A Destiny Low and Winding

A stowaway on a contaminated ship must choose between self-preservation and connection

Ire Coburn is a recent graduate of a creative writing master's program. By
night, they help people breathe, and by day, they do everything else. Speculative fiction focused on grief is their jam, and they hope to spread the word. They can be found @urban_sith_ on X.

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Temptation Marrs did not expect the captain of The Valkyrie to stumble into her secret base in the cargo bay. It was her own fault, really; she had gotten careless. She had never even considered the possibility that an officer might come searching the freight for a cure to whatever indomitable, alien thing was taking over the spaceship, and she was not prepared for a quick getaway. She should have known better, because here he was, in the flesh, bleeding all over her perfectly good stolen blankets.

“Um,” she said when she saw his face. He was deathly pale; she could trace the mapwork of his veins all the way up into his neck. The skin on his arms was riddled with pockmarks and bubbling with raised blisters. There was also what appeared to be a massive wound somewhere in his lower abdomen, but she couldn’t make sense of its size or shape with his hand pressed against it. “Hi.”

To his credit, Captain Theodore Manna did not take long to adjust. He spotted her, raked his bloodshot eyes down her face, and beckoned her out from her hiding place with an impatient wave of his free hand. She followed, mostly because she didn’t know what else she was expected to do, and because a captain had never given her such a direct order before. He looked like he was an inch shy of death, but his eyes still gleamed with the frosty fire of a man in charge.

He shoved her in the direction of some unopened crates banded across the side with TOP SECRET and HANDLE WITH CARE. She hadn’t noticed these when she’d shoved herself between other boxes in other places within the cargo bay—or, she had noticed them, but she’d also noticed the Andromadic seal on the top, that twist of ink that marked things she had chosen never to touch. She’d decided that she didn’t fancy a years-long prison trip just for snooping, and the boxes had since vacated her awareness.

“Search those for anything that looks promising,” the captain said gruffly, then turned to his own marked stack of boxes. He didn’t have to elaborate; there was no need. Temptation knew what he meant when he asked for promising. She doubted they would find it here. She took a deep breath and readied herself to rifle for it anyway.

The tops of the crates were easy enough to rip off; all she had to do was find the weak spots along the edges and press on them with her bodyweight behind her elbows. She wondered if that meant anything, if the scientists had been this bad at storage the whole time. Some part of her was still worried about the seal and about the words painted on the side, but the other, larger part of her wanted to live.

Inside, her boxes were mostly disappointments: research paper after research paper written in a language she hadn’t bothered to learn, closed vials labeled with elements she recognized from the periodic table, and, in one instance, a glass case carrying something shiny and mint green. She didn’t need to ask the captain if his boxes were more of the same. His groans and curses were answer enough.

“Keep moving,” the captain ordered, shuffling into the aisle. His hand was still on his stomach. It was still seeping red. “We’re not done yet.”

Temptation nodded her head. They moved to the next tower of boxes, then the next after that. Each new, pointless container sank her heart further into her gullet.

“Would it be labeled something as simple as antidote, do you think?” she asked after her last failed attempt, and barked out a laugh, trying to break the tension. The captain did not respond. When she turned, she saw why.

He was on the floor, draped over himself. Red smeared the newest set of boxes behind him, following the path he must have taken as he slid down. She rushed over to him and crouched down to his level, but she didn’t know what to do; she wasn’t medical. Her hands hovered over his shoulders, itching, unsure where to go.

“Name, child,” the dying captain rasped, pulling on one of Temptation’s arms.

 Temptation blinked at him for a moment before she came back to herself. Blood bloomed between Captain Theodore Manna’s lips, spilling down his chin to coat the collar of his shirt. Temptation found herself wishing she’d brought tissues to clean him up—tissues, or a medkit, or some other impossible thing that she didn’t have access to.

“Hurry,” he groaned beneath her, tightening his grip.

“Right,” Temptation said on an exhale, and tried to count her breaths. “Right, okay. Uh, I’m Temptation Marrs, sir.” She glanced at his mouth again. “You’re bleeding an awful lot.”

The captain let out a noise almost like a laugh and brought his free hand up to his face to speak to the watch on his wrist. “Temptation Marrs,” he repeated, and the interface lit up. Temptation realized a second too late what was about to happen. A projection appeared above the small screen, displaying name, age, details. Temptation Marrs, 25 years, she/her. No record of galactic service. Not listed on ship manifest. Criminal history substantial. A grainy picture of her replaced the hologrammed words; she blinked, and it blinked a second behind.

So this is what I look like at the end of the world, she thought, and licked her chapped lips. She found herself…lacking. She rubbed at a drop of the captain’s blood that had smeared next to her eye and tried to tuck a piece of frizzy hair behind her ear.

“Stowaway,” the captain grumbled, the word falling like lead. Temptation felt that same icy stab of fear in her back that she always got at the threat of being punted out of an airlock into the silent cold of deep space. He might be dying, but he was still the captain; he could probably hit a button on that ornate watch and have her escorted to the nearest emergency exit. She wouldn’t be able to save herself no matter what stunts she tried to pull.

He shifted beneath her, moving his head to look more fully into her face. Dark blood rippled from a corner of his mouth, and Temptation tried not to pay attention to the patch on his shirt that was growing again in her periphery. Instead, she let him look at her, and she met his frightening stare. If she was going to die, she wasn’t going to die a coward. Temptation Marrs was a lot of things: near-orphan, stowaway, wanted criminal across two separate galaxies. But one thing she was not was a coward. After a pause, his left eye twitched, and he tongued at a clot, pushing it over his lower lip.

“Sir,” she started, but he waved his hand, making the projected image of her disappear.

“Temptation Marrs,” he said again, directly into what looked like the receiver of the device. Temptation had never been this close to an interface like this before, and it was different from what she had expected. Thicker. “Make her acting captain. Grant full access.”

“Sir,” she tried again, bending over to reach for the watch so she could—could slam her hand over it, or peel it off his skin, or just, just take it and step on it with her boots until she heard it crack. Acting captain. That was ridiculous. That was the mark of a man already dead. She let herself think it fully for the first time, the thought cold and hard to hold in its entirety: she was listening to the captain’s last words. She was the only person to bid him goodbye, and he was still trying to save this ship. It didn’t seem fair.

The captain moved away from her too quickly. He saw her coming and pulled his hand back before she could grab the watch, rolling on his side to tuck it under his armpit. Temptation sat back on her haunches and listened to the roar of her heart beating. There wasn’t really anything else for her to do; he was already mumbling the rest of the script into the watch. She caught the words vessel and clearance and launch sequence. She wasn’t even the one dying yet, and she still felt the urge to cry.

When he was finished, Captain Theodore Manna rolled back towards her and held the device out. She took it from his blood-stained fingers and wiped the red sweat from the inside of the band off on her shirt. She was glad to find that her hands barely trembled as she secured it to her right wrist.

“Thank you,” she said gruffly, because it felt like the sort of thing she was supposed to thank him for.

“Brig will show you what to do,” the captain said through a wince. “Just let them see that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And tell them I love them, will you?” he asked, wiping at his lips again. It did nothing but smear more of the blood around. A tissue, Temptation thought again with a spike of nausea. I’d kill for a tissue right now.

She opened her mouth to answer him, but he was gone before she got out the first full syllable. His hand fell onto her lap, and the whistle of his lungs faded away. She gulped around the lump forming in the long line of her throat and focused on breathing in through her nose, out through her mouth, and doing it again.

“Yes, sir,” she whispered to the corpse when she was ready. His blue eyes were already empty.

• • •

Temptation tinkered with the thought of sticking around for approximately two seconds. Then she moved. She got up from the floor, gently placing the captain’s limp hand back onto the ground. She had no plans to find Brig V. Manna, first mate of The Valkyrie, and inform them of their father’s change in status. She owed nothing to either of them. She wasn’t going to sit on this vessel and die like Captain Theodore Manna had. She was going to get on the first escape shuttle she could find and jump ship. It didn’t matter that she had been made acting captain, or that she was the last person to see the previous captain alive; that wasn’t something she’d ever asked for.

Even though she wasn’t going to find them, she brought the watch up to her face and attempted to speak into the same part of it she’d seen Captain Theodore Manna speak into. “Brig V. Manna,” she said, trying to find the receiver. And: “Please.”

Information pulsed above the interface. She pulled back to see it better. Brig V. Manna, first mate of The Valkyrie, 25 years, they/them. Extensive record of galactic service. Would you like to know more?

Temptation said, “Yes.”

The words above the watch wiped themselves into gossamer pixels, only to be replaced by a scroll of Brig’s entire galactic history. They’d served alongside their father on The Valkyrie since they were old enough to be conscripted. Their rise through the ranks was impressive, even to someone like Temptation, someone to whom it didn’t really matter. They’d been on this very ship through tour after tour after tour, rounding Cygnus X-1 eighty-seven times in the past three years alone. It looked like they’d never taken a break.

Maybe they’d make a better acting captain than she would.

If Temptation Marrs was ever going to serve as a captain, a real one, with all of the bells and whistles, she wanted it to be on a ship of her own, and she wanted it to be real. She already had a name picked out: The Aftermath. Not as stylish as The Valkyrie, but it didn’t have to be, because it would be hers. The Valkyrie wasn’t her ship; now, with the body of Captain Theodore Manna cooling in the cargo bay, it wasn’t anyone’s.

She couldn’t make that dream come to fruition if she stayed here and died like he had.

She came up with a plan, slipshod and quick: get to the escape pods. She would figure out the rest of it there. She had come up with worse plans in her line of work, and look at her now; those had all turned out fine enough. She was on her way down the hall within the first three minutes after the captain’s wet, untimely demise.

Then the ship tilted, and she felt the gravity roll of an engine blowing out in the heels of her feet. One of The Valkyrie’s twin engines going nonfunctional meant the built-in gravity was about to flicker. It also meant that at least one of the genetically linked engineers had died.

Time was up. She needed off.

Temptation knew she had about ten seconds before the gravity shift reached her, out here in the stern with the freight, one of the farthest places she could get on a vessel this large. The engines were situated up towards the bow of the ship, she knew; the effects would push out like ripples in water moving from a marked point of disruption. The stern would be the last to feel it. She slung an arm around the nearest support beam and clapped her hands over her ears, hoping to keep them from popping when the air changed. Then she braced her boots against the floor and waited for the inevitable wave to come down the hall.

Come it did. Boxes and barrels in front of her lifted from the ground, thudding quickly to the roof of the bay. She slid up a bit on the pillar, but at least she knew where she would be when the gravity came back on. As long as nothing moved to settle above her, she would be fine. She brought her knees up and crossed her legs around the column, securing herself somewhere in the middle.

She counted to ten in her head, and then she did it again.

When she reached her third five, the gravity flipped back on. She dropped to the floor, landing firmly on her feet, and shook herself out as she waited for all of the other objects in the air to fall. Once she was sure she wasn’t about to get hit by a stray container, she took off down the hallway.

This wasn’t her ship, but she knew it like the back of her hand. She’d never snuck her way onto a ship whose blueprints she hadn’t memorized. She needed exit points, emergency paths, places to avoid. Only certain ships took trips around Cygnus X-1, and the price for legal passage on a vessel like The Valkyrie was something she couldn’t meet. With its state-of-the-art time constriction service to balance out the time dilation that the black hole would pull on the ship, she could never even dream of affording it. She had learned that years ago when she’d begged ship officials for a way to see her dads and been met with raucous laughter after she presented all the money she’d been able to save. So she had learned the ins and outs of every ship that ever went to Cygnus X-1, and she’d snuck onto The Valkyrie when no one was paying attention. Temptation knew how to look like she belonged somewhere in passing. After that, it was almost easy; all she had to do was find a place to hide.

It took a couple seconds for her to equate the blueprints in the back of her mind to something three-dimensional, but this wasn’t her first time making adjustments on the go. The moment she had it configured, she launched forward with another burst of speed, leaping over the objects that had spilled into the walkway during the gravity outage. She saw the signs for the science wing flash by on her left, but she didn’t need that—that was where the entire bloody issue was. She tried not to think about it as she tore through The Valkyrie, but it was impossible; she’d been made acting captain of the fucking ship because of what was happening in the science wing.

An alien attack from within. They’d hit an asteroid field six Earth hours back, and whatever cage was holding some creature in the lab had—exploded. Cracked. Suddenly, people were dropping like flies, convulsing on the floor. Bleeding out. Choking on their own tissue. It was in the fucking vents. Invisible, undetectable. They were in full quarantine: no one in, no one out.

Temptation did not need to wonder when her own infection would streak through her body and kill her. That was something to worry about later, when she’d dismantled the security array and fudged her way into an escape pod. And now, with the dead captain’s interface on her arm, that would be easy.

She hoped.

• • •

“I know that you don’t know me,” Temptation tried, holding her hands out in front of her chest. “Please, listen. My name is Temptation Marrs. I have to go.”

The uniformed officer in front of her outside the locked escape bay—and how lucky was she, that the name pinned to the front of that uniform read Brig V. Manna—sneered something nasty under their breath. When they looked back up at her, their brown eyes were gleaming with something bitter and angry. “Who are you to fuck with the quarantine protocol? Do you not understand what one hundred percent contaminated means? It means we’re all fucked! It means you have a responsibility not to leave!”

“I know. Okay?” Temptation pressed her tongue into a bloody seam in her lip. “But you have to move and let me open the—”

“Who died and made you king?”

Temptation wanted to come up with a better response than, “Your dad. For starters.” But she couldn’t, and then it was out of her mouth anyway.

Brig had started pacing the hallway in front of her, guarding the door to the shuttles. At the mention of their father, their steps faltered. Something childlike and horrendous flashed across their face, and Temptation leaned back against the wall and tried to make herself a smaller target.

“What?” they asked, breathless.

Temptation gulped around the guilt. Oh, there were so many better ways she could have done this. So many nicer ways. “I-I’m sorry. He, uh. He gave me this.” She turned her hand around and showed them the thick watch. Another expression lanced across Brig’s face. “He made me acting captain. He said that you would…that you’d show me what to do.”

“Did he,” asked Brig without the lilt of a question. Their face betrayed every feeling they were having. Temptation hated it, hated seeing their emotions telegraphed across their eyebrows, hated having to watch it happen. Hated what she was going to have to do next.

“And that he loved you,” she added in a low voice, and finally had the decency to look down at the floor.

When sobs broke out of Brig’s mouth, it wasn’t even a question for Temptation to reach forward and pull them into her chest. It was just the most decent thing she could think to do. Brig stiffened in her hold for that first moment, but they crumpled into her within the next, burying their face into the crook of her neck.

The two of them stood like that for a long, long time. Temptation listened to the sound of their awful breathing until the pace of it settled into something more regular. Their mouth was warm and damp on her skin, but she didn’t dare interrupt whatever fragile peace they could find against her body. She didn’t know them; that didn’t matter. She’d been in their place before, told by someone crueler than her that her dads were in a cryo they’d never set a waking date for. If someone had hugged her then, she thought she would have hit them. Most days, she wished someone had tried anyway.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. Brig’s arms around her waist tightened. “Really, I am.”

“Stop,” they whined, and pushed away from her. She tried to look into their face, but they were shaking their head, swinging blonde hair in front of their eyes. “Stop it. You don’t have to do this.”

“Yes, I do.” She sucked in a breath and felt it move between her teeth. “I didn’t know him, but he tried to save us. He was looking for an antidote, for a way out.”

“Shut up,” they sobbed, but it didn’t seem like they knew what they were saying. They just sounded torn open. Temptation remembered being like them, how alone she’d been in her mourning. How desperate, how afraid. She didn’t want Brig to feel like that.

She thought she hadn’t owed them anything, but that wasn’t true anymore. Their father had died honorably. He had died hoping Temptation would carry on whatever was left of his mission: that she would find Brig, and that they would search for some kind of solution to this. She realized that now. He had depended on her because he had to.

Temptation wanted it to mean something that she’d been the one he found.

“We really can’t leave, can we?” she muttered, finally voicing the fear out loud. She’d come into this part of The Valkyrie to leave it all behind, but it was all pointless, wasn’t it? She stared Brig down and was glad to see that they met her gaze head-on. No shirking. They would have made a good captain, in some other timeline. “I mean, we’d just spread it. Wouldn’t we?”

Brig’s sigh shook on the way out of their mouth. Temptation knew whatever they were going to say next would hurt. “Yeah. It’s—they think it’s airborne. We exhale next to someone who doesn’t have it, we infect them. Then this thing’s in all of us.”

Temptation tried to remember how to breathe. “Humanity shouldn’t end because of one infected vessel.”

“Agreed.” And they sounded like they really meant it, which made Temptation feel like she really meant it too.

Temptation’s knees trembled, and she had to lean against the wall to support herself. It was too late. It was already too late. She’d been dead the moment she’d set foot on The Valkyrie. Her breathing came in hot and fast. She felt Brig’s hand on the bottom of her spine, and she tried to focus on that minor point of contact, to ground herself in the comfort of another human being. If she left now, she’d doom them all. She couldn’t do that. Brig had been right before: they had a responsibility.

She wasn’t going to cower from this.

“Now seems as good a time as any,” Brig said quietly over Temptation’s shoulder. “There’s not really anything I can show you on the HyperFocus. Every planet within a hundred lightyears of us will know we’re unsalvageable. The captain doesn’t even have to activate the distress signal; it’s automatic after the second death. As soon as the captain, um, died too, it would have shifted our status from dire to useless.”

Temptation wondered what it meant that a signal didn’t go out for the first death. If ships like The Valkyrie always had to build at least one death into every trip they took. Something about it made her uncomfortable. If I had a ship, she thought, uselessly, I’d never program something like that. Except she’d never know now. She’d never get the chance to see. She shrank away from Brig’s touch and sank to the floor, bringing her knees up to her chest. Then she wrapped her arms around herself, hooking her hands around her elbows, and slowly began to rock.

“That’s too bad,” she said, noticing a stray thread in her pants as Brig settled down beside her. She thought about The Valkyrie and about The Aftermath. Lives and lives she would never have. “I was really looking forward to captaining my first ship.”

She looked over. Brig smiled. Temptation noticed the dimple in their left cheek and felt sorry to see them die. There was a life they’d never get to lead, too. There was a whole person they would never turn into. Twenty-five was too young to die. That was…that was nothing. They were both supposed to get so much more time.

“Did you want to be captain?” she asked quickly, overcome suddenly by the urge to know. What had they wanted to be? Who had they been training to become? She looked at the interface on her wrist—the HyperFocus, she’d never had a word for it before—and considered undoing it and handing it over. Brig V. Manna was built for this, weren’t they? She unfurled, letting her knees fall back down.

Brig huffed out a laugh, and it sounded like their father’s. “Never in a million years.”

Temptation’s fingers paused where they were fiddling with the strap. “What did you want to do?”

Brig’s nose twitched. “I wanted to be a painter.”

Of all the things they could have said, Temptation thought that she was least ready for something like that.

“What?” she asked, almost choking on her spit. “A painter?”

Brig swallowed. Temptation watched it. “Yeah. I was going to…” They trailed off and sucked in a deep breath. Temptation thought about reaching out and circling her hand around theirs. She didn’t. “I was going to talk to my dad—to the captain—about taking a leave of absence when we got to port.”

Eighty-seven trips around Cygnus X-1. A dozen other trips across other star systems in between. Right.

She looked at the watch and brought her hand back to twist it around her wrist. She couldn’t give this to them. Oh, she couldn’t do that to them. Years and years of being their father’s perfect kid, and now they were going to die because of it, trapped in the ship they’d never wanted to be a part of. The HyperFocus was her responsibility. She wouldn’t make it theirs. There would be one person in Brig’s life who listened to them.

“What does the V stand for?” Temptation asked instead.

Brig let out another laugh like a shot.

“Victory,” they said, voice scratchy, brown eyes wet. They weren’t looking at her anymore. Their expression appeared far-away, left behind, as they stared hard at their scuffed shoes. They were seeing something Temptation wasn’t. Their dad, maybe; she was certainly picturing hers. Her death would be a postcard in the mail. Something for them to look at if they ever woke up. Maybe they wouldn’t even remember who she was. “What a joke, right?”

“Brig Victory Manna,” Temptation whispered, and tried to remember how the fullness of that name felt rattling her gums. It would probably be one of the only times she would say it before the end. “And I thought my name was bad.”

“Oh, oh,” Brig said, chuckling. She wanted to hold onto that laugh, wanted to remember it in her final seconds of consciousness as The Valkyrie drifted through the endless cosmos. “Temptation Marrs has opinions on names?”

“At least I got it honest.” She did snatch Brig’s hand up from the floor then, curling their fingers together. They were warmer than she thought they would be. That was something worth remembering, too. “Temptation Marrs, child of Avarice Consumes.”

Avarice’s face swelled to the front of her mind: he’d had kind eyes. It was one of the things she’d hated the most about him when he’d left. That he could make leaving look like a kindness.

“There’s no way that’s real!” Brig said. And there was that laugh again.

“Just wait. I’ll show you my birth certificate when we get off this hunk of space metal.”

Temptation smirked mirthlessly at the floor. She felt Brig’s fingers tighten around hers. They weren’t leaving this ship. She knew that now. Not alive, and maybe not even dead. They were contaminated, all of them, every single passenger and crew member. There was no safe corner on this vessel. It was only a matter of time before whatever was inside them exploded through her brain matter too.

“What did you want to be?” Brig asked in a wet voice.

Temptation considered lying to them for a moment, then realized that she couldn’t. They’d told her about their true self. She would tell them about hers. “I really did want to be a captain.”

The silence between them stretched until it was taut. Temptation licked her lips and was about to do something to break it when Brig finally replied. “Is that why you snuck onto The Valkyrie?”

Temptation’s head snapped up. When she looked at Brig, they just looked apologetic. “I’d remember your name if I’d seen it on the ship manifest.”

Every year she’d spent in freefall—lost, alone, trying to survive—came over her in a rush. She hadn’t wanted to lie. Her mouth moved before she could stop it. “This ship is big. That manifest must be lengthy.”

Brig’s mouth tightened. “Not lengthy enough to forget a name like Temptation Marrs.”

Temptation blinked at them. “How long have you known?”

“Since you turned up and introduced yourself.” Then, when Temptation just stared: “You should really stop telling everyone your full government name.”

For lack of any better response, Temptation grinned.

“You’re probably right,” she said through a cackle. She tipped sideways, bumping shoulders with Brig. They were touching everywhere now. If she turned her face into their neck, she thought they probably wouldn’t mind. “I should have come up with an alias by now.”

“To be fair,” Brig said into her hair, “it’s a killer name.”

After a minute, the mood sobered again. That was fine; Temptation was expecting it.

“I always kind of thought we were alone out here,” Brig whispered. It sounded like the kind of secret you don’t confess to unless you’re sure, totally and absolutely sure, that you’re going to die. “I never really, um. I don’t know. Believed we’d find something we couldn’t contain.”

Temptation’s gut reaction was: Stupid, Brig, that’s so stupid.

Of course they weren’t alone. The universe was vast, vast, vast—more of it uncharted than was bound to a map or a page. They’d never been alone. That was small thinking, believing a universe full of galaxy after galaxy after galaxy could only sport one sentient species capable of expansion. That was selfish thinking.

Temptation had always believed in that. In not being the only sentience this side of Andromeda. It was one thing to believe it deep in her marrow, but it was another thing altogether to feel as some creature thrummed aboard The Valkyrie, watching as it tried and failed to initiate contact.

Brig let out a soft noise, and Temptation tried not to notice it. She tried not to hear it, right next to her ear. She was thinking. She was thinking for the first time in a long, long time about something other than herself. It left a bright taste on her tongue.

If she had been an alien being tasked with finding her species a new home—if she had been left with one option over dying in the wide endlessness around her—if her cage had been split apart during a rocky trek through an asteroid belt that hadn’t lit up on the map—if she had seen the opportunity, and if she had grown up learning that humans were a thing that existed, something with legs and eyes and arms and heartbeats and bones, with more ways of navigating the world than she would ever possess—if she had been placed onto a class-A vessel and given no other choices—

“I have to go,” she said quickly to Brig, shoving herself upright with her free hand. If she didn’t go now, she would never do it. She’d stay here in this space with Brig, and she’d die with them when the hermetic seals gave out, and so would the alien she was trying to save. “Move, I know what to do.”

“What?” Brig asked, but they let go, extricating their fingers from hers. They looked ridiculous below her, splayed out like a frog. Their blonde hair was hanging in front of their face again, draped over one hard brown eye. Temptation thought about giving in and kissing them full on the mouth, just to know what they tasted like, just to know the feel of the thing she would never again get the chance to do, but something in the ship rumbled beneath her, and she sprang into action. Brig wasn’t hers. She wasn’t here for Brig. She was the acting captain. And she was here to save them.

She thought of their father and hoped that he knew he had made the right choice, betting on her. Wherever he was now, she wanted it to be nice.

“I know how to fix this,” she said with a smile that she hoped Brig would remember in the horrible hours to come. “I know what the alien wants.”

She knew what Brig’s next question was going to be. Before they got to it, she held up a finger. Don’t ask me. Don’t. I can’t lie to you if you ask. She walked quickly and swiped the HyperFocus over the nearest door to the shuttle bay; it let out a warning about contaminants and pulsed red. It listened when she swiped the watch again, though, rising open with a yellow warning light. “Get everyone to the shuttles and go. You’re getting out of here, Brig Victory Manna.”

She wondered what kind of painter they would be. She was only really sorry that she wouldn’t get the chance to see it.

Then she turned on her heel and sprinted down the hallway, following the signs to the science wing of The Valkyrie.

The door was locked, but that wasn’t anything to the acting captain of a ship. She swiped the HyperFocus over this door too, and the pad let out a soft green glow as the door zipped out of her way. She rushed inside and listened to the quiet humming in her limbs as it guided her through this wing she had never been in. She pictured the ship’s blueprint and maneuvered past labs that didn’t mean a thing to her, past great machines whirring and whining in the dim silence of the abandoned unit. Lights flickered above her, but that didn’t slow her; something in her knew where she was going. She was being led somewhere, dammit, by something she couldn’t name. Some would call that God. Temptation Marrs called it destiny.

The low light in this part of the ship did nothing to hide the thing that was waiting for Temptation when she finally made it to that room at the edge of space and time. She felt unmoored here, separate from the rest of The Valkyrie. Untouchable. The thing glowed in its broken container, leaking blue into the creases between the metal plates that made up the floor. Temptation watched it for a moment—for several moments, enraptured and mourning all the same—and knew, with a clarity sudden and intense, that the thing was watching her back. She couldn’t see any eyes, but those weren’t necessary; it was a feeling, deep within her, that noticed. The bit of her head that was humming with a song she couldn’t decipher got louder, then the sound vanished, leaving sticky fingers in her skull.

Destiny. Here it was.

Temptation sucked in a slow, trembling breath through her teeth and heard the air whistle between the gap in the first two. She thought of Brig for some inane reason and swallowed around the sadness that thinking about them left in her throat. There was no point in running or hiding or punting herself out of the nearest airlock; this thing was in her, the same way it was in everyone on the ship. Temptation didn’t feel any different: no molting limbs, no extraneous thoughts. But there was a pressure at the back of her neck, an asking of a question; something was crying inside her brain stem, and it was strange and new and fearsome.

It wasn’t bad, though. Temptation doubted this creature knew how to be a bad thing. It was just an unfortunate thing. A thing bottled up and lost, searching for meaning, clinging onto the hope that someone, somewhere, would be able to understand it.

Wasn’t that every creature in this star-fucked universe, though? Wasn’t that Temptation, too? She’d gotten a taste of understanding from Brig, and it had opened up the rest of her synapses. She’d happened across a bit of understanding from the captain, and she’d become the leader of a cruiser she had no license to run. To be understood—wasn’t that what every living thing wanted? Wasn’t that worth all the pain it took to get there? Temptation didn’t believe in a god, but she did believe in this: in lingering next to people who could make you feel seen for the first time in your galaxy-forsaken life. That wasn’t a crime. That was just a life. That was just living.

All this thing wanted to do was live. Temptation couldn’t fault it for that.

She would give it a place to do just that in the short time they had before The Valkyrie bid a final goodbye to her passengers.

Temptation took another deep breath and closed her eyes, opening herself up.

“Come out,” she said, and was glad her voice only shook a little. “Leave everyone else. I want to know you.”

Hesitance blossomed in her shoulders, echoing across her back. She shook her arms out and focused on the sticky feeling that dripped between her vertebrae. First contact, wasn’t it? First successful contact, that’s what they would write about when they found her. Hundreds of attempted first contacts, and Temptation was the one who got to hold onto the real deal. It was okay that she wouldn’t survive it to the end. She knew her death was creeping towards her the same way she knew that her fathers were never going to pick her up from the spaceport, that they were spinning around Cygnus X-1 until the universe blew itself up: she knew it because it was true, because it had always been true. She had never imagined dying anywhere else but on a space vessel. This time, though, she pictured her name printed across a page and felt her heartbeat quicken under her sternum. At least it wouldn’t be for nothing. She had never let herself think of a death this heroic before.

“Leave them,” she said, and her voice was stronger this time. “They don’t matter. Let them go. I am the one who wants you.”

Something warm grew in the space between her clavicles. She felt matter gathering itself under her throat: pieces of the alien that had been sitting dormant in other areas of the ship, pulled from the minds of people who didn’t know that the thing could want.

She hoped that Brig wouldn’t be the one to find her like this after the vessel went down. Anyone but them. They didn’t deserve that.

So many things had stopped mattering since the captain’s death. This was the one thing that still did.

Anyone but Brig, she thought out into the universe, pushing on the thought, expanding it out as far as she could. Don’t make them be the one who has to clean up my mess.

The universe echoed endlessly around her. She didn’t know if anything was listening. Probably not. But it was worth it to ask, she thought. Worth it to try. If anything could keep Brig from being the first person to find her, she hoped it would listen.

“Come out,” she repeated, and heat, bilious and bright, split through her head.

• • •

Thank you, Temptation Marrs. Thank you for your understanding. I promise to treat you well.

• • •

Zie woke up, together, on the wrong side of a door.

“What the fuck happened?” a scratchy voice cried. There were hands underneath zir arms, and it took a moment for zir to orient zirself: first to each other, then to the movement of that conjoined body, bulky and impossibly combined. Zie was not moving zirself, zie realized, as zie mapped out neck, arm, chest, hip, leg. Zie was being dragged.

Look up. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, look up. Please.

The neck tilted backwards, and the eyes craned towards the ceiling. When zie made contact with the one pulling them along, zir body wanted to gasp, or cry, or leap out of their warm hands.

I’m sorry, Brig, I’m so sorry. I didn’t want it to be you.

Zie tried to speak, but Brig made a noise low in their throat like a growl, and zir mouth closed. Zie tried to keep track of where zie was in the ship, but it was hard when zir vision kept doubling and tripling back over itself as the two beings inside of the body curled around each other over every cranial nerve. Being alive was glorious, but it was also exceedingly difficult, senses firing repeatedly, a frenzy of awareness. Zie bit down on zir tongue without meaning to and tasted the flash of blood down zir throat.

When zie finally realized that Brig was heading to the escape shuttles, it was too late; they were already there, and Brig was already moving zir towards the last one, its red light blinking a warning. Zir eyes caught on to bits of the world around zir, and it was like being born again all over, to realize that the other shuttles were gone. That zie had done it. Zie was the last of the contaminated. It was wondrous.

It meant that zie absolutely could not get onboard that shuttle with Brig.

Zie struggled a bit in Brig’s grasp, flopping like a fish or like a—mnescatm, a piece of that melded mind thought, and got the image of something small and slippery, more sensation than actual memory. Temptation didn’t have anything like a mnescatm stored in the remnants of herself; this was a fully alien sensation. Like a fish or mnescatm. Sure.

“No,” the body that once belonged to Temptation Marrs cried out, struggling. “Let us go. It wasn’t supposed to be you.”

“Fuck you, it wasn’t supposed to be me,” Brig swore, pulling the body up to zir feet. They looked at zir, and their face creased in a way that made zir body hurt underneath zir ribcage. There were tears on the edges of Brig’s eyes, and zie wanted to reach out and thumb them away. But zir body was not just zirs any longer; zir body was a shared home.

Please. Let me.

Zir hands were trembling as zie placed them on Brig’s cheeks, but Brig was shaking so badly anyway that it hardly mattered. The two bodies met each other at the same place. There was blood on Brig’s palms when they wrapped their fingers over the back of zir hands, but it was fine; it was zir blood anyway. Zie briefly wondered where zie was bleeding and mentally moved about the flesh towards coppery warmth, finding it at the back of zir head, right at the base of zir neck. Brig must have felt at the wound before deciding to pull zir out.

“You shouldn’t have come back,” zie said in a voice that only a little bit didn’t sound like Temptation’s voice. Zie felt again like zie was about to cry and dug zir fingers into the soft places behind Brig’s ears, feeling at the hair that brushed around them. “You should have lived.”

Zir voice broke on the last word, and zie felt zir chest caving in, gravity sucking it back to zir spine. Brig was supposed to be out of here, on a shuttle zooming to the nearest planetary port, sending out SOS signals through every radio wave they could find. Instead, they were here. Propping themselves against a wall and staring at zir, the universe’s latest creation.

“Screw that,” Brig hissed, moving their thumbs across zir skin. “Screw leaving you behind. I’m not letting you go down with a ship that isn’t even yours, Temptation.”

I’m not Temptation anymore.

But that didn’t feel quite right.

I’m not only Temptation anymore.

That was better.

“Your dad,” zie started, but Brig grunted so forcefully that zie didn’t finish the sentence.

“My dad,” they said, pulling on zir arms, cleaving the space between them into smaller and smaller halves, “didn’t know you. I do. I’m not losing you too. Don’t you dare do that to me.”

Zie was something new, something uncharted. Zie was human and alien at the same time, and zie was also neither. And Brig had come back for zir. Brig hadn’t listened to Temptation.

“You were getting your out,” zie hissed, and felt like the words were being ripped from zir teeth. “You could have had your leave.”

Realization flared in Brig’s eyes, dark and violent. Their hold on zir tightened, pressing down hard enough that zie could feel it in the bones of zir wrists. “Oh, fuck you, Temptation. You didn’t do this for me. Tell me you didn’t do this for me.”

“Not just you,” zie said, and Brig exhaled hard through their nose.

 “I didn’t ask you to do that,” Brig whispered when they could finally reply around some swell of feeling zie saw pulsing through their body. “No one asked you to do that.”

“We know.” Zie did know. Temptation had known when she had chosen it. It hadn’t stopped her.

Brig tugged on zir hands, urging forward again. “It’s still time to go, Temptation.”

Something was clotting zir throat. Zie choked a cry down and tried to speak without whimpering, digging zir heels into the floor. Zie couldn’t let Brig do this, not without warning them. It felt strange to refer to zirself as something unmeshed, but zie said, “I’m not alone anymore. I’m not…who I was anymore.”

Brig scoffed. “As if that matters. Get on the fucking shuttle. We’ll figure it out there.”

The being that was not only Temptation laughed. It was thick and drenched in some unnamable emotion. “No one else will die. We promise this to you.” Zie felt it in the depths of zirself, this truth. Temptation really had done it. She’d given the creature a place to live, a refuge inside of her own body. Zie felt dizzy at the thought. “It’s not in anyone else.”

“Great,” said Brig, dropping zir hands and shifting away. In a quick movement, they were at zir side, circling an arm through zir elbow. They began to walk, and zie had no choice; zie followed after them, step for step, pulled along. Brig was breathing so much of zir air. Zie heard every intake of Brig’s breath like an echo through zir own body. Airborne, was it? “You’ve got it contained. That means we’ll make it to the nearest planet and get you figured out.”

“If you left us here—”

Brig’s head whipped around to stare into zir eyes again. “Are you going to do this the entire ride?”

Zie couldn’t help it. Zie sobbed.

“I’m serious,” said Brig, continuing onward. They were entering the shuttle now, Brig and Temptation and that unnamed thing. A shuttle just recycled air, zie remembered. A shuttle with something airborne would mean nothing. If they weren’t fully merged—if either parts of zir gave up—

We’re not giving up, came a thought, unbidden, from that new, pulsing part of zir brain. We are complete now, Temptation. Are you going to refuse our new self?

No, the part that still housed Temptation Marrs responded instantly. No, never. Of course not.

Zie dipped back into sensation. Brig was still looking at zir. “I am physically incapable of having this argument with you for longer than the next five minutes,” they insisted.

“Why?” zie coughed out, wiping at zir eyes. They burned. “We got it out of you. We did it.”

Brig’s gaze softened. “You did.”

“I’m supposed to be dead now,” zie whispered, speaking singularly from both parts of that shared self, filled with wonder and dread. “But I’m not.”

“You’re supposed to be alive, Temptation,” Brig said, still not understanding. They were leading zir through the doorway now. Another foot, and they would be sealed in together. Zie looked at Brig and felt a surge of something through zir throat. “Like I said, no one told you to sacrifice yourself. Let’s get you off this galaxy-cursed ship.”