In current time, the third inhabitant quietly mourns. She gazes up at the mirror of her new quarters and wills herself to shrink the pain down. She gently thumbs at the adipocere stuck to the creases of her glove. All her clothing and the little valuables she collected are gone but the book is still with her. She was stupid going down there, did not know if she would be safe or not. She remembers a few more people behind her, rookies that never lived through a failure this big. She was too late to save her not by seconds but by days.

The hull was too decayed, Aslan would have been replaced sooner, likely by her. 

The rookies are all outside, huddled together when she opens her door to have a smoke.

“Are you allowed to have that” one of them asks. She walks past them as she nods. Not in the mood to explain herself, she didn’t know what she was doing when she dove in. Could have caused all of their deaths. They follow her to the vivarium, in current time, the dead crew member is not there, it smells like death anyways.

Aslan is still alive. She is herself now. Fully and entirely. She thinks about the pay check she lost. Enough for lifetimes of retirement. She is too old for this. 65 years of life, soon to end. 15 of it spent back home, then school, then a high school sweet heart, then hours spent laboring.

 She is diving towards some detritus. She considers flailing but assumes she is dead or dying already. Her bones are glowing through her skin, she wills her hands to move. They do. Her bones are loose underneath her skin. She senses them pulling and swaying. Maybe imagines it. She spreads her arms wide, her legs are not responding, and childishly imagines herself stopping. 

It works.

 It works and she stops, her knees hits her chest and something gives. She is naked and glowing in the middle of nowhere. The ship is a grain of sand in the distance. No stars, are visible where she looks. But things are bright in her periphery. She spins, bringing her arms close to her sides and wiggling her toes. Everywhere she looks has nothing. She panics for a second, not knowing if she is hallucinating or if this is another dream or memory. She needs to find the ship and scavenge, call for help. Does she need help? 

 She flaps her arms and imagines she is swimming. Feels water lapping up when she closes her eyes. Smells the chlorine. Opens her eyes and the ship is in front of her. Feels the pull of it, her scalp stinging, she has to avoid the hull where she was rotting. Suddenly paranoid, an image of a fork stuck to an outlet comes to mind. 

 Aims herself towards the ship and launches. Her eyes are stinging, the water coalesces and clings to her face, her hair is whip straight, long enough to tickle the top of her legs. Her arms are bunched back, the skin in between her shoulder blades are greasy, the hull of the ship is a small grey dot in the distance. Best case scenario is; the ship is mostly functional, has a spare escape pod with enough fuel, med bay has some IV bags, oxygen is optional. Eating could be optional too. Would be funny if she still had to use the bathroom. The least she needs is the location the escape pods went to. Shower would be nice a mirror would be nice, an explanation would be the nicest. Her mind is perfectly blank, she feels the need to think about her outline. She was agonising over her paycheck, she was angry but 

The hull of the ship is sagging, it looks like a pillow cut in half, the foam has hardened in place. The emergency lights are on. A thick length of chain almost hits her, it curls, hits the top of the hull and dents the name of the vessel, A P R I C O T turns into A P R I CUT, the top half of the o sags inwards. Aslan tries her best to wade away as another shock goes through the chain, like a struggling snake. The links seize up completely and stop moving. 

Aslan shuffles her thoughts back and forth. She is somehow surviving the vacuum of space. The ship is fucked, all the escape pods are emptied out, cleanup might arrive one day but the whole operation was on its last legs. She does not want anything interesting to happen to her, that seems inevitable now. The chain is doing some weird stuff. She should check it out.  

All the crew she has ever met had been superstitious.   She is vaguely aware of signs and the divine and whatnot. Mainly she is hideously curious.  She swims up, has to picture the ceramic of the bird for a moment. Going up is a lot harder than going straight. The stars are still missing, her brain is set on ignoring their sheer number. 

She gently touches the chain, her brain flashes. She loses time. She is on top of a white cube. It is slightly bigger than her wingspan, has a rippled surface like marble carved away with water, her toes are firmly splayed, in between them is a seam. The seam opens, she can hear crickets, inside. Her gaze inward sucks her in. Adrian is inside. Cracks an egg into a skillet. Some of the shell falls in. 

“Was I dreaming this whole thing?” She asks. Adrian looks up, he is still wearing the helmet. He has a stained bathrobe on, he is wearing his thinnest, most worn pair of boxers. He is younger than she remembers him being. His liver spots are gone, he has a freshly sewn cut in between his pointer and thumb, bright green thread made from modified grape vine. The kitchen is one neither of them inhabited for any amount of time. There are linoleum hearts on the floor. The walls are a strange brownish red with mint green flowers. He flexes his hand and watches the pull of the thread. “No” he breathes. 

“You missed me that much.”

Aslan is thinking really hard about something, she has not done this in years. She thinks about love crew feel for each other. She thinks about the 50 transient people she tried to know but people kept getting swapped out. Now that she is out of dream land she is unsure if she actually liked her husband, whether they just huddled together cause they were both warm and creaky, whether they felt love, she is unsure.

“You are not him.” She says, coldly. “You are not her” he responds. The egg spurts in the pan. He flinches when the hot oil hits his bare chest. 

1. How come?
2. You are thinking for a start. 
3. You are not him, tears of frustration well up. The scrape of her thighs are back, she feels old and ugly and stupid, mashes her hands to her face, feels jagged bone and wire, something squelches when she rolls her hands up and down her face. “MIRROR” she gasps. Adrian turns towards her. She is panicking. She feels fear in the bottom of her spine, a sensation of falling comes to her unwillingly.

Adrian sees this and leaves the egg alone. He grabs her by the elbows. She tilts her chin up and sees a green glow. The colour is the same as glow in the dark paint. Something yellow peaks out from her brow. Frozen human fat, same consistency as butter. 

She is a skull, her face and personhood is gone, an injury that is improbable has stricken her. Her eye sockets are empty, her lips are gone, a grinning Halloween skull stares at her, bordered by a sickly grey of skin. How does she see? How does she speak? How is she alive?

Aslan looks beyond the reflection and sees a twitching spinal column, Adrian is dead. She is dead. The ship is dead. The plants on her windowsill are dead. The mission is dead. 

Good god. Why is she still around.