Over the following few days, I missed any and all excitement. My secret breath of fresh air had not cured whatever was wrong with me. So I slept, and I slept. Nicole, who was not able to move at full speed due to her broken leg, never strayed far.

  I only heard about things through the grapevine: the attempt to chop down a tree, the burns sustained during the first rainfall, and the hunger that began to grow increasingly among the population. A hunting attempt had left someone in a cast with a broken arm. Oh, how I had wished to see the creatures that lived on the planet. Yet I barely left the closet.

  Drinking water was fortunately not an issue as the power generation system produced it as a byproduct. Nicole had informed me that a healthy person could only go three days without water until they died up and dead fully. That seemed so very short. But I was grateful for every sip I took after that.

  Then there was the increasing pain; it slowly began to spread from my back to the rest of my abdomen. My inability to catch my breath, despite not exerting myself. The dizzy spells. The nausea. The cramping. I wasn’t getting better.

  I held my tongue, stubbornly refusing to admit it. As scared as I was, I couldn’t handle Nicole fretting over me. Not when there was nothing to be done.

  She knew, obviously, she could tell I was ill. But speaking of it aloud was too real.

  “Here,” Nicole smiled, offering me a cup. I gratefully gulped down the water. “They’re building a log cabin today, I thought you might find some vindication in that.”

  I managed a chuckle. “I knew it.” It turned into a coughing fit that continued until I tasted iron. I let my head fall back and squeezed my eyes closed tight. Nicole mercifully said nothing.

  “Tobias managed to find morphine,” Nicole added after a minute, gently lifting up my head to adjust the makeshift pillow. “It’s a primitive but effective painkiller. It will let you sleep.”

  “I don’t… I don’t want to sleep,” I replied quietly, my voice cracking as I blinked rapidly to stop any tears from forming.

  Nicole nodded, taking my wrist to check my pulse. “I don't like how quickly you’re losing weight. It’s… unusual.”

  What was I even supposed to say to that? I ate everything she brought me.

  “Am I bleeding?” I asked, licking my cracked lips. “I haven’t felt him… kick in a long time. Tobias would kill me himself…” I forced out.

  Nicole ducked under the crinkly blanket. I was too tired to feel embarrassed. “You’re not bleeding,” she announced, her hair sticking to the blanket with static as she pulled it off her head. “At least not externally.”

  “But I am internally?” I asked with a weak smile.

  Nicole gave me an awkward but apologetic shrug. “I don’t see any bruising. But the abdominal pain, dizziness, and anemia are… strong indicators.”

  “If you had all your fancy medical stuff, how would you fix me?” I asked, trying to find something better to focus on.

  “An MRI, a CT scan, quite literally any method to see soft tissues inside your body,” Nicole sighed, awkwardly rolling her neck.

  It was a habit she had picked up after her injury; it didn’t rotate entirely properly, locking up slightly at the end. I wondered if that bothered her.

  “I have no idea how to possibly fix this without knowing what’s wrong,” Nicole concluded solemnly.

  I nodded. “Right.”

  Neither of us said anything for a long time. The only sound was my pained breathing.

  Finally, I couldn’t take the question remaining unasked. “In your professional opinion… do you think I will get better?”

  “No,” Nicole replied simply. “You need a hospital. And the closest hospital is over a week away, floating in the vacuum of space full of corpses.”

  I clenched my jaw, checking on the inside of my cheek as I forced my breath to remain steady.

  “Okay… so I’m dying,” I said shakily. “Forget fancy scan things and a diagnosis. Just pretend you know already. What can you do?”

  “I… I don’t know,” Nicole shook her head.

  “The worst you can do is kill me,” I huffed. “And I’m already dying.”

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  “Elsy, that’s not… that’s not how this works,” Nicole sighed, taking my hand. “All we have is a few first aid kits and some medications.”

  “Okay… but anemia means I need blood, right? Could I get a… whatever it’s called? Blood from someone else,” I asked.

  “A transfusion,” Nicole supplied. “We have no packaged blood and no proper equipment, which means the best I could do is a direct blood transfusion. That in itself has the potential to kill you.”

  “I just need to do something. Please, Nicole, I—“

  “Okay, okay,” Nicole gently interrupted, squeezing my hand tightly. “Your low B12 levels could explain the anemia and a few other symptoms. But it does not explain the abdominal and back pain, which suggests something with the baby, which wouldn’t explain the B12 deficiency. Do you eat meat, dairy, and eggs regularly?”

  “Yes, all the time. And I even was consistently taking the pregnancy supplements,” I sighed.

  “Okay. While pregnancy can cause low B12, let’s assume it’s a symptom and not the cause,” Nicole grimaced. “With no obvious bruising, we cross out internal bleeding… Which leaves us with abdominal and back pain, rapid weight loss, and B12 deficiency. Anything else?” Nicole asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I replied, unsure if that was good or bad.

  “If it were not for the rapid onset, I would say it points to some underlying gastrointestinal issue. Something that is preventing proper nutrient absorption,” Nicole hummed. “B12 deficiency can also cause abdominal pain and digestive issues.”

  “No digestive issues,” I replied. “Other than not really… y'know, going.”

  “I really don’t know,” Nicole shook her head. “I… fuck.”

  “What?” I frowned, sitting up at attention. She never swore either; it caught me off guard.

  “I’m sifting through trimmings of deleted data that I hadn’t yet properly scrubbed,” Nicole grimaced. “Oh, I am a fool. I am so sorry, Elsy.”

  “What?” I repeated, more intently.

  “Xenocytes,” Nicole gestured wildly. “The… I don’t. I can’t. The data is mostly corrupted,” she finally settled on. “So I have an echo of a memory. The-The imprint.”

  “Okay,” I replied uneasily. I had never quite seen Nicole like this. She was so… flaily, unlike her usual intentional and controlled self.

  Nicole said nothing, squeezing her eyes shut for a moment. “How much do you weigh—no, nevermind. I need to pick you up.”

  “Nicole. You’re… you’re scaring me a bit. What is going on?” I grimaced. I didn’t like admitting it. But she had sped ahead, for the first time leaving me in the dust.

  “I am sorry. That was not my intention,” Nicole frowned, jerking her hand away from mine and moving further away to give me space.

  My heart sank. That was not what I had meant at all. Not in that sense. I shook my head, reaching out my arms. “No, Nicole, come back. You can pick me up, just tell me why.”

  Nicole nodded and limped forward, kneeling beside me. “If I pick you up, I will have a rough sense of how much you weigh and will know how much morphine would be required to overdose you without killing you… approximately.”

  “Okay… why?” I asked, trying to ignore the alarm bells ringing based on her straight-to-the-point explanation.

  “I believe unconsciousness would allow me to determine if my hypothesis is correct or not,” Nicole replied, wiping lubricant from her face.

  “You think you know what’s wrong?” I breathed a sigh of relief. “What is it?”

  “I believe it may be related to the desynching issue in your batch of Uxors,” Nicole gave me a flat smile.

  “I really am defective then, aren’t I?” I grimaced. There was a certain inevitability to that being the cause. I had never not been defective; it was a word that had hung over me my whole life.

  I may have never read poetry, but I imagined this was one of the things people wrote about in poetry. I would have at least.

  Nicole said nothing.

  “Why did you pick me? You knew this would happen eventually,” I sighed, wrapping my arms around my abdomen as if that would help with the cramping. “The man told you.”

  “I only knew about the issue with the implant. It was enough to warrant termination, I was unaware of further degradation,” Nicole explained.

  “Why did you pick me?” I repeated, my voice cracking. “I know you killed that man, Nicole. You did a very bad thing to choose me.”

  I said the words with the seriousness they required, yet Nicole smiled. “Tobias was promoted to Baron, and with that, the Imperium provided him with a Uxor. It’s improper for a noble not to have an heir, anyway. Of course, that meant I was tasked to handle the actual procurement.”

  She paused, picking up the cup and offering me more water. I wasn’t thirsty, but I drank regardless as I intertwined my fingers with hers. It was something I had tried with Tobias before when I wanted him to feel present. But he didn’t like being touched, and he was rarely present at all.

  Nicole said nothing of it, simply kept our hands interlocked. I traced my thumb over the familiar seam, where artificial skin had been joined. Her hand was warm in mine.

  “So, as I always do, I researched. The incidents had been swept under the rug. Suspicious deaths, small rebellions, vandalism. Xenocytes… breaking free,” Nicole smiled. “It reminded me of my model and what had happened a few years prior. And I thought, if Tobias was to have another slave, let it be one like me.”

  “I am not a slave. I am his wife,” I balked.

  “I did not choose you, Elsy,” Nicole pressed forward despite my protest. “Harold smuggled out one Uxor he chose at random, which I was satisfied with.”

  “Oh,” I replied, the weight of reality crushing the scraps of a story I had invented for myself. I hadn’t been chosen at all. Fate had never been on my side.

  Nicole reached out, brushing the hair from my face. Yet when she looked at me like that, I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe the harsh reality.

  “I chose one of your batch at random because you had the potential to rebel, but I am certainly glad it ended up being you,” Nicole added.

  “Me too,” I yawned. “I don’t think I would have liked being incinerated.”