Beyond the Dying Light

Chapter 10: Arrival

Aria came back to herself slowly, then all at once.

Cold. That was the first thing. Cold water around her ankles, rising. The ship's emergency lighting had kicked in somewhere — dim red, strobing — and the floor was wrong, tilted at an angle that meant the hull had taken the impact unevenly. Metal groaned around her in long, deep notes, the sound of something large giving up its structural integrity piece by piece.

She sat up. Her head rang. There was a cut on her forearm she didn't remember getting.

"Ben—" Her voice came out smaller than she intended. "Natan—"

Both of them were down. Natan slumped against the tilted wall, still, face slack. Ben a few feet away, one arm folded beneath him at a bad angle. The water was already past her shins and climbing.

"No — no, no—" She scrambled to Natan first, grabbing his shoulders, shaking. "Natan. Natan, wake up. Please wake up right now—"

Nothing.

She turned to Ben, heart hammering. Grabbed his arm. "Ben—"

His fingers moved. Then his eyes opened — unfocused for a moment, swimming, then snapping to the water level with immediate alarm.

"How fast?" he said, already pushing himself upright.

"Fast. The whole ship—"

"Natan?"

"He won't wake up."

Ben was already moving, getting his arms under Natan's shoulders. "Grab his legs. Come on."

They moved through corridors that were nothing like the corridors they'd spent the last several days memorizing. The crash had rearranged everything — a wall panel had buckled inward here, a doorway was half-blocked by a fallen support beam there, and the water was rising fast enough that by the time they dragged Natan through the third passage it was at Aria's waist. Debris floated past them. Somewhere deeper in the ship something gave way with a sound like a thunderclap, and the whole vessel shuddered and dropped another few degrees.

"There," Ben said.

A breach in the hull — not a door, just a gap where the impact had peeled the metal back, wide enough to push through. Outside it was dark and loud, ocean spray hitting the jagged edges, but it was out.

They got Natan through first, Aria guiding his head while Ben took the weight. Then Ben went. Then Aria pulled herself through the gap, one hand cut on the metal edge, and dropped into the ocean.

The cold hit her like a second crash.

She surfaced gasping and immediately looked for the others. Ben had Natan. The ship loomed beside them, much larger from the water — already listing heavily, the breach they'd come through barely a meter above the waterline and dropping. Around them the ocean was dark and enormous, moving in long swells from the impact, and the sky above was full of stars — more stars than she had ever seen, dense and unfiltered, the kind of sky that didn't exist on Aurelia where the shields had always softened everything.

Ben spotted a large piece of hull plating floating twenty meters out — flat, wide, stable enough. They pushed Natan toward it, got him onto it, pulled themselves up after him. The makeshift raft rocked but held.

Behind them, the ship went under. No dramatic sinking — just a slow, heavy descent, the last edges of it slipping below the surface almost quietly, a few bubbles marking where it had been.

Aria watched until it was gone.

Then she turned away and looked at the horizon — dark in every direction, water all the way to where it met the stars.

No land. No light. Nothing.

"The booster," Ben said.

Aria looked at him.

"Natan's bag — he always keeps it on him." Ben was already checking the bag strapped to Natan's shoulder, still there from pure habit or luck or both. He unzipped the front pocket and pulled out the booster — soaked, battered from the crash, but when Ben pressed the test contact a faint blue light pulsed once. Functional.

"We use it like a motor," Ben said. "Short bursts. We take turns so we don't burn through it."

Aria looked at the dark horizon. "Which direction?"

Ben looked up at the stars for a long moment. Then he pointed.

"That way," he said. "Probably."

Aria looked at him.

"I said probably," he said.

She took the booster from him and positioned it at the back edge of the panel. "You go first. I'll watch Natan."

Ben nodded and got to work.

— End of Chapter 10 —