The Tear Between Stars

by impolite_menace

Summary:

A dying universe casts out one of its last survivors, a man named Simon who carries the final truths of his collapsing world, and sends him into the path of the only human left who can save him: Ryland Grace.

What begins as an impossible rescue becomes a fragile alliance as Grace and Rocky uncover the truth behind the destruction of Simon's world and the quiet, devastating fallout left in its wake.

As Simon starts to trust that surviving is something he may finally be allowed, the three of them start shaping a plan that might bridge realities.

But saving a universe demands precision, trust, and a closeness none of them expected… and the doorway between worlds is far from stable.

Chapter 1: the silent passenger

Overwhelming pressure burdens my frame

I don't think it was ever built to carry this much weight

Lost in sight beneath a sea of praise for saving all that help

For someone else who needs it just a little more

collarbone - jhariah

✴

      "Grace check Sample Batch Three again." Rocky’s voice drifted through Grace’s headset in a cascade of three harmonious chords, bright and layered like someone playing a tiny alien synthesizer in a grand cathedral. The shoulder‑mounted translator did its best, flattening the music into English that carried none of the nuance, warmth, or personality that lived inside Rocky’s real voice.

      Ryland Grace tapped the touchscreen with his stylus, watching the numbers flicker across the display.
      “Batch Three looks clean, buddy. Astrophage levels are below detection threshold, and the Taumoeba are metabolizing normally. No stress markers, no starvation behavior.”
      Rocky answered with a buzzing chord that vibrated faintly through the speaker, accompanied by the soft clack of claws on metal.
      “Good. Very good. Taumoeba must stay happy. If Taumoeba get sad, everyone die.”
      “Spoken like a true scientist,” Grace laughed, leaning back in his swivel chair until his spine protested with three sharp pops. Space furniture, he reflected, was designed for efficiency, not for the everyday lumbar needs of a man who had once been forcibly recruited into saving the world.

      He let his gaze wander across the lab, taking in the familiar shapes and shadows. The Hail Mary had changed so profoundly since his first, terrified awakening that sometimes he barely recognized it. Back then, it had felt like a tomb; every surface had been cold and hostile, and every silence had felt like a countdown to something he didn’t yet understand.
      Now the ship felt… lived in. The blank white walls shaped around Rocky’s transparent xenonite passages, and months of shared habits had settled over the place like a thin layer of warmth, turning the once‑sterile corridors into something that almost resembled a home. The hum of the life‑support systems had become a constant, comforting presence, and even the faint chemical tang of Eridian nutrient gel—once sharp enough to make Grace's eyes water—had blended into the ship’s scent profile, becoming part of what “home” meant out here.

      Rocky and him were three months into their current mission. Three months of quiet, predictable science without a crisis: Grace still wasn’t entirely sure how to process it. His brain kept waiting for Eva Stratt to materialize out of a ventilation duct like some kind of bureaucratic cryptid and demand to know why he wasn’t working around the clock, panicking about everyone's survival.

      A full year had passed since he’d first arrived on Erid—a broken man with a ship full of Taumoeba and a head full of trauma. They had saved Erid, they had probably-maybe saved Earth, and impossibly, they had saved each other.
      Erid’s sun, 40 Eridani A, was finally clear of the infrared sludge that had threatened to freeze Rocky’s home world. The crisis was over. The universe had taken a long, shuddering breath and let it out.

      But science didn’t stop just because the world didn’t end.

      The initial fix had worked, but a year of observation had left Erid’s top minds—and Grace himself—with lingering questions that gnawed at the edges of their optimism. Astrophage bred exponentially faster near a star. Would Taumoeba populations hold equilibrium over decades? Could Astrophage adapt, mutate into a strain the Taumoeba couldn’t metabolize? Would future generations wake to find the stars dimming again?
      To find out, the brightest minds of Erid had patched the Hail Mary back together and sent Grace and Rocky into the inner envelope of the Eridian solar system.

      Their mission was simple in theory and maddening in practice: monitor the active solar vents, harvest fresh samples from high‑radiation zones, and stress‑test the predator–prey balance until they were certain whether or not humans and Eridians would need periodic, manual interventions years down the line.
      For the first time in his life, he wasn’t racing a ticking clock or clawing his way out from under the shadow of a dying sun; instead, the Hail Mary had settled into a rhythm that felt almost domestic, with days filled with spreadsheets and temperature logs and the quiet, unspoken camaraderie of two friends who had survived the impossible and were now learning how to live in its aftermath.

      They were two survivors who had stared into the absolute end of the world, clung to each other, and somehow beaten it.

      Between sample collections, Grace spent hours by the thick xenonite barrier dividing their living quarters in the med-bay, trading problems and stories with Rocky. Sometimes they worked through human chemistry together—Grace explaining why water was weird and wonderful, Rocky countering with Eridian solvent systems that made water look boring by comparison. Other times, Rocky walked him through the engineering logic of Eridian architecture while Grace tried, and usually failed, to keep up with the math.

      “Grace look at screen too long,” Rocky observed now, giving a small push against the wally that sent his xenonite sphere gliding toward him in the microgravity. He bumped gently against Grace’s boot, the contact light but steady, and shifted his dense little body inside.
      Eridians saw with high‑frequency sonar, so the vacuum outside the viewport meant nothing to him, but the ship’s outer cameras were mirrored onto his self-made haptic display.

      “Data seem good. Grace eat food now? Eat slush?”
      “It’s called oatmeal, Rocky, and I’ll eat in a minute,” Grace said, smiling at the blocky silhouette of his best friend. “I just want to finish logging this radiation variance from the solar flare we passed yesterday.”
      "Grace say that one hour ago."
      "Yeah, well, I’m consistent."
      "Grace is stubborn human."
      "Love you too, buddy."
      Rocky made a pleased chord—something warm and resonant that the translator rendered as a flat beep.

      Grace turned back to the monitor, but his eyes drifted toward the viewport. 40 Eridani A burned a deep orange‑white, its corona rippling in slow, hypnotic waves.
      Below, the small inner‑orbit world curved beneath them like a darkened ember, its dayside a molten smear of copper and gold where the star’s light struck the atmosphere at a brutal angle. The nightside, the side they hovered above, was a vast, cooled shadow; a deep violet sphere threaded with faint, electric arcs where charged particles skimmed the upper atmosphere and bled into space.
      Thin bands of ionized haze clung to the terminator line, glowing faintly like a halo caught between night and day.

      The Hail Mary drifted in a stable orbit above that quiet hemisphere, close enough for their instruments to drink in the star’s radiation vents but far enough that the hull wasn’t cooking under the UV flux. The ship traced a gentle arc above the planet’s nightside, engines idle, the hull humming softly as the solar wind brushed against it.
      The peace of it all felt almost unreal. Ever since Ryland Grace had left Earth, his brain didn’t know what to do with peace; to him, peace often meant something horrible was about to happen, that the universe was inhaling before the scream.

      He shook the thought away. He wasn’t on a suicide mission anymore, and he wasn’t dying. He was doing science with his best friend, and that was enough.

      Grace let himself breathe, letting the quiet settle around him. The soft hum of the ship blended with the gentle, rhythmic sounds of Rocky fidgeting with his engineering tools, creating a layered ambience that had become as familiar to him as the creak of floorboards in an old house. It was a strange sort of comfort, one he never would have imagined possible back when he was alone and terrified, trying to remember his own name while alarms blared at him.
      He found himself thinking, with a kind of fond disbelief, that maybe this was what normalcy looked like for him now: a spaceship drifting near a foreign sun, a best friend who expressed himself with pleasant harmonies, and a lab full of microscopic predators and prey whose entire ecosystem depended on his ability to keep their strange little universe from tipping out of balance.

      Grace reached for his pouch of oatmeal, telling himself he would finally eat it before Rocky launched into another lecture about weak human nutrition, a phrase Rocky delivered with such earnest disapproval that Grace had started to suspect Eridians considered food a competitive sport.
      He never got the chance to eat it.

      Suddenly, the proximity sensors erupted in a scream.

      Not a gentle alert or a warning beep, but a full, body‑shaking, nerve‑flaying klaxon that ripped through the cabin like a physical force, a sound so sharp and sudden that Grace’s entire body jolted, his hand spasming open as his stylus spun out of his fingers and skittered across the console, and for a split second he was right back in that first awful awakening on the Hail Mary.
      A bright red warning box exploded across his primary monitor, obliterating his spreadsheets with all the subtlety of a brick through a window.
      PROXIMITY WARNING: LOCALIZED GRAVITATIONAL BLIP DETECTED. MASS DETECTED CLOSE-RANGE.

      "Whoa—hold on—hold on," Grace muttered, though the words came out thin and unsteady, as if they were trying to escape before he could fully form them. He leaned over the console with the frantic precision of someone who had survived far too many life‑threatening situations for one lifetime, fingers flying across the keyboard. “Rocky, did you deploy a sensor drone without telling me? My radar is going absolutely haywire.”
      “No drone!” Rocky’s reply burst forth in a cascade of sharp, discordant musical notes—fear, unmistakable and raw, vibrating through the metal floor before the translator flattened it into something that sounded far too calm for what Rocky was actually feeling. “Radar blip appear from nothing! No acceleration! No heat trail! No entry! Just appear! Is there now! Look-look-look!”

      A queasy, weightless lurch swept through him, the kind that made the faint gravity feel suddenly unreliable, as if his own body had slipped out of sync with the room around him.
      Things didn't just appear. They left fingerprints—trajectories, thermal blooms, ionized trails, gravitational ripples. If something showed up without any of those, then either the sensors were catastrophically malfunctioning or something deeply, cosmically wrong was happening.

      He pulled up the optical feed from the external cameras, zooming the high‑resolution lenses onto the flagged coordinates, hoping for a glitch, a dust mote, a stray reflection, anything mundane, boring and safe.
      The universe, as usual, declined to cooperate.

      "What the hell…"
      Silhouetted against the blinding, molten corona of the Eridian sun was a tumbling, unrefined mass—something that looked like it had been torn out of a myth or a fever dream. It was a grotesque, jagged knot of dark, calcified bark and deep‑red frozen ice, a shape that defied easy categorization. It resembled a massive, ancient tree root that had been ripped out of the earth by a hurricane and dipped in thick, coagulated blood. It rotated slowly, unevenly, as if it were struggling against its own inertia.
      “The telemetry makes no sense,” Grace said, his voice cracking as his scientific instincts rebelled, “the thermal sensors are picking up a heat signature from the core. And—wait—hold on—is that an oxygen trail? It’s... venting gas? Something organic is venting gas into vacuum...” Nothing vented oxygen in space unless it was alive, had been alive, or was full of something that really, really shouldn’t be leaking.

      “Structure is organic‑wood, Grace!” Rocky chimed, his singing escalating into a frantic, uneven rhythm—his version of hyperventilating. Grace could hear the panic in the musical notes behind the translator, the way they wavered and spiked. “Inside wood‑shell, I see calcium, I see iron, I see ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬!”
      The translator failed at the word, and Rocky noticed.
      "Internal structure… scaffolding!"
      "Scaffolding? Like a structural frame?"

      “Like bone!” Rocky corrected, his voice hitting a trembling, high‑pitched chord. “Grace! Human form! Inside wood‑ball! Faint vibration—slow-slow—heart! Is heart, Grace! Real! Alive!”
      Ryland Grace's entire body locked up, breath suspended halfway in his chest, fingers hovering above the console as if moving even a fraction of an inch would shatter the fragile, impossible reality of what Rocky had just told him.

      A human, out here.

      His mind tried to assemble possibilities—escape pod? Impossible. Biological experiment? Nothing human‑made looked like that. A hallucination? Rocky saw it too. A corpse? Rocky said alive. A survivor? From where? How? 
      A heavy, rushing roar filled his head, drowning out the alarms, the hum of the ship, even Rocky’s frantic tapping. The quiet, peaceful universe that had lulled him into a sense of safety for months suddenly felt like it was leaning in close, holding its breath, waiting for him to understand that everything—absolutely everything—was about to change.

      Grace didn’t know how long he stayed frozen like that, suspended between one breath and the next, staring at the impossible shape tumbling across his monitor while his mind tried—and failed—to assemble any coherent explanation. Nothing in any human database, nothing in any Eridian archive, nothing in any sane universe resembled a wooden, blood‑stained cocoon drifting through space with a human heartbeat trapped inside it.
      A ghost of that first terror brushed against him—the disorienting, airless terror of waking on the Hail Mary with two dead crewmates and no memory—tightening around his chest before he shoved it aside. It was the awful sense that the universe was once again about to demand something from him that no one should ever have to give.

      But then Rocky made a sharp, urgent trill—three discordant notes that pulsed through the air and snapped Grace back into motion.
      “Alright,” he breathed, though the word came out thin and stretched, as if it had to fight its way through a throat that wasn’t entirely convinced speaking was a good idea. “We need to get closer. We need to match orbits before it drifts into the solar wind and gets cooked.”
      “Yes‑yes!” Rocky buzzed, his notes sharp and frantic, “Object tumble fast. Must catch before drift too far.”

      Grace’s hands were already moving on their own as he pulled up trajectory data and tried to make sense of its erratic spin, sweat gathering at the back of his neck as he attempted to predict its next stuttered turn. The wooden mass rotated irregularly, wobbling like something half‑alive, half‑dead, and wholly wrong. Grace felt a cold sweat bead at the back of his neck as he tried to predict its motion.
      “Rocky, keep eyes on it,” he said, though Rocky was already gliding forward in the low gravity, his xenonite sphere drifting into position beside the viewport. He pressed the sphere’s surface against the frame, anchoring himself with a quick internal shift of weight.
      His claws tapped rapid, uneven bursts against the inner shell as he used acoustic vision to track the object with unnerving precision.
      “Tell me if the rotation changes. I need to know if it’s stable enough to approach.”
      “Rotation wobble‑wobble,” Rocky reported, his grammar fracturing under stress. “But heart still beat. Slow-slow. Weak. Human inside dying. Grace must hurry!”

      Grace forced air past the tightness in his throat. The idea of a human dying out here, alone, trapped inside a wooden… whatever it was, made something twist painfully in his chest. He didn’t know who they were, where they came from, how they got here, or why the universe had decided to drop them into his path, but none of that mattered. Someone was alive. Someone needed help. And he was the only human within light‑years who could give it.
      “Alright,” he murmured again, more to himself than to Rocky. “We need to bring it in. But we don’t have the mechanical arms your ship had. And I’m not doing an EVA! Not with that thing venting oxygen and who‑knows‑what else; that's way too unpredictable.”
      “Yes,” Rocky agreed, his notes low and uneasy. “Outside bad. Human die. You die. No‑no.”

      Grace stared at the tumbling mass on the screen, mind racing, searching for any viable retrieval method that didn’t involve him getting cooked, poisoned, irradiated, impaled, or all of the above. The Hail Mary wasn’t designed for salvage operations. She was a research vessel, a jury‑rigged miracle, not a rescue tug.
      But she did have one thing, his brain interjected: an airlock.

      The idea arrived in Grace’s mind with the kind of reckless clarity that usually preceded either a breakthrough or a disaster. It was the sort of idea he would have immediately vetoed if anyone else had suggested it, the sort of idea that would have earned a stern lecture from Stratt and a full psychological evaluation from any sane mission commander.
      Unfortunately, he was the only human in the solar system, and he had never been particularly good at choosing the safe option when someone’s life was on the line.

      “Rocky,” he said slowly, feeling the weight of the decision settle over him like a pressure change in the cabin, “I think… I think we can swallow it.”
      Rocky produced a confused, questioning trill, the sound rippling through the metal floor like a puzzled vibration.
      “Not literally,” Grace clarified, though the absurdity of the phrasing almost made him laugh despite the adrenaline flooding his system. “I mean we open the airlock, match velocities, and maneuver the entire ship around it. We let it drift into the bay instead of grabbing it. Like catching a soap bubble without popping it.”

      Rocky emitted a long, rising chord that carried fear, disbelief, and reluctant awe at once.
      “Very dangerous, Grace. Very‑very. Must match speed perfect. If wrong—crash. Break. Kill human inside.”
      “I know.” He knew exactly how insane the idea was, how many things could go catastrophically wrong, how many variables he couldn’t control. But he also knew that doing nothing meant letting that faint, fragile heartbeat fade into silence, and he could not let that happen. “But it’s the only chance we’ve got.”

      Rocky sighed a slow, heavy tune, the sound resonating through the xenonite sphere as he let his weight shift inside it — the Eridian equivalent of a long, resigned exhale.
      “Then do. Rocky guide. We save human.”
      Grace's hands hovered over the controls, trembling slightly, and he forced himself to steady them, to breathe, to focus.
      “Alright,” he whispered, more to the universe than to Rocky. “Let’s go catch a nightmare.”

      He pushed off from the console and drifted through the cabin in a controlled glide, the inertia of his movement felt like swimming through warm air. His fingers brushed handholds and railings as he made his way toward the pilot’s seat, each contact grounding him, reminding him that he had done impossible things before and survived them. The adrenaline in his bloodstream sharpened everything—the faint vibration of Rocky’s movement through his tunnels and the cold metallic tang of recycled air.
      He settled into the pilot’s chair, strapping himself in with motions that were far more automatic than confident. The seat felt too large, too exposed, as if the ship itself were waiting to judge whether he was about to do something heroic or catastrophically stupid.

      Grace’s hands hovered over the controls for a moment longer than he meant them to, because even though he had already committed to the plan and already felt the weight of the decision settle into his bones, there was still that tiny, treacherous part of his brain whispering that this was insane, that he was about to try to catch a tumbling, half‑organic, half‑nightmarish object with a ship that was never designed for anything remotely like this.
      He triggered the outer airlock sequence. The heavy mechanical doors groaned through the hull as the system cycled, depressurized, and slid open into the yawning blackness of space. The internal cameras switched to a stark, grainy view of the absolute nothingness beyond. The sight of that dark, open bay waiting to swallow something so grotesque—it looked less like a piece of ship architecture and more like a throat, a gaping mouth waiting to gulp down something the universe itself had tried to spit out.

      Ryland Grace pushed the feeling down and forced his attention back to the controls, to the delicate thruster adjustments, to the numbers scrolling across the screen like a lifeline. The object was out there, tumbling slowly, bleeding oxygen into vacuum, and somewhere inside it, a human heart was beating.
      “Adjust pitch three degrees down,” Rocky buzzed, and Grace could hear the urgency beneath the words, the sharpness, the tremor, the way each chord clipped short as if Rocky were barely restraining panic. “Object tumble left. Must match. Must match now.”
      “Copy,” Grace muttered, though the word came out strained, stretched thin by concentration and fear. Steering the Hail Mary was never intuitive; Grace had never been particularly good at piloting even under ideal circumstances, and these were anything but ideal.

      The ship shuddered as he fired the lateral thrusters, nudging the Hail Mary into a slow, careful rotation that mirrored the wobbling spin of the wooden mass. He felt every vibration through the seat, through the floor, through his bones, as if the ship herself were holding her breath along with him.
      “Too fast!” Rocky cried, tapping a rapid, panicked rhythm against the glass of his chamber. The sound came through the metal like a second heartbeat. “Slow rotation! Slow! You crash if too fast!”
      “I know, I know, I’m fixing it,” Grace rasped, though his hands were shaking and his breath was coming in shallow bursts. The object was close now—close enough that the external cameras could pick out individual ridges in the calcified structure, the jagged fractures where frozen red ice clung to its surface.

      “Grace, velocity mismatch point‑zero‑three meters per second,” Rocky warned, his notes each like a tiny alarm bell. “Must correct or object hit hull. Break. Kill human.”
      "Working on it," Grace whispered, fingers flying across the controls, adjusting the ship’s drift with tiny, precise bursts of compressed gas that felt far too small to matter and yet were the only thing keeping them from smashing into the object and turning the entire rescue into a catastrophic smear across the airlock wall. He watched the numbers tick down, the relative velocity narrowing, the rotational vectors aligning, and tried not to think about the fact that he was essentially parallel parking a starship around a haunted tree stump full of human.

      The wooden mass drifted closer, its rotation slowing as the Hail Mary matched it, the two bodies falling into a precarious, delicate dance. Sweat beaded on Grace’s forehead, floating into the air from his temples, stinging his eyes, but he didn’t dare blink, didn’t dare wipe it away, because if he took his eyes off the trajectory lines for even a second, that might be the second everything went wrong.
      “Closer‑closer,” Rocky murmured, his voice low and trembling now, the translator barely keeping up with the rapid shifts in pitch. “Heart still beat. Very weak. Must hurry but careful.”
      “I’m doing my best,” Grace breathed, though it felt like a pathetic understatement. His entire world had narrowed to the glowing overlays on the screen, the faint hum of the thrusters, the slow, inexorable drift of the wooden sphere toward the open airlock, and the knowledge that one wrong move—one twitch, one miscalculation, one moment of hesitation—would kill the person inside and possibly take him and Rocky with them.

      The object crossed the threshold of the airlock with agonizing slowness, its jagged surface scraping the edges of the camera frame. Grace held his breath as he made the final adjustments, nudging the ship forward by centimeters, aligning the rotation by fractions of degrees, guiding the Hail Mary around the object like cupping a fragile egg with your hands.
      “Almost,” Rocky whispered, "Hold steady. No shake. No wobble.”
      Grace’s hands trembled so badly he had to clamp them around the controls with both knees on either side to keep them from slipping, but he forced himself to breathe, to focus, to trust that he could do this. He had done harder things. He had survived worse odds. The universe, just this once, might allow him to pull off something impossible without demanding a price.

      The wooden mass drifted fully into the airlock. There was a soft, sickening thud as it made contact with the inner restraints, a sound that reverberated through the hull as a muffled blow.
      For a fraction of a second, nothing moved.

      Then Grace’s fingers, acting on pure instinct, stabbed the control panel.
      The airlock doors rumbled back into motion, massive plates of composite and metal sliding along their tracks with a grinding, resonant groan that he felt more than heard. The cameras caught the last sliver of starlight before the chamber sealed, and for one surreal moment, the image on his monitor looked exactly like a live mousetrap snapping shut.
      The doors locked with a heavy, final clunk that reverberated through the hull like the closing of a vault. The alarms cut off in the same instant, their shrill insistence collapsing into a sudden, almost disorienting quiet. The thrusters powered down, the vibrations in the deck faded, and the Hail Mary settled into a stillness so complete it felt as though the entire ship were holding its breath.

      Grace didn’t move. His hands remained frozen on the controls, fingers curled in a half‑grip, muscles locked as if any motion might somehow undo what they had just accomplished and send the wooden cocoon tumbling back out into the void. His pulse thudded in his ears, loud and uneven, the only sound in a cabin that had gone utterly silent.
      Rocky broke it with a chord that dropped through the air like a physical thing—relief and triumph at once, and the sound trembled through the floor and into Grace’s ribs, a quivering resonance that made his whole body feel unsteady.
      “Grace!!!” Rocky screeched, “Grace catch human!”

      Grace let out a long, uneven exhale, the kind that comes only after the body has been clenched too tightly for too long, and the release left him sagging back in his chair as the adrenaline drained from him in a slow, overwhelming wave that made his limbs feel hollow and his thoughts scatter like loose pages of a book. His heart was still pounding, his hands still tingling, his mind still struggling to accept that they had actually done it—that the impossible object was no longer tumbling alone through space but was now inside his ship, inside his world, inside the one place he had believed was safe from new horrors.
      “Yeah,” he whispered, staring at the monitor where the wooden cocoon now sat cradled inside the Hail Mary like something sacred and monstrous, a threat and a promise all at once. “Yeah, buddy. We did.”

      The silence that followed wasn’t peaceful. It was the kind that made the air feel too thin, the kind that left room for questions he hadn’t dared ask until now.

      “You sure they are human?” Grace asked, the question slipping out before he could stop it. His voice was thin and hoarse, full of a fear he didn’t want to name, because the idea of another human out here was too enormous when he had just made peace with never encountering one again.
      “Grace only human I know,” Rocky replied, his chords low and wavering. “But this is similar structure. Real. Alive.”

      Grace steadied himself, eyes drawn inexorably back to the sealed airlock. The cocoon looked even more sinister now that it was no longer moving, its stillness unnatural, as if it were waiting for something.

      To his side, Rocky was already moving.
      The Eridian launched himself across the compartment with a speed Grace would never have expected—low gravity turning each shove of his claws against the inner shell into a bounding, desperate glide.
      The xenonite sphere shot forward, drifting and accelerating in sharp, frantic bursts as Rocky shifted his weight inside it, correcting his course with quick internal kicks that sent the ball skimming across the floor. He angled himself toward the airlock, the sphere vibrating with the intensity of his focus, like a tuning fork straining toward a distant signal only he could hear.

      Grace blinked, startled.
      “Rocky?”
      Rocky’s chords came out tight, thin, vibrating with a fear he was barely containing.
      “Need look! Need see. Must know what inside.”
      Rocky pressed both sets of claws to the xenonite, his body going utterly still except for the faint tremor running through his limbs. His chords dropped into a low, resonant hum—the sound he made when he was focusing so intensely that the rest of the world fell away.

      “Outer layer wood,” he said, each note slow and deliberate. “Grown. Shaped. Like... armor.”
      A hot rush surged through him, sharp and disorienting.
      “And under that?”
      “Human shape curled small. Very small. Like... hiding. Hurt.”
      For a heartbeat, the world seemed to shift sideways inside his skull.
      “But alive?”
      “Alive,” Rocky said. “But weak. Heart slow. Body wrong. Many breaks. Damaged.”

      “Alright,” Grace steadied his breathing, gathering his voice into something firm despite the chaos clawing at his nerves. “We need to be smart about this. We don’t know what’s on the outside of that thing. Could be spores or pathogens. Could be… I don’t know. Some space fungus. Evil tree pollen. I’m not taking chances.”

      He initiated the decontamination sequence. The airlock’s internal systems roared to life, bathing the cocoon in a brutal cycle of high‑temperature sterilization sprays that hissed and steamed across the jagged surface. The cameras flickered as the UV arrays activated, sweeping the chamber with a barrage of radiation intense enough to sterilize surgical equipment. The wooden shell glistened under the assault, droplets of melted frost running in thin, red‑tinged rivulets that evaporated before they reached the floor.
      Rocky made a low, uneasy chord that vibrated through the hull.
      “Grace burn? Question?”
      “Just the outside,” Grace muttered, watching the readouts spike and settle. “If there’s anything nasty clinging to the surface, I want it dead before I go anywhere near that thing.”

      When the cycle finished, he flooded the airlock with breathable air, watching the pressure equalize and the temperature rise to human‑safe levels. The cocoon floated motionless in the center of the chamber, steaming faintly, almost as if it were exhaling after being held underwater.

      Grace forced himself to look away and reached for the centrifuge controls. The Hail Mary’s artificial gravity system was never meant for delicate salvage operations, but still, he needed some semblance of downward force if he was going to handle whatever was inside that cocoon without it drifting around the chamber like some nightmarish balloon. He strapped himself into the pilot’s harness, fingers moving with a tense, practiced familiarity as he activated the spin‑up sequence.
      The ship’s hull groaned in a deep, resonant way that always made him think of old wooden ships straining against ocean currents. The faint hum of the rotating section intensified, and the artificial gravity began to settle over him like a heavy blanket. He watched the cocoon carefully through the monitor, praying the shift in force wouldn’t crack it open or jostle whatever fragile life was inside. Thankfully, the object shifted only slightly, rocking in place before settling again.

      He was halfway to the suit locker, already reaching for the EVA harness, when Rocky came skidding back toward him—the xenonite sphere gliding in a frantic, uneven staccato across the low‑gravity floor.  The sound of his voice was sharp, panicked, and unmistakably urgent, each chord rising and falling in jagged, uneven spikes that meant fear—real fear—the kind that made Rocky’s voice crack like stressed metal under strain.
      “Grace,” Rocky warned, “Mass emit strong ionizing field. Very strong. Dangerous. Also chemical vapor—volatile. Bad‑bad. Grace go in, Grace die.”
      Grace froze with one arm halfway into the suit. He turned slowly toward Rocky, watching the Eridian’s silhouette tremble inside the sphere, the whole shell vibrating with the force of his distress.

      “How high is the radiation?” Grace asked, though the question came out thin and breathless, more instinct than speech.
      Rocky sang again, faster now, the rhythm sharp enough to sting through the floor.
      "Seven sievert per hour."
      Grace swallowed, throat tight.

      That wasn’t just “bad”; that was lethal. That was your DNA unzips itself like a cheap zipper and your organs file for divorce territory.

      “Jesus,” Grace whispered, staring at the cocoon steaming in the center of the airlock. “That’s… that’s reactor‑core exposure. That’s lethal in—”
      “Minutes,” Rocky finished, tapping a frantic, anxious rhythm against the ball. “Human body break. Cells break. Grace die.”
      The rational part of Grace’s mind screamed at him to stop, to listen, to think, to not walk into a chamber full of lethal radiation and unknown alien fumes. But the other part—the part that had woken up alone on this ship and still chosen to save two worlds, the part that had held Rocky’s hand across the void, the part that could not, would not, let another human die alone in the dark—overrode everything else.
      He forced himself to breathe, to think, to calculate.

      Radiation.

      He couldn’t block it completely, not with what he had. But he could reduce it.
      A thought hit him so hard he actually staggered: The Eridian exosuit. The one Rocky had built for him, the one designed to withstand 210°C, crushing pressure, and the brutal thermal environment of Erid’s surface. The one with the internal layer of Astrophage as a heat shield.
      Astrophage didn’t just absorb heat. It absorbed all electromagnetic radiation, including ionizing radiation…

      A tight, forceful beat pressed against his ribs, quick and unsteady.
      “Rocky,” he said slowly, “the xenonite suit you made me. You covered it in Astrophage, remember? For heat protection?”
      “Yes,” Rocky answered, chords trembling. “Astrophage layer thick. For Erid surface. For hot‑hot. But why—?”
      “Astrophage doesn’t care what kind of energy it eats,” Grace said, his voice rising with a sudden, desperate hope. “Heat, light, gamma rays, X‑rays—it absorbs all of it. If the suit is coated in Astrophage…”

       Rocky emitted a single, sharp, rising chord of realization that vibrated through the chamber like a struck tuning fork.
      “Radiation shield,” he whispered. “Astrophage eat radiation. All radiation. Suit safe.”
      “It's not perfect,” Grace said quickly, because he wasn’t foolish enough to pretend this was a miracle fix. “The coating’s thin, it’ll saturate fast, even if the Astrophage multiplies. But it might buy me a few minutes.”
      Rocky tapped a horrified rhythm that rattled the glass.
      “Suit help, but not save. Radiation still high.”

      “It’s still a terrible idea,” Grace muttered, already moving toward the storage bay where the Eridian exosuit hung, its exterior shimmering faintly with the black, oily sheen of Astrophage, “but a terrible idea I might survive is still better than one I definitely won’t.”
      He dragged it out, the suit heavy and awkward in his hands, the Astrophage coating rippling like liquid shadow under the lights.

      Rocky rolled hard into his path, the xenonite sphere skidding sideways in the low gravity until it planted itself squarely between Grace and the suit locker. Inside, Rocky pressed four claws against the inner shell, his whole body trembling at a frequency Grace had only ever heard during emergencies.
      “Human inside maybe alive, but Grace go in, Grace maybe die. Then Rocky alone. No‑no‑no. Rocky can't be alone in space again…”

      Grace paused, helmet in hand, and looked back at Rocky—his best friend, his partner, the person he had crossed a star system for. The fear in Rocky’s sing-song hit him harder than the fear of severe radiation damage.
      But then he looked at the alien mass on the screen again, at the faint, impossible heartbeat, the human who had somehow survived long enough to reach him.

      “I’m not letting them die,” he whispered. “Not when I can do something.”
      He sealed the Eridian exosuit around himself, the alien materials locking into place with a deep, resonant thump. The interior temperature surged, then stabilized, the suit’s internal systems humming to life around him like a living creature.
      The radiation dosimeter on the wrist panel flickered. According to his rough calculations—panicked, rushed, but grounded in some element of physics—seven sieverts per hour dropped to about 0.2.

      Still dangerous, still reckless, but still absolutely something Ryland Grace would do to save another person's life.
      He stepped toward the airlock door and disengaged the inner seal. And he stepped inside.

✴

      Up close, the wooden structure was even more unsettling, more disturbingly alive in a way that made Grace’s skin crawl beneath the exosuit. The calcified bark—if it could even be called that—was ridged and knotted like the roots of an ancient tree that had grown without gravity, twisting in directions that defied any biological logic he was familiar with. The red ice that had clung to its surface during retrieval had begun to melt during the decontamination cycle, leaving dark, viscous streaks smeared across the airlock's metal floor like the aftermath of something wounded and dragged.

      Grace crouched, the exosuit’s joints whining softly, and touched a gloved finger to one of the crimson puddles.
      The substance clung to the xenonite in a thick, gelatinous smear. It stretched slightly before breaking, leaving a tacky residue that glistened sharply under the harsh overhead lights.
      “Is it actually blood…?” he murmured, his voice echoing inside the helmet, sounding smaller than he intended.
      Rocky’s reply came through the airlock's comms, his chords low and uneasy.
      “Think yes. Density same as human. Iron same. Need test to confirm.”
      “Not the priority right now, bud,” Grace muttered, straightening again. “You still hearing a heartbeat?”
      “Yes,” Rocky answered immediately. His tapping came through the floor in a rapid, anxious rhythm, each strike sharp and uneven. “Very weak. Very slow. Still there.”

      Grace exhaled, a shaky breath fogging the inside of his visor before the suit’s circulation system whisked it away. His eyes drifted over the irregular surface of the cocoon, comparing it instinctively to Earth trees—oak, cedar, redwood—but none of them matched. This wasn’t bark or wood akin to what he knew; it wasn’t anything that had ever grown under a sun he recognized.
      He needed to get inside, needed to get to the human before that faint heartbeat flickered out.

      Grace crossed the chamber to the industrial laser cutter mounted on the wall. It was a heavy, brutal tool meant for slicing through hull plating, not alien biology, but it was the only thing he had with enough power to breach the calcified shell. He lifted it with both hands, the exosuit compensating for the weight, and thumbed the activation switch.
      A thin, blinding beam snapped to life, casting sharp reflections across the cocoon’s glossy surface.

      “Rocky,” he said, voice tight with concentration, “I’m starting the cut. Keep watching the radiation levels. If they spike—”
      “Rocky watch,” Rocky said, his chords trembling with tension. “Grace careful.”
      Grace positioned the cutter against one of the thicker ridges, braced himself, and began making slow, deliberate incisions through the gnarly, bone‑like wood. The laser hissed and spat as it carved through the material, sending up curls of smoking, miasmic vapor that the suit’s filters struggled to keep up with. Even muted, the smell that seeped through was sharp and metallic, like burning sap mixed with something chemical.

      He kept his left hand hovering near the emergency vent switch, ready to flush the entire mass back into vacuum if something hostile emerged—parasites, spores, tendrils, whatever cosmic horror the universe felt like throwing at him today—while the safety tether clipped to his suit gave a small, reassuring tug every time he shifted.
      The cutter bit deeper until the shell glowed red, the material softened, and then split ever so slightly.

      Grace worked methodically, carving through root‑like structures that spiraled around the sphere, each one pulsing faintly with residual heat. He didn’t know if they were structural supports or veins or something far worse, but he severed them one by one, the laser whining as it fought through the dense, alien tissue.
      “Radiation stable,” Rocky reported, though his voice stayed tight with fear, a narrow, metallic tension. “Chemical vapor rising. Suit filter working. Not long.”
      “I’m not planning to be here long,” Grace muttered, sweat beading along his hairline despite the suit’s cooling system.

      He reached the final root, the last visible structural anchor.
      He hesitated for half a second, breath caught in his throat... then he sliced through it.

      The laser cut cleanly; the root split with a sharp, brittle crack, and immediately the sphere exhaled.

      A violent hiss of internal pressure burst from the incision, blasting Grace with a wave of hot, metallic air that made the suit’s radiation alarms shriek in his ears. The cocoon shuddered, its surface flexing like something inside had just shifted, just reacted, just woken up.
      Grace stumbled back, raising the cutter defensively.

      "Rocky—?"
      “Heartbeat spike!” Rocky cried, leaping into a frantic, discordant trill that vibrated through the floor. “Fast now. Something change.”
      The crack split wider with a wet, collapsing sound, and the sphere’s interior—whatever it had been, whatever nightmare purpose it had served—gave way all at once. A surge of dark, heavy fluid spilled out in a sudden, catastrophic wave, splashing across the airlock floor, and spreading outward like a collapsing tide. The suit’s filters caught the sour tang of it, but the smell hit Grace like a punch: blood, old and new, layered with something chemical and sour, something that did not belong in any human body.

      A cavity of red opened before him, a grotesque alien imitation of a womb—vast, glistening, and suffocatingly alive. The chamber’s inner walls were layered with congealed fluid that clung in thick, uneven sheets, each one catching the harsh airlock lights and reflecting them in dull, viscous ripples. Heavy drops of dark liquid gathered along the ridges and seams, swelling until gravity coaxed them free. They fell in slow, deliberate impacts against the metal floor, each one landing with a wet patter.
      It looked like something that had grown around its occupant, enfolding, sealing, and preserving in a way that felt protective and predatory at the same time.

      The body on the inside slid forward through the ruptured opening with the limp, boneless collapse of someone who had been held upright only by the structure around them. The movement was slow, almost as if the cocoon were releasing it only because it had been forced to. Grace lunged, catching the person before they hit the floor, the exosuit’s servos whining under the sudden, uneven weight.
      The human sagged heavily against him, far heavier than their frame suggested, as if the cocoon had been supporting more than just the body—holding them together in ways Grace didn’t even want to think about.

      It was a man. He was unconscious, barely breathing, and catastrophically damaged.

      His dark hair clung to his scalp in thick, tar‑black ropes, the strands fused by layers of blood that had dried, softened, and dried again in a grotesque, glue‑like cycle, leaving the whole mass looking lacquered, heavy, and sculpted by whatever nightmare fluid he had been suspended in. It glistened faintly under the harsh lights, as though the stain had seeped deep into the follicles themselves, tinting everything a shade too dark to be natural.
      But his skin—Grace’s breath hitched.

      The man’s skin was a landscape of damage, swollen and uneven, mottled with the unmistakable signatures of pressure trauma and chemical exposure. Blisters the size of Grace’s thumbnail bulged across what was visible of his chest through giant rips in his clothing; translucent domes stretched thin over angry, inflamed tissue. Some had ruptured, leaving peeling rims and raw, weeping patches beneath; others looked ready to burst with the slightest touch. Between them, scratches crisscrossed his torso in frantic, desperate arcs, shallow but numerous, as though he had clawed at himself in panic or delirium, trying to escape something that had followed him even into unconsciousness.
      His right arm hung limp, fingers curled loosely inward, the muscles slack with exhaustion or nerve damage... or both. The other shoulder ended in a torn, crusted stump—not fresh, barely bleeding, but sealed in the terrible, unmistakable way of an injury that had been cauterized by heat, pressure, or something far stranger. The edges were puckered and uneven, as though the limb had not been cut away but ripped by an environment that simply refused to let it remain attached.

      Grace’s stomach lurched violently.
      A hot, sour wave of bile surged up his throat, and for a moment he genuinely thought he might vomit inside the xenonite exosuit.
      The man’s face was ghost‑pale beneath streaks of dried fluid, features slack with exhaustion, lips cracked and darkened as though the blood loss had drained the color from them long before Grace ever arrived. His eyelids fluttered weakly, lashes clumped together with crystalline residue that caught the light like frost.

      And the smell—
      A pungent, acrid chemical stench, sharp enough that his instincts recoiled despite the barrier of the helmet. It wasn’t rot or an infection, but something stranger—metallic, solvent‑like, the scent of a body marinated in an environment that had no interest in keeping it alive.

      The dosimeter on his wrist spiked again, the numbers climbing relentlessly.
      “Rocky,” Grace breathed, adjusting his grip as the man sagged further, his weight dragging at Grace’s arms. “He’s… he’s in bad shape.”
      Rocky’s chords trembled through the comms, thin and high, tense with fear.
      “Heartbeat very weak. Still there. Human body emit strong radiation. Very dangerous.”

      Grace didn’t need the warning. The numbers were rising fast, and the man’s skin radiated heat through the suit—not fever heat, but something unstable, something that made the hair on the back of Grace’s neck stand up even through layers of alien engineering.
      He hooked his arms under the man’s shoulders, braced his stance, and dragged him toward the inner airlock door. His boots slipped slightly on the slick floor as the blood—if it was blood—spread beneath them in dark, heavy streaks that clung to the metal like oil. The exosuit compensated, stabilizing him, servos adjusting with each uneven step.

      He was halfway to the door when a faint, awful sound reached him: a soft, wet sizzle. Grace halted mid‑movement, air gathering shallowly in his chest.
      The man’s skin, covered in the thick, dark coating of blood, was reacting seemingly to the blood itself. The fluid still clinging to him in heavy patches began to bubble and hiss, tiny pockets of air forming and bursting as if the blood were burning him, as if it were eating into him with a slow, corrosive hunger.

      “Rocky,” Grace whispered, horror creeping up his spine, “the blood is reacting. I think it’s burning him? It’s… It’s bubbling.”
      Rocky’s voice spiked into a sharp, discordant alarm.
      “Blood not normal. Not human only. Mixed with volatile chemical. Must wash now. If chemical stay on skin, human die faster.”
      Grace didn’t hesitate. He pivoted sharply, his gloved hand fumbling for the emergency maintenance panel, slamming it open to reveal the industrial water lines—thick hoses meant for equipment cleaning, not human bodies, but they were all he had.

      He grabbed the hose, twisted the valve, and a violent jet of cold water blasted out, hammering against the man’s body with enough force to stagger Grace backward. The blood came off in patches, thick and dark and clinging, swirling across the floor in heavy, diluted waves that pooled around their feet before spiraling toward the drainage grates in sluggish, red‑tinged currents.

      Grace’s stomach twisted painfully at the sight of the man's complete apathy. The only reason someone didn’t react to water that cold was that they were far beyond normal pain responses...
      "Rocky, open greywater isolation," he ordered, voice tight and shaking. "I’m not letting this crap into the life support loop."
      “Yes,” Rocky replied immediately, claws tapping frantically. “Greywater tank open. Drain active. Keep washing. Chemical still present.”

      The floor grates opened with a mechanical clunk, and the contaminated water vanished in a violent downward pull, sucked into the ship’s sealed greywater tanks where it couldn’t poison anything living. Grace kept spraying, kept watching the man’s skin, waiting for the last of the sizzling to stop, waiting for the final bubbles to collapse, waiting for any sign that the chemical reaction had fully ceased.

      Finally—after what felt like an eternity compressed into seconds—the sizzling quieted, and the bubbling subsided. The man’s skin, though still swollen and uneven, no longer writhed beneath the surface.
      Grace shut off the hose, chest heaving, the exosuit’s cooling system struggling to keep up with the heat of exertion and the radiation still bleeding off the man in strong, invisible waves. Water and diluted blood dripped from the body in slow, heavy rivulets, forming thick, resinous trails across the metal floor.
      "I think that’s as clean as he’s getting," Grace said, his voice shaking.
      "Good-good," Rocky answered, though his chords were still tight with fear. "Bring human now. Medical bay ready."

      Grace tightened his grip on the limp, half‑cleaned body in his arms. The exosuit’s servos whined as he hauled the man upright again, the weight dragging at him in a way that felt wrong—too heavy, too lifeless. He dragged him through the inner hatch into the ship proper, each step heavy and deliberate, echoing with the knowledge that every second mattered.

      The Hail Mary reacted instantly. Internal sensors flared across the surrounding screens in a rapid, overwhelming cascade—RADIATION SPIKE, BIOHAZARD DETECTED, CHEMICAL CONTAMINANT, CRITICAL VITALS—but Grace ignored all of them except the last. The man’s chest was still rising and falling in shallow, uneven breaths, and that was the only thing that mattered.

      “Rocky,” Grace said, breath fogging the inside of the helmet before the suit cleared it, “make sure we can seal the med-bay. Full isolation. I don’t want anything getting in or out.”
      “Yes,” Rocky replied immediately. His tapping echoed through the floor in a rapid, anxious rhythm. “Rocky close doors and vents. Rocky make safe.”
      Grace could hear Rocky move, the frantic scrape‑thump‑scrape of claws against the inside of the xenonite sphere as it skidded across the floor. Rocky rarely lost coordination, but now the sphere wobbled in sharp, uneven bursts, bouncing off a bulkhead before correcting course. He was running, tripping, panicking inside the ball, each desperate kick sending it gliding too fast, then not fast enough, as he scrambled toward the med‑bay controls.

      Grace half‑carried, half‑dragged the man down the short corridor toward the medical wing. The exosuit’s heavy footfalls thudded against the deck, each impact leaving a faint smear of diluted red behind them. When he reached the ladder down into the med‑bay, he hesitated for only a heartbeat before shifting his grip, bracing the stranger’s weight against his chest with an amount of strength he was not aware he possessed. Rocky was already there again, hovering anxiously at the side of the shaft, and Armando—the med‑bay robot—activated his ceiling rail, multiple arms unfurling and ascending toward them with that slow, precise choreography Grace remembered all too well.

   Together—Grace guiding from above, Armando supporting from below—they eased the stranger down the ladder’s narrow span, step by awkward step, until Grace’s boots hit the med‑bay floor and the robot’s arms could take more of the load. From there, the transition was almost fluid: Armando’s rail carriage glided along its track, helping Grace maneuver the limp body across the room and onto the articulated medical cradle that had once kept Grace alive.

      The stranger’s limp body folded into the contours of the diagnostic frame like a marionette with its strings cut.

      Armando didn't waste a second. His mechanical arms unfolded with insect‑like precision, scanning the stranger from head to toe in a slow, deliberate cascade of blue light. The diagnostic display erupted with warnings so dense they overlapped one another in a chaotic, pulsing wall of red, and Grace couldn’t even read them fast enough to understand what he was looking at.
      “Armando,” Grace said, voice cracking despite himself, “tell me what’s happening. I don’t—just tell me what’s wrong with him.”

      Armando’s voice was calm, clinical, and maddeningly steady, contrasted with Ryland Grace's panic.
      “Primary concerns: airway compromise, hemorrhagic shock, chemical toxicity, and acute radiation syndrome. Secondary concerns: extensive dermal injury, metabolic collapse, and systemic infection risk. Prioritizing immediate life support.”
      Grace swallowed hard, trying to force his brain to keep up.
      "Rocky," he said, "read me his vitals. I can’t—"
      “Radiation level very high… stranger sick," Rocky whispered, slowly and carefully, "Sick like… Rocky crew."

      Grace flinched as if struck.
      “Don’t—” he choked, then forced the word out again, louder, harsher, “Don’t say that. Not this time.” He shook his head violently, as if he could physically shove the comparison away. “We’re not losing him. I’m not letting that happen again. Just—just tell me what else. Give me something I can work with.”
      "Human blood full of chemical. Acetone. Isopropyl. Very bad. Body breaking inside. Heart beat slow. Pressure low. Oxygen low.”
      Armando moved with terrifying speed, but not recklessly; every motion was calculated, prioritized, sequenced. Two mechanical arms seized the stranger’s jaw, tilting his head back with clinical force while a third arm guided a flexible tube toward his mouth.

      “Initiating airway protection,” Armando announced, and the tube slid down the man’s throat with a smooth, practiced motion. Internal pumps activated with a low, rhythmic hum as they began suctioning toxic red sludge from his stomach and airway, preventing him from aspirating the chemical slurry that had been slowly killing him.

      Another mechanical arm deployed a tourniquet—thick, high‑pressure, combat‑grade—cinching it high and tight around the man’s mangled upper arm. The device tightened until what little seepage still leaked from the cauterized stump slowed to an even fainter, sluggish ooze.
      Grace winced, not only from squeamishness but from the sheer brutality of the interventions, and the deep instinctive knowledge that it was the only thing keeping the man from dying right here on the table.

      "Rocky," Grace said, leaning over the display, "what’s his blood pressure?"
      “Very low,” Rocky answered, tapping a rapid, anxious rhythm. “Human in shock. Need blood.”

      Armando was already ahead of them.
      Two large‑bore IV lines punched into the man’s remaining arm and into the bone of his leg—intraosseous access, the kind used when veins collapse—and warm saline began flooding into his system in steady pulses. The machine compensated for catastrophic fluid loss, chemical dehydration, and vascular collapse with cold, mechanical efficiency.

      Grace stared helplessly at the numbers, his heart hammering, his mind racing through every half‑remembered emergency protocol he’d ever skimmed, none of which prepared him for this.
      "Armando," he said, voice shaking, "is he… is he going to make it?"
      "Prognosis indeterminate,” Armando replied. “Stabilization required before further assessment. Additional blood volume necessary.”
      Rocky shrieked a sharp, alarmed rhythm.
      "Human need blood very soon. Body empty."

      A thin, uneven breath scraped past the knot forming beneath Grace's sternum.
      “I’m O‑negative,” he whispered, the words hitting him like a physical blow. “I’m a universal donor. I can—I think I can actually help him. I can give him what he needs.”
      Rocky’s chords spiked with unease.
      “Grace blood safe? Human blood same? No harm?”
      Grace exhaled, steadying himself.
      “If he’s human, it should be compatible. And he doesn’t have time to wait for anything else,” Grace said, the words leaving him in a thin, unsteady breath.

      Armando responded immediately.
      “Compatibility test required. Initiating donor analysis.”
      A small sampling arm extended toward Grace, its movements smooth and deliberate. The xenonite suit’s wrist port—one of Rocky’s earlier modifications—clicked open with a soft mechanical snap, exposing the narrow interface beneath. The sampling needle slid in with a faint pressure, drawing a small vial of blood directly from Grace’s bloodstream.
      Grace watched the numbers scroll across the diagnostic display, watched Armando analyze his blood with inhuman speed, and compare it to the stranger’s deteriorating vitals. The soft chime that followed felt far too gentle for the moment.

      “Donor match confirmed,” Armando said. “Human-to-human transfusion viable. Preparing transfusion line.”
      Grace’s stomach twisted. Relief and dread tangled together in a way that made his pulse spike, the xenonite helmet amplifying the sound of his breathing until it filled his ears like a storm. He was standing in a sealed medical bay with a dying man on the table, a machine that knew more medicine than every doctor on Earth combined, and an alien friend who could read chemical signatures faster than Grace could form a coherent thought—and somehow he was still the one making decisions he had no training for.

      Armando extended the transfusion line toward him, the tubing snaking through the air with a smooth, almost predatory certainty. Grace tried to steady his breathing, tried to keep his hands from shaking inside the xenonite gloves, tried to pretend he had even the faintest idea what he was doing.
      "Donor line prepared,” Armando said. “Initiating sterile interface. Please remain still.”
      The transfusion port on Grace’s wrist clicked open automatically again. The line connected with a soft, magnetic lock, and Grace felt a faint tug—barely perceptible through the suit—as the machine drew the first measured milliliters of his blood to prime the system.

      Rocky’s hums vibrated in a rapid, high‑frequency tremor, the sound thin and sharp with fear.
      “Grace heart very fast. Breathing fast. Panic, must calm.”
      “I’m trying,” Grace said, though his voice cracked, because he wasn’t calm, not even close. The sight of the stranger on the table—intubated, tourniqueted, IVs in both arm and bone, skin mottled and swollen and barely clinging to life--
      Armando’s voice cut through the rising panic with clinical precision.
      “Beginning transfusion. Donor blood entering patient circulation. Monitoring for reaction.”
      Grace watched the line fill with his own blood, watched it travel through the tubing toward the man’s arm, watched the machine regulate flow rate and temperature and pressure with the kind of calm, unshakeable competence he desperately wished he had.

      Behind the transparent xenonite walls, Rocky was a frantic blur of motion. His entire body vibrated with panic as he scuttled back and forth along the tunnels, tapping out rapid, discordant rhythms that ricocheted through the medbay like a second heartbeat. He tripped over his own limbs, scrambled upright, slammed into the wall hard enough to make the xenonite ring, then darted to the opposite side as if trying to see the man from every angle at once.

      Grace barely registered any of it, because for the first time since dragging the stranger aboard—since washing the blood off him in the airlock, since hearing the awful sizzle of the blood reacting against his skin—Grace finally allowed himself to look at the man lying on the cradle.

      The blood had hidden so much.

      Now that it was gone, Grace saw a body that looked like it had been through something no human being should ever have survived.
      His hair, freed from the tar‑like crust that had glued it to his scalp, lay flattened in uneven, water‑darkened sheets, exposing the full shape of his skull in a way that made him look startlingly human, startlingly breakable. Without the blood masking it, Grace could see where the strands had been rubbed nearly raw at the roots, as if whatever he’d endured had scoured at him even through his hair.

      His skin looked worse without the red to hide it. Under the med‑bay lights, every distortion stood out in brutal clarity: raised fluid‑filled pockets that looked almost waxy, sunken areas where the tissue seemed to have collapsed inward, and broad swaths of discoloration that didn’t follow any pattern Grace recognized.
      Some regions looked over‑pressurized, stretched too tight over the bone; others looked deflated, as though the underlying structure had simply given up. It wasn’t the chaotic mess of blisters and blood he’d first seen, it was something deeper, structural, as if the environment he’d come from had reshaped him at the cellular level.

      His clothing was torn and shredded, but the damage went far beyond rips. The fabric itself looked diseased—puckered in places, swollen in others, its surface warped into bulbous, uneven nodules that mirrored the corrupted texture of his skin. Some patches had risen into soft, spongy mounds, while others had hardened into brittle, blister‑like bubbles that cracked when he moved. It looked like it had been reshaped by the same hostile process that had ravaged his body, as if the contamination hadn’t cared where the man ended and the material began.

      And across his face—cutting diagonally from above his right brow to below his left undereye—was a bruise unlike anything Grace had ever seen. A long, burst‑vessel streak that looked like the skin had been pulled or twisted by forces he couldn’t begin to understand. It was something internal, something structural, something he had no frame of reference for what could do that to a human face.

      His gaze drifted lower, following the line of the bruise down toward the curve of the neck, and that was where he stopped. A small symbol sat there, tucked just beneath the angle of the jaw—a clean, geometric mark, simple enough to look almost corporate, manufactured, the kind of thing that should have come with a context or a briefing or at least a memory of having seen it somewhere before. But Grace had nothing. No recognition, no association, not even a guess.
      And then he saw the damage.

      A warped, blistered scar cut straight through the symbol, the skin puckered and uneven in a way that spoke of heat applied directly, deliberately, with the kind of precision that came from someone trying to erase something they didn’t want to exist anymore. The mark was still visible beneath the ruined skin, stubborn and half‑hidden, like a secret someone had tried and failed to bury.
      Grace stared at it, waiting for his brain to supply meaning, for some connection to snap into place, for anything at all to explain why a man would carry a symbol like that—and why someone else would go to such lengths to destroy it.
      Nothing came.

      And then there was the arm.
      Grace had seen it already—had washed it, had seen the ragged, torn stump where the limb had been ripped away—but seeing it now made something in his chest seize. The tissue was angry and raw, the swelling severe, the shape uneven and jagged. He found himself staring at it with horrified fascination, unable to look away, unable to process how a human being could lose an arm like that and still be alive.

      Behind the xenonite wall, Rocky slammed into the tunnel again, claws scraping, chords vibrating in a frantic, terrified rhythm as he ran back and forth, tripping over his own limbs, scrambling upright, tapping out patterns that sounded like panic made physical.
      “Grace! Grace, you stop moving! You wrong‑color! Heart too fast! Sit!”

      Grace didn’t hear him, not really. He was staring at the stranger’s face, at the way the intubation tube fogged slightly with each shallow exhale, at the way his chest rose and fell in a rhythm that looked like it could stop at any moment, at the way his skin twitched beneath the surface as if still reacting to whatever chemical nightmare he had been submerged in.

      The world around him narrowed to a single point, a single breath, a single fragile thread of life that felt like it could snap at any second. Armando’s computer voice cut through the fog, calm and clinical, the only steady thing in the room.
      “Monitor your breathing, Dr. Grace.”

      The room tilted, the lights smeared, and the edges of the med-bay softened into a blur.
      Rocky’s chords spiked into a sharp, panicked shriek.
      “Grace sit!”

      Grace tried to answer, tried to say he was fine, tried to say he could keep going, but the words tangled in his throat. He saw only the stranger’s face—pale and battered beyond belief—and Rocky’s silhouette pressed against the xenonite wall behind him, claws tapping a frantic, helpless rhythm.
      Then the world went black.

✴

      Ryland Grace woke slowly, the world returning to him in a thick, disorienting haze, as if consciousness were something he had to claw his way toward rather than something that simply arrived. For a long moment, he lay still, staring at a ceiling he didn’t recognize, feeling the strange, unexpected sensation of air on his skin instead of the rigid, transparent pressure of the xenonite suit. His limbs felt heavy, his head throbbed with a dull ache, and his chest rose and fell in shallow, uneven breaths that didn’t feel like they belonged to him.

      When he tried to sit up, the room lurched sideways in a slow, nauseating roll that forced him to grip the floor beneath him with both hands. His knuckles whitened as he fought the wave of dizziness that washed over him, and for a moment he couldn’t remember where he was or why he felt hollowed out from the inside.

      “Grace! Grace awake! Slow. Do not move or fall again!”
      Rocky’s voice hit him like a physical jolt—frantic, high‑pitched, chords vibrating so fast they almost blended into a single continuous tremor. Grace forced his eyes open, the world tilting in a nauseating sway, and found Rocky right beside him, the xenonite sphere pressed against his hip where he lay sprawled on the floor at the top of the ladder. The whole shell shuddered with the force of Rocky’s panic, vibrating in uneven pulses that traveled through the metal decking and into Grace’s ribs.
      Inside, Rocky had braced two limbs against the inner shell, claws splayed wide. He kept shifting his weight in frantic, jerking bursts, trying to block the ladder opening even though the hatch was already sealed, trying to keep Grace from sliding toward it, trying to keep him from standing, from falling, from fading out again. Every movement inside the sphere was a desperate, instinctive attempt to hold him in place with the only body he had.

      Grace blinked hard, trying to make sense of things.
      His skin felt cold and clammy, his arm ached where the transfusion line had been, and the xenonite suit—the full-body shell he had been sealed inside—was nowhere in sight.

      “Rocky…?” Grace rasped, his voice raw, his throat painfully dry. “What… what happened? Why am I out of the suit? Where’s—where’s the man? Is he—?”
      A cascade of frantic, discordant chords spilled from Rocky, claws clicking in a pattern that betrayed how terrified he had been while Grace was unconscious.

      “Grace fall. Grace sleep long,” Rocky said, his voice wobbling between pitches in a way that betrayed how close he had come to panic. “Armando take suit off because Grace too hot, too faint, too low blood. Rocky watch whole time. Grace safe now. Human stranger still alive. Barely.”

      Inside the ball, Rocky’s limbs were suddenly drawn tight to his body, every joint locked in a posture that radiated a kind of rigid, helpless fear.
      “Grace suit bad,” he added, the chords tightening into a sharp, anxious whine. “Blood on suit. Very dangerous. Robot say must remove fast. Must void everything with blood. Rocky throw suit out airlock. All pieces. All tools. All floor covers. Everything touched blood. Gone.”

      A sudden, electric rush tore through Grace, clearing the fog in his head with brutal efficiency.
      “You—you vented the suit?”
      “Yes,” Rocky said, chords rising in a sharp, defensive trill. “Armando say blood react. Blood make chemical danger. Radiation danger. Must remove from ship. Must clean stranger human fast. Rocky help. Rocky scared.”

      Grace’s pulse spiked, a cold rush of adrenaline cutting through the fog in his head. He pushed himself upright again, slower this time, gripping the floor plate under him until the dizziness receded enough for him to breathe.
      “Rocky… talk to me. What happened after I passed out?”
      Rocky’s chords dipped into a low, mournful hum, the translator flattening the emotion but not erasing it.
      “Armando keep stranger human alive. Grace blood help. Pressure rise. Heart beat stronger. But many problems still. Very bad problems.”

      Grace swallowed hard, dread pooling in his stomach.
      “Okay,” he whispered. “Tell me the ones that matter right now. The ones we have to deal with first.”
      Rocky hesitated—which was never a good sign—then began listing them with the solemnity of someone reciting structural failures on a ship already taking on water.'
      “Human arm very bad. Torn wrong. Flesh sick. Need cut more. Need remove melty parts or sickness spread.”
      “Like an amputation?” Grace murmured, rubbing a hand over his face.
      “Yes,” Rocky said, tapping once in confirmation. “That. Must do soon. If not, rot spread. Infection spread. Mutation maybe spread.”
      Grace’s stomach twisted at the word mutation.

      “Alright. What else?”
      Rocky’s singing trembled, thin and strained, vibrating with a fear he could barely contain.
      “Worst part,” he said, each note tight with dread. “Human blood… empty. Bone liquid dead. Radiation kill all cell-making. No cells, body cannot fight anything. Cannot heal. Need medicine to grow.”
      Grace closed his eyes, exhaling slowly as the weight of the words settled over him like a physical force. His pulse thudded in his ears, heavy and uneven. A bone marrow transplant?
      “Rocky…” he whispered, “that’s… that’s not something we can just do.”

      Rocky set two pairs of claws against the inner curve of the xenonite sphere, drawing his limbs in tight as though bracing against a force only he could feel. The shell around him shivered with the tension running through his body, a fine, uneven vibration that carried his fear as clearly as any word. His harmonics wavered—thin at the edges, strained in the middle—but the intent beneath them held firm.
      “Robot say same. Hard. Very hard. But not impossible. Maybe fix. Maybe find way. But must act soon.”
      Grace leaned back against the wall, feeling the exhaustion in every muscle. His body felt hollowed out, scraped thin by blood loss and adrenaline, but beneath the fog and the fear something else began to stir—the faint, familiar hum of problem‑solving, the instinctive shift from panic to analysis, the part of him that had survived the Hail Mary mission not by strength, but by refusing to accept that any dead end was truly a dead end.

      He pushed himself upright, the motion feeling like dragging his consciousness uphill through slippery sand. The room tilted, then slowly righted itself, and for a few heartbeats all he could do was cling to the walls and breathe through the hollow, weightless ache that came with having donated far too much blood in far too little time.
      The image of the stranger on the cradle tried to force its way back into his mind—the swollen skin, the ruined arm, the burns that looked like some vindictive universe had tried to erase him molecule by molecule—and Grace shoved it aside with something close to desperation.
      Standing at that bedside again, watching numbers fall and alarms scream, would break him right now. He needed distance, and the part of himself that had once stared down a dying sun and thought, fine, let’s do the math.

      “Rocky,” he said, his voice rough but gaining a thin thread of resolve, “Armando can handle the arm. Let him do the amputation. You watch for contamination spread, okay? I need to go to the lab.”
      Rocky’s chords fluttered in a tight, anxious tremor.
      “Grace walk? Grace strong enough?”
      “Not sure,” Grace admitted, forcing his legs to cooperate anyway, “but I’m still the closest thing to a hematologist within several light‑years, so I guess I’m on shift.”

      Rocky stayed parallel to him as they moved, the xenonite sphere gliding beside Grace with a precision that felt almost uncanny, matching every hesitant step and tracking each subtle wobble as though he could steady him through sheer proximity. Grace leaned against the corridor wall more than once when the dizziness surged, his fingertips dragging along the smooth surface in a slow, searching sweep, but each step toward the lab felt like returning to a language his body still remembered how to speak.
      By the time the door slid open and the layered hum of intricate machinery spilled out to meet him, his breathing had lengthened into something steadier, and the fog in his head had thinned just enough for the world to come back into focus.

      The lab looked exactly as he had left it during the Hail Mary mission: clean lines and cold light. Stainless steel surfaces reflected the pale glow of displays; racks of pipettes and sample tubes stood at attention like soldiers waiting for orders.

      Grace planted both hands on the counter, grounding himself. His gaze drifted, almost by accident, to the far wall, where the whiteboard hung in its usual place. The surface was still smudged with the ghosts of old equations, the faint residue of frantic calculations from what felt like a lifetime ago, and across the center, in thick, uneven strokes, sat the words he had written in the moment everything had fallen apart: Save Rocky.
      Beneath it sprawled the chaotic lattice of his Taumoeba‑escape notes—the fuel‑loss math, the trajectory corrections, the desperate, furious scribbles of a man who had realized he would never see Earth again and had chosen, without hesitation, to save his best friend instead.

      The memory hit him like a warm punch to the chest, and for a heartbeat, he felt that same fierce, bewildered feeling that the universe had, once again, given him something worth sacrificing something for. 

      Then the image of the stranger in the med‑bay rose uninvited—the wounds, the marrow failure, the way his body was collapsing from the inside out—and the smile vanished, wiped clean by a cold, sinking certainty that if Grace didn’t act, that man would die.

      Grace reached for the eraser. His hand shook, but the motion was steady enough. One long, deliberate swipe dragged across the board, smearing the past into a pale haze until the surface stood blank and waiting, the way it had the day he’d first needed it to save someone important to him.
      He uncapped a marker and, in firm, deliberate strokes, wrote across the top: Operation: Save Irradiated Stranger. 

      The words steadied him, gave him something solid to push against, a mission he could hold in his hands instead of letting the fear swallow him whole. He braced one palm against the board, feeling the cool surface under his skin, and forced his mind into motion. 
      Radiation‑induced marrow aplasia meant the stem cells in the stranger’s bones—the hematopoietic progenitors that should have been quietly churning out red cells, white cells, platelets—had been shredded at a genetic level. No production line, no blood. No blood, no oxygen transport, no immune defense, no clotting. Every cut became a hemorrhage, every microbe became a mortal threat, every day without intervention became another step toward irreversible collapse.
      Grace knew the textbook answer, but he also knew exactly why the textbook answer might as well have been a fairytale out here.

      “Rocky,” he said, rubbing at his temples as a holographic interface bloomed to life above the bench, “on Earth, the only real fix for this is a bone marrow transplant. Replace the dead stem cells with healthy ones from a donor. But we can’t do that. Not between strangers.”
      Rocky sang a puzzled rhythm, the pattern sharp and uneven.
      “Why not? Grace human. Stranger human. Blood work together before. Statement.”

      Grace turned back to the whiteboard and drew with the kind of fierce, deliberate focus he used when explaining something to his students who needed pictures more than words. He swept the marker in one long curve to form a femur, then sliced it open with a clean cross‑section, shading the marrow cavity with tight, practiced strokes until it looked full, living, busy. Inside it, he added clusters of oval cells in tidy pockets—stem‑cell niches—and only then did he drag a jagged lightning‑bolt fracture through them, a visual representation of what the radiation had done.

      “Blood is easy compared to this,” he said, tapping the intact side, then the ruined one. He drew two circles beside the bone—DONOR and RECIPIENT—and beneath each he sketched quick, simplified immune cells: Y‑shaped antibodies, spiky T‑cells, the kind of doodles he’d perfected in classrooms where attention spans were measured in seconds. “Red cells don’t care who they’re visiting,” he went on, drawing a smooth arrow from DONOR to RECIPIENT. “They’re couriers. They drop off oxygen and go home.”

      Then he circled the immune cells under DONOR, drew a thick arrow from them into the stranger's outline, and underlined it with a hard stroke.

      “But marrow comes with an entire immune system baked in.” He drew the immune cells waking up inside the stranger—arrows radiating outward, turning into jagged lightning bolts that struck the organs he sketched in rough silhouettes. The board looked like a battlefield.

      “If I put my stem cells into his bones,” he said, voice low but steady, “my immune cells would wake up inside his body, look around, and decide everything they see is an invader. Skin, liver, gut, blood vessels, all of it.”
      “Cells attack? Kill human?”
      “Very likely,” Grace said, swallowing against the dryness in his throat. “I think they call it graft‑versus‑host disease. It would kill him faster than the radiation might.”
      He let his weight sag against the counter. A donor match was out of the question; there was no registry to search, no siblings to test, no time to play immunological roulette. Even if he himself were a partial match by some cosmic joke, the risk would be obscene.

      Grace let his thoughts run their course, the flood of half‑formed solutions thinning until only the ones that might actually save a life remained. He exhaled, lifted the marker again, and swept his earlier diagrams aside, clearing space beneath the mission header before writing in long, deliberate strokes.

      Option 1: Artificial marrow scaffolds
      He drew a quick lattice, a simple grid, nothing fancy, and tapped it once with the marker.

      “In theory,” he murmured, “you build a tiny framework, like a trellis, and let new marrow grow on it.” Then he slashed a line through it. “But it takes months and highly specialized materials... and a lab the size of a small city. We don’t have any of that.”

      Option 2: Induced pluripotent stem cells
      He wrote it cleanly and circled it once.
      “You could take one of his skin cells, rewind it to factory settings, and rebuild the marrow from scratch,” he said, almost wistful. Then he shook his head. “But his DNA is too damaged. It’d be like trying to restore a library after the books have already burned.”

      He crossed it out and hesitated before writing the third line, the marker hovering in the air as if waiting for permission. Then the idea surfaced—quiet, stubborn, and suddenly bright.

      Option 3: Autologous gene repair
      Grace straightened, fingers tightening around the marker, and Rocky immediately noticed the shift in his posture, his chords lifting in a hopeful tremor.

      “Grace thinking. Statement,” Rocky said, chords lifting in cautious hope.
      Grace didn’t answer at first, tapping the board beside the words, then drew a small cluster of surviving stem cells—simple circles with tiny nuclei—and enclosed them in a careful ring.

      “This wouldn't be replacing,” he said, his voice gaining momentum as the idea took shape. He drew a second ring around the first, then arrows radiating outward like a slow explosion. “This is repairing. Find the few cells that survived the radiation, fix their DNA, get them working again, grow them into millions, and put them back.”
      He added a short timeline beneath it—uneven ticks marking weeks—then an arrow pointing back to the stranger’s outline.
      “I can keep giving him blood if we keep the volumes low enough, and we can keep him alive while the cells grow. Then we re‑seed his marrow with his own cells.”

      His hands were already moving, pushing the whiteboard aside and pulling the laptop toward him, calling up the genetic‑editing software they'd pre-installed on all the Hail Mary's devices, but he'd thankfully never actually needed. The CRISPR interface unfolded across the display in a clean, intimidating cascade—sequence editors, template libraries, repair‑pathway models—tools he understood on paper but had only ever handled in controlled, academic contexts, never in the raw, high‑stakes immediacy of a real human genome.
      “Rocky,” he said slowly, the idea crystallizing as he spoke it aloud, “we don’t actually need a donor. We don’t need my marrow at all. We need his marrow—just not in the broken, irradiated state it’s in right now.”

      Rocky answered with a quick, bright burst of sound, an eager staccato that made the xenonite sphere give a sharp little tremor against the floor.
      “Grace can repair? Fix marrow?”
      Grace let out a slow breath, the kind that felt like it scraped the inside of his ribs on the way out.
      “Maybe,” he said, and the syllable steadied him. “If I can get even a tiny sample of his bone marrow—no matter how damaged—I can sequence it. The radiation will have shredded it: double‑strand breaks, point mutations, deletions, the complete horror show. But I still have my own genome as a reference, and at its core, human DNA is human DNA. I can line his sequences up against mine, identify where the damage is, and use CRISPR to correct the mutations.”

      He paused, rubbing the back of his neck as the absurdity of it hit him.
      “It’s like Jurassic Park… but… successful,” he muttered.
      Rocky’s hum fluttered in a confused trill.
      “What is Jurassic Park? Question?”

      Grace waved a hand, exhausted and exasperated and faintly amused all at once.
      “It’s an Earth movie where scientists look at an extinct genetic catastrophe and say, we can fix that, and then they absolutely do not fix that. It’s basically a documentary about bad lab decisions. Not important.”
      Rocky tilted his head, clearly filing this away under deeply concerning human cultural artifacts, but he didn’t press. Instead, he leaned closer to the barrier, chords vibrating with cautious hope.

      “Then Grace grow cells?”
      “Yes,” Grace said, and this time the word came out with momentum behind it. “Once the sequences are repaired, I can clone the corrected stem cells in the incubators. Millions of them. Enough to restart his marrow and rebuild his blood.”
      Rocky tapped a rapid, excited rhythm, the sound bright and sharp.
      “Then Armando put back in human? No fight? No attack?”
      “Exactly,” Grace said. “Because they’re his cells, just… repaired.” The idea settled into place with a weight that felt almost physical. Grace exhaled, long and shaky, as if releasing the last of the panic that had been coiled inside him since the proximity alarm first screamed.

      Rocky’s chords swelled into a warm, resonant sound that filled the lab, vibrating through the metal and into Grace’s bones. It was the Eridian equivalent of a relieved sob.
      “Grace fix. Grace save.”
      Grace didn’t answer immediately. His hands were already moving, pulling up equipment lists, drafting the extraction protocol, mapping out the CRISPR edits he would need to perform. The exhaustion still clung to him like a second skin, and the fear hadn’t vanished so much as shifted into a quieter, more manageable shape.

      There were still a thousand ways this could fail, a thousand steps where everything could go wrong, a thousand unknowns waiting to ambush him.
      But for the first time since he’d pulled the stranger aboard, Grace felt the shape of a path he could actually follow.

✴

      Grace lost track of the first day almost immediately, and by the time the second bled into the third, he had stopped trying to measure time at all. The ship’s chronometers continued to tick in their quiet, indifferent way, but none of them mattered. The only clock that meant anything was the one inside the stranger’s failing body—a clock that was running out of hours far faster than Grace could work on a solution.

      Armando had already completed the emergency amputation and extracted the marrow sample Grace needed, securing it inside a sealed containment pod while the med‑bay remained in full lockdown. Rocky stayed in his xenonite third of the room to supervise the procedure, pressed close to the barrier in his sphere, harmonics tight and anxious as he watched Armando work. But the moment the doors sealed and Grace retreated to the lab, Rocky rolled after him, keeping so close that Grace could feel the faint vibration of the sphere whenever he shifted in his chair.
     But Grace himself didn't step foot inside the med-bay again; he couldn’t afford to. Every hour he spent looking at the stranger was an hour he wasn’t repairing the marrow.

      So, Ryland Grace lived in the lab.

      He slept in short, involuntary bursts at the workstation, waking with his cheek pressed against a keyboard or the imprint of a pipette pressed into his skin. Sometimes he woke to the soft thud of Rocky nudging his sphere against the leg of the table, or a rapid, worried rhythm tapped against the inner frame—Rocky’s way of making sure he hadn’t passed out cold on the floor.

     Armando, unable to leave the med‑bay, eventually started sliding portions of the Eridian‑engineered rations onto a stainless steel cart and nudging it up toward the open hatch at the top of the short ladder. It wasn’t a system at first—just something he did once, then again when it became clear Grace wasn’t remembering to eat. After a couple of days of watching him work himself hollow, it settled into a quiet routine. Rocky would roll over, brace his sphere against the cart’s lower shelf, and guide it down the corridor with steady, practiced pushes, the metal rattling softly with each bump. Grace ate whatever appeared—nutrient bricks, protein slurry packs, the thin carbohydrate wafers the Eridians had designed for long missions—barely tasting any of it. He drank water without registering it, spoke only when necessary, and spent every waking moment staring at the same impossible problem from a thousand angles, trying to carve a path through it before the stranger’s marrow collapse became irreversible.
      And through all of it, Rocky stayed close enough to touch, close enough that Grace never had to wonder whether he was alone.

      The first week vanished into the fabrication of equipment that the Hail Mary had never been designed to hold. Grace and Rocky cannibalized half the ship’s auxiliary systems to create a negative‑pressure micro‑incubator capable of supporting human hematopoietic stem cells.
      They built a CRISPR delivery chamber with a precision tolerance so fine it made Grace’s hands shake just looking at it—a hybrid of Eridian engineering and human molecular biology, capable of delivering guide RNA and repair templates into cells without frying them in the process. They printed custom pipettes when the ship’s supply ran out, fabricated sterile microfluidic channels to handle single‑cell sorting, and rewired the ship’s sequencing array so it could process human chromosomes instead of astrophage’s bizarre, streamlined genome.

      By the end of the second week, the lab looked like a battlefield of abandoned prototypes—warped microfluidic chips, contaminated culture flasks, half‑assembled bioreactor housings, and a graveyard of failed simulations that had crashed the ship’s processors more than once. Grace’s eyes were bloodshot, his hands unsteady, his voice hoarse from disuse, but he kept going, because every time he paused long enough to think about the stranger lying in the med‑bay—every time he imagined the slow, silent collapse of a body with nothing left to sustain it—something inside him tightened hard enough to make him nauseous.
      He tried everything. Every simulation ended in the same place: the stranger’s body rejecting anything that didn’t match his irradiated HLA profile with absolute, molecular precision.

      Grace stared at the sequencing data until the numbers blurred, until the double‑strand breaks and chromosomal fragments and radiation scars all blended into a single, overwhelming mosaic of damage—a genome so shredded that even the software struggled to render it.
      He ran CRISPR simulations until the ship’s processors overheated, because repairing a genome this damaged required thousands of simultaneous edits, each one modeled, tested, and validated in silico before he dared attempt it in vitro. He hand‑adjusted guide RNA sequences until his fingers cramped, tweaking PAM sites and homology arms by fractions of a nucleotide. He rewrote entire gene‑repair pathways from scratch, building template libraries to patch the genome’s missing segments, reconstructing regulatory regions that had been blown apart by radiation.

      By the third week, Grace had stopped speaking in full sentences. By the fourth, he had stopped speaking at all.

      Rocky stayed with him through every hour, barely leaving his side except when the med‑bay demanded it. Whenever Grace swayed or forgot to blink, Rocky hummed anxious melodies against the inner frame, sharp little bursts of sound that cut through the fog in Grace’s head.
      “Grace unhealthy. Statement,” Rocky said more than once, his voice a thin, vibrating thread of fear. "Grace must rest.”
      Grace ignored him.

      He didn’t know what day it was anymore, but he knew this one felt different.
      Something in the lab had shifted—not the air, not the equipment, but the way his brain finally stopped dragging itself through mud and started lining up thoughts in a straight line again.

      After nearly a month of failures—after every automated repair algorithm had crashed under the sheer volume of genomic damage, after every auto‑stitching routine had thrown fatal errors, after every simulation had folded the moment it tried to model hematopoiesis—today felt like the first time the problem wasn’t actively mocking him.
      He pulled up the stranger’s marrow scan again, the one he had memorized so thoroughly he felt like he could have redrawn it from memory.

      Then he summoned the second sequence beside it: the one he had built by hand through weeks of editing. At this point, he had made thousands of manual edits, nucleotide by nucleotide, reconstructing the genome from the ground up until it resembled something that might, just might, be capable of supporting life again.
      The contrast was brutal. The strangers' chromosomes had been broken in half, pathways that should have supported blood formation reduced to static: it was a biological city leveled by radiation. By contrast, Grace's synthetic sequence looked like a cathedral.

      He had rebuilt the CRISPR pipeline so many times that the code felt like an extension of his own hands—fragile and temperamental, but real. And today, for the first time, it was stable enough to finally test the genome he had repaired himself.

      His pulse thudded in his ears as he initiated the run.
      The simulation began reading his reconstructed genome, validating each of his manual corrections, stitching the broken sequences together exactly as he had designed them. Grace leaned in, barely breathing, watching the progress bar crawl forward with agonizing slowness as the system tested each edit and the virtual stem cells attempted to self‑renew.

      The simulation did not crash.

      The repaired stem cells divided cleanly, then again, and again, their differentiation pathways reactivating in a smooth, controlled cascade that made Grace’s breath hitch. The screen filled with green indicators—viability, stability, replication fidelity—each one a tiny, impossible victory.
      Grace stared at the results, unable to process them at first. His brain had been braced for failure for so long that success felt unreal, like a trick his sleep-deprived brain was playing on him. He blinked once, twice, then leaned closer, hands trembling so violently he had to brace them against the console.

      Behind him, Rocky’s voice shifted—an uncertain rise in pitch.
      “Grace? Question?”

      Grace swallowed. His throat felt tight, like the words were catching on the way out.
      “It worked,” he whispered. “Rocky… I think it actually worked.”
      For a heartbeat, there was silence. Then Rocky’s music exploded into a bright, resonant burst—a full‑body chord of joy so powerful the translator clipped and stuttered, unable to contain it. Rocky pressed his xenonite ball closer to Grace's legs, his harmonics vibrating the metal floor, the walls, the air itself.

      “Grace solve!” he cried, “Grace solve!!! Amaze!!!”
      Grace didn’t realize he was crying until his vision blurred and a tear slid off his chin, hitting the console with a soft, wet tap. He tried to wipe it away, but more followed, hot and uncontrollable. Weeks of fear, pressure, and the quiet, suffocating terror of being the only person who could save the last human within light‑years finally broke loose. His breath hitched, his shoulders folding inward as if his body had been waiting for permission to fall apart.

      He initiated the real‑world protocol with shaking hands, loading the stranger’s damaged marrow sample into the CRISPR chamber. The ship’s systems accepted it with a soft mechanical hum, then began the layered editing sequence he had spent weeks designing. The chamber lights pulsed in slow, steady rhythms as the machine rewrote the broken genome strand by strand.
      When the incubators accepted the first batch of corrected stem cells and began their slow, steady expansion, Grace let out a sound that was half‑laugh, half‑sob—a raw, unfiltered noise pulled from somewhere deep in his chest.

      Rocky’s chords softened into a warm, harmonic sweep—the Eridian equivalent of a hand on his shoulder.
      “Grace safe now,” Rocky said gently. “Stranger human safe soon. Statement.”

      Grace didn’t answer; his body simply gave out.
      He slumped forward onto the workstation, collapsing into a deep, heavy sleep—not the shallow, twitching micro‑sleeps of the past weeks, but the kind of unconsciousness that comes only when a body has been pushed far beyond its limits and finally, mercifully, allowed to stop.

      Rocky stayed beside him the entire time, curled close, protective. He monitored the incubators, watched the CRISPR logs scroll by, and kept vigil over the man who had hopefully just saved another human’s life with nothing but desperation, stubbornness, and a refusal to let the universe take one more thing from him.

✴

      Ryland Grace felt almost human again after the first real sleep he’d had in weeks. His joints still ached, his eyes still burned, and his muscles protested every movement, but his mind—for the first time in what felt like a lifetime—was sharp. The fog that had wrapped around his thoughts was gone, replaced by the clean, electric hum of a brain finally firing on all cylinders again. The incubators were running smoothly, the CRISPR logs were clean, and the repaired stem cells were multiplying with the steady, confident rhythm of a system that knew exactly what it was doing.

      And that meant Ryland Grace could finally face the lesser problem: the arm.
      Rocky rolled his xenonite ball closer, producing a soft, uneasy chord that hovered somewhere between concern and impatience.
      “Arm tissue still unstable.”
      Grace pulled up the scans Armando had been collecting. He expected the usual suspects—inflammation, infection, or necrotic spread: ugly but familiar.

      What he saw instead made him sit forward so fast the chair squeaked.
      The tissue wasn’t behaving like any biological process he recognized. Localized heat spikes pulsed through the stump like tiny solar flares, micro‑radiation bursts flickered in irregular intervals, and biochemical signatures drifted across the display in patterns that didn’t match human metabolism, bacterial growth, fungal invasion, or anything else that belonged in a medical textbook. And beneath all of it, faint but unmistakable, was a repeating waveform—a rhythmic oscillation that suggested the contamination wasn’t just present but active.
      Alive in the way a parasite is alive...

      Grace rubbed his temples, staring at the thermal map as if it might rearrange itself into something less horrifying.
      “Okay,” he murmured. “So this isn’t an infection, and it’s not necrosis either, it's... It’s… something else.”
      Rocky’s chords shifted into a questioning interval, the sound sharp and curious.
      “Define something else? Question?”

      Grace zoomed in on the thermal spikes, watching the heat signatures pulse like a heartbeat.
      “It looks like it's using energy. Heat, radiation—whatever it can pull from the tissue. It’s not alive in the traditional sense, but it’s behaving like a system that needs a power source.”
      Rocky produced a short, confused trill.
      “Like combustion? Question?”

      Grace let out a tired laugh—the kind that sounded like it had been sandpapered on the way out.
      “No, bud. Combustion is at least polite enough to stop when you take the fuel away. This thing is more like… like a toddler with a marker and no supervision.”
      Rocky’s tone fluttered in alarm.
      “Human toddler dangerous? Question?!”
      Grace pinched the bridge of his nose.
      “No, Rocky. That was a bad joke, I'm sorry. I’m very tired.”

      Rocky emitted a low, unimpressed hum.
      “Human jokes confusing.”
      Grace sighed.
      "Trust me, they’re confusing for humans too.”

      Grace sighed and leaned back, rubbing at the bridge of his nose.
      “Armando's cooling of the wound didn’t work because we didn’t remove the energy source. We just slowed it down. It’s still feeding on whatever heat the tissue produces from the inside out, and the radiation shielding didn’t help because it’s not just radiation—it’s any thermal flux.”
      Rocky’s music dropped into a low, worried hum.
      “Then remove energy source. Statement.”

      Grace froze. Rocky tilted his ball slightly.
      “Grace?”
      Grace stared at the screen, then at the astrophage containment unit across the lab, the realization blooming so fast and so violently that it almost hurt.
      “Rocky… you just solved it.”
      Rocky released a startled burst of bright, high‑pitched harmonics, the sound sharp with surprise and rising disbelief.

      “Rocky did?”
      Grace pushed himself to his feet, the exhaustion that had been dragging him down for weeks suddenly overridden by a surge of clarity and adrenaline that felt almost electric.
      “Yes, you did. Think about it: this contamination needs energy to sustain itself, right? It’s feeding on whatever it can pull from the tissue. And we have the most efficient energy‑absorbing organism in existence sitting right there, doing absolutely nothing except being the universe’s hungriest little vacuum cleaner!”
      Rocky followed his gaze with a slow, dawning understanding.
      “Astrophage.”

      Grace nodded, already pulling up the containment protocols, his mind racing faster than his hands could keep up.
      “Astrophage absorbs heat, light, radiation—everything this contamination is using. If we apply a microscopic, tightly controlled amount to the stump, it’ll drain the energy faster than the contamination can use it. It’ll starve it.”
      Rocky’s harmonics wavered between excitement and alarm, oscillating in a tight, trembling pattern that made the air feel charged.
      “Grace must control amount precisely. Too much astrophage and human becomes… very cold.”

      Grace winced, rubbing the back of his neck.
      “Yeah, I’m aware. I’d prefer not to accidentally flash-freeze his entire torso.”
      Rocky released a sharp, scolding burst of sound.
      “Not funny. Statement.”
      Grace held up both hands in surrender, palms open.
      “I'm not joking! But the principle is sound. We don’t need a lot. Just enough to create a localized energy sink.”

      “Procedure possible!” Rocky declared, his pitch rising with determination.
      Grace pulled up the astrophage handling protocols, fingers flying across the interface with a speed he hadn’t had in weeks.
      “We’ll need a gel medium to keep it localized—something viscous enough to prevent migration. And we’ll need to monitor temperature and radiation in real time. If the tissue drops too fast, we pull it immediately.”
      Rocky added, “Armando must be ready. Statement.”
      “He will be,” Grace said, already assembling the parameters. “He’s already removed all the damaged tissue. Once the contamination is neutralized, he’ll just need to keep the guy stable. The stem‑cell infusion is going to hit hard if it works... He’ll be weak, but he’ll be responsive sooner or later, and we have to be ready for that.”

      Rocky’s voice brightened, not just with excitement but with something warmer, something that vibrated through the lab like a rising tide of hope.
      “Grace solve again!” he sang, the harmonics lifting in a way that made it unmistakable he wasn’t just celebrating the solution — he was celebrating what the solution meant. “Human friend for Grace soon! Statement!”

      He turned back to the workstation, already assembling the components for the gel medium, already calculating the safe concentration, already preparing the monitoring suite. The CRISPR incubators hummed steadily behind him, a reminder that one impossible problem had already been solved.

      Now it was time to solve the second.

✴

      Grace sealed the astrophage gel into its containment sleeve and stood there for a long moment, staring at the med-bay doors as if they were something alive—as if they were watching him back. For weeks, he had buried himself in simulations, in gene repair, in equipment fabrication, in anything that kept him from having to face the man he’d dragged aboard. It had been easier to pretend the stranger was a project, a set of numbers on a screen, a problem to solve, rather than a person whose life now depended entirely on him. But now the help he had spent weeks working on was ready, and there was no more work left to hide behind.

      Rocky rolled his xenonite sphere closer, his harmonics soft and steady, a low musical reassurance that vibrated through the floor and settled into Grace’s bones like a hand on the shoulder.

      “Grace must go in. Statement.”
      Grace nodded, though his throat felt tight enough to choke him.
      “Yeah. I know.”
      "Need words of encouragement?" Rocky asked, his pitch lifting in a hopeful little arc.
      "No, bud. Just gotta... get this done. Hope it works."

      Grace stepped into the suit bay out of habit, only to stop short when the muscle memory collided with reality. There was no suit anymore—no xenonite shell to hide inside, no comforting barrier of alien engineering to make him feel like he was operating at a safe remove. All that remained on the bench was what he had laid out earlier: a pair of nitrile gloves, a filtered mask, and a thin disposable gown meant for chemical spills, not for approaching a man who had once been radioactive enough to kill him in minutes.
      Rocky had checked the readings many times. The stranger’s radiation output had finally fallen to something survivable—still not good, still not something you’d want to live next to, but low enough that a mask and gloves would keep Grace safe from whatever trace contamination lingered.
      At least it was something between him and the unknown.

      He pulled the mask over his face, snapped the gloves into place, and tied the gown behind his back with hands that didn’t feel entirely connected to him. The med‑bay doors slid open with a soft hydraulic sigh, and he stepped through.

     He wasn’t ready. He had told himself he was, had rehearsed the moment in his mind, imagined walking into the med-bay with clinical detachment, imagined focusing on the stump, the contamination, the astrophage gel—anything except the man lying on the bed.

      The last time he had seen the stranger, the man had been a nightmare made of flesh—a ruin soaked in blood and chemical sludge, skin blistered and bubbling, hair glued to his skull in dark, sticky ropes. Grace had carried that image with him for weeks, buried it under work and exhaustion, but it had never really left him. It had lived behind his eyes, a ghost he refused to look at directly.
      Now he saw the man again, and the ghost shattered.

      Armando had worked on him relentlessly while Grace lived in the lab, and the transformation was so profound it felt unreal.
      The stranger’s skin—once mottled, blistered, and grotesquely bubbled—was almost human now. The worst burns had been excised and replaced with grafts, the largest one a pale, delicate patch of skin from his upper chest now resting just above his brow, its edges faintly pink but healing cleanly. The rest of his skin bore the faint texture of trauma, a subtle unevenness like the surface of cooled wax, but it was no longer a fungal bloom or a chemical horror. It was simply the skin of a man who had been through hell and somehow survived it.

      His hair was clean and dry, a dark chocolate brown that curled slightly where it brushed the pillow. His face, slack with sedation, looked heartbreakingly human now: the strong jawline, the faint stubble, the dark lashes resting against his cheeks. The bruises that had once painted him in violent purples and blacks had faded into muted yellow‑brown shadows.
      His breathing was slow and even, the rise and fall of his chest steady and rhythmic, a quiet metronome of life. The monitors reflected the same truth: a stable pulse, a steady oxygen saturation, a body relying on external instruments, but no longer fighting to exist.

      Grace moved closer without meaning to, drawn in by an emotion he didn’t have a name for. The man’s lips had color again, a soft, living flush that hadn’t been there before. His hand, resting at his side, no longer held the rigid tension of shock but lay loose and natural against the sheets. His skin wasn’t cold; his pulse, visible on the monitor, was steady.
      And he felt something inside him break open—a pressure he hadn’t realized he’d been carrying, a fear so deep it had become part of him. The terror he had swallowed for weeks, the guilt of not being enough, the crushing loneliness of being the only human in this universe and almost losing the first one he’d found. It all surged up in a single, overwhelming wave that hit him so hard his knees nearly buckled.

      Rocky’s voice came through the xenonite wall to his side, soft and worried.
      “Grace feeling okay?”

      Grace exhaled a breath that trembled on its way out, his eyes fixed on the man who had been dying mere weeks ago.
      “He looks… alive.”
      Rocky produced a warm, resonant chord that filled the medbay like a blanket, wrapping around Grace in a way no human touch could.
      “He is alive. Because of Grace."

      Grace lifted a hand to wipe his eyes, then stopped halfway, suddenly aware of the tremor in his fingers and the heat gathering behind his mask, overwhelmed by the enormity of the moment and embarrassed by how close he was to breaking.
      “Because of us,” he whispered, the words barely more than a breath. “If anything… because of us, Rocky.”
      Rocky’s harmonics brightened in a soft, rising glow, a sound that carried pride and relief and something like joy, settling around Grace with the quiet certainty of a truth finally spoken aloud.
      “Grace not alone. Statement.”

      He forced himself to step back, to breathe, to remember why he was here. The stump—a clean amputation just below the shoulder—lay under a sterile field. The tissue was neat and precise, but the thermal map hovering above it told the truth that the naked eye couldn’t see: faint pulses of heat, micro‑radiation flickers, the strange alien contamination still clinging to the wound like a parasite that refused to die, feeding on whatever scraps of energy it could steal.
      Grace positioned the astrophage gel applicator.
      “Slow and controlled.”
      Rocky’s chords tightened into a thin, tense harmony.
      “Monitoring.”

      Grace applied the gel.
      The astrophage spread across the tissue in a thin, shimmering layer, almost like frost forming in fast‑forward. The sensors reacted immediately—temperature dipping, radiation signatures weakening, the contamination’s energy pattern flattening. The alien residue tried to flare once, a desperate spike of heat, but the astrophage absorbed it instantly, starving it faster than it could react.
      Grace watched the readings, barely breathing.

      “Come on…”
      The last thermal pulse flickered, sputtered, and vanished.

      Rocky’s tone brightened into a triumphant harmony that vibrated through the suit.
      “Contamination neutralized. Statement.”
      Grace sagged in relief, the tension leaving him so abruptly he had to catch himself on the edge of the workstation.

      “Armando, finish the cleanup.”
      Armando moved with mechanical precision, sealing the wound with sterile polymer, each motion exact and unhurried. The stump’s readings stabilized completely—no heat spikes, no radiation bursts, no biochemical anomalies. It was over.
      Grace stepped back, chest tight, heart pounding inside the suit. The man on the bed looked nothing like the dying creature he had dragged aboard.

      Rocky’s voice softened.
      “Human safe from alien life now!”

      Grace nodded.
      But safety wasn’t life. Not yet.

      Grace stepped toward the console beside the bed, the thin disposable gown rustling softly with each movement, a faint, papery whisper that barely masked the sound of his own breathing behind the filtered mask. The CRISPR incubators glowed in the dimmed med‑bay, their internal chambers swirling with a faint golden suspension. Millions of repaired hematopoietic stem cells drifted inside—genetically the stranger’s, but whole again, unmarred by radiation, each one a tiny, perfect engine of regeneration waiting for release.
      He stared at them for a long moment, struck by the surreal beauty of it, by the impossible fact that weeks of work and fear and stubborn refusal to let this man die had condensed into something that looked like captured starlight floating in a glass chamber.

      He loaded the infusion cartridge into the IV port. His hands were impossibly steady despite the tightness gathering in his chest. He had spent weeks building this pipeline, fighting simulations and equipment failures, and his own collapsing body; weeks terrified that he would lose the only human he would likely ever see again in his lifetime.

      Rocky rolled his xenonite ball closer, producing a soft, anticipatory harmony that vibrated through the med-bay like a held breath.
      “This is final step. Statement.”
      Grace exhaled slowly, fogging the inside of his mask.
      “Yeah. This is the part that hopefully gives him his life back.” With a deep, final breath, he pressed the initiation control.

      The infusion pump activated with a soft, almost apologetic click—a sound so small it felt absurdly inadequate for what it represented. The repaired stem cells began flowing into the man’s bloodstream, a quiet, steady stream of life slipping through the IV line like liquid starlight. Grace watched the tubing fill with the faintly luminescent suspension, watched it disappear beneath the stranger’s skin, watched the monitors shift in real time as the first wave dispersed into circulation.
      And then—nothing. No alarms, just the slow, clinical hum of machinery doing its job.

      The cells would circulate briefly, then begin homing to the bone marrow cavities, guided by CXCL12 gradients, VCAM‑1 adhesion, and the stromal‑cell signaling that even a damaged human body still produced. Once there, they would settle into the marrow niches, nestle into the stromal matrix, and begin dividing. Slowly at first—hematopoietic stem cells were cautious by design—then exponentially as the repaired genome proved itself stable.
      Within hours, the first signs of proliferation would appear. Within days, white blood cells. Within weeks, platelets and red cells. Within months, a fully rebuilt hematopoietic system.

      Grace opened the marrow‑integration panel—the diagnostic suite he had written himself, a Frankenstein hybrid of human medical software and Eridian signal analysis—and the display bloomed into a lattice of molecular markers, the earliest signs of stem‑cell engraftment, the ones he had memorized so thoroughly he could have recited them in his sleep.
      For a long, suffocating moment, the panel showed nothing but baseline noise, the flat, indifferent hum of a body that had been dying for weeks, and Grace felt something cold twist deep in his stomach, a slow, sinking dread that maybe he had been wrong, maybe the simulations had lied, maybe the cells were too damaged or the body too far gone or the universe simply too cruel to let this work.

      And then, almost shyly, a single indicator flickered to life.
      CXCR4↑ homing initiated.

      Grace went absolutely still, breath caught somewhere between his lungs and his throat, as if the slightest movement might scare the signal away. A second marker appeared, steadier this time, as though the system had found its footing.
      VCAM‑1 binding detected.
      His breath hitched, a tiny, involuntary sound. A third marker followed, the one he had been terrified to hope for.

      S‑phase entry: 0.3%
      Rocky’s chords rose in a trembling, hopeful interval, the sonic equivalent of leaning forward.
      “Grace?”
      Grace leaned closer to the screen, eyes wide, heart pounding so hard he could feel it in his fingertips, and when he spoke, his voice was barely more than a breath.
      “They’re dividing.” The panel updated again, faster now, the numbers climbing in delicate, perfect increments—S‑phase 0.7%, S‑phase 1.1%—and each new value felt like a heartbeat, like the universe finally, finally giving something back.

      Rocky released a sound Grace had never heard before, a bright burst of harmonics that vibrated through the entire med‑bay, a sound so full of relief and joy that the translator clipped and stuttered helplessly, unable to contain the sheer force of it, unable to translate the way Rocky’s entire being seemed to flare with emotion.
      “Life growing! Statement! Life growing!!!”

      Grace pressed a gloved hand to his mask, blinking hard as emotion surged up his chest in a hot, overwhelming wave.
      “He’s going to make it,” he whispered, his voice cracking under the weight of it. “Rocky… I think he’s actually going to make it.”
      Rocky’s voice softened into a trembling, reverent sweep of harmonics, warm and bright and impossibly tender.
      “Grace saved human!!! Amaze amaze amaze!!”
      Grace shook his head, tears slipping down his cheeks.

      “Yeah bud,” he said, voice thick. “We saved him.”

      Rocky rolled a little closer, tapping the inside of his sphere in a quick, hopeful rhythm. Grace lifted a hand without thinking, and Rocky bumped the xenonite shell gently against his knuckles, the closest thing they had to a fist‑bump.

      They stayed there beside the bed, the med‑bay humming softly around them, watching the numbers rise in steady, patient increments, watching the first new cells this man’s body had managed to make in weeks. The readings held, the markers strengthened, and the tight pressure in his chest finally eased enough that he could breathe without feeling like he was waiting for the floor to drop out from under him. For the first time in longer than he cared to count, he let himself believe the man might actually wake up. The thought settled in, small and solid, and he held onto it like it was the first real thing he’d had in weeks, because now, finally, there was something to wait for.

✴