Chapter 17: Prime's Choice

Grey light pressed through the viewport like something dead trying to get in. The Badlands had an absence of dark that amounted to the same colorless wash, hour after hour, until Sera couldn't remember what actual illumination looked like. The grey seeped through every crack in the Morningstar's hull, through the gaps where plating had buckled, through the viewport's scratched surface where micro-fractures spread like veins in a bloodshot eye. The deck plating was cold beneath her. She'd stopped noticing that two days ago — or what felt like two days, time being one more thing the Badlands consumed. Her back rested against a bulkhead panel that had lost its heating element sometime during the first night. The bodysuit's fabric, designed for temperature regulation, did nothing here. It was just cloth now. Battered cloth on a battered woman sitting on a cold metal floor. Pip sat beside her, eight inches of stillness. Their wings lay flat against their back, folded tight, and Sera couldn't remember the last time she'd heard them buzz. The colors that normally shifted across Pip's skin — blues, greens, purples — had gone to grey. Not grey like the Badlands grey. Worse. Grey like something that used to be beautiful. In Pip's lap, a circuit board and a tool. Both dead. Both held anyway. Sera's hand rested on the deck between them, close enough to touch Pip's knee. She didn't reach. Pip hadn't moved in hours. Across the bridge — what was left of the bridge — Prime stood at the main console. His dark chassis had gone matte in patches, the glossy mirror-finish eaten away by entropy until he looked like he'd been sanded down by something patient and thorough. His gold accent lines flickered. Not the steady glow she knew, not the warm pulse…