Kali was still getting used to not needing the bioadapter suit on 24/7, and would often wake herself up in a raging panic when she felt the brush of her own skin against itself, instead of against the softly lubricated silicone lining she had grown so accustomed to on her thirteen-month shuttle journey that ended at the Troy Station. Tonight’s panic was shorter lived, but the abrupt jerk up off the pillows cricked something in her neck that she’d need massaged out later.
Realizing she was safe, she would not suffocate, her body would not begin to wither in on itself, she relaxed just a bit. She still instinctively went to check her left arm, see if the necrosis and infection had spread any further down, but found that it was still neatly amputated off and tightly bandaged at the shoulder. The limb had been gone for three weeks, since they landed at Troy. Next to her, Dawn lay sprawled out in their shared bunk, drooling. It had been the raw cinnamon skin of her leg against Kali’s that startled her awake. Despite the restless nights, Kali considered this the ultimate bounty provided by the arrival to Troy—not the food, not the medical graces, but skin touching skin again.
The soft orange lights scheduled to simulate circadian morning had not yet winked on, meaning it was before 0500 hour. If she was awake, she might as well be up. After letting her gaze wander a moment along the curves and dips of Dawn under the sheet of their shared bunk, Kali slipped out of bed. Out of habit, she checked her datapad to see if the atmospheric conditions had stabilized; they hadn’t. The blizzard persisted. Somehow, thirteen months of relying on digital readings for everything hadn’t increased her trust in computers one bit—to be fair, the shuttle’s nav-rig hadn’t exactly been 100% accurate, had it? She inched down the automatic metal shade to peek through the port window, slowly to not wake Dawn, and observed for herself the icy flurries pounding themselves against the side of the station.
Their savior storm was in the third week of its vicious sideways assault, with wind speeds of over 400 mph and ice flecks the size of a standard motherboard. Kali had heard rumblings about Troy potentially running out of solid food soon if the cargo ships remained stuck in orbit for much longer. She recalled the bitter tang of nutrient pastes and chalky protein pellets, how they had tasted like divine nectar in the pleasureless hollow of the shuttle. She could deal with supplement rations, if it meant the blizzard kept up its communications-suppressing rampage. As long as the Troy Station still wasn’t able to get into contact with the Rhea Habitation, Kali and Dawn could put up with anything.
Unsure of what to do with her spare time, Kali paced her and Dawn’s shared quarters—which was more like taking three steps, turning on her heel, and taking three steps back to where she started. They shared nothing more than a double bunk, a narrow locker built into the wall for their clothes and personal items—of which they had none, save for what the station had provided—a small sink for washing up, and the port window that, when there wasn’t a blizzard raging, would’ve looked out onto the cargo yards, where the solid food rations and the rest of the station’s supplies would be coming in from the planetoid’s orbit. Bathrooms and the canteen were down the hall, shared with 38 other new arrivals fresh out of orbit.
Kali decided she’d get a workout in and changed into her exercise clothes, making sure to be extra gentle as she slipped the tight sleeve of the compression top over the still-healing stub of the missing arm. She moved the bandage-wrapped protrusion, rotating it alongside her shoulder, still nowhere near used to the absence on her left side. She figured she’d never adjust. A waterbag was filled up at the sink and she cracked open the door to her quarters; silently, to not wake anyone on their hall still waiting, asleep, for the 0500 hour lights to cycle on and start another new day at the Troy Cross-Galactic Cargo Shipping Station.
Paused in the doorway, she ruminated on her neighbors and slid into her boots. Most of them were data analysts, like Dawn, but there were a few cargo hands and one other orbital navigation technician. His name was Beau, and Kali had seen him maybe three times since the all-arrivals orientation their first day at Troy; he was rumored to be a paranoid insomniac from the Utu Belt who spent days at a time away from the domestic quarters, wandering the halls or stationing himself at the nav-rig for hours upon hours on end. Those few times Kali had run into him were at the beginning of her rotation on the rig, and he’d always seemed reluctant to peel himself out of the chair, face sunken with wakefulness, a restlessness only soothed through the repetitive rhythms of checking the axis tilt, checking velocity, checking drag, adjusting thrust, surveying orbit scatter plots, repeat. Kali understood that restlessness—it had kept her sane and alive for thirteen harrowing months on the shuttle—but she didn’t understand how the guy could willingly go that long without a shower.
Dawn made friends easily at Troy and dragged Kali along with her like a defunct parachute that quit out on liftoff. Dawn insisted it was necessary for survival at the station, took Ulyssa’s managerial warning to lay low and blend in as a suggestion to learn the life story and become the best friend of all 38 fellow Trojan newcomers. Kali found it difficult to remember the names of the many people Dawn would insist she had to meet—a feat made more difficult by the fact that they were nearly all data analysts and nearly all from Lunar New Hatra. She’d call three people by the wrong name, leave the canteen in distress, and Dawn would still have the temerity to tell Kali that they’d liked her.
What was really there for them to like? What did anyone here know about her? About either of them? They knew what Dawn told them, what she chose to present as the truth—Kali and I are from the Rhea Habitation on Othrys-2. We came over to Troy on a pilgrim barge to find new work. Kali lost her arm to a rare disease she picked up at the shuttle port.
The first time Kali stepped foot inside the Rhea Habitation after living on the Outskirts her whole life, she had been manacled to a chain gang and forced to build a new hydroponics plant. Two months in the Habitation, on the chain; she didn’t know how to swim, they had to resuscitate her too many times after nearly drowning in the tanks. Her lungs still rattled wetly whenever she breathed too heavily. A pilgrim barge? Kali almost sobbed aloud every time she thought about her and Dawn cruising into orbit on one of those silver-hulled behemoths, bellies full and eyes bright for a destination they’d set out for with hopeful intent. She wondered if those final imploded bits of their stolen shuttle she’d been tracking during downtime on the nav-rig had finally swept out of orbit or plummeted down on the far side of the planetoid. If they had, she wondered how fine of dust the scraps would need to grind down to before that thirteen-month wound in her soul healed over.
The arm ached—the one that wasn’t there, the one still working its digits over the ghost of the shitty stolen shuttle’s nav-rig, the one likely pulverized into atmospheric sand at this point—as Kali took one last look back at Dawn, represented by the barely-there artificial light of their quarters as a lump softly rising and falling. The blizzard’s roar was nothing but a muffled moan against the station’s titanium plating. If it ever let up, Ulyssa and the other station managers would finally be able to get comms out to the Habitation to figure out exactly where they came from and exactly how they got to Troy. They’d learn that Kali was an escaped convict, and Dawn her accomplice. After the hell that was their time on the shuttle, what she’d suffered, Kali found it hard to be afraid of what those consequences would look like for her; but it was easy to fear what it would mean for Dawn.
So, she decided that today, and as many subsequent days as she could muster, she would be good. She’d learn the name of every goddamn Lunar New Hatran data analyst and she’d sit through her rotations on the nav-rig without complaint and she’d listen to Ulyssa’s rules and eventually, she’d figure out a way to get them both out of here. She’d be good, because it was so easy to be bad in this cold, shitty place.
Kali shut the door quietly behind her as she stepped out into the hallway and headed for the exercise wing, softly massaging the wrapped up stub of her missing arm.
Magnus Fraipont is a third-year creative writing major and double minor in professional writing and WRD. They are fans of all things fantasy, science fiction, horror, and comedy, and prefer writing short fiction and poetry. Their work has appeared in Issue Five of the Orange Couch and in the 46th edition of Crook & Folly. They love orange pens, big wet juicy burgers, and you!