Chapter Text
Eva Stratt is eight years old when she dies.
It is not some psychological or symbolic death. It’s the real thing. Clinical.
She’s playing by a lake not far from her house. She’s a proficient swimmer, the best in her age group, so her parents have no trouble with letting her go out by herself.
The rocks are slippery from rain, but it's nothing she's not used to, and she knows this path like the back of her hand, a trail worn down from years of use. In the summer, the lake was overcrowded with so many people desperate to escape the heat.
But today, in the middle of the winter, it's just Eva.
There’s no one to watch her. No one to see as she trips over a tree root that climbs up an inch too high above ground. No one sees as she hits her head and tumbles beneath the smooth surface of the water, leaving her head ringing and her world a blinding white long before she has the chance to scream.
Dying is a strange experience. Especially when you're so young. It's not truly death if it doesn't stick, but some part of it does stick. It remains with you, even if you don't quite know how.
She doesn’t remember drowning, doesn’t remember her mother finding her, and she doesn’t remember the hospital. But she remembers the fear. It was a similar fear to that she felt when her brother had died. A similar fear to learning the fate of the world lay in her hands. A fear she felt learning the fate of Ryland Grace laid in her hands.
When Eva had calmed down, and they'd sent a doctor to talk to her— his face long since a blurred memory— he tells her, in fancy clinical words that mean nothing to a young girl whose biggest problem was previously the older girls who kept cutting in front the school lunch line, that her heart had stopped. That they were lucky they found her when they did and if it’d been any later, she wouldn’t have survived at all. That for six long minutes, she hadn’t survived.
Eva Stratt was intimately familiar with death.
With the Petrova Taskforce, death was simply another word. A casualty, a statistic signed away on neatly printed papers. Distant. So very different from a little girl dying scared in a lake. And yet— at its core, it was exactly the same.
“Is it hard to let so many people die?” Ryland Grace had asked her with a level of empathy in his voice Eva had never heard aimed towards someone like her before.
“No.” she said, with such certainty that there’s no room for any doubt. Because to a woman like her, doubt is dangerous. Doubt is far more deadly than Astrophage and nuclear bombs.
And doubt was exactly what led her to this.
“Eye movement detected.”
She wakes up to the sound of faint whirring, a bright light in her eyes and an ache in her body. Eva swallowed sharply— and immediately gags, her airway obstructed. Panicking, she reaches up to her mouth, but her arm doesn’t cooperate, flopping uselessly at her side.
“Body movement detected. Please remain still. What is two plus two?"
Eva doesn't answer. She can’t. She hardly registers the question. The noise is muffled, like her head is underwater, and there’s an uncomfortable feeling in her throat, and then the pressure is relieved. She can breathe… somewhat.
The machine whirs, more urgently. “What’s two plus two?”
Forming the words takes too much effort. Eyelids heavy, she debates returning to sleep. The world won’t end if she doesn’t answer basic math questions.
“You have been in an induced coma. You may experience memory loss, difficulty speaking.”
It takes a moment for her to register where she is. What she's doing. Astrophage. The Hail Mary.
She's in space.
The realisation is not as unnerving nor terrifying as it should be. She imagines she’ll freak out about it later. For now…
"What's two plus two?"
Four. She knows the answer, but her mouth refuses to form the words. It's a strange feeling, like she's not quite in control of her own body. It’s unsettling.
Slowly, methodically, Eva forces her mouth open, sounding out each letter, like a child speaking its first words. “Fo…ur.”
Eva’s tongue is heavy and stubborn in her mouth, and the words are slurred, spoken in a voice not her own— her ‘r’ is more of a ‘w’ but the robot seems to accept her response, its arm spinning around. “Correct! Cognitive assessment complete. Please wait for your physical assessment. Movement is unadvised.”
She winces, the cheery voice echoing in her skull. Who the hell coded this to be so happy?
Eva makes a mental note to talk to whoever… right. Can’t talk to anyone. She’s in space.
When the robot finally withdraws, satisfied with its poking and prodding, Eva fumbles upright. She swirls her tongue in her mouth, trying to work off the nerves and get it to cooperate with her.
“Who’s awake?” she asks, ineloquent, words still slurred. It sounds a bit like she’s said “toothache”, but she’s understood well enough.
“Grace, Ryland” the ship answers, “Stable. End of manifest.”
The words are closely followed by a groan, muffled through the ships walls, and a noise that sounded an awful lot like someone falling over.
“And Il… Ily..” Eva gives up trying to pronounce Ilyukhina’s name in her current state, doubtful she could even pronounce her own name. “The other?”
“Ilyukhina, Olesya,” the voice responds, “Deceased.”
Her heart drops into her stomach. Of course, there was always a chance something would go wrong, but still… she’d taken every measure.
It hadn’t been enough.
All the planning, the countless people who worked to build the ship that would save humanity. Not a single corner cut, not a single expense saved. And yet:
Ilyukhina was gone. It was just Grace and her left.
In the vast expanse of space, the only living beings are Eva Stratt and the man she sent to die.