as you summon to a feast day,
so you summoned against me terrors on every side.
In the day of the Lord's anger
no one escaped or survived;
those I cared for and reared
my enemy has destroyed.
- ʟᴀᴍᴇɴᴛᴀᴛɪᴏɴꜱ 2:22

Alex and Cullen watched Spellmeyer leave, silence ballooning between them the further and further Spellmeyer's tiny silhouette got. Alex felt the inexplicable urge to twitch, to jitter his leg, to move something, but something stopped him. A bad feeling, perhaps, or a muscle memory.

Instead he turned to Cullen beside him. They had just met, but Alex liked his quiet thoughtfulness. He could hear the other boy thinking, head churning. It would be useful, he knew that thinkers were the first step before doers, but at this point, thinking would just send them all to nerves.

"Want to explore?" Alex turned to Cullen, offering a smile. He could tell Cullen was nervous, flinching at every creak and hiss the spacecraft made. A goal, a task, would ease the both of them. Alex could feel his own anxiety firing up already.

"Explore," Cullen repeated. "Is that a good idea?"

"There's nobody here," Alex soothed, standing. He offered his hand to Cullen. "C'mon, mate, we'll be fine. Let's go."

Cullen took his hand, pulling himself up. "Not far. We need to stay behind in case Spellmeyer comes back. I don't trust this ship for a moment, no matter how many..."

The silence filled again, heavy and pregnant.

"How empty it is," Cullen finished weakly, staring at the ceiling.

Alex cleared his throat, shifting on his feet. "All right, fine by me. We'll stay in the Fauna bay," he confirmed. Cullen offered him a halfhearted smile. "Left or right?"

Cullen looked this way and that. The left side was the herbivore wing, wafting with the smell of farm animals and hay. A few cows lowed, and a horse nickered from the depths of the hall. It was darkly lit, most of the lights were broken, but in the distance they could see a dim flicker of light. To the right, lit with red emergency lights, was the carnivore wing. This one was silent, scentless.

"Right," Cullen decided.

"Scared of the dark?" Alex joked, picking his way over the rubble of knocked-over shelves and bags of animal foods. Cullen followed with a short laugh.

"No," he rolled his eyes. "But we already know what's down the herbivores' hall. Might as well explore something new."

"True that," Alex leapt down into the carnivore hall, turning to wait for Cullen, who slid down a broken shelf and landed at the bottom.

Alex, who had woken in the herbivore wing, had yet to see the bodies. Cullen knew how bad it was. He had come to consciousness just outside of the Fauna wing, where dead bodies lay, getting thicker and thicker the further he walked into the atrium. That was where Cullen had found Spellmeyer, laying among the dead, right above a cryopod that had sank into dormant mode under the ground.

Alex had been shaken awake by Spellmeyer and Cullen, who found his body resting among the little lambs of the herbivore hall. Cullen had thought to search his body for tools, perhaps a weapon when he saw the uniform, but Spellmeyer had seen Alex's chest lift and sink ever so slightly.

As sharp as Spellmeyer's eye was, he didn't catch the matted hair that shifted in the depths a bloody goat pen.

Alex and Cullen pressed forward, moving carefully between the red floor lights, hands braced out in case something jutted from the ground unexpectedly. Already their shins were covered in bruises from unseen debris or piping.

Something darted past, setting the red lights flickering.

Alex froze, his hand going for his gun. Cullen sucked in a breath, bracing his back against Alex's.

"Move. Slowly," Alex breathed lowly.

He felt Cullen's head nod against the back of his shoulder.

Alex carefully took a step forward, Cullen stepping back in synch, their bodies pressed close. Alex felt the shakiness of Cullen's breath, the pattering of his heart. He held his own breath, willing it to even out.

Another flicker of lights, a flash of the whites of eyes.

Cullen jumped, colliding into Alex, who was barely jostled. Instead, Alex lifted the handgun to eyesight, sweeping slowly from left to right. Cullen bent slowly, hands feeling for a weapon on the ground.

A low, feminine hum.

Cullen jerked back from the floor, grabbing the jacket of Alex's uniform. Did you hear that?

Alex slid his foot back, letting it settle against Cullen's. Yes, I heard it. Calm.

Cullen let out a quiet, shaky breath, his body relaxing against Alex's.

"Boo," the voice whispered, right in Alex's ear, the breath hot and smelling of cherries and cigars.

Cullen shouted as Alex whipped around, taking aim blindly, firing straight into the heart of the beast.

Spellmeyer yelped at the end of Alex's gun, the empty firearm smoking slightly, struggling to support a girl clinging to his side. A third figure floated up behind him. "What the hell?"

Alex lowered the gun. He and Spellmeyer stared at each other, shattering.

"Fuck," Alex threw the gun to the floor with an angry clatter. He could feel the others' eyes on him, tracking him as he stalked deeper into the shadows, his shoulders tense, hands shaking.

He knew that scent. He knew it like the way he knew guns and military drills and ways to kill a man. Something itched at the base of his spine, tantalisingly close.

With a roar, Alex slammed his fist into the wall, the echo of his rage slamming against the walls in a ringing clatter.

"Alex?" Cullen called. "Is everything okay?"

Alex fisted his hair, rumpling it, twisting agitatedly. Something was wrong, something was so fucking wrong about this. The monsters, the fucking monsters, there was no such thing as monsters. There was no such thing—

"Alex?" that was Spellmeyer. "Come back. We can't have people wandering off."

He screamed, in his head, then let the tension go in a stifled, forced exhale. Remember the training. Don't let emotions get the better of you. Don't make stupid mistakes. Don't put the others at risk.

Alex marched back, sliding back into the red lights. "Sorry." No explanations, but he would pull his weight twice over to make up for it. That was how he was raised. That was the role he would play.

"I can carry her," he offered, holding his arms out. The girl, though chubby, was probably half the weight that Alex knew he could carry. And his body ached for something to distract him from the turmoil churning in his head.

Spellmeyer gratefully passed the girl over. She leaned against Alex's arm, distant, unaware of who held her up. With the red floor illuminating her, the girl looked more like a wisp than a person, her ragged white dress limp and bathed in shades of red.

"Can I pick you up?" Alex asked her gently. She stared at him, unseeing, a silent tear escaping down her cheek. "Da vox en Common?"

"Go ahead," a lilting, feminine voice said. "She speaks both, but all she does is cry. It's faster if you just pick her up."

Alex's eyes flicked up, now registering the third figure, another girl with bird-thin bones, cat-like features, and a bubbly smile that offset her clipped words. She was ethereally beautiful, enchanting to look at, even in the horrible darkness.

"Sumin," she introduced herself, dimple flashing under the red light. She was alarmingly pretty.

"Alex," he returned, his sentence dropping off awkwardly. What was he supposed to say, nice to meet you? "That's Cullen."

Cullen nodded at her warily.

"Hm," Sumin eyed them both.

A beat.

"Oh, that's Nixie," she said suddenly, as if remembering the weeping girl was there.

Spellmeyer looked as if he wanted to pull Nixie out from under Alex's arm. His hands jerked forward as he spoke, as if to take her back. "Are you going to—"

"Right," Alex shook himself. Whatever that— thing was had shaken him badly. He needed to snap out of it, focus.

"Do you need help?" Cullen asked. "She doesn't look so good. Where did you find them?"

"Atrium," Sumin answered for Spellmeyer. She looked unsettling in the red light, as if bathed with an unholy glow.

"Weird. We were just there an hour ago," Cullen murmured. Alex could hear him doing the math, calculating the minutes between them, the eerie voice, trying to connect dots that were invisible to the naked eye. "Why—"

Nixie let out a little sob, swaying, then toppling to the side. Alex barely caught her, grunting.

"Chat later," he suggested.

"Sure," Sumin agreed.

Alex lifted Nixie into his arms, thankful for the screaming in his muscles that replaced the screaming in his head. She leaned into him, resting against his neck. He could feel hot tears seeping down his skin. All she did really was cry.

"We need someplace safe," Cullen rasped, eyeing a flickering red bulb with unease. Alex tasted the bitter fear rising back up again, could smell the whiff of burnt cherry smoke.

"Preferably without any bodies," Spellmeyer said, tapping his fists together nervously. "They make her worse."

Alex glanced down at Nixie, who did seem to be growing slightly more aware now, no bodies in sight. She felt familiar in his arms, and he hugged her closer, reassuring.

"I woke up in the library," Sumin said in her dancing voice. "There weren't any bodies. But it's inconvenient, on the north side. Essentially the entire ship's length."

"If it makes her feel better, we should go," Cullen said decidedly. "And if there are no bodies, maybe there's no... monsters."

"Monsters," Sumin repeated, a scoff in her voice.

"The library is closer to the control system," Alex ignored her. "We need to head that way, anyway. I don't— I'm not sure about what happened with everybody else, but I know that we need to get to Olympus."

Cullen startled, as if he'd forgotten. "Olympus," he murmured.

Sumin brushed her fingers over her wrist. "Well, fine."

"We need food," Alex added. "There's a dead cow in the herbivore hall. Its throat is slit, no infections. We can drag it along with us, maybe some fruit if the Flora bay is intact."

"I can't drag a dead cow," Spellmeyer said blankly.

"Take her," Alex lowered Nixie to the ground, nudging her awake. "Go on, love, you'll be all right."

She stumbled into Spellmeyer's arms. Sumin watched, expressionless.

"Cullen and I will go back and get the cow," Alex shook out the numbness in his arms. "Sumin, go ahead with Spellmeyer to the Flora bay."

She nodded. "C'mon, Spellie."

Spellmeyer followed after her, hobbling Nixie along beside him. Quickly, they were swallowed by the red lights and cavernous corridors.

"The cow," Cullen prompted. Alex blinked.

He nodded. "Right. The cow."

They walked back the way they came.

✸

Nixie felt like she had failed. Everywhere they went, she was dragged. With each challenge they faced, she was the one they had to reconfigure to protect. She could see the resentment in Cullen's eyes, the pity in Alex's. The only one who seemed to not mind her uselessness was Spellmeyer, but even then, he looked at her as if he saw a stranger sometimes.

All Nixie wanted was to close the eyes of each and every person they passed, to drape them in cloth to let them at least have their dignity.

Perhaps those open eyes, glassy and unseeing, were why Nixie couldn't sleep herself. Exhaustion crashed over her like a tsunami, but the waves raged so often they would not let her sleep. She never got used to them, and they never left her alone.

Her biggest failure, though, was the way her hands twitched when Harvey Jones' voice came through that door. Still, there was the slick of dried monster blood from the one that had chased Iphigenia into their arms, the ever-constant reminder of what lay on the other side of these sealed doors. Harvey's shadow casted the dried blood into darker relief, shading it so black it could've been oil.

And despite the monster, despite Harvey the monster, Nixie still thought, he needs me. He needs that door to be opened. He needs to be loved.

But Spellmeyer, with his flying hands, held her back. Not again. Letting Iphigenia in that first time, without a thought, had been a failure. He wasn't going to let her repeat it. In some ways, she was thankful.

"It can't be him," Spellmeyer said, his voice gone hollow.

"Please!" Harvey banged on the door from the other side. Nixie was reminded of the way Iphigenia's monster had thrown itself at the sealed doors.

"Why can't it be him?" Iphigenia asked, her proud voice wavering.

Spellmeyer fidgeted.

"Why can't it be him," Sumin repeated, voice going sharp in the way Nixie hated. It pierced at her throat. Sumin's eye was twitching, and she looked even more furious.

Spellmeyer fumbled for the words, his hands moving as if they lived on their own, trying to pluck the right sentence out of the air. "I—"

"Because you saw him die," Alex said.

Spellmeyer sat, shell-shocked.

Harvey banged on the door. "Spellmeyer, please! I'm sorry, I'm so sorry—"

Nixie felt the pull of the ocean, the deep draft that it took as it sucked the tide away from the shores, building up for a crashing crescendo. Her chest started to hurt.

He looked up at Alex, haunted. "H-how did you..." his hands were still for once, trembling through death throes in his lap.

Alex's brown was creased in concern, his sculpted eyebrows knitting. "Spellmeyer, you woke up on top of Harvey's cryopod. Where he suffocated. Right, Cullen?"

Cullen squeezed Spellmeyer's arm. "That must've been horrible. He's your boss."

Spellmeyer looked fragmented. His eyes were focusing on too many things at once. It scared Nixie, the way his brain was scattering apart in his head. She slowly put her hands over her ears, pressing out the sounds.

Cullen and Alex's mouths were moving. Sumin's eye was twitching. Iphigenia's fingers were wrapping around a bloodied gong mallet. Spellmeyer's eyes were falling apart.

Nixie could still hear Harvey pounding against the door, even with her ears shut. It rattled her brain. THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP. THUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP.

She stood up. The world was quiet, foggy, underwater. She walked to the door. Pressed the button.

The steel doors slid open, parting from the middle.

Belt buckle. Button-up. Slacks. Suit. Argyle socks. Tie. Shoes. Smile. Harvey Jones was revealed slowly, the door uncovering him bit by bit in Nixie's slow-motion world.

She stepped forward, and pressed a hand to his chest, leaning just outside of the library door. Her wet eyes met his sour goat's pupils.

"Nixie," Harvey Jones sighed, nearly a purr, worms wriggling from the pores in his skin. His lips were blue. There was a coin on his tongue that flashed when he spoke.

"Dad," she said.

"Give me a hug," he opened his arms.

Nixie, who didn't want to be a failure, had the wooden stake in her hand. A little sliver of oak that had chipped off in Iphigenia's battle with her monster. Nixie had pocketed it right away. She didn't want to fail them.

But that was all they could see. A liability. A failure. And even in this moment, they thought her weak.

So Nixie failed for the hundredth time when Sumin body slammed her, again, out of the doorway.

Nixie fell to the ground, scream rising, as Harvey Jones' arms closed around Sumin instead. The wooden stake slipped from her fingers and clattered to the ground as Sumin was sucked through the door, and Alex's hand slammed on the button too late, the metal sealing shut behind her.

"DAD," Nixie screamed, throwing herself at the door. She slammed her head into the metal, her skull throbbing. "GIVE HER BACK."

It rang in the silent library as Nixie and the others stared at the place where Sumin used to be. 

author's note!

you know, i get a lot of anxiety about not having perfect chapters, but then i force myself to upload without major editing. i think it's a good way to force myself to not be upset about this stuff, because it's just a first draft. everything i write is just a first draft, i've yet to go back and edit anything (except tattooed heart) so for a first draft? this is good. if you ever feel crap about stuff you've written, think about how much editing professional books go through. you're at phase one, it's supposed to be bad. 

okay anyway that's just a side note. another note: the timeline is supposed to be jumpy, you guys are supposed to be kinda weirded out by the way scenes cut and stuff. it's not supposed to be cohesive.

also i promise the dog symbolism is coming soon <3