You awake in a fully lit room. No base-wide emergencies, no roaring leviathans, no annoying Cave Crawlers tapping on the roof. A Stalker's tooth sits on your bedside table, more token than trophy, but it is as silent as a fossil. Yet something woke you, and you sit up in bed to try and locate the cause.

As if on cue, Skye coughs again.

You get out of bed and go over to her room. She's developed a recurring cough these last few days that only seems to have worsened after the Reaper attack.

Seated on the edge of the bed, you pass her a bottle of water. She sips it carefully, but this latest fit plagues her well after she puts the water down.

"Skye, your hands."

Green spots rise out of her skin, the result of the bacterium's progression.

"It comes and goes," she says, slipping them under the covers. "Luckily, it's only appeared on my extremities so far."

"Do they hurt?"

"The bumps? Nah. They're rather unnoticeable, just unsightly." She pauses, then grins. "Don't worry. I hear it's only highly contagious, and completely lethal if left untreated."

"But the Sea Emperor will cure it, right?"

She shrugs. "That's what happens in the game. It's been right about everything else so far."

You rub your eyes. "You're injured. I don't like the thought of you being down there and not able to, you know, get around like you normally do."

"I can take care of myself," she insists.

"How soon do you think you'll be strong enough to go?" you say with a sigh.

Later that night, you make plans to sneak out of the base. When you remember the habitat will simply tattle on you as soon as you leave, you abandon the plans and just go.

The sun is setting, and you steer the Seamoth to the dunes while there is still enough light to see by. After a few short minutes of searching, you find what you came to see.

The carcasses of two Reaper Leviathans lie on the ocean floor, already covered by scavengers. The army of Sand Sharks pays you no mind as you hover a short distance away.

You can make it. If Skye says you can make it, you will.

And so, preparations to get underway begin in earnest. You make a new reinforced suit for Skye, as well as the Prawn Suit upgrades that you have the resources for. She throws out material names and quantities at a speed that makes your head spin. Every space in your inventory is spoken for. You'll even carry some loose items in the cab of the Seamoth, mostly food and water.

One of the downsides of having only one Seamoth is the cramped space. With Skye practically seated on your lap, and you pushed as far back as you can go, there is no room for oxygen tanks or other equipment besides your dive suits. If you have to get out for any reason, you'll have to summon an air tank out of your PDA, put it on, and hook it up before any breathing can occur.

You're pretty sure the Seamoth's oxygen scrubbers can handle the increased demand of two occupants. You know Skye will want to get out and swim around a few times along the way.

She walks you through a theoretical tour of the Lost River, starting from the blood kelp trench just a few minutes away. She uses entries on your PDAs as visual aids. The various zones you'll have to pass through oscillate from incredibly dangerous, to no danger at all, and back to incredibly dangerous.

"You'll like it down there," she says as you help her limp around. "It's very peaceful, very picturesque."

"I don't like the ocean," you remind her.

"But it's not quite ocean," she presses. "It's something . . . more. Sure, you're in water, but there's walls and ceilings all around you. Then there's lakes and rivers and waterfalls. You really forget about everything up here, and it's not just the bacteria talking."

You help Skye change her bandages. Part of you wants to do so as a way of returning the favor. A small, selfish part wants to ensure she stays strong and healthy enough so she can continue to do most of the work on the way to the promised cure. The rest aligns with what you said earlier – you're a team, and you'll finish this grand odyssey together.

She scans through pages of data on her PDA as you unwind the bandages from her thigh. Despite her ability to rattle off entire entries verbatim, she routinely feels the need to brush up on creature profiles and pirated alien knowledge.

When you get to the underlying flesh, you do your best to hide your automatic grimace. The deep gashes will no doubt leave deep scars, and it looks like some areas of the remaining skin were pulled uncomfortably tight when they healed. Skye doesn't seem to notice, not her mangled leg nor your pained expression. She looks up only to remind you, again, to bring a flashlight.

To Skye, they are little more than new scars in a sea of others – a badge of accomplishment, even. Old marks peek through the flesh spared by the Reapers' teeth. On the edges of her injury, where her healing is the most progressed, other wounds, long-healed, await the newest additions.

To you, they are a painful reminder of your failure. You left; you allowed her to handle the threat alone. You will not fail her again.

By the time you get around to applying a fresh roll of bandages, her uninjured foot manically taps the floor from where it hangs over the edge of the bed. She wants to be on the move, she wants to be doing something. If she stays still for too long, she'll fall asleep. It's somewhat comical, those few times you've glanced up to see why she didn't respond to your last comment, only to find she fell asleep in her chair. All or nothing, that girl – all go, or all stop.

At least she lets you finish tucking in the edges. As soon as your hands leave her leg, she's on her feet, off to craft something or count something that can't wait another thirty seconds. She limps like a peglegged pirate whose treasure is about to be stolen.

That evening, you create a new entry on your PDA. You title it simply: "Skye."

Skye told you she never made a record for herself. By the time she realized she needed one, she no longer had the materials to build it. It's a sad story – the lonely girl with the borrowed name.

You consider waxing poetic, something that compares the vast ocean to the expanse of sky above, an unmovable object that met an unstoppable force and had no choice but to yield, heavily veiled in metaphor so you can reasonably claim it's about something different if she ever swipes your PDA.

Ultimately, you don't know what aspects of her personality she would choose to record for preservation. Does she even consider her brash confidence important? Based on the distant stare you've seen on her face a few times, she knows what's important by its absence, and she is stuck with the rest.

After nearly an hour of staring at a blank page, you turn off the tablet. You hear her clomping steps from deep within the habitat.

Then, "Skye has disembarked the habitat."

You hope she at least took the Seamoth, though there's no telling what she could be out there doing. By her own assurances, you have everything you need to make the journey to the Lost River and beyond.

One of her latest oddball ideas pops into your head.

"If I shot myself in the ass with the repulsion cannon, I wonder if I'd have enough force to go flying out of the water."

Skye lays everything out in two adjacent lockers. Everything is ready to go – you're just waiting for the last batteries to finish charging. Her leg has gotten stronger, but she still doesn't put her full weight on it.

She pokes her head into the multipurpose room where you sit, watching the little Stalker chase a Holefish.

"Hey, come up to the surface with me."

You take the Seaglides and some half-charged batteries to conserve energy in the Seamoth's power cells.

"Race you to the top," she says, diving horizontally through the open hatch.

You manage to keep up, but Skye still beats you. When you break the surface, she's waiting to rub it in.

"Cripple, one. Stalker Bait, zero."

"Where are we going?" you ask. Traces of your lingering anxiety filter through your mind, though recently, they only seem to crop up when you're at the surface, unable to see the horizon beyond the waves.

"I thought we'd go to the island," she suggests. "Get on dry land, soak up some sun."

So you go. The batteries won't be finished for another couple hours.

This isn't the first time Skye's taken you to the island, but it is the first time she's not on the hunt for some super critical resource. It reminds you of the other island, oodles of leisure time and punting Cave Crawlers.

She reclines on the beach, still damp from the swim, and closes her eyes. You note how pale your skin has become and take a seat beside her.

"What did you want to come here for?" you ask.

"I came here before I made my first deep dive," she says. "No, I take that back. It was the other island. Regardless, I knew I was about to go deeper than I ever had before. I wasn't going to see the sun for a long time. So I took some time to just, enjoy life.

"It's gotten to the point where dry land feels stranger than being in the water. I don't know if I'll ever get used to that. Anyway, I spent so long on the island that I got to see an eclipse. I'd seen them before, but this one was different. It was the first one I just sat and watched from start to end. Nothing was chasing me, I wasn't running low on food or water, I wasn't looking for the all-important next piece. I just sat, and watched. I wanted to do that again.

"The last time I prepared to go to the Lost River, I thought it would be a one-way trip. Not in the sense that I'd die or anything, I just figured I'd come out the other side via the warp portal. Then again, I guess dying was always an option."

"Good grief you're morbid," you say.

"Well, hold on, I'm not finished. What I meant to say was that I didn't imagine I'd be returning to the surface except to get what I needed to make the hatching enzymes. The last thing I expected to hear was your distress signal, and I thought it was a glitch.

"What I'm trying to say, is that you're stubborn, and critical, and you put me in mortal danger – on more than one occasion. I might have been at the Sea Emperor's door by now, but I would do it all again. I'm glad I came back up to the surface, and it doesn't matter if you go with me, or if you don't go, because now, I'm not alone on this planet."

She closes her eyes again and takes a slow, deep breath of air. Sometimes you forget that she was alone before you came along – she handles it so well. She was alone longer than you've been on the planet. Even now you have trouble wrapping your mind around that one.

And still she offers you a way out, a rare life raft. With all the time you've spent by her side, you know she would make the final journey alone and bring the cure back to you, no doubt about it. But you've already made your choice, and you don't want to think too much about the options.

"Are we having a moment?" you ask with a chuckle, trying to lighten the severity of her previous statements.

She sighs; her serene, carefree smile dissolves. "I was. Doesn't really matter. I just had these things on my mind and well, I wanted to make sure they didn't go unsaid."

Feeling thoroughly scolded, you lean back until your shoulders touch the warm sand. The sun dips low towards the horizon, bringing an end to another brief day cycle and giving way to an equally brief night cycle.

"After we get back," Skye says, "after we get the cure, we'll be busy busy busy. There'll be nothing standing in our way of building that rocket out of here. We'll be so excited, we'll probably forget to eat."

"Just as long as we don't forget to deactivate the big gun," you say.

She snickers. "Yeah, let's not forget that."

You spend a few more minutes sitting on the beach, not saying anything, merely looking out over the water. The sun does feel particularly good against your skin.

"Well, we've probably sat around long enough," Skye says with regret. She stands and offers you her hand. "Shall we?"