The sound of Blake’s footsteps echoing through the hallways of his fortress rang out with a solitude that Blake wasn’t used to anymore. Back in the day, when it had just been him and Samanta, this feeling was the norm. Then, as the place slowly filled over time, first with Leo, then the day workers, then Sofie and Pari, and now with Arlette and Gabriela, the atmosphere of isolation had long faded away.

Now, though the castle remained inhabited, that lonely atmosphere had returned. He’d been in funeral homes livelier than this. It was as if the fortress itself mourned the loss of a universally beloved figure, which, by certain definitions, was the case.

Blake had never really loved or adored Pari the way the others—especially Sofie, Gabriela, and to some extent Arlette—had. He found kids to be annoying and Pari was no exception. The girl had been loud and annoying and... well... childish. He would miss the way she giggled when she was about to do something naughty that would give Sofie a headache, and he did find the whole thing sad and depressing overall, but he wasn’t distraught the way certain others were.

Perhaps that was good. Somebody needed to keep their hands on the reins, and few of the denizens here seemed interested in governance right now. Largely, it seemed it was down to just him and the person he was headed to see.

A minute later, Blake strode into Leo’s office to find him where he always seemed to find him, regardless of the time of day: behind his desk, surrounded by work. Blake used to preach at Leo about how work-life balance was important and how Leo was going to grind himself down into a figurative stub of a human being, and Leo would sagely nod and reply that he would take Blake’s words under advisement. Then, the next day, he’d work deep into the night anyway. He’d even shot down Blake’s offer of more underlings, saying that some things needed to be handled personally. At this point, Blake had long given up trying to chase the Otharian back to his quarters, even at such a late hour. Leo was going to do what Leo was going to do.

“Hey Leo, how are you holding up?” Blake said in greeting, plopping down into a chair situated in the corner of Leo’s fairly spacious office.

“Well enough, given the circumstances,” the administrator replied, giving him a solemn glance. “I think that question would be better sent your way than mine.”

“I’m holding up alright. Bummed, I guess, but not like the others. Sofie hasn’t left the room where we put Pari’s body in over a day. She wouldn’t stop crying the whole time and I’d bet my life she hasn’t slept a wink. Arlette’s thrown herself into interrogating the survivors of the group that attacked. And that woman walked into my armory, turned half of the skitters inside into scrap metal, and then went off to who-knows-where. I don’t even want to bother trying to find her, to be frank.”

“What about Samanta?”

“Sam’s... well, you know how Sam is. Keeping it all inside, whatever it may be.”

“Given the loss of her family, I’m sure this has only reopened some very painful wounds inside of her, whether she is showing it or not,” Leo opined. “As her caretaker, I hope you are doing what you can to help her overcome this terrible loss.”

Blake let out a groan as he leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “It’s just that I’m so bad with all this feelings bullshit. And given my connection to her family, I don’t know if I wouldn’t even make anything better, you know? It would probably be better to have somebody else do it...”

“No, when you decided to become her caretaker and guardian, you accepted that responsibility. Others might be able to help, but this is your job,” Leo stressed, his expression serious and uncompromising. “I know that it is not my place to tell you what to do, but I feel that this time I must insist. Try your best. You owe her that much, at least.”

“I’ll just make everything worse. That’s why I usually just try to avoid this kind of thing.”

“Have you never lost somebody you deeply cared about?” Leo asked with a frown.

Blake gave the question a moment of thought. “Not really? My parents are still alive, my grandparents are still alive—other than my maternal grandfather, but he died when I was two...”

“Then you would not understand. Sometimes, just the attempt can make all the difference in the world.”

“Oh? What, did you lose somebo-” Blake froze as he noticed the man’s frown deepen into scowl territory. He’d momentarily forgotten Leo’s plight. The man had been happily married to a loving wife before his incarceration. But something had happened to his partner while he was behind bars: she’d disappeared, and even after a year of searching, Leo could find no sign of her. Not even a grave. In some ways, the uncertainty made it all worse, because it prevented him from moving on. “Right... sorry. Still no sign of her?”

Leo let out a mournful sigh. “I continue to hold out hope, no matter how slim. One never knows what the future will hold. Perhaps I’ll receive a mysterious message from her out of the blue when I least expect it.”

“Ha, if only,” Blake remarked.

“I assume there is to be a funeral?” the Otharian wondered, steering the conversation back to the first unpleasant topic. “Have you planned the details? Will she be given an Otharian style ceremony or something else?”

“There won’t be a funeral,” Blake informed him with a shake of his head. “She’s too special of a resource to waste. Maybe when I’ve learned all I can from her body.”

For the first time in a long time, Leo looked completely taken aback.

“What?” Blake huffed defensively. “Did you see what her blood did?! It ate a massive hole in that tavern’s floor, fell into the basement, ate through that, fell into the sewers, ate through that, and kept going down for nearly a mile! It’s absurd! I’ve never heard of anything that corrosive, and it seems to eat literally everything other than her own flesh! I can’t even run tests on it yet because it eats through any container I put it in! I had to encase the girl’s body in a pod on an incline so all her remaining fluids stay in her upper half, because if I didn’t, she’d eat her way through the fucking floor! You want me to just put her into the ground?! For what?! She’d just end up sinking herself into the middle of the planet!”

The administrator paused for a long while, seeming to struggle to figure out how to respond. “If somebody were to go against your wishes to help somebody dear to them, what would you do?”

“Huh?”

Leo steepled his fingers and met Blake’s gaze with a grave one of his own.

“Sofie loves Pari. That is undeniable. Arlette as well. Perhaps even Madam Carreno. I cannot imagine any of them agreeing to let you treat that child’s corpse as a piece of meat for study. If you continue to insist on it, they will act against you. Not out of hatred or enmity towards you, but out of love for the child. So I ask you again: what will you do in that sort of scenario?”

To Blake, the answer was obvious. “I don’t care if they do it out of love or anger or hatred or whatever the fuck; motivations don’t matter to me. If somebody is going against me, they’re going against me, period. And I’m going to bring the hammer down on them hard. End of story.”

“...I see...” Leo replied. “I must get back to my work. Is there anything you require, or did you just stop by to chat?”

“Kind of both? I wanted to talk to somebody for a little who wasn’t bawling their eyes out, but I also wanted your opinion on something. You know how Stragma and Drayhadal joined the war at the last moment and pushed the Ubrans back to the Divide? It seems that Drayhadal is demanding payment for their services from the Eterians, while Stragma basically just pillaged Gustil as they swept through under the guise of ‘looting Ubran supply chains’. Now, I can’t help but notice that we did far more work than either of those two countries. We lost a lot of valuable crystals, nearly stalled out the technological development of Otharia for months, and gave me a never-ending headache. Yet, we haven’t demanded jack squat from anybody. Seems like an oversight on my part. If they get to be jerks, I want to be a total megajerk.”

“Hmmmmm... perhaps you are correct.”

“Of course I am correct. The question is, if I’m gonna flex some, how should I be flexing?”

“Trade deals,” Leo responded after a moment’s pondering.

“Trade deals? That seems a little tame compared to what the other two are doing.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure. Their actions seem harsh, but they are one-time events. Trade deals last for a long time. You have the power right now to force Eterium, and perhaps even Kutrad, to sign pretty much any trade agreement you desire. Over time, that will gain us more than any single act of pillage or extortion could ever hope to provide. And it will help Otharia grow. Even with your works, there are many things we still have trouble acquiring,” he explained, indicating all the documents piled high. “Paper, for one. Sofie tells me she needs mountains of it for her teaching, but even if you were to boost our limited paper industry with better machines, we still would not have the wood we need in the quantity we need. But Eterium and Kutrad have more than enough.”

“I see, that makes sense,” Blake admitted. “See, this is why I come to you. You always know what to do.”

For a moment, a worn out and defeated look flashed across the Otharian’s face. “Oh, if only that were true.”

*     *     *

Blake paused for a moment outside of Samanta’s room and took a deep breath. He could do this, he told himself.

Leo was right. Blake hated to admit it, but he was the closest thing the kid had to a parent right now, and this sort of thing unfortunately came with the territory.

Sam had always been a largely withdrawn child ever since he’d first met her. The rare outburst aside, she kept her emotions bottled up. Blake had always been grateful for that. It made her so much easier to handle than some child who was always throwing fits or something. Still, he reminded himself that not showing emotion wasn’t the same as not feeling emotion. She was probably suffering just as much as the rest of them.

Taking his helmet off for maximum empathy, he knocked lightly on the door. The hour was fairly late, but he’d checked Alpha a moment ago and he’d reported that she was not yet asleep. However, no answer came.

“I’m coming in,” he announced, waiting a second and then opening the door. It slid aside to reveal Samanta’s spacious bedroom. Blake’s gaze swept across the room and found the child lying on her side on the bed, her face covered with tears and mucus.

Tears. Fuck.

The girl saw him standing in the doorway and blanched, burying her face in a nearby pillow and shouting “GO AWAY!”.

In pretty much any other situation, Blake’s response would have been to do exactly as she demanded and get out as quickly as possible. He hated dealing with this sort of thing, and had found long ago that the simplest solution to that was simply to abandon ship and not deal with it at all. But he couldn’t do that this time.

With a deep breath, he walked into the room and sat down onto the mattress near her feet, drawing a strained cry of protest from the furniture.

“You want to talk about it?” Blake asked, doing his best TV-dad impression.

“No, go away...” she muttered through the pillow.

“Look, I know we all feel bad about Pari, but-”

“S-shut up!” Sam cried out, finally removing her face from the pillow to give him a heated glare. “You didn’t e-even l-l-like her! Don’t p-pretend you care!”

“Hoo boy,” Blake muttered under his breath. Why couldn’t this sort of thing be easy for him like it was for everybody else?

“I don’t have to love somebody to care if they die,” he asserted. “I’m sad just like everybody else. But this isn’t about me. This is about you. I just want you to know that I’m here for you if you need me, alright?”

“Like you w-would ever understand...” she sniffed.

“Try me,” he offered. “I will never understand unless you tell me.”

“I-I... i-i-it’s...” she choked out. “WAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!”

Blake shifted uncomfortably as Samanta burst out into full-blown bawling.

“It’s my fault! She died b-because of me!” she cried out. “F-first my family, then P-P-Pari... e-everybody I care about d-dies! If I... i-if I hadn’t been there, if I h-hadn’t th-thought of her as my f-f-friend, i-if...”

Blake was not the most emotionally adept person in the world, but even he knew there were ways you were and were not supposed to handle a situation like this. You were supposed to address a grieving child with comfort and caring and all that jazz. Yet, upon hearing her words, Blake couldn’t help himself. He laughed. Hard.

Perhaps because of his inappropriate outburst, Sam’s weeping stilled for a moment as she watched him cackle. After a few moments, Blake’s mirth finally subsided enough to let him catch his breath and regain his composure somewhat.

“Oh, Sam, Sam, Sam,” he chuckled as he wiped away a tear of laughter. “I hate to break it to you, kiddo, but you are not that important. Reality doesn’t care about who you like.”

“B-b-but-”

“No buts. If we want to have a serious discussion about blame here, then let’s start with that. You didn’t kill Pari, just like how you didn’t kill your family. The fault lies, first and foremost, with the people who did the deeds. Don’t try to take their guilt for yourself. Especially since you’re just a child. Let us grownups deal with that bullshit.”

“I-if they hadn’t noticed me, then-”

“Sam, what did I just say? You can apply that kind of thinking to all different parts of this. If the tavern had bothered to hire a few bouncers, then maybe this wouldn’t have happened. If Sofie and Arlette had hit their panic buttons properly, then maybe this wouldn’t have happened. If Gabriela had brought her sword, this definitely wouldn’t have happened. There’s a thousand ifs involved in any tragedy, and this one is no different.”

He let out a heavy sigh.

“Let’s be honest, Sam. If you really need to throw more blame around, throw it on me. I should have been able to stomp those terrorists into the ground long ago, and they wouldn’t even exist if I wasn’t here in the first place. I’ve done a poor job on this front, and this is the result. So if you have to blame anybody, blame me and not yourself, alright?”

Sam didn’t respond. Instead, she just stared forward towards the wall without blinking. Blake took solace in the fact that she at least wasn’t openly weeping anymore. Perhaps he had done his job successfully after all?

“I had a friend once say that nobody is truly dead if people still remember them,” Blake continued. “So, let’s try that, huh? I think you’ll agree that Pari is somebody that will be very hard to forget.”

Sam snorted, which he took to mean success.

Blake decided that was about all he could manage. His time here was up. His mind was already screaming at him to go anywhere else and leave this emotional bullcrap for some other person at some other time, and he felt a little proud that he’d managed to fight the urge for this long already.

As he went to stand up and leave, Blake paused. There was one thing he needed to tell her. Something that he had never said to her before, but which she deserved to hear.

“I’m sorry, by the way. About your family. If I had been a little better, I probably could have saved your mother. But I wasn’t. I was hesitant, and skittish, and I made poor decisions. The final blame will always lie with those terrible men who killed the people you cared for, but still... I’m sorry. Now get some sleep.”

He clicked his tongue in disgust as he rose and walked out of Samanta’s room. What was he even saying? Not even half a year ago, he would have never even considered uttering such a thing. He was getting soft.

This was all Sofie’s fault.

*     *     *

“You gotta be kidding me...” Blake mumbled to himself as he passed by the “morgue” the next morning and noticed a certain figure still sitting in the same place beside the slanted pod as she’d been since two nights ago. “Alright, enough. Out!”

“Wha?” Sofie lucidly replied as Blake marched in. Looking at her red, puffy eyes, pale white skin, matted and tangled hair, and generally disheveled appearance, Blake could tell instantly that she hadn’t slept a single moment in more than two days. She even appeared thinner than before, though Blake wasn’t sure if that was real or just a product of the light and his imagination.

“Jesus Christ, Sofie,” he growled in aggravation. “I get that you’re upset that Pari died, but at the rate you’re going, you’ll be joining her any day now. Go get some sleep!”

“I’ll... I’ll sleep here,” she said, her speech slurring slightly with exhaustion.

“No, you won’t. Go!” Without waiting for her to cooperate, Blake grabbed her by the upper arms and half-lifted, half-dragged her towards the doorway. “Out! I’m not dealing with this anymore today! Out!”

“No! Stop!” Sofie cried, fighting his robotic grip with a sudden spurt of manic energy. “I’m not going! You can’t make me-”

Unceremoniously tossing her into the hallway, he shut the door in her face mid-protest, sealed it, and breathed a contented sigh. Much better. Even the dead deserved their alone time.

Taking a moment, Blake glanced around the room to make sure Sofie hadn’t left something behind. He didn’t need to give her legitimate excuses to come back inside. The chamber was a rather small and sparse one, with only a few chairs set against the walls. The only notable feature was Pari’s “coffin” or “tube” or “pod” or... he wasn’t really sure what to call it.

Its design entirely influenced by various science fiction movies he’d watched throughout his life, the container sported a largely cylindrical shape oriented length-wise to the floor, with a wedge-shaped base attached to the bottom to prop it up at a thirty-degree angle. The half of the cylinder facing upward was actually a set of curved double doors that could recede into the rest of the cylinder, revealing a mesh metal screen. This allowed for viewing without risking physical contact and was the current arrangement. Should it be desired, the screen could also recede into the rest of the cylinder.

Taking a glance at Pari’s body in the tilted tube, Blake noted with amusement that, giant hole in her torso aside, the dead child looked healthier than her living sister. The corpse remained as it had been that day, still covered in what little clothing she’d worn to the tavern, or at least what remained of said clothing after contact with Pari’s blood.

While most of the cloth had been eaten away, one article remained notably intact: the girl’s arm sleeve. Made out of some unknown red organic material, the sleeve was at most a quarter inch thick and covered the entirety of her left forearm. A dark stone could be seen embedded in the center at the top of her arm, its purpose unknown. Blake had noticed the sleeve rather early when they’d first met, as it stuck out against the rest of her outfit. According to Sofie, the child had been wearing the covering as long as they’d known each other, and she refused to take it off for any reason, not even when bathing. Apparently it was a gift from her beloved “grandfather”, and that was all she would say about it. When it came to “grandfather”, Pari rarely said much at all, other than talking about how amazing he was.

Blake slid the screen out of the way, exposing the body. He wanted to know more about this item. The fact that it was the only thing other than Pari herself to survive her all-consuming blood had to mean something. Reaching down with his right hand, Blake gingerly touched the sleeve and the hand sticking out of it with metal-clad fingers, making sure that nothing was going to eat away at him. Satisfied he was safe, he willed the metal to flow up his arm, revealing his flesh to the air. Using his nails, he tried to pry up the edge of the sleeve, but to no avail. No matter how hard he tried, the sleeve seemed adhered to her skin, almost as if they were one and the same.

“What the hell?” he muttered in frustration and confusion. His failure to pry the sleeve from Pari’s arm bothered him, but something else was bothering him more. Something was wrong. He just couldn’t put his finger on it. He touched the arm and hand again, and suddenly it clicked.

The hand felt warm.

Blake was no forensics expert, but he knew that two-day-old bodies were not supposed to feel warm. To make sure, he reached out and touched the child’s foot sticking up at the raised end of the tube. It too felt warm. No, no, this would not do. This would not do at all.

Creating a scalpel and small dish from the nearby wall, he carefully sliced off a small piece of the toe—a thin square perhaps a half-inch each long and wide—once more making sure that no technicolor light show started up. He needed to look into this further. Adjusting the thermostat for the room to funnel as much of the chilly morning air as possible into the room before the day heated up—he would figure out air conditioning one day, he swore—he stopped just before heading back outside. Though he couldn’t hear any noise coming from the other side of the door, Blake figured the odds of Sofie being there were too high for him to risk walking out holding a piece of Pari in his hand. Making a temporary doorway in a different wall instead, he made his way to his quarters for some investigatory experiments.

*     *     *

Several hours later, a persistent buzzing broke Blake away from his observations. Perhaps that was good, he allowed. His biology knowledge going no farther than what he’d learned in high school, he’d found himself frustrated as he first stumbled through creating the necessary equipment and then stumbled even harder trying to figure out what was going on with the Pari sample. He needed a reason to take a break.

Checking the screen, Blake found Arlette standing there waiting patiently for him. The former mercenary appeared not much better off than Sofie had, showing just how fervently busy she’d been since the incident. Still, he knew Arlette was pragmatic enough to know when to sleep, unlike a certain other person. He could tell from the way she carried herself after Pari’s death that this wasn’t the first person she cared about to die an untimely death.

Miss Demirt’s performance as his head of national security had been, by and large, fairly good so far—better in some aspects than he’d dared hope, even. She’d taken to using his skitters almost as if she’d grown up in a work with technology, leveraging his forces with skill and an eye for logistics that he had not expected. In almost all aspects, everything was going great. Sadly, almost all was not all.

The guerrilla terrorist movement that had sprung up several months ago remained a problem that neither she nor he was able to solve. Arlette seemed outright ashamed of her inability and kept pushing herself harder to try to tackle this mysterious group. On one hand, he liked that she refused to simply accept her failure. On the other, well, he’d worked in the tech industry. He knew what burnout could do to a person, and he thought he could see it approaching with her. Perhaps, with what she came to tell him, that would soon change.

Resuiting, he hurried out to the private meeting room located near the outside of his quarters. Several terrorists had survived that woman’s rampage, and Arlette had scooped them up and carted them back to the fortress dungeon for interrogation quickly after the attack. Her presence could only mean she was finally finished. Eager to finally pluck out this thorn in his reign’s side, he opened the door and allowed her inside. She entered and sat down stiffly, a look of worn-down resignation on her face. Blake didn’t like what that meant. Still, he allowed himself some room for hope.

“Well? Done squeezing everything you could out of them, I presume? Did you find out who their leader is? Where they’re hiding?”

Arlette shook her head. “It wasn’t them.”

“...what?!”

“No training, no organization, just a bunch of idiots with weapons who looked at the real terrorist movement and said ‘let’s do that too’,” she moaned, putting her face in her hands and massaging it wearily. “Part of the reason I took so long is that I had to be sure this wasn’t some ruse designed to throw us off the trail of the real rebel movement, but unfortunately I’m convinced now that it’s real.”

“Seriously?! These assholes are just copycats?!” Blake blurted out in irate astonishment.

Arlette nodded. “That is, sadly, exactly what this is. They all got it in their heads that now was the time to ‘fight the good fight’ and slaughter a bunch of people in a tavern. What bothers me the most is that this probably won’t be the last group to get such ideas.”

“Ugh, that’s just going to be more noise for us to have to sort through. This is such a fucking mess...”

“I...” Arlette hesitated, unsure if she should continue her thought.

“Yeah? What’s on your mind?”

“I keep coming back to the question of why didn’t the skitters activate?”

“We went over this,” Blake reminded her. “You didn’t hit the panic buttons properly. That’s the only explanation.”

“Both of us?”

“If a signal had been sent, not only would the nearby skitters have activated, an alarm would have gone off back here. A very loud alarm. I would not have missed it. So obviously, no signal fired, so you must not have activated the button properly.” He glared at her through his mask. “Or are you saying my technology failed?”

“Ah- no, no,” Arlette rushed to add, “I just meant, if somebody else-”

“There is nobody else,” Blake shot back. “The only other people who could make crystal tech have been dead for a long, long time. I can only do it because of my powers; I tried to make a machine to create the circuit channels, but even I couldn’t figure out a way to generate them outside of my own special abilities. So are you suggesting that one of these people, who you yourself referred to as ‘idiots’, was able to figure out something I could not? Come on. Look, I pay you in part to be paranoid, but there’s a point where you’re just getting scared of your own shadow and you seem to have crossed past that point a while ago.”

“I apologize, sir, I-”

“Don’t apologize, just get your head on straight. I’ve seen you tearing your hair out over this before, and Pari dying just makes it all that much worse, but you can’t let this become your white whale or-”

Blake’s sermon cut off mid-sentence as an ear-splitting screech of metal being ripped apart interrupted the conference. Arlette jumped, looking up at the ceiling in the direction of the terrible noise.

“Shit...” he grumbled.

“What was that?” Arlette asked.

“She’s back. I think we need to get up there, now.”

His underling trailing behind him, Blake strode quickly out of his personal quarters and made his way up to the room housing Pari’s corpse. There he found a ragged, gaping hole where the door was supposed to be and a loose ball of crushed metal lying on the other side of the hallway. Peeking inside, he found himself staring back at two blazingly furious pairs of eyes. He had just enough time to notice Sam sitting in the corner, looking somewhat shell-shocked with her eyes glazed over, before that woman roughly grabbed him by the shoulder and dragged him inside.

“What are you trying to do?” Gabriela fumed, her grip tightening to the point that his shoulder armor began to dent.

“Madam Gabriela, please release my employer,” Arlette said as she emerged from behind his armored form.

“Arlette!” Sofie cried out. “He wants to keep Pari for himself and use her to make bombs and stuff!”

“What part of ‘go fucking sleep’ are you unable to understand?!” Blake shot back.

“Shut up! You don’t understand anything!” the exhausted woman snapped, her eyes wet with tears. “You weren’t there! You don’t see her dying gaze every time you close your eyes!”

“Sofie, calm yourself,” Arlette said, stepping between the two. She turned back to him and, with traces of danger in her tone, asked, “Sir, is what she says true?”

“No!” Blake exclaimed. “I don’t want to use her to make bombs!”

“And you have no thoughts of keeping her corpse for other experiments, yes? We will bury her with the dignity any child deserves?”

“I mean, uh, look, I think-”

“Part of her toe is missing!” Sofie gasped. “It wasn’t like that before! Somebody cut it off!”

Those words were all it took to ignite the tension in the room as three separate voices made their outrage known to him at thunderous volume.

“How dare you-”

“-no respect for the dead-”

“-might have been wrong in my assessment-”

“Hey, I took that sample for a reason!” Blake argued into the noise.

“-complete human garbage-”

“-utterly sinful-”

“-might have to reconsider our arrangement-”

“Goddammit! Will you people just listen to me?! Look! LOOK!” he hollered over the din, grabbing Sofie’s hand and pulling her over to Pari’s container and shoving her hand against the dead child’s toes. Everybody stopped for a moment, looking at them both in confusion.

Sofie’s went wide as she slowly wrapped her whole hand around the dainty foot. “It’s... warm?” she asked. “Dead bodies shouldn’t be warm.”

“Right! That’s why I took the sample, so I could look into this! And that’s why I turned the temperature in here down, too. I wanted to make sure the warmth was coming from inside her and not because you were doing something to her while I wasn’t around.”

“You... why didn’t you tell us?!” Sofie demanded accusingly.

“Because I wanted to try to get some answers first without you all piling on me like this! I just discovered it myself only a few hours ago!”

“And?” This time is was Arlette. “Did you find anything?”

Blake cleared his throat. “Okay, look, biology is not my field of expertise, but... I don’t think she’s dead.”

“She’s alive?!” Gabriela gasped.

“No, at least by my definition of alive, she is not,” he quickly corrected with a shake of his head. “She’s not breathing, her heart isn’t beating, her brain probably isn’t firing, and I don’t see any sign that she’s healing. She’s not alive. But somehow, almost two days after all of this, her cells aren’t dead. Her individual cells, on their own, are still functioning.”

“B-but how?” Sofie stuttered.

Blake shrugged. “No idea. With no blood to nourish them, they should have shut down long ago. But they haven’t.”

“The poor thing,” Gabby said so softly that Blake almost didn’t hear it. “Trapped in limbo, stuck between life and death.”

“This is terrible! Her spirit cannot pass on if she is not truly dead!” Arlette bemoaned.

“Um...” a small voice said.

“But this doesn’t change anything,” Sofie stated.

“I agree,” Arlette added. “Alive, dead, or in between, it doesn’t matter. Pari is not a test subject.”

“H-hey everybody...”

“What the hell is wrong with you people?!” Blake cried out in exasperation. “Her blood fucking destroys all matter it touches and you don’t want to even look into it?!”

“Blake-”

“Sam, be quiet! The adults are talking,” Blake irritably scolded the child.

“But... her arm thing is being... weird,” she said, pointing into the tube.

“It’s what?” Sofie asked as they all crowded around to look at what Sam was indicating.

Due to lack of space, Blake found himself standing behind Sofie and looking over her shoulder. When he did, he found that the sleeve he’d tried to remove was slowly changing color. The crimson color was slowly draining away, leaving behind the familiar, soft pink of flesh. Blake’s eyes went wide as he realized that he could see blood vessels winding this way and that through the sleeve, separate from Pari’s darker skin beneath. Was this thing somehow alive?

“Has it ever done this before?” he asked Sofie. If anybody would know more about this thing, it was her.

“No, never,” Sofie said authoritatively.

Suddenly, a translucent blister nearly two inches in diameter sprouted up from the surface, growing up and around the small stone embedded in the center of the sleeve. The blister flooded with the crimson color that had suffused the entire sleeve just moments ago, and the stone—now fully encapsulated by the blister—floated free of its former position. Lurching to one side, the stone pressed up against one side of the blister’s thick membrane.

“What the hell is going on?” he wondered aloud, his mind blown. This... this was biotechnology! This was science fiction-level shit right here! Sophistication far beyond anything that Earth was capable of!

“I don’t have a clue,” Arlette admitted.

“Wait, look!” Sofie gasped. “Is that-!”

Blake quickly spotted the cause of Sofie’s outburst. Both above and below the newly formed blister, certain blood vessels were starting to bloat and darken, causing them to become easily visible to everybody. Blake watched in complete shock and amazement as the blood vessels finished darkening, leaving a series of clear lines that Blake recognized. Though he couldn’t read the language, he had seen enough Eterian Common to know what it looked like.

“What does it say?” he wondered.

“It says...” Sofie leaned in to get a better look. “No way...”

“It says ‘no way’?” he replied, puzzled.

“No,” Arlette explained, a look of concern on her face. “It says ‘follow bubble, bring body for great reward’. Now that Pari’s dead, somebody wants her back.”