Chapter 13 #2
The creature’s arm shot out and grabbed Levi as he kept firing, and Levi had only a moment to register a thought: This one is going to hurt.
But it didn’t turn him like the others. Its fingers reached for his face and froze, its head tilting as the metal tips extended into thin wire-like filaments, feeling along his face and temples, cold enough to burn.
They pressed in and Levi heard something on his skin pop and felt a strange cracking as they pushed further, into the bone beneath, and through the bone into whatever was on the other side.
His knees gave out and he was staring at the ceiling and somewhere beyond all of it was Asher screaming his name. Why…?
Something happened in his head.
He was standing in Ethan’s apartment.
The door was open behind him. It was a late afternoon day, there was light through the kitchen window — golden, dust-moted, the kind of light that existed before anything went wrong and would exist after.
His keys were still in his hand. He was bringing Ethan groceries.
The smell of the apartment filled his lungs: Ethan’s coffee, the detergent he used, the particular staleness of windows that hadn’t been opened in days.
He called Ethan’s name.
No answer.
Ethan was on the floor, slumped against his couch.
There was vomit down the front of his shirt, his face turned sideways, eyes half-open, and his lips blue.
Levi dropped the groceries, his phone dialing 9-1-1 before he hit the ground beside Ethan to shake him.
He bought oranges that day to make Ethan fresh orange juice, because orange juice always cheered him up.
It was always odd to him how long those oranges rolled after he dropped them. One of them hit his knee as the operator asked for the apartment’s address.
He was back on the ship. The creature’s dish was close enough that the apertures filled his vision, cycling, and the filaments in his skull were deep and he could feel them moving, branching, reaching into places that held things he didn’t look at.
Behind the creature — through the blur — Asher was twisting Jasper’s head too far around, but Levi couldn’t hear it.
The filaments pressed deeper.
Levi’s body started to come apart. Not with pain, exactly — the sensation had moved past where pain lived and into a colder register, like a machine being disassembled while it was still running. His fingers went numb. His tongue went numb.
The ambulance. The hallway of the hospital.
Fluorescent lights and linoleum and the smell of antiseptic that didn’t quite cover the smell underneath it.
The coffee from the machine near the nurses’ station that tasted like nothing, but Levi held the cup because holding something warm was better than holding nothing.
A plastic chair. His hands in his lap. His hands rolling an orange that he didn’t remember grabbing…
waiting for information that had already been decided by events he wasn’t present for.
The doctor. A man whose face carried the kindness of someone who had done this before and would do it again.
Scan results on a screen. The words arriving in pieces, each one landing separately before rearranging into a sentence: brain activity.
.. minimal... not compatible with life.. . multiple organ failure…
He could hear it in the ship — tck... tck... tck — and the vibration in his chest changed. Not a proximity warning anymore.
Asher was still fighting, Levi could hear blows landing…the shape of Asher yelling, and then a heavier sound: Asher hitting the wall again.
Ethan’s hospital room. There were wires and tubes all over Ethan, running from a hole in his throat, IV’s, sensors…
machines blinked and beeped and hummed in patterns that were supposed to mean alive and didn’t.
The ventilator made the sound of breathing for someone who wasn’t breathing and Levi watched a chest rising and falling in a machine’s rhythm, not Ethan’s rhythm, not anyone’s.
The light from the window fell across Ethan’s cheek the way light falls across a table or a chair or anything that doesn’t know it’s being touched.
Nobody’s home.
Asher had broken free. Levi could see him — blurred, at the edge of his narrowing vision — on his knees beside the creature, trying to wrench it away from Levi’s head. Asher was yelling something.
There was a weight in Levi’s hands. A clipboard.
Heavier than paper or plastic, heavy with what signing it meant.
There was a nurse’s hand on his shoulder.
The doctor explained what would happen when they disconnected the ventilator, the clinical language that existed to make the unbearable sound like a procedure.
The clock on the wall ticked the way it always did, the way it would continue to tick after Levi signed his name and his brother stopped being kept alive by machines.
He signed.
The ventilator sound changed. The steady mechanical rhythm faltering.
Slowing. Ethan’s chest — the rise and fall that had never belonged to him — stopping.
The monitors making a different sound now, a sustained sound, a single continuous tone that filled the room the way water fills a space when a wall breaks — everywhere at once, no gap, no silence between the notes because there were no notes, just the one long line of sound that meant his brother was dead.
I killed him.
The flatline and the apertures merged into one continuous tone, the hospital and the ship collapsing into the same moment, his brother’s death and his own death becoming the same.
His vision was almost gone —the familiar narrowing tunnel, the edges dark, the center still holding. Asher was on the floor a few feet away, bleeding from a crushed nose and the bones of his arm protruding through the EVA suit...
Levi tried to say his name. His mouth moved. No sound came out. Just the shape — Ash — on his lips. He could barely form the thoughts he wanted.
“Levi — Levi, please — tell me what to do —” Asher’s voice broke on the second Levi.
The sealed gloves reached and didn’t reach.
His face was wet, his breathing doing the thing it had done during the blackout, and his mouth was shaping syllables that weren’t quite landing as words.
“You always say this is a game…it’s not a game… it’s not a—”
Something cracked open on his face, his jaw dropping as his eyes widened. “If it really is a game…” Asher’s lips quivered, blood and drool dripping down his chin. “...if it really is a game, I don’t want to play this anymore. I—I want to exit this game.”
Everything went black.