Seated at the table in the mess when the fire broke out, Mace had suffered burns to a degree and percentage that did not, according to Icarus, bode well for human survival. His pain made him restless. Almost insensibly so. Like his whole body had become an amputated ghost limb. On their eighth day homebound, he hauled himself silently off his cot and lurched to his feet.

"Mace, you should stay down." Capa spoke flat-voiced from his place at the prep table, where he was laying out fresh air-wrap and cleansers.

"He's right. At least for another day or so." Trey laid off helping Capa. He went to the mechanic, reached to lay his hand on the man's arm-- and Mace gasped harshly:

"Stay away from me, you fucking-- you fuck-- you Goddamn freak." He staggered past Trey as Trey jerked his hand back; he paused, panting, at the door. "God, it's hot in here."

He left. They listened to him move off along the corridor, his retreating steps the shuffle-and-wheeze of an old man.

"I should go after him," Capa said.

Trey shook his head. "You'd probably do him more damage trying to bring him back."

A handful of hours later, when respect for Mace's pride and pain gave way to concern, Trey approached Capa in the far reaches of the engineering section, where the ship's power plant ground out their motion home from a series of huge gears and pistons straight out of an art-deco yesteryear pragmatic, beautifully tooled, slick with glistening black grease. Capa had had a grim vision of finding Mace mangled to chunks and gristly red pulp amongst these man-tall gears. Later, he would think the truth was worse.

"I found him," Trey said. He was shuddering; his eyes were filled with tears. And his hands: his hands looked as though they'd been scalded or burned.

Mace stared at Capa with opaque eyes. Rimed-white eyes.

From his coffin. Or display case. His body moved slightly with the nudging of invisible currents. He was facing them, fully submerged, from the aquarium-like structure that housed the mainframe and its coolant.

"He said he was hot," Trey whispered. "He said he felt hot. God, Capa..."

Capa felt his gorge rising. He looked away, stayed silent until the urge to vomit had passed, had re-manifested itself merely as a sheen of clammy sweat on his forehead.

"Let's get him out of there," he said.

But they couldn't. Even with gloves, protective clothing, or, at Trey's horrible but practical suggestion, a grappling hook intended for EVA use. Icarus, like the arctic oceans of Earth, like the greatest of the Great Lakes of North America, the lake that declared itself superior to all others, near whose pine-forested rocky shores Capa had grown up and whose ice-covered groanings and great booming crackings sometimes haunted his sleep even now, was unwilling to give up her dead. They grabbed, missed. They splashed themselves with the coolant, which clung and burned like a napalm based not on gasoline and fire but on the sheer embodiment of cold. But still Mace-- or what had once been Mace-- avoided rescue.

Capa was sweating. His mind was swimming in agonizing contemplation around coolant burns to his torso, his arms, his hands. He was shaking with exhaustion, frustration, and horror.

"What are we going to do--?"

Trey, panting and sweating, looked back at him in helpless silence.

Icarus answered for him:

Present activities in mainframe housing threaten disruption to coolant flow and to mainframe functions. Recommended action: cessation of said activities. Repeat: present activities in mainframe housing threaten disruption to coolant flow and to mainframe functions--

So they left Mace where he was. They climbed down off the gantry over the coolant tank and staggered out of the mainframe chamber. Away from Mace and the blank white accusation in his opaque eyes.

When Cassie heard about Mace, she cried. Different it was from the sounds she made out of physical pain. A quiet, hopeless sobbing that managed to cut even more deeply into Capa's heart. He wanted to hold her; he knew that would spell agony for her raw, burned skin. So he settled for tending to her even more carefully, that much more gently.

Until she put an end to that, too. He was cleansing the blistered flesh of her throat when she spoke and he felt as much as heard the words:

"How could you let him go off on his own?"

Her voice was a sandpaper whisper. Capa didn't reply. He could smell her cracked skin, the sickly salt tang of pus and damaged cells. He could feel her eyes on his face, studying him. He heard her tears:

"Am I going to die, too?"

He heard accusation then. And, worse: resignation.

He looked at her, met her eyes. He wanted to tell her the truth: that he saw her only as she'd been before the accident. That she was beautiful to him, that she would always be beautiful to him. That he'd care for her, love her, now and always. But he knew those weren't the things she wanted-- or needed-- to hear. He looked in her dark, hurt eyes. Deep down, he thought he saw trust.

"No," he said. "I won't let you die, Cass."

She looked at him for a long moment. Then, coldly, she said: "Leave me alone."

Trey cared for her after that. He reported her progress to Capa, murmuring the words like a troubled diplomat who finds himself trapped between powers on the brink of war and who knows that open conflict would for one, if not both, of those powers mean utter destruction.

Capa was listening to Trey's latest report from the bowels of an access hatch outside Comms. It was his turn to have a shot at repairing their external communications. He wasn't having much luck, despite the fact that he'd loaded the system's wiring layout to a data pad and had that pad near at hand. He was hot; he was tangled in wires; he was covered in pine-green insulating grease. Still, he could feel patience, compassion even, as he looked up at Trey, squatting on his haunches at the hatch's edge.

"She'll come around, Trey. She's healing. She'll feel better soon."

"You really think so?"

"Yeah." Capa allowed himself a smile. Just for Trey's benefit, to quiet the hopelessness in the navigator's eyes. "Just wait and see."

A day later, in retrospect, that smile seemed like hubris.

On that day, Cassie tried to get up. She fell and, in falling, struck and split her burned hide. Capa came running when he heard her scream. By the time he reached her, she was writhing on the deck, as though she could like a snake twist free of her damaged worn skin and, with it, her pain. Capa for a moment stuck himself to the illusion. Then, nearing, he heard her gasping. Whimpering. Tears were running down her raw cheeks. He reached for her--

"No--!" she snarled at him.

Shocked, he scrambled back, away from her. He sat himself timidly on the floor of the medical bay and watched her. She was watching him, and her dark eyes were baleful. Hating him or her pain. Or both.

Either way, it gave her focus. He could see that. He sat there for hours-- it may even have been a day-- while she stared her hatred into him. It broke from her, finally, like a fever. She keened quiet sobs as he lifted her and placed her back on the bed. She drifted off to sleep or unconsciousness while he tended to her.

Icarus knew which way to go, and their engines were functional. They were on course. So Capa and Trey divided their time between tending to Cassie, the damaged comms system, and the Oxygen Garden. Capa set up a cot in the garden, and, a few days later, when Cassie was stronger, he carried her there. She stayed quiet, being carried, even though Capa must have been hurting her; all that day, she said nothing while he worked on his knees beside her, there in the loam. When he dared to look her way, he could see, though: she was sleeping more peacefully than she had since she'd been hurt. He'd been right: the cool green life of the place was doing her good.

Trey, coming in, ducked past and through the ferns-- primitive and airily beautiful and impervious to inept gardeners like himself and Capa as they were-- and looked at Cassie with gentle concern. "Is she--?"

"Shh." Capa smiled slightly, and then, less slightly, with conviction. For the first time in nearly a month, he felt something like peace. "Yeah."

"That's good." Trey knelt across from Capa, busied himself, as Capa already was, with poking seedlings root-down into the black soft dirt.

They planted for a time in silence. Then Capa said: "We'll have to ask Corrie if this spacing's correct. These seem awfully close together."

"Corrie's dead," Trey countered mildly. He looked Capa's way. "Remember--?"

"Yeah." Capa hesitated--

"I mean, no. No, I didn't remember. Not right away." A blank, burning flare of frustration and grief. He rubbed his temple with the heel of one dirty hand and scowled. "Am I going insane, Trey? How could I forget something like that?"

"Strain. The deployment, the accidents, all the deaths. Man, I'd be more worried if you weren't messed up."

Capa hesitated. He felt he should say something in acknowledgment, but he couldn't speak. He was doubling in on himself. Like dizziness it was. He dug his hands into the damp crumbly dirt and held on. Until that thin covering of dirt over metal tightmeshed decking over shielded insulation over an alloy bulkhead that separated him from the black absolute nothing of space gave him strength, as Earth herself or even the thought of homecoming to that Earth gave him strength.

"You're right," he said. He looked back at Trey. Trey met his eyes in even but comforting acknowledgment. They both went back to planting. Capa felt content.

His contentment lasted, and, gradually, grain by grain as it were, it grew.

Until his fall.

The lights failed two weeks later. He and Trey labored to pinpoint the cause. The pinpointing, at least the more secondary aspects of it, led Capa, armed with a strip of fieldwork light cells, to the second level of the flight deck.

He checked readings. Scanned a newsroom's-worth of monitors for power consumptions, shortages, shorts in the system.

Then, descending the metal-grille steps, he happened in the darkness around his ankles to misangle his left foot. He misstepped. And he fell.

With the crack but an indirect memory, he lay on his back on the hard grilling of the flight deck's lower section and stared in as-yet-unreceived agony at his left leg. Specifically at that part of his left leg just below the knee. And he thought how white bone looked against flesh. Against blood. Against the dirty powder-blue fabric of his trousers. As white as snow.

And then he heard himself scream in pain.