‘You came home late,’ Mom said. Her voice was annoyed, and her face was, too, right until she looked at Kip. The lines around her eyes let go. ‘Kip, what’s wrong?’
Kip had barely realised that he’d started crying. Stars, he was such a fuck-up. His parents were dumb, but they cared, in their own dumb way, and they’d always cared, and then he went and did shit like this. He stood there stupidly, hands in his pockets, trying to pull the tears back. He failed. Fine. He failed at everything else anyway.
He cleared his throat and frowned at the floor. ‘I need to tell you guys something.’
Eyas
Eyas sat in her chair and stared at Sawyer’s corpse, lying ready on her worktable. This was a typical sight, an everyday tableau, and the tasks ahead were normal as could be. But nothing about this body was normal. Nothing about this was okay.
She sat for half an hour before she finally got to her feet. She walked to her cabinet, opened the top drawer, and took out a belongings bag. The bag was made of throw-cloth, clean and well-stitched. A neutral way to contain objects that were anything but. She turned to the body, hesitant like she’d never been. Knowing him in life wasn’t what troubled her. She’d prepared corpses of people she’d known, and known far, far better than a one-time acquaintance such as this. Hexmates’ family members. Her favourite childhood school teacher. Her grandfather, which had been bitterly difficult. No, her reticence came from elsewhere. This wasn’t a heartbreak. This was a desecration.
Her nose itched beneath her heavy breathing mask. She rarely wore a mask at work, not even when the person had been old or the death had been gruesome. But then, she’d never worked with a corpse in this state. It wasn’t dangerous, of course – it had gone through a decontamination flash on arrival like all the rest. However, it was in the early stages of unchecked decay, and neither Eyas nor any of her colleagues encountered that regularly. This corpse hadn’t been brought to the Centre on the day of death, accompanied by a grieving family and sombre medical staff. This corpse had been brought in by a patrol team, still retching and moaning over what they’d found hidden away.
Are you sure you want to take this one? her supervisor had asked. They’d been assembled that morning, every caretaker and apprentice, sitting in shock as it was explained what had been left for them.
I’m sure, Eyas said. She’d volunteered, and no one had argued. Everyone knew it was right. She was the one who’d gasped when the patroller displayed a picture of the corpse’s face. She was the one who’d known the deceased’s name.
Someone had thrown Sawyer away. Like garbage. Like a thing unwanted, used up. The thought filled Eyas with silent rage. The feeling smouldered in her chest as she removed a soiled shirt, a pair of thick socks, a trinket ring of alien make. It rattled her hands as she washed the body and saw flecks of trash floating down the drain. It wrenched her jaw as she reset visibly bent bones. She hoped whatever happened had been quick. Stars, she hoped it had been quick.
Sawyer was just one death, but the indignity, the aberrance, the slackness brought on by improper storage made her think of the tendays following the Oxomoco. She remembered cleaning body after body after body, laid out not in the seclusion of her workroom, but in the chill of a repurposed food storage bay. She remembered the day spent aboard the Oxomoco itself, when it had been her turn to take a shift cleaning out the abandoned Centres. She remembered learning what bodies looked like when they’d only composted halfway, remembered the smell that lingered on her exosuit in the airlock, remembered spending a standard afterward hand-grinding bones that hadn’t disintegrated properly after exposure to air.
That time had been worse than this. An exponential amount worse. And yet, tame as Sawyer’s corpse was in comparison, she knew the details of this day were going to bolt themselves to a similar spot in her mind. She didn’t know this man, really, but he’d . . . he’d trusted her. Blindly trusted her, just like he’d blindly trusted the people who had led him to this table. If she’d been more patient with him, if she’d answered his letter and become his friend, if she’d given him a few more than five minutes of her time, would he – no, no, no. She knew better than to get dragged along by ifs in situations like these, and she shut that line of questioning down. The guilt lingered, even so. Ghosts were imaginary, but hauntings were real.
She turned over the corpse’s right arm, studying the hole where his wristpatch had been. The removal had been rushed and clumsy, and there wasn’t much she could do about the damage. She wrapped it with a cloth bandage, for decency’s sake. She’d read about patch thieves who prowled the grittier sides of spaceports, but – even though she had no experience with such things herself – her gut said this wasn’t that. She’d never heard of that flavour of crime in the Fleet, and she doubted, under the circumstances, that someone had jumped on that particular bandwagon now. No, someone didn’t want anybody to know who this corpse had been. But she knew. She’d given patrol a name, a place of origin, and a scrib path. We can work with that, the patroller had said, visibly grateful. That was a shred of comfort, at least. That was something.
She lifted the corpse’s arm and inserted a length of thin, fluid-filled tubing connected to a bot reclaimer. She hit the switch and heard a mechanical hum as the reclaimer activated Sawyer’s imubots, directing them to parade up the tube and into the soon-to-be-sealed receptacle. Eyas would then send them along to the hospital, where they’d be sterilised and reset and injected into someone else. Nothing went to waste in the Fleet.
She looked at the thrown-away corpse, the skin bruised and blue. Nothing was supposed to go to waste.
The reclaimer finished its task. Sawyer’s body was ready for storage. Eyas wheeled it into the stasis chamber and shut the door. The corpse was gone, but she could still feel it in the room with her, a mess that would never be clean. She looked at the bag she’d put the clothes and trinkets in. There was a delivery label printed on the front of it, waiting for a name and family address. She found a heat pen, and wrote the only piece of information she had. She hoped the patrollers would fill in the rest.
She removed her mask, washed herself as hastily as good hygiene would allow, and left the room in a hurry, taking the belongings bag with her. She passed colleagues in the hall, but didn’t meet their eyes.
‘Eyas?’ someone called. ‘You okay?’
Eyas said nothing. She continued to the main chamber and took the elevator down to the cupola. She kept everything placid, everything inside, just in case there were any families down there, seeking the same quiet she was.
The elevator came to rest. Thankfully, thankfully, Eyas found herself alone.
She sat on one of the benches surrounding the domed window in the floor. Stars spilled out beneath her feet. The Centre wasn’t sunside, but it was right on the cusp. Bright fingers of light teased past the thick windowsill, upstaging the delicate glitter beyond. The constellations changed as the Asteria continued its unending orbit, but the view from this spot always felt the same. The constancy was a comfort, a reminder that whatever unpleasantness you’d just been through was only a moment, only a blink within a vast, slow splendour.