The gray paste tasted like sweet drywall and metal.

  Nathan forced it down, throat convulsing, and scraped the last of it from the foil packet with his thumb. It wasn't food. It was fuel. He needed the engine to run.

  He had been running it for days.

  He didn't know exactly how many. Time had dissolved somewhere in the first hours, when the screaming was still new and the drones were still moving through the crowd in patterns he thought he could map. He had tried to map them. He was a builder. He understood systems. He had watched the drones and tried to find the logic and then a woman three feet away had simply come apart at the seams of herself, her shoulder separating from her body with a sound he was never going to stop hearing, and the mapping stopped.

  He had been walking since then.

  His left knee ground bone on bone with every step, a dry, catching rasp that fired up into his hip and died somewhere in his lower back. The patella wasn't tracking right. Something in the joint had been put back slightly wrong, like a door hung a quarter inch off its frame. It worked. It just worked badly and loudly and with a specific kind of pain that had stopped being acute and become simply weather.

  He looked down at his left hand.

  Three fingers and a thumb. The skin over the fourth knuckle was smooth and sealed, as if he had always been built this way. The silicone ring he wore on job sites was gone with the finger. He had stared at it for a long time, that first day. He didn't stare anymore.

  He had a job to do.

  "Christine."

  His voice came out wrecked, scraped raw from days of use in air that was too dry and too recycled and tasted faintly of whatever the drones used for decontamination. He pushed forward into the mass of bodies anyway.

  The holding bay was vast. He hadn't understood how vast until he had been walking it for days and still hadn't reached every wall. Thousands of people packed into pristine white space that had been designed for cargo, not grief. The acoustics turned every sound into something larger than itself. Weeping became a tide. The hymn that had started somewhere in the second day had evolved and spread and now rolled through the crowd in overlapping waves, different verses, different languages, sometimes three at once, the melodies colliding and separating and finding each other again.

  He had joined it himself, early on. The vibration helped. It moved through his chest and into the gap where his finger used to be and reminded him that he was still a body, still present, still here.

  Christine would sing. He kept listening for her voice in the hymn.

  He kept not finding it.

  Around him, the drones worked.

  They moved through the crowd in slow, deliberate arcs, scanning. When they stopped over someone, a light swept down, pale blue, and a tone sounded, and then the drone spoke in that flat translated voice.

  Name. Function. Biological integrity assessment. Name. Function.

  Most people answered. Some couldn't. Some had lost the ability to form words, the transport having scrambled whatever wiring connected thought to speech. Those ones the drones simply logged and moved on, leaving them sitting against bulkheads with a small mark glowing on their forearm like a price tag.

  The dead the drones collected without announcement.

  They would descend over a body, extend two smooth arms, and lift it from the floor with a gentleness that had nothing human in it. No pause. No acknowledgment of what was being carried. The crowd parted for them out of instinct and closed again behind them, and the space where a person had been was filled within seconds by the press of the living.

  Nathan had stopped counting the collections.

  He passed a man sitting against the wall with his face arranged wrong, the left eye several centimeters below where it should have been, blinking steadily in the recycled light. The man was eating paste from a packet with his right hand, methodical, unbothered by his own reflection in the polished floor. Surviving. Nathan moved on.

  He passed a woman whose foot faced backward. She had rigged a support from torn fabric around her calf and was walking on the heel of the reversed foot with a slow rocking gait, covering ground. Surviving. Nathan moved on.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  He passed the place where the food packets were distributed.

  He smelled it before he saw it. Not the paste itself, which smelled of almost nothing, but the crowd around the distribution point, which had compressed into something feral and dense. People at the edges were shouting. Someone had gone down and was being trampled by accident by people who didn't know they were trampling, who were just trying to get to the front, who hadn't eaten in however many days this was and had stopped being able to think past the hunger.

  Nathan changed direction.

  He shoved through the outer ring, using his size the way he used it on job sites, not aggressive, just present, just solid, filling space until space opened up. He got to the man on the ground and hauled him up by the arm. The man didn't thank him. He just lurched toward the front of the crowd the moment he had his feet. Nathan let him go.

  He took a packet for himself from the distribution drone, which handed them over with no expression because it had no expression to give, and he kept moving.

  "Christine."

  A section of the crowd ahead had thinned. He could see a gap near the far wall where people had arranged themselves in a rough ring around something he couldn't yet see. He moved toward it, the knee grinding, the paste sitting heavy and wrong in his stomach.

  The ring opened around a woman on the floor who was seizing. No one was touching her. They were watching with the particular helplessness of people who wanted to do something and had no idea what. Nathan scanned the circle for anyone who looked like they knew and found no one.

  He got down on the floor beside her, turned her onto her side, cleared her airway with two fingers, held her shoulder so she didn't crack her head against the floor. He had watched Christine do this a dozen times. He was not Christine. But he knew the shape of what needed doing.

  The seizure ran its course. The woman went still. Breathing.

  A young man at the edge of the circle dropped down beside him. "Is she okay?"

  "For now." Nathan stood, the knee screaming at the movement. "Stay with her. Don't leave her alone."

  The young man nodded. Nathan moved on.

  Christine.

  He said her name less out loud now. Not because he had stopped believing, but because his voice was nearly gone and he was spending what remained of it on things that required volume. He said it inside instead, a steady internal transmission, the same three syllables cycling on repeat the way the hymn cycled through the crowd.

  She would be where the worst of it was. That was her nature. The sicker the room, the more she moved toward its center. He knew this the way he knew the load-bearing walls of a structure. It was simply how she was built.

  He was moving toward the far end of the bay where the bodies were densest, where the sounds were worst, where the drones were most active, because that was where she would be.

  A booming voice rolled through the bay from above.

  Nathan looked up.

  On a high gantry, one of them stood. Not in armor. A long pale robe, nine feet of translucent blue skin, veins pulsing with slow bioluminescent light. It spoke through the device at its throat, the voice cascading through languages, Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, English, the same message in each.

  We construct a Dome. Your biology is delicate. The atmosphere requires calibration. We build for your safety. Two moon rotations.

  The crowd stilled and then fractured. Some people wept with relief. Some screamed. The young man who had been circling near Nathan's elbow since the food queue grabbed his arm.

  "We're going to die here," he said. His skin was mottled with gray patches where the pigment had failed. He was pulling at his own hair with his free hand, not seeming to notice. "Look at us. We're already dead."

  Nathan looked at him. Looked at the panic spreading outward from him like a crack in a load-bearing wall.

  He grabbed the kid by both shoulders and pushed him back against the bulkhead. Not hard. Just enough to stop the motion.

  "Look at me," Nathan said, finding the voice he used over jackhammers.

  The kid looked.

  "You're breathing. You feel that floor? You feel my hands?"

  "But Earth..."

  "Is gone." The grief hit him like a structural failure, sudden and total. He held it. "We are what is left. If you panic, everyone around you panics. Is that what you want?"

  He let go. Turned to the people watching.

  "Check your neighbor," he said, loud enough to carry. "If they can't walk, help them walk. If they can't eat, help them eat. We work together or we don't make it."

  A few nods. The crack stopped spreading.

  Nathan turned and kept moving.

  On the gantry above, the alien was gone.

  But something was happening near the base of the gantry access, a disturbance in the crowd, a ripple of movement and noise that had a different quality from the general chaos. Not panic. Something else. People pressing toward a point, trying to see something.

  Nathan changed direction again.

  He pushed through the crowd, the knee grinding, his voice gone to a rasp.

  A drone had descended near the gantry base. Not a collection drone. Something larger, with different lights. It was scanning the crowd in a slow arc, the blue light moving across faces, and when it stopped on someone it spoke.

  Name. Function.

  And then it was separating people. Pulling them from the crowd in ones and twos, moving them toward the gantry access, the door that led up.

  Not the dead. Not the severely damaged.

  People who could answer. People with functions.

  Nathan shoved forward, the crowd thick and resistant and moving in every direction at once.

  Name. Function.

  He couldn't see who was being taken. He could only see the gap they left behind, the crowd closing over it like water.

  Red Leader, some part of him thought, unbidden. Red Leader, if you're up there—

  He pushed harder.

  "Christine!" The word tore out of him, the last of his voice, swallowed by the hymn and the weeping and the ten thousand sounds of a species learning to survive without a planet.

  The drone's light swept on.

  The gantry door sealed.

  Nathan stood at the edge of the cleared space and looked at the door and breathed.

  She was somewhere in this bay or she wasn't. She had been taken up or she hadn't. She was alive or she was against the far wall under a silver sheet with a glowing mark on her forearm.

  He refused the last thought.

  He turned around.

  He kept walking.

  "Christine."

  Thanks for reading!

  A quick request: I am my own editor, and to be honest, I’m horrible at that part! I'm still a student of this craft and these are very much works in progress. If you see something obvious or... worse... something that ruins your immersion, please tell me. I want to fix it.