back of my mouth.
The audio calls. Hearing him breathe, waiting for me to speak. His silhouette, standing in the doorway of the airlock when the ships connected. Standing and waiting for me to arrive and see him there.
I tip over and, without quite realizing it, pass out.
HOURS SINCE THE ETERNITY CAUGHT UP:
63
When I wake up, my eyes won’t open. I rub at layers of sleep gunk and salt from crying, but my eyelashes still hurt when I force them open.
J. My mother. The sick bay. Wires. Scalpel.
I feel so dirty. There’s blood all over me, scabbing and crisp and peeling. I long for my own ship, my own bed, my own life. My den to hide in. But I’m stuck here, at least for now.
I walk to the bathroom, leaving a cocoon of towels on the sofa. There’s a shallow ringing in my ears. My mouth is so dry I’m not sure I could talk. When I open my lips, flakes of red blood fall to the floor. I wonder vaguely if it’s mine.