Chapter One: Gaps and Shadows
All at once, Dawn’s eyes opened to light, from nothingness. Her first breath was a sharp one that stung her lungs. She twisted her head around every way her neck would allow for a glimpse of her surroundings. Panic sunk deeper in her bones with every glance. Her world consisted of two and a half feet - barely enough room between circuits and levers to turn around. The pod, she remembered.
Dawn tried to remember her training. She tried to conserve oxygen. Calm. Calm was her mantra, one she just couldn’t follow. How long had she been in there? How far from Mukurus had the explosion flung her? How would anyone ever find her, drifting through the dim darkness of Antila II? Each breath became an extreme, either deflating her chest to a tiny, dense knot or expanding it to the point of pain against her ribcage. Faces flashed before her, unlabeled memories of people she knew from the world outside her tiny pod. Hard as she tried and little as she believed, Dawn couldn’t remember their names.
The gruff Captain with the hollow, hoarse laugh. The researcher with a great smile he didn’t seem to know what to do with. The man with smoldering yellow irons for eyes, haunted by his own soul. Then there’s the memory of a force, a warmth, without a face. She thought it was a woman. It confused Dawn more than comforted her just then, that all she could remember about her was her voice and a pink light.
“Dawn. You were a good teacher. I’m glad I met you.” The woman’s words floated through her mind like her pod through the darkness. Heavy as she knew they were, they remained weightless without gravity to give them meaning.
“A… Alie…” Dawn tried to remember. Warm beads squeezed themselves from her eyes, without her full understanding. “No, dammit!” Dawn cocked her head back in frustration. What am I doing? She stopped herself a second before slamming it down. She turned on her side to curl up and consider her very few options.
It took a few minutes, but Dawn eventually settled on two real choices. Float through space indefinitely and bereft of memory, or jostle her brain to remember. To remember the people that had saved her life, the reason she was even near Mukurus when it exploded. Without it, she was left only with maddening mystery and oxygen for a few days. Dawn sat up, breathed deep and ran her fingers along every cold, glossy panel. She searched everything she could reach, then shuffled to reach more. Dawn found analysis upon endless analysis.
“How about this one?” Dawn asked herself. The tap of
a finger brought up a fuel consumption report. “Alright… How about you?” She scrunched up to prod another of the screens. This one showed a flight pattern - a hardly significant, straight line through space it had no map for. Dawn remained patient for the next eight panels she checked.
“Come on…” she grumbled at the ninth. Waste disposal records. “Give me something,” Dawn begged. The next panel answered her with ration recommendations. One display after another disappointed her, then enraged her. Her fists clenched. Water reserves. Coolant levels. Ambient temperature. Deacceleration charts. She couldn’t find a damn thing about her mission or her crew. Memories or no, the universal truth remained that a body can only cage so much frustration. Dawn swung her head down like a ball-point hammer, straight for the console of her pod. The thunk sent her very tiny world to black.
Dawn’s teeth clenched tight. A single bead of warmth trickled down her sore forehead. The surface against her, however, was ice cold. Too cold to be the console of her tiny pod. She opened her eyes instead to a dull red stone. Dawn stepped back, bewildered to watch a streak of deeper red drip down from the dent her head had put in the clay wall. The pod had vanished from around her. It had been replaced with a different world, one big enough for her at least to stand. She could even walk three paces in any direction. Dawn turned around to survey the red stone room, which was somehow both familiar and a complete mystery.
A cot sidled up against the rough back wall, with an energy-screened window over it. A toilet perched in wait for her relief in the opposite corner. A thick iron door marked the exit, a few inches left of her bloody head-dent. It had no handle.
“Where...” Dawn muttered to herself. Her feet carried her on the wind of the thought, to the cot. She knelt on it to peer through the window. Ruby dots plunked down on the sheets around her knees, soaking outward like bloody little explosions. On the other side of clear energy waves that she knew better than to touch were traces of a landscape she never thought she’d see again.
Barren, crimson clay stretched out from the outer wall of her cell to a rich, azure body of water. From the look of it, the lake stretched all the way around the building, which was on an island. A few thick-trunked trees with peeling skin of bark on the outsides stuck up from the arid, red soil here and there on the island. Beyond the far shore of the lake, however, the forest was dense. The shadow of the canopy was too deep to see past. Dawn bent down to angle her view up at the sky. The translucent beige tinge of a terradome veiled the stars, and she could only barely make out the shimmering blue streak of the SkyLine high above.
“Mars… I’m on…the hell is going on here?” Dawn asked, of any force that knew. Even she herself might have the answer, she realized, if she could only remember something - anything! That boiled a pot of frustration deep in her gut. She’d never planned to return to her home planet. Now she was in some sort of prison from the looks of it, and she couldn’t even remember why. But from what Dawn remembered about prisons, there had to be at least one other person there with her to hold the keys. “Hey! What the hell? Anyone! Where is this?” she called out.
“Settle down!” another woman’s voice rasped. Dawn stiffened upright to listen more carefully. She had to pinpoint where it had come from.
“Or what?” Dawn challenged, just as loud.
“Or you’ll bring the coats, jackass! What’s wrong with you?” hissed the other woman. The longer she spoke, the clearer a chord of recognition plucked in Dawn’s brain. It wasn’t the same woman who Dawn dreamed of as a pink warmth, but it was someone she knew. She tracked the woman’s voice to a nearby wall, where the tiniest crack near the ceiling let her voice in.
“Coats?” Dawn answered, lower.
“The nurses! You… Oh God, you’re having another episode, aren’t you?” asked the woman. Episode? The word sent a twinge of heat through Dawn’s muscles. She resisted the inexplicable urge to put her fist in the wall to say:
“If I was, would I ask your name?” The woman sighed long and loud.