PoV: Kel

  Since Lazarus had relented on the whole bucket-and-tent thing, this camping trip had morphed into one of the best experiences of my life. Seriously. I didn’t think sleeping on the ground and pretending to be wilderness survivors would be fun, but here I was grinning like a lunatic with blood under my fingernails and a full belly.

  The first hunt? Exhilarating. All of us missed our first shots, of course. The little deer-like creature bolted into the woods so fast we were left blinking, bows still drawn. Next time, though, we learned. The wind mattered. The sound of our boots mattered. The fact that Mira couldn’t stop humming while we were supposed to be sneaking? That definitely mattered.

  We spotted another one near a ridge. I crept up from downwind, heart pounding. Drew the bow, took aim just behind the shoulder, like Lazarus said and let it fly. I was a bit off. Hit it in the rear leg. It stumbled and bolted.

  I was halfway through tracking it when Laia appeared, calm and quiet, holding the animal already downed. She said Lazarus had been clear there was to be no suffering. “Take the shot, or I will,” she said.

  Which raised a question I hadn’t asked out loud yet: How the hell does a spaceship know so much about hunting?

  Skinning and bleeding the carcass was… less poetic. Lynn bailed. I don’t blame her—there were sounds and smells involved that didn’t exactly scream “dinner.” But Stewie stuck with me. Kid was surprisingly good at it. He had taken to studying the animal and looking at how it worked.

  We prepped it right following all of the instructions for bleeding, skinning, trimming. Laia helped us identify the safe cuts. Apparently, we didn’t want to eat the glands. Good to know.

  Fishing wasn’t for me. The whole sitting-with-a-rod thing? Boring. I needed movement. Something tactile. I got so bored I started to throw rocks into the take to hope and hit a fish at random. So Laia suggested spearfishing. Said it’d be more “visceral.” She wasn’t wrong.

  First few tries, I missed. Every. Damn. Time. Turns out fish aren’t where they look like they are. Refraction was a thing. Light bending through water. Once I adjusted for that… I got one. Then another. I dragged three large fish back to camp like a triumphant caveman.

  This whole experience—it made me feel different. Raw. Real. Alive. That word doesn’t mean much when you’ve spent most of your life scrounging inside dead ships. But now? Every sunrise felt earned.

  Lynn didn’t get it at first. She tried. She’d help with meals and occasionally poke at the fire. But it was Mira who really brought her around. Mira had taken to the whole “outdoors” thing like it was her calling. She and Lynn had been working on food prep together, learning how to cook over an open flame. Mira called it “bar-be-que gourmet.” I wasn’t complaining. I was sure it was another term from Lazarus.

  Meanwhile, Stewie had discovered swimming.

  Swimming. Voluntarily submerging yourself in water. Who even thought of that?

  The Kall-e, that who. T’lish said the Kall-e were taught to swim from a young age. “It’s good for the skin,” she claimed. I wasn’t sure if she was being serious, but she was surprisingly good at it. She even became our swim instructor.

  The first time I wandered too deep and couldn’t touch the bottom, I panicked. I flailed. I splashed. I might’ve shouted something about being eaten by sea monsters. T’lish laughed at me so hard she snorted water. I vowed revenge by showing off. Once I got better I tried to out-dive her. Failed spectacularly. I had to be rescued by her. She even gave me one of the strange Kall-e smiles.

  Stewie, though? Natural. Kid glided through the water like he’d been born in it. Mira said it was probably all the wiry limbs. Stewie said she sounded like a sore loser and splashed her in the face. This somehow devolved into all of us trying to splash each other. Laia had taught Lynn a trick where she trapped water between her palms and squirted water at us. I didn’t have to guess where the technique had come from.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  What struck me most, though, was Lazarus. He just… knew everything. Every technique. Every method. How to hunt, how to skin, how to build shelter, how to fish, how to float, how to swim and hold your breath without choking. Who would think you could pinch your nose when submerging? We had all noticed this.

  So we decided to try cornered Laia over dinner except camping made it hard to stay focused. The fire crackled lazily, casting soft orange light across the clearing. Skewers sizzled over the flames, dripping juices onto the coals with satisfying hisses. Mira passed around slices of roasted root vegetables like they were treasures. Honestly, they kind of were it had taken us half the day to find them.

  “These taste weirdly sweet,” Stewie said, chewing with a thoughtful frown. “Like, not bad weird. Just… weird.”

  “That’s because they’re genetically modified,” T’lish chimed in from her seat near the fire, her tone slipping into lecture mode. “NeuroGenesis engineered this moon however long ago. Most vegetables wouldn’t survive here. The soil is too alkaline, and the weather cycles are unstable. These” she held up a root chunk between two claws “were designed to adapt. Deep taproots. Microbial resilience. They even photosynthesize under planet light, partially.”

  Mira blinked. “They photosynthesize at night?”

  “Partially,” T’lish repeated with a shrug. “Enough to survive. It’s inefficient but elegant.”

  “Well, I like ’em,” Lynn muttered, grabbing another skewer. “Genetically modified or not, they beat nutrient balls.”

  Stewie glanced toward Laia, who had been unusually quiet. “So… are you gonna tell us how Laz knows all this stuff, or are we going to pretend Laz is a walking library of knowledge?”

  Laia tilted her head. “Huh. You want to know that?” I wasn’t sure why she was surprised.

  “Obviously,” I said, waving a skewer for emphasis. “You’ve been dancing around this for days. He’s too good at this. The fishing, the hunting, the fire-building. Come on, Laia. What is he and how does he know all this?”

  She went quiet for a while, She still had a direction connection to Lazarus in orbit, so I was sure she was getting permission or maybe a story to tell us. Eventually, she must have got her answer.

  Laia looked around the circle, the flickering fire reflected in her eyes as she hovered in the air, her wings beating slowly. “Lazarus is old.”

  “How old?” Lynn asked, half-daring.

  Laia’s voice softened. “Very.”

  “Not helpful,” I muttered. “Is he, like, corporate-founder old? Or ancient-oracle old?”

  Stewie leaned forward. “He talks about things from before the Fall like he remembers it. Was he alive back then?”

  Laia nodded. “Yes. Before the Fall. Before the Reclamation. Before the Corporation Age. His mind… his brain was preserved. Frozen in stasis.”

  Lynn’s eyes widened. “Wait. Wait wait wait—like cryogenics?”

  “Yes,” Laia said simply. “NeuroGenesis recovered him from an ancient vault along with many others. Reconstructed his neural map. Built the first Todd-class interface around it. Lazarus is a copy like we had already told you.”

  There was a long silence.

  “So he’s, what… he was alive five thousand years ago?” I asked slowly.

  “Roughly.”

  Stewie gave a low whistle. “Dude. He’s like a grandpa from the literal past. A pre-Fall popsicle they stuck into a starship.”

  Mira hugged her knees. “That’s… kind of sad.”

  “It is not,” Laia said firmly, but not unkindly. “He’s alive. He’s flying. He has you.”

  “That doesn’t make it not sad,” Lynn said, voice softer now. “He doesn’t even have a real body anymore.”

  “I would argue,” Laia said, glancing toward the firelight, “that Lazarus is more real now than most people in this galaxy.”

  “Still,” I said, poking at the coals, “must be a strange kind of loneliness.” We had understood he was person inside a ship, but he was also a person out of his time.

  Nobody said anything after that. The fire crackled. Wind stirred the leaves. Somewhere nearby, something chirped like a frog trying to be a cricket.

  Then T’lish piped up, breaking the silence. “I find the concept inspiring,” she said, taking another bite of root. “Preserved knowledge. A living fossil. I wish I could get see the far future.”

  “Good luck with that,” Stewie muttered. “You’re already old at twelve.”

  “I am middle-aged,” T’lish huffed. “And I will outlive your sass.”

  And just like that, the heaviness broke.

  We passed around the last of the skewers, told a few stories, and even got Mira to sing one of the songs Lazarus had taught her. He had called them sea shanties and had said they were perfect for travelling around in a spaceship.

  But the truth about Lazarus lingered, somewhere beneath the warmth of the fire and the taste of sweet moon-roots.

  I think we all saw him a little differently after that. Not less human.

  But More.