Work Text:
You’re barely finished with your ascension to god tier when they drag you off your quest bed. Dragonflies scatter and you flail awkwardly, completely caught off guard, which is a pretty fucking rare experience for you. But you’ll give yourself a break because honestly, you just slit your own throat. That’s a good enough reason for letting someone get the drop on you.
You throw your weight backward against whoever’s got your arms, but they feel like they’re made of solid steel. “You’re late,” you say, shooting for calm. You miss but you manage slightly exasperated, which is good enough. “Ten minutes earlier and I wouldn’t be a god.”
There’s probably a heart thing that you could be doing right now, but fuck if you know what that is. You’re wearing your ridiculous god tier pajamas. The thing holding you wrenches you up off the bed like you weigh nothing, and you manage to twist around enough to see that, yes, it’s an imperial drone. There’s another one behind it, staring at you with blank eyes. As far as you’ve ever been able to tell, drones don’t speak.
You drum your feet against its knees and buck in its grasp, trying to break its hold. It’s like fighting a truck. The other drone lifts into the air, apparently deciding that the situation doesn’t warrant two of them. The drone holding you tightens its grip around you and starts to lift into the air as well. You twist, digging your fingers into the plates of its exoskeleton. If only you could reach your sylladex. You have a lot of pointy things in there.
“Send a message to the others,” you say out loud. The response flashes on your glasses.
TT: Two steps ahead of you.
TT: Roxy’s the closest. She’s on her way.
The drone shifts behind you. One of its hands plucks the glasses from your face and crushes them. Splintered bits of plastic and glass rain down on the receding ground.
Do the heart thing. Do the heart thing. Do the heart thing.
You fail to do the heart thing.
The drone palms your head with one massive hand and twists until your neck snaps.
--
You open your eyes to a bare metal ceiling. It is so completely foreign to you that for a moment you can do nothing but stare at it blankly. Where are you? How do you not remember what you’ve been doing? Where have you been?
Oh, right. You’ve been dead. And now that you and your dreamself are one, when you lose consciousness, there isn’t any other place for you to go. This is a new and unpleasant experience. You’ve never lost time like this before. Even when you’ve lost track of one of your selves before, it was always because you were paying too much attention to your other one.
Failing to exist is a very new experience for you.
The room you’re in is small and industrial. The walls, ceiling and floor are made of bare, riveted steel. You’re lying on the floor, and there is nothing else in the room except a small, slimy hole in the corner that has apparently been used as a toilet. It emits a sour, fishy stench. The only light in the room comes from a phosphorescent strip that runs the perimeter of the ceiling.
Your sylladex is empty, which is unsurprising but still unpleasant. Even if it was filled mostly with puppets and orange soda. The most glaring absence is Cal. You probably haven’t spent a moment apart from your best friend since you were ectoplasmically reamalgamated.
Your hands are cuffed behind your back. You roll your head from side to side. No sword wound in your throat, of course. That healed when you became god tier. And no broken spine, either. Probably getting your neck snapped by a drone while trying to escape is not very heroic or just.
You wonder if Roxy will be able to find you. You have no idea where you are, but it’s obviously alien. It’s very dark in here, and you can hear a faint, steady hum, like a distant engine. If you had to guess, you’d say you were on the Battleship Condescension. Your friends aren’t stupid. They’ll be able to figure out pretty quickly that you’ve been taken here, right? Your AR would have told them that it was imperial drones that caught you. Of course, just because they know where you are doesn’t mean that they’ll be able to get you out.
--
It’s another two hours before there are noises in the hall outside your cell. By this point you’ve given yourself the tour of your cell and are thoroughly bored. Boredom: yet another new experience.
You rise up as a key turns in the lock, but before you can do anything—your only option here seems to be "frantically kicking them to death” which probably won’t work but you’re willing to try anything once—pale yellow energy crackles around you and slams you against the wall.
In the doorway is a tall, thin troll with glowing yellow eyes and absolutely no expression on his face. He’s wearing a plastic respirator and a pair of goggles around his neck. A psionic of some sort, apparently. He steps aside docilely to allow another troll to glance into the room. This one has a blue sign on her chest and another respirator.
“Bring him,” she says in Alternian to the psionic. Yellow energy tugs you forward like you’re on a leash, and you stumble out of the cell.
The ship is made up of that distinctive troll mix of hardware both robotic and organic. Bundles of what look like umbilical cords run along the ceiling. The blue blood presses her hand to a glowing screen set into a door and leads you into an airlock. She pulls the respirator up over her nose, and goggles down over her eyes.
“Hold your breath,” she says to you in English.
Water begins to rise from the grating in the floor. It’s cold, swirling around your ankles, then your knees, then all the way up your chest. You hold your breath and close your eyes as the water churns over your face.
You open your eyes again when there is a rumble. The airlock door ahead of you unlocks and rolls open. The blue blood pushes off into the room, followed by the psionic, who drags you after him.
The room reminds you of some sunken cruise ship. Elegant furniture is bolted to the floor. Watery green light comes from sconces attached to the walls. Even the walls here are paneled in muted stripes of lavender and gold.
Just inside the door, the blue blood pulls another respirator from where it was attached to the wall. As soon as she turns it on, bubbles spill out of it. The mask fits over your mouth and nose. You suck in stale air. It is still attached to the wall in a long tube, which unreels as the psionic pulls you further into the room.
There is an aquarium standing in one corner of the room. It’s so ridiculously incongruous that you stare at it. A massive glass tank, filled with fish and water. A little slice of the ocean, kept neatly behind glass so it doesn’t disturb the rest of the room.
Her Imperious Condescension stands in the center of the room. She doesn’t float awkwardly like you and the two other trolls; her swim bladder keeps her at an even buoyancy, able to stand flat footed on the floor. Her hair is a black, eldritch mass around her head. She smiles like a shark.
“Hello, my prince,” she says pleasantly.
You take a breath of flat air that tastes like plastic. “Your Majesty,” you say in the most unimpressed voice you can manage. “Is this where I tell you that you’ll never get me to talk?”
She smiles. “Talk, or don’t. I don’t care.” She paces around you, moving through the water as sinuous as an eel. “You’re just a minor player in this game.”
“Bullshit,” you say. “I ruined your plans.”
She stops next to you and reaches out to push one claw between your cheekbone and the mask. Water trickles down your mouth and puddles over your chin. You flinch away and her finger slips free, sealing the mask against your face again.
“It’s always the pawns who make the first move,” she says.
“You wouldn’t have me here if I wasn’t important.”
She moves away from you again. “How long do you think it will take them to find you?”
Oh. You’re bait. That should have been obvious. You don’t say that out loud, though, because you’d like to avoid fish puns if at all possible. You shrug. “Don’t know. They’re busy people.”
“Do you think we can have them make you a priority?”
That does not sound like a pleasant prospect at all. “They’ll be here,” you say.
Her flat fish eyes gleam. “Let’s hope so for your sake, chum.”
--
You discover the purpose of the aquarium.
It’s large enough that you fit inside easily, although you can lean your forehead forward to touch the glass in front of you and stretch your cuffed hands back to touch the glass behind you with very little effort. Tiny blue fish flicker around your face and brush against your arms. You breath shallowly into the respirator and let your feet trail over the sand in the bottom of the tank, where crabs scuttle back and forth. Your god tier pajamas are waterlogged, weighing you down.
Your eyes burn at the salt in the water. You close them and just float. The temperature is warmer than the rest of the Condesce’s quarters were. This is tolerable. You can do this. You can wait. It can’t be that long before Roxy and Jake and Jane figure out where you are, especially if the Condesce wants to lure them here. Whoops, that’s another fish pun. Anyway. They’ll come soon, and now that you’re all god tier, the three of them together will be a formidable opponent. You never prototyped your sprites so the Condesce doesn’t have an advantage. It will be fine.
You hate being the damsel in distress, but it’s not like you have a lot of choice in the matter. In any case, you’ve played your part in helping make all three of them stronger. You were the inciting force for a lot of their development. You made Jake a warrior, and you helped Jane reach god tier, and you have helped nurture Roxy for so long. If they are able to save you, it’s only because you made them strong enough. And you have faith in your own abilities.
So you wait.
It’s hard to tell the passage of time. Your skin prunes in the water. Fish brush your skin. Someone taps the glass, and you open your eyes to see the Condesce there. She is holding a small computer screen in her hand. On the screen you see yourself in the tank. She must have a video camera trained on you, and she’s probably sending that feed to your friends. They’re going to be watching this.
She disappears again. It’s hard to see her move around the room. Your tank is lit from below, and the rest of the Condesce’s quarters are dark, so all you can see are occasional shadows moving past your tank, like seeing glimpses of horrorterrors in the Furthest Ring.
When you close your eyes, there is no other you there. You don’t have another body. There’s only one of you now, and time seems to stretch longer for it. You have no distractions anymore.
Hours pass.
When you resurrected—you don’t really like that word, by the way. Too many Christian overtones. But when you reached god tier and your body healed from the damage you’d inflicted on it, it restored you to the factory default, as it were. You weren’t hungry or thirsty or tired or injured. Now your stomach is starting to growl, and your tongue is sticking to the roof of your mouth. You don’t want to know what’s going to happen when you need to piss.
The temperature in the aquarium is just warm enough to keep you from dying of hypothermia, which was a thoughtful detail on the part of the Condesce. You tap your knuckles against the glass behind you, distracting yourself with finding a rhythm. In your head, you mentally deconstruct your brobot, and then you build it all over again, one piece at a time, in excruciating detail.
You know how to keep yourself entertained for long hours of solitude. How could you not? You grew up alone, and your only interactions with humanity has been talking to your few friends online. But of course, you always had your robots and your AR. You could watch the carapaces on Derse or you could go fishing off the skeleton of your apartment building or you could make highly imaginative pornography. Right now you have a handful of crabs and fish and your own wavery reflection in the glass.
--
You are so thirsty.
Water, water everywhere, etc. It’s salt water. You can’t drink it. The salt will overwhelm your kidneys and eventually your heart will stop. Dying of kidney failure and a heart attack inside a tank of water is not heroic or just but you don’t want that kind of death to be broadcast to your friends.
But.
Your tongue is so thick in your mouth and your lips are cracked and your head is throbbing like the worst hangover. You lick the moisture of your own breath off the inside of the respirator. The shadows that move outside your tank are fuzzy like a television tuned to static.
--
You don’t know how long it’s been. You were never that great with keeping track of time. Derse and Earth had different rotations, different orbits, which meant that day and night didn’t always sync up between your bodies. Time didn’t mean much to you. You didn’t sleep, anyway. But if you had to guess, you think it’s been more than twelve hours. Less than eighteen. Probably.
There is a certain point where you will begin to hallucinate. That’s what happens when you die of thirst. You will lose your mind. At least you won’t be conscious for the end. A small mercy.
What are the others doing? Brainstorming some sort of escape plan? Are they still slogging through their respective planets, killing imps and completing puzzles? Is Jane trying to hold back Jake and Roxy, telling them that they need to come up with a strategy before they blindly rush in to save you? Is the AR giving them advice?
That last thought sends a thrill of unease traveling up your spine. Both you and the AR know that logically, they shouldn’t rush into this. You are not in danger of a permanent death right now, but everyone else will be if they rush in to save you. This is not going to be pleasant for you, but when it comes down to it, it’s better that they leave you here to wait until they have a plan they know will work. And yes, that’s logical! You would tell them that if it were anyone else trapped here in the ship. But how long will it take them to come up with a plan? How long before they decide they’ve leveled up enough to make their attack? A few hours? A day? Several days?
A week?
A month?
--
The fish start nibbling at your flesh, and you bat them away. But they keep coming, and you can feel them tickling as they try to wriggle into your ears. A bloodworm twists its way into your tear duct. At a certain point you realize that you’re hallucinating and you cling to that thought until it slips away again and you are fighting inside your tank, flailing at the glass
and you can see the horrorterrors on the other side of the glass, unfathomable, infinite, writhing in the void
and the glass is gone, you’re not in the tank at all, you’re floating in the ocean because you’ve fallen from the girders under your apartment, and there’s no one to save you from drowning
and Roxy is opening the top of the tank and Jake is pulling you out and Jane is standing over the Condesce’s corpse and you’re safe and you’re alive and you’re so thirsty, so terribly thirsty
and you use your shoulder to shove your mask askew
and you drink and drink and drink
--
You wake up.
Your head is leaning against the glass, which hums a little as filters run. The water is cloudy with foulness that you don’t want to think about. You shut your eyes again and breathe slowly into the mask.
You’re not thirsty anymore. Not hungry. You feel clear and renewed, but also empty, like someone scoured all the emotion out of you.
Claws tap the glass lightly. You don’t open your eyes.
“A troll would have lasted longer,” says the Condesce.
“Didn’t think I was being rated on my stamina,” you say. “I’ll keep that in mind next time I compete in the not-drowning Olympics.”
“Your friends can’t hear you, you know. They don’t care about your witty comebacks.”
“You find me witty?” you say lightly.
“What a brave little boy,” she says. “Sometimes I just want to peel you apart and see what’s inside you.”
You don’t have an answer for that.
--
A few hours later, you open your eyes to clear water. You peel your face off the glass and shift around, trying to shake out your numb arms. They are still cuffed uncomfortably behind your back. At least you know that you can’t face any permanent damage from any of this. If you actually get out of here.
When, not if.
No.
You were right the first time.
You have no way of knowing whether you’ll get out of this. It would be nice to think that the alpha timeline requires you to survive all the way through this campaign, but that’s not necessarily the truth, is it? Maybe the game requires you to remain here in the Condesce’s custody, dying again and again until you finally manage to die for good. Maybe you already served your purpose and the universe has no use for you anymore.
--
“Caught any of them yet?” you ask when you catch a shadow moving past your tank. Your voice is thick with your swollen tongue.
You see her stop in front of the tank. “You were right,” she purrs. “They’re busy with other things.”
You wonder if she would tell you if she caught them. Maybe she would just let you go on forever, never knowing whether your friends came for you or not.
She starts to move away again. “Can I—” you blurt out, and then when she pauses, you swallow and say more calmly, “You got anything to drink?”
She laughs and touches the glass with her fingers, five little circles of gray skin. “Why would I? I’m a sea dweller,” she says.
“How long—” You cough. “How long has it been since you caught me?”
She watches you and you think she isn’t going to answer.
“Four days,” she says finally.
--
You don’t want to do this.
You don’t want to do this.
You want Cal. It’s so stupid. You know it’s stupid. But you really want him right now, even if it meant your friends would see you hugging him like a child. Who cares? They already saw your first humiliating death. You just. Want to hold on to something.
You don’t want to die alone again.
--
You brace your back against one side of the tank and bring your feet up in front of you, to your chest. You plant your feet against the glass and you push as hard as you can. You don’t even know what you’re trying to accomplish. If you break through the glass, you’ll probably cut your legs all to hell and die of blood loss. But you don’t care.
You push and push and kick and kick, your hands clenched into useless fists at your back.
“I want water!” you scream into your mask. You don’t even know if she’s in the room, but that doesn’t stop you. “Give me water!”
You scream until your voice gives out. You kick until you can’t move your legs anymore. You bang your head against the glass until blood threads through the water.
When you have no energy left, you sag against the glass, which remains unmarked. You take shaky, shuddering breaths in the mask. Your chest feels like there’s a bird trapped inside it, struggling to get out. It hurts to breathe. Your nose is stuffed up and your mouth tastes rancid.
“Let me out,” you rasp. “Please let me out.”
You think of the video camera, broadcasting you to the world. It must be so painful for them to watch you, knowing that they haven’t saved you yet. It must have hurt them to watch you die. If you were there, you would forbid them from watching, just to make sure that they don’t panic and make their move too soon. You wonder if the AR has done that.
You hope he hasn’t. You want them to watch. You want them to know what their hesitation is doing to you.
--
When your entire being has focused into a single, fixed point of thirst (one thought pulsing in your head: waterwaterwaterwaterwater), they take you out of the tank and bring you to the center of the room. You are floating like a half-deflated balloon, your legs dragging against the floor. Your mask is still attached, the tubing stretching across the room into the gloom. You clench your fists behind your back, your hands numb.
You struggle to stand on the floor. You move drunkenly. You have trouble remembering how to get your limbs to go where you want them.
A hand strokes through your hair and then the Condesce moves into your line of sight, her hand resting on top of your head like you’re a puppy.
“Still with us?” she says.
“For now,” you reply with a leaden tongue. You feel empty, even more hollow than before. Your insides must have been replaced with void.
“Your friends are still busy,” she says. “Do you think they’ve abandoned us?”
You don’t answer. She strokes your hair again and then rests her hand on the back of your neck, where her claws rest lightly on your skin.
She pulls up your mask with her other hand and then leans in to capture your mouth with her own. She is all tongue and teeth, and you only have half of a startled inhale to work on. You have never been kissed before but you think humans don’t kiss like this, like they’re trying to decide whether you’re food or not. She tastes like salt.
When you’re straining for breath, she tugs your mask back over your mouth and smiles at you. From this close, all of those serrated teeth are fucking terrifying.
“Trying to—make them jealous?” you gasp out once you’ve gotten your breath back.
“Do you think it’ll work?” she asks you indulgently. She drags her claws down your front, pulling threads from the fabric of your shirt. You cringe preemptively when her claws reach your crotch, but she stops just above it.
“I’m not afraid of troll junk, if that’s what you’re going for,” you say, your whole body tense as you wait for her hand to move again. “I’m a sixteen-year-old guy. Sex isn’t going to be torture.”
You’re a sixteen-year-old guy who has never been attracted to a woman in his life, and even if troll gender is kind of an ambiguous thing, you’re not really feeling this right now. But it is better than the tank. Anything would be.
She shows all her teeth and then tugs down your stupid god tier pants. Her hand closes around your limp cock, the five points of her claws digging into your flesh.
“Think it’ll grow back?” she murmurs, and holy fuck. You cringe, curling up, but she just laughs and squeezes and then lets go to shed her own skirts.
The red-purple of her arousal unwinds in the water. This isn’t about sex, really. This is about her dominating you. You’re not hard, but you don’t have to be. Her bulge unsheathes, slick and dark, and you have to look away.
They’re watching this. They’re watching this, fuck, you can’t do this. You can’t.
No, you have to trust that the AR is not letting them watch it.
She captures your chin. “Look at me,” she whispers, sliding her other hand under your thigh to tug your legs apart and pull you to the floor.
You want to enjoy it. You want to enjoy it because if you’re enjoying this, it means this is a thing you and she are doing together. If you’re not, it’s a thing she’s doing to you, it means that this is—
Think of something else. Your robot. You had been reconstructing its chassis when you last lost your train of thought. Where were you? Forget it, you’ll start from scratch, and you’ll list every single nut and bolt in your head one at a time as you go.
“Stay with me,” she hisses, and she pulls off your mask.
You clamp your mouth shut automatically. She lets go off the mask and it drifts away through the water, its tubing reeling it back in. She slides a hand around the back of your head and pulls you roughly against her lips, and the gills in her flanks flare pink. She breathes air into your mouth.
You press yourself against her, breathing in the air in hitching inhalations. Your knees are splayed over her thighs, digging into the floor. Your body refuses to let her in. Porn always makes this part look so easy but your body is just point-blank refusing to make this work.
She closes her mouth. You push your mouth against hers but she doesn’t part her lips.
You know what she wants you to do, but even you can’t make it work. You try to force yourself to relax, which is ridiculously difficult when your brain is telling you that you’re going to need air pretty soon and your heart is beating high in your throat. You bear down onto her bulge with increasing force, not caring if you’re going to regret this because you need to breathe, you need air right the fuck now.
Then suddenly you’re sinking down on her bulge, and she lets you suck greedy, ragged gulps of air from her lips. Your body burns as it stretches. You rock your hips and sink down further and she fists both her hands in your hair.
“My darling prince,” she whispers against your lips, pushing up into you.
She seems inclined to take this slow, and as you trade breath with her, you reconstruct a robot in the back of your head, piece by piece. You keep your eyes fixed slightly past her ear and you picture the slow, patient process of cutting the metal and soldering it together.
There is a certain uneven pleasure in the feeling of her body sliding into yours, but it still comes as a shock when her hand brushes your cock and you realize that you’re half hard. It’s almost like that part of your body belongs to someone else. It’s comfortable, having this separation again. Whatever happens to your body here is okay, because your mind is elsewhere, back in your workshop with your tools.
“You’re leaving me again,” she murmurs. The needle points of her claws dig into your cock again and you are suddenly completely focused on her again, choking on your next breath. She trails her mouth down your jaw and then closes a hundred shark teeth over the pulse in your neck. You stay very still, your heart beating too fast from a combination of terror and dehydration. She could rip out your throat. She could devour you like a school of piranha. Your lungs hurt with the need to breathe again and for a desperate second you think that if you just take a deep breath of water right now, you don’t have to face any of this. You’ll just drown, and that will be so much easier.
Her tongue lathes your neck and then she lets go. Tiny threads of your own blood twist through the water from a dozen small puncture wounds. She moves back to your mouth and you suck in air again, squeezing your eyes shut, hating your own desperation. She rocks up into you with a sharp hitch of her hips, then again, and on the third time you feel the cool, wet pressure of her release.
She runs both her hands through your hair and licks the back of your teeth. “They won’t be coming for you, will they?” she asks when she pulls back. “Sometimes a pawn must be sacrificed.”
Fuck you, you want to say, but that would use up your air. She holds your head in both hands and kisses you again, but this time she keeps her mouth closed. You push against her in growing desperation, trying to open her mouth with your tongue, your teeth, but she just lays kisses over your jaw and your cheeks and your eyelids, unconcerned. You thrash against her, your hands grasping uselessly behind your back, but she just licks the curve of your cheekbone and hums. Fuck you. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Don’t do this. Don’t.
The urge becomes unbearable. You can’t fight it anymore. You open your mouth.
She holds you while you drown.
--
You’re in the tank again, and your body may be whole once again but your god tier pants are still trapped around your ankles, and you have no mask.
Your chest heaves. You squeeze your eyes shut and hold on to that one lungful of oxygen that your magical resurrection has given you. Drowning hurts like a bitch and you only just woke up and you don’t want to do this again, not so soon. At least you’re not thirsty anymore.
You hold it until your vision goes dark, and letting the water in almost feels like a relief.
--
With your next life, you pull on your cuffed hands as roughly as you can. You don’t care if you break your wrists or scrape a layer of meat off your hands. You have to do something to distract yourself from the endless string of deaths ahead of you. You smash your hands against the glass and pull on the chain with all your might. You run out of time.
--
You slam your feet down on the shells in the bottom of the aquarium as hard as you can. The water pulls the power from your blows but eventually you manage to crack a clam shell in half, leaving a jagged edge. You don’t grab it yet because you’ll only drop it when you die again.
--
Drowning doesn’t hurt as much when you do it willingly.
--
You get the shell in your right hand and dig it roughly into the heel of your thumb. You can’t bring yourself to think seriously about what you’re planning to attempt, although the thought runs through your head that you have no idea what the limits are for god tier healing. Sure, it will heal killing blows, but does it regrow anything that’s been cut off?
You hesitate long enough to die again.
--
Fuck this. So it doesn’t grow back. It will be the price you have to pay.
--
You can’t manage it the first time, or the second, or the third. By the fifth, though, you manage to mutilate your hand enough to pull the cuff off the mangled remains. The water becomes cloudy with your own blood and you drown.
--
It grows back.
--
With your hands free, you drag up your pants and then launch yourself at the top of the tank. It’s obviously not meant to be opened from this side. The lid is heavy metal and is locked shut. You turn upside down in the water and kick it. You don’t know if the Condesce is watching you. If she is, she’s probably highly entertained by this right now.
--
You find a palm-sized rock in the sand at the bottom of your tank and start banging on the glass right were it meets the lid. The glass is very thick, but it rolls under in a lip here and if you can break the lip all the way around, you can start to think about lifting off the lid.
--
At first you think the shaking is just the adrenaline coursing in your body, but then you realize that it’s external. The ship is shaking.
The vibrating stops and then the whole ship gives a slow, lazy roll like it’s riding up a wave and then down again. You’re jostled against the side of the tank and you drop the rock. What is happening? Have they come for you?
--
You can’t get through the glass. It’s physically impossible. It chips off in flakes like fish scales and it will take you a year to break it enough to pull off the lid. You drop the rock again and this time you don’t retrieve it. The ship rumbles distantly. If it isn’t your friends, you hope it means you’re going to crash.
--
They don’t come.
You don’t know how long you spend dead, because it’s hard to keep track of time. But from circumstantial evidence it seems it takes about twenty minutes between death and resurrection each time. Reality at the moment is like a film with a very low frame rate. You get a two or three minutes snapshot of your life, then a twenty minute pause. You think the ship started shaking three hours ago. It hasn’t stopped yet.
--
At the five hour mark, the shaking stops. If the Condesce wins, will she cram them into this tank with you? You don’t know if you can handle watching them die like you keep doing. You don’t know if you can handle watching the Condesce do to them what she did to you. You’re not even confident you can deal with what she did to you. But you’re not thinking about that yet. Maybe not ever.
Fuck them. You hate them so much.
--
You float like a dead man. If you stay perfectly still, your air lasts a little longer. If you don’t panic, then death almost feels comfortable.
If the Condesce takes you again, you’ll try to assassinate her. It doesn’t matter if you succeed. Surely if she kills you in the process, it will be considered heroic. Or will it? You don’t even care if she dies or not. You just want to end this, and suicide is not heroic.
You have the broken bit of clam shell tucked into the waistband of your pants. Hardly a weapon, but all you have.
The tank vibrates faintly, but this time you recognize it as the sound of the airlock opening. The Condesce has returned from battle. You don’t open your eyes.
And then suddenly you do as someone bangs on the glass. You jolt backward. Roxy stares in at you, a respirator attached to her face. It looks like the one the blue blood had been wearing. Her eyes are very wide with panic. She looks up and then kicks her feet, shooting up toward the top of the tank.
You claw your way up the side of the tank. Roxy is frantically tugging at the lock. She looks through the glass at you again, her expression blind with panic. You touch the glass and stare back at her. If you run out of air again, it will be twenty minutes before you wake up. She’ll have to haul your corpse out of here on her own, and surely that will bog her down. She’ll get caught.
She pushes off the tank with her feet and draws her laser rifle. Aiming at the metal lid, she pulls the trigger. A hot pink stream of energy hits the lid and water boils away. Roxy flinches back. The lid is unchanged.
She only hesitates a second before she waves frantically at you, gesturing for you to get down. There is not a lot of room to move but you sink down to the sand, where the crabs scatter away from you. Roxy points at the glass over your head.
This time the beam passes through the glass. You are hit with a warm wash of water, but most of the heat boils up to the top. You open your eyes and look up. The hole is not nearly large enough to fit through.
Roxy rips off her mask and shoves her arm through the hole in the still melting glass. Surely it's hot enough to burn, and you can see blisters rise on her arm, but the respirator makes it through. You take it from her hand and jam it onto your face.
This is the first oxygen you have tasted in hours and it is the sweetest thing you have ever had. You take in deep, shuddering breaths until you feel lightheaded. You’re hyperventilating but you don’t care.
Another blast rocks the tank, and then a third, and the hole is now wide enough for a person. Roxy shoves her hand through again and grabs the respirator from you. She presses it to her own face long enough to take a deep breath, then gives it back. When you take it again, she takes your arm and pulls you out of the tank.
You kick your way to the airlock door. It opens under Roxy’s keyboard command, and you pass into the small antechamber.
With a roar, the water begins to drain through the grating at your feet. You’re clinging to Roxy but the weight of gravity returning brings you to your knees. You hunch over, pressing your forehead to the grating, and hold the respirator to your face even after the last of the water drains away.
Roxy drops down next to you. “Dirk, it’s okay, it’s okay,” she says, flinging her arms around you. “It’s okay, you can breathe again.”
She pries the respirator out of your grip. You take a ragged breath of air, real air, and when you let it out, it’s a sob. Roxy cups your face and pulls you against her chest. You fist both hands in her shirt and fight to control your breathing but it’s a losing battle.
The other door opens on an empty hallway. Roxy strokes her fingers through your hair but draws back when you pull away.
“I’m sorry,” you choke out. You don’t even know what you’re sorry for.
“It’s okay,” Roxy whispers. “I got you. Come on. It’s time to go.”