Page 114 of Stars

Sarah’s eyelids fluttered. She nodded. “We fought. I got her back intoUnity. I tied her down. She slashed me.” She pressed on her belly, and a wetsquelchfilled the dark module.

Heavy clanking sounded over their heads, through the bulkhead and above them. Mark, Sasha, and Sarah looked up. “Freedom,” Sasha breathed.

Thunk. Something heavy hit the bulkhead. Metal slid on metal as something dragged acrossFreedom’sinner hull.

Sasha’s breath hitched.

InUnity, Michaela’s low snarling, her frantic, desperate snorts and growls, quieted.

A shriek pierced the station, blasting down fromFreedom, loud enough to make Sasha double over and cover his ears. He spun, aiming his light toward the dark hatch opening.

“Joey,” Sarah gasped. “He’s still up there.”

Another scream, nothing but pure terror drenching the station and electrifying the darkness. It choked off in a wet gurgle, a whimper that curled around Sasha.

Mark grabbed Sarah’s hand and guided it to where he’d been holding pressure over her wound. “Hang on, okay?” he said softly. “We have to help him.”

She nodded, her eyelids fluttering closed. She curled into the bulkhead, tucked between a cargo net and a laptop stand, hiding in the dark corner. As Mark and Sasha pulled away, she melted into the shadows, disappearing from sight.

Mark and Sasha moved toFreedom’shatch, hovering on either side of the opening. Their breath puffed in front of their faces, clouds of nearly frozen vapor hanging in the module. With life support offline and the station on the far side of the planet, they were bleeding heat into space every second. Ice crawled in from the edges of the windows. A chill drenched Sasha, pouring down fromFreedom.

Above them, they heard nothing. Silence. Not a whimper or a cry or the thudding from before. Or the scrape, like raw bone scratching against metal.

Mark grabbed a dark laptop, ripping it out of its stand and holding it like a hammer. Sasha spun and wrenched one of the station handholds off the bulkhead. He grasped the end of the two-foot-long pipe in one hand.

“Cover me,” Mark breathed. “On three.”

Sasha nodded. He hefted his flashlight and rose with Mark, back to back, through the hatch.

The smell hit them first.

Hot blood, and fresh. The stink of terror, sour on the back of their tongues. Piss and shit: a body emptying itself in fright or in its death throes.Freedom’s hold smelled like an animal’s lair.

Freedom’spower was offline, and the hold was dark, filled with the same weighty black fromUnity. Not even the emergency lights were on. It was as if they’d moved out of the known universe and into an entirely new plane.

This is the land of the dead.

Sasha heard Mark’s breathing, fast and choppy beside him. His own breath rattled his lungs, made his throat tremble. His heartbeat thundered against his eardrums, hard enough he thought his eyes were shaking. But no, that was just the strain of trying to peer into nothing, into the totality of darkness they’d entered.

Mark swung his flashlight in an arc toward port while Sasha turned starboard. Their ship’s hold came into view, the same capsule that had shot them through the atmosphere and into space. He’d sat in that chair, right there, only days before. What had happened, so suddenly, so horribly? His flashlight swept the cockpit, the hold, light dipping into his and Mark’s seats, the command console, stowage lockers—

A shadow hovered in the darkness, hunched over something pushed against the bulkhead.

A wet sound filled the cabin. Slurping.

Globs of blood floated past Sasha’s head.

His flashlight landed on the figure and found the crimson flood covering the bulkheads, arcs of arterial spray jettisoned from a body. Even in zero g, there was enough force to propel blood out of an artery, fling it through the capsule. But who?

The shadow’s back was to Sasha, clothed in the same T-shirt the whole crew wore.

His breath hitched as his gaze rose over the long dark strands and the threads of crimson weeping from a cluster of holes drilled through the scalp.

“Holy God,” Mark gasped.

Rafael whirled, baring his teeth as he screamed, that inhuman, collapsed-organ sound. His face was soaked in blood, his teeth stained, hands and arms drenched to his elbows. Floating in front of him, Joey’s lifeless body was torn open, his entrails rising like a curtain, his own blood a geyser erupting in slow motion from his ravaged abdomen. Bones stuck up at odd angles from his chest, cracked ribs wrenched apart by Rafael’s bare hands. Joey’s heart protruded from the gore, bitten in half, his aortic arch shredded.

Rafael shrieked again, twisting and shoving off Joey’s corpse and launching at them.