by Hana Starr
His voice broke, and that was the end of it. Everyone sat in stunned silence, taking the information in and mulling it over. Saffron looked around, stunned and disbelieving, and noticed again that strange bitter weariness all around the room. It was almost as though everyone had already accepted this fate, had anticipated it coming long, long ago.
“What are we going to do? We can’t give up!”
Everyone turned to look at her. She tucked her head down, hiding shyly, but she could still feel them watching her.
“What do we do?” Karree laughed hysterically, and then burst into tears. She put her face in her hands. “We wait to die!”
Eban clapped his hand, bringing attention back up to him. “Those of you who have working monitors, bring your system’s operation down to the lowest level possible. If it isn’t part of mandatory life-support, shut it down completely. And everyone must turn off their monitors afterward. There must be no unnecessary waste.”
After that, silence fell again. No one broke it, but for labored breathing.
Saffron kept watching Eban. As soon as the attention turned away from him, he sank down on his chair heavily and put his face in his hands.
Her heart snapped in half like a stressed rubber band as she realized what this meant for him. Once upon a time, he had been so worried about how he would tell his people they were running out of time.
That was his reality, now. The public awaited reassurance out there and he was doomed to bring them death.
Her knees gave out. Dropping down to the cold, hard floor, she put her face in her hands and wept for everything she’d come to know and was now about to lose.
Chapter Twelve
With the entire Icari ship running in a state of perpetual dusk, it took two months for the water system to shut off. That was manageable, though incredibly inconvenient. The ship was rather flat, so the water stores were wider and flatter in the belly of the hold than it was deep, but it was still an annoyance for everyone and made keeping the farming plots watered correctly a near impossibility.
On the plus side, Saffron discovered Tullia’s management notes. Unfortunately, the lights were so dim now that the plants all died anyway. There was no hope of even saving them.
The first of the elders began to die, though not even an autopsy at the medical bay could determine why. Something in the air, the food? Was it simply old age, an illness, or depression? No one knew, but by the end of those two months there was only a single mated couple left alive.
At the third month, the lights went out entirely. A full day of darkness saw all their eyes adjusted but no one was happy about it. It signaled the end of unnecessary movement, and the halt of any number of dangerous, manual jobs which required a clear view to be able to accomplish.
Eban tried valiantly to rouse his Icari to movement, to keep them healthy, but now many of them simply sat in one spot and prepared to die. Their slender frames thinned to skeletal levels.
During the fourth month, a child died. They went for a flight in the dark, missed a leap from one perch to another, and fell from the rafters. That saw the installation of a new rule that no one should fly at the risk of severe punishment.
When Eban announced that, the mother of the dead child began to weep and scream. “Damn you!” she howled, clawing at her own face as her husband leapt forward to restrain her. “Damn you and that clipped human! Punishment? What punishment could be worse than this?”
As she was pulled away and shushed into tormented silence, Saffron knew that she was right but Eban was doing his best to act as though nothing had changed. For once, it was he that was resisting change and his people who had accepted it.
As far as she knew, they were still mated. He slept in her bed most nights, though she didn’t know where he was on the nights that he didn’t. Probably wandering around, weeping in secret as he so often did now. Either way, she had lost all her appetite for sex and so had he.
Six months, two weeks, and six days, the food ran out.
“I give up,” Eban whispered before he announced it, leaning his head dejectedly against Saffron before heading out of the command room to stand in the entrance of the hallway right where it joined at the atrium.
“My people,” he said blandly, not bothering to call out. They would spread the news, and Saffron knew with a pang that her mate hadn’t eaten in several days. He was already weakening, already starving.
I did the same thing, though. We’ll all die together.
“There is nothing more to eat. I’m sorry. Say your prayers and think of home.”
There was no response to him, no outrage. Everyone had already accepted their fate. No one was even moving, their heads bowed. The dead could not be separated from the alive in that moment, and so it would be for good in only another week or two.
“Saffron?” Eban whispered.
She turned to face him. His arms wrapped around her, holding her against his hollow chest as his heart struggled to continue. “Yes, my love?” she whispered back.
He gave a short, watery bark of laughter. “I suppose I never did get to tell you that I love you.”
“You didn’t have to. I knew.”
They kissed, but there was no comfort in it. Her whole body felt so empty that she couldn’t register any sensation or emotion outside of hunger.
“I never thought I would actually have to ask this, but now the time is upon us, isn’t it?” Eban took her hands. “Where would you wish to die with me, Saffron? Where shall it be?”
She didn’t even have to think about her answer.
It took the last of her strength to climb Eban’s ladder. The gravity was going, and the air would soon follow. They curled against each other, their lips touching as they lay in each other’s arms. Saffron was shivering, or was that Eban? It was impossible to tell anymore.
And there was no telling how much time passed. Consciousness fluttered in and out of her mind. She thought she heard explosions at one point, but that might have been just a memory. And she thought that she fell and hit something hard, but it might have just been a dream of that fall she took –a version where Eban couldn’t save her and she hit the ground. If there were voices and crashes, if the dark world spun dizzily in front of her eyes, and if her whole body started to scream with pain, she thought it was probably just part of dying.
Her circle was coming to its close, her life about to end. Her whole world, narrowed down to darkness and gasping breath and aching jabs of agony at her spine.
She hadn’t often thought of dying, not even when her parents passed away, and she hadn’t the mental powers to spare for it now.
“Saffron?”
“Eban.”
Her lips moved, shaping the name of the commander whom she loved, but her eyes were closed and she couldn’t hold on any longer.
Chapter Thirteen
“Wake up!”
From somewhere very far away, a voice pleaded desperately for her. It was male and strangely accented, reminding her oddly of a man with impossibly dark eyes and shaggy hair with bangs that fell down over his forehead. He was a beautiful man, angelic even without the mechanical wings sprouting from the back of his vest.
Suddenly, there were two patches of warmth on either side of her face that felt distinctly like hands. That startled her and she cried out, thrusting out her hands in front of her to try and push away from the stimulus. After so long without, she didn’t want anything to do with feeling anything. It was too overwhelming, too distressing.
Then, warmth settled around her whole body and that was better because there were no confusing contrasts. Held still and secure like that, she didn’t even really mind when the same voice started speaking to her again. Not after quite a long time did the words start to make sense.
“It’s okay,” Eban whispered, rocking her very slightly in his arms. She knew it was him now, was catching up to herself; that rocking was just as dizzying as her dreams, but she didn’t mind that, either. “It’s okay, my love
. My mate, don’t you worry about a thing. Please, come back to me. I have you. It’s okay.”
Saffron swallowed hard and tried to speak, but her mouth wouldn’t quite work properly. Eban seemed to hear her anyway though because he called out, “Someone, fetch me some water.”
A minute later, a damp cloth touched her lips and wetted her tongue when she opened her mouth. It was like heaven, and she pulled it into her mouth to suck on. The water was sweet and tasted like earth rather than a metal holding port. Again and again, the damp cloth returned to her lips until after one swallow in particular, she felt like trying to talk again.
“Eban? What…what happened?”
“Why don’t you see for yourself, my Saffron?” he whispered tenderly. “Open your eyes, and I will show you what you need to see.”
Her eyes felt gummy and swollen, and the light pressing at her eyes was painful, but she knew if Eban wanted her to do it, she would.
One after the other, she peeled her eyes open.
Greenery.
Blinking, she tried again. The vague sheet of shifting green in front of her eyes intensified, and then solidified. Details came soon after.
It was a forest before her, wild and untamed with thick undergrowth. The trees were strange and looked rather more like very tall bushes, and there was a distinctly musky, ancient feel to the air. Actually, the sight reminded her of depictions of flora during the rule of the dinosaurs. The colors were deeper and richer than were to be found back on earth, more olive and ochre than simple green.
Inside the forest, where she lay against Eban, was a meadow blanketed with tiny tendrils of a mosslike material. There were other Icari moving about the meadow, their clothes ripped and threadbare, but the sight of them up and about was so strange that she started to wonder if she was hallucinating.
“What…?” was all she could manage.
Eban shifted her around, turning his body slightly.
Focusing herself again, she looked out again and saw an assortment of slight dwellings, made of wood and twisted scraps of metal. Catching the sight of an interior as someone opened their door and stepped inside, she saw a medical bay bed inside and several objects that had once been on the ship.
“We were so lucky,” Eban whispered, his voice choking. “Not all of us survived. I didn’t know if you would. When I came to, you were on the floor and I didn’t know if you’d fallen, and there was blood everywhere…”
That explained the pain in her spine. “How bad is it? Am I still pretty?” she tried to joke.
“You landed on a broken monitor screen. We didn’t know if you would make it for the longest time.” Tears streaked his cheeks as he gazed at her. “But, you did. You pulled through. And you’re so beautiful. Everything is beautiful.”
Looking around, she noticed a fire blazing in a stone hearth in front of one of the houses. A pan was set over it, tended by an Icari child. Further off, she saw a group of men toting hoes behind them with smiles on their faces. And over there, a woman was dragging an animal behind her. It was dead, a bloody gash across its neck.
Only then, watching that woman drag the animal so effortlessly, did Saffron realize how low the gravity was here.
“Eban?” she asked, her voice uncertain. “Are we dead?”
“No, not us. Many of us, but not you and I. The most we can figure my love, is that we were drawn into the atmosphere of this planet as we passed it while drifting. We crashed, uncontrolled. The ship is in ruins, though we have been trying to salvage what we can. There is life here, everywhere. There is water. There is everything that we could ever want, Saffron. It’s a miracle.”
She laughed a little. It made her back shriek with pain but she clamped her teeth down on it. She was still too exhausted to really be able to think coherently, or feel anything but pure astonishment, but she kept trying for him. “Not a miracle. I’ve told you all along that everything…turns out how it should be.”
“I’m sorry I doubted you,” he whispered, and touched his warm lips to hers. “I won’t do it ever again.”
“Good,” she replied, and kissed him back as best she could. “That’s no way to treat your mate.” A thought occurred to her. “Karree?”
“Karree will bother us no longer.”
“Oh, no,” she whispered. Karree was dead?
“No no!” he corrected gently. “She is very much alive and has been a great help to me. Just, I spoke with her and she saw how much I cared for you. She understands us now, even if she does not approve of it.”
Saffron sighed with relief. As much as she disliked the first mate, the last thing she wanted was for her to die.
“What do we do now?”
“Now?” Eban looked down at her. Though there were shadows beneath his eyes, she thought she saw a bit of his old pride and confidence inside him. “Now, we focus on survival. We strip the ship and see what we can make here. When you are feeling better, I’ll be counting on you to help us with your expertise. I have received a report that your lab might still have some usable parts in it.
“But, for you? You must sleep and I will take care of you. That is what mates do for each other.”
She hardly needed any urging, and her eyes were already slipping closed as Eban continued to murmur quiet plans for their future in her ears. He spoke of farming and hunting, of rebuilding and mapping the surrounding areas, and creating signals to try and communicate with anyone else intelligent who might be here.
And she fell asleep fully as he said, “And someday, when all else has been settled, we will regain our wings again. And this time, I will teach you how to fly. I love you, my mate.”
I love you, she wanted to say in response, but didn’t quite manage. That was okay, however. The way he stroked her hair told her that he already knew.
The End
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About the Author
Hana Starr is a romance author living in the Pacific Northwest. She spends her day at tech startups and at night she day dreams what is beyond our skies – she recently started to puts those dreams on paper to share to everyone. When she is not busy writing, she loves escaping in a book, traveling, and just enjoying life with friends and family.
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