Note: For a better reading experience, I suggest finding this story on Ao3 in it's original, intended form. The version that's reposted here might have messy formatting, unfixed errors and les information in author's notes.
Shadow Girl of Mars
Chapter I
First Contract Protocols
SOL 6
This entry marks the first sol of Mark Watney's conscription into the service of the Shadow Entity.
I have no idea what exact contract has been signed, nor its true cost. From the way my blood was spilled, I can only assume it has been sealed with blood. Not the most pleasant thing in the world, but I survived it. Another thing I'm sure of is that the service to the shadow entity involves a decent health plan. No clue if it covers dental.
Or… I just might be mental.
There is a possibility that everything that has happened to me since getting skewered by the antenna has only been a particularly vivid hallucination, caused by the loss of blood, or oversaturation of oxygen or any other reason that sent me off my rocker to full on mars sickness and madness.
I would never know.
In the time since my injury, I have stared into the Shadow, and it has looked back at me. Who knows what is and isn't real anymore?
The Shadow Entity saved my life only to latch onto my suit, and demand to be brought inside the HAB. Am I now a vessel of humanity's demise, cursed to carry the Shadow Entity all the way to earth?
It might mean I'm going to be heading home (woo), to enslave or exterminate the whole human race (boo), or for some other purpose. Your guess is as good as mine.
There has been no pamphlet given, nor I had trained for such an outcome.
I am but a humble botanist and engineer. Certainly not a shadowbinder, nor anyone qualified to judge the composition and true nature of the Shadow Entity.
I do not know if I am now a disciple of the Great Old One of Mars, or if I have met some alien lifeform, stranded the same as I am. I am completely in the dark... or, well... in the shadow.
I sure hope the Shadow Entity appreciates good humor.
After all, we're (or at least I am) stranded on Mars.
There is no way to communicate with Hermes or Earth. Everyone thinks that I'm dead. I'm in a Hab designed to last 31 days. If none of the critical systems for my survival breaks down and kills me, I'll eventually run out of food and starve to death.
Or, the Shadow Entity might use up all of my blood even before that happens.
I'm pretty much fucked. That's my considered opinion. Fucked.
My only hope is to attempt to initiate a second contact and inquire about that first-sol new workplace tour. Maybe ask for a pamphlet. I can only hope the shadow entity is not a subcontractor to NASA, else I'm in quite a bit of legal trouble with this unauthorized outside employment.
From Log Entry on Sol 6, by Mark Watney.
The Martian
He came to awareness slowly - pain from the injury was burning, and the suit systems were screaming a few concurrent alerts - each was a different problem he'd have to take care of or die.
No pressure.
The suit was actively bloodletting - which meant that its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide was exhausted and it was actively venting air into the Martian atmosphere. All to keep oxygen at a healthy level - the CO2 absorbers were long spent.
That was what the loudest beeping was all about.
Beep - you're running out of time.
Beep - you're running out of time.
And on and on…
Mark wanted to verify the readouts on the suit's arm, to quickly check how much of the nitrogen tank was remaining; to know exactly how much time was left for him, but... Even as he slightly shifted inside the suit, the arm itself didn't even twitch.
Was the arm stuck? On what?
He tried to shift his whole suit, but the resistance was unbreakable.
If he had fallen face down, or on the side, or in any other uncomfortable position and something had fallen on him, he could understand not being able to move, but now…
He was half seated, slightly leaning to the side, putting his injured side openly upwards. It was an extremely improbable position to end up after falling down and losing consciousness.
Had he sleep-walked? Why couldn't he move now?
He didn't feel that weak... Even with the pain of the injury flaring up as he strained the muscles, he should have been able to gather enough strength to do a lot more than just flex his fingers.
Through his glass visor he could only see a small part of his torso and one of the elbows - and of course, the sandstorm was still blowing, obscuring visibility-
There was a break in the dust storm, a barely perceptible phenomena for his weakened vision to latch on. The dust storm was swirling around him, but never seemed to be able to reach him.
With wind this strong, a background noise of martian sand hitting his suit would have been distinctive and ever-present, but that just wasn't happening.
Instead, the storm was diverted to the side. It was a see-through barrier, perceptible only because neither wind nor dust would cross it. He could see dust piling up at the edges. It was a circular barrier, perhaps even a perfect dome; creating a protective pocket of calm in the storm for him and him alone.
Impossible.
Loss of blood and pain alone was not enough to explain this.
It was only then that he noticed movement at the very edge of his vision - he couldn't see what it was, but there was a shadow being cast over him - one that was very slowly shifting, as if something was there, standing right behind him. Moving.
He didn't recall any rock formations that could have cast such a strong shadow. The wind seemed to have winded down since his injury, and there wasn't anything of appropriate size it could have carried there. Nothing should have been near him.
Maybe a piece of HAB's canvas got torn off? Had it landed close, fluttering in the wind, casting the shadow? It was a huge stretch, but…
He tried to move again, grunting and straining. The suit's incessant beeping shifted a tone, the breach might have been getting bigger. In the sparse Martian atmosphere, his blood must have boiled and evaporated, leaving behind a messy gunk, which might have helped at least partially seal the breach.
Now that he had moved, it must have dislodged-
Then, he felt something else had pierced through. There was an alien rush of coldness spreading slowly around his injury. While it was numbing the pain, he couldn't help but panic. It was as if something - inhuman - was touching him.
He yelped loudly and started struggling even more and then something gave - or he was allowed to look.
If there's shadow, there's something that creates it, right?
Wrong.
There it was - an impossible creature made entirely of shadow.
No tangible object was there to cast a shadow over him in the first place. It had always been the entity, sitting on him.
Dark, swirling and unnatural, it had a darker concentration in the middle, like a black living tumor, attached to the site of the injury. It was sprawled all over, spreading shadow tendrils around the space suit - that's what was restraining him from moving.
He would later name it the Shadow Entity.
Now, his only course of action was to scream.
So he did - shrieked like his life depended on it.
The creature seemed completely unbothered by this. He felt quite clearly that he was being watched - even though the creature had no eyes to speak off. Then it clamped down its hold again, forcing him to keep still.
He still attempted to escape.
Then there was a voice. A terrifying dark voice of the deeps of the shadow, one that reverberated through his whole suit. A voice that made his teeth ache and hair stand up.
"NOS. STUMP."
It wasn't helpful, but Mark was surprised enough to stop struggling - but he didn't stop panicking nor shouting.
"Let me go!" he tried. "Let me go!"
Nothing.
The numbness and cooling of his body close to the injury was spreading - just what was happening there?
"Don't eat me!" Mark tried once more, but his voice wasn't so strong anymore.
The suit's alarms beeped again, this time indicating an error caused by an unexpected readout.
"No shit!" Watney croaked out, and shuddered as the cold spread even further, reaching his lungs and causing a short coughing fit. "I'm going to die if I don't seal the suit!"
"URASE!"
"What?" Watney tried.
"URASE."
And then there was a short spike of pain. Numbed, more distant, but still rather painful.
The piece of the antenna flew out of him like a bullet - and then it slammed into the invisible barrier, and deflected towards the ground, burrowing into the ground. There was no blood on it, as if someone had licked it dry.
The wound felt really weird. He couldn't place the sensation, couldn't even begin to understand. Had the shadow entity plunge a tendril inside to stop the bleeding? Or was it absorbing his blood? His body was growing number and number by the second.
He tried to speak out, but couldn't manage it.
Then, without any warning, in place of the eldritch Shadow Entity, there was a young woman. Perhaps even a teenager. Strange clothes, torn and battered. Possibly at least partially a uniform - the green vest looked like a heavy duty military flak jacket. He could see bits of metal plate exposed through the tears in the fabric.
Her only protection from the deadly planet was a long, dark coat worn over everything. It had a black circular emblem on one of the shoulders, and a glimmering metal plate with a different symbol tied to one of the sleeves. The coat looked the most damaged of her gear. There were holes in it, and a piece of it looked like it was bitten by someone with huge teeth, and in places it was ripped to shreds and burned.
She had no spacesuit, no helmet - and was all lightly covered in martian dust. This left her face visible - white skin, features he couldn't exactly place, and expression of pain and concert. Haunted, distant eyes.
One of her hands ended abruptly, morphing into the same shadow substance that it was before - and the shadow tendrils from it were still inside his suit. Another was a perfectly human looking hand, placed on the suit over the spot of the injury.
"Worry," the girl said in an almost normal voice, strained as if speaking this way hurt her even more than just taking a person's shape. It sounded like she (or it) was in a hurry and out of breath. "I-hill weall yoe."
There was a green-tinted glow, and then, suddenly, his pain disappeared entirely.
"Worry," the girl repeated, and folded into herself, becoming once again the shadow tumor - right over the breach.
"Wha-" Mark gasped, as the strange coolness receded. The tendrils binding him in place retreated back into the Shadow Entity. He flexed his arm experimentally - there was no resistance this time.
Now that he could move, his training took over. This was something that was drilled into him during training, and muscle memory didn't care for any shadow entities. Even with panic still beating in his heart, his hands found a breach kit.
But he couldn't seal the breach while the - thing - girl - shadow - was in the way.
The kit was nothing more than a funnel with a valve at the small end, and a generous amount of extremely sticky resin. He held it awkwardly, unsure how to ask the Shadow Entity to move away.
Before he solved that issue, one of the spacesuit's alerts suddenly stopped. The system monitor wasn't detecting a breach anymore.
Not giving him time to think, the Shadow Entity once again billowed, folded onto itself and quickly seeped inside his spacesuit, through the breach.
He gasped, but he couldn't actually feel much of a presence. Perhaps the inside of his visor had gotten darker, and maybe the whole suit hung a bit more awkwardly, but that was nothing. He couldn't get a visual confirmation on the entity at all.
"Are you still there?" He asked, fearfully, in a quiet whisper.
There was a hiss-whisper-echo inside of his suit. No actual words, but a proof of presence to be sure.
"Shit."
No reply.
He looked at the funnel in his hand. At the clearly open puncture in his suit, and then at the invisible barrier.
Oh.
At least one of the questions was answered. The barrier must have held in all of the air that his suit was losing. It had taken a while until the pressure outside and inside of the spacesuit had equalized.
That's why the monitor couldn't detect any leakage.
The levels of carbon dioxide were also rising. With the difference of pressure equalized, the martian atmosphere would be seeping in, and the bloodletting couldn't even happen. The little monitor was quite confused about it all.
Mark returned his attention to the breach. Even when undetectable by his instruments it was still there - clearly visible.
"I'd like to seal the suit now," he offered, as if these words could communicate even a sliver of the impossibility of the situation. "Will you remove the force field after I do it?"
There was no verbal answer.
Instead, he could feel something tensing between the layers of the spacesuit, and then one of the suit's arms moved. This must have been exactly the trick as with the restraining shadow tendrils, but in reverse - from the inside.
He didn't fight it, and the Shadow Entity manipulated his hand closer to the breach. If lingered for a moment, and then the hold on the sleeve was released.
"Ah - you want me to cover it? That's good," he said. "I'll take it that you want to stay inside. That's - weird, but I'm not in a position to argue, am I?"
The shadow entity didn't stop him when he started on it.
The repair kit glued onto the side of the spacesuit very quickly. It stuck firmly to the outer surface as the resin did its job. If there was an active leakage happening, this would have been slightly more difficult. Now, he only needed to close the outer valve and that was it.
He had done everything correctly, but still spent some extra time to make sure everything was secure. With minimal difference in pressure between the inside of the suit and the dome, he needed to be absolutely sure the repair kit would hold.
He would be putting it to the true test when the force field was removed. Unless it wouldn't be removed, and he'd be trapped. With a strange shadow entity as a passager inside his own suit.
Unsettling.
"At least now I know that I wouldn't survive a horror film," Mark joked out loud. His throat hurt and felt parched, but the injury from the antenna had completely disappeared - together with the numbness, he felt much better. Still tired, but a lot stronger. "Am I going to be the guy who gets eaten from the inside due to his own stupidity?"
He shook his head slightly. The Shadow Entity had healed him, so maybe devouring him wasn't on the agenda.
"Please don't eat me from the inside," he pleaded, just in case.
There was no response.
"That's reassuring, thanks. Well, there we go!"
He tried to stand up.
It was hard - there was a hint of resistance from his suit again. It was as if the entity had to adjust itself to match his pace - and after a few moments, he realized that the Shadow Entity was actually trying to assist him, effectively reducing the weight of the suit.
He couldn't stand up straight with the dome in place. He reached out to touch it. It was a real, physical barrier, just made out of nothing.
"What now?" he asked, glancing at the ground.
There, he could almost make out a small pool of his own blood. It hadn't boiled away only because the atmospheric pressure under the dome was much higher than outside.
He could have sworn that something moved underneath him. The blood marking the red planet - shifted.
He could almost make out the strange pattern his blood took. A mix of oriental, foreign symbols, shapes reminding him of the Latin alphabet - all formed and disappeared in a blink of an eye.
Then, his blood glowed - or maybe that was just a trick of light - and the dome disappeared.
There was a rush of wind that jostled him a little - the whole dome had much more pressure than the outside, resulting in a tiny explosion of air as it expanded to be eaten up by the hungry Martian atmosphere.
The patch-seal held.
The readings showed oxygen at slighter higher than normal, 25% concentration. There was enough nitrogen in the to make it to the HAB before even resorting to breathing pure oxygen. Not too bad.
He would live.
For now.
Note:
Thanks for reading 💙
This is not going to be a long story, but there's potential for short sequels and spin-off scenes.
At the time of posting, all four chapters of the main story are in a draft form, same as a little bonus one-scene-thing that will be posted separately. Pending some final edits, I am aiming to complete it some time around Halloween, by posting a small chapter each day.
This story was, very, very loosely inspired by "The Maretian", but only in a sense that Mark Watney has to contend with someone who casually breaks the laws of physics as he knows it.
The miscommunication between Shikako and Mark is just there to make it more difficult form them to team up, at least in the beginning. I chose to portray this difference based on a Skewl, a short film you can find on youtube, that tries to show how English language sounds for non-spreakers.
In that vein, some words sound vaguely familiar, some match, and some mean different things.