cast your shadow in flame

into the black

This is Issa's job.  She picked it; she came up with the plan.   But now she is falling, tumbling head over heel, into the black.  Fear eclipses all else.  She pants.  Her breath fogs her viewscreen.   The condensation glimmers with the glow of her read-outs.   They flash and scream red at her, but the letters are lost beneath the panicked rhythm of her breath.

She falls and falls.  The black surrounds her.  It holds her.  She hangs, motionless, fixed, but her head spins.  She swallows a mouthful of bile and chokes down waves of nausea.   Her throat burns.   She goes to wipe her mouth, but her glove tinks against her viewport.   Beyond the ceaseless siren of her suit is only black.

She turns, twists.   It's all the same.

As if propelled by her movement, she begins to drift.  She breathes.  The wail continues.

Her gloved fingers tap the exterior of her helmet.   Each registers on the corners of the viewscreen as a flickering yellow.  Her breath is still unsteady.  Sucking it in, forcing it out, that burning filling her lungs—but the viewscreen fades to green.

Then to black.

As if it had crept into her suit.  She has to check it.   Could be tears.  Microscopic holes from the friction of dust as she fell into—what was it?   She remembered hovering in orbit above an unnamed world.  The four of them suspended over all that green and white.   A shadow passed over them.   It burned bright—red and green and purple rippling around it as it streaked down to the planet below.   And it pulled them down.  She fell.

"Orestes?"  Her voice is small.  The dark swallows it.  "Kills—Sparrow? Anyone?"  She can barely hear her own words.  The weight of all that dark smothers them.  She feels it now.  Bearing down upon her and dragging her down—like gravity, like death rushing up at her, like sleep descending upon her.  But it felt all wrong.   She struggles against it.  Twisting and grabbing and kicking and rolling, she fights.   For some sense of up or down.   For some bit of something—anything.

"It can't be nothing."

She was on her belly, hanging over an open shaft down into the deep hum of the engines.  This was before, but it wasn't.   Sparrow was below.  Far below, its head a tiny orange speck—but that was wrong.  The android couldn't hear.   It craned its head back.   Empty grey eyes stared up at her, and she could see the yellow of the track lights in them.  Sparrow smiled.

"There has to be an explanation.   Don't worry."

"How can you be so calm?"

Its eyes blinked at her.   "Was that a rhetorical question?"

"Where are the others?"

"At their stations."

It climbed down.  Its feet guided the way down the rungs.   Its eyes remained intent on Issa.

"You should be at the helm."

"No, I should—this is wrong.   This has already happened."

Sparrow smiled.  "You should be at the helm."

It had stopped its descent.  Smiling and staring, it waited as she struggled to remember.   She had a job.  She had picked it.  She'd spent weeks researching and plotting—

"You should be at the helm."

She shakes her head.   The viewscreen—she smacks at her face.   Her hand slaps against her helm.  Yellow flashes over Sparrow, still smiling, still staring.  The viewscreen fades to green, and Sparrow is gone.  There is only black beyond the green displays.

"Sparrow?"

It rushes past.   A blur of color startles her.  Arms up, she twists away.   The android is there, drifting.  The synthetic fibers of its hair fan out around its face.   Its eyes are black.

"This form comforts you."

She shakes her head.   "Where are the others?"

"They are here.   They are all here.   Those you hunt.  Those who fight against them for the Mask."

She turns, but there is nothing.  She sees only black.  "The fuck is going on?"

"Shall I show you?"

It offers her its hand.   The outstretched palm is so bright pink, it glows against all the black.   She stares at its hand.  It smiles.  She thinks of the shaft, of being on her belly and Sparrow below.

And so it is again.   She frowns down at the android.  Its eyes, still black, blink up at her. It's climbing up now, offering up its hand whenever it can.

And the sight reminds Issa of when they were running guns for elven resistance fighters near Jeriam's Tears, a fiery nebula with three young stars burning hot and caught in each other's gravity.  They were based on a station hidden in the black between the Garaille Cluster and the gravitational well of Jeriam's Tears.   When she looks up again to see habitat clusters, gleaming green and gold, as they had in her first approach to the station, she knows this can't be.

She pushes the image away, and the android is there.  It offers its hand.

"You should be Orestes."

And it is.  It looks every bit the part.   It has his round cheeks, his wide nose.  It has his dark skin, mottled in splashes of pink here around his mouth and there on his left hand.  It has his strip of tight fuzzy curls down the center of his head, the brand on the left side: MORITŪRUS.

"This form is comforting."  But his voice is flat . "Your memories with him are tainted with sorrow."

"What are you?"

"I am."

She rolls her eyes.  "You don't have to imitate his flair for the dramatic, do you?"

"I imitate only you conceive."

It offers her his hands, and she grabs for them.