“You needed the shower anyway.” Jenny pinched her nose.
I shoved her playfully, and she pushed me back. Jenny felt like the sister I’d begged my mom for when I was little. Before I understood where babies came from or why my father was never around. Either way, I was glad she was on Qriosity.
“Uh, Noa? Jenny?” DJ sounded more serious than usual. “I think you should check this out.”
DJ was standing over the busted pipe. There was a hole the size of a basketball in it, and the edges of the thick metal looked like they had been eaten through.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” DJ said.
“I have.”
Jenny and DJ turned to look at me.
“The day I died,” I said. “There was a hole like this in the coolant conduit. Conduit F-519.” No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t forget the details of that day. They were like the seam of a sock poking my toe inside my sneaker, irritating and impossible to ignore. The darkness of space, the sound of my own voice in my helmet. I remembered everything, right down to the taste of the air in my suit.
“That can’t be a coincidence,” Jenny said. “Right?”
I was starting to think that Jenny’s theory about there being another person living on Qriosity might not be as far-fetched as I’d initially believed. Worse, though—that person might be a saboteur.
“What could do something like this?” DJ asked.
“I don’t—” I stopped, and my eyes shot up to meet his. “Wait, we’re thinking this is a what? Why not a who?”
“Whom,” Jenny said.
The blood had drained from DJ’s face. The last time I’d seen him that scared was in the video when he was pumping my chest in the airlock, trying to bring me back to life.
DJ sputtered, “I mean, I don’t know, I guess. It might not be a what—”
Jenny ran her fingers over the ruined section of pipe. “No, I think you’re right. Feel how the edges are pushed up?”
I traced the border of the hole. The metal felt rough and jagged. It did not feel like damage caused by someone burning a hole into it from the outside.
“Are you saying that you think something came out of the pipe?” DJ asked.
But she didn’t need to answer. Jenny, DJ, and I pressed ourselves together. The room took on a sinister quality. The receding water, which was less than a couple of centimeters deep now, could have been hiding anything.
“We should talk about this somewhere—”
“More secure,” DJ said, finishing Jenny’s thought.
“Ops?” I asked. “Maybe we can rig the scanners to turn inward and check the ship.”
“Good idea,” DJ said. “We should definitely do that.”
A wave of déjà vu washed through me, and my knees nearly buckled. “Not again.”
“What?” DJ grabbed me under my arms to help keep me upright.
“I’ve done this before.”
“This?” Jenny asked. “You’re stuck in another loop?”
I shook my head, trying to sort reality from my confused memories. “No, I don’t think so.”
DJ kept us moving toward the door. “Let’s talk about it when we get to Ops.”
But the feeling was growing stronger. “There was one loop where I tried to stay awake for as long as possible because I wanted to see what would happen. There had been a monster chasing me, but I assumed it had been a hallucination. I’d been awake for days by that point.”
Jenny’s voice was trembling when she said, “What happened?”
It might have been better if I hadn’t said anything, but I couldn’t keep it to myself now that I’d brought it up. “It ate you and DJ, and then it eventually got me, too.”
“But it was probably a hallucination,” DJ said. “You don’t know for sure.”
“Great,” Jenny said. “We’re being stalked by a monster that’s got a taste for human flesh and lemon cake, and we’re all out of lemon cake.”
“Let’s not panic.” The way DJ managed to remain calm awed me. No matter what mess we stumbled into, he rarely let it fluster him. “We’re going to—”
“Warning! Magnetic containment of Cordova Exotic Particle Reactor is failing. Total failure will occur in four minutes and seven seconds. Warning!”
DJ’s calm vanished. Without a word, he dashed into the corridor at a dead run.
“Wait!” Jenny called. She turned to me. “Where’s he going?”
“Reactor Control,” I said. “Probably. Come on!” I took off after DJ, running as fast as I could. Climbing the ladders recklessly. There might have been a dangerous monster on the ship with us, but that wouldn’t matter if the reactor’s containment failed and Qriosity exploded.
I was running so fast that I nearly missed the door to Reactor Control. Jenny had fallen behind, but I could hear her cursing me for not slowing down, DJ for taking off without saying why, and Qriosity for not having an elevator.
DJ was standing at a console, tapping the screen furiously. As I entered the room, a metal shield lowered around the core and the doors slammed shut behind me. “Warning! Radiation exposure protocol has been activated. Warning!”
Jenny banged on the doors even as I yanked on the latch to open them. “DJ? Noa? Are you in there?” The doors were too thick for her voice to travel through. I was hearing her over the comms. “I can’t get in!”
“We’re in here!” I yelled back, though I wasn’t sure she could hear me. “What the hell is going on, DJ?”
DJ didn’t reply. He didn’t even look up from what he was doing.
“Noa?” Jenny called again. “Oh! Oh God, I think there’s something out here! Open the door! Noa, open the damn door!”
The lights flickered once and then died, plunging the room into darkness.
A loud clang like a bell echoed through the room.
Jenny screamed.
FOUR
I CALLED JENNY’S NAME. I called DJ. Neither answered. I would have given one of my ears for light to see by. I didn’t know why the power had failed or why the loss hadn’t triggered the emergency lights. I had no idea if Jenny was alive or why DJ wasn’t responding. Anything could’ve been hiding in the dark. Anything could have been waiting for me to move within reach of its grasping limbs so that it could snap my neck and eat me in peace.
“DJ?”
If DJ had answered, he would have told me that everything was going to work out. That we were safe. But I didn’t feel safe. The current crisis reminded me of the sci-fi flick starring Jenny Perez, Project Vortex: In the Beginning. The movie’s premise is that an alien infiltrates a deep space vessel, the ENS Eden, stalks, and kills the entire crew except for Jenesis Paine, the ship’s medic played by Jenny Perez, who survives by putting on a spacesuit and luring the alien monster out of the ship, where she wrestles it into submission and then flings it into a nearby star. I’d seen the movie six times, and I’d given up expecting it to make sense.
I’d been in Ops when the fold drive had last engaged; the nearest star to Qriosity was over ten light-years away, so we wouldn’t be doing that.