I couldn’t think of a way to grab the guitar from the instrument pile without Nori noticing something was up, but I figured I could come back later to get what I needed when there weren’t any mechara around.

  “Nori! Sorry I left in the middle of that party, I had a great time but I ended up having to leave” I said, hoping she wasn’t angry with me for leaving early.

  “What? Oh, yeah no that’s fine I ended up having to leave early anyway since we got a new shipment from earth and I had to oversee it. They’re sending more stuff with each trip and we’re having a hard time sorting it all” she said.

  “Ah well, I’m sure that’s a good thing anyway right? It didn’t seem like you wanted to be there anyway” I said.

  “Yeah yeah it’s fine. I’d rather be here anyway” she said, her voice getting softer as she spoke.

  I couldn’t put my finger on it but there was something off about how Nori was acting. She seemed like she was trying to sound more relaxed than she actually was, her eyes barely blinked as she had her gaze locked onto me.

  She’d been acting strangely since the last time I saw her and I’d unfortunately forgotten to ask what Flint had meant by the whole ‘sector five’ thing.

  “Nori?” a male mechara asked, approaching from behind, “do you have any idea what this is?” he asked, holding up a bag filled with some old Gameboys in it.

  “Not right now Florence, just put it to the side for now and we can figure it out later” Nori responded, not taking her eyes off me.

  The man looked puzzled for a moment but ultimately turned around and placed it on a table with other assorted electronics.

  “Sorry, is something wrong?” I asked.

  “Can I show you a thing?” Nori asked.

  “Uh… Sure, of course” I responded, feeling a little confused about her behavior.

  She nodded and started leading me toward a car that had been parked on the far side of the room.

  She didn’t say anything, but she was walking pretty quickly, making me hop a little as I tried to keep up.

  As I followed behind, I couldn’t help but notice something I hadn’t seen her carry with her before. On the left side of her hip she had a holster and inside it was the same type of flashlight I’d taken from Michael, the same type the guards used on me.

  Reluctantly, I got into the melodian side of the car and without a word, Nori began driving off, giving the other mechara a small wave as she drove out the large front door and into the seemingly endless row of streets and hallways on the other side.

  I looked back for a brief moment, frustrated I hadn’t been able to get the guitar but I figured I could always come back again for it.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, my eyes glancing down at the flashlight.

  I didn’t want to arouse any suspicion but it was obvious something was up. If she reached for her hip at any point I’d be sure to look away or try to grab it from her before she had a chance to use it on me.

  “I need to show you something” she said as we drove up a large ramp, bringing us up toward the center of the lifeboat.

  With each passing floor I felt the gravity getting lower as we spiraled up through the various floors and well into the blue zone. The interior of the ship still looked extremely industrial rather than turning into the organic shaped housing I was used to seeing in the blue zone, which told me we were still in the central ring. It seemed like the center ring was a place that was just used for the maintenance of the ship.

  It made sense that people wouldn’t want to live in a place that would occasionally go down to zero gravity, sending all their belongings in all directions before gravity would turn back on.

  I could tell we were getting toward the center of the ship. Not just from how much lighter I felt, but also from my lack of visibility when looking along the curve of the ship. As we went up in floors, the bend of the ship gradually became tighter. I could still see pretty far, even toward the surface the ship was still massive, but it was still a noticeable change.

  Like the other sections of the central ring, there were large pipes and wires strung along the walls of each floor, but as we drove I noticed them getting larger in size. Every branching corridor brought their own sets of pipes and wires that would combine with the existing ones and as we drove they just kept getting larger.

  Eventually we were brought to a large opening. It looked like a massive open square but still had the industrial look I’d gotten used to on the central ring. Above us was a large glass ceiling, looking up into the surface of the ship all along the windows I could see people in the automated vehicles driving across it along with a few pedestrians walking between the first and third rings.

  Along the walls the massive pipes came together into a single structure towering above us all the way up to the windows which were at least five stories above us.

  The structure was a massive sphere made of different sized pipes and fans with a doorway at its base.

  “Have you ever been here before?” Nori asked as we pulled up to the base of the spherical tower.

  I shook my head.

  “Let’s head on inside, I need you to see something” she said as she parked the car and started leading me inside.

  Once we were inside, the sound of the machines seemed to disappear completely, replaced by a deafening silence as we found ourselves in a small control room that wouldn’t look out of place from a nuclear reactor. The panel had a series of buttons and switches along with a whole host of screens, all of which had some sort of graph or chart displayed on them. In front of the panel was a window looking out at a series of scaffolds and other control surfaces.

  To my surprise, we weren’t alone. A single melodian stood at the control panel, standing on a ledge that came out from the front of it. It seemed to be designed for both melodians and mechara to be able to work on it.

  As we entered, Nori cleared her throat.

  “May we have the room to ourselves for a bit?” she asked the melodian.

  He turned around, his eyes glowing white.

  “Of course, anything you need Nori” he replied in a robotically calm tone.

  He glanced at me for a moment before hopping down from the small platform and slowly making his way out of the room.

  “Why did you bring me here?” I asked Nori softly

  “Do you see those panels in there?” Nori asked, pointing out the doorway next to the control board leading into the scaffolded section of the building.

  The area she was pointing to had a large screen with two hand panels on either side.

  “Uh, yeah I see them” I said, feeling a bit confused.

  “I need you to go press one. Either one, doesn’t matter” she said.

  “Sorry, could you just tell me what’s going on?” I asked.

  Nori slowly turned away from me but I noticed her hand reaching down toward the flashlight on her hip.

  “It’s uh… A lot to explain. Please, it’ll make sense in a moment” she said.

  I could hear how nervous she was and I considered my options. On one hand, I could do what she was asking. I assumed she’d already figured me out and it was possible she just wanted to test me. Since meeting her, she never showed any sign of disliking me and she had to have figured out that her father had recognized me. She likely just wanted to get control of the situation before bringing it up.

  On the other hand, I could just run for it. She likely couldn’t catch me and I could probably meet back up with the listeners. The problem was, Nori had a lot more power on the ship than they did. She also was the only way I’d be able to carry out the lifeboat seven mission for the listeners, so if I wanted to be on their good side, I had to be on her good side.

  I sighed, realizing that either way, my best option was to do what she was asking.

  She visibly relaxed as I turned and made my way through the doorway.

  I looked back for a moment, seeing her hand on the control panel as she gave me a nervous smile and a nod.

  As I pressed my hand to the left panel, I fully expected it to not respond, just like all the other panels I’d seen throughout the ship.

  To my surprise, the screen in front of me came to life as a blue screen came into view with a lot of text on it. I couldn’t understand what it was saying, but a moment later the left side of the screen turned red as a loud buzz sounded out through the room, the other side of the screen remained blue.

  “What? No!” I heard a frustrated Nori say from the control room “I thought that would work!”

  “Did I do something wrong?” I called out to her.

  Nori stepped out toward the door, her hand on the flashlight.

  “You don’t have the password? What was the point of all this then?” she asked, her frustration turning slowly to anger.

  “I don’t…” I started to say just as I saw the melodian from before walking up behind her.

  In a moment I saw him reach out and effortlessly push her through the doorway as if she weighed nothing, causing her to stumble onto the platform in front of me.

  A moment later the doorway started to close behind her, locking the two of us in the room as the melodian left the control room just as quickly as he came, leaving the two of us locked inside without an escape.

  “Nori! Are you okay?” I asked, stepping toward her with a hand outstretched.

  Before I knew what was happening I was suddenly cast into the white void.

  “Gah!” I exclaimed as I stumbled for a moment, staying on my feet.

  “Why?! What did I do?” I yelled out to nothing.

  There was no sound, no echo, no noise of any kind.

  “Dammit” I said as I sat down, crossing my legs in front of me as my tail held me up from behind.

  I shook my head, covering my face with my hands in frustration.

  Without seeing him, I could tell he was sitting next to me.

  “I feel like I keep messing up” I said quietly, fighting as the words were getting caught in my throat.

  “I know” came a calm, measured response from the melodian next to me.

  “What did I do wrong? Where did I mess up?” I asked rhetorically.

  “You messed up by giving her the camera” he said.

  “What?” I asked, looking over to him to see he was sitting the same way I was.

  “It was my fault really. I was so focused on that guitar. I think I distracted you” he said, rolling side to side a little.

  He didn’t seem upset or worried. As far as I could tell he was as calm as he could be and I wasn’t sure why that would be.

  “But she asked for it…” I said.

  “She was telling you a story. When she got to that part of the story, she was trying to impress you with how well she’s learned English. She was talking about how the humans asked her a question and she did her best to speak the way they did. She was telling you about how she didn’t understand what that meant at the time and how much of a struggle it was during the first moments of contact. But you were so distracted by the guitar you didn’t notice” he said.

  He was smiling, speaking as though he was reminiscing on an old memory, as if it didn’t affect what we were going through within that moment. He didn’t seem to have a care in the world.

  “How did I not know this?” I asked, dumbfounded.

  “You heard her speak English, it stood out to you since it’s what you’re used to hearing. Unfortunately you only gave yourself away further when you accidentally directed her to the printer box. That’s probably when she found out about you. Until this moment though, she was afraid to bring it up. She probably planned on locking us in this room until she could figure things out” he said.

  “Ah… Yeah. I mean, I had a feeling it was a trap. I just didn’t know what else I could do…” I said.

  He placed his hand on my shoulder.

  “It’s okay. You did the right thing. But we shouldn’t stay here long. Just like before, the longer we stay, the harder it will be to get out. But I wanted to tell you something first” he said.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “I need you to remember that she’s your friend. She likes you. She’s only doing this because she’s afraid of what you might be hiding. She won’t hurt you as long as you remember that she wants to trust you. She just can’t right now because of the secrets you’ve been hiding. As long as you tell her the truth, everything will be okay” he said confidently.

  “How do you know all that?” I asked.

  “I know that because if I’m wrong, there’s nothing else we could do. Sometimes you have to hope for the best because giving up won’t help either way” he said with a smile.

  “Okay… That… Makes sense I guess…” I said, looking over at him and looking into his large brown eyes “Thank you…”

  “Just one thing though” he said, his hand still on my shoulder.

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “Whatever you do, please start playing music again. I miss being able to talk” he said, a bit of sadness coming across his face.

  I nodded “Absolutely.”

  He smiled, leaning forward and wrapping me in a hug.

  “You’ve got this,” he said.

  I opened my eyes wide, staring out into the void as I focused, just like I did with the mechara from before, like I did after my last time in the assembler back on earth, I focused as hard as I could, remembering where I was, remembering what I had to do.

  The void started to break, starting as a black dot in front of me. With my attention focused entirely on it, I felt the warm embrace of my other half slowly fade as the black spot got larger, slowly starting to expand out to the point where I could see into the room I was standing in.

  Nori was at the window, looking out into the ship, presumably hoping to grab someone’s attention. The flashlight was in her hand, pointed directly at me.

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  Around my field of vision was all white, but as long as I kept my focus I could keep the white void away from me.

  “Nori” I said in a hoarse voice.

  She turned around, shocked to hear me speaking.

  “Nori, please stop” I said, every word feeling nearly impossible to get out of my mouth.

  “How… How are you doing that?” Nori asked, looking down at the flashlight to make sure it was still on.

  “Please… Nori… We can talk…” I said, feeling my hands shaking.

  “Who are you? How did you get here? Are you… Are you working with… Her?” she asked, turning her full attention away from the window and onto me.

  “Nori… Please, you’re hurting me…” I said, unable to move, barely able to keep myself on my feet.

  “I’m… I’m sorry, I can’t trust you…” she said.

  She sounded unsure of herself. The firm tone she’d taken before fading away as she faced the reality of potentially hurting her friend.

  “Nori” I said again as a foreign thought came into my head from my other half, telling me exactly what I needed to say to her “We were both there. I saw it too.”

  “What?” she asked, confused.

  “I know why you fear phase three. I know what it sounded like. I heard the screams. I felt my lungs fill with smoke. I was there, I was just as afraid as you. I don’t remember him, but your dad recognized me. I think… He had hope of me returning. He was happy to see me. If you can’t trust me, can you at least trust him?” I asked, the words barely getting out.

  The light went out, the white outline around my vision disappearing as I was fully brought back to the room. In front of me Nori’s eyes were yellow, tears dripping down along the side of her beak as she looked at me in shock.

  I took a deep breath, looking up at her as I held my arms out.

  She seemed to understand the message. The fear she’d felt earlier was fading away as she came to me, getting down on one knee and wrapping me in a hug.

  We held each other for a few minutes as I held Nori up, letting her lean against me .

  “I’m sorry” she said quietly.

  “It’s okay. I… I should have told you earlier” I said.

  “So… Just to make sure…” she said, pulling back from the hug and looking at me.

  “Hm?” I asked.

  “You’re… Not working with Sloan, right?”

  I sighed “Oh gosh no that lady is crazy. She was trying to kill me while I was down there. I barely escaped.”

  “Wait… What? Why?” Nori asked, sitting back a little more, her hands on my shoulders.

  “I have no idea. I didn’t exactly stop and ask” I said.

  She nodded, thinking to herself for a moment before speaking in English “So you understand what me saying now?”

  I smiled, deciding to respond in English “Yes I can understand you just fine. But your grammar could use a bit of work.”

  Her eyes lit up immediately as a giant smile spread across her face.

  Before she could respond the sound of the door opening again drew our attention.

  A melodian was standing at the control panel, their eyes lit up white.

  “Sorry about that Nori” she said as she made her way to the door “I must have bumped you by mistake.”

  It was a different melodian from before, but under the control of Artemis that didn’t seem to make a difference.

  Nori and I looked at each other, confused about the blatant lie Artemis was telling us.

  Without another word she turned around and left the area, leaving the two of us alone once more.

  “Oh wow um… Okay” she said, sitting back a bit and looking around “Can… Can we talk? Not here. Back at my place.”

  “Yeah let’s do that. But uh, can you tell me what this place is?” I asked.

  Nori nodded “Yeah I think that’s fair” she said as we both stood up, “this… Is Artemis. His brain at least. He runs the ship. He performs all the lower level functions of the ship. He’s in charge of regulating… Well… Everything. Oxygen, suage, lights, electricity, transportation, the melodians. Well, while they’re under his control at least.”

  “Right. Yeah I think I pieced that together. But what were you expecting this to do?” I asked, gesturing to the panel.

  “That… Is…” she sighed “That’s what we’ve been trying to get up in operation since the lifeboat seven disaster. This is Artemis’s system access. Nobody has had the password for it in a long time. We don’t even know what the password is, but we know it will open ‘for the right person’, or at least that’s how the story goes.”

  “And you thought I might be the right person?” I asked.

  “He saved you right? Is that how you…” she paused for a moment, checking the doorway “... found yourself on earth?”

  “I’m uh. Not entirely sure how it all happened, But I think he did save me. Yeah” I said.

  “Okay. Yeah well. I thought it was worth a shot. Even if it did work we’d still need a second person” she said, gesturing to the second panel “We’d need two people with the password to get in anyway.”

  “So your plan was to see if I had it, then lock me in here until you could get control of the situation” I said as I put my hands on my hips.

  She reached up, scratching the back of her neck.

  “Uh… Yeah pretty much…” she said.

  I smiled as I turned and made my way out the door.

  “It’s fine, let’s get moving” I said.

  It felt like Nori and I had both felt more relaxed on our second drive. I thought of Nori as a friend and I hated keeping the secret from her. The fact that it was finally out there in the open made me feel a lot better.

  The drive wasn’t very long but the view was quite beautiful. We came out from the underground along a ramp that led us up from the central ring where we got a beautiful view of the setting sun. It was the melodian’s time to be out, so the streets were packed with them. I always enjoyed seeing so many melodians without being under the effect of Artimus.

  We pulled up to the building Nori lived in and made our way up to her place without saying anything. We both had a lot of questions on our minds but we didn’t want to talk until we were in private.

  “Okay” she said as she closed the door behind herself as an audible click from the lock rang through the room “Birthday cakes. Candles? Why?”

  “Sorry, what?” I asked.

  “Am I saying it right? Birthday cakes?” she said as she gestured for me to take a seat at the table as she made her way into the kitchen.

  Until she said it a second time I didn’t even notice she was saying the English word for it.

  “Uh. So, their calendar is based on… years” I said, feeling weird for saying the english word for ‘year’ but I didn’t know any time equivalent in mecharan “and when you’re born you have a celebration every year as a little celebration.”

  “No no not that, that makes sense” she said as she came back into the room with two glasses of a reddish liquid.

  “I’m asking about the candles. The fire. What do they do? What’s their purpose?” she asked as she slid one of the glasses to me while sitting at the other end of the table.

  “I don’t know, they’re fun I guess? I never really thought about it” I said as I picked up the glass, the liquid giving off a nice aroma that reminded me of berries.

  “Darn. Okay. Sorry, that one’s been confusing me for a while and I was embarrassed to ask about it” she said.

  “Ah. Yeah sorry, I guess you’ll just have to ask them” I said as I took a drink from the glass.

  “So please, tell me about yourself Tess. Start at the beginning” she said, leaning back in her chair.

  For the second time that day, I was able to open up to someone about myself. After spending months on the lifeboat I felt an overwhelming relief to be able to tell someone about who I was.

  I told her about how I grew up, my relationship with John, with Emily, Oliver, Gav. I told her about my house, everything that happened that led to John’s death, my journey to find out where I came from and how I got there. I told her about how much I yearned to know why I was sent there, having little to no memories of my past. I told her about the memories I’d seen inside the shard I was given, the way we discovered how to read it, my various encounters with Sloan.

  Throughout the story she rarely interrupted, only asking for clarification in a few places about what certain words meant. At one point I pulled out my backpack and showed her what I’d brought, from the items I had from lifeboat seven to the MP3 players that all had dead batteries in them. Out of all the items, the one she took the most interest in was the wheel.

  “So this is the one you had with you?” she asked, holding the bright red wheel up to look at it.

  “Yeah. I don’t remember much about my past but I remember my mom saying she used to play in the gravity games. This one is from the board she used I think. At least, it’s from the board that was at the place I lived. My dad used it to get across the middle ring while it was spinning but we crashed.”

  Nori eyed it closely, a look of confusion on her face.

  “But this isn’t what gravity game wheels are made of. This is something else” she said.

  “Oh… Uh, in that case I don’t know, I can only tell you what I saw in the memory” I said.

  Nori nodded, putting the wheel back down “Well that’s quite a story. I’m actually surprised you’ve been able to keep it a secret for this long.”

  I nodded “Yeah… Hey could I ask you something?”

  “Oh absolutely” she said, leaning forward.

  “Can you tell me about Artemis?” I asked.

  “Ah, yeah. Artemis. Where to begin… I guess we start at the beginning. It’s a long story, but I mean… We have time. You said you found out where we came from right? The ‘crab nebula’?”

  I nodded, taking another drink from the glass.

  “Right so, that’s where we came from. It was a long long time ago. Your species, the melodians, they lived on a very large planet. It was tidally locked with our sun, which meant it had an extremely stable ecosystem. Weather was calm, predictable. Only the parts between the day and night side of the planet were habitable of course, since the side facing the sun was hot enough to melt metal, the other side was about as cold as a planet could get. But with everything being in a stable balance, that meant right in the middle was habitable. So that’s where the melodians got their start. Gravity was similar to what you’d experience on our lower decks, there were a lot of heavy metals, heavy gasses and lots of competition amongst the various lifeforms.”

  She took a drink from her glass, clearing her throat as she continued “The mechara didn’t start there. We started on your planet’s moon. Our genetic sequences are similar, so we think your planet seeded its moon with life and after a very very long time, we both became intelligent races.

  “We had communication with each other, but we didn’t actually make contact with each other until much later. Unfortunately, our star was getting larger, which was slow, but eventually the melodians were getting to a point where they couldn’t stop their ecosystem from failing catastrophically. With everything on their planet being so stable, there were too many delicate ecological systems in place that all relied on each other to be able to keep up.”

  “I have a bad feeling about the word ‘catastrophic’ in there…” I said.

  “Yeah… Unfortunately, the oceans became too hot. The plants putting out the oxygen died, the atmosphere lots its balance and started creating storms. Each time a storm would show up, it would mix those heavy gasses that usually sit at the ocean surface to stir up into the atmosphere. Eventually, without those heavy gasses in place, the ocean would catch fire and the entire ecosystem would crumble.”

  “And there was no way to stop it?” I asked, frowning at the thought of an entire planet dying so suddenly like that.

  Nori shook her head “They tried everything they could but eventually their efforts would fail and their planet would die. Thankfully for them though, they’d built a computer that was able to crunch the math enough to figure out how to keep the planet alive for as long as possible.”

  “Artimus?” I asked.

  Nori shook head head “Not yet. No. This computer was named ‘Mother Nexus’, it was originally supposed to just tell them how to keep the planet alive, but it was repurposed to figure out how to save the melodians by getting them off planet.”

  “Did they not have rockets?” I asked.

  “Too much gravity. It wouldn’t be possible to get everyone off planet like that. Instead, Mother Nexus figured out how to create complex materials and taught us how to build them.”

  “Wait. ‘us’ as in the mechara?” I asked.

  “Exactly. The melodians didn’t have the ability to get off their planet on their own. But the mechara did. We weren’t as technologically advanced as the melodians if you can believe it. But Mother Nexus taught us how to build rockets, get off planet, harvest materials from asteroids and use the complex materials she’d created in order to create an elevator. It wasn’t easy, since the planet didn’t spin, but it was made possible with an orbital ring.”

  “I’m sorry I uh… Don’t know what any of that means…” I said, feeling quite lost.

  “That’s okay, that part isn’t important. The important part is that with Mother Nexus’s help we were able to do it. The melodians got off planet and were able to join us. There was a lot of chaos during the transfer but it all worked out in the end.”

  “So, where does Artemis come into the picture?” I asked.

  “Right, so many thousands of generations after that, we were running into our own problem. The sun was starting to cool. There wasn’t anything we could do to stop it and we knew the only way to save ourselves would be to leave that place and search for a new home for ourselves.”

  “That makes sense” I said.

  “The problem was, we didn’t know how to do it. There were a lot of solutions proposed, but nothing quite worked. It was either too difficult, too impractical or wouldn’t get us out in time. We had an issue where we were aware of the impending explosion of our sun, but each generation decided it would be the next generation’s problem because it was too difficult a task to handle. Well… We ran out of generations, and the problem wasn’t solved.”

  “So… What did they do?” I wondered.

  “Well, it turns out, Mother Nexus was still alive. She contacted us and told us she could get us off the planet. But with the amount of sand that had built up on her solar panels and the amount of data it would require to send, it would be impossible to get everything to her in time, so she asked us to send someone to her” she said.

  “And that was…” I said, feeling like I knew the answer.

  She nodded “That’s right. That person was Artemis.”

  “Oh wow” I said “So he was a person? A melodian?”

  “He was, yeah. He went down there, got Mother Nexus in full operation and was able to bring that data back. Soon after, we started building the lifeboats. There were nine of them in total. One through three were for mechara, which were set to go toward the inward part of the galaxy. Four through six were for melodians which went toward the outer rings of the galaxy, then there’s us. The mixed lifeboats, seven through nine.”

  Wait so, the first six weren’t a mixed group like this?” I asked.

  “No” she said “They were set up to only have the one species on them.”

  “Why did they do that?” I asked.

  “Uh… Politics. I think that’s the best answer I could give. The mechara and the melodians… They didn’t exactly get along. As a compromise they decided to segregate the first two groups of lifeboats while keeping the last three as a mixed colony.”

  “So, Artemis… He was a person…” I said as I realized that didn’t make much sense.

  “Oh, right so, Artemis, he was on lifeboat seven and sadly died shortly after our sun went supernova. It took a while, but his assistant oversaw the ship after his death, but they quickly found that there was simply too much to handle. The ship had so many moving parts, so many interwoven systems that it wasn’t possible to keep it all in check in a reliable way.”

  “Sounds like the problem they had on the melodian planet” I said.

  Nori nodded “Exactly. So they decided to build a new Mother Nexus. It became operational shortly before Artemis’s assistant died of old age. Her name was Salene. Before she died she named the new computer after her old mentor.”

  “Wow… And that room we were in today…” I said.

  “Yeah. That was the supercomputer she built. Without the Artemis network this ship wouldn’t be able to run. Certainly not for the amount of time it’s been running” she said with a smile.

  “So then… What happened to lifeboat seven?”

  Nori’s smile went away, “That… Was Sloan… We don’t know why she did it. We don’t know what motivated her. But she caused its destruction.”

  “How though? How could one melodian do that?” I asked.

  “Nobody… Suspected a melodian of being able to do that… at some point, she figured out how to disable Artemis by destroying his central cooling. The system responded by spinning up the ship. It’s a backup system that forces airflow through the components. Unfortunately, once she was able to do that, she blew out one of the windows at the front of the ship. Without the Artemis network up, the computer wasn’t able to seal anything off and the ship slowly lost pressure. That pressure loss caused the three rings to rub against each other in a way they weren’t designed to do and with all the extra speed they had, they overheated and failed catastrophically. The entire ship was blown into six pieces with the front and back portions getting set free and the middle ring snapping in half.”

  We both sat in silence for a while as Nori let me process everything that had happened. It was horrifying to hear, but I didn’t know what else I could have expected.

  “So… Why us?” I asked quietly.

  Nori nodded “I’ve asked that ever since I got here. I don’t know. Maybe we just got lucky. Maybe there’s nothing special about us. I don’t know. That’s why I was hoping you had the password, I thought maybe there was something special about you but… Maybe you’re just like me. Got lucky.”

  “Yeah…” I said, sighing to myself as I slumped back in my chair.

  “Oh!” Nori exclaimed, nearly causing me to jump out of my seat.

  “Gah! What?!”

  “Sorry, sorry. I just realized, you could solve a HUGE problem for me” she said, leaning forward.

  “Uh, sure I guess? What do you need?”

  “I need you to… Oh, maybe not actually…” she said, trailing off as she sat back in her seat.

  “What, what is it? I can help with translating stuff if that’s what you need” I offered.

  “No no not that. Well. Maybe. But no that’s… Okay so, we need to get this processing core from Artemis’s old installation on lifeboat seven. It’s meant to be a gift for the humans” she said.

  I was a little confused “What? Why would you need my help with that?”

  “Okay so, I’m guessing you can’t use any of the hand pads on this ship, right?” she asked.

  “Uh, well aside from the one you brought me to earlier” I said.

  “Right, right that one’s different. I mean for access doors and stuff” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Okay so, our melodians are having that same problem. Until we can get a new Artemis installation on lifeboat seven, those doors are stuck with the old members of that ship” she said.

  “Okay” I said, but one thing didn’t make sense to me “So why can’t you or Rosa go there?”

  Nori took a deep breath “Ah, yeah so… Rosa… Won’t go. She’s refused, told us to go ahead with the new installation. I think she won’t go because well… She was a lot older than you and I when it all happened. She remembers the whole event a lot better and she doesn’t want to go back there. Trust me, we’ve tried to convince her, to just go once, but she won’t do it.”

  “Ah. Okay but what about you?” I asked.

  “For me, it’s too cold. Mechara can’t go there and we don’t have any suits that could handle the entrance process. Not in its current state” she said.

  “Sorry, too cold?” I asked “couldn’t you just warm it up?”

  “We… Can’t… Not yet…” she said. Her voice trailing off, sounding like she was suddenly quite uncomfortable.

  “Why can’t you warm it up?” I asked.

  She looked up at me, speaking quietly “We… Don’t want the bodies to rot.”