Valor Station’s in a state of extreme excitement when we return from the crash site. None of them can possibly ascertain the condition of the future, so they instead crowd the medbay with concerned stares and hushed whispers. Michelle had suggested I go to the medbay with her at some point to ensure that she didn’t faint upon spotting the gruesome visage of the co-pilot’s wounded face, but I declined her offer. ‘Too many people,’ I had told her. ‘Not my forte.’95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡRRM7ryCVUJ
Luckily for me, she understood. She’s a surprisingly kindred spirit for how flowery she is, often finding stress in large crowds just as I, but even she couldn’t resist the allure of witnessing the only remaining survivor of her torrid mistake. That, of course, left me to wander the station on my own after removing my expedition gear, a chance I took with great fervor. All too often, the hallways are gluttonous with people, bearing great gatherings even in the dead of the Antarctic winter. To find peace and quiet on such a night is next to impossible. The whole place seems wrong when not bustling with motivated bodies and the greatest minds the USA has to offer, but it is not a sensation I detest. It defrays the stress of living amongst people far wiser than I will ever be.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡvalqWR3TwW
Even so, such a task can only continue for so long before it grows dull and trite to my constantly racing mind. With blatant boredom upon my face, I retired to my room for the night, and there I find myself busy observing my photos from the plane crash. Though the first two images are incredible shots, made atmospheric by swirling winds and a racing blizzard, the last image weighs heavily upon my mind, the spectral picture containing the pilot’s final moments.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡbYwUoWp578
The photo itself is no delicacy. It’s as brutal as brutal can get, documenting in excruciating detail what it means to die in a violent event, to have a body torn into two separate pieces and thrown into the Antarctic snow for the eyes of God to recoil from. Even so, my eyes naturally flutter towards it upon the flickering screen of my black camera, placed squarely upon the rounded steel desk in my personal quarters.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ8YS4La6AdA
It’s straightforward to become desensitized to death but far more complex to live under the threat of such a fate. Many people dread seeing another person die. To watch the light die from a human being’s eyes is to invite death upon the minds of all those who witness such a feat. Such an event is traumatizing enough to permanently change the brain’s structure; I know from experience. My life’s trajectory shifted entirely when I heard my father die. However, the fact of the matter is that one death oppresses a mind to the point that strength blooms from beneath the weight of adversity. Before long, one corpse becomes two, then three, then four, until a graveyard blooms in a mind regardless of any person’s complicit desire in willing it to be so. At some point, cadavers stop being human beings, and they start being fixtures of the mind; perhaps sacrifices for scientific progress, perhaps casualties in wars gone wrong. Either way, desensitivity is a bane to empathy, and it’s the same reason I look at the crewmembers on Valor Station with both disdain and fear.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡfVb2Sj2dXa
At the end of life, all human beings look the same. At the end of life, all human beings leave. What use is there in growing attachments to them while they are alive?95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡr509VKCW66
It is for this reason that my eyes continue to drift towards the snapshot on my desk; apathy smashed together with morbid curiosity, humanity sacrificed for intrigue. I can’t remember the color of the corpse’s hair. Was it brown? Black? Blond? I’m compelled to find the truth. I reach out towards my desk. My fingertips ghost across the steel top as I carefully take the camera into my hands.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡSAnpbsMFAa
Standing here, however, reveals me to myself. I see my reflection painted onto the full-length mirror directly perpendicular to the desk in my peripheral vision. The sudden glimpse of my own body is shocking enough to expel me from my room entirely. Without warning, I throw myself beyond the threshold of my dormitory and into the Valor Station hallways.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡR2LObxUACe
The station itself was constructed much like a concrete brick less than two years ago. It’s a massive, rectangular, three-story behemoth sitting like a modern bastion on the edge of the Antarctic wasteland, balancing upon giant steel stilts to keep it above encroaching snowdrifts. Hallways face outward while rooms huddle near the center, allowing each expedition beyond dorms to yield fantastic sights when passing alongside the blocky, six-foot-tall windows dotting each corridor. While this might usually enable me to watch distant glaciers glitter like incandescent crystals on the burning horizon, a combination of darkness and the blizzard plaguing the south pole has entirely blocked the environment from view. As a result, I walk in silence, a quietude so stifling that it sends a murmur into my abdomen, a yawning rift that threatens to swallow me whole.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡSITAetWJnl
The thought itself quickens my pace. I focus on my feet, and I fill my mind with the photo of the pilot to keep me distracted from my own thoughts. I have experience in dampening the darkness within me, and so the beast remains still. I will it so for the remainder of my journey, though it is only when I reach my destination that I realize I hadn’t even understood where I was to go in the first place.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡijztFHsuPt
My subconscious led me to the medbay. It’s a first-floor fixture, the door closest to the stairs and the pneumatic locks that lead out into the ice shelf beyond Valor Station. My feet stop before it as if guiding me towards fate; most curiously, however, is that fluorescent light shines from beneath the hinges, indicating that the room is still in operation even despite the curfew. Standing in heavy silence, I hear only my shallow breaths and a light, tinny sound within the medical quarters. Whoever within is still hard at work.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ0ltclWVXPW
The mere thought of walking into a social conversation is enough to make me think twice of my midnight wanderings, and yet my feet carry me forward. Without my explicit permission, my legs take me from my point of stasis into the medbay, parting the doors with my hand. Within, I find Victor and the co-pilot Esther had pulled from the plane crash earlier today. The co-pilot rests unconscious on one of four hospital cots, face cleansed of the blood that had once clung to her skin.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡILD4Vm1g3r
“Ah, Gwen,” Victor glances up from his work at a steel shelving unit; his back is turned to me, thus rendering his task invisible as well. “What brings you in?”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡUNsdlhP9aj
“Nothing, actually,” I manage. Somehow, I get further into the medbay, even despite every cell in my body urging me to turn and run.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡeDlcKO1aqv
“Insomnia?”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ2j1ORQ8eNa
I narrow my eyes. “How’d you know?”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡA1dPIrXFMg
Victor turns around from the mobile shelving unit to look at me thoroughly; a pair of shiny forceps is in his hands. “You’re always wandering at this time,” he observes with a little self-satisfied smile on his lips. “This is just the first time you’ve actually made an effort to come near the medbay.”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡscn0nZV97k
I look at his face, scruffy and roughly shaven with black hair graying near his ears, and then I look away with a simper. He’s observant, isn’t he? Some part of it makes my skin crawl—how long has he been watching me to know my nighttime habits this well?—and another part of it makes me glad that he’s the station’s doctor. A man with that much attention to detail is a man that the crew can trust to take care of them.
“Yeah,” I admit, crossing my arms over my chest as I lean against the edge of the hospital cot closest to the door. “Sleep just seems to hate me.”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡkbII24W2lx
Victor nods. “That makes two of us,” he adds with a gentle smile on his lips. “Though I’ve always been curious about why you’ve never come to get it treated.”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡzkp66q4xuz
An easy question. I drag my eyes across my surroundings, from the spotless metal desks huddled in one corner to the four hospital beds oriented in perfect rows equidistant from each other. Sterilized and clean, nothing of substance is allowed in the medbay, not even genuine joy nor happiness. Such clinics are deathly congregations masked with fresh coats of paint by every sunrise. I can’t stifle the shudder that passes up my shoulders, and I clutch my hands with placid ferocity.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡzzNb8qQzxP
“Hospitals have never helped me.”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡS15lxNt03I
“So, what makes tonight different?”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡxteqaRg38z
A second passes, and then my eyes land squarely on the woman lying in silence on the cot furthest from me.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡV5Zg6yH72N
“Ah,” Victor nods, a smile on his lips. “That makes sense.”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡQUVR3Kf8G4
“How is she?”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡgVca9tKGYE
Victor places the forceps in his hands upon the steel shelving unit behind him. “Severe burns, seven broken ribs, a head injury,” Victor lists, voice low as he looks down his body, from his crossed arms to his feet. “Not good. Station’s not equipped for major injuries like these.”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡMd1NXekdqC
I shudder. Any hope of receiving new equipment had just gone up in flames a few hours ago. “I hope she lives.”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡdk6nfvoRtZ
Victor’s agreement is beneath his breath but heard nonetheless, a dark whisper into the medbay’s suffocating luminosity. “Me, too.”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡgaLEFkQJUO
At the very least, the stranger’s been cleaned up. Blood poured from a gash atop her head when the crew and I found her at the crash site. It drenched her face in sticky globs of crimson ichor, and her eyelashes had been covered in frost and developing icicles. Now, looking at her face beneath the sickly fluorescent lights, I see what she was meant to be seen as; a human being rather than a pile of bloodied flesh. The co-pilot is a blonde, bearing wisps of golden sunlight shorn into a short undercut atop her head, and though her hair is down and splayed across the pillow behind her, her taut hairline suggests frequent updos. Her forehead has been decorated with metal staples and makeshift stitching, and her neck shows signs of trauma, from pulled-tight bandages to scattered gauze pads. In any other world, she would be pretty. Tonight, she is nothing more than a symbol of the end, a harbinger of death. Every second that my eyes remain on her face is another second that I am reminded of the station’s looming doom.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡTXfcEPQs2Q
It’s only now that I recognize there is no name to her face. I tear my eyes away from her battered visage to glance back at Victor. “Do you know her name?”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡZ2tskxwxkS
“She wasn’t conscious to tell us,” Victor stipulates. “But I found her license in her jacket. Anastasia Sviontak.” His voice stumbles across the last name, distinctly foreign even when framed in Victor’s subtle accent.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡmFwg51odYx
“American?”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡFHGPdLgoEZ
“That’s what the card says.”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡI7hjKNn1F1
“Huh,” I hum, mind already racing to determine the woman’s origins. Perhaps it’s wrong of me; her license says that she is American, and yet her name suggests that she is yet another addition to the nation’s melting pot. Provided that she survives, maybe I will ask her about it, immigrant to immigrant.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡPn146kqgpL
Victor goes silent, and so do I. Something weighs on both of us. It’s the kind of struggle that drags a room into darkness, even one so pasteurized as this. While I cannot possibly read Victor’s mind, his eyes notoriously blank, my struggles boil down to nothing less than survival. The future is uncertain, blotted out by snow and frost, brought to ruin by the wreckage three miles out. I lock these thoughts in my mind, but my tongue is faster. Before I know what’s happening, my mouth moves.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ9KC98xLApP
“How do you think the rest of the crew is taking all of this?”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡjIS8Cld9CK
Victor shifts his head from one side to another, rolling an idea around in his mouth. “I don’t think it’s sunk in for many of them,” Victor murmurs, tapping his fingers against his biceps in a staccato pattern. “Most of them were just curious about Anastasia here. Esther’s on autopilot already, likely feels like she’s back on Pendleton. If anything, the only people who have been thinking about what happens next would be you, me, and Michelle.”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡzJGNmydRk4
“What makes you say that?”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡBmIH7Ha4HB
Another tap from his fingers, another rhythm played on his arms. “First time you’ve come from the medbay out of fifteen nights of mindless wandering. Doesn’t take a genius to tell you that you’re more nervous than usual, probably about the future.”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡYi4myTmMN7
“For Michelle, I saw her in the middle of a nervous breakdown when the plane crashed. She was the first to cope with the shock, so she’ll be the first to look into what happens next.”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡdayvP2FiHr
“And me?” Victor allows a tiny, tepid smile upon his face. “It’s my job to look ahead.”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡGgnS8hUt8J
I can’t stifle the surge of envy that rises in my throat at this revelation; I’m smart in my own right, but Victor seeks to outshine me in every other way. To get even the briefest glimpse into his mind is to be blinded by the light that floods from it. Sharp as a blade, keen as a whip, the kind of person to solve problems before they even appear. How can a photojournalist compare to a visionary in the world of medicine? I smile to hide the green color surging into my soul.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡyawU5ocyT3
“You’ve got us all figured out,” I muse.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡQOQLl91bpc
“Just surface-level, really,” Victor admits as he leans against the steel table behind him. “Humans are good at patterns, both in making them and finding them. For the most part, the crew is predictable. Where the complexity really evolves is in how their actions are informed, even if subconsciously.”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡfN9ekeJjxf
I’m curious now. Victor’s already figured out my patterns; that much is obvious, but his words imply that he’s since moved on to parsing what exists beneath. What intimate details could he have possibly determined from my behavior?95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ3Xdl6BuwtQ
“It sounds like you’ve thought about this a lot,” I add in a whisper. In truth, I had meant to ask precisely what I had been thinking moments before, but my tongue refused to form the words. Luckily for me, Victor’s mind finds my original topic on its own.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡZASdP8gXpQ
“Quite a bit,” he answers, though his head tilts upward, and his hand reaches for his poorly-shaved chin as he peers at me from across the room. “Though I haven’t quite figured you out yet.”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡuBT8TIPhFw
A surprise to me. For the most part, I imagine that I’m as easy to read as a book. Curious, I shift my weight on my hips and appraise Victor just as he appraises me. “I’m that much of a mystery?”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡbgCtuFiOAa
“Somewhat. Rather, you’re difficult to get close to. Isolationist to a fault, and I can’t imagine Esther’s relationship with you helps that trait in the slightest.”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡzX4jxy5ta3
The mere mention of Esther’s name is enough to set my jaw and turn my head to the side. While our paths rarely cross, a fact that has primarily come about due to my personal effort to avoid her, when our paths do cross, it often results in spine-tingling tension and stiflingly subtle hostility. Even in the mess hall, I frequently find her eyes on my back, staring into me as if I am nothing more than a representation of myself. While I can’t be confident in the validity of such claims, I suspect that she’s ruined my reputation with the rest of the crew in turn. What made her dislike me so much is no secret, a rather potent combination of bureaucracy outside of the base and my position as a media contact, but knowing such reasons does little to alleviate the sting of such needless antagonism.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡrPJGh1JspK
In the absence of an answer, Victor speaks up again. “Sorry,” he laughs. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ1K9qj9FvC4
“No, no, it’s okay,” I bite back, hurried. “Just a… Shitty situation for me is all.”95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ7tLaKxZxFw
I breathe in, then out. The air that circulates through my lungs leads me to a new conclusion.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡwR1EVVDGWT
“I should go to bed."95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡaKRCeBfld7
Victor nods. “Me, too."95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡfD8zN8JXJt
Even so, neither of us move. We stay still and silent for a few moments, both of us staring down at our arms crossed over our chests.95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ6qeuhK1wMw
Then, eventually, Victor goes back to the steel shelving behind him. He had already organized and sterilized the tools he utilized for Anastasia’s recovery. Yet he takes all of the scalpels and forceps out once again, then moves to index them anew. As the familiar clatter of steel hitting steel fills the medbay, I lift myself onto the empty hospital cot behind me, and I sit there with my hands sitting in my lap. There we remain for the rest of the night, not a lick of sleep hitting our minds. How could either of us slumber when what will greet us in the morning is a mystery?
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