She is Sarya the Daughter, of Shenya the Widow. She will not die today.
And then she is on the floor again. Her knees rest on metal and one arm is hooked over a ladder rung. Something salty runs to the back of her throat and she tries to spit, but her lips don’t move. It occurs to her suddenly that there is nothing insurmountable in life, nothing she can’t fix…except for the fact that she has trapped herself in a freezing cargo hold and no one knows where she is. “Helper,” she whispers. But she’s left her Network unit up above, where she can’t reach it. The darker part of her mind has triumphed, and this is where it has left her.
She pushes off sideways, head down, onto hands and knees. The hot flame of her anger sputters but it doesn’t die. What happened to her beautiful sharpened nails? Why are her hands crusted with dried blood? There’s more too, coming from somewhere, drops falling and freezing instantly in beautiful patterns. It must be cold in here. She hears that sound again, her name again, and finds that she is crawling toward it. She heaves herself away from the ladder, down the tunnel of ice, the fierce violet warming to almost-red, so strong and gorgeous she’s going to have to remember when she writes home. These are such deep colors, you could get lost in these colors, and look how the condensation from her breath freezes in place when it touches them, and why are her breaths so loud…
No, she rages. This is not how a Widow dies. And she doesn’t know much about Humans, but she is absolutely sure that they don’t give up and freeze and die the first chance they get—
But hush, now. Why be so angry? Why does it seem so important to continue? She doesn’t know, and she doesn’t care. If she will just lie down now, it will all be over.
But she doesn’t lie down. No, this is the Daughter who dragged Shenya the Widow across half of Watertower, and somehow that bitter memory summons the absolute dregs of her strength. She manages one last pull, and finally here is something familiar in her new and alien world. A recessed area of the cargo hold is clear of ice, containing only a gleaming hulk in the darkness. This is the source of the glow: a gaping red cockpit, and a holo ring blazing a blinding scarlet in the frozen darkness.
“Eleven?” Sarya tries to whisper. Her tongue fights her. Her lips don’t move. She has to blink her sticking eyelids a few times before she can read the glowing symbols orbiting the suit. The ice shatters the light into a thousand crimson shards, each of which shows some distorted version of same word:
SARYA
Sarya collapses to the frozen deck, her limbs finally giving out. She feels nothing when her cheek presses its textured surface. Her mind rages within her, but all the fury in the galaxy won’t move a body that has stopped responding.
She has lost.
But now someone has lifted her off the hard floor. She can’t remember where she is or who this could be, but she is annoyed. She wants to demand that this person put her down, but the impulse dies somewhere between her brain and her tongue and no words emerge. Red light filters through eyes that are squeezed shut. Hot air blasts from above, so hot she can feel her skin burning. Softer, warmer arms take over for the cold, hard ones. They twist around her, wrap her, set her up vertically and hold her there. She cries out when they begin massaging damaged tissues, causing pain everywhere they touch. Somewhere out there, somewhere outside of herself, she hears a hum and a series of thunks as the cold is locked out.
Somewhere far away, her stomach rises. Her hands drift upward as Eleven shifts its gravity field. Something inside her has a hold on her; it is shaking her with violence, fighting the firm grip of the suit’s straps. This is a dream, says her mind. It has to be, because someone is holding her right now, and who has ever held her except for her mother?
She can’t close her fists, but she can keep her eyes clenched tight and she does. She draws gasping chestfuls of the warm air, twitching her limbs aimlessly in motions that are half Widow signs and half nothing at all. Eleven’s straps stroke her hair and her back, and a soft sound begins to emerge from somewhere above her: the hissing rattle of a mother Widow soothing her daughter. Sarya’s breath catches at the sound. And then, somewhere inside her, something splits wide open. With a heave and a wrenching cry, she weeps for Watertower.
Waking in an autonomous pressure suit is a disconcerting experience even in the best of circumstances. The gravity is low. Your feet are off the floor. You are supported by straps in non-ideal places, which means half your limbs have fallen asleep. You also cannot see the actual walls of the suit, thanks to its holo projector. As far as your groggy mind can tell, you just woke up bodiless, floating a good meter and a half off the floor.
But Sarya is thankful for the straps—at least she is once she has finished flailing. They have her by the wrists, and they save her from shredding the spray bandage that covers her fingers. She examines those fingers with all the concentration available to someone who is fairly sure she was drugged to sleep. Not that she’s complaining. And the fingers look okay. They hurt, but they move. And she’s not dead, how about that? That’s not something you can take for granted, is it? Lately, anyway. She is warm and alive and she has all her limbs and—
Can we go through all this later, says her body with a pointed biofeedback signal, because it has physical needs too.
All right then, first things first. “I—” she says out loud, and stops. Her own voice has startled her, raspy and deeper than she’s ever heard it. She swallows through the burn in the back of her throat. “I need to go to my room,” she says. When the suit doesn’t respond immediately, she touches the inner wall with one bandaged hand. She doesn’t know which Eleven she’ll get. Will it be the cheerful advertiser of features, the blithe reader of its own brochure? Or will it be the Eleven who has now saved her life twice over?
“Does your intelligence reside in a biological waste–producing shell?” booms Eleven. “Are you weary of halting missions midway because of the pressing needs of nature? The AivvTech UAE provides a full waste management suite, from water recycling to—”
“Eleven,” she says. “Don’t be gross.”
“This sub-legal intelligence does not—”
“You fooled Hood,” she says. “But you can’t fool me. You saved me. Twice. I know you’re more than just a—” She stops, searching for a word.
[A moron?] appears, superimposed on the purple ice outside.
She feels her chapped face form the tiniest beginning of a smile. There’s the intelligence she was looking for. “Well, I wasn’t going to say exactly that, but—”
[And it’s three times.]
She thinks back. Oh, right, it is three times. “Fine,” she says. “You saved me three times. And maybe after somebody saves you a bunch of times you don’t really want to…you know. Inside them.”