The Lethal Ascent Curve

by Wow_a_Spoon

Summary:

Two men are trapped on an alien ocean planet with nothing but wreckage and regret. Shadow survived two years alone until Sonic washed ashore, who is still bleeding memories of a wife who'll never know he lived.

The deep teems with monsters that hunt through waters below. But Sonic and Shadow?

They become worse monsters.

---

Toxic Sonadow Subnautica AU. Heed the tags.

Chapter 1

The corpse's anus was glowing green.

Shadow paused in cleaning the solar panels, cloth still in hand, watching the waves push the dead creature further up the beach. A sea creature called a stalker, this one. He'd named them himself, documented their gharial-like snouts and obsessive metal-hoarding behaviour like a good Alterra employee. Two years of this. 734 days, to be exact, since the Aurora was shot down and left him the sole survivor on this ocean planet.

Nobody to report to anymore. Nobody to check if he was following protocols. But he did anyway, because what the fuck else was there to do.

The stalker's body rolled in the surf, its purple-tipped fins limp, bioluminescent discharge leaking from... well. He'd dissected enough healthy specimens to know where their organs sat. Had seen hundreds of corpses killed by the infection over two years — fish with glowing veins, beached leviathans rotting with light seeping through translucent skin. Always the same pattern. The bacteria activated, consumed the host from within, then left them beautiful and glowing and dead.

But watching green light leak out of this particular orifice, Shadow realised something he'd never considered in all his documentation. When the bacteria finally won, he'd shit light too. Die with his asshole glowing like a broken chemical glowstick.

That particular indignity hadn't made it into his reports.

He finished the last section anyway, filed the observation away somewhere in his head where all the other data lived, and went inside to prepare for bed. Alone. Like every other fucking night for nigh on two years.

Inside, Shadow went through his night-time routine. Boots by the door, left one first — always left since day 482 when he'd tried right and the fabricator had malfunctioned. Stupid, but there it was.

Dinner was a nutrient block. Raw as usual, eaten standing at the counter while watching the same dent in the metal panelling he'd been staring at since day 392. Tomorrow he might add water, make it into porridge. That would be special. Something to look forward to. Sometimes the dent looked like a face. Tonight it looked like nothing.

Teeth brushed for exactly two minutes, counting seconds because the timer's beep had started sounding like voices around day 500-something. The fabricator got checked three times before bed — empty, still empty, third time empty. "Nobody's printing anything," he told the machine. "You can sleep." It hummed back. Day 630 he'd started saying goodnight to it. It never answered, which was the correct amount of conversation.

Bed. Left side, even though the right had been empty for seven hundred and thirty-four long days.

Storm sounds were getting louder. Good. Better than the quiet where he could hear his own breathing and start counting it and then forget how to breathe normally because he was thinking about breathing. The waves were getting violent, crashing against the foundation pillars below. Thunder rolled across the water, but not quite thunder. Thunder didn't usually—

The sound split the night open. Not thunder. Definitely not thunder.

Shadow was at the window before his brain caught up with his body. The sky lit up green — sick, bright green — as the precursor gun fired. The same sound from day 452 when the Sunbeam had tried to land. When he'd watched his rescue turn into burning metal rain. When Captain Quinn's last transmission had cut to static mid-word.

Another ship had found this planet. Another ship was being torn apart.

 

⭒⭒⭒

 

Nothing.

Shadow swept the Seamoth's lights across another patch of debris. Metal fragments, shredded panelling, something that might have been part of a cargo bay door now twisted into something grotesque. The ship had been smaller than the Aurora — much smaller. A cargo hauler maybe, or a transport shuttle, the kind that made routine supply runs between colonies without being equipped for anything catastrophic.

The pieces were everywhere and nowhere. Too small. Too scattered. The Aurora had left sections intact, whole compartments that had survived the impact. This thing had just...separated. Like someone had pulled it apart at the seams and thrown the bits into the ocean.

A life pod should have deployed. They always deployed. Even the shittiest transport had emergency pods that launched automatically when the hull breached. He'd found three from the Aurora in his first week, back when finding pods still meant something. But here there was nothing except metal confetti sinking through black water.

The Seamoth's proximity sensor pinged. Debris to the left. He turned the lights and caught orange fabric, his chest doing something stupid and hopeful before his brain caught up. Seat cushion. Just a waterlogged seat cushion descending slowly like everything else, like it had somewhere important to be at the bottom of an alien ocean.

Two hours of searching grid patterns while the storm tried to flip his sub. The Seamoth groaned against the surface turbulence it wasn't built for — neither was he, probably, but here they both were anyway. His hands stayed steady on the controls even though his stomach had relocated somewhere near his spine.

Lightning cracked overhead, illuminating the wreckage field for a split second. Dozens of pieces, hundreds maybe, spreading out in the current. Getting further apart. Getting harder to search. 

Getting pointless to search.

A storage crate tumbled past his viewport, still sealed. The company logo on the side belonged to some agricultural supplier — seeds probably, or fertiliser. Things meant for growing, for living people who'd need to eat somewhere that wasn't an alien ocean.

Another wave caught the Seamoth and nearly flipped it, the motion causing Shadow's head to hit the ceiling.

"Fuck."

Time to go. Past time, really. The storm was winning and there was nothing here anyway — nobody to find, nobody to save, nobody to disappoint when they realised their rescue was just another infected corpse walking around and counting his days until his anus glowed green. He turned the Seamoth around and started back toward the base, letting the lights sweep across the debris field one last time. Metal. Fabric. More metal. Something that might have been personal effects, too mangled to identify. Someone's photograph of people who'd never know what happened.

No bodies, though. The gun had made sure of that, efficient as always. Vaporised on impact probably, or burned up in atmosphere when the ship came apart. Better that way than floating, better than washing up on his beach in a week with light leaking from their—

Shadow cut the thought off. Focused on navigation, on getting back before the Seamoth's hull gave up, on anything except the fact that he'd just added another ship to his mental list. Day 734. Third ship destroyed. Zero survivors, again.

The maths was simple. Three ships divided by zero survivors equalled him, alone, watching the ocean eat everything. The agricultural company would file an insurance claim. Someone would mark the crew as missing. Life would go on somewhere that wasn't here, and he'd still be counting days, searching empty water for people who were already gone.

No-one survived that. No-one ever survived that. Except him, and look how well that was working out.

 

⭒⭒⭒

 

The engine was making that sound again.

Sonic wedged himself deeper into the maintenance shaft, datapad balanced on his stomach, trying to convince the cargo ship's cooling system that it didn't actually want to die fourteen light-years from the nearest port. The readout showed everything running normal, which was engineer-speak for "fucked, but not fucked enough to show up on diagnostics yet."

Three more weeks of this run. Three more weeks, then back to the outpost, back to his wife, Amy. Should've been home a week ago, but Alterra had tacked on an extra month to their route. His wife was probably forgetting what he looked like by now. Nearly a year since he'd taken this temporary gig. Temporary because the pay was triple what he'd make planetside, and they needed the money if they were ever going to afford their own place instead of company housing. Temporary that had turned into eight months, then ten, now almost twelve months of video calls with lag so bad they couldn't even have a real conversation anymore.

The cooling system hiccupped. Sonic smacked it with his wrench — an old school tool, but sometimes you needed the classics when the Repair Tool decided to be fancy and useless.

"Yeah, that's what I thought," he told the pipes. "Know who's boss."

The detour was bullshit. Corporate had rerouted them a month ago. Something about Alterra wanting someone to swing by sector 4546B, check on some "equipment malfunctions" at their facilities. Sure. Equipment malfunctions. Because Alterra always told the truth about why they needed cargo ships to make unscheduled stops in uncharted space. Probably lost something expensive and figured it was cheaper to throw hazard pay at freight crews than send an actual research vessel. Cost-cutting disguised as opportunity. The captain had seen the credit amount and agreed before anyone could blink.

Sonic didn't care about the hazard pay. No, he cared that the detour meant another month before he'd see Amy. Another month of her living her life while he floated around fixing things that broke if you looked at them a certain way. Another month of their marriage existing mostly in delayed messages and "sorry, connection's bad" and promises that this was the last long-haul run, really, he meant it this time...and fuck, he really needed to think of something else. His thoughts were beginning to sound like a broken record.

The datapad beeped. Temperature spike in the cargo bay. Of course. He started backing out of the shaft, already thinking about what tools he'd need. The ship had thirty-seven things wrong with it at any given time, but only about three were ever worth worrying about. This wasn't one of them. Just another thing to fix, another hour of—

The lights went red.

The impact alarm screamed.

Sonic's head snapped up, smacking into the pipe above him. The whole ship lurched sideways, and suddenly he wasn't in a maintenance shaft anymore, he was falling across it, datapad and Repair Tool flying, his body slamming into the opposite wall as gravity decided to completely give up on making sense.

“ALL PERSONNEL EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY.”

The world had tilted on its axis as Sonic tumbled through the emergency lighting, red strobing across crew members trying to crawl, run, fall toward the escape pods.

"HULL BREACH IN SECTIONS FOUR THROUGH SEVEN," the computer announced, real helpful, as if they couldn't feel the ship tearing itself apart. “ALL PERSONNEL EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY.”

Sonic's hands found a doorframe. Pulled. The pod bay was right there, just needed to—

The ship screamed. Metal doesn't usually scream, but this did, long and high as something important separated from something else important. The artificial gravity cut out completely and suddenly everyone was floating, floating and screaming, floating and bleeding from where they'd hit things on the way up.

Three pods already gone. Launch tubes empty. Good. Good, people got out. Now it was his turn.

Pod four had five people cramming into it, the maximum, someone yelling about waiting, about room for one more—

It launched. Automatic systems. No waiting.

Pod five. Sonic kicked off the wall, flew through the chaos toward it. The door was open. Empty. He dove in, hands fumbling as he strapped himself into the seat harness.

"Wait! WAIT!"

Two crew members called out to him. The cargo coordinator and someone from navigation, swimming through the air toward him, arms out, almost there, almost—

The door hissed shut.

No. Sonic's fist hit the manual override. Nothing. The pod's systems had control now, emergency protocol, no override, no stopping it. Through the tiny window he saw the navigator's face, mouth open, hand touching the glass just as the pod kicked free of the ship.

Then acceleration turned everything into physics.

Sonic's body slammed into the seat. Five Gs, maybe six, enough that breathing became optional and his vision went sparkly at the edges. The pod spun, showing him glimpses through the window, of the ship coming apart, pieces spreading out, other pods launching or maybe just debris, hard to tell, everything on fire, everything falling.

His hand found his wedding ring. Twisted it. The metal was warm. Real. Still there while everything else wasn't.

The pod hit atmosphere like a fist hitting a wall. The heat shield screamed. The spin got worse. His stomach decided it wanted to be in his throat but his throat decided it wanted to be in his brain and his brain decided it wanted to stop existing for a while—

"Please," he said to no one, to the pod, to the ring cutting into his finger as he gripped it. "Please, I need to get back to her."

The surface came up fast. Too fast. The pod's chutes deployed, jerked him so hard his teeth clicked together, bit his tongue, blood in his mouth mixing with the taste of recycled air and fear.

Impact.

Black water. Black everything. Then nothing at all.

 

⭒⭒⭒

 

Water. In his mouth. Salt and copper and salt and—

Sonic's eyes snapped open to darkness— no, wait, emergency lighting, dim and red, and water sounds that meant nothing good. He tried to sit up. Couldn't. The pod was sideways, maybe upside down, everything hurt and his head felt stuffed with cotton.

The harness cut into his chest, holding him at some angle gravity shouldn't allow. His legs were wet. Why were his legs wet?

Because water was filling the pod. Obviously. Spilling through a breach in the wall. Great. Perfect. Fantastic.

"Okay," he said out loud, because hearing his own voice meant he wasn't dead yet. "Okay, think. You're not drowning. You're just…pre-drowning. There's a difference."

Water coming in from somewhere below him. Or above? The pod had given up on normal orientations, and the emergency panel that should be to his left now blinked error codes above his head — too far to read, too important to ignore.

Fingers fumbling with the harness release. Stuck. Everything was always stuck when you really needed it not to be, and the water had reached his waist now, cold enough that his muscles were already complaining.

"Come on, come on, you piece of—"

The harness popped free. Sonic fell, landed in water that reached his chest when he stood — crooked standing because the pod's floor had become a wall, storage compartments spilling their contents into the rising flood. Emergency rations floated past. A medkit bobbed around like someone's idea of bad joke.

The pod tilted again, corrected itself momentarily before canting to the other side, tossing him around like loose cargo. But at least the escape hatch was within reach again, and Sonic waded towards it.

Water kept coming. Steady. Patient. Like it had nowhere else to be.

The hatch release was slippery under his fingers as he pulled himself up, legs scrambling against the tilted wall while water sloshed higher with each wave that hit the pod. His fingers found the manual override — thank god for manual overrides — and twisted.

The hatch burst open and the storm rushed in. Rain, wind, the pod immediately flooding faster because physics was unforgiving that way. He stuck his head out and nearly got it taken off by a wave.

Dark water everywhere. Black sky, black ocean, black death in every direction except—

Lightning cracked and there it was. Land. Actual land, maybe two hundred metres away, lit up for a second like the universe's apology for everything else.

"Oh, you've got to be kidding me."

He couldn't swim. Of all the things to never learn, and he'd ended up on an ocean planet. Amy would laugh if she knew. Amy would— no, focus, grab things, survive now, panic later.

The pod lurched and tilted further. Everything not bolted down started sliding toward the open hatch while emergency supplies tumbled past him into dark water. Sonic grabbed at anything useful — missed the medkit, missed the rations, but his hand closed on something inflatable. Flotation device. Yes. Good. Under his arm, what else?

There — an emergency grab-bag spinning past, sealed and waterproof. No idea what was in it but better than nothing. He snagged it as the pod rolled again, nearly throwing him out before he was ready.

Water at his shoulders now. The pod was going down. Now or never, swim or die, except he couldn't swim so it was float or die, and honestly those odds weren't much better.

Sonic hugged the flotation device to his chest like it was Amy, like it was solid ground, like it was anything except thirty pounds of inflatable lies about his chances of survival.

Then he jumped.

The cold hit him — full-body slap, everything seizing at once. Muscles, lungs, brain, all signing off together. Only the flotation device brought him back up, gasping, choking on salt water while waves played volleyball with his body.

They kept coming. Each wave picked him up, showed him the land — closer or further, it was hard to tell — then dropped him into another valley of black water. The flotation device kept his head above water, mostly, when the ocean cooperated.

"Fuck fuck fuck— okay, fuck, you can do this. C'mon c'mon c'mon—"

Sonic kicked his legs. That's what swimming was, right? Kicking? He can definitely kick. His body moved forward maybe a metre before the current dragged him back three. The emergency bag was already trying to sink, pulling at his shoulder. Should drop it. Couldn't. Might need whatever was in there if he didn't drown in the next five minutes.

Lightning again. The land was closer. Definitely closer. Rocky shores, some vegetation at the top, and was that a structure? Looked like—

A wave hit him in the face. Salt water up his nose, down his throat, his body trying to cough and breathe simultaneously, achieving neither. The flotation device slipped. He hugged it tighter, legs thrashing uselessly below.

"This is how I die," he told the storm, spitting water. "Not in space, not fixing something important. Drowning fifty metres from land because I never learned to—"

Something solid hit his foot. Then his knee. Rock. Actual rock. The water was getting shallower, waves driving him forward now instead of playing catch. His feet found purchase, slipped, found it again.

Walking. He was walking. Crawling. Some combination that wasn't drowning. The emergency bag dragged behind him through surf while the flotation device stayed locked in his grip — his fingers had forgotten how to release things.

Another wave shoved him forward and his knees hit sand. Actual sand. Beach. Land. Not-drowning place.

Sonic crawled up the beach until the waves couldn't reach, then collapsed. Still clutching the flotation device, still wearing the emergency bag, still breathing — which seemed impossible but his lungs were doing it anyway, pulling in air that didn't taste like salt.

The storm raged on. He needed to move, needed to do anything except lie here like dead wildlife. But first, just for a second, he was going to appreciate being horizontal on something solid.

Okay, moment over. Sonic pushed himself up on his elbows and holy fuck sand was everywhere — in his mouth, his ears, places sand shouldn't physically reach. But his wedding ring was still there, somehow. That’s all that matters.

"Okay," he told his legs. "Time to be useful."

Standing took three tries. His body kept insisting horizontal was better, safer, less likely to result in more drowning. But rain was coming down hard enough to hurt, and the vegetation line was right there, maybe twenty metres up the beach.

He grabbed the emergency bag and finally let go of the flotation device — it had earned its retirement. Holy fuck would he love to retire right about now. His legs worked, sort of. Walking like a newborn giraffe but still walking, despite his calves being on fire from all that useless kicking. Progress.

The trees — or whatever they were — offered some protection from the rain. Too dark to get a proper look, but it didn't matter. Sonic leaned against one, trying to catch his breath, and turned to look back at the ocean.

Oh.

The cargo ship was everywhere. Pieces of it, anyway, lit up with each lightning strike. A section of hull here, burning despite the rain. Part of the engine array there, sinking slow like it hadn't figured out it was dead yet. Debris spread across miles of water, some of it on fire, some just gone, the ocean taking its time swallowing three thousand tons of metal and cargo and—

And people.

The navigator's face through the pod window. Hand on the glass. The cargo coordinator swimming through air, trying to reach him. How many pods had launched? Three? Four? He'd seen them launching but everything had been spinning, falling, burning.

"They made it," he said to the storm. "Other pods made it."

But the debris field was massive. The ship had come apart completely — not like a crash but like an explosion, like something had reached out and pulled it to pieces. Thirty-seven crew. Thirty-seven people who'd been complaining about the detour, about the coffee, about normal things five minutes before everything went to shit.

Where were the other pods? By now he should see them floating. Should see lights, emergency beacons, something.

Nothing. Just fire and metal and the storm eating everything.

His legs decided they were done standing. Sonic slid down the tree trunk, sat in wet sand, watching pieces of his ship burn in the water. His hands were shaking. When had that started?

Amy was waiting for him. Three weeks she'd been waiting, was going to be waiting a lot longer now. Would anyone tell her? Would Alterra send some corporate representative to explain her husband's ship had an "equipment malfunction"? Would they even know what happened?

How was he going to get home?

The thought hit sideways. He was on an alien planet. In a storm. Alone. No ship, no crew, no way to call for help. No way to tell Amy he was alive. No way to—

"Stop," he said out loud. Voice too high, strained. "Just. Stop. One thing at a time."

But his body wasn't listening. The shaking was worse, teeth chattering even though he wasn't that cold — or maybe he was, hard to tell when everything was shutting down. Shock. This was shock. He knew what shock looked like, had treated other people for it, and here he was sitting under an alien tree watching his entire world burn and there was nothing...

Nothing he could—

The emergency bag. Right. Yes. Something to do besides watching everyone be dead and being stuck on a planet that wanted to drown him.

Fingers fumbling with the seal, but it wouldn't open. They kept slipping, shaking too hard to grip properly. Sonic bit down on one edge, pulled with his teeth until something gave.

Inside — a chemical light stick. He cracked it, green glow spreading across his hands. Other things in the bag — water purification tablets, emergency rations, some kind of beacon maybe — but he couldn't focus because something warm was running into his left eye.

Blood. He touched his brow, fingers coming away red. When had that happened? The pod, probably. Or on the ship. Or the rocks. Or any of the times the ocean had used him as a chew toy. The cut was deep, kept bleeding even when he pressed his palm against it. His fur was matted with it, had been for who knows how long, rain and seawater washing it away so he hadn't noticed.

The shaking was getting worse. Whole body vibrating, muscles firing randomly — trying to warm up or shut down, he wasn't sure which. The chemical light made everything look sick. Green shadows, green rain, green blood on green fingers.

The beacon in the emergency bag was cracked. Wouldn't turn on. The water purification tablets were sealed at least, and there was a knife, some basic medical supplies — bandages already soaked through from rain, antiseptic that would be useless if he couldn't keep the wound dry.

He tried to stand. Legs said no. Tried again. Still no.

The debris kept burning out there, though some fires were dying now, the ocean winning, pulling everything down. By morning there'd be nothing left. Like they'd never existed. Thirty-seven people just gone, and Alterra would mark it down as another equipment malfunction.

Sonic pressed the soaked bandage against his brow hard enough to hurt. Blood kept coming, running down his face, dripping onto the emergency supplies. Everything was wet. Everything was ruined. Everything was—

He was alone. On an alien planet. In uninhabited space where ships didn't pass except on special detours. Where help wasn't coming because nobody knew to look.

The shaking was bad enough now that he couldn't hold the chemical light steady. It rolled from his hand, settled in sand, casting shadows that moved shakily in the storm wind.

Forced himself to breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth, exactly the way Amy did when her anxiety got bad. She'd learned it from some colonist wellness programme, made him practice even though he'd laughed at the time.

Well, he's not laughing now. The breathing helped, slowed the shaking just enough to think past the panic.

Three weeks. He was supposed to be home in three weeks.

Amy would be making dinner plans. She always made elaborate plans for his first night back — restaurants, home-cooked meals, couldn't decide which was better so she'd plan both. Cleaning the apartment even though it was already clean. Buying fresh sheets. Telling her friends he was finally coming home, really this time, the last run, they could start trying for kids like they'd talked about.

Three weeks.

He brought his ring to his lips, tasted salt and blood and gold. Still real. Still there.

"Okay," he said against the metal. "Okay, get up. You've fixed worse problems with less equipment."

That was a lie but his legs believed it, finally cooperating when he pushed himself up. The chemical light went back in the bag with everything else. He needed shelter. Somewhere dry — drier, anyway. Somewhere that wasn't standing under alien trees bleeding in the rain.

Lightning illuminated the beach again and there — a gap in the rocks, about fifty metres up the shore. Maybe a cave, maybe just an indent, but it was something.

Walking hurt. Everything hurt. But he'd been hurt before, fixed things while hurt — this was just another malfunction to work through. One foot. Another foot. Don't think about the blood still running down his face or how his wet fur made him feel like something that had crawled out of a drain.

The gap in the rocks went deeper than expected. An actual cave, narrow but deep enough that rain couldn't reach the back. Sonic ducked inside, had to crouch at first, then the ceiling opened up enough to sit properly.

Inside was dry sand. Actual dry sand. He collapsed into it, back against the cave wall, finally out of the wind.

From here he could still see the ocean through the cave mouth. The fires were dying, just occasional flickers when lightning struck. His ship becoming memory, becoming nothing. But he was here. Breathing. Bleeding, sure, but breathing.

The emergency bag had his blood on it now, dark stains spreading across fabric. He pulled out the bandages again, pressed them against his brow. Without rain washing everything away, they might actually do their job. The antiseptic would have to wait until he could see properly — the chemical light made everything look poisonous anyway.

So he sat. Watched the storm throw itself against the island. Thought about Amy's laugh, the way she snorted when something was actually funny, not just polite funny. Thought about anything except the navigator's hand on the glass.

The shaking was less violent now. Just tremors, muscles discussing whether to keep going. They'd decide yes. They had to.

Amy was waiting.

Notes:

Oh hi, if you recognise me, no you don't hdjkafhsj but I've been planning to have this as my Dead Dove account for a while now, and what better way to get started than to start slowly uploading all my darker fics I was too shy to publish. Anyway, Subnautica scared the shit out of me, but there was still some weird comfort from the isolation in such a vastly alien environment. I wanted to write about it, so ofc I used Sonadow bc I'm obsessed and it would be interesting to explore a breakdown of their psyche in extreme environments. I crave toxic dynamics and what better AU to use but this one?

I hope you enjoy ✌️

You can find me on @wow_a_spoon on Twitter/X too

Chapter 2

Something was eating him.

Sonic's eyes snapped open to find— okay what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck — a glowing blue eye the size of his fist, four legs, mandibles working at his jacket sleeve like it was trying to figure out if he was food or furniture.

"SHIT—"

He jerked back, whole body trying to escape in six directions at once. The thing — spider, crab, nightmare fuel with too many joints — skittered sideways but didn't let go. Its legs made clicking sounds on the cave floor. Click click click. Like typing. Like something calculating whether to eat his face.

More of them. Three, four, a whole fucking congregation of them deeper in the cave, their eye-things glowing in the dark like broken emergency lights. All watching. All clicking.

Sonic grabbed the emergency bag with his free hand, swung it at the one chewing his sleeve. It released, scuttled up the cave wall — up the wall, because of course it could — and hung there looking offended. If giant eye-things could look offended.

"Nope. No. Absolutely not."

He scrambled backwards out of the cave, dragging the bag, not turning his back on the clicking brigade. They followed to the cave mouth but stopped at the daylight, clustered there like they were discussing whether he was worth pursuing.

Daylight. Actual daylight. First time he could see properly and—

The plants were wrong. Everything was wrong. Trees with fat trunks, smooth bark, leaves that looked too thick. Orange things hanging from branches — fruit maybe, but the wrong shape, wrong colour, like lanterns made of meat. These tall silver-blue things that weren't quite trees, weren't quite mushrooms, just standing there being impossible. Pink fungi scattered around like someone had tried to make the place cheerful and failed.

His jacket had holes now. Little mandible-sized perforations where that thing had been taste-testing him. Great. Perfect. Alien planet, alien spider-things, alien saliva probably giving him alien diseases.

Stand up. Get bearings. Figure out where the hell—

Ocean. Ocean everywhere he looked except the island under his feet. The storm had cleared and the water stretched to every horizon, that same black from last night now showing its true colour — this sick, gorgeous turquoise that belonged in travel advertisements for places people actually wanted to visit.

No debris. No pods. No floating bodies. Like the cargo ship had never existed.

But there was another ship.

Out there, maybe two kilometres, maybe three — distance was hard to judge with nothing for scale — a massive hull jutted from the water. Capital ship. Alterra design, the distinctive modular architecture they used for long-range exploration vessels. The thing was enormous, made his cargo hauler look like a lifeboat. Someone had taken a city block and tried to make it fly, then changed their mind halfway through and parked it in the ocean.

Half-submerged. Been there a while from the look of it — the metal had that particular patina of long-term water exposure. Weeks at least. Maybe months.

Another dead ship. Another batch of people who thought they were going somewhere else.

Something else caught his eye — something on a ridge above him. Structure. Definitely a structure, not natural rock formation. Walls and corners and what might be observation windows, though the glass was so weathered he couldn't see through it. Someone had built here. Someone had tried to make this place home, now seemingly abandoned.

Someone who probably wasn't around anymore to complain about him borrowing their stuff.

"Okay," he told the turquoise nightmare of an ocean. "Okay. Water. Food. Shelter that doesn't have clicking things in it."

The emergency bag had survived the night, though something had leaked inside — he'd figure it out later. Right now he needed to move, needed to explore, needed to do anything except stand here looking at that capital ship and wondering how many people were inside it.

The spider-things were still watching from their cave. Sonic gave them a wide berth as he started walking, looking for a path up to that structure. His legs protested — everything protested — but sitting still meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering, and that way lay nothing useful.

The green grass crunched under his feet, wrong texture, like it was made of plastic trying to be organic. Sonic's boots squelched with each step. Everything was still damp — shirt clinging to his fur, overalls chafing in places that were going to be a problem later. He peeled off the perforated jacket, wrung it out best he could, tied it around his waist. The morning sun might actually be good for something.

The path up wasn't really a path. More like erosion had made something climbable. Dirt, loose rocks, those silver-blue not-trees growing at angles that suggested the ground had shifted since they'd started growing.

The structure was bigger up close. Prefab construction, the kind Alterra used for temporary research stations that always ended up permanent. Walls were some kind of composite material, weathered but intact. The door — proper airlock door, heavy-duty — wouldn't budge. Sonic tried the manual release, the emergency override, even gave it a solid kick that just hurt his foot through the steel toe of his boots.

Rusted shut. Not rust exactly, but some kind of mineral build-up in the seals. Been sealed for months, maybe longer.

But there was something else. A raised bed made of the same composite material, about waist-high, filled with dirt. Plants growing in it — actually growing, not just surviving. Some kind of melon things, spotted and huge. Potato-looking things but not quite potatoes and not quite shucked-coconut. Other stuff he had no reference for. All of it overgrown, spilling over the edges, as if someone had planted a garden then forgotten to come back.

Judging by the state of these buildings, no-one has been back for a long while. He tried to not think about the reasons why the previous occupants were no longer here, and instead diverted his focus on the possibilities of whatever salvage had been left behind.

Sonic sat on the edge of the bed. His legs were already done with today and it had barely started.

His fingers found his wedding ring, twisted it. Amy would make a list. She always made lists when things got overwhelming. "Break it down into pieces," she'd say. "Can't eat the whole elephant at once." Weird saying, but it worked.

Okay. Take stock. Figure out what he had, what he needed, what could kill him fastest if he ignored it. Time to actually look at what he'd been dragging around.

"Let's see here…"

The emergency bag was a mess. Chemical light fluid had leaked over everything, that sick green colour making the contents look radioactive. He pulled things out one by one.

The glowstick itself, cracked along the middle, still weeping fluid. Useless now.

Water purification tablets in their sealed container. Thank fuck for that. Two weeks' worth if he could find water to purify.

Five nutrient blocks wrapped in foil. They looked like compressed cardboard had a baby with chalk. He'd eaten them before during long shifts. Tasted like disappointment but at least it kept you alive.

The beacon, definitely broken. Something had cracked the housing and the electronics inside were soaked with glowstick juice. Even if it worked, signal range would be shit. Might be able to salvage the transmitter, use it for something else. The battery pack looked intact at least.

A knife. Basic utility blade, nothing special, but sharp. That was something.

Medical supplies were fucked. The bandages had soaked up water and chemical fluid, the gauze was a soggy mess. The antiseptic bottle was intact at least.

One flare. Still sealed in its wrapper, might actually work when he needed it.

Sonic spread everything out on the growbed edge to dry. The sun was getting warmer, making steam rise from his damp fur. His head still hurt from whatever he'd hit it on last night. The cut had stopped bleeding but probably looked bad. Hard to tell without a mirror.

The plants in the growbed rustled in the wind. Some of them had flowers — pink things that looked almost normal until you noticed the petals looked too…fleshy. The melon things were heavy, full of something. Food maybe? Or poison. On an alien planet, everything was poison until proven otherwise.

He needed water first. The structure might have supplies inside but the door wasn't happening. There might be other buildings — this looked like part of a complex, not a standalone unit.

His stomach made a sound, a rumbling protest that almost pitched high from neglect.

"Yeah, I know," he told it. "Nutrient blocks. Breakfast of champions and people with no other options."

When had he eaten last? Before the ship came apart. Before everything went sideways. The blocks sat there in their foil, looking exactly as appetising as the time he'd tried to eat one dry and nearly choked. At least then he'd had coffee to wash it down. Terrible coffee, but still coffee.

"Water first," he decided. "Then figure out if these plants are food or decoration. Then cry about the coffee situation."

Priorities. He was good at priorities. Fix the immediate problem, then the next one, then the next. Don't think about the big picture where he was stuck on an alien island with spider-things and no coffee. Just the next problem.

Water. Right. Time to find some.

 

⭒⭒⭒

 

Day 735. Shadow marked it in the log before leaving. Always mark the day. Protocol. No protocol meant no structure which meant no discipline which lead to chaos and chaos concludes to misfortune and death. Mark the day.

The Seamoth cut through calm water, scanner running continuous sweeps. Debris everywhere now the storm had passed — metal fragments twisted into abstract sculptures, panels that might have been walls once, insulation foam bleeding toxins into the water that the smaller fish were already investigating with suicidal curiosity. Shadow collected what he could reach. Copper wiring, still insulated. A sealed container of something that rattled. Circuit boards that might still function if he dried them properly. Small things, manageable things, nothing like the massive hull sections his scanner was picking up forty metres down where the water turned black and shapes moved that had too many teeth for casual conversation.

Not going down there. Simple calculation of risk versus reward, and Shadow preferred his body in one piece rather than several digestive tracts.

More wreckage ahead, part of a cargo bay door floating like the world's worst life raft. He approached slowly, checked for stability before attempting salvage. The metal would be useful if he could—

The scanner chirped.

Shadow's hands stopped moving. That wasn't debris notification. That was...active signal. Distress beacon, standard emergency broadcast channe;, the kind that meant someone had lived long enough to activate it.

Impossible.

He checked the readings twice, then a third time because two years of solitude had taught him that hope was just disappointment that hadn't happened yet. But the signal stayed steady, approximately two kilometres west, past the mushroom forest he'd been avoiding since day 400-something when a boneshark had rammed his Seamoth so hard it left actual teeth marks in the hull.

Two kilometres west meant the dunes.

Of all the places for a pod to drift, it had to be there. The scanner showed the topology in harsh blues and blacks — the seafloor dropping from two hundred metres to over a thousand in a series of sandy slopes that looked deceptively peaceful until you noticed the furrows where things the size of buildings had been hunting. He'd been to the edge exactly once, seen a shadow that had made him reconsider several life choices, and decided that was enough scientific observation for one lifetime.

Reapers hunted there. Forty metres of muscle and teeth and a roar that could be heard from kilometres away.

The signal continued its steady pulse. Someone was alive out there, or at least their beacon was, which might amount to the same thing if he didn't check.

Shadow's hands weren't steady on the controls. When had that started? He gripped harder, forced them still through will and necessity. This was a rescue situation. There were protocols for rescue situations, even though the last seventeen times he'd followed rescue protocol had ended with him cataloguing empty pods and trying not to think about what had happened to the people who should have been inside them.

The Seamoth turned west, leaving the familiar territory of his daily patrol routes. The mushroom forest passed beneath first — those massive fungal trees that glowed with bioluminescence he'd once found beautiful before beauty became just another data point. Giant mushroom caps the size of buildings, the water thick with spores that made navigation difficult, and always the risk of another boneshark deciding the Seamoth looked like competition or a mate or whatever went through their primitive brains.

Then the seafloor began its descent, and the water changed from blue-green to something darker, hungrier.

One kilometre out. The scanner swept wider patterns now, looking for movement in three dimensions because Reapers didn't always attack from below.

Five hundred metres. Something massive disturbed the sand to his left, a wake like an underwater avalanche. Shadow increased speed, knowing it was probably the wrong choice but making it anyway because standing still was definitely not the right choice either.

Two hundred metres, and there it was — life pod, standard emergency model, orange fabric faded but intact, flotation devices somehow still functional after who knew how many hours in the water. It bobbed at the edge where the shallower waters gave way to the dunes, right where the continental shelf dropped into depths that light gave up trying to reach.

Shadow approached carefully, watching the scanner, watching the water, watching everything except the hope trying to claw its way up his throat. No movement visible through the pod's small window. The hatch was sealed, which meant either someone had sealed it or the automatic systems had, and automatic systems only engaged when—

Don't think about that. Observe. Document. Act according to protocol.

His hand hesitated on the Seamoth's hatch release. Two years of solitude had established patterns that worked, routines that kept him functional if not exactly sane. He knew how to exist alone. Knew his protocols, his careful documentation, his precise distance from everything that might require emotional investment. Another person would disrupt that. Would require...interaction. Conversation. Remembering how to be something other than a collection of survival protocols wrapped in increasingly dubious sanity.

The pod bobbed in the current. The signal continued its electronic plea for help.

The water was calm here. Just empty blue stretching down into black, peaceful as a held breath. Nothing moving on the scanner except the pod's gentle drift.

Shadow opened the Seamoth's hatch.

The water lapped against the Seamoth's hull. Shadow secured a temporary line from his emergency kit — nothing fancy, just enough to keep the pod from drifting while he investigated. The orange flotation ring was slippery under his hands as he pulled himself up, finding the external ladder. His muscles remembered this motion from Aurora emergency drills years ago, back when drills were theoretical and drowning was something that happened to other people.

The top hatch had a manual release. Shadow gripped it, turned, pulled.

Five faces stared up at him.

Five. Living. Faces.

Shadow's brain stopped. Just stopped. Two years of solitary documentation, of talking to fabricators, of careful protocols performed for nobody, and suddenly there were five sets of eyes looking at him with desperate hope and his mouth was moving but nothing was coming out.

"—alive thank god someone's alive we've been—" "—is that a Seamoth? You have a working—" "—almost out of water the recycler's failing—" "—please help us please—"

Voices. Actual voices that weren't his own, overlapping, urgent, alive. Shadow tried to speak and what came out was barely a whisper, his vocal cords apparently having forgotten their purpose.

"I—"

They kept talking. All of them talking. So much noise after so much silence.

"I HAVE A BASE," Shadow said, and all five flinched because that was too loud, much too loud, he'd forgotten about volume control, forgotten how to modulate for other people's ears. "I mean. I have. Safe. It's safe."

A hand reached up toward him — someone in a medical uniform, blood on their collar, eyes wide with relief. Shadow pulled back instinctively. Two years without touch and suddenly there were hands, reaching, grasping, too much too fast.

"Tow," Shadow managed, forcing the word into something like normal volume. "I'll tow you. To safety. The base."

"How long have you been here?" someone asked. A woman's voice. Engineer's uniform.

"Since the Aurora," Shadow said, which meant everything to him and nothing to them.

"The what?"

He was already starting to climb down. "It's... I'll attach the cable."

"Are there other survivors? Have you seen—"

"Seventeen pods." The number came out automatic, factual. They'd take it as hope but he didn't clarify that all seventeen had been empty.

Someone else tried. "Is rescue coming? Do you have communications?"

Shadow's hands found the ladder rungs. The question required too many explanations about the defence gun, about the quarantine, about things they'd learn soon enough. "The beacon still works," he said finally, which was true — his emergency beacon did still work, pointlessly broadcasting to ships that would never come.

He could hear them talking to each other as he moved — relief mixing with confusion, but mostly relief because anyone with a Seamoth was better than nobody. Their voices carried across the water, actual conversation between actual people, and Shadow's hands shook as he opened the Seamoth's rear storage.

"Sir? Sir, what's your name?" someone called down.

"Shadow," he said, realising that his existence is finally acknowledged by his name being shaped by lips.

"Shadow, thank you. Thank god you found us."

He didn't respond to that. Didn't know how. Just pulled out the towing cable, focusing on the familiar task.

The Seamoth had a proper towing rig in the back storage — he'd salvaged it from the Aurora months ago, never used it, kept it because protocols said to keep emergency equipment.

Their voices continued. Someone laughed — nervous, hysterical, but still laughter. When had he last heard laughter? They were discussing him, he could hear it, wondering who he was, how long he'd been here, whether help was coming. So loud. Everything about them was so loud after two years of carefully controlled silence.

Shadow's hands found the towing cable, heavy-duty synthetic that could handle the drag. He'd need to attach it to the Seamoth's front mounting point, then secure it properly to the pod's frame, not just the flotation ring. Simple process. He'd documented the procedure on day 347 for no particular reason except having procedures for everything made the days have structure.

"Could one of you—" he started to say, turning back to ask for someone to catch the rope.

The water was empty.

Just flat blue nothing where the pod had been. The temporary line drifted loose, severed clean through. No splash, no scream, no sound at all. Like the ocean had simply erased them.

Shadow stood there holding forty metres of useless towing cable while his brain tried to process the impossible. Five people. Five voices. Five sets of eyes looking at him with hope, and now nothing but the Seamoth's gentle bobbing and the scanner showing empty water all the way down to black.

Nothing on the surface. Nothing on the scanner. Nothing but depth beneath him that went down and down into places where pressure turned bodies into something else.

His hands were shaking again. Worse than before.

Five people. He'd touched the pod. Heard their voices. They'd been real, alive, talking about rescue and tomorrow and things that mattered to people who expected to keep existing.

Gone.

Shadow's scanner beeped. The beacon signal was still active — 200 metres down, moving. Not sinking. Moving. Lateral motion, rising slightly, dropping again. The pattern was wrong for debris. Wrong for current. Wrong for anything that wasn't being carried.

Bubbles broke the surface. Big ones first, then smaller, then a spreading darkness that wasn't shadow. Red. Spreading like ink, diluting fast but definitely red.

His body understood before his brain did. Already moving, already reaching for the Seamoth's hatch, muscle memory faster than conscious thought because two years of survival had taught him that hesitation was just death with extra steps.

The scanner showed the signal rising. 150 metres. 140. Coming up but not straight up, more like something was playing with it, the way a cat might bat around something small and breakable for entertainment.

Shadow's hands found the controls. Engine startup sequence, systems check bypassed because there wasn't time, never time when things went wrong this fast.

120 metres and rising.

That's when he heard it. A roar. Sound made into physical force, vibration that went through the Seamoth's hull and into his bones, made his teeth ache. The kind of noise that reminded you some things were too big to fit in your head properly, so your brain just processed them as wrong wrong wrong get away.

The Seamoth's engine caught. Shadow didn't look back. Looking back was how people became statistics. He pushed the throttle forward and the little sub responded, nose lifting, accelerating away from whatever was using that life pod as a toy.

Behind him, something broke the surface. He heard it — water displaced by mass that shouldn't exist, the sound of the ocean trying to accommodate something that violated several principles of biology and basic decency. The beacon signal on his scanner stopped transmitting.

Just stopped.

Shadow kept the Seamoth at full throttle, heading east toward shallower water where massive things couldn't follow. His hands were steady on the controls even though his brain was calculating exactly how fast a Reaper could swim (faster than a Seamoth) and how far they were from safety (not far enough) and how many people he'd just watched die without watching them die.

Something hit the Seamoth. Not hard enough to breach but hard enough to throw Shadow sideways into the console, the whole sub spinning as something scraped across the canopy — a mandible, serrated edge catching the glass, leaving a groove that spider-webbed immediately under pressure.

The Seamoth lurched free, more luck than skill, slipping through what must have been a closing jaw by centimetres. Shadow corrected the spin, looked at his position. Too far from the shallows. That thing would catch him in open water, tear the sub apart like wet paper.

Down. Only option was down.

The depth gauge read 180 metres. His basic depth module was rated for 200, 250 if he wanted to risk hull breach. The mushroom forest started at 200. The Reaper was built for open water hunting, might lose interest in the obstacles, the tight spaces.

Might.

Shadow angled the Seamoth into a dive. Behind him that sound again, closer, the water itself complaining about having to accommodate something that big moving that fast.

200 metres. The pressure warning started. "WARNING: Approaching crush depth. Hull damage imminent! Ascend ASAP!"

The mushroom caps appeared below, bioluminescent blue-white giants that would've been beautiful if Shadow had time for beauty. He dove between two of them, the Seamoth protesting with new sounds — metal stress, seal compression, all the little noises that meant the ocean was trying to squeeze him into something smaller.

225 metres. "WARNING: Maximum depth reached. Hull damage imminent!"

The Reaper followed. He could hear it hitting things, see the shadows of disturbed spores in his peripheral vision. These things weren't supposed to be smart enough to pursue through obstacles but apparently nobody had told this one.

Shadow banked hard around a massive fungal trunk, the Seamoth's flood lights showing glimpses of things that glowed back — jellyfish, floating spores, creatures he'd never documented because they only lived at depths that wanted him dead. Another mushroom loomed and he went under it, through the root system, places the Seamoth barely fit.

240 metres. "WARNING: Maximum depth reached. Hull damage imminent!"

The creaking was constant now. Not the gentle protest of normal operation but the sound of materials approaching their breaking point. Shadow could feel it in the controls, the Seamoth responding slower, fighting him.

A gap between three mushroom caps, barely wide enough. He threaded through, felt something clip the tail section. The Reaper's roar was different here, muffled by the forest but also echoing off every surface, coming from everywhere at once.

248 metres. The console sparked. An actual spark, electricity arcing where it shouldn't. The depth warning had given up varying its message and just repeated the same alert, overlapping with itself until it became white noise.

Movement in the flood lights — not the Reaper but a boneshark, startled by the intrusion, ramming the Seamoth's side because that's what they did when confused. The impact drove him deeper.

252 metres.

Metal groaned. The canopy bowed inward, visible now, a slow-motion collapse waiting to happen.

Then the Reaper was in front of him.

It had circled. Somehow. Forty metres of predator hanging in the water between mushroom caps, head turning toward the boneshark that had just realised its mistake. Shadow had maybe two seconds while it decided which prey was worth the effort.

Water sprayed across his face. The Seamoth was leaking, pressure finding every weak seal, every stress fracture. The controls were sluggish. The depth gauge flickered between numbers that all meant death.

The Reaper's head swivelled back toward him.

Shadow slammed the throttle forward and aimed for the largest mushroom trunk he could see. The Seamoth lurched, protesting, but moved. The Reaper moved too, jaw opening, those four mandibles spreading wide enough to engulf the entire sub.

Impact.

The Seamoth hit the mushroom at full speed. The trunk crumpled, released its payload — thousands of yellow spores, dense as fog, spreading instantly through the water. The Reaper's roar changed pitch, confused, its echolocation useless in the cloud.

Shadow pulled up hard, ascending through yellow nothing, depth gauge counting backwards — 240, 220, 200 — while behind him something massive thrashed in the spore cloud, hitting things, lost.

180 metres. The pressure warnings stopped screaming. The leaks were still spraying but less aggressive now, more like aggressive suggestions than demands. Shadow kept the Seamoth moving east, following the beacon signal on his HUD. His base. Safety. Actual walls between him and whatever was still thrashing in that spore cloud.

170 metres. 160. The water cleared, just blue again, empty blue without teeth. The pressure warnings had stopped but the Seamoth still leaked, still made concerning sounds with every metre.

The precursor gun's silhouette broke the surface ahead — that massive alien structure marking his island, his base, his two years of careful isolation that had just been shattered by five voices he'd never hear again.

The Seamoth barely made it to the shallows. Shadow aimed for the platform, didn't slow down properly, didn't care. The hull scraped against metal and rock as he beached it, grinding to a stop half out of the water. Wrong angle. Terrible for the chassis. Didn't matter.

He sat there. Engine off. Hands still gripping the controls even though they'd arrived, even though it was over, even though his fingers had cramped from pressure.

The mandible scratch across the canopy was right at eye level. One long groove where serrated bone had tried to find purchase, tried to peel the Seamoth open like fruit. More cracks splintered the glass around it, holding but only just. Another few seconds and it would have breached. He'd have drowned in his own submarine while being eaten.

Two years. Two years of careful distance from anything that big, and he'd almost died trying to save people who were already dead by the time he'd turned around.

Shadow's hands wouldn't release. Had to think about it, consciously tell each finger to let go. They came away shaking, cramped into the shape of the controls.

He leaned back, pressed both palms against his face, tried to breathe normally. The air tasted like burnt plastic from the sparked console, salt from the leaks, sweat from him.

Five people. He'd had them. Five voices asking questions he couldn't answer properly because his brain had forgotten how to have conversations. Five chances at remembering what other people sounded like, what they needed, how they moved.

The ocean had kept them instead.

 

⭒⭒⭒

 

The sound was jarring at first. Water running over rock, but steady, continuous. Not waves. Sonic followed it through vegetation that grabbed at his boots, past more of those green-blue tree things that grew at angles that hurt to look at.

The lagoon opened up below him — a bowl of turquoise water carved into the island's centre. Saltwater, from the smell. But there, on the far side, a stream of clear water fell from the rocks above, cutting a channel through mineral deposits before joining the lagoon.

Fresh water. Had to be. Rain from higher up, collected and filtered through rock.

Sonic half-climbed, half-fell down to where the stream hit a natural pool before overflowing into the lagoon. The water was cold, clear, didn't smell like salt. He cupped some in his hands, tasted it carefully. Not salt. Mineral taste, sure, but not salt.

"Thank fuck."

He stripped. Everything off, boots and overalls and shirt all dumped on the rocks. His fur was matted with salt, blood, that chemical light fluid that had leaked everywhere. The water was cold enough to hurt but he didn't care, ducking his whole head under, scrubbing at the cut on his brow until it started bleeding again.

The emergency bag got the same treatment, turned inside out, rinsed until the green stains faded. His clothes too, wrung out and beaten against rocks. The water ran pink, then brown, then clear.

Clean. Or cleaner. His fur stuck up in weird directions as it dried, but at least it wasn't crunchy with salt anymore. The cut on his head looked bad in the water's reflection — deep, jagged, already showing signs of infection around the edges. The antiseptic was going to hurt like a bitch.

He filled the emergency bag with water from the stream. The fabric was waterproof enough to hold liquid, though it wouldn't last forever. Maybe a day before it started seeping. He'd need something better, but for now it would work.

The climb back up took longer. His legs were done pretending they worked properly, each step requiring negotiation. The sun was higher now, actually warm, making steam rise from his damp fur.

His supplies were still spread on the growbed where he'd left them. Mostly dry now, the foil on the nutrient blocks catching sunlight. Sonic dropped the water bag carefully, sat on the edge, looked out at the ocean while catching his breath.

The wreck was…wrong.

He stood up, checked again. That massive hull jutting from the water, the capital ship he'd seen this morning — it had moved. This morning it had been...there, he was sure of it, off to what he'd mentally labelled as left. Now it sat further around, different angle, different distance maybe.

No. Ships didn't move. Not ships that big, not ships that had been sitting there for weeks or months or years. He was confused. Had to be. Different vantage point, different time of day, shadows playing tricks.

But the sun was behind him now, and this morning it had been—

Sonic turned in a circle, trying to orient himself. The sun rose in the east and set in the west, except he didn't know which way was east here. Didn't know if this planet's rotation matched standard colonial orientation. The wreck was there, the empty ocean was there, the island was here, but the relationship between them had shifted.

Unless the island had moved.

He sat back down, hard. Islands didn't move. That was the whole point of islands. They were land, fixed points, things you could navigate by. Islands were supposed to be the one thing that stayed where you put them.

The wreck sat there, massive and still, refusing to be where his memory insisted it should be.

"I'm losing it," he told the ocean. "Day two and I'm already losing it."

But losing it or not, he still needed water. The body didn't care if your brain was manufacturing false memories about moving wrecks — it wanted hydration, demanded it, would shut down without it regardless of what his eyes thought they were seeing.

The water purification tablet went into the bag. Little fizzing thing, turning the water cloudy as it worked. Thirty minutes according to the package.

Thirty minutes. He stared at the package, then at the cloudy water, then back at the package. How the fuck was he supposed to know when thirty minutes had passed? No watch, no datapad, no ship's chronometer ticking away in the corner of his vision. Just him and the sun that had moved...some amount since he'd started.

Right. Okay. That song Amy always caught him humming — the one from that old vid she loved. Four minutes, give or take. So if he hummed it, what, seven times? Eight to be safe? That would be roughly thirty-two minutes, which would—

Sonic stopped himself. Sat there holding a bag of cloudy water while his brain tried to justify counting song repetitions as a legitimate timekeeping method.

"Jesus Christ," he said to no one. "This is what I've come to. Song maths."

He set the water bag down carefully. It would take however long it took. The tablet would do its work whether he counted or not. While it worked, he unwrapped one of the nutrient blocks.

It looked exactly as appetising as he remembered. Compressed beige nothing, like someone had taken all the joy out of food and formed it into a brick. The wrapper claimed it contained a day's worth of calories and essential nutrients. The wrapper was lying. These things kept you technically not-starving, but calling it food was generous.

He bit off a corner. Chalk and cardboard, just like always, but somehow worse when it was all he had. No coffee to wash it down. No prospect of real food later. Just four more blocks after this one, then whatever those plants were in the growbed, then nothing.

The block turned to paste in his mouth. He forced himself to swallow, took another bite. His throat didn't want to cooperate. Everything about eating this thing was an argument with his body about what qualified as food.

Amy would have laughed at him. She'd tried one once, just to see what he complained about during long hauls. Spat it out immediately, declared it a crime against food, made him promise to never eat them if he had any other option.

He didn't have any other option.

The nutrient block sat in his stomach like a threat. Sonic wiped his hands on his still-damp overalls and stared at the sealed door. He needed inside. Whatever was in there — tools, food, medical supplies, a goddamn bed that wasn't sand — he needed it.

The knife came out. He worked it into the door seal, tried to find any gap where the mineral build-up might be thinner. The blade scraped against composite and oxidation but didn't bite into anything useful. He tried the hinges next — if he could pop the pins maybe — but they were internal, protected, designed by someone who'd actually thought about security.

The observation windows were thick, designed for pressure differentials. He could break them maybe, but not with a utility knife and desperation. The walls were solid composite all the way around. No maintenance panels, no ventilation access he could squeeze through.

"Come on, come ON—"

The knife slipped, nearly took his thumb off as he fumbled to not let it drop to the floor. Sonic stepped back, breathing hard. The building sat there, smug in its sealed status, keeping whatever supplies it held away from someone who needed them.

"Shit..."

A glint of reflected light caught his eye — further up the slope, through the vegetation. More structures. Higher up, scattered across the island's upper reaches where the rock rose into something like a mountain. Different elevations, connected by what might have been paths once but were now just silhouettes in the overgrowth.

If this building was sealed, maybe those weren't. Maybe whoever had lived here had fled upward, left doors open in their hurry to...to what? Leave? Die? Become the kind of missing that didn't get found?

Sonic sheathed the knife, grabbed the water bag. The purification tablet had done its work, the water clear now, presumably safe. He took a careful sip and...yup, it tasted weird, that almost chemical-clean taste, but it was wet and at least it didn't burn going down.

The path up was worse than the morning's climb. Steeper, the vegetation thicker, those fleshy pink flowers catching on his clothes. His boots found purchase on root systems that shouldn't exist — too vein-like rather than root-like, like someone had tried to engineer trees and couldn't decide if they were creating plant or animal.

The first structure he reached was half-collapsed. The roof had caved in, whether from weather or time or something worse. Inside was a ruin of rotted furniture and scattered equipment, everything covered in what looked like moss but probably wasn't. A fabricator sat in the corner, screen dark, its casing split open and components no doubt friend from exposure to the elements.

Nothing salvageable. Nothing useful. Just evidence that people had lived here and stopped.

Higher up. The path — definitely a path now, cut into the rock with tools, not erosion — switched back across the face of the slope. Sonic's legs protested every step but he kept climbing because the alternative was sleeping outside with the spider-things.

The second structure was better. Intact at least, though the door hung open at an angle that suggested the frame had warped. Inside was darker, the windows covered with growth, but he could make out shapes. Furniture. Storage containers. Another fabricator, this one potentially functional.

But first, the smell hit him.

Not rot exactly. Something else. Sweet and sickly, like fruit that had fermented then gone past fermentation into something chemistry shouldn't allow. It came from deeper in the building, through a doorway he couldn't see past.

Sonic backed out. Whatever was in there, he didn't need to meet it. Not yet. Not without knowing what it was or how long it had been dead or if it was actually dead.

The highest structure sat at the peak, smaller than the others but positioned to see everything — the lagoon, the ocean, the other buildings below. Observatory maybe, or whoever had been in charge had wanted the view.

This door was closed but not sealed. The manual release actually worked, though it took both hands and his foot braced against the frame. The door scraped open, revealing—

Clean. Mostly clean. Dust and neglect but not decay. Windows on three sides, clouded but intact. A single room with basic furnishings, nothing too fancy. Just a desk, chair, storage lockers, a bed platform built into the wall.

And a PDA on the desk, powered down but undamaged-looking.

Sonic picked it up carefully and turned it over. Standard issue, the kind everyone carried for documentation, communication, inventory management, the kind he also had to keep his log of tasks and things to fix on his old ship. The power button responded, screen flickering through start-up sequences.

Text appeared briefly — "Degasi" and below it "Torgal Corporation" — before the screen corrupted into gibberish. Pixels scattered, reformed, scattered again. The date stamp showed briefly: twelve years ago. Then more corruption, lines of code eating themselves, error messages stacking upon more error messages.

He tried the reset sequence, the diagnostic mode, even smacking it against his palm. The screen kept glitching, showing fragments and half-loaded sections, part of a word here, half a timestamp there, nothing complete enough to read. The data was fucked, properly fucked, the kind of corrupted fucked that needed specialised recovery tools he didn't have and wouldn't know how to use anyway. His expertise ran to engines and cooling systems, not data reconstruction.

Sonic set the useless PDA aside. Twelve years. Someone had been here twelve years ago and now their records were digital garbage. "Great."

The bed platform had a mattress, thin but much better than sleeping on sand or dirt. The storage lockers were mostly empty though, some expired rations, different from his nutrient blocks but equally unappetising, and a few tools too corroded to identify. But there was a water container, proper sealed storage with a spout that actually worked.

He sat on the bed. It creaked but held. Through the windows he could see the sun getting lower, maybe three hours until dark. The wreck was visible from here — to his right now, which meant either he was turned around or it really had moved. The observatory gave him a full view of the ocean, the island below, everything he'd need to watch for rescue that probably wasn't coming.

Sonic poured the purified water into the container. The emergency bag was wet inside but still functional, and he'd need it to carry his supplies up from the growbed. No point leaving things scattered around the island.

The door locked from the inside. An actual lock, mechanical, not electronic. Someone had thought about security, about keeping things out. He tested it twice, made sure it would open again, before heading back down for his gear.

The trip down was easier than up, but the return journey with arms full of supplies was something else. His boots found the same footholds but his legs were running on stubbornness now, each step negotiated separately. The emergency bag held the knife, the remaining nutrient blocks, the medical supplies. The jacket, still damp, hung around his neck.

By the time he reached the observatory, his body was done. Properly done, the kind of exhausted where lying down became non-negotiable soon.

Inside, he arranged things with the care of someone who might need them in the dark. Nutrient blocks in one storage locker. The knife within reach of the bed. Water container on the floor, topped up with what remained in the bag.

The medical supplies went on the desk. The antiseptic bottle was still intact, and there was gauze that had dried out enough to be useful. The cut on his head had been throbbing all day, probably infected already. He could feel the heat around it, the skin tight and sore.

Sonic poured antiseptic onto the gauze. The smell hit immediately — sharp, chemical, the kind of smell that promised pain. He pressed it against the cut.

"Fuck fuck fuck—"

Fire. Actual fire across his brow, into his eye, down to his teeth. His hand wanted to pull away but he held it there, counting seconds while the antiseptic did its work. Through tears and pain, he looked out the window to distract himself from the burn.

The sun was lower, painting everything orange. He looked for the wreck.

Gone.

No. He blinked hard, kept the gauze pressed against his head, looked right where it had been. Nothing. Further right then — there. The massive hull, but now it sat almost at the edge of his view from this window, much further right than before.

"What the fuck."

The gauze stayed against his head, antiseptic still burning, while he stared at the wreck. It wasn't moving. Wrecks didn't move. Dead ships stayed where they died, that was the whole point of being wrecked. But it had been there this morning, then somewhere else when he'd checked earlier, and now it was way over to the left in a different place.

Sonic grabbed the corroded PDA with his free hand, used its edge to scrape dirt off the window where his sightline hit the wreck. The mark was small but visible — a smudge on the glass that lined up exactly with the ship's bridge section. He stood in the same spot, feet planted, and stared at it.

The wreck sat there. Not moving. Not drifting. Just being a dead ship in water, exactly like dead ships were supposed to do.

He watched for a few minutes. Ten? Until the antiseptic had stopped burning, settled into a dull ache. His eyes started watering from not blinking enough. The wreck stayed exactly where it was, lined up with his smudge, refusing to move while he was watching.

"I'm losing it." His voice sounded tight in the empty room. "Day two and I'm already tracking hallucinations."

But he'd seen it in different positions. Three times now, three different spots, unless his brain was manufacturing memories. Which was possible. Exhaustion, dehydration, head trauma — there were plenty of reasons for his brain to start making things up.

The wreck sat there, patient as death, waiting for him to look away so it could move again. Or not move, because wrecks didn't move, because he was having some kind of breakdown.

"Amy would say I need sleep," he told the window. "Amy would say I'm overthinking. Amy would—"

Would be wondering why he hadn't called. Would be checking message systems, thinking about delays, not knowing yet that delays had become permanent.

The gauze came away pink and yellow — blood and something else that shouldn't have been there. He poured more antiseptic, winced through the second application, then bandaged it properly with the last of the clean gauze. It would hold for now.

The door clicked audibly as he locked it, a bolt that slid into the frame. He tested it twice — the spider-things could probably chew through the walls if they wanted, but the door would keep them from wandering in while he slept.

Sonic turned away from the window. The bed creaked when he sat on it, creaked more when he lay down. The mattress was thin enough to feel the platform through it, but it was horizontal and dry and inside walls.

The wreck would be there in the morning. Or somewhere else. Or his brain would start working properly and remember where it had always been.

Sleep. He needed sleep. Tomorrow he could figure out if he was going crazy or if dead ships had learned to wander.