Chapter 4
WHEN ‘PROBABLY NOTHING’ BECOMES ‘DEFINITELY SOMETHING’
MIKAELA
The day after Tina collapses, I wake up… fine.
Well, “fine” is relative, but on a broad scope, I feel okay.
Tina is still recovering. She’s lying flat, her skin looking like thin paper and her eyes glassy.
Alex has her on strict bed rest, which in Alex-speak means: “move and I will tie you down.”
I lower myself onto the mat beside her, careful not to jostle anything, and hold out the bowl I brought.
“I brought porridge,” I say. “Gourd and a little meat. It’s not gourmet, but it’s soft. How do you feel?”
“Like I got hit by a truck,” Tina rasps. The words scrape on the way out. “But better than yesterday. So… yay?”
“Do you remember anything?” I ask. “Before you went down?”
She squints, scanning back. “One second I was making notes on Drakav anatomy, and the next my stomach tried to evacuate through my throat.” Her mouth twists. “I don’t recommend the feeling.”
I wince. “Yeah. Hard pass.”
Alex appears then, moving in that focused way she gets when she’s worried. She presses a full waterskin into Tina’s hands.
“Drink,” she orders. “Slowly. You’re behind on fluids.”
“I’m always drinking,” Tina mutters, but she obeys. “It just doesn’t stay where it’s supposed to.”
I watch her carefully. The thin sheen of sweat on her brow. How the waterskin trembles in her grip. The way her shoulders sag as if gravity suddenly doubled.
She looks… depleted. Like something is quietly siphoning her strength.
And she’s not the only one.
Lucy lies curled on a nearby mat, knees drawn up, arms wrapped tight around her stomach. She hasn’t puked like Tina, but she’s complained about brutal cramps all morning. She’s on her second full waterskin since breakfast; I know because I watched Alex refill it from the spring about an hour ago.
Across the cavern, Pam sits near the wall with her back braced against it, eyes half-lidded. She’s been drinking almost constantly too, throat working in steady swallows, but her lips remain stubbornly dry and cracked.
A thin thread of unease pulls tight in my chest.
The morning drifts by in uneasy slow motion.
Those of us who still feel mostly functional go through the motions: grinding fibers for mats, mending clothes, scraping the flesh out of gourds. But the usual hum of chatter is muted. Every cough, every shift, every pause draws eyes.
We’re all waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It does, just before midday.
Amelia is helping Erika sort through the bundles of firebloom we’ve collected. I’m close enough to hear them talk—argue, really—about whether the firebloom is more like paprika, or just straight-up painful like biting into a raw pepper.
Then Amelia goes quiet.
She presses one hand to her stomach, fingers splaying.
“You okay?” Erika asks, head snapping up.
“Yeah. Just… cramping.” Amelia tries to wave it off, but there’s a stiffness to her voice that sets my nerves buzzing.
Fifteen minutes later, she excuses herself and retreats toward the sleeping area. When I slip back to check on her, she’s curled on her side on her mat, arms locked around her middle, face slick with sweat.
She manages a small, brave smile when she notices me. “Hey. It’s fine. Just… feels like my intestines are trying to claw their way out. Nothing I can’t handle.”
But I see the death grip she’s got on her waterskin. The way she flinches when she shifts, thinking I’m not watching.
I find Erika near the cooking fire a little later, and we trade one of those loaded looks where no one wants to say the quiet part out loud.
“Is it just me,” Erika finally murmurs as I crouch beside her to help turn skewers of lizard-chicken over firestone, “or does this feel like something’s going around?”
“It’s not just you,” I say. My voice comes out flatter than I intend.
She swallows, jaw tightening, and we both turn back to the fire as if cooking harder will fix anything.
The rest of the afternoon leaks away. We keep busy because that’s what humans do when we’re scared and can’t fix the problem in front of us. We scrub, we organize, we double-check stores.
My body is weirdly tired even though I haven’t done anything physically demanding. My thoughts keep circling back to Tina. To Lucy. To Amelia and Pam.
By evening, the exhaustion has settled into my bones.
I sit with the others near the fire, meat on a rib in front of me. It tastes like dust in my mouth. I chew, swallow, take another bite more out of duty than hunger.
When Erika suggests I turn in early, I don’t argue. That alone tells me something is off.
But sleep does not come.
I’m hot. Not feverish-hot, exactly—just…wrong. Like I’m wrapped in a heavy coat on an August afternoon and someone keeps edging the heater closer.
I roll onto my other side, pressing my back against the cool stone of the wall. The chill seeps through my scale-tunic, but the relief is brief. My skin still feels too sensitive.
The cramping starts sometime around what I guess is midnight.
At first, it’s just a slow ache, deep and low in my belly. The kind of dull pressure that reminds me of a period cramp that’s about to become A Situation. It builds in a slow wave until I have to curl around it, knees drawing up toward my chest.
Breathe in through the nose. Out through the mouth.
It’ll pass, I tell myself. It’s probably nothing. Maybe something in the food didn’t agree with us. That happens. New environment, new microbes, new… everything.
Except we’ve been here for weeks now. We’ve been eating the same core diet for weeks. If the Drakav food were going to wreck us, it should’ve done it already.
The cramp eases. I uncurl, muscles trembling a little with the release.
My hand finds my waterskin in the dark.
The first swallow is—no exaggeration—complete bliss. The water is cool and clean and hits the back of my throat like rain after a drought. My body lights up with want.
I drink.
And drink.
I stop only when the skin slumps empty in my hand, and I realize I’ve just downed half of it in one go without thinking.
An unpleasant awareness slides down my spine.
This isn’t normal.
This isn’t nothing.
Something is wrong. Really, seriously wrong.
And I’m not the only one who knows it.
Through the narrow gap in the partition, I have a partial view of the main cavern. Firelight throws restless shadows across the uneven rock. Most of the other women are down, or pretending to be, making small restless movements on their sleeping mats.
Near the center, Kol gathers several Drakav warriors.
They form a loose circle around him, big shapes outlined by the glow of the fire. They’re using the mindspace, but the intensity is unmistakable. Shoulders bunch. Claws tighten on weapon hilts.
The discussion is short. Whatever decision they reach, they reach it fast.
Then they move.
I watch them leave in twos and threes, heading toward the tunnel that leads back out into the desert. Hunting party, I think automatically. We’re burning through more food than usual. We’ll need fresh meat, more firebloom, more something to keep up with how much water we’re chugging.
They vanish into the tunnel one by one until the entrance swallows the last of their shapes.
One male doesn’t go.
Sarven stays.
He remains near the edge of the main cavern, halfway between the tunnel mouths and the line that marks off our sleeping area. His posture is its usual coiled-still: back straight, shoulders relaxed but ready, hand near his blade, as if he’s waiting for trouble to show its face.
His gaze drifts, tracking the shadows, the entrances… and then it stops.
On the gap where I’m hiding. For a long, suspended second, he stares right into the darkness where I lie.
I swallow, throat suddenly dry again, even with the water I just poured into myself. My heart ticks up, punching at my ribs.
I should look away. Pretend I’m not terrified.
I don’t.
Because the truth is, I am scared.
Really, really scared.
My body is doing things I don’t understand on a planet I barely know, with no hospital, no meds, no tests. Just a former nurse, a medical student, and a handful of dried herbs.
And across the cavern, braced against the wall like a living barricade, Sarven looks… unmovable.
Big and solid and watchful.
Right now, in this cave full of sick human women and worried alien warriors, he is the only thing that looks truly, stubbornly unbreakable.
So, I hold his gaze.
And I don’t look away.