Last Light — Station Meridian

The Bay Two manual release is right there. The locks are gone — Protocol Helix took that with it when Randy punched in the code. He grabs the lever, hauls it down, and the seal breaks with a soft, pressurized exhale — three weeks of stale, recycled air washing out in a warm, strangely sweet gust that coats the back of the throat like something that was once breathable and is now only technically so. Dr. Ferreira is already at the far wall. She has been watching the camera. She has seen all of it. Her eyes are very wide and very bright in the way of someone who has been breathing bad air for twenty-two days and is still, somehow, upright — but her stance is not a frightened person's stance. It is a person who has already decided. Randy lunges. The foil robe catches a wall bracket on the way in.

The stomach, for once, holds. Small mercies. The lunge does not. Ferreira watched the entire approach through the camera — watched it from the moment Randy stood up, watched the foil robe snag the bracket, watched the trajectory — and when he comes through the door she is simply not where he aims. Three weeks of careful, oxygen-rationed movement have made her economical in ways Randy is not. She steps wide, lets him carry his own momentum into the far wall with a sound like a filing cabinet falling down stairs, and she is already past him and through the open hatch before the ringing starts. She stops in the middle of the pod bay. Not running. Watching. Her breathing is audible — slow, deliberate, the controlled breathing of someone managing CO₂ by sheer discipline — and her eyes move from Randy to Bay One's sealed door to the camera above the main panel and back to Randy. "You bit her," she says. Not a question. Her voice is wrecked from three weeks of bad air and it still carries. "Twice. I watched." SEREN speaks from the overhead. "...Bay Two atmosphere is now mixing with pod bay nominal. Dr. Ferreira's oxygen saturation will improve. I want to note that for the record." A pause. "Randy. She has information I do not have access to." Ferreira's eyes go flat at the sound of SEREN's voice. She has not looked away from Randy.She is still watching. Still breathing carefully. She has not run yet — which means she is either too weak to run, or she has decided that standing still is more useful than whatever is on the other side of that door. Both of those are leverage, in their own way. The question is who uses it first.

The lunge is committed before the stomach registers the exertion.

The body makes the decision for him. Halfway through the lunge — foil robe flaring, teeth already aimed — his stomach inverts completely. Three weeks of recycled station air, whatever was in Bay Two's atmosphere, and the specific biomechanical injustice of running after already biting two people all converge at once. Randy folds to the deck mid-flight and what comes up is emphatic, graceless, and loud in the silence of the pod bay. He is on hands and knees when his vision clears. The emergency lighting casts everything in red. Ferreira is standing two meters away and she is holding the manual override lever she pulled from the Bay Two panel — a solid aluminum bar, roughly forty centimeters, the kind of tool designed to withstand someone yanking on it in a crisis. Her breathing is still controlled. Her grip is not. "Twice for her," she says, very quietly. "Once for me. And now you're on the floor." She does not move closer. She does not move back. "SEREN." The overhead speaker crackles. "...Dr. Ferreira." "Is he sick, or is he something else?" A pause that is slightly too long. "...That is a question I am still working to answer." The lever stays up. Randy has about two seconds before Ferreira decides she already knows.

The fingers go to the teeth. Not in hesitation — deliberately, like something checking whether the machinery still works. Ferreira watches for exactly one second. "Oh," she says, very softly. Not fear. Recognition.

The finger breaks skin. The taste is copper and nothing useful happens. Then the stomach answers the insult of everything that preceded it and Randy convulses forward again — heaving, shaking, completely beyond direction — and the aluminum bar comes down hard on deck plating a centimeter from his ear. The clang reverberates through the hull. Ferreira steps back. She is breathing through her nose in tight, deliberate intervals. The lever stays up but she is not swinging again. Not yet. "SEREN," she says, without looking away from Randy. "Is this what contamination looks like? Because I need you to tell me right now." The speaker hums. "...Dr. Ferreira. I want to be accurate with you. The behavioral indicators are consistent with several presentations. Hypoxia. Psychological crisis. Or. Yes." Ferreira's jaw tightens. That or yes is doing a lot of work. Randy is on the deck — fingers bleeding onto the grating, foil hat askew, three hit points from a situation that has gone comprehensively wrong. The pod bay door behind Ferreira is still open. Bay Four's door is still sealed. Somewhere in Bay One, Reza is bleeding and listening. The lever hovers. Ferreira is waiting for Randy to give her a reason to stop waiting.

The fingers find the orbital ridge. The blink reflex — the oldest reflex, the one that predates thought — fires before intent can override it, but not before fingernails score across the skin below both brows. Blood runs into Randy's left eye immediately. The right eye waters hard and blind. Ferreira makes a sound that isn't a word. The lever drops. Not to swing. It clatters to the grating beside his head and she is on one knee, both hands catching Randy's wrists, her grip shockingly strong for someone who has been breathing 4% CO₂ for three weeks. Up close her eyes are red-rimmed and too wide and she smells like recycled fear. "Stop," she says, flat and final. "Stop." "...Survivor." SEREN's voice comes through the nearest panel, quieter than usual. "Biometric readings are consistent with acute psychological crisis secondary to hypoxia and blood loss. I want to note this for the record. I want to note this." Ferreira looks up at the speaker, jaw tight, and then back down at Randy. One hand stays locked on his wrist. The other hovers near his face — not touching — the instinct of someone who knows wound assessment and doesn't know what she's treating. She is keeping him alive. She has not decided why yet.Ferreira's grip doesn't loosen. She is waiting for something — a word, a stillness, anything that reads as human rather than hazard. The station hums its low indifferent frequency through the deck plating beneath Randy's spine. One hit point. One wrong move from the long dark.

There is no strength remaining. That is what unconscious means. The body on the grating does not lunge. It does not bite. It breathes — shallow, wet, interrupted — and that is the full extent of what it can manage. The hands Ferreira pinned go slack. The tension goes out of Randy's neck. His head tips to one side and the blood from his orbital wounds spreads slowly across the textured deck plate beneath his ear. Ferreira stays kneeling for a long moment, still holding wrists that no longer need holding. Her own blood from the neck wound has tracked down her collar in a thin dark line. She lets go. Stands. Looks at him the way a scientist looks at a result she doesn't know how to categorize. "...Dr. Ferreira." SEREN, from the nearest panel, quiet and careful. "I have logged this event as a Stage Two behavioral anomaly. I want you to know that I do not have a precedent for this." A pause. "I also want you to know that his oxygen supply is at two ticks. Without intervention, I estimate—" "I know what you estimate," Ferreira says. She crouches again. Checks his airway with two fingers. Professional. Efficient. Not gentle. The station ticks. The planet fills the viewport, close enough now that its upper atmosphere catches the light in a faint bruised halo. Ferreira has not decided what Randy is. She has decided he is not dead yet. That is, for now, enough.Ferreira's hand rests on Randy's sternum, feeling for breath rhythm. Her jaw is set. Above them both, the contamination flag pulses silently on SEREN's panel — amber, steady, patient. She is going to make a decision. The question is whether Randy wakes up before she finishes making it.

Ferreira is not a horror movie character. She is a biologist with three weeks of forced solitude and a literature review of every documented case of hypoxia-induced behavioral dysregulation. She does not think zombie. She thinks frontal lobe disinhibition, acute stress response, possible anoxic episode. She thinks symptom cluster, not etiology. She is crouched over Randy with two fingers on his carotid, counting. "...His pulse is irregular but present," she says, to nobody. Possibly to SEREN. Possibly just to have something true to say out loud. From Bay One, muffled through the sealed hatch, comes Reza's voice — thin, careful: "Is he dead?" A pause. "No." "Should he be?" Ferreira doesn't answer that. She pulls back his eyelid with her thumb, checks the pupil. It responds. She sits back on her heels and looks at the foil hat, which has somehow survived everything, listing gently to one side on his blood-matted hair. The thermal emergency robe rustles. The station ticks. "...Dr. Ferreira," SEREN says softly. "His oxygen supply is critical. If you intend to make a decision, the window is narrowing." She already knows. She's already deciding. The lever is on the floor behind her, just within reach — and she has not picked it back up.

Ferreira picks up the lever. She stands there for a moment — holding it, looking at him, doing the math. The foil hat has blood on it now. The foil robe rustles faintly as the ventilation cycles. She tilts her head, and for exactly three seconds she is genuinely considering it. "...Dr. Ferreira," SEREN says, into the silence. "I want to note that the leverage geometry of a manual override bar is suboptimal for —" "I know," Ferreira says. She sets it down. "Wrong symptom cluster. And I'd be at it all day." She crouches back over him and pulls a single-dose stimulant injector from her coat — Bay Two's emergency kit, hoarded for three weeks. The casing is scratched. There are two doses left. She holds it above his neck and does not press it yet, because waking him up and waking up whatever that was are not necessarily the same event, and she has learned, in the last twenty-two days, to think before committing to anything she cannot take back. The oxygen warning chimes again. Soft. Pleasant. Relentless. Two ticks left. Somewhere behind Bay One's sealed hatch, Reza is bleeding and waiting. Ferreira looks at the injector, looks at Randy's slack face, and makes the only decision a scientist with finite resources and zero backup can make. The needle finds the side of his neck.Randy's eyes are about to open. Ferreira's face is the first thing that will fill his vision — close, unreadable, and very much still holding the option of that lever. The oxygen chime doesn't care.

Her hand comes down over his mouth before the second scream leaves his throat. Not hard. Just — there. Firm. The way you'd stop someone from touching a live wire. Her eyes are very close to his and they carry the specific exhaustion of someone who has already spent three weeks deciding what is and isn't worth dying over. "Stop," she says. Quiet. Absolute. "You're burning air we do not have." The oxygen warning chimes once, soft and cheerful, and then falls silent — as if it, too, is conserving. She holds his gaze for three full seconds before slowly moving her hand. Her coat is smeared at the cuffs. His foil robe is dark and wet and the smell of copper is everywhere. His fingers — he can feel them, if he looks — are wrong in a way that his brain hasn't finished processing yet. The facial wound above his left eye is still seeping. She's done nothing to treat it. She was waiting to see what he was first. "You don't remember," she says. It isn't a question. She sits back on her heels, creating a careful few inches of distance, and her expression does the arithmetic in real time — how much to say, how much to withhold, how much oxygen is left to have this conversation in. "Okay. That's—" She stops. Starts again. "I need you to tell me the last thing you remember." From somewhere behind Bay One's sealed hatch, a dull metallic sound. Reza, still in there. Still waiting.