The Archangel Chronicles part Eight: Fumbling Through Delirium

The walls here were rippled, formed of the same melted stone that made up most of the colony. An arched doorway led to a kitchen nook, little more than a stone corner with a stove and other cooking implements arranged in an arch around a small table.

Without asking, he poured a cup of coffee and offered it to her. She took it and sipped without comment while Ghan vanished into a dim doorway. She looked around for a place to sit for a few minutes while Ghan changed. The only chair in the kitchen leaned against the wall, suffering from a broken leg.

Ghan emerged from his bedroom, a cap pulled over his head to hide his hair, dressed now in pale loose yellow scrubs.

"Ready?" He said as he breezed past her back into the clinic. Rhian set down her cup of barely-sipped coffee, and followed him.

"I’ve been looking over the scans," he said, rifling through papers on his desk. "I hoped we would not have to open it up, but nothing I can see on these explains the abilities Marin and Margrace ascribed to it."

"Will we do a full dissection?" She asked.

"I want to, just because I’m curious. But I wonder if it would be a wise thing to do."

"Why not?"

"What if it’s brothers come back? Do we want them to find us with that thing open on the table? You were a diplomat, how do you think they would react?"

"Not well. Those are the kinds of things that start wars. But that’s with humans. Who knows how these creatures would react?"

"From what they experienced up there, I would say these creatures are less friendly than any human group we’ve ever met. It ate a shipload of Reavers."

She went cold at the mention of them; she’d shed no tears for that.

"Have you seen the creature yet?" He asked.

"Not really. In the ship, submerged in the water. What you showed me."

He stepped away from Rhian, down the long narrow corridor Rhian recognized from her visit to the morgue. Ghan turned at the morgue’s door and said, "I’ve been keeping it in the cold room. I don’t know if it decomposes at normal temperatures, but it’s best to be safe."

He stopped at the door, and Rhian almost stumbled over him.

The room was cold and clean and silver. The doors to each of the cold storage slabs were closed, save for one.

The chamber that held Portia Greer’s body was open, the sliding slab extended as far as it could be.

And Portia Greer herself was sitting upon on top of it, staring at them.

* * *

Margrace dreamed of falling. Falling from the mountain, falling from the sky. Galen’s face shrinking above her while Phoebe’s smile spread. But she never hit. Every time, she woke with a jump in her heart, clutching at sweat-soaked sheets. The walls, devoid of windows in this, her bedroom, leaned in at her, throbbing with the rhythm of a lover’s breath. Hadrian’s breath. She gave up on sleep and sat up, clutching her knees to her chest, stretching cramps out of her legs.

It was morning anyway; a look at the clock revealed. And later than her usual rising time, though she’d hoped to give herself the day to sleep. Yesterday’s crash, not to mention her endless conference with Jerem and the annoying ministrations of her little brother had exhausted her.