The corridors of the ship had become a sughterhouse. Laser bsts shone and flickered with a green glow as they sliced through the bodies of the charging beasts. Streams of yellowish exudate and blood fell everywhere, bubbling from the cauterised stumps, along with guts and getinous organs. An acrid stench of charred flesh soon filled the corridors, along with smoke. The limbs of the spider drones creaked as they retreated to face the creatures. One by one, they were eliminated with precision. But even in pieces, they stubbornly continued their advance, crawling, writhing, eager to reach the intruders that threatened their nest aboard the Chronos. Sooner or ter, the counterattack of the Jorogumo was overwhelmed, and like flies, they began to fall. The sers overheated, and then the Goblins, Fairies, and Hounds charged against the metal spiders, fullerenes, and silicon, tearing them to shreds with fury. They burned in fmes and exploded. Sparks, spshes of blue coont, and the smell of charred circuits mingled with the essence of the massacre. The st android was massacred by the Wrecker. The ser bsts could not damage its chitinous armor. They only fueled its rage, and with a tackle, it threw the android against a wall. Painfully, and amidst crackling, it tried to rise shakily. It was of little use, as the Jorogumo ended up crushing it between its fists. It bit it like a dog pying with its prey, and with a shake, it finished tearing it apart. But the metal arachnid would not leave without one st breath. As its debris fell through the air, the ser cannon activated one st time, tracing a spiral of cutting death. The beasts surrounding the Wrecker were sliced like butter, falling apart with a viscous and repugnant sound. That horrendous mass received a cut on one of its faces, and with a surge of fury, it crushed the remains of the android between its cws. An explosion echoed through the corridors and compartments, along with a distant fireball. —. Don’t stop! Don’t look back! — Harding ordered between gasps, upon hearing the distant roar of the enraged beast. Elongated silhouettes were approaching amidst the decaying emergency lights, flickering due to the impending relentless cascading failure. The ggards of the massacre were coming after them. Goblins and infected crew members falling apart. It was incredible to think they were still alive. Some of them, already horrendous masses of yellowish slime, gave in to their own transformation and colpsed. A few continued the chase. Naomi turned around, and with the pulse rifle in her hands, she fired. The burst tore off the left arm of what was once Madalyn Koerner. The mouth of her stomach and chest glowed like fire, and she writhed as streams of brown goo erupted from her amputated limb. Her flesh swelled, as if worms were beneath her skin. If she was about to transform into something worse, they did not know. Naomi finished her off with three shots to the chest. Right in the light, as Daimonji suggested. But they kept coming. Boris Sareva, Drake Kader, and Higa Kobayashi were coming alongside a mob of howling aberrations. Melted, mutated, and recombined crewmates beyond recognition, with only vestigial limbs and tumors shaped like faces betraying their stripped humanity. Max stepped forward and pulled the trigger of the Psma Saw, while the tool trembled and the barrel heated to a bright red with a blinding fsh. A shot was fired, and upon contact, it sliced through Kader and two creatures following him, which Naomi finished off as they writhed in pools of exudate and purulent blood, awaiting a metamorphosis that never came. Upon reaching the emergency stairs, Yakiv and Ayna continued to climb, while Harding, Naomi, and Max stayed behind. The engineer pretended to stay with them, but the First Officer put an end to those ideas. —. Keep moving! — he ordered in an authoritative, if hesitant, voice. Reluctantly, Yakiv obeyed. The creatures closed in, using the corridor door as a bottleneck.Max swapped the psma saw for the shotgun and took aim. Five seconds that seemed endless. A rush of gunfire and sparks in the darkness. His pgue-transformed crewmates met their end, and as the fireflies glowed and twisted them, hoping to give the fallen a new purpose, they finished them off. Silence fell deafeningly and suddenly as they surveyed the carnage before them. They waited an exhausting minute for another aberration to peek around the corner, or for tentacles to sprout from the ceiling. Nothing happened. —. Clear. — Harding said. —. Clear. — Max repeated, and both lowered their weapons. They hurried to climb the stairs —. Naomi, let’s go. — but she kept aiming. Seeing her made his stomach knot. Something in her gaze had changed as she backed away, remaining on alert, with every inch of her body ready for a fight.The way she gripped the weapon. Her movements as she aimed and the way her muscles remained tense. That was not the product of desperate survival, but of someone raised in a martial environment. No matter how much she wanted, the Bck Shadow would never leave her body. It was what Max, and especially Naomi, feared. —. Naomi. — Max said softly, and she turned around startled, spinning with the weapon. In a fraction of a second, their gazes crossed, and suddenly she was again the Naomi he knew. The head of the trauma team aboard the Chronos. The one who saved lives instead of taking them. Max’s partner, his beloved. Her expression reflected a mix of surprise, shame, and regret as she lowered the rifle and put on the safety, albeit unwillingly, with the same military composure as before. —. Yes, let’s go. — she replied more hesitantly than her body reflected.***As they moved up through the 15 levels and reached the refuge, they locked themselves in tight. They raised pressure seals on the bulkheads, and then, they set about welding the entrances. Deep down, they knew it was a futile effort. Sooner or ter, the Forest of Fireflies, with its tendrils and the shoots that protected it, would find a way in. —. What do we do then? Stay here to die? — Max wondered in his head. He didn't want to voice it, as it would only provoke more panic and frustration among the crew he was in charge of. —. You are the captain. You tell me. — Lay's voice replied, with a tone that was both sad and indifferent. Max felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up as he finished sealing the st bulkhead. He felt watched and then turned to look at the corner. There was nothing. His subconscious mind expected to see Lay sitting there, with a sad, tired, and pleading expression. As if she were asking him for help. As if he had to save her too. Max cursed inwardly as he wiped the sweat from his forehead with his forearm. —. What would Matkovich do in my pce? — he then wondered. But in trying to seek answers, the same scene repeated itself over and over. The captain was dead. At least, as he remembered him. His body remained vilely alive. The fireflies took care of that. The whole story of Captain Sebastián Matkovich mattered little. The man half-machine. The captain of the Chronos, older than his own ship and yet, as much a part of it as his own vessel. Survive a nuclear winter? Be a veteran of eight wars? Help rebuild humanity when it fell apart during the Gray Pgue? Be the first captain of the First Starscraper ? Be the first living human to reach Proxima Centauri? For the fireflies, it didn't matter. Irrelevant details for their purpose. The captain had been dehumanized to cells, tissues, marrow, and bones. A resource for the parasites, twisting his essence for their own ends. Consume. Assimite. Recombine. Grow. That was the purpose of the creatures. Max? Naomi? The rest of the crew? Bags of meat with some utility. What was useless was discarded. It was the fate that awaited humanity if they ever came into contact with those damned fireflies. Max wondered if it wouldn't be better to let himself be assimited. Everyone shines in the forest because in the forest everyone is fireflies. Could there be peace then? But then he remembered the screams that pursued them. The crew members, his crewmates, were suffering in an unspeakable agony. The offer of the fireflies was not paradise, but hell. —. I will take care of Satoshi's wounds. Wait for me here. — Naomi's voice told him, and Max emphatically nodded with his fist and thumb raised. As he watched them pass, he remained staring into nothingness, trying to conceive some desperate pn. And if the fireflies didn't come for them, what was left then? To die? A good captain goes down with his ship. The st option was clear, but he didn't even dare to utter it. It was within reach, like the Psma Saw that time. He just had to take it. *** Naomi barely gave Satoshi time to feel pain. She immobilized his left forearm, quickly cleaned the wounds, and administered 10 mg of intravenous anesthesia. She worked as best as she could with the fractured bones and had to remove two splinters. With jewelry work, she pced blocks of nanites with carbo-cy in the breaks, applied hydrogen peroxide and povidone-iodine to the superficial wounds, and then somatic gel, which partially closed them. They would finish it completely in three days, and externally the forearm would look as good as new. Not so the fracture. The ulna and radius had to be immobile to regenerate properly. For that, she put a cast on it and pced a sling. On the stump of the ear, she did the same; hydrogen peroxide and povidone, then somatic gel with stem cells. On top, she put a kind of bck cap that had a nanogel mold for an ear. Satoshi looked like a rugby pyer, one battered and bruised after a bad match. It was supposed that in three months a new one should grow. If the Ebisu deigned to help them, Satoshi's wounds could disappear in a couple of days. She gave him two Alfevac pills for the pain, and the work was done. The young policeman thanked her silently. Tired, she sighed. First she took off her monocle, then her gloves, which she threw into a recycling bin. She turned off the equipment and sat for a few minutes in what they called the infirmary. It was a small room that had once been a storeroom. To her left was a rectangur window that looked out over part of the inner garden. There was the body of the fairy, now unrecognisable. It had taken the form of a tree and was sending out fiments like branches that had clung to and twisted around the nearby balconies. The red light of Lacaille 8760 filtering through the skylights gave her an inexplicable feeling of sadness. She didn't know who or what it reminded her of.—. How long would it take you to kill Satoshi? — a voice asked while pying with the ser scalpel between her fingers, before putting it back in its pce. To her horror, she discovered it had been herself. Naomi froze and stopped maniputing the tool. She remained staring into nothingness. Her own unconscious mind answered her. Not much time. While the young policeman knew martial arts and had more strength than her, Naomi didn’t need more strength than Satoshi to dislocate his shoulder. Besides, Satoshi was injured. He had no way to defend himself from a Kimura. Keeping him immobilized, she would pierce his neck with the ser scalpel. There was no need to decapitate him, just to cause a jugur incision. There would be a struggle, but nothing could prevent death, as Naomi would keep the wound open. In less than a minute, the floor, her clothes, and herself would be covered in blood. The scandal would call Harding. The old man would be a problem. He knew how to fight and was also healthy. Naomi had to focus on taking his weapon. Honor didn’t matter. Any technique was valid from that moment on. She would end it all with two shots to the skull. One to kill him, another to make sure he wouldn’t get up. Yakiv and Ayna would be easy to eliminate. Civilians without military training. Although if they caught her off guard, they could even kill her. Lohengrin’s gravity made them sturdier than her. But brute strength, without training, meant nothing. She would kill them before they even knew what had happened. Like with Harding, two shots for each. And then, Max. She assessed the threat. Training in Jiujitsu in zero gravity. Muay Thai and Karate in standard 1 G. Strong enough to be a mosquito. With some focus, he could take her down if Naomi hesitated too much. That’s why the fight shouldn’t even happen. She was sure Max would wonder what was going on, and at that moment, she would shoot him. Naomi felt disgusted with herself as she returned to the present. She found herself in the infirmary again. The clock read 16:00, and the light from Lacaille 8760 filtering through the skylights had dimmed. Slowly, she lowered her gaze, expecting to find a sughterhouse. Instead, she found the ser scalpel between her fingers. A tool for cutting tissues according to frequency and practicing surgeries. A deadly weapon, if she chose to see it that way. She wanted to move it out of her sight, but as she looked around the room, she realized that even a pencil was a potential weapon for her. —. Naomi. — Max’s voice came from the other side of the door, and the scalpel slipped from her hands, falling to the floor. Her heart lodged in her throat as it throbbed frantically, and a sudden pain pressed against her skull like an invisible band —. Are you okay? — —. Yeah. — she hurried to say, clearing her throat of the knot that had formed —. I’ll be right there. — She bent down to pick up the scalpel, but something stopped her. Her stomach churned, and tears threatened to appear as she recalled the scenes of that nonexistent sughterhouse. Max’s confused and absent face as he received the shot in the forehead, while a pool of blood formed beneath her. Naomi could imagine what would happen next. As always, she would regain control, and it would be like waking from one nightmare to enter another. She would realize what she had done, and then she would try to bring Max back, attempting to piece him together like a broken toy. But she herself knew it was impossible. —. Why don’t you just let it happen? — she imagined Sixta asking her, as in her st nightmares —. You know that if the Fireflies catch them, you will join a collective suffering. You won’t be able to die, even if you want to, because hunger will keep you miserably alive. If you care so much for your crewmates, if you love Max so much, let it happen and kill them all. Then do it to yourself. You will have saved them all. — Naomi thought she heard her voice just behind her, and she turned quickly. She found a corner covered by a long shadow. There was no one. Slowly, Naomi sighed and held her head. Deep down, she knew Sixta was right. Her mother was always right. No one could escape the Fireflies. As she picked up the ser scalpel, she contempted it for a few seconds that stretched longer than they should have. A sleek metallic cylinder, the size of a pen. Capable of cutting bones in milliseconds if adjusted enough. She didn’t need it; it would end up overheating. It was enough that it could cut flesh, veins, and arteries. Go for the jugur of each one, before they could react, and then for her own. That’s how it would all end. She hurried to put it back where it was and retraced her steps, covered in cold sweat. —. What the hell am I thinking? — she said to herself quietly. She turned to look, in case the shadows surrounding her manifested Sixta. That’s what she was, after all, a Bck Shadow. She couldn’t change it, even if she wanted to. She shook her head and, turning her back to the table, hurried to leave. When she returned to the living room, Max was waiting for her. He was sitting on the floor, next to the window covered by metal ptes, finishing a cigarette. She was gd to see him alive and whole, and not with a hole in his head. Sometimes Naomi thought she was going crazy, especially when she imagined herself waking up in the middle of the night and shooting Max for no apparent reason. Or being at work, in the medical bay, suddenly grabbing a scalpel and deciding to kill whoever crossed her path. By herself, she could cause a massacre, and there would be no one to stop her. C-Sec were inept. She could easily disarm one of them, use him as a shield to kill the others, and then finish off the human shield with a shot to the head. Then Naomi would refuse, and contempte her own thoughts, terrified. Why did she think that? Simple. She was a Bck Shadow. The assassins of the Jovian Federation. Born to serve. Raised to kill. Why should she think otherwise? When she reached Max, she sat down and cuddled up next to him. Upon seeing her, he smiled and rested his head on hers. Sometimes she felt that the gentle and nky giant was all the support she had to keep from going insane. They both fantasized about a quiet life in the future. The idea of aging outside of Chronos was becoming tempting. They imagined living in a paradisiacal and impossible world, with shallow turquoise waters, white sands, palm trees, and a gas giant in the sky, just the two of them, without rush or luggage. Outside the sor system, there was no world that met such conditions. The terraforming of Titan had been canceled, and the closest thing to such an idyll was Mars, although much drier. Moreover, Naomi’s subconscious quickly ruined those fantasies with murderous delusions. She felt that the Bck Shadow was another person inside herself. Or was it the human part? Which of the two came first?—. Naomi, what's wrong? — Max asked her. She didn't respond. She imagined herself getting up abruptly and stabbing him in the neck with a knife. She shook her head and charged at Max harder, closing her eyes, trying to swallow her tears. He said nothing. He was afraid of losing the little he had left. The little he loved, and the worst part was that she would be to bme. However, she wouldn't be doing anything other than what she was created for, to kill. —. When you told me that we would get off the Chronos someday, and that we would have a cabin in Argyre, were you serious, or not? — Max paused, looking up, hoping to find a starry sky. The metal ceiling with ducts and grilles prevented it. —. I don't know. — was his answer —. I liked to fantasize about that. About a cabin in the countryside, surrounded by mountains and a ke. But when I had the chance to do it, I didn't dare. I think I was scared. I stayed on the Chronos for so long that I got used to it, and to be frank, I couldn't imagine having a life outside the ship. — He pointed to where he imagined the sor system would be —. Now that I think about it, if I wanted that life so much, I should have taken the opportunity. Lay is closer to fulfilling that dream than I am. For me, it's already too te. — —. Why is it too te for us? — Naomi asked, looking in the same direction but unable to see the names of the stars. She barely used the RED. It was something Max ended up liking. Max opened his mouth, but she put a finger over his lips —. Don't even think about saying it's because of the fireflies. — Max insisted, but she interrupted him once more —. They still haven't come for us. We still have a chance. I'm going to tell you something. When I heard you talk about that life, I took it seriously. I also fantasized about a cabin on Mars. I imagined that life with you, Max. You, me, two cats, and a little dog. — Hearing her, Max burst out ughing, and she smiled, but that ughter faded little by little as she spoke —. It may sound childish, but I still want that life, and I will do whatever it takes to achieve it, even if it means cutting and slicing the twisted and mutated bodies of our crewmates. And if we die, to meet again in another life, and cross half the universe to achieve it, wouldn't you do it? — Max said nothing and looked down. He remained thoughtful —. Make me a promise, Max. If we manage to get out of this nightmare, we will do everything possible to fulfill that dream. Even if it's when we're old, or even if it's in another life, we will have a cabin on Mars. And if only one of us lives, we will do it in honor of the other. — —. No. — Max stated —. I don't want to lose you, Naomi. I can only imagine that life with you, and no one else. — Naomi's eyes became gssy, and the smile that formed on her face highlighted the dimples in her cheeks. Her heart began to beat hard, and a knot formed in her throat that became painful. Then, she pressed her head against his chest and hugged him tightly, as if nothing could separate them. —. That was all I wanted to hear. — Naomi said to him —. Do you promise me it will come true? — —. I promise. — he replied. They fell asleep. They promised to dream of that life. A cabin by a ke, two children with features crossed with theirs, and an Akita Inu. They would do what married people do during the day, and then, he would watch the bluish sunset of Mars. In her pce, the forest of fireflies awaited her. And with its sickly glow, Sixta awaited her too. Since that collective delirium began, Naomi always ran. She tried to catch up to someone, but who? It was what everyone dreamed of, but it didn't work with her. Her Surrogate Mother didn't take long to break the illusion. She was the anchor that kept her sane, preventing madness from pulling her in, and also her personal executioner. She always appeared in the middle of a clearing when Naomi stumbled, failing to meet that abstract figure that slipped through her fingers. She wore her bck armor with a spider-like appearance, shiny like an obsidian mirror. To say that one was the mother of the other was an unfair description, and even calling them twins was an understatement. Sixta and Naomi were exact carbon copies of each other. Only one difference stood out. Sixta's eyes were green and devoid of shine. In contrast, Naomi's were one green and the other amber. —. You know what you have to do, Nine. — hearing Sixta was a bizarre experience, like hearing her own voice from an external point of view. Something Naomi had never noticed until she deserted —. No one can escape the fireflies. Not even us. — she warned.Her Bck Shadow half was eager to make her react, wake up, and obey that st order. It wasn't a cold-blooded murder; it was mercy, and she knew it well. The fireflies themselves showed her their true form and purpose. There was no paradise on the other side. Only eternal agony. But her human half resisted. She wanted to believe that there was still hope, and that they could survive the hunger and fury of the creatures. So she forced her other half to stay hidden in the corner of her mind, where it had been relegated. Naomi knew that sooner or ter, she would escape, and no one could stop her. In a paradox of certainty and uncertainty, she remained paralyzed and broke in tears. —. I can't. — she cried —. I can't do it. — Sixta hugged her. A gesture that seemed so foreign, and yet, she had done it once. It was when Naomi, then Nine, accidentally killed Trey. They were nine years old. That was when she realized what she had come into the world for, and Sixta made it known to her with the tender embrace of a mother. —. You will have to gather your courage. — were her st words —. You can't do it any other way. — and that was the st time Naomi saw Sixta in her dreams. She knew it when she opened her eyes. But a horrendous feeling of foreboding arose as Max curled up with her, trying to comfort her. The next time she lost control, when the Bck Shadow appeared again, no one would be able to stop her.