look at me

How Emily got here matters less than the fact that here is where she is: here, having stolen a built-for-one spacecraft and speedread the manual in the glove compartment to learn to fly it; here, laughing to herself high-pitched and manic because what am I doing keeps running through her head and she does not have an answer; here, checking the air supply on her helmet one-two-three-four-five-six times before stepping out onto what can barely be called a ship anymore.

It’s more rubble than anything else, floating through a darkness like nothing she’s ever known. The walls are cracked wide open, the floors held together by nothing but hope; all the metal has gone dull in the three years since the Siren’s last transmission, all the lights flickering. She doesn’t know how they’re working well enough to flicker — the place is so torn-up, it shouldn’t have any functional wiring left. She doesn’t know anything about engineering, but she doesn’t need to to know this isn’t a place that should work, not anymore.

“Why am I even here,” she says aloud, gripping tight to what handrails still exist as she wanders her way through the wreckage. Emily knows what she’d hoped to find — Mallaidh, safe, somehow, despite three years of radio silence and the last message-in-a-bottle letters she’d sent sounding all too much like an ominous goodbye. “She isn’t here — she’s not. That’s a fact. There’s nothing here anymore.”

She pointedly does not wonder what could have torn a ship apart like this. If she wonders about that, she’ll panic, and she has limited air. She can’t panic. When she gets back to Triton, then she can panic.

The ship’s radio crackles to life around her, just enough air left in orbit to carry the sound, and she starts to panic.

It’s all static, at first — static that sounds like a thousand voices overlapping all at once, a cacophony that makes Emily clenches her eyes closed and try to cover her ears before remembering the helmet that covers them, before remembering she needs to hold onto the walls so she doesn’t float away and quickly grabbing onto a pillar. The urge to scream at it to stop, please grips her tightly for a moment, but she keeps her lips locked shut.

The noise quiets on its own. And then —

Something that sounds shockingly like her own name, through the noise. “Em — il — y Mai — na —,” broken by bursts of static, but unmistakeable. “Emily, Emily, E — mily,” it says again, and that can’t be a coincidence, not when it sounds so much like —

“Mallaidh?” Emily doesn’t dare say it above a whisper. The radio booms excitedly, short fits of something that sounds almost like laughter, like joy — it’s a bright and clear sound against the ambient creaking of the ship around her, and it makes her heart ache.

It’s a cruel joke someone is playing. It must be, because there is no way Mallaidh could be here, because she died in whatever accident tore the ship apart. Her fiancée is gone, and yet.

“Is that you?”

The radio hums, a strange not-music. “Captain’s cabin,” Mallaidh’s voice says from all around Emily, sounding clearer by the moment. Emily’s breath catches in her throat. The display on her helmet claims that she has enough air left to last several hours, but it doesn’t feel that way — it feels like all her oxygen has been stolen all at once, and all she can do is float from room to room, pushing herself haphazardly off walls, down corridors barely held together. She dodges floating debris, looks around at each stray bit of paper and wonders if it was once Mallaidh’s, if a letter was once written on it.

Emily ignores the shadows on the walls. Mallaidh had written about strange things, in her letters — and maybe that makes it foolish for Emily to be here, but she wants answers, wants proof. Emily was a poet, after all. Shadows on the walls could easily have been metaphor when written by her pen; here, it is less easy to believe, when the sensation of being watched follows Emily through the ship. Out of the corner of her eyes, dark shapes move with a purpose. Emily knows she is the only living thing here, but that doesn’t mean she is the only thing here.

She’s come too far to stop, though, so she keeps going until she finds a door marked Captain.

She squeezes her eyes shut before pushing it open.

“Emily,” Mallaidh says. Her voice no longer comes crackling from the speakers around them, but directly in front of Emily. And still, she can’t open her eyes. She doesn’t dare. She should leave — she should find her way back through the labyrinth of ruins and to her ship, return to the moon, never speak of this again. She should go home and bring flowers to the empty grave in her garden.

“Emily,” Mallaidh says again, and she’s laughing, like she used to when Emily gave her flowers, when she read poetry aloud in their bed, when Emily proposed to her. Not because anything was funny, just because sometimes it is the only way to externalize joy. “Look at me.”

Emily’s eyes open.

Mallaidh doesn’t look the same as Emily remembers — she flickers at the edges of her, she is made of smoke only momentarily solidified, there is static in her smile and her auburn hair has grown unruly around her head, a halo unburdened by gravity — but the freckles across her nose are the same, the nervous way she twists her fingers in front of her chest, the smile stretching its way across her face. The essence of her, which Emily could recognize with her eyes closed, is identical.

“Oh,” Emily says, all other words gone from her mind. She was never the poet, of the two of them. She’d left it to Mallaidh to twist sentences into art.

Mallaidh laughs. It echoes through the speakers of the ship, all around them. It’s the most beautiful sound Emily has ever heard.