The emergency lights flickered on, filling the room with an ominous red glow that made me feel like we were definitely trapped in hell. But hell was better than nothing. I scanned the room and spotted DJ crumpled on the floor in front of the console he’d been working at earlier.
“DJ!” I crawled across the floor to him. Blood stained his face from a gash on his forehead. His eyelids fluttered when I rolled him over, and he turned to the side and vomited. The sharp tang triggered my gag reflex, and I tugged my shirt over my nose and turned away. As soon as DJ had emptied his stomach, I dragged him to the other side of the room.
“DJ? Talk to me. Are you okay?” I pulled off my shirt and pressed it to DJ’s head to stanch the bleeding. There was so much blood, but my mom had told me once that even superficial head wounds bled a ton, often making the injury seem worse than it was.
“Ow.” DJ tried to touch his forehead, but I batted his hand away.
“You hit your head pretty bad. You’re bleeding and probably have a concussion, so take it easy.” I wasn’t sure how DJ had hurt himself, but everything on Qriosity seemed like it was designed to kill or maim us, so it could have been anything. “Do you know what happened to the lights?” I asked. “Did the reactor shut down again?”
“No.” DJ spoke slowly as I cradled his head in my lap, keeping pressure on the wound. “The magnetic shield around the reactor was fluctuating. I shunted power from non-essential systems to shore up containment.”
“Good thinking.”
DJ smiled weakly. “Where’s Jenny?”
I’d been so busy being scared of the dark and then worrying about DJ that I’d forgotten about Jenny. She was out there alone. No, she wasn’t alone. She’d said there was something in the corridor with her. “She was right behind me, but the doors shut and I couldn’t open them, and she was screaming. DJ, we have to get out of here so we can find her.”
“Help me up.”
I lifted DJ gently out of my lap, stood, and tried to pull him to his feet, but he clutched his head and doubled over, moaning in pain. I lowered him back to the floor. “Yeah, that’s not going to work.”
“I’m sorry, Noa. I’m sorry.” DJ repeated it over and over, his voice thick with tears.
I smoothed back his hair, combing my fingers through it and whispering to him that it was okay. DJ tried to close his eyes, but there was an episode of Murder Your Darlings where Marco had suffered a concussion while helping Anastasia solve the case of a serial murderer who targeted brown-haired baristas. He’d gone undercover at the Happy Bean and had been assaulted while emptying the spent coffee grounds into the compost bin. When Anastasia had found him, she’d told him that he shouldn’t fall asleep with a concussion or he might not wake up.
I doubted the show was a useful source of sound medical advice, but I refused to take risks when it came to DJ.
“Eyes open, DJ.” I gave his arm a gentle squeeze. “I need you to talk me through how to fix this mess. We’ve got to unlock the doors. Jenny might be in trouble.”
DJ opened his eyes wide and blinked like he was trying to convince his body that he didn’t want to sleep. I peeled back my shirt, which was now soaked through with DJ’s blood. The wound was still bleeding. I hopped up and grabbed the first aid kit from the other side of the room. I dug out the tube of InjureEZ Wound Sealant and squeezed the gray paste across the gash. Almost immediately, it spread to cover the cut, and DJ’s face relaxed at the same time.
“How does that feel?” I asked after I’d wrapped gauze around his head.
“Little better.”
“Do you think you can help me?”
“I’ll try,” he said through clenched teeth.
I hated that he was hurting, and I wished I could take him to medical so MediQwik could work its science magic, but I couldn’t unseal the doors without him. I took my bloody shirt and spread it across the vomit puddle by the console so that I didn’t have to look at it, but the smell was overpowering. My stomach lurched.
“Doors first, okay?” I said.
“Yeah.” DJ might’ve had a concussion, and he might have been a little sluggish, but he was still the smartest person I knew. If anyone could get us out of the reactor room, it was him. “What’s the screen say?”
The terminal was filled with readouts of the various systems, most of which I was unfamiliar with, but a flashing alert at the top of the screen caught my attention. When I tapped it for more information, the floor dropped out from under me.
“There was a radiation leak, DJ. That’s why the doors sealed shut.” I immediately began imagining my hair falling out and my skin sloughing off. Tumors bursting from my skin. Of all the ways I’d nearly died aboard Qriosity, radiation was my least favorite.
“How much radiation?” DJ asked, sounding infinitely more calm than me.
“This doesn’t say,” I told him. “It only says that we’ll reach fatal exposure in four hours.”
“Four hours is plenty of time.” DJ had scooted into a sitting position and was watching me patiently. His face was covered in blood, he had a concussion, and we were both being irradiated to death, but he looked like he had everything under control. Like we were still in the garden arguing about colors.
“What about Jenny?” I asked.
“We can get the comms working,” DJ said. “Then the reactor.”
I stood over the console completely certain I had no idea what I was doing. How was I supposed to fix anything when there might be a monster loose on the ship? When Jenny might be fighting for her life? When Qriosity might explode?
“How do I do this?” I hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
“I’ll talk you through it.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “How do I do anything right now?”
“You just do it. You do it because not doing it could be the difference between surviving and not. You do it because no one else can.”
DJ’s pep talk didn’t make me less terrified, but it did get me moving. “What do I do first?”
One step at a time, DJ walked me through how he’d diverted power from secondary systems to the magnetic containment field that shielded us from the reactor core, and explained how to return power to the communications system.
“Will we lose containment again if I do this?” I asked. “I don’t want to dump more radiation into the room.”
DJ shrugged. “Probably not. Internal comms aren’t a big drain on the system.”
“You’re guessing, aren’t you?”
“Maybe a little,” he said.
“How often do you do that?”
DJ looked away sheepishly. “It’s an educated guess. I didn’t have time to calculate exactly how much power the containment system needed, so I threw everything at it just to be sure.”
I laughed out loud, letting the sound fill the room with madness. “We really are one stupid mistake away from death out here. We’re kids playing with stuff we don’t understand.”
“Noa—”
“It’s a miracle we haven’t blown up Qriosity yet.” I chose to believe the numerous times that I had blown up the ship during my time loop didn’t count.