She was standing in darkness; only a small ring of light was visible around her feet. She twisted around without moving her legs, and she finally began to notice the subtle speckling of stars coming into view behind her. As if her eyes were continuing to adjust, the stars grew brighter and more numerous until the round cockpit window was filled with the spiral cloud of a galaxy.
She turned back to the direction her feet were facing to find a great space station hovering out the back window of her escape pod.
Her heart began to race. ORBIT’s station was still there?
At the exact moment she realized where she was and what she was looking at, the station exploded in one fiery blast. The noise pounded in her ears as the glass of her window burst and fire rushed into the escape pod. Flames engulfed her and ripped her skin apart. She uttered an agonizing scream.
She woke up in the process.
She was lying on sterile white sheets in Westfall’s hospital ward. The room was dark, save for the dim light of a distant oil lamp flickering down the street that filtered through the window beside her.
Clamping a hand over her mouth, tears poured from her eyes as she tried to stifle her cries. It was a dream. It was only a dream; just like all the others.
But everything about it had felt so real. The feelings were real. The guilt was real.
She shuddered and rolled to her side, alternating between sobbing and gasping for air.
She heard movement across from her and opened her eyes to find Ella shuffling around the curtain over to her.
“I’m s-sorry—if I woke you,” she huffed breathlessly, only for a stuffed dog to be set in front of her view of the young girl.
“This is Sandy,” her soft voice came from behind it.
“Sandy?” She repeated.
“Mm-hm,” Ella peeked around the dog. “Whenever I’m scared or feel bad, hugging him makes me feel better.”
The nameless woman squinted her eyes. “Don’t you need him?”
“Not tonight. Besides, this was Sandy’s idea.”
She sniffed through her nose before propping herself up on her elbow to get a better view of Ella and Sandy. “Are you sure?”
“Mm-hm!” Sandy was pushed closer.
The woman cupped the stuffed animal with her hand and pulled it against her chest. “Thanks,” she said softly, still hovering on the verge of tears.
“You’re welcome!”
With Sandy under her arm, the woman heard Ella struggle to climb back into her own bed. She then glanced down as tears again rolled from her eyes. She laid back down upon her side, shut her eyes, and squeezed Sandy with all her might.
- - -
The woman awoke the next morning to brilliant sunlight filling the room from the window beside her bed. She was shocked that she had slept through the night after waking from her nightmare; it had been her first night of halfway decent sleep since arriving on Braecia. She glanced down to find Sandy squished between her arm and her chest. Maybe Ella was onto something.
She sat up, listening for any residual movement across the room. When she heard none, she assumed she was the first one awake. She retrieved her glasses, tucked the stuffed dog under her arm, and slipped out of bed. She stretched her arms and bent down, giving her gown a quick tug to cover her knees. She softly drew away the edge of her curtain to find Ella turned away on her bed.
Her lips tugged into a smile, and she delicately set the dog on the bed beside the young girl.
“Thanks, Sandy,” she whispered.
Her stomach began to growl as she turned back to her own bed; clearly, her appetite had returned in full force. But with the door to William’s office-bedroom still closed, she decided to let him sleep in and venture elsewhere for food and drink. She knelt down in front of the nightstand beside her bed and searched for a change of clothes. A few blouses and two long skirts had been provided by the women of the town—not generally her style, but she was in no position to be picky. Still, she dug further in case the black pants she had arrived in might have been washed and folded away with them.
She stopped rummaging when she saw a glint of silver beneath a long blue skirt. Narrowing her eyes, she pulled out all of the clothes. Her sonic blade lay at the bottom of the drawer, along with a pair of black and silver goggles.
Seeing the weapon again sent shivers down her spine: this was the tool she built to escape from ORBIT. In as much as she was proud of its construction and abilities, she hated the stain of what it had helped her accomplish.
The goggles had been left in the escape pod, most likely on accident since they served little use within the miniscule spacecraft. The highly reflective silver of the wide lenses acted like a mirror as she glanced into the drawer at them. Her face, thin and worn, looked back.
The day after she arrived in the medical ward, William had mentioned returning to her escape pod, and she had agreed to let him take anything he deemed usable. She found it surprising that he would return these particular items to her in the process.
She huffed through her nose, covered the blade and goggles with one of the skirts, and pulled the other out to change into. She slumped against the bed when the act of standing up sent a wave of dizziness through her body, but once she recovered, she stepped lightly on her feet across the room to the washroom. After changing and cleaning up, she opened the door at the far end of the hall as quietly as possible and was engulfed into the sunlight.
The nameless woman had only been outside once before, though it was under the guidance of William to take a few paces around the block to test her strength. He had gestured to a few points of interest, but her memories from the last few days were hazy at best. Once her eyes adjusted to the light, she could see the long line of buildings along the crossed streets before her.
The buildings were all lined together in rows that butted up against the dusty road with only the front-facing facades to mark them as different spaces. Some had tall windows with intricately carved frames while others had wooden balconies stretching out on their top floor to provide shade to the one below. Some of the buildings rose high above the others with additional floors, while others remained simple with shops open on the ground and living spaces above. Behind her, the hospital stood on a small patch of green space that took up the full block.
As she started down the street, the seemingly well-kept buildings were not as pristine as they appeared. In fact, many of the spaces appeared vacant.
With another growl from her stomach, she set her curiosity aside and attempted to find breakfast.
She had barely turned a corner when she ran into a very excited Carla—and learned that the teenager had donated the white blouse, blue skirt, and belt she was currently wearing. Despite not being in the mood to entertain such high-energy, she knew Carla would be her ticket to finding breakfast. Submitting to the local’s sense of direction, the woman followed behind Carla and offered succinct answers to her many questions until they reached the town’s bakery.
“I really want to be a nurse just like Lillith, so I try to get all my chores done really fast,” Carla was babbling as the woman across from her quietly munched on a biscuit. They had taken up a small table on the wooden porch of the bakery along with a few others, though none were as verbose as the jovial teenager. “Momma thinks I’m just trying to get out of my chores, but I figure if I do well, she’ll be proud of me for what I’m learning. Course, she also don’t like that I’m dating Thomas. She thinks being a mayor is dangerous work and doesn’t think he can focus on me enough. What was your job before you came here?”
The woman almost missed the question as it seamlessly followed a long stream of Carla’s consciousness. “Oh, well, I...” She trailed off. What was the answer to this question? A soldier? A warrior? She couldn’t answer with those—not when she was already faced with suspicion. But before ORBIT... why was it so difficult to move beyond her time on the space station to remember her life before?
Carla noticed the woman’s furrowed brows, nervous that she had uncovered another sensitive topic; although it couldn’t have been more embarrassing than trying in vain to learn the woman’s real name.
“The theater,” the woman offered, her eyes focused far beyond her biscuit. “I used to work at a theater with my brother.”
“Oh!” A wave of both relief and understanding washed over Carla. “That’s so cool! What did you do there? Were you an actress? Did you get to be on the stage? Oh, I think it would be so amazing! I could just see me up in lights, with Thomas cheerin’ me on... Say, have you had a boyfriend before?”
The woman’s biscuit fell from her hands as she swallowed. Immediately her eyes grew guarded before her gaze dropped completely.
“Sorry,” Carla concluded softly.
“Frieda! Frieda!!” A woman in a purple dress rushed down the road. “Why aren’t you answerin’ your phone?!”
The scene distracted the two women, along with the rest of the bakery’s patrons sitting at the outside tables.
“You know I hate talking on that thing! What is it?” Frieda emerged from a window down the street.
The woman in purple huffed as she hunched forward. “It’s Ella!!”
The nameless woman paused. “Ella? Like, Ella in the hospital?”
Beside her, Carla’s face had gone white. “Oh no.”
The woman whipped her head around. “What do you mean, ‘oh no’?”
But Carla didn’t say another word. She left behind her untouched biscuit and darted around the small wooden railing that enclosed the porch. She disappeared around the corner in the direction of the hospital.
The woman stood, a sinking feeling filling the pit of her stomach. She pressed her lips together, gathered up the edge of her skirt, and ran after her.
- - -
The nameless woman sat, silent, on the side of her bed. The privacy curtain that once separated her bed from Ella’s had been drawn back. The bed was stripped of its sheets and lay vacant.
She took in a slow breath through her nose with unblinking eyes.
She had not cried when she heard Ella Pearson had passed away. She, instead, felt callused and numb. She didn’t know what to feel, or what to think, about the young girl who had tried to befriend her. She did, however, add Ella to the ever-growing list of people she had lost.
William was standing beside her, his arms wrapped at his chest. His eyes showed signs of tears, and they gazed at the bed sorrowfully.
“What was wrong?” The woman asked without moving. “What happened to her?”
The doctor turned his head toward her. “I never knew exactly what was wrong, to be honest. She and her mother were attacked by the beasts—”
“Beasts?” He attracted her attention.
He shifted on his feet. “Big, wooly creatures with eyestalks on their head and four arms,” explained, waving his fingers to reenact the eyes and arms. “They have teeth like knives. When I was growing up, we barely saw them; just shadows in the woods every so often. But over the years, they’ve come closer, become more numerous, and they’ve begun to attack the residents. We can’t hardly work without one of them coming upon us.” He shook his head. “Ella and Arianna were walking back home one evening when one of them came out against them. They killed Arianna on the spot and severely wounded Ella. We rushed her here and were able to save her, but as her wounds healed, there was still something wrong. She was still in pain.”
“She never seemed to be,” the woman looked introspectively.
William’s lip tugged. “She was very strong for someone so small.” He sighed and looked down. “I fear she had internal injuries from the attack, but there was nothing I could do aside from making her comfortable. You’ve probably noticed our medical ward is... severely lacking.”
The woman also offered a sigh, turning back to the bed. She tilted her head when she noticed something on the floor below it. She rose and knelt down.
A pang of grief overwhelmed her as her eyebrows furrowed. She leaned forward and lifted the small stuffed dog from the ground as her lips parted.
Chapter Notes