Chapter Text
It's been a year and Grace still takes a moment to remember where he is when he wakes up. His eyes blink open. It's still dark, the light of the moon through the fog peering in his window, broken into pieces by the angular frame. It comes to him at once, the memories rushing in like the tide, the mantra he taught himself in quiet moments in the silent absence.
My name is Ryland Grace. I taught eighth grade in San Francisco, California. I majored in molecular biology.
Grace looks out the window. It's an approximation of Earth, but he can see the details. The rocks are different, streaked with elements that would have been gasses back home.
My name is Ryland Grace and I am 16.3 light-years away from Earth.
Grace realizes what woke him up when it happens again, a rhythmic knock on his door. Thump thump thump. Grace gets up, tosses on one of his sweaters, and walks in socked feet and his pajama pants to the door. The knock comes again, more urgent. Grace yawns and opens it.
"Alright, alright, don't break it down," Grace grouses, peering out into the half-light.
Rocky is on his doorstep, shifting from foot to foot in his exo-suit. Grace has learned Eridian, though he can't speak it. The translator was clunky, and even though he came to associate Rocky with the voice in the computer, Rocky's real voice has eclipsed those few confusing months. Eridians have a plethora of accents, even if they all share a lingua franka, and Rocky is no exception.
"I know you're a heavy sleeper but geez," Rocky huffs.
If Grace had to describe it, Rocky's accent reminds him of a collegue he had from Boston. He tends to drop the more rhotic sounds, clipping off trills and avoiding the more guttural scraping noises entirely. Certain notes get drawn out too, ending in more of a hum.
"Okay I'm up now," Grace says, gesturing at himself, a bit more than half dressed and a little less than half awake.
Rocky pauses. He seems… anxious. Grace feels something still in his chest. Rocky wouldn't come in the middle of the night, wake up Grace, for good news.
"Come in," Grace says, stepping aside. "We can sit and talk."
Rocky tromps inside, making soft noises on the simulated hardwood floors. Grace still marvels at that, the way the Eridian scientists were able to take what most people would consider rocks and build something so familiar out of it. Rocky settles in the living room, on what passes for a couch on Erid. Grace sits on his side, on a more Earth-like piece of furniture. Rocky seems to think for a minute, considering before speaking.
"You talked to us about radiation," Rocky says. He's being careful, his words precise in a way Grace hasn't heard in years. He leans forward as Rocky continues. "The… particles. In the air. Invisible. They make us sick and die."
Grace nods. One of the first things he did when he got to Erid, after laying on the synthetic beach for an hour, was talk to the Erid leaders about radiation. It felt… familiar. Sitting in a room, feeling woefully inadequate to be telling people anything like he was an expert. Rocky keeps talking.
"Erid has a new moon."
"What?" Grace asks, snapping out of his thoughts.
"Outside the rings," Rocky explains. "They want me to help build a probe to visit it."
"Wait wait," Grace says, standing up to pace. "How do we just get a new moon? They don't just appear out of nowhere!"
Rocky trills, an unhappy noise. Grace doesn't think about how he just referred to Erid as his, as theirs. It might as well be. Grace doesn't know when that solidified in his mind.
"You've already slept a whole sun cycle," Rocky clicks, referring to the fact that Eridian days are much shorter than Earth days, "And you're still grumpy."
Grace goes to move his glasses and realizes he isn't wearing them.
"Sorry Rocky," Grace says. He sits down. Rocky untenses, his legs slumping a bit more against the stone slab.
"The moon just appeared," Rocky explains. "One of the satellites captured the moment. I brought… ah."
Rocky rummages around in his satchel before producing a smooth tablet made of rock. Grace couldn't hope to read Eridan documents, made of a series of bumps that are at different distances and sizes to create the words. Videos are more complicated, a series of tones that convey distance. The tablet Rocky hands him is similar to the device he built on the Hail Mary to translate color into depth, but in reverse. Each tone registers as a value, from black to white. It was a collaborative effort with some of the top technicians on Erid, and for the hundredth time Grace feels his chest swell with the depth of the Eridian kindness for him. Grace takes the tablet and Rocky pokes it a few times, initiating the sequence.
Grace watches the black and white image, with the rings of Erid clearly visible, one of its moons already in frame. Grace named the five moons of Erid after the rivers in Hades, and he can tell by the egg shape on the tablet that the one he's looking at is Cocytus, the closest and most irregular of Erid's moons. Grace watches as the moon spins past the satellite slowly. And then it appears. A round object, just beyond the rings, a rough circle suddenly starts moving, as if it was always there, orbiting around Erid.
"Holy crap…" Grace says softly.
"Grace you aren't wearing your glasses," Rocky says. "Are you sure you can see it, question?"
"Yes I can see it," Grace snaps. "I'm not blind without them."
"Just checking," Rocky says with a placating gesture. "Your eyes are very prone to malfunctioning."
Grace sits down on the couch, still holding the tablet. He touches the sides, rewinding and replaying it. The object really does just… appear. Grace thinks back to what Rocky said.
"Wait Eridians are going to it?"
"Sending a probe," Rocky corrects. "Data collection."
"Can you send a camera?" Grace asks.
"That was partly what I wanted to ask, if you'd let me," Rocky huffs. "Adrian wants to talk to you, to make sure you can see the camera output."
Grace nods, standing, and then realizes he's still half dressed. "Are we going like… now?"
"Unless you're too grumpy."
"I'm not grumpy," Grace says, "I'm wonderful."
Rocky laughs, a chittering sort of bark, as Grace steps back into his room. He makes his bed first, not perfectly but just making sure nothing is wrinkled. Fabric isn't really something they have on Erid. There is a sort of leather made from the bacterial mats found in the sunlight layer, but Grace thinks it's a textural nightmare. Grace rummages through his closet, finding one of his T-shirts and a pair of cargo pants. He looks at the shirt for a few minutes. It was Yao's. They can't afford to not use it, because of the aforementioned fabric shortage, but Grace always feels weird when he does. His memories have come back, but even then he didn't really know Yao. Didn't get the chance.
Grace pulls on the black shirt and his glasses, taking a few more minutes to get his socks and shoes on, and heads back to the living room. Rocky is standing, shifting from foot to foot. Grace yawns, pushing up his glasses to rub his eye. Rocky hums in sympathy, a noise almost a mimic of Grace's own yawns.
"I'm ready to go," Grace says.
"Good," Rocky says, "You take forever to put on your skin."
"Ugh don't call it that," Grace says with a shiver. "You know what clothes are. Eridians wear clothes."
Rocky chitters as they walk out of the house into the night. Grace closes the door behind them, mostly for Rocky's sake, and they start across the cliff above the water. They walk in silence, listening to the rustle of the synthetic grass. It's a bit more… sharp than Earth grass. Made of a bit more silica. But it waves in the artificial breeze all the same.
The edge of the dome is mica sheets, thick enough to withstand the pressure of Erid, thin enough to let in light. There's two exits, one a pressurization chamber for Rocky and any other Eridian that wants in and the other for Grace. He opens the seal, using the whistle notes Adrian programmed, and steps inside. Suiting up takes a minute, but the solid pressure suit keeps Grace from turning into a crushed soda can so the discomfort is worth it. After the first rudimentary suit Rocky made to show Grace his ship, the scientists back on Erid were able to fashion a more skin-tight one. He steps into it like Iron Man and seals each panel in front of him, like buttoning up a shirt. Once he's suited up and has his oxygen tank strapped on Grace pushes the button to pressurize the airlock.
Even with the suit 26 atmospheres is dizzying. The heat is suffocating, and Grace hears the fans whir on, keeping his flesh from cooking off his bones. Grace can taste the magnetic field, a strange buzzing in his teeth. Rocky shakes out of his suit, bouncing out into the dark Eridian air with a little dance. Rocky leads the way to the lab not far from Grace's dome.
The surface of Erid is dark, almost impenetrable to Grace's human eyes. His flashlight helps, but even then it's a knife in an endless blanket of darkness. The ground is dusty, a little squishy, with huge boulders and pillars of black rock. The Eridians live in cave systems, a maze of warrens forming the city around them. Grace wasn't shocked to find out that Rocky was from one of the Eridian capitals, Grace's dome residing in the governing campus research division. Essentially a top university.
Other Eridians whistle and chrip at them as they walk the path to Adrian's lab, not too far, but far enough for them to encounter a few students and families. Grace can tell young Eridians from the elders not just because of their size and brighter colors but because the kids are often found crawling or riding on their parents. Rocky knocks on the lab door before entering, a sliding sheet of rock across one of the cliff faces.
"Rocky! Grace," Adrian says, waving to them.
Adrian is bigger than Rocky, closer to the size of a small pony, their carapace a deep blue color with flecks of orange zircon. They have similar carvings on their skin to Rocky, one in particular they both share. Grace can read them now, sort of. He knows that one ties them together as one family. Mates. Adrian scuttles over, their hands dancing over Rocky's surface as they chirp and sing. It reminds Grace a bit of how ants greet each other with their antennae. Then they go the same to Grace, but less intensely. An Eridian hug.
"Come this way," Adrian says, tugging Grace gently with one of their arms towards a low bench.
They turn on the light, a bulb coated in xenonite to cast a yellow glow over the workbench. Grace turns off the flashlight. The camera is different from anything that would exist on Earth. Adrian demonstrates by aiming the boxy camera at Rocky.
"And then you push the button to scan, like we would with a normal camera," Adrian says.
The box emits a short pulse of noise, high pitched, followed by a sort of whirring, like a 3D printer. Adrian takes the thin sheet of xenonite from a slot in the camera when the whirring stops, showing it to Grace by holding it up to the light.
"It's a lithograph," Grace says in awe.
Adrian whistles in agreement, tapping their feet. "Yes! I got the idea from your Earthtapes. It's readable by both Eridians and you because of the differences in texture."
Grace smiles, turning to Adrian. "That's amazing!"
"Thank you," Adrian says. "We're sending the probe tonight. Hopefully it can bring back samples. We're using the fishing line technique Rocky invented."
Rocky stands taller, trilling.
"I'm the one who did a lot of that work you know," Grace says.
"I thought of it," Rocky defends.
"You're both very smart," Adrian says. Grace feels a little like when he would break up a fight between two students, but he tries not to sulk about it. Adrian changes the subject, "Rocky did you tell Grace what we talked about, question?"
Rocky perks up, "No not yet."
"Tell me what?" Grace asks.
"We're having a clutch," Adrian says.
"I'm carrying it," Rocky interjects.
Grace looks between both of them. Then he smiles. "That's great!"
"We want you to be our…" Adrian makes a noise Grace hasn't heard before.
"Sorry I don't understand," Grace says. Rocky and Adrian exchange a few words, too fast for Grace to understand. Then Rocky speaks.
"Like… guidance. I… have no hatchmates left. Adrian is far from home. Children need a big family, to look out for them. We want to ask you if you'd do that… for us."
Grace thinks back to those first nights on the Hail Mary with Rocky, when the Eridian watched him sleep every night. Those lonely days Rocky must have slept alone and scared. How important it is for Eridians to look out for each other. How small some of his students are. How big and dark Erid is. And further back, to his students on Earth.
"I think we have a word for that on Earth," Grace says. "Godparent."
Rocky chirps happily. "Godparent! Grace, will you be their godparent, question?"
Grace smiles. "Of course."
Rocky bounds over, Grace dropping to his knees to return the embrace. Adrian follows, slower, enveloping both of them with their forelegs. Grace can hear the soft hum, the Eridian equivalent of a heartbeat, all around him, like a bubble of sound. He holds onto Rocky, loops one arm around Adrian's leg. Grace feels tears falling down his face. He's home.
Grace spends the next two weeks trying not to think about the moon. Eridian days and weeks are complicated, so graciously Rocky and the others who interact with Grace often have adopted Earth times. Which means he teaches roughly every two days for a few hours. He's giving a lecture on radiation when one of the pebbles raises her hand.
"Yes," Grace says, pausing to point at her.
"Doctor Mister Grace, what's going on with the moon, question?"
Grace feels a sudden rush of deja vu. For a moment he's looking at a different little girl, wide eyes and dark hair. The Petrova line. The sun dying. He opens his mouth, closes it again. She trills, tapping her foot twice. Grace has them pick names on the first day of class, and she chose Maryam. Grace looks at her. Looks back to the board.
"We're not sure," Grace says honestly. "It doesn't seem dangerous. But we can talk about it more when the probe returns with more news."
Maryam settles back into a crouch, her white-speckled carapace leaning against the dark rocks. No one speaks for a moment. Grace raises his pen.
"Alright," Grace says, putting on a smile. "Let's talk about Chernobyl."
Grace walks away after class, up the trail past his house, to the tree Rocky built for him. It's not made of wood, not exactly. The vegetation on Erid is mostly on high mountains, ones that stretch above the living layer. The plants below the clouds are more like Earth mushrooms, pulling nutrients from the ground rather than the sky. Grace touches the bark. It doesn't feel like home, but it feels close. He sits down, among the waving blades of shore-grass.
Grace looks out at the water, the sound of waves and wind, the blanket of fog over the coast. Grace suddenly feels the weight of it, the distance between him and San Francisco, to Earth. Grace draws his knees to his chest. He will never see another human again. He loves Rocky, Adrian, all the pebbles he's taught. But part of him misses it, going to a cafe and ordering a coffee, biking through the streets cluttered with debris of human life. He reaches out to touch the grass. Grace breathes. He laughs softly. He misses the mice, the creatures that scraped by at the edges of his life, the bugs in the weeds, the seagulls harassing tourists. He's alone in his terrarium, and he is grateful, beyond grateful. But his human brain feels the loneliness like a missing limb.
"Grace? Where, question?"
Grace looks up. Adrian is cresting the hill, blue carapace a deep cobalt in the daylight. Their cephalothorax is taller than Rocky's, a northern Eridian trait. They carefully pick their way along to Grace, the sun shining off the sheets of xenonite protecting them.
"Hi, Adrian," Grace says, waving an arm.
Adrian settles down next to him, providing a shield from the wind. They curl their legs under them, like a cat, something Rocky doesn't do often.
"I like your water," Adrian says. Their voice is more steady, like rolling waves, more clicks and pops than the way Rocky talks. "It reminds me of home."
"Yeah? Where are you from?" Grace asks. They hang out a lot, and yet hardly ever does Adrian speak of their own life. Mostly they sit and look at the waves.
Adrian hums. "The informal name is Cold Stone, Jagged Cliffs. But if you want I can sing you its name."
Grace nods. Eridian names are dense. In just a few seconds of speech they can convey an entire scene. Most places and people have short informal names and longer, more poetic ones. Rocky gave Grace an informal name, just like he gave Adrian since he didn't know anything about either enough to give them a song. Grace feels pretty proud of his namesong now, being the only human who has one.
"I'd love to hear the full name," Grace says.
Adrian hums. The cliffs are high, the surf crashes ice at the edge of the rocks, rich with tungsten and cobalt, but we are unafraid. Our people are strong, we belong here as much as the ice and the cliffs.
"I hope it brings you as much peace as it brings me," Adrian says.
Grace smiles. "This place is perfect."
Adrian makes a soft purring noise. "Thank you. I'm sorry about the sand."
"It's okay," Grace says with a smile. "I like the coarse grains."
Adrian laughs, a sound like falling stones. They sit there, quiet for a while. Grace leans on Adrian a little. They've been… for lack of a better word Grace's rock. They listen to the waves. Adrian doesn't say much, now or ever. The things they tell Grace get folded away neatly, careful and cherished. Grace watches the lights beginning to turn orange, a simulated sunset. He's tired.
"Sleep," Adrian says. "I'll watch you."
Grace hums. Adrian hums back. Grace closes his eyes. The wind smells like salt and stone. Adrian starts to sing, a soft vibration with meaningless syllables. Grace feels his eyes closing. Adrian keeps singing softly. Grace drifts off.
Grace wakes up in bed. Someone's knocking again. He turns to look at the time. It's early, but the light is coming in blue through the curtains. Grace stands up, yawning and stretching. He smooths the blanket but doesn't put an incredible effort into it. He pulls on his robe, heading for the door. Grace wishes vaguely that his life had less of these early morning wakeup calls with Earth-shattering revelations. Erid-shattering? Grace puzzles that has he opens the door.
Rocky is there, but so is Adrian. He's tapping from foot to foot, chittering softly.
"Rocky? Adrian?" Grace asks, pushing his glasses to a more acceptable angle.
"The probe came back," Adrian says. "We need you in the lab. It's urgent."
Grace swallows thickly. More memories wash over him. The smell of salt, the taste of black coffee and no sleep, dark, storm blue eyes and blond hair tossed by the wind. He nods.
"Let me get a shirt on."
Grace follows Adrian and Rocky through the city, to Adrian's lab. It's buzzing, many other Eridians working like a hive of ants, crawling across the ceiling and walls and floor. Adrian asks for something to one of them, in the Northen dialect Grace isn't fully familiar with. Then they bring over the documents, translated into English print along with a vial of something dark red.
"Look at this, it's from the samples taken from the moon," Adrian says, handing him the papers and the vial. It's chemical makeup analysis. 90% water, 8% protein… 0.9% inorganic salts…
"That's… that's human blood," Grace says, his eyes going wide as he stares at the vial in his other hand. He flips to another page, seeing the scan from the planet. It's red, with jagged mountains of ivory rising from the ocean. He feels like he's going to throw up.
"It's O negative," Adrian says. "We tested it based on the medical team's research about your blood."
Grace feels dizzy. A moon entirely covered in human blood. What… could that possibly mean. It breaks every convention he's ever heard of.
"That's… that's not possible!" Grace protests.
Rocky sways side to side, "Adrian tell him the other thing."
"What?" Grace asks, unconsciously tapping his foot twice.
"The collector picked something else up," Adrian says. "This way."
They lead him through a hall, down a flight of stairs, communication wires singing as messages fly across the network. Adrian leads him into another room, with a big tank in the middle and a few smaller off to the sides. Grace approaches the big tank. It's sealed, pressurized, filled with water. Grace can see a form inside, floating. It's like nothing he's ever seen before. Maybe during an undergrad elective, learning about animals, some unit about deep sea fish. It's nearly twenty feet long, jet black scaly skin. Black hair billows around its face, skeletal with high cheekbones and a strong brow. Its arms are drawn up to its chin, strangely studded with teeth. It has ribs, too many of them, torso too long, just shy of human. Gills flutter on the side of its chest, blood red filaments peeking out from black skin.
"What… what is that?" Grace asks, his voice coming out like a whisper.
"It was in the collection chamber. We didn't expect there to be… life," Adrian explains. "Somehow this one survived the trip down from the moon. We… did our best. Copied what we did for your dome and what the probe found about the surface of the planet. There's others, but they're all small… didn't survive the journey."
"This is nuts," Grace says softly.
Adrian hums in agreement. They say a word Grace hasn't heard before. At his puzzled look they explain.
"We have a word in my language," Adrian says. "It means the river is flowing backwards."
"Crazy," Grace says.
"Crazy," Adrian agrees.
Grace leaves the lab. He goes back home. It's one of his days off, so he goes to the shore. Grace picks up a handful of stones, not soft and weathered like the rocks of the Pacific Northwest, but more like scaled up sand grains. Grace draws the pad of his finger over the rough edge. He feels his pulse in his chest, his wrists. He takes a breath. He can't stop thinking about the creature in the tank. It breaks everything he knows, everything he's studied. Grace tries not to think about it, tries to focus on the waves. He can't.
Grace walks back to the house. He has a phone, or something approximating it. It only calls one place; Adrian's command center. Grace feels bad about bothering them again, but he knows he won't be able to rest until he solves this. The feeling in his gut is similar to when he asked Stratt for the astrophage, when he begged her to let him help. He hopes this doesn't end the same way.
"Adrian," Grace says over the phone. "Can I have one of the fish?"
Grace sets up a makeshift lab in his spare room. No one's been using it, since the only people who visit him are Rocky and Adrian, and when Rocky stays over he sleeps in Grace's bed. Most of the stuff is already in there, taken from the Mary when the biodome was first built, languishing in boxes. Grace clears everything into the dining room, exchanging it for the table. After a fair amount of rooting around he has the basics set up.
Adrian brings the fish in a glass case, preserved in formaldehyde. It's pretty gross looking, and somehow nothing like the one in the big tank. This one is small, with a body much like a regular fish, but… Grace looks into the case with a vague sense of dread. It has a distinctly human face. The curve of its brow, the delicate bones in its cheeks. It's the unmistakable face of a Caucasian woman, blending perfectly into the blood-red scales.
"I don't like it," Adrian says.
"Me neither," Grace says. He puts on his gloves and carefully lifts the fish up and onto the towel on the table. It's not the most sterile, but he's doing the best with what he has.
He starts with extracting some of the blood from the fish. It's coagulated and gross, but he is able to get some. Following his hunch, he analyzes the makeup. It comes back the same. He doesn't have the antibodies to check if it's human specifically, but that would make sense. Grace does a G-band stain, opens the fish up to look at its organs, everything. With every test, his throat tightens. A growing list of things that don't make sense.
"What are you finding, question?" Adrian asks. They've been keeping him company as he flits around the lab, curled up in the corner.
"It's got human DNA," Grace says.
He looks at the G-band under the microscope, but it doesn't change. 23 pairs of chromosomes. His stomach lurches, looking over at his workbench, the curve of the pale cheekbone under the overhead light. She looks like she could be sleeping, if it weren't for the pallor in her face, the sunken look to her closed eyelids.
Adrian makes an irritated chittering noise.
"Yeah," Grace says. He sits down heavily. "It just… doesn't make sense."
He reaches into his pocket to find his glasses. To his surprise the vial of blood is still in it. Grace holds it up to the light. It looks like something's… moving. Grace stands up, starts prepping another slide. Adrian chirps as Grace works, putting the slide under the microscope.
"No way," Grace breathes.
"What is it, question?"
"Adrian," Grace says, looking up. He feels his heart beating in his chest, thick and heavy like footfalls on hardwood. "There's Eridian bacteria in the blood."