Getting there was easy. I reached the cargo bay with no problems, and I found enough food to keep our bellies full for a month. Returning was where I got into trouble. My oxygen tank malfunctioned, and I didn’t have enough air to get back. It took me nearly two days to find another tank while keeping hidden from the dead. I managed to get myself stabbed in the belly by a jagged piece of metal, and I had nothing to fix the wound with but antibiotics, glue, and prayer. The whole time, I was scared Nico would try to come find me, and get caught by the dead. It wasn’t the first time one of us had been out longer than expected, but Nico could be impulsive. It was one of the things I loved about him.
When I finally returned to our room, Nico had locked the door and wouldn’t let me in.
“Come on,” I said. “I’m sorry I was gone so long, but I brought you chocolate.”
“I’m sick,” he called through the door. “I have yellow crap coming out of my eyes.”
I pounded on the door. I clawed at it until my fingernails broke and bled. I screamed until my voice was raw. “Let me in!” I refused to believe Nico was sick. I refused to leave him to suffer alone. I refused to let him die.
“No,” he said. “You have to get away from here.”
“I’m not leaving you, Nico. I’ll never leave you. Not ever.”
Nico kept trying to convince me to go, that it was too dangerous to stay. He tried to be gentle, telling me he’d been worried. That he was happy he wasn’t going to die wondering what’d happened to me. He tried being mean, saying he didn’t love me and never had. He even begged. But I wouldn’t go.
I sat in front of the door for two days, talking to him while he grew sicker. Crying silently while he screamed from the pain and begged me to kill him. I told him stories, I told him lies, I told him the only truth I knew: that I would love him forever. I stayed with him until he took his last, gasping breath.
After that, living was little more than a habit. I became lost in my grief. I got careless. I wasn’t looking to die, but I didn’t care much for living, either. A couple of weeks after Nico passed, I allowed myself to become cornered in an airlock. There were no suits, no spare oxygen tanks, and only one way out. I’d seen what happened to folks who were caught by the living dead, and I didn’t want to die that way.
My idea was to open the hatch, blow the zombies into space without being blown out myself, and repressurize the airlock before I suffocated.
The first part of my plan worked. The second part, not so much.
NOA
WE HAD REGROUPED IN THE med suite because dying was exhausting and I didn’t want Jenny to overexert herself. “This is some bullshit,” Jenny said.
“I agree.” I was sitting as far from Ty and DJ as I could in the small room, trying not to stare at DJ but finding it difficult to avoid. I didn’t know who he was anymore. I wondered if I ever had.
DJ held up his hands, trying to regain control of the room. “I know it sounds ridiculous—”
“The part where you were living on a space station full of zombies?” Jenny asked. “Or the part where we’re all on a program and I’m not the star?”
“I promise everything will make sense when I finish, but I’ve still got a lot to tell you.” The DJ speaking now lacked the confidence of the DJ I’d spent the last few months getting to know. But I also sensed from him a feeling of relief that he didn’t have to hide anymore.
“I thought Ty was a hell of an actor,” I said. “But you clearly win the award for best performance in a drama.”
“Noa—”
“Was anything real? Was our whole relationship make-believe?” A thought occurred to me. The room contracted, breathing in and out. “Was that his outfit I woke up on this ship in? Did you dress me in your dead boyfriend’s clothes?”
“Christ, DJ,” Jenny said. “That’s sick.”
“I’m not Nico,” I said.
DJ hung his head. “No. You’re not.”
I didn’t know what to say or do. I wanted to run dramatically from the room and fling myself out of the ship, but that would have killed me and I didn’t want to die. It seemed I wasn’t the only one unsure what to say. Jenny was uncharacteristically quiet as well.
It was Ty who finally broke the silence. “Please don’t stop, DJ. You dying was the best part of that whole maudlin story, and I must know what happens next.”
“We should’ve gagged him,” Jenny said.
I glanced at the cabinets along the wall. “We still can. I’m sure there’s something in here we can use.”
Jenny swung her legs over the side of the bed and came to sit beside me. She leaned her head on my shoulder. “Do you want DJ to go on? We don’t have to do this now.”
I caught DJ’s eye. Telling the story seemed to cause him at least as much pain as it caused me to hear. So I nodded. Partly because I needed to know the whole truth. Partly because I wanted DJ to hurt.
DJ
THE SECOND TIME I WOKE up in space, I was resting on the bottom bunk of a barracks-style room that I was sharing with at least fifty other teens. I opened my eyes gasping, struggling for breath and not understanding why there was oxygen and why I could breathe. My last memory was of suffocating. Of dying. It took a moment to realize I was no longer in a vacuum. I wasn’t even on Arcas. I was thrilled to be alive, but confused about how. Thankfully, in that, I wasn’t alone.
I got up and wandered around. The overhead lights were too bright. I stumbled into a girl, who shoved me back like I’d attacked her. Kids were shouting questions into the air and flinging accusations at one another. The smell of violence filled the room the way the sharp tang of ozone heralds an oncoming storm, propelled by confusion and fear. I began herding some of the younger kids toward the walls to get them out of harm’s way.
Just when it seemed like the chaos had reached a tipping point, a sharp screech cut through the noise, and we were all suddenly too busy shielding our ears with our hands to worry about anything else. A hologram of a woman in her mid-thirties appeared at the front of the room, and the alarm stopped.
“Hi! I’m your host, Jenny Perez, whom you probably remember as the precocious kid detective and bestselling author Anastasia Darling on the award-winning mystery entertainment program Murder Your Darlings. If you’re seeing this, then you have died. Sorry about it!”
One of the boys I’d gathered around me—he looked twelve or thirteen—broke into tears. I didn’t think crying was going to do anyone much good, but I couldn’t fault him for doing it. If there was ever a situation that called for crying, we were in it.
“Welcome to the Fomalhaut Processing Center. On the surface is Fomalhaut High School, where you will attend classes, dances, and sporting events, and go about your typical teenage lives, during which time you will be assessed by Production. Your performance will determine your next placement, so do your very best!
“Refusal to participate is not an option and will earn you a spot at the Jenny Perez Reeducation Arts and Crafts Camp. Rule breaking of any kind will not be tolerated and will result in punishment. Teachers will be watching at all times, and they’re not nearly as pleasant as me. But if you do what you’re told, and put on a great show, you just might survive.