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While the majority of moon AT-5 is occupied by the fourth blood ocean, navigable only by boat or submersible, there is a small rocky continent that holds the COI research station. It has a population of less than fifty people, but was built for more than that; at the time of AT-5’s discovery, the COI was significantly larger, because the nine-day conflict on Filament Station hadn’t occurred yet. Now, it’s too big for the number of people stationed there, which has apparently been a frustration for some time, according to Wilson.
“But today, that’s in our favour,” Wilson explains. “And I also happen to be the guy who makes the schedules, so I’m pretty sure I know where everyone’s supposed to be.”
True to his word, the cramped, dingy hallway is completely deserted, but Simon can’t help the suspicious glances he casts at each and every shadow. The last thing he feels comfortable doing is wandering around in the open on a COI base, but he doesn’t have another choice—it’s trust Jack and his friends or run off on his own, and there’s no way in hell he’s leaving Jack behind now.
Simon knows how it feels to be abandoned, and he’s not going to go through that again if there’s anything he can do about it. So he’ll be good, and trusting, and stick close to Jack’s side, and all three of them will see that he’s worth keeping around. That it’s good to keep the Butcher on your side.
Wilson calls them to a halt and kneels on the ground. “Here it is,” he declares, tapping a wall panel that’s a slightly lighter colour than all the rest. “Just going to take me a minute to get it open, so keep an eye out, would you?” He looks up at Simon as he asks the question, and Simon nods.
“Got it.” Simon straightens up and folds his arm over his chest, trying to emulate the posture of the COI guards that stood watch outside his cell. He casts his eyes along the corridor, taking in the details of the station’s architecture; he instinctively compares it to Eden, because that’s all he really knows. Where Eden is clean, wide open, well-lit, and old, the COI’s research facility looks cobbled together out of whatever they could spare, and even though it’s relatively new, reddish-brown rust creeps up the inside of every metal surface, giving it an uncanny feeling of age that isn’t true. The ceilings are low and the hallways narrow, and Simon realizes, all of a sudden, that the cramped space inside the Iron Lung wasn’t designed to torture convicts—this is just how the COI lives. Everything is a little too small, presumably to conserve resources.
The wall panel clatters to the floor with a loud bang, and Simon’s head reflexively snaps over to look at Wilson.
“Sorry,” Wilson says, with a sheepish smile. “Butterfingers.” He wiggles the offending digits as if it’s supposed to be funny, but Simon is the only one that can see them, and he’s too jittery to laugh.
“Come on, Sevens, get on with it,” Jack hisses. He’s impatiently shifting his feet, making his claws tap and scratch against the floor, like the tick-tick-tick of his internal clock projected outwards. “Do you want to get caught?”
“I’m done! I’m done, it’s open,” Wilson replies, hastily, as he stands up and dusts his hands off on his cargo pants. “I have to go down last to seal it back up again, so… into the garbage chute, flyboy.”
Simon grimaces and takes an instinctive step back. “I did not agree to a garbage chute—”
“No, no, it’s—” Wilson pinches his nose and sighs. “Fuck, sorry. It’s from a movie. It’s really just a maintenance shaft, I promise.”
“Never heard it before.” Simon peers down into the gap, taking in the ladder that stretches down into the darkness. He doesn’t really care about whatever Wilson’s quoting, anyway; he just wants to get out of the open. “Jack, you come down after me.” Without waiting for a response, Simon slips into the gap and starts to climb down, his boots clanging on the metal rungs with each step.
The ladder is fairly short; even if Jack had slipped and fallen, he would have had barely enough space to hurt himself, and the space at the bottom is so cramped that Simon has to crouch to avoid hitting his head. Jack squeezes in next to him, and his arm brushes up against Simon’s, but neither of them say anything.
A moment later, Wilson slides down the ladder, but there’s not enough space for all three of them to huddle at the bottom. Simon has barely a second of warning before Wilson crashes into them both, sending the whole group of them tumbling to the ground.
“Ow,” Simon mutters, from the bottom of the pile, but the dull ache in his elbow is nothing compared to the agony of ripping off his own arm, so it’s mostly sardonic.
“Sorry. We’re heading this way.” Wilson quickly disentangles himself from the pile as if it’s nothing, then ducks away into a nearby crawlspace without even a pause to catch his breath.
“Keep up, Simon,” says Jack, and Simon nearly grumbles in response, but then he looks up and sees the tiny smirk tugging at Jack’s lips.
“Yeah, yeah, yuk it up,” Simon replies, as he shakes his head and pushes himself up to sitting. He tries and fails not to stare at Jack’s baggy pants pulled tight over his ass as the other man turns to crawl after Wilson, and the only thing that tears him away is his shirt riding up and making his tailbone itch. “Shoot, one second. Wardrobe malfunction.”
“I just told you to keep up!” Jack’s voice echoes back through the narrow space.
“This is just a connecting shaft, so it’s pretty tight, but it’s short; we’ll wait for you on the other side, okay?” Wilson adds.
“Please don’t say ‘shaft’ and ‘tight’ in the same sentence ever again.”
They laugh.
Simon drags his nails over his back and reaches up to tug his shirt down. It’s not actually his shirt; it’s a dark grey one of Wilson’s that hangs off of his bones so severely that Rob had to rework his old harness into something more akin to a pair of suspenders. The texture is much softer than his old prison uniform, and part of him is hoping that Wilson won’t ask for it back.
But as he’s adjusting his shirt, his knuckles brush down over the base of his spine, and he pauses. He’d almost forgotten about the odd protrusion on his back in all of the excitement of escaping from quarantine, but now he finds his skin pulled taut over a singular point, almost like a spike growing out of his spine. It’s also incredibly sensitive, sending a shudder through his entire nervous system when his fingers brush around the base, and he bites back a surprised gasp.
“Simon?” Jack’s voice cuts into his thoughts, and Simon reflexively yanks his shirt down. “You good?”
“Fine!” Simon replies, with a very convincing voice crack. “I’m coming now.” He hopes that the bagginess of the shirt will disguise his ailment until he can figure out what it is; though with how Rob and Wilson reacted to Jack’s chicken legs, he doubts they’ll throw him out. He still doesn’t want them to find out anyway.
Simon crawls through the vent as quickly as he can, trying not to think about the steel walls pressing in on him. At the other end, it opens up to the largest hallway he’s seen yet—though ‘hallway’ feels a bit generous, as most of it just appears to be carved out of the moon’s rocky underbelly, with support beams that Simon can just barely make out in the light of Wilson’s flashlight.
“This doesn’t look like a maintenance tunnel,” Simon comments, brow furrowed. “Why is it so dark?”
“All the maintenance tunnels are old mineshafts,” Wilson explains. “You’d be surprised what it turns out we can salvage from moon rock. But eventually the returns weren’t worth the effort, and the higher-ups shut down the mining. The lights got repurposed.” He turns and starts to walk into the darkness, flashlight beam lighting a small spot ahead of him to lead the way. “Which means that even if they come looking for us down here, we’ll be nearly impossible to find. And I know these tunnels like the back of my hand.”
Simon starts to follow Wilson, but then he notices that Jack has gotten distracted, turning his head this way and that to peer oddly at all of the walls. He taps him on the shoulder as he goes by and startles Jack from his stupour.
“Hey!”
“Hey yourself.” Simon takes Jack’s elbow; he doesn’t know how accurate his new vision is, and he doesn’t want to find out when he loses his only friend in an abandoned mineshaft with a concerning amount of ‘condensation’ reflecting the light off of the walls. “Slowpoke.”
After a moment, Wilson breaks the silence by asking, “Have you really never seen Star Wars?”
Simon blinks. “Who, me?”
“Yeah, you. That movie I referenced earlier, it was Star Wars.”
Simon shrugs, trying to appear nonchalant. “Never heard of it.”He doesn’t mention that it sounds like a COI propaganda film.
Wilson pauses, and in the shadows, Simon can just barely make out the incredulous expression on his face. “Does Eden not have Earth movies?” he asks.
Simon twitches and instinctively stands up straighter (though Wilson is still a head taller than him). “Eden has good movies,” he replies, pointedly. “Like Night Train to Europa and Red Heaven.”
“Those are both Martian movies.”
“Exactly.”
Wilson waves a hand dismissively, backing down from Simon’s challenge. “Well, Star Wars doesn’t count because it came out before there were any colonies on Mars, so it couldn’t have been made there anyway. The Terran-Martian movie discourse isn’t applicable.”
Before Simon can respond, Jack cuts in. “Where are we going, Sevens?” he demands. “We’re goddamn fugitives and you’re wasting air yammering about a four-hundred-year-old movie.”
“First of all, there’s plenty of air down here,” Wilson informs him, matter-of-factly, “and second of all, we’re not really going anywhere, I just figure that it’s best to keep moving. Do you want to go somewhere?”
Jack presses his lips into a thin line, then mutters, “Fine, whatever.”
Simon lets go of Jack’s arm. “What, you really hate movies, or something?”
“I just want you two to take this shit seriously,” Jack snaps, and even though Simon has already removed his hand, he smacks it further away. “I could still be dying of radiation poisoning for all we know! Just because it’s not noticeably progressing doesn’t mean that I don’t have fucking cancer or something!”
Wilson stops and turns back to look at them both, accidentally shining the flashlight in Simon’s eyes in the process. Spots fly through Simon’s vision, but he just shakes his head and doesn’t complain, because he figures this might as well happen at this point. “Strictly speaking, you wouldn’t have cancer, at least not for a while,” he puts in. “Tam gave the engineering department a whole lecture on radiation before we installed that damn thing, the dosage is so high that it actually just stops your cells from reproducing—”
“Well that’s very reassuring,” Jack interrupts, dryly, “but I also bet it doesn’t usually turn people into lizards, either, so who fuckin’ knows.”
But Simon’s brain is caught on one word that slipped from Wilson’s mouth so easily that he nearly didn’t notice it, and he can’t stop himself from asking: “Sorry— Tam? As in, Tamsin? From the SM-8?”
Wilson’s head snaps over to look directly at Simon. “How do you know that? The SM-8 went kablooey months before you got here—sorry, Jack—and I didn’t think they would give you that kind of info.”
Jack shakes his head. “It’s fine.”
“I, uh…” Simon abruptly realizes the situation he’s placed himself in; he can’t formulate a lie off the top of his head, and the truth sounds absurd. He decides to say it anyway. “I’ve met her. Or, I thought I did, at least, in a… a dream, or a hallucination, or something.”
“Describe her.”
“About this tall”—Simon gestures above his head—“dark skin, braids, greying hair… she said she was a doctor. I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve been seeing shit since I got dropped in the ocean and I know I’m not crazy, I’m not.”
A beat passes.
“…we should keep moving,” Jack says.
Irritation throbs in Simon’s temple. “That’s her, isn’t it? And nobody’s shown me photos, or anything, I swear. I know because I met her yesterday.”
“Is that what you were doing when you passed out?” Jack demands. “Is that where you go when you zone the fuck out? You’re meeting with our dead coworkers?”
“I can’t fucking explain it, I just know that that’s what happened,” Simon snaps. “Come on, Jack, you’re literally getting mutated into some kind of weird ass dinosaur thing, and this is where you draw the line?”
“Weird ass dinosaur is not the same as seeing dead people, Simon!”
“That one’s not a pre-Martian movie,” Wilson puts in, and it’s so unbelievably jarring that Simon’s annoyance slams directly into a wall. Both him and Jack immediately abandon their conflict to turn and look at him. “What? ‘I see dead people’? From The Sixth Sense?”
“This is fucking pointless,” Jack exclaims, and he throws his hands up in exasperation. “You’re both fucking insufferable. I don’t know how I’ve ever tolerated any of this fucking shit. Introducing you two to each other was a goddamn mistake.” And he storms off, further into the tunnel, forcing Simon and Wilson to hurry to follow him.
“He was different before he got hit with the cancer ray,” Wilson says, quietly.
“I heard that!”
A pause.
“And you’re the one who said it’s not fucking cancer!”