Chapter Text
Eva Stratt was pretty sure Ryland Grace wasn’t human.
It sounded insane. And maybe it was insane. But at this point in her life, she was fairly pliable when it came to accepting the seemingly impossible. The sun was being eaten by alien cells, nibbled up by things that should, for all intents and purposes, not exist. Nothing should be able to survive on the surface of the sun—and Eva didn’t need a Ph.D. in Microbiology to know that that was a reasonable thought to have.
But the astrophage did. And it should be impossible.
So sue her if she thought Ryland could be something else impossible.
He seemed normal enough, if a bit strange, when she first walked into his classroom after school hours. His classroom was more than fine. Very personalized, what with the planetary diorama hanging from the ceiling. Cute drawings clearly made by middle school students were taped onto the walls with care, and judging by his overall softened and obviously-caring demeanor, she got the impression that there were probably a few special pieces of his students’ art hanging on his fridge back home, too. In the spirit of a humble middle school teacher, he all but shooed her away that day when she started talking about his past life, like anyone reasonable trying to save a modicum of dignity would have, curling in on himself away from even the sheer mention of his shunned paper, until she brought up the astrophage and their propensity to survive in the most heinous conditions known to life itself.
When she lured him in with the ghost of a promise to finally get to prove his own thoughts right, he was, again, nothing short of normal. A perfectly reasonable captive scientist, who hopped around like an overexcited Jerboa when he discovered that the astrophage were indeed life forms, managed to make friends with just about everyone he came into contact with, and drained Carl’s spending account on what basically amounted to a rudimentary breeder box for the first alien life forms to come to Earth. He chit-chatted through the comms into the observation room, wriggled his fingers when he found out something particularly interesting, had a fidgety habit of twirling around in his chair while he was waiting for the centrifuge to stop spinning, and he threw things around the expensive lab when his arid hypothesis about life forms was eventually disproved by his own methodical spectroscopy.
Or, whatever method he had used—she knew that he couldn’t see into the alien cells, so spectroscopy probably wasn’t what he’d used.
…right?
Eva really tried to keep track of everything he told her, didn’t want to be totally in the dark concerning the astrophage research, wanted to be able to effectively communicate with the rest of the scientists what was happening at the bunker—but, admittedly, she didn’t care much about the specifics beyond what was absolutely necessary for the plan to manifest and for her team to mobilize. That was why she had him. To figure out the squishy scientific stuff while she handled the politics, in turn. Not that she couldn’t understand, but it simply was not her forte. She’d done her training in the more technical sciences.
All this to say in some roundabout way that, at first, he seemed like any regular man. Made of the same substance, flesh and blood knitted together into an altogether affectionate front that lowered every guard that she could possibly have. He was dorkishly charming, extroverted to a nauseating fault, and, even if she hadn’t been surrounded by top military and government personnel that could kill a man with all four limbs tied behind their backs, she initially clocked Ryland as completely and utterly harmless.
It was only aboard the Gansu that that perception started to change.
The aircraft carrier was a fine metal fortress floating in the middle of nowhere, rocking minutely to the rhythm of the South China Sea, like a baby in a bassinet being comforted by a loving mother. Except if that baby was a bunch of high-ranking officers, scientists, and taskforce administrators that had never known a second of comfort their entire time aboard the thing, and if the mother was the cruel and unforgiving personification of Mother Nature herself, who accosted the ship with storms at every turn like she was fundamentally against the very research going on within it. Like it was defying her carefully-planned extinction event and she had a bone to pick with the human will to survive by any means necessary.
The Gansu was many things to many people. Home for all of them, at least for a time, Hell for a few, who longed to see their families, and paradise for some, who couldn’t imagine being anywhere else but the forefront of saving the world. It was the staging ground for humanity’s salvation. It was the genesis of many cases of seasickness and homesickness. It was cold, like the steel alloy that held it together, made warm only in moments by passing smiles and small victories as Project Hail Mary took shape.
For Ryland, the Gansu was… well. Eva saw that he clearly was uncomfortable being on the ship, and every fiber of his being seemed to itch with the desire to leave. To him, she reasoned, the floating entrapment seemed just as much a circle of Hell as the fact that they were trapped on a dying planet with a suicide-mission longshot as the only way out. She thought it might’ve been the abundance of guns (he looked the type to be afraid of them, after all), or the fact nobody knew he was out in the middle of the ocean, or maybe it was just early-onset island fever creeping in. Either way, for Ryland, the Gansu seemed to be a cage.
Eva, on the other hand, thought it was sort of just a big floating office with really good security.
And, of course, breeding grounds.
Not just for the astrophage, but for her growing suspicions about the impossibility of Doctor Ryland Grace.
—
It started with little things.
Miniscule inconsistencies and oddities that Eva noticed about the blond man over time.
The first thing was that Ryland just… didn’t eat.
Barely at all.
In the cafeteria every day at twelve, amid the cacaphonious and boisterous roar of military personnel and stressed scientists shoveling down their mess-hall gruel, Ryland was more of a third-party observer than a participant at whatever table he chose to sit at. He always had a tray, sure, but he only ever picked at it. A sip of water between smiles, a single leaf of lettuce that made his nose wrinkle, perhaps a spoon or two of mostly-clear broth—never anything of real substance. He sat down, he played with his food, and then he scraped the majority of it off onto his coworkers’ plates or just tossed it in the trash before he left. Not even the Egg Drop Soup that had been specially prepared for a crewman’s birthday had been able to entice him into swallowing more than a few sips.
At the time when she first noticed his lack of interest in eating, it had been a week and a half since Ryland boarded the Gansu, and in that span of days, the closest thing to actual food that she saw him consume were the red strings of licorice that occasionally hung from his lips while he was working or writing or just idling around. But he was generally restless, and she thought it was probably more of an oral fixation than a craving, since he was also a big fan of chewing on everything he could get his mouth on. The temples of his glasses, the ends of his pencils and pens.
Lack of appetite could be somewhat of a reasonable reaction to the mission at hand, so Eva hadn’t initially thought too much of it. Besides, some people were finicky with eating in front of others; maybe he’d squirreled himself away some snacks that nobody on the ship knew about, maybe he had an eating disorder. There were a litany of plausible explanations for the avoidance that did not amount to anything overtly suspicious, in the beginning.
The same could not be said of the rest of the anomalies.
—
The second of them happened two days after she noticed his lack of appetite.
In her quarters, Eva wrapped herself in a wool coat and tied a scarf around her head to shield herself from the whipping winds of the moonlit weather. Catching her reflection in the mirror, it reminded her all too much of an elderly Russian woman going to the Divine Liturgy. Mittens coating her hands, she embarked on a characteristic late-night stroll over the epoxy resin that coated the landing strips of the ship. The wind was less intense than she’d imagined, and it was even somewhat pleasant as gentle droplets of rain tickled the top of her head.
She had always feared becoming her mother, who embodied every stereotype known to Germany, if only because she never wanted to hear ‘I told you so,’ but she acquiesced herself to enjoying it. Walking in the rain reminded her of her upbringing. Of smelling cornflowers and petrichor while she jumped in puddles with her yellow rain boots without any knowledge that the sun would someday fade.
On lap three around the deck, she spotted Ryland leaning against a railing near the starboard side, raincoat draping down his back and flapping against his pants. For a brief moment, she considered passing him by, leaving him to his own devices, but her innate curiosity got the better of her and she found her legs working against her, betraying her, closing the distance between herself and the strange man who had captivated her attention a bit more than she figured was normal.
“Dr. Grace,” left her lips before she could protest, “it’s 2 A.M.. We have the team meeting in the morning. You should be in bed. At the very least, in your quarters.”
She didn’t know where the hint of concern came from—curse her, she really was turning into her mother—but it was sapped from her body a moment later when Ryland turned to look at her in the near-blackness of the deck.
The ambient moonlight caught his eyes, and both of them flashed a reflective white like an animal caught in high beams. His damp hair framed his pale face like a hood over two headlights. They struck Eva in her chest with something pernicious, cutting through the inky blackness between the two of them like blades, and she felt not unlike a bunny staring into the eyes of a fox. With a predator’s gaze trained on her, picking her silhouette out against the backdrop of the forest, as it grew closer, muscles poised to strike, to end her, jaw clamped around her neck—
“---so should you, Stratt. Here, c’mon, let’s get inside...”
Ryland’s raincoat was over her, pulled open to encompass her form in a bit of a side-hug. He ushered her back towards the safety of the interior halls of the Gansu.
“...alright, then.”
When she looked up at him to pull her lips into a razor-thin smile as a token of her gratitude, his baby blues were back to their usual softness. The color of the sea in daytime, if a bit lighter. A little black dot in the center. Framed by water-speckled specs. Harmless.
“Goodnight, Dr. Grace.”
“Goodnight, Stratt.”
She learned, that night, via an unceremonious Google search back in her room, that that particular phenomenon, known as eyeshine, was caused by a thin membrane called the tapetum lucidum. A reflective tissue layer, it acted much like a mirror, bouncing light back through the photoreceptors so the eyes could snatch up any wandering photons it might’ve missed on the first pass, subsequently improving night vision in nocturnal and crepuscular animals.
For all intents and purposes, the tapetum lucidum was a perfectly reasonable explanation for what she had seen on the deck in the dark.
Except for one little detail.
Humans, being diurnal, did not have one.
—
The third happened in the conference room.
Two more days had passed since the night on the deck, and Ryland’s eyes had been largely forgotten, though their strangeness still lingered ever-present in the back of Eva’s mind.
What was at the front of her mind, in their stead, was the succinct realization that, for all his apparent timidity and gentleness, the newest addition to her science team was actually fairly arrogant.
He practically came alive on Project Hail Mary, growing into himself as he was given the glamorous title of the world’s leading astrophage expert. Having been gifted some new purpose in the scientific world, a chance to truly make a difference, or perhaps to clear his name from representing nothing but the disgraced bundle of quackish ideas he was currently perceived as, outside of the walls of the Gansu, he guarded his research like an animal. Defended it like a rabid thing. He shot down ideas in the board room with a vengeance when he had even an inkling that they would not work out, much to the chagrin of the other officers who proposed them earnestly. He gave presentations that were overconfident in nature, littered with personal Ryland-isms that the crew was quickly coming to understand were just shorthand nonsense for various scientific procedures.
He was annoying, sure. Overconfident. But that was exactly what she wanted him to be. Someone who thought he was right when everyone else thought he was wrong.
The exact sort of behavior that had gotten him ostracized from the scientific community at the UNESCO conference.
Eva hadn’t been there, of course, but she was fairly sure that the scene playing out in front of her was a fairly accurate recreation of the sort of thing that had happened at that symposium.
“No—no, I don’t—listen to me, we can’t do that, do you understand what’d happen if we—do you not understand how these things work? Have you been absent for, like, every single team meeting we’ve had so far?”
She sat at one of the chairs with her ankles crossed, hands folded over top one another, resting them on the cold wooden surface of the table. Ryland sat to her left, another scientist to her right, and across the table and to the side was Dr. Dickson, who had simply voiced his curiosity over whether or not the astrophage could derive fuel from exposure to a hydrogen fire.
“Dr. Grace, there’s no need to be insulting—”
“That’d kill us all, what you’re proposing would kill us all—”
“Dr. Grace—”
“---because the astrophage is a heat-sink, and after being enriched with fire, all it’d take is a single photon to create an explosion, and with the amount of astrophage I have aboard the ship, it’d just be a domino effect, and—tada! Your idea just murdered half of the Petrova Taskforce, Dickson!”
It was a reasonable thing to be irritated over, especially since Dickson had been particularly cumbersome with his hypotheticals for the entirety of two weeks. He was the type to have a question after every presentation slide, much to the chagrin of the rest of the room.
The argument that ensued—if it could even be considered an argument with how mild-mannered Dickson was—was unremarkable, yet still complete with an underhanded comment from Ryland about how it was quite fascinating how Dickson managed to secure himself a position on the Petrova Taskforce despite his latest research paper’s results being unreplicable. Something about his obvious ‘perseverance and talent for negotiation’ despite his obvious professional setbacks. It earned a chorus of giggles from the room, and Dickson’s face brightened like he was sunburnt. Grace ended the conversation with a smile, flashing just for a moment, right as Eva glanced at him with a raised eyebrow that nonverbally told him to move off the subject of Dickson’s question and onto more important things.
Besides the fact that a considerable amount of mirth danced in his eyes at the prospect of, seemingly, shutting down the riff-raff at the table—something Eva had hoped was inside of him somewhere but, after observing his neurotic and disorganized demeanor for the first few days, had not thought she’d ever find—there wasn’t really anything interesting about his face. It was the very same handsome collection of features that she found her gaze fixating on more and more over the last two weeks. The same scruffy chin, the same crop of dirty blond hair, the same sparkling peepers behind thin panes of glass.
But her eyes snagged on his teeth.
They were bright white, perfectly straight, thoroughly ordinary and well-taken-care-of, except for the fact that one of them was digging mildly into his bottom lip. And it wasn’t just a bit pointed, like some people’s tended to be; it was practically elongated, tapering to a fine dagger that reminded her more of a fang than anything else. She stared at her hands and tried to wrack her brain for any memory of his smile or laugh since he started working on the project, some recollection that she could compare the vexing image to, to prove that there was no way that this thing had been protruding out of Ryland’s jaw for the entirety of his time on the ship and she simply didn’t notice, but she came up empty.
When she finally came back to reality, descending from the heavens of her thoughts, and went to take a second look, Ryland had closed his mouth for once in his life as Dickson, awfully late with his comeback, brought up his ‘oh-so-prosperous teaching career at a middle school.’
“Girls, girls, you’re both pretty,” Eva interjected, “can we move past this? It’s the end of the world—I’d like to think we can all put aside our differences and focus on what really matters, here. Now, Dr. Grace, finish your status report.”
“...right. The, um, the astrophage—”
She watched his mouth the entire time he spoke.
Later that evening, in her quarters, bundled up in a fleece blanket and drinking her fourth coffee of the day, Eva clicked through articles on malocclusion for pictures that resembled the structure of Ryland’s mouth, but everything she found featured crowded, crooked teeth—cuspids pushed forward by lateral incisors that looked nothing like the perfect rows he possessed. It was bizarre, to think that there was nothing on the first page of Google to suggest that this was something that ever happened in the human mouth, but, then again, she reasoned that there were medical anomalies all over the planet, people with odd conditions and aesthetic differences, and she didn’t really know enough about odontology to make a definitive determination on whether or not his teeth were normal.
She closed the tab and laid awake, staring at the ceiling, until the sun came up over the Gansu once more.
—
The fourth, admittedly, happened in small moments over the entire two weeks Eva had had Ryland aboard the carrier.
He moved wrong.
Or, rather, he moved too well.
He had the uncanny ability to creep into the corner of her vision without being noticed. He could exit a crowd, or slip into a room, everyone none the wiser to his location. She’d seen him at the daily conferences one moment, and then he was gone the next, and nobody had heard a door open or close or seen that shock of straw disappear. Not that any of this indicated that he was graceful at all—God, no, he was the least graceful person that she had ever met, always tripping over himself in the laboratory, nearly falling out of his chair while he leaned back and tried to balance a pencil on his nose, dropping this and that to the floor with an ‘oh, fiddlesticks’ that was part of a broader lexicon that was very quickly becoming winsome and eliciting amused little smiles from her whenever she heard it.
But, despite his persistent lack of grace, he was, paradoxically, quite quiet. He almost didn’t seem to breathe when she was sitting next to him during the taskforce meetings, she had to strain her ears to hear his presence, and when he was fixated on something, like a slide under his microscope, he became still. Each muscle taut and holding him in place, like a statue. It reminded her of the potential energy stored in the springy fibers of an animal while coiled in the precious few moments before striking.
The strangest of all was his light-footedness.
A man of his weight and stature, just peeking over six feet, should have a somewhat heavy stride. Or, at the very least, some sort of auditory indication that he was moving around. But Ryland was silent, even when wearing the heavy military-issued boots that replaced his Converse after just two days of standing on his feet in the lab day and night.
The shining example of this particular oddity was when he practically materialized behind her one night when she was sitting alone in the conference room, thumbing through physical copies of reports that she was marking up with yellow and pink highlighters, circling important vocabulary and rubbing at the sides of her head as she thought about the impossibility of the deadline that the sponsors had set on their project. She sniffed, burying her face into her hands out of exhaustion, feeling it clothe her body like the black sweatsuit she had on, and it was only when the scent of coffee beans wafted to her nose that she had any indication she should be turning around.
And there he was, holding a pair of coffees in each of his hands, his fox sweater hanging off of his frame. He looked tired and worn, despite the close-lipped smile that was plastered on his face.
“When did you get here?” she asked, reaching out to take both coffees—an action that Ryland protested against by holding one of them close to his chest, yelping out a soft ‘hey, c’mon!’ that was so helpless that Eva consented to letting him have his caffeine—and then sipped hers in a soft, slow motion. She reveled in the taste and watched him sit down in the chair next to her.
“Just now, don’t worry, I wasn’t staring at you for like, twenty minutes, that would’ve been weird,” he chuckled softly behind the white lid of his coffee, closing his eyes as he took a small sip. Despite the contented sigh that he gave, he still looked down at the liquid like it was the most disappointing thing he’d seen in his entire life.
“Mhm,” Eva resigned herself back to the papers, neglecting to voice her thoughts, ignoring the strangeness of his reaction to the drink (the coffee aboard the Gansu was not particularly good, and this was one of the things about Ryland that had a very easy explanation) to focus on the strangeness of his approach.
The floors of the Gansu were metal. And Ryland was wearing shoes.
How hadn’t she heard him?
“You look tired, Stratt.”
Ah. That’d explain it.
“I think I might turn in early tonight,” she murmured, staring at the pages before her, “I’m… I think I might be falling asleep while sitting up.”
—
Eva organized all of her observations into a text file on her computer. Over the three days that passed since the argument in the board room to now, she had collected two more things. They were arranged in short sentences like she was a field researcher commenting on behavioral anomalies of a rather interesting new species:
DR. RYLAND GRACE: HUMAN (?)
• Dr. Grace does not eat.
• Correction: occasionally consumes candy, coffee, and sodas.
• Dr. Grace’s eyes glow in the dark.
• Tapetum lucidum (?)
• Dr. Grace appears to have fangs.
• Note: have not gotten close enough to confirm.
• Dr. Grace is unusually stealthy.
• Not necessarily inhuman, just sort of creeps me out.
• Dr. Grace is cold to the touch.
• Reynaud’s Phenomenon (?)
• Dr. Grace has very good hearing.
• No human being can hear a conversation from three rooms away.
It felt like the answer was on the tip of her tongue, or rather, her fingers, considering she was typing away her theories that could potentially explain the strange attributes to the astrophage researcher in a reasonable and not-so-conspiracy-theorist way. Nothing of the sort really stuck, though, and every theory she came up with had some sort of hole in it.
He could have Reynaud’s, sure, but he was cold to the touch even on his trunk, as she’d discovered when she set a hand on his shoulder to remind him that he was late for a team meeting, once, and maybe Yao had lied when he told her that he didn’t say anything about the coffee maker conversation that Ryland apparently overheard and then had a slip of the tongue about, but it was out of his character and Ryland had been fidgety when she asked him how he knew. Maybe he had some strange medical condition that made his eyes reflective—leukocoria had been her ultimate settling—but even then, most patients were infants, it usually only occurred in a single eye, and it was associated with life-threatening cancers and vision loss. Clumsy as he was, Ryland did not have significant vision problems. He was simply far-sighted.
Her curiosity led her to schedule a prompt medical exam on the Gansu’s newest addition, much to his vehement protest. And after much unease and every excuse under the sun for why he couldn’t make it down to the medical ward, he finally gave in.
The results were… interesting.
“...I’ve never seen anything like it, Miss Stratt.”
The ship’s doctor, Dr. Baker, twiddled her thumbs as she stood in front of Eva’s desk, inside of her office, after hand-delivering Ryland’s results on printed forms as requested. She was a tiny woman, with curled hair, a button nose, and big doe-eyes hiding behind windowpanes of the most ridiculous circular glasses Eva had ever seen in her life. Her frumpy brown dress hit her mid-calves, overlaid by a crinked lab coat that, despite all its efforts, failed to give her any authoritative appearance despite the decades of training and experience in the medical field that led her to becoming responsible for the health of the Petrova Taskforce on the Gansu. She looked more like an Amish trying, and failing, to blend in with researchers.
“Tell me what I’m looking at, here,” Eva asked, thumbing idly through the papers.
“Well—” the doctor took a step forward, adjusting her glasses, “for starters his internal temperature is about forty-five degrees Fahrenheit. Which is… I don’t think I need to explain to you that that’s well below what it should be.”
“I see,” Eva didn’t react, “and?”
“And his heart rate is thirty beats per minute, which, while quite bradycardic, isn’t entirely unheard of, but—the thing is, that sort of thing typically happens in elite athletes, not regular people.”
Eva tilted her head.
“Anything else?”
“The blood sample I took indicates he's fairly anemic. And deficient in a few vitamins. Not really too much of a cause for concern, but I’d definitely want to see him back in a few weeks to check those levels again. I prescribed him a multivitamin and some iron tablets.”
“Is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“Hm.”
Eva handed the stapled packet back to the doctor.
“Clearly, your equipment for measuring heart rate and temperature are faulty,” Eva told her with forced certainty, “The blood analysis equipment can stay, but we need to order you a new set of measuring tools. Dr. Grace is clearly walking around, talking, doing research, and functioning. There’s no possible way he’s colder than a corpse with a heart rate that low. I’ll file for new equipment within the hour.”
“But—”
“And, doctor, delete these records. They’re grossly incorrect.”
“...yes, ma’am.”
As soon as Dr. Baker left, Eva leaned back in her chair and steepled her hands beneath her nose, her index fingers resting against her lips. If she had any doubts about her hypothesis, they were firmly swept away along with the puzzling data that was well on its way to being destroyed.
She quite simply didn’t know what to make of his test results, but she knew one thing for certain.
Ryland Grace definitely was not human.
—
Whatever he was, he was starving.
However unfortunate for him, it did end up being this very hunger that became the final piece of the species puzzle that fell into Eva’s lap on a cold evening when Ryland appeared outside of her office to hand over his latest analysis of astrophage emissions.
She had taken to manufacturing excuses to see him lately, requesting brief, solitary appointments under some false pretense or another, just to study him. She was hunting for more glimpses of those anomalies in the dark of his irises, watching for the quick flash of his teeth—searching for another eyeful of that unnatural architecture hidden behind his plush lips. For days, these sessions had yielded nothing beyond the mundane, much to her disappointment, but Eva was patient. She knew that if she waited long enough, he would eventually slip. And when he did, she would giddily log it away in the encrypted text file she kept buried under three layers of passphrase protection.
“Hi, Stratt,” Ryland murmured as he stepped over the threshold after knocking thrice, holding printed files in between his hands against his chest like he was a shy child about to show his brooding, unfeeling mother his best drawing in the hopes that it ended up on the fridge.
Eva smiled, though it didn’t reach her eyes, and motioned for him to sit.
“Hello, Dr. Grace.”
He sank into the leather chair, and it practically absorbed him, while Eva subjected him to an unhurried appraisal. She dissected his posture, her eyes tracing the slope of his shoulders.
It had been seventeen days since Ryland boarded the Gansu, and he was clearly fading.
He looked less like a living being and more like a plaster cast of one. His skin had sallowed to the near-translucent, icky hue of milk, and deep, violaceous bruises were stamped beneath his eyes, lending him a rather raccoon-like quality. His gait had lost its rhythm—sluggish, uncoordinated, like the halting movement of a puppet operated by frostbitten fingers. He was drowning in his fox sweater, pulling the fabric tightly around his frame as though the climate-controlled air of the carrier was leeching what little warmth he possessed straight from his marrow. His entire demeanor dripped with a pathetic, deprived, cagey stickiness that he left behind in every room, lingering like the stale, feverish scent of unwashed bedding after a long bout of flu.
“What have you found?” Eva asked, holding out her hand to take the papers from his, skimming through the first few pages with purpose. He always wrote his lab notes at the back, and even when they really didn’t say much of anything she found them to be a great, succinct synopsis to translate into her best euphemistic doublespeak to send back to the world sponsors when they asked for periodic updates from the project.
“Well,” Ryland began, his tone thin, “the astrophage are pretty happy with the breeder boxes, and—”
Ow.
Flipping the last page in the sheaf, the piece of paper slid across Eva’s index finger mercilessly.
It burned a little, despite being so small (she hated how papercuts did that), and a teeny droplet of blood oozed out from between the split skin, glistening in spherical perfection like a dark red pomegranate seed resting on her flesh. She frowned down at it, pulling open the drawer in her desk with her opposite hand, fumbling mildly through pens and paperclips and sticky-notes for the little packet of band-aids she kept around for this very reason.
“Oops,” she voiced, “sorry, Dr. Grace. I didn’t mean to get blood on your papers.”
Ryland didn’t answer.
At least, not with words.
Instead, a low, agonizing rumble vibrated from his abdomen. The sort of borborygmus that accompanied a gastric contraction that had no choice but to hurt. It was the vile sound of a digestive tract wringing itself bone-dry in a cruel, involuntary spasm. In the near dead silence of the office, it practically reverberated off of the bulkheads and buzzed in Eva’s bones.
It was loud enough to be amusing, and she lifted her eyes to meet Ryland’s, fully expecting him to flush bright crimson, curl in on himself, maybe start stuttering—
Any teasing comment about it that she might’ve had for the man died in her throat.
Ryland looked… gone. Far away.
His pupils were fully dilated, two vast black abysses that swallowed both of his irises whole. His eyes were locked onto her finger. She watched as he slowly dragged his tongue over his upper teeth, coating them with saliva, and then swallowing the excess with a heavy, wet click that sounded unnaturally loud in the small room.
Instinct, ancient and primal, crept up inside of her. Once again, under his gaze, she felt wholly reduced to something small and fragile—once more, a rabbit caught with her back against a tree she couldn’t scale in the tall grass, frozen beneath the looming shadow of that predator once more. Staring straight into a damp, drooling maw, smelling the humid, iron-laced tongue of a beast preparing to taste skin and snap bone. Waiting to consume every part of her, to tear her to pieces with abandon.
She could almost feel the creature’s hot breath against her nose and cheeks. A cold shudder thrummed down her spine, playing her vertebrae like an instrument.
Eva hastily wrapped the bandage around her finger, yanking the adhesive tight to hide the blood from view.
“...as you were saying, Dr. Grace?”
Ryland’s stomach let out another pitiful whine, as though it consciously mourned the loss of visual stimuli, and he finally looked away.
He blinked rapidly, the glazed, unpredictable sheen vanishing from his eyes as reality seemed to flood back into him. He looked down at the floor, pressing a hand flat against his middle as if to physically suppress his own body. Shame cascaded over his pale features, and with haste, he swiped at the side of his mouth. Eva hadn’t noticed the little rivulet of drool headed for his chin—it had been obscured by his stubble.
Ryland was a far cry from the lighthearted embarrassment she had anticipated moments prior, and she almost felt bad for him.
Almost.
Her elevated heart rate still wasn’t settled down enough to feel that much empathy.
“...sorry. Haven’t eaten dinner. I need to hit the cafeteria after I get out of here."
His voice was strained, dry, like he hadn’t had water in days. Words escaping him mirrored the crunchy sound of leaves scraping against the pavement.
Eva stared. She thought carefully about her reply, but eventually settled on:
"I haven’t seen you eat a single meal in the cafeteria since you boarded this ship, Dr. Grace."
"I… I eat," he told her weakly, the lie lying dead on the desk between them, "I just don’t like eating in front of other people. I have… um, a stomach condition. It flares up."
"I see," Eva said smoothly, not believing a word, “now… what were you saying about the astrophage?”
—
Vampire.
That was the explanation Eva decided on, the following morning.
It creaked and groaned like an old house settling into itself in the quiet corners of her mind as she sipped on her first coffee of the day, sitting in the cafeteria amidst the gentle buzz of the early riser crew wanting to get a head start on whatever waffles and eggs they could shovel down their gullets before getting to work.
Vampirism was the only taxonomy that thoroughly accounted for everything in her text file plus the odd display that had happened the previous night, and it made leaps and bounds of sense, all things considered. However, there was a singular problem with the theory.
It was totally ridiculous.
Then again, Eva was currently commanding a team dedicated to analyzing light-devouring, interstellar micro-organisms. Her internal threshold for the impossible had been systematically dismantled weeks ago, and, admittedly, the goalposts for absurdity were being dragged into new terrain with every passing sunrise as Ryland discovered more and more about the astrophage. Stranger things than blood-drinking humanoids were actively consuming the yellow dwarf in the upper atmosphere as she sat at the table, nibbling on a piece of unbuttered toast.
If single-celled alien entities could survive in the vacuum of space, feeding on a literal star without needing a breath of oxygen, why couldn’t a predator exist in the dark underbelly of hominid development?
Still, despite the fact that it wasn’t entirely irrational to think that a human-like parasite could’ve developed alongside Man over the centuries and fed off of his life force, the sheer gothicity of the idea made her embarrassed to say she had ever come up with it in the first place. It made her feel like a failure as she hid behind her coffee cup, glancing about the cafeteria as though everyone else in the room knew about her surrendering her intellect to what basically amounted to a childish fantasy.
Yet, as she dug deeper into the literature later that afternoon, that fantasy revealed itself to be, at least mostly, a dataset rather than a myth. From the Upir of the Slavic steppes to the Strigoi of the Carpathians, virtually every isolated culture since the dawn of recorded history had birthed its own variation of the same blood-bound revenant. Be it cursed to walk the earth, a witch, a spirit, a zombie, the premise was the same; an entity that fed on blood, or flesh, or both, sometimes preferring to tear open infants or pregnant women or virgins, sometimes indiscriminately feeding on whatever it could get its claws on.
If the concept were purely fictitious, dozens of geographically isolated civilizations would not have independently drafted the exact same blueprint for a cannibalistic nightmare.
So that settled it.
Ryland Grace was… a vampire.
On a ship, in the middle of the ocean.
And he was starving.
…what was Eva to do?