Broken

Flyer 247-3 hasn’t flown in five days. In these five days, she has become accustomed to the hum and whine of the air filtration system cranked to its highest setting. She has become accustomed to her cell, four paces long, four paces wide. Its lack of view. She has become accustomed to peering through green goggles, to seeing the walls and most everything as yellow-green. Yellow-green walls, pantry door, front door, bathroom door, sink, water heater, reclining chair with its feeding IVs and other tubes and wires that she’s usually hooked into through her suit. She is about to make all of this disappear.

She stands in her suit in front of her reclining chair, and she cradles her helmet, which she can’t stop petting. The smoothness of it is the only sensation that makes this body feel anything other than heavy, as if the smoothness under her fingers transforms her to pure light.

Still, she hesitates. The shadow in the repair warehouse—what that shadow said. It was a joke, just a joke so the shadows could laugh at her behind her back. And the rest of what she saw outside her cell? Read the rest in Clarkesworld, September 2024.