After finishing off a large pot of meat goop, Laila wasn’t tired. She still hurt in the general liver area, but it wasn’t that bad. She mostly stayed in the surgery room with the heater, since she only had on her, now bloodied, regular clothes, and it was freezing outside.

  From time to time, Jecca came back inside to check on her. Laila noticed that Jecca wasn’t wearing particularly thick clothes. She supposed that made sense, if she were going off the stories about these sorts of experiments she’d heard. Whatever patches Jecca had gotten before she was dropped here would probably have something to do with where she was dropped.

  There were no windows in Jecca’s little house.

  ‘I don’t suppose you have any warm clothes you’d be willing to give me,’ Laila said, not exactly asking a question, the next time Jecca came to check on her.

  Jecca only ever frowned with her eyebrows. ‘I don’t really have any spare clothes,’ she said. ‘You have a different body shape to me.’

  Laila nodded.

  Jecca looked her up and down.

  Jecca was taller than Laila, narrower than Laila and, of course, distinctly more grey. Not that the greyness affected the sorts of clothes that would fit her. But she was distinctly grey.

  ‘I could make you some,’ Jecca said. ‘Warm clothes? I…’ She left the room. She came back a minute later. ‘I have some furry leather, that should be warm, right?’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to put you out,’ Laila said, before realising that that was an expression Jecca might not know. ‘I could make them myself, if you were willing to give me the materials.’

  Jecca’s eyebrows raised, making her already too-big eyes noticeable more too-big. ‘Oh, that would be much easier,’ she said. ‘I’ve never made clothes for someone else before, I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to do it.’

  ‘It’s not very different from making clothes for yourself,’ Laila said. ‘Do you have some kind of measuring tape?’

  Jecca’s eyes widened even further. ‘I have a measuring string,’ she said, and left. She came back with a measuring string. It was fairly thick cord with knots at impressively regular intervals about the width of Jecca’s pinky finger.

  ‘That’ll work,’ Laila said. ‘I haven’t made myself clothes for a while. I don’t know my measurements.’

  Jecca nodded and offered the string. ‘I’ll get you materials,’ she said, and left again.

  The whole string was about three metres long. Experimentally, Laila measured her waist. That was a bad idea. She’d recently been impaled around the waist. She was about twenty pinky-widths around, which she reckoned equated to about thirty centimetres.

  Jecca came back with an armful of furry leather, a handful of thread and a single needle. ‘From memory…’ She put the pile down on the operating table, frowned around at the room briefly, and grabbed something from a shelf. ‘Good…’

  If Laila let her mind wander, she could imagine that the thing was the base of a sewing machine. She was correct. Jecca cleared some bits off a table, pulled some more bits off shelves, screwed them together and jammed a wire into the side of it and suddenly there was a large sewing machine in the room.

  The sewing machine was certainly rougher than the one Laila had back at home, but it was a sewing machine. The needle was much lower gauge than what Laila was used to, and the sewing machine was distinctly bigger.

  Laila took a moment to inspect Jecca’s clothes. ‘Where you naked, when you arrived?’ she asked.

  Jecca shook her head. ‘I had a jumpsuit on,’ she said. ‘A kind of dull blue colour. It more or less disintegrated the first time I tried to wash it.’

  Laila nodded. Jecca’s current outfit, a longsleeved tshirt and long pants, looked homemade from up close. The seams were a bit uneven, some edges were a little frayed. But they could just as easily have been a little worn, and either way they were very well made. They were also not made from leather.

  ‘How did you get… I’m guessing cotton, for clothes?’ Laila asked. ‘I doubt it would grow around here.’

  Jecca shook her head. ‘I traded for it,’ she said. ‘There’s some people…’ Her eyebrows edged closer to each other and she pointed at one of the corners of the room. ‘About thirty-one hours walk that way. I get vegetables from them as well, sometimes.’

  Laila nodded, that was useful information. ‘Do you trade metal? Or things you’ve actually made, like the sewing machine and such?’

  Jecca nodded. ‘I was going to go back out and get more from the crash,’ she said. ‘I’ll be at least six hours. Are you… do you… can I leave you here? Do you want to come with me?’

  Laila wanted to go with her, but she didn’t want to go out without warmer clothes. She hadn’t sewn any clothes for a while, but six hours sounded like a reasonable amount of time to get something done.

  ‘If you don’t mind leaving me here, I can stay,’ she said. ‘I’ll make myself a coat or something and maybe next time I can come with you. I’d like to see what happened to the others.’

  Jecca nodded. ‘I’ll let you know if I see anyone,’ she said. And she turned and left. Then she opened the door again. ‘You can cook yourself more food, too, if you need. The pemmican is in that box beside the stove.’

  ‘What’s pemmican?’ Laila asked.

  Jecca frowned at her. ‘It’s preserved meat. It’s what I cooked for you already.’

  ‘Oh, that works. Thank you again, Jecca. I really appreciate all of this.’

  Jecca kept frowning, nodded, and closed the door.

  Jecca was feeling some kind of way. She wasn’t sure exactly what kind of way she was feeling. Even if she couldn’t pin it down exactly, she was enjoying whatever way she was feeling.

  Maybe she was feeling appreciated. So far, Laila was the first person to repeatedly thank her for her help. Even if Jecca wasn’t helping because she wanted thanks, it was still nice to be thanked.

  With that settled, Jecca didn’t worry about it as she trekked back down the slope to where she’d found Laila in the first place. Those pieces of giant gun were peppered with light snow, but still easily spotted. Jecca piled them up, just in case more snow came, and kept going.

  Jecca regretted disassembling her cart 361 days ago, but she hadn’t needed it at the time, and it had made for a perfectly serviceable shelf. It had been 492 days since the last major crash, and they weren’t common to begin with. She supposed she could reassemble the cart when she got back, if she really needed it.

  From what Jecca had seen, the ship had broken up quite high in the atmosphere. Not only was the wreckage spread all the way down the side of her plateau, but every piece of metal she was coming across was, at best, discoloured from the heat of atmospheric entry. A lot of smaller pieces were partially melted, bigger plates were cracked, bent, and scorched.

  Like the pod that Laila had arrived in, very little of the salvage that Jecca sorted into piles had been in good condition to begin with. Wire shielding was frayed where it hadn’t been burned off in the descent, rust had turned black from heat, even some of the windows, usually the least damaged pieces of ships, were cracked and broken.

  She had been sifting through the wreckage for an hour and forty-two minutes when she finally found something that looked useful. And the first sign that there had been anyone else in the ship other than Laila.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  A bunker had fallen from the sky and, though scorched and oxidised a lovely deep blue from its descent, had embedded itself nearly two metres deep into the rocky cliff without splitting.

  The thick, sealed door of the bunker hung open, a smear of dried blood on the locking wheel. Jecca had to jump to catch the bottom of the doorway and pull herself though the hatch and onto a soft and slightly squishy floor.

  Inside the bunker was a fairly ordinary looking bedroom, from what Jecca understood of bedrooms. A large, soft bed must have been bolted to the floor to not have tipped over or broken during descent. At the foot of the bed, the lid of a large metal box that must have also been bolted down hung open.

  A desk and chair were bent and twisted against the far wall, where the slightly deflated airbags around the rest of the room were pierced and sagging. Glittering shards of glass near the bed accompanied another small smear of blood on the mattress.

  The computer that the desk and chair had presumably been set up in front of was not only unharmed, but still running. It had been bolted into the wall and floor, and must have been assembled quite solidly for the insides to still be intact.

  Jecca checked the box first. There was another smear of dried blood on the lid, but the inside was completely empty. So she ignored it in favour of the computer.

  In her time here, Jecca had gotten her hands of a few different computers scavenged from crashes. Some of the components had been very useful for making into other devices, but none of them up until now had survived hitting the ground.

  She had very little experience with operating computers other than her tablet, so it took her three minutes to work out how to operate this one. A keyboard and trackpad had to be pried out of the airbags on the wall so that Jecca could attempt to make sure to turn the device off safely.

  Only once before, 2037 days ago, had Jecca needed any tools beyond her metal sheers and a prybar to disassemble a wreckage. She doubted she would be able to drag this whole bunker back home, and she didn’t want to risk tearing open the walls to attempt to pull out this computer.

  She didn’t know what kind of power source might be powering the computer, and similarly didn’t want to tear open the walls to try to find out. She would just have to hope it hadn’t been made too unstable by the crash and come back another time with the tools she would actually need.

  Instead, Jecca dragged the table out into the snow. Two of the legs had snapped off and the tabletop was cracked and dented, but it was the closest to a large, flat surface that she’d found so far. So she rigged up her chain to it and started back home.

  As she passed her piles, Jecca loaded up her makeshift sled until it scraped irritatingly against the stony ground. Once again, she left the pieces of that giant gun behind as she headed back up the slope.

  Back at Jecca’s brick house, Laila was some combination of frightened and excited. The sewing machine worked basically like any sewing machine she’d operated before with three exceptions: it could only do straight stitches automatically; it could punch through leather without so much as slowing down; and it didn’t have any safety features that might stop it from punching through Laila’s fingers just as easily.

  Laila, who did not have a watch, had lost track of time in her ongoing negotiation with the sewing machine. She thought the negotiations were going well, given that she’d put together an admittedly quite basic parka and a hood with a face shield.

  She was getting ambitious, trying to make long mittens with open wrists so that she could use her fingers if she needed to. She wasn’t ambitious enough to try to make proper gloves with fingers.

  Laila hadn’t worked with leather very much before right now, and she suspected she wouldn’t have enjoyed it if not for this scary sewing machine. It was fairly stiff, a bit uneven, and the skin was oddly both dry and oily. But she had a big, scary sewing machine, so she was having a great time.

  At first, she didn’t notice the slowly increasing screeching noise of Jecca’s return. It started as just a part of the general background noise of wind and pattering snow, and the sewing machine was loud.

  By the time it reached the house, Laila was squinting intently into the storeroom, trying to identify something she could use as a weapon against whatever kind of mechanical horror was about to break open the door.

  She jumped when Jecca opened the door.

  ‘Oh,’ Jecca said, strongly implying the ‘you’re still here’. ‘That looks nice,’ she said instead.

  Laila was wearing the ankle-length parka, her arms poking out of holes in the sides. She was already a little too warm, but she’d figured that leather would protect her from the mechanical horror.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Um… do you have any buttons? I can’t really see anything in here.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Jecca said, those eyebrows meeting in the middle again. ‘It’s totally full… oh… it’s too dark?’

  Jecca got very close for the first time since Laila had woken up, leaning in to stare intently into Laila’s eyes.

  Her breath was not warm in the way that Laila was used to. It wasn’t cold, but it wasn’t warmer than the ambient temperature of the room. ‘That makes sense,’ she said. ‘You have very pretty eyes. Colourful.’

  Jecca turned and stepped into the storeroom before Laila could think of anything to say to that.

  ‘I have… aha!’ Jecca leaned back out of the room with a small leather bag in one hand. ‘I made these almost four thousand days ago. Bone buttons.’

  Laila took the offered bones. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Your eyes a pretty as well, by the way.’

  Jecca smiled. Laila didn’t think she’d seen Jecca do that before. In the same way as her frowns, the smile was mostly in her eyes and eyebrows. The corners of her lips twitched up just a tiny bit.

  For a moment, they just stood there and smiled at each other, which was pleasant.

  ‘Oh,’ Jecca said. ‘I found a bunker. Do you know anything about that?’

  The moment was ruined. Laila scowled. ‘That was Rukan’s room,’ she said. ‘Closest to a safe place if the ship crashed.’

  Jecca nodded. ‘There was a bed in there, so that makes sense. There was also a computer, which was still powered. I didn’t think to bring any tools, so I’m going to go back soon to get it. First I…’ She disappeared back into the storeroom, explanation turning to a mumble as she sorted through things.

  Laila waited.

  Jecca stepped back out of the storeroom, four rubber castors in her arms. ‘I need a new trolley,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot of stuff out there.’

  ‘It used to basically be a whole space ship,’ Laila said. ‘Was Rukan still in his room? Did you see any bodies or anything?’

  Jecca’s eyes managed to widen. ‘No, I didn’t see anyone,’ she said. ‘The door was already open when I got there. There a box that might have been emptied out, and a bit of blood and broken glass.’

  ‘Much blood?’

  ‘No.’

  Laila frowned. ‘Hopefully he’ll get an infection at least.’

  Jecca’s gaze shifted into the middle distance and her eyebrows got close to the top of her nose, but not quite all the way together. ‘There wasn’t…’ she said, slowly. ‘I imagine that if he had medical supplies, he would have bandaged his hand before he went outside. So he may get an infection.’

  Laila snorted. ‘Good.’

  Jecca nodded once, then turned to go. This time she remembered to explain herself before she’d gotten all the way outside. ‘I’m going to make a new trolley,’ she said. ‘I’ll be outside if you need anything.’

  Laila nodded back. ‘Do you… are you hungry?’

  Jecca shook her head. ‘I don’t think I get hungry,’ she said. ‘If you want some food, I can make some before I go out again.’

  Laila shook her head. ‘I can cook, I just figured you might want some.’

  Jecca shifted the castors to one arm and looked at her watch. ‘I should probably eat,’ she said. ‘That would be very nice of you.’ Then she left.

  Laila frowned at the door for a moment. If she had been working for six hours, she should have something to eat before she kept going. The longer she wasn’t working, the hungrier she was getting.

  She went and put the buttons with her sewing, took off her parka, and figured she would work out how to turn on the stove without going outside and asking. She was right.

  Laila cut open one of the stiff bags beside the stove and discovered squishy fat with flakes of what looked like dried meat mixed in. It didn’t smell like much, but at least it didn’t smell bad.

  She went and opened one of the iceboxes. There were no onions, but there was a dish with a chunk of liver in it. That was distracting. What was she supposed to do with a piece of her own liver?

  Laila opened the other icebox and found onions, cabbage, capsicum, and some kind of leavy green, all frozen. After a moment of indecision, Laila took one of each and a handful of greens, dumped the bag of what she supposed must have been pemmican into a large pot and put it on the stove while she chopped the vegetables.

  Something like half an hour later, the goop didn’t taste like much, but the spinach and capsicum had helped. Some garlic and salt and this would be a totally reasonable meal, but Laila figured if there were no seasonings around the stove, Jecca probably didn’t have any.

  Laila managed to rustle up another bowl and spoon, put her parka back on, and carried the food out to Jecca, who was doing something vaguely absurd to the twisted remains of Rukan’s desk.

  Jecca was using a hand-awl to drill holes in the steel tabletop, presumably to bolt the castors on.

  ‘Do you not have a drill?’ Laila said, instead of something like ‘I brought some food’. But she remembered why she’d actually come outside quickly enough. ‘Here’s some food.’

  Jecca frowned at her, ducking to rub her hands in the snow. ‘This is a drill,’ she said.

  ‘I mean…’ Laila handed the bowl and spoon to Jecca while she debated how to describe an electric drill. There was an obvious way. ‘A motorised version of that.’

  ‘You’re smart,’ Jecca said through a mouthful of pemmican. ‘Maybe I can use one of the motors out of that pod you landed in for that.’

  ‘They’re not that hard to make,’ Laila said, without a mouthful of pemmican. ‘If you can connect power.’

  Jecca nodded along. ‘You’ve made one before?’

  ‘An…’ Laila had been about to say she’d made an electric screwdriver, but that seemed like it would complicate the topic. ‘A small one.’