Aumegden was found staring at the wall, not just dreamily, or blank, but with a slight glare, a frown, a sneer, a tight jaw. Her mind was a fugue, turning over with monotony and thought she had thought long silenced. She was being useful, she knew. She was useful. Lt. Castillo chose her especially, not because of her parents, not because of the press—this operation was relatively quiet—it was her, not her parents; it was her skills, not the curious circumstances of her birth. She was a pilot, she was a good pilot, she could have been a racer, she could have been a star, fast and bright and dead on a coroner's slab, her blood toxic with drugs that made her go faster by the time she was twenty-five. But that wouldn't have been useful, that would have been a waste of genetic material, a waste of resources, utterly pointless. She had purpose and for that she had to be grateful.

Where was Icrel's angst playlist when you needed it?

All these grinding thoughts. She was useful. She was alone. She liked to be alone. She was lonely. She did not like being lonely. Everyone else was just too slow for her. The plants, she hoped, would teach her patiences. She had to wait and care for the needy, thin, fibrous roots to develop into something stronger.

She looked out of the windows, there weren't any people. It was just trees and trees and rocks and distantly the skyline of the forgotten city. Somewhere, beyond her, were people.

She couldn't keep looking out the window. She let herself get lost in the blankness of the wall. She meditated on it, found peace in the emptiness, learned to drown out the constant little updates from the others. They weren't important. If they were, they'd come to her. She could be useful.

A day of this and no one noticed.

At night, she turned off the machinery, not particularly caring if this destroyed everything. She listened to sudden stopping of the machines. She sat in the darkness and tried to listen to the growing of the plants. In the dark they did not grow, but they should, they passed phylum and creaked with movement, she just had to listen.

She heard nothing and turned the machinery back on to listen to that, remind her of a good time, the soothing hum of the orbital station. When she could jog through the corridors that curved so slightly that you didn't notice until one leg gave out more than the other. She would turn and jog again, to keep balance. The artificial gravity not always sustained, would lift her mid-step into the air, and when she landed, she didn't miss a beat. She had never fallen. She had gotten used to the little jumps.

Solid ground and stable gravity made them weak, she thought as she dreamed of the orbital station. Home. Alone. Quiet. Where she was known, necessary, and not smothered by attention.

Aumegden woke with a gentle hand on her shoulder. She was sitting in the hydroponics station, slumped over the workbench. When she sat up, her cheek rasped as it was pulled from the metal. Condensation.

'Hello?'

It was Dr. Chen.

'Good morning.'

'I don't need another mental assessment. I just like to sleep with the humming like the orbital station.'

'I think you've been working too much here, in isolation. Would you be willing to swap with Hestamoloc or Joshua?'

'Hesta, yeah, he's looking for the plants with Dr. Matsumoto?'

'Well, he's supervising Icrel at the moment. Dr. Matsumoto still needs another day.'

Aumegden nodded. 'Oh yeah. He fell and Hesta carried him.'

Dr. Chen watched her face. Aumegden was certain she was too sleepy to be bitter, but there was something the medical officer had seen.

'How long are you in here per day, Aumegden?'

'Twelve hours altogether.'

'How did you know Hestamoloc carried Doctor Matsumoto?'

'I saw them.' Aumegden pointed out of the window.

Dr. Chen nodded. 'Of course. I thought for a moment… they came from the city, but they wouldn't have, would they?'

'No. I suppose not.'

'Have you looked in the city yet?' asked Aumegden watching Icrel's backside sicking out as he was brushing away the root systems of a tree. He had been like this for an hour, he had started off by lying on his belly, but then moved to his knees. His entire front was covered in dirt.

'No. Why?'

Aumegden, sitting on a rock, shrugged. 'The city might have less advanced time, or more advanced time. They have gardens, why not see what they cultivated for domestic use?'

'We're not part of the archaeology team, we aren't looking for answers, we are mapping the current environment. If they need our help, they then can ask for it.'

'Survey team to see if the planet is worth colonising?' Aumegden looked around and counted how many more days until the next group of surveyors would arrive. She knew they would be academics as dull as the ones she was with, but they would be new people.

'Basically, yeah. Without Dr. Matsumoto's go-ahead it'll have to be private enterprises or some reason for the empire to be interested.'

Aumegden nodded. 'I still think we should look at the city.'

Icrel sat up. 'I don't like being out the swamps either.'

'Say I ordered you. I didn't think it was safe considering Dr. Matsumoto's injury. And you're still a child.'

They moved to the city gardens and found that there was little to unearth. Because the city was so small and had to build upwards, it did not have the spaces for gardens, even in the areas with bigger complexes, the only sign of luxury was an inner open-air courtyard. There was remnants of bio-matter in pots, which Icrel spent two days trying to collect samples of and attempt to understand. The findings, by Dr. Matsumoto, revealed they were plants that might've been able to survive with little water and little light—good for decorations.

They had avoided the blotches of flora for its variety. Dr. Matsumoto reasoned that since these were spread across the entire city and varied from cluster to cluster within the same street, it was likely the result of a post-occupant environment event. A tornado or flood. And then Dr. Clayton added some other possibilities such a time storm, and other variations quantum shower, temporal gales.

A week of nothing found and Lt. Castillo called Aumegden into her office in the evening.

'Do not presume you know better than our mission parameters. Return to your duties as hydroponics co-ordinator.'

Oh, she didn't even make eye-contact, she didn't even look up from her work. She didn't even change her tone of voice, she was disinterested in having to do this. Aumegden didn't expect this, she didn't even know she was being called into the office for a reprimanding, she assumed it was a progress report. Her uniform was sloppy, her posture lax. She no sooner understood what had been said than she was dismissed.

She needed somewhere loud and distant to cry.

She had to bite into her glove, like a gag, to stop the whimpering being overheard. She bit until it became angry and she continued biting until her teeth hurt.

It was night, it was dark, and in the moonlight she could see the clusters of varied plants in their night cycle. There was a coiled one that looked like a rosebud had been stretched, it had shrunk back into itself like a pink cocoon. Another was bulbous with a spout of stigma and anther. They weren't useless, they were interesting.

She swore, a sharp, wet expletive that cut through the night.

The plants before her shuddered and opened a little, returning to their day cycle, very briefly, very tentative. The cocoon became the stretched rosebud, the bulbous relaxed so that the stigma and anther were not so clustered.

It could have been the shadows. It could have been her imagination.

She shone a light away from them, enough to see them, but not enough to scare them. She made another noise, another bark, and they opened a little more.

With her gloveless hand she touched the stretched rosebud and it opened up around her finger, then snapped shut again very quickly. It felt an ordinary petal, but there was definitely some amount of touching to understand.

She had to study this before the others, prove herself that she wasn't wrong about the city. Show that bitch of a lieutenant.

She brought it back to the hydroponics lab and fell asleep with a few samples in front of her.

They found her in the afternoon. It was the scheduled day of rest, although the work was never that tiring it was always useful to have a day not to mind or care about things. They had not noticed the empty bed. Then Chitra saw the slumped figure in the hydroponics lab, without protective clothing on. She did not panic, she assumed Aumegden was sleeping like last time. She knocked on the window to wake her, but she didn't move. She moved around, having to stand on her tip-toes to see her face.

The was a green slime pooling around her face on the bench.

She shrieked and called for help.

Dr. Chen was never off-duty. Dr. Chen didn't get rest-days. Dr. Chen had the assistance of Nursebot-W7Alpha who could enter contamination zones without protective clothing, even at risk to the units functionality.

Nursebot-W7Alpha entered the hydroponics lab and lifted Aumegden from the workbench.

Aumegden woke a little, bleary, remember last time, thinking it was the memory breaking into her dream. Her cheek hissed against the cool workbench.

It wasn't condensation.

For the faint of heart, stop reading, move on to the next chapter. Aumegden will be out of commission, but still alive. I will be more delicate with descriptions.

The for grotesque amongst you who delight in the horrors of life and survival: The slime on the bench was viscous and drooped from the left-side of her face, it was secreting in globules of pale green. Her left-side, her skin, was melting away in these droplets, replaced with rough lumps of hard, pointed skin, the ends of which wriggled with tiny burrowing tendrils.

Her jaw hung slack, with a torch in her mouth, Nursebot-W7Alpha could see the other end of the burrowing infestation pushing through her cheeks, some of the swollen roots of the parasitic seeds had worked their way into her jaw, up into her teeth.

As they worked on ways to stave off the infection and kill the parasites, Aumegden went blind in one eye. Dr. Chen watched as the burrowing seeds, slowly, and not quite painlessly, consume her eye and replaced it with a mass of squelching tendrils. When she shut her eye to stop them bursting out, they took the eyelids. Dr. Chen, in a slight panic, used a surgical laser on the swarm in the eye socket. They reacted with some writhing squeals and gradually formed a hardened shell to prevent any further interruption of their infestation.

When they came to the root systems of her hair, they were much more painful, burrowing under the skin and pushing up, squeezing out all the capillary and pushing themselves out with it.

The hungry plants were held back by a cocktail of antibiotics, leaving Aumegden with half her face. Much like the murals, much like the face on the black sarcophagus.