Work Text:
Before he falls into the dark, he swears he sees the red mass of Mars, alive, right there in front of him, the sun curved around her like a cupped, golden palm. As if, should he try hard enough, he could simply reach out and touch it.
When he wakes up, he's shackled to a gurney cart, naked and shivering. Salvage his clothes. We don't have anymore spares. It's something old, beyond outdated by the feel of it. He can hardly see anything where the overhead lights blind him, even as he tries to squint through them. Something dabs at him and then prods and stings, and suddenly it's more than one hand, working methodically over him. We're wasting supplies on him that could be used on the other survivors. The faces around him blur. Rougher fingers grab at him and force his head back into place whenever he moves it. Alcohol, peroxide, blood—it all hurts his nose the same.
He screws his eyes shut. He opens them. He tries to remember how he got here. There's the echoes of something that grows louder in his ears the closer he gets to it. He had the core schematics on him when he surrendered, didn't he? He must know how it works then, or at least have some knowledge of our stations. He could prove useful to us if he's been trained somehow. When he tries to lift his head to look at who's talking over him, he's shoved back down again. You can't be serious? He's a killer like the rest of them! All Eden knows how to do is take!
Eden. His brothers. Weakly, he pulls at one of the cuffs holding him and listens to the rattle. They…
He already renounced them.
They'll all say whatever they need to in order to avoid a bullet! The Council Authority should've marked him for dead.
We need bodies, living ones.
Ava, there were kids—
We can't afford to lose anyone else. Even if he doesn't deserve it.
The air tastes like metal. Something else he can't place. He reaches for his right wrist, only to be stopped short by an impossible margin. His bracelet is still there, but he can't feel it anymore. No thin, skin-warm glass sits against the inside of his wrist or his palm where he usually tucks up his token when he works. They must've cut if off of him. Or, he lost it when—
What about the tattoo?
Burn it off. It doesn't matter anymore. Either way…it's all gone. He's one of ours now.
They grab him by the hair and force his head to the side. They shove rubber over his tongue and callous fingers close his jaw shut around it with a muttering to preserve his teeth. Something touches his neck. He thinks he hears himself cry out, or it's a hundred, other dying voices doing it for him. He can smell cooked meat—actual food, not dried rations, not things pulverized and cubed and lifeless.
It doesn't stop.
He reaches for Eden and she no longer answers.
Eyes up here, Convict. They introduce him to his penance inside of a metal box. A weathered speaker stands sentinel on the wall. A sheet of mirrored glass on one side, nothing but rivets on the others. They can see him, he can't see them. When he asks about the token from his bracelet, they tell him the Council Authority has confiscated it for their own use, that he's lucky they don't take everything they can from him. He grabs at the knife sheath, empty and abandoned, on his vest-hood. He's not sure what else they even can.
They don't call him anything more than Convict once he's led out into the wider brig area. Sometimes numbers follow along with it. Six-two. They remind him of the death toll on Filament Station every time they conduct their count, but they never tell him how many of the other children of Eden didn't survive the raid. Stand here, Convict. Step back, Convict. Raise your arms. Kneel. Count. Jump. Bark. Fetch. Hell, he's surprised they don't tighten a collar around his neck along with the shackles.
They never ask him who he is, they only tell him what they think he's done.
And, like everything else the Consolidation doesn't deem to fit, he lacks a name that isn't a part of their whole.
Notably, the other, Eden-lost convicts are kept as far apart from him as the COI can afford. Collusion, they claim. Incentive to riot, to dissent, to unravel the work they're doing here, because Eden can't be trusted to understand what really matters. Their Cause. Never lowercase. Always capital. It follows him in the emblemed halls they march him down. A self-important flailing against a cosmic inevitability, in Father's own words.
All kinds of rumors of what really happened on Filament Station quickly pass through the convict block they've confined him to.
He never corrects them, not when he knows they won't listen—when the truth won't feel as neat as what the Consolidation comforts themselves with. Letting them believe what they want comes with its own consequences, though. A handful of COI personnel with family who lived there, their loved ones lost. He can't blame them for their rage. He doesn't apologize, there's no point in it, not now, not when it won't mean anything. Not when they won't care if he told the truth anyway. His brothers are gone, those who are left only know that he failed his mission, that he turned against them. They won't be coming for him. They made that more than clear when they left him to die in the wreckage.
When the COI's grieving do finally corner him, he fights back only because it's an instinct older than him. With one of the straps removed from his harness, he wraps the leather body of the knife sheath tight over his knuckles the moment he realizes they're trailing him down into the brig's one-way maze without his usual, armed escort to nudge him along back to his cell. Bargained off somehow. Persuaded to look the other way, maybe. Not that it would take much. Tooth and nail, he understands that. It's the makings of an older, simpler world. One he always heard fading stories of on Mars before he could even walk.
Their footsteps echo closer behind him, clanging on the metal grating. He ties his hair out of his face. He keeps it tight to his skull like his mother showed him. In the weeks before his first Pruning, his mother had tried to cut it short, to make it so none of the other kids could grab at it and pull. He told her not to touch it. She'd let him grow it long since he was at her knees, called him little lion for it—even if neither of them had ever seen one outside of the near broken and ancient holo-vids collected between them. And there, in the heart of Eden, under a dead and dying sky, she pressed her knife into his much smaller hands and showed him how to use it. Until he was ready. Remember, Simon, quick and painless, like I taught you…this world has enough suffering in it already, there's no need to add any more.
If he survived the Prunings, he can survive this.
They close in on him in three. He can tell they're not killers from the way they hold themselves. He uses his wrapped hand to down one of them, his bare fist for another, his body for the last as he drives his arm into their throat until they go the wrong color in the face. Until he's shaking with the effort to keep them still as the others groan and gather themselves nearby. They come at him again. He struggles. He survives. The rush of it pounds in his ears. Eden demands sacrifice, my sons! The soil cannot feed itself. Blood begets blood begets blood. Death—he learned at the foot of the Last Tree—is how life persists.
The guards stun him down first, and then the others.
He's thrown back in his cell, bloodied, bruised, and triumphant until the twitching finally wears off. The knife sheath is hidden away in his clothes until he can re-secure it—he won't give the Consolidation a chance to take away anything else. One of the guards lingers at the door after the others leave. Their COI patch marks a hard glare against their worn-down vest, eyes a cut of sharpened silver in the low light. If it were up to me, I would've just let them kill you…
Darkness folds in around him as the door shuts, and the lock turns, and he's left alone with himself again. He knows they won't let him out for days. He'll be lucky if he receives his rations either. He's not even the one that started it, but he knows they don't give a shit about any of that anyway.
As he slumps against the wall, he spits out the thickened saliva pooled under his tongue and rolls a piece of something he hopes isn't his own tooth around in his mouth until he swallows it. It's not food, but it feels like something. It'll be all he gets for a while. Somehow, the COI has hardly any resources for anything they consider 'extra', but just enough scraps to maintain a proper brig on this rust bucket. Because, sure, that makes sense. With no other choice, he curls up against the wall to wait.
Only the aches in him give away that time keeps passing at all. The slow, steady cramping in his stomach. The dryness of his mouth. He shivers the colder it gets. A delirium circles him the longer the door refuses to budge. One of the other convicts had called it solitary, said that only those the COI can't force into order get scruffed into it. He's not sure what purpose it serves, what any of this does. Maybe there's no point to it. To any of this shit. It's nearly funny to him, how many dead-ends the COI will back itself into before admitting they're just like the rest of the universe—fucked.
Eden was always simpler in her conviction. She had no need for convicts nor prisons to hold them. There were no breathing bodies wasted away in closet-cramped cells. Everything was returned to the soil to continue the cycle the moment it outlived its use on this side of the veil. It's our burden to bear, to carry out what should've been our End. The Consolidation perverts what has always been meant to be, but you, my children—you alone understand what we must do.
For some reason, the COI refuses to kill him; it's a reality he can't quite wrap his head around, and yet, it persists.
All he knows is that he's killed for far, far less.
'Then why couldn't you finish the job this time?'
He blinks slowly and turns his head even slower, towards the darkest corner of his holding. It's a familiar sight, the shadow of him like an afterimage, robes tattered in blackened ash, the rest of him in flickers—bright and then nothing. The half of his face he can no longer remember always gone missing with the rest.
It's been days since he's spoken to anyone. His tongue moves clumsy behind his teeth where it sticks. "I did…"
'Is that what you think happened? Or is that how you want to remember it?'
No…he— he remembers it. He… They'd made it to the heart of the station. Him and the others had quietly handled what resistance they met on their way in and then fanned out to gather what they could before the rest of the COI colonists became aware of their invasion. But Father had entrusted him and a few others with a different limb of this mission. He headed for the auxiliary terminal, east of the reactor core. The schematic partially memorized, the layout mapped in his head as he counted off the corridors and picked through their sprawling labyrinth of iron and steel.
He'd gotten there. He'd attached the stolen, terminal-repair box. He'd seen that the others had made it to their stations as well. He'd started his work. He pulled the wires free as it spit out what he needed to cut, what he needed to twist or strip bare and he did the opposite. He'd held the final two in his hands and trembled as he read the output, the warnings flashing in back-lit yellow on the dark screen. WARNING: REACTOR MELTDOWN IMMINENT. WARNING: REACTOR MELTDOWN IMMINENT. WARNING. WARNING. WARNING.
They hadn't told him what Filament Station's core was actually made of, or, far more likely, he simply hadn't bothered to read that far into the manuals Father had given him. Nuclear fission, sure, whatever, fine—he got that much. It was like the rest of the scattered space stations sustaining themselves in the roaming dark, but an older model, a far outdated element—an entirely unstable one without the proper fail-safes behind it. The same ones he was instructed to shut off. The ones that Father entrusted him with killing like everything else that's ever fallen under his teeth. Cross them already, Simon! What are you waiting for?
It was a suicide mission.
They were all supposed to die there. A part of him always knew that. But, as he stood there, his brother's words barked down the nape of his neck, he'd realized—despite everything—he wanted to live.
He put the wires back. The reactor slowly stabilized without his part of the fail-safe sabotage fulfilled. He grabbed different ones. He manipulated what he could to make the COI aware of what was about to happen, so they could get out, fight, survive. So they'd at least have a chance. Don't just stand there! Do something! A spark in the wrong place, ignition. The fire chewed his brother to pieces right in front of him.
He hardly even thought about it as his other brothers found him and yelled and grabbed at him until the heat chased them all down the corridor and he ran, and ran as the warnings blared in monotone over the speakers: EVACUATE WING, ENGINE MALFUNCTION, EVACUATE WING, ENGINE MALFUNCTION, EVACUATE WING, ENGINE MALFUNCT—
He tried to stop it.
He—
He didn't think it would end the way it did. He just thought he could—that maybe there was another way, some other method to get the Consolidation to listen to them, for Eden to listen to him for once, to understand that they could work together or to at least stop what they were doing, and just—
To help…
'To help with what, Si? A rotting speck in a dying sea of stars? At least you gave us the quick exit, didn't you?' His brother snaps his waxy, dripping fingers in front of his nose. 'Out like a light.'
Eden was starving. There were still too many to feed.
The Last Tree was dead and Filament Station was supposed to—
'To…?' He shivers at the press of hot, humid air against his neck, stinging like a hollow needle humming into his skin. 'Save us? You knew what it was you were doing up there and then you decided to suddenly give a shit. How'd that turn out? You made it out alive, didn't you? Sixty-two COI souls in exchange for one ticket off Eden. What does freedom taste like, Simon?'
"I didn't know. I…"
'You did! You knew exactly what you were supposed to do and you didn't do it!'
"I did what I had to!"
'Did you?'
Selfish, coward, killer. His knuckles sing when he hits the floor. The throaty thud of steel plating coughs back at him. He hits it again. And again. Until blood smears along the face of it. Until it's all he can feel. A whine slips through his teeth as he pushes against it as hard as he can and nothing budges.
He can't get out of here, he'll probably never get out of here, and he can't swipe this blood off of his skin either.
'All you had to do was follow your orders.'
"I was trying to stop it!"
'Were you?'
He shakes his head. None of that was supposed to happen. He couldn't do it, and he didn't know. He didn't know what it would do (he did, he did) and he couldn't (he had to)—he didn't want to—not like that—not yet. But he had to. He had to do it. There was no other choice. It was Filament Station or the soil and the grove, and he didn't— He had to do it. But not like that, nobody deserves that kind of a slow, irradiated sloughing off the bone. (he didn't want to die like that. like nothing. like it was all for nothing. he wanted to live, he just wanted to fucking—)
The COI doesn't deserve to die like that. Not even the children of Eden…
'You gotta be shitting me. When did you suddenly decide to grow a conscience?'
'They're dead because of you!'
'Simon the Butcher, lost his nerve.'
All he can taste is ash.
"I'm sorry—" He's shaking. "I didn't…" He's begging. He doesn't even know why anymore. He grabs at his head like he can push it all out. "Fuck!"
The brother that's broken off from the others handling the Harvesting elsewhere watches as he hooks up to the terminal and starts the core diagnostic procedure. He has half a mind to bark at him to keep his eyes on the hallway like he's supposed to, but there's something there that wasn't earlier. He's seen it before, when he's put the bad end of his knife up to someone's neck; when they suddenly realize, no matter how hard they struggle, they're not making it out of this one. 'They say one reactor core's got enough radiation to ruin a place like this ten times over,' his brother laughs quietly. 'Ironic, isn't it…? To have your only hope left be the thing that's gonna kill you.'
The thing in his cell laughs and laughs, and he feels sick. He grabs at the scar on his throat. Claws at it where it aches, like he can tear the ink Eden gave him out of himself, like he can fix what the COI took from him. But nothing works. None of it ever. fucking. works.
He throws up weak bile when his stomach finally gives out before he does. Until he's left shivering on his hands and knees, praying at the feet of something that can no longer hear him. God didn't do this to punish us, my son. He showed us what we're meant to do. This is our calling. He feels roots and soil under his shins that isn't even there, that never will be again, and Father's hand in his hair, warm and firm, punishing if he ever tries to twist away from it.
Filament Station wasn't supposed to end the way it did. It wasn't supposed to end like that. He tried to stop it. He tried to, but— Eden wasn't either. The Last Tree. The Quiet Rapture. Any of it.
None of this was ever supposed to happen.
He ends up turned onto his back, silent and still except for his rough breaths. There's no bed in this cell. No blanket. No warmth. The only light is the thin sliver that creeps under the door and casts a dim glare against the dull paneling beneath him. He can hardly stretch from one end to the other without curling up slightly. Curved into the floor, he stares up at the trembling condensation on the ceiling. Its drops shine like the echoes of stars, a ghost of something already long dead staring back into him.
He reaches for his right wrist and finds nothing but empty cording.
He's alone…
Maybe he's always been alone.
Out of everyone—of all of them—he still doesn't understand why they were the only ones left behind.
Conviction Realization. That's what they like to call it. It makes it sound nicer than what it is.
The Consolidation stipulates that in exchange for his freely ('freely' being an oxymoron he can't help but trip over the more they use it) given labor, he can earn his freedom. He can only assume it's their idea of redemption. Contribute to the collective, and you'll have a chance to be welcomed into their fold. Earn your place. Bullshit...
Apparently, the rule applies to everyone, even him somehow, but they don't tell him how much his own debt is. Because of course they don't. It's an obfuscated concept that he shoulders anyway. He has no other choice.
They start him with simple, monitored courier tasks from one corridor to another, and then with menial repair work. With things that don't exactly feel like they do much to get him anywhere. They don't even feel like he's supposed to be doing them. Not with a stunner gun always leveled at the back of his neck. Not when they shackle him to the pipe along the wall and make him work on an oxygen leak one-handed. Not when a guard shoves him down into the depths of the station to handle an engine misfire as they tell him he's lucky they even let him try.
It's when he's hauled over to lend a hand alongside a non-Eden convict with a life-support system patch that he hears about how one of the other brothers of Eden has gone missing. Lucky bastard must've earned his way out. Lucky bastard… It's the same thing the COI medics kept calling him after they patched him up. The longer he's stuck here, he's starting to think maybe it had nothing to do with luck.
The tasks they assign to him seem near endless.
They work him in shifts that feel like they go on forever as well. He hardly sleeps. They hardly feed him. He's given only enough stale water to stay upright, to not pass out from the heat near the core's shielding or the sweat that never seems to stop unless he's cold enough his fingers go numb. Whenever he starts to slump over, they haul him back to his feet. They escort him to his next assignment, and he follows.
At times, he tries his damndest to figure out what they're making him do, especially when the things he's doing seem particularly useless. Even worse, tedious for no reason. Like here, in the belly of an unused section of the station, where he's kneeled on the solid, metal decking and hunched over the whirring cutter in his grasp. At the least, it's easier to work now that they stopped shackling him. It's not necessary. Not when the steel batons at their waists' shine like long teeth in his peripherals. It's more than enough of a reminder of what happens if he ever stops.
With ragged and grime-blackened nails, he works the metal panel off of the hallway wall and sets it aside with the others. They're quickly carted off before the stack can pile up too high. Notably, it's not other convicts that gather them, but a handful of COI personnel. And he can hear the chatty mechanic he's been paired off with tapping along the hallway ahead of him all the while, deciding on the next one to have him rip up with a sharp rap of his knuckles and a right, this one'll do.
When he tries to figure out what it is they're gathering it all for, he can't. The iron and steel panels are mostly uniform, but not always. The measurements the mechanic shows him with his hands don't reveal much of what it will be either. He can only assume it's to spot weld parts of this waning satellite back together where it's decayed away on the outside. A fist knocks on the floor. A sharp whistle and an over here, c'mon follows. He cuts through the panel the mechanic points out. He removes it.
He wonders how long the COI will take to devour itself from the inside out. If they'll simply keep going until nothing is left in its middle except empty, endless void.
As he pries out the next panel, he catches a glimpse of his muddled reflection in the warped face of it. For a moment, he wonders if Father is still alive on Eden, if the grove has descended into nothing more than a mass grave yet. If Father knows he failed his mission on purpose. That he surrendered, that he didn't die with his brothers the way he should've. The way he was always supposed to.
Something hard knocks into his back and he grunts through his teeth. A glare is spared for the guard looming over his shoulder and the baton clutched in their fist.
"What? Got something to say?" They nudge him harshly with their boot, and then kick hard at his side. "Keep working, Convict."
He takes the blow. He doesn't fall over.
"Easy," the mechanic says with a frown where he's crouched beside him. "He's no good to us if you hurt 'im, is he?"
"Mind yourself, Jack. He'll turn that thing on you if you give him an inch."
He ignores the ache in his ribs. He continues his work. He's had plenty of time to get used to them talking around him.
Jack keeps glancing at him in the way he knows the guy is going to ask it eventually. Even with his hood pulled up, some of them still recognize his face at the worst angle. It's the same question those who are still skeptical always ask him. Jack must be naive enough to have offered to help with this task without knowing who he'd be stuck with down here. Or, he was also volun-told.
"Hey…" Jack whisper-shouts over the echoes of the faceless others working around them elsewhere in the station, convict and personnel alike. Everyone has their part to play in this. "Did you really kill all those people?"
He keeps working. When he carves up the next section, the sparks spit into his face and the scar on his throat burns and burns.
He doesn't answer.
He doesn't have to.
His mother always talked about the stars. All the way from the surface of Mars and then on Eden once they finally settled there. It's a decision he had childishly dug his heels in at; when things like that had still seemed so impossibly big and terribly large. Come on, it has a tree! It'll be just like home, Simon. Oh, don't be like that, I promise it'll only be for a few months. Sometimes it's hard to recall how the stars looked before the end. He mostly remembers the day they started to fade away. When he watched it all vanish through the glass ceiling of the sanctum alongside the others.
None of them had known what it meant until Father stepped up to guide them. To return an order to Eden's chaos.
Now, after everything, he's not so sure whose word he's meant to follow anymore.
It'll be okay, Simon. You'll be okay… He can still feel it, where he held her hand before she died. Where she touched his brow. His nose. Cupped the side of his face and pushed her forehead hard against his. I love you so much.
She had been chosen for a non-standard Pruning. A Thinning, is how he always thought of it. One without a struggle. A seventh of the children of Eden handpicked by Father, and he'd somehow missed the knife in his neck again.
He doesn't watch it happen, he never does with these kinds of things. It's different when they aren't allowed to fight back. Instead, he recites the names of the stars he can remember as he holds onto her knife and waits outside of the Last Tree's sanctum for it to be over.
Once he's brought inside by another brother who was sent to fetch him, the bodies have already been dealt with. The blood languishes in the soil, coagulates in rivulets and seams across the too wet dirt. Father cleans off the already wiped blade with the edge of his robe. His nails are still red at the seams.
With a loose gesture towards Father's feet with the end of the knife, he kneels in front of him.
"Simon."
He looks up.
Father rarely uses his name. Son. Child. Brother. He's not sure what he feels anymore when he hears Father say it. A dull emptiness, or a blunted rage.
"The Last Tree is dead."
He glances at it. I can still see them! Stop saying they're gone. We can all see them. It's right there, though. Barren, sickly, but the trunk still stands. Her roots. He can see it. He— My son... those stars are already dead. They've fed her soil. They've given her everything.
They've used their blood, their bodies, his mother, he—
"Eden is sick. We've grown arrogant in our languishing. Humanity has led us to believe anything lasts, even this, while God has shown us nothing should." Father's hand falls on his brow and blood-steeped fingers lay heavy over his skull. "The Consolidation has tried to spit in His eye for far too long. Filament Station is an affront to His end, and you, my son, must help us bring it to its ruin."
There's no use in speaking anymore. Not here. It's this, or the dirt. There's no waste on Eden; they'll use him alive, or they'll use him dead. Either way, what choice does he have but to obey.
Father continues. He half hears any of the words. About their burden. About how the last brother will one day return to the grove and then, only then, will they all become the soil. He only wishes they'd all stop talking about the fucking tree. It was never about the tree. None of this was ever about a stupid tree. He clutches the preserved seed in his palm as Father drones on and on and he tries to pick out which blood splatter under his knees is his mother's.
If anything Eden ever taught him was true, he'll at least see her beyond the veil.
The sermon continues. All he smells is rust. Wherever the soil touches his skin and clothes, he knows it will stain him. He stays kneeled in it anyway. Father pets his hair idly, the way he does most of his sons. He thinks of the strange android mutts he saw on Mars when he was much smaller, the ones only the most well-off colonists owned like half-alive trophies.
Father finally steps away.
He's given his orders. They'll Harvest Filament Station's supplies and then Prune her people to feed the grove. They'll render the space station un-salvageable afterwards so none can rebuild within its walls, and take what technology and knowledge the COI has hidden away from them within it to snuff it out as well.
He's given the core schematics and told what he must do. You've always been the more clever of the flock, my son. I trust you can handle this. Of all the lambs Father's reared, he's never strayed. Father trusts him. Believes that he'll help lead this one with his brothers the way he always has. That he's the last hope they have left.
Their last…
…chance.
"Convict, we have a proposal for you." The offer starts and then doesn't stop. "Refusal will result in a doubling of the current debt, acceptance will earn you your freedom."
They proposition him through the thin slit in his cell door. Not face to face. He can't even see her eyes. He still doesn't even know her name. None of them have ever asked his either, only what happened, what he did, and what he will do to atone for it. He wants to ask what his current tally is at, but he knows they'll never answer that. He can repair a thousand panels, remove ten thousand and more, and he would never earn his way out of here.
Even if he'd never been on Filament Station, even if he tells them he tried to stop it, over and over, they've already chosen their monster.
"Convict." It's the same voice as before. Annoyed, now, as if he's merely her inconvenience and that this decision won't entirely fuck him either way. "We need an answer."
"Fine."
He doesn't even know what he's agreed to. Maybe it's worse he's stopped caring. Fuck it. If it really is a way out, if this isn't just another lie, or another stupid dream, he's going to bite into it and never let go.
What are sixty-two lives measured against one? What's a thousand, struggling souls against an entire universe?
When he accepts their offer, nothing happens.
They bring him his usual, one-meal ration for the day. Except, it's not a compressed, synthesized protein- brick this time. It's actual food. Pale gray, rehydrated meat of some kind, steeped in enough brine to curdle it. He eats it too fast. He feels like he's starving the more he swallows it. The aftertaste is unpleasant, oily and thick, but he ignores that. He's eaten worse. It sits heavy inside of him once he's done. He finds an actual container of fresh water tucked into the side of the tray, instead of the tiny portion of over-processed, reclaimed piss he usually gets.
As he downs it, and dribbles of it lose themselves down his chin and throat in his haste, he thinks about how the last time he had anything like this was on Eden. A meager celebration before their campaign against Filament Station. He'd looked up at the Last Tree, sat under it, right where he told himself they killed his mother. It had no leaves left on it by then. Only thin, sickly branches. It hadn't flowered properly in over a decade, longer—ever since he was just some dumb kid who barely knew what it meant to kill. He'd held onto her knife while the others ate and drank and he watched Father at the head of them all. Again and again, he worried the flat of his thumb over the sharpened edge of his mother's blade.
Listlessly, he thinks about what would have happened if he had drawn it over Father's neck right there. About dying. About living. About his mother and about the stars and the planets and whether it's really, truly fucking possible for a billion, brilliant things to vanish without so much as a sound.
When he hits the floor, he realizes, distantly, that they drugged his food this time. He fights it until he can't. Until he doesn't have it in him to do more than lay there and laugh.
And then sleep.
'Simon… Simon!' A hand grabs him by the arm as another of Eden's children drags him down the corridor. 'Seriously, come on. You need to see this—the stars, there's something wrong with them, there's something—'
"Fuck…" His head aches. Everything does.
When he starts to come to, it doesn't feel like he's laying on the floor of his cell anymore. And he can't stop drooling into whatever scratchy fabric is under his cheek. He can't move either. There's a strip of something gauze-y tied tight over his eyes. Even when he blinks hard and scrunches his face to try and shift it up, it stays dark.
He drifts in and out like that. Until whatever he's in now comes to a stop, and the purr of a much smaller engine than a space station's beating heart thrums under his side. Hands grab at him. Sluggishly, he's aware he's hauled up and led somewhere, but he can't keep track of the locations he's mapped out in his head through the COI cellblock or the greater space station. All he knows is that nothing about wherever he is now is familiar in the slightest. They'll probably start him off here at square zero then. Awesome…great.
Just his fucking luck, really.
A stubborn, pneumatic air lock that sounds like it wants to stick peels itself open past his nose and everything suddenly smells like blood. It's thick enough he would have gagged if he hadn't smelled it a hundred times before. A fresh body, a fresher kill, he can feel it warm and splattered over his arms and face, feel the knife, still shivering in his fist. They drag him forward, they ragdoll him up a set of steps and his shins knock into the lip of something hard enough to hurt before he's dropped down in a scatter of limbs.
He slurs out curses at them, only for them to get drowned out by the clang of metal banging overhead as they shut him into whatever this is. It takes another few moments for the feeling to finally return to his fingers.
He clumsily pushes the makeshift blindfold up until it's stuck along his brow. He assesses his new reality. Which—looks like shit, frankly. It's obviously a ship of some kind. More of a shallow, banged-up tube. One that also reeks. Once he scrapes himself up off the floor and sits at the console of it, he can hear talking outside. See the vague shadows of bodies and the faint hints of lit-up monitors past the dull glass of the small, round window. Someone passes close by it and he pulls his hood up reflexively as they go.
A sudden crackle, static-whine from over his shoulder startles him, and he glares at the overhead speaker situated behind him. It warbles again. The tiny, yellow light flickers and then, "—ng on. Convict, can you hear me?"
He doesn't answer. He hears them working on the container he's in. He knows what welders sound like. Riveters. Wherever he is, they're obviously still repairing it while he's stuck inside of it. How generous.
"…you tested the microphone, right…? …it still works…?" There's muttering, muffled over the tinny speaker. A sharp tap-tap makes him wince before the voice comes back, louder, "We need a verbal response, Convict."
With a sigh, he finally speaks. "I can hear you."
"Good." There's a rustle of something, a slightly more hushed remark as whoever is at the microphone turns away from it, "Start the pre-descent procedures. We don't have any more time to waste."
Descent?
Clunk-clunk-clunk. His new cage rocks as it collides with something below his feet. He catches himself on the console. He can't see anything past the window any longer as it becomes splattered in a foamed, red slurry. Not a window, a porthole, he tells himself, as he realizes this isn't a spacecraft. His eyes flick to the depth reader, the controls, the oxygen meter in bright, glowing squares.
It's a submersible.
The Consolidation…they hide their technology, their people. Father told them all at his pulpit, eyes wild, a fever in him. They won't tell you what they found. But I will. One moon stands apart from the rest, and in the darkness of that moon: an ocean of blood.
Eden was right about one thing. The COI had taken to the barren moons as a last ditch effort, this one in particular, and studied them—or, this is their first attempt at it.
He's not sure which reality is worse.
They submerge him with every deafening ratchet of his chain tether. It's brighter than he thought it'd be. Under the spotlights the blood that swells past the porthole shines rich and thick, fresh and arterial—like it's been cut directly from the source. It covers the glass until it's all he can see. For a moment, he's suspended there, right at the precipice, and the heavy slosh of it slaps against the iron top where his only true exit from this endeavor remains.
"Beginning the descent."
Everything rumbles. He barely steadies himself as the whole thing shakes like it might rattle apart around him. It'd be poetic, to go out like this. Crushed like some tin can in a cheap, piece of shit the COI slap-welded together with hopes and fucking dreams.
"Mission clock started. Exploration of AT-5 underway." The read-outs she makes pass numbly over him as she labels his expedition and notes the beginning of his next penance.
Mentally, he marks another tally for himself. Even if it feels pointless sometimes. Even if he can't remember all the bodies he already crawled over to get here.
Metal groans around him as the depth meter sinks.
"How's it looking down there, Convict?" He doesn't answer. He doesn't think she cares either way. "Ready to do some good for a change?"
Her silence, he assumes, means she wants a response.
It takes him a moment to speak, his ears rushing with the sound of the blood pushing at the hull.
"Yeah..." For a moment, it hardly sounds like himself. "Let's get this done."
He grabs at the knife sheath on his harness again, his thumb worrying at the worn edge of the leather he's scratched at until it's become napped, the rivets of it shined like new under his skin. The longer he stares at it, the porthole becomes a bulbous, dead eye that does nothing but stare right through him.
That's it then. He'll earn his freedom here, at the bottom of their obsession. Their own last chance.
He can't help but think of Mars as his reflection watches him in the pane, see her glaring through the hexed panels above the grove as the leaves changed color. How he thought he'd never look up from Eden without seeing her take up nearly the whole of the horizon—and then, like she was never there, she was suddenly gone.
Everything was gone.
He listens as the sea swallows him whole.
This is all he has left.