It was dark. Not the ordinary dark of sleeping — she knew that dark, had spent four months acquainting herself with every quality of darkness a metal box could produce. This dark had weight to it. A closeness. The specific pressure of a space that had become smaller than it was supposed to be, and her body knew it before her brain did, registering it in the particular way her body registered things it didn't like — a tightening across her chest, a shallowing of her breath, the small animal part of her that had opinions about enclosed spaces beginning to form and express those opinions with some urgency.

  She tried to move her left arm.

  Something stopped it.

  She tried again. Metal. Close. The surface that should have been a wall at a comfortable distance was flush against her arm, and when she reached out her right hand she found the same thing — surfaces that had no business being where they were, the geometry of her box rearranged into something she didn't recognize by touch in the dark.

  She became aware, comprehensively and all at once, that she was trapped.

  The claustrophobia didn't announce itself. It never announced itself. It just arrived — the walls pressing in from every direction simultaneously even though she knew intellectually that walls didn't press, that the metal was stationary, that she was the one perceiving it as encroaching rather than it actually encroaching. Knowing this did not help. It had never helped. The knowledge and the feeling existed in separate compartments and the feeling was significantly louder than the knowledge right now.

  Light, she thought, with the focused clarity of someone cutting through panic by finding the next immediate useful thing. Get light. Then see. Then think.

  She metaphorically reached for her flux.

  It was there — lower than she'd like, the crash had cost her reserves the way physical trauma always did, but present, accessible, the blue-green of it visible to her perception even in the dark. She gathered a small amount to her right palm, concentrated it, pushed it toward the surface. Flux used as a light source was not in any manual she'd read. It was, she was fairly certain, another thing she'd arrived at out of necessity, and she added it to the mental list of things she was quietly proud of and immediately moved on.

  The blue-green light bloomed in her right hand.

  She looked at what the crash had done to her box.

  The ceiling had come down.

  Not completely — it wasn't flat, it hadn't pancaked, but it had buckled in a way that had reduced the vertical clearance on the left side to approximately forty centimeters, which was where her arm had been when she'd tried to move it. The floor had warped upward on the right, creating a ridge that ran diagonally across the space and had presumably been what her head had connected with at some point during the tumbling, given the dried blood she could feel crackling at her temple when she turned her head.

  The iron chair was still bolted to the floor. She was not in it — she was on the floor to the left of it, which meant she'd been thrown from it during the crash and had landed in the section that was now most compromised. The steering wheel was bent. The control panel had components that were no longer in their original configuration.

  The window was intact.

  Of course the window was intact. The window was indestructible. The window had never been damaged by anything and apparently a crash landing on a partially eaten planet was not going to be the thing that started. Through it she could see sky — a dim, low-contrast sky the color of old copper, with the quality of light that came from a star that was present but not generous about it.

  She was on a planet. She had known this. Knowing it from orbit while crashing and knowing it from inside a caved-in box on the surface were experientially distinct.

  She pulled her flux light closer and assessed her immediate situation with the systematic attention of someone who had learned that panic was less useful than inventory.

  Hull integrity: the system was displaying 13%, which she read and set aside because 13% was a number she would deal with after she was not inside the 13%. The hatch — she looked for it, found it, and found that the wall section containing it had deformed enough that the hatch was no longer flush with the surrounding surface. It was jammed. Not destroyed, not breached, just jammed in its frame by the structural distortion of the crash.

  She could not open the hatch.

  The walls pressed.

  "Okay," she said, out loud, because she needed to hear something and her voice in the blue-green light was better than the silence. It came out steadier than she felt. "Okay. You've been in worse."

  She thought about whether this was true. The anti-flux Igo had been worse. Probably. She had been in actual vacuum with four percent flux reserves and hypothermia. This was just a caved-in box on a planet surface. This was, comparatively, manageable.

  The wall to her left was approximately fifteen centimeters from her face.

  "Flux welding," she said to herself, in the tone of someone assigning a task. "Cut a way out. Simple."

  She concentrated the flux in her right index finger the way she'd done dozens of times — the same technique, the same focused pressure, pushing it out in a controlled beam. The welding beam was blue-green like the rest of her flux, which she'd never thought much about until now when it illuminated the inside of the box she was cutting her way out of and made everything look like she was working underwater.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  She picked a section of wall — not the ceiling, not the compromised sections, but a lower panel that the system confirmed was still structurally separate from the weight-bearing deformation above. She cut slowly. The metal was thicker than she'd have liked and the flux consumption was steady and her reserves were lower than she wanted but the beam was clean and the cut was clean and the section of wall she was removing was becoming removable.

  The claustrophobia persisted throughout. She dealt with it the way she dealt with most things she couldn't immediately fix — she noted it, registered its presence, and continued doing the thing she was doing anyway. The walls were where they were. The ceiling was where it was. None of these facts changed what she needed to do next.

  She cut for forty minutes.

  The section came free.

  The atmosphere of the planet hit her immediately — thin, with the particular quality of air that was technically air and was also mostly helium, she instinctively activated her flux lamination because she was not sure what gasses constituted the air on this planet. The temperature outside was cold in the specific way of a planet that received light from a star that wasn't trying very hard. The gravity hit her next — not dramatically, not a wall, just a persistent additional weight distributed across her entire body, her own mass suddenly costing more to carry than it had in the box.

  She squeezed through the gap she'd cut and stood up outside her box for the first time on solid ground.

  Her legs registered the gravity immediately. 1.3 times what she was used to — she knew the figure, the system had told her on the way down in the middle of everything else it had been telling her — and the figure was accurate and somewhat more present as a lived experience than as a number. Her knees had opinions. Her lower back, which had spent four months on a metal floor and then been thrown around during a crash, had extensive opinions.

  She stood anyway. Straightened. Looked at the box.

  The box looked terrible.

  The port side — the side she'd cut through — was the best side. The starboard side had the bent thrust arrays she'd noted from inside. The bottom was gouged from where the box had scraped to a halt, leaving a long scar in the red-brown dirt. The top had a dent she hadn't felt from inside because she'd been unconscious when it happened. The hull integrity was 13% and looking at it from the outside she understood why — it was a box that had crash landed and looked exactly like a box that had crash landed.

  Gerald was on. She could see his light through the window, still humming, still flickering, casting that familiar yellow glow through the indestructible glass onto the alien dirt.

  "You survived," she told the box.

  The box did not respond. She was glad it was still standing.

  She touched her temple where the blood had dried and winced — not dramatically, it wasn't that bad, but it was there she filed it under things that were happening to her body that she was managing. The 1HP skill sat in her passive list, active, doing its one thing. She was not going to die of the head wound. She was going to have a head wound and continue existing, which was the skill's entire value proposition. (Yes bleeding and injury count as Biological attrition as well so she has a higher tolerance for blood loss than a normal human)

  She thought about the 1HP skill properly for the first time in weeks.

  Four months of living under it had taught her things the description hadn't covered. It kept her alive. It didn't keep her comfortable. The hunger she'd managed since day one was a constant she'd stopped registering the same way she'd stopped registering Gerald's hum — present, always present, background. The weakness that came from eating only once a month was something she compensated for in her flux practice, in her movement, in the way she paced herself on long fabrication sessions. She was never full. She was never rested in the way that actual adequate nutrition produced rest. She was always, at some level, running on less than she needed.

  The 1HP skill's promise was narrow and it kept it precisely: she would not die from biological attrition. Everything short of dying was, apparently, still available to her in full.

  On a planet with 1.3 times Earth's gravity and thin atmosphere and an uncertain food situation and a box at 13% hull integrity and a head wound, that promise felt both more and less comforting than it had on day one.

  She added find food on this planet to her personal task list. Added figure out if anything here is edible. Added do not die of something the 1HP skill doesn't cover because the skill was specific and the universe was creative.

  She straightened up. Rolled her shoulders against the gravity's insistence. Looked around properly for the first time.

  The surface stretched in every direction — red-brown, dry, the texture of something that had been thoroughly desiccated over a very long time. The rock formations were varied and sharp-edged in the way of landscapes that didn't have weather to soften them. The plants were there, scattered, clinging to the shadow sides of the larger formations — small, withered, with leaves so blue they looked painted, an improbable color against the rust of everything else. She looked at them for a moment. Blue leaves under an orange star. She filed that away.

  The gravity pulled at her persistently. She shifted her weight and felt her body recalculating.

  Then she turned to look at the horizon and stopped.

  She had seen it from the window on the way down, in the middle of the crash, in between the tumbling and the atmospheric entry and the focus required not to die. She had registered it then the way you registered things in a crisis — noted, filed, not processed. She had known what the system told her: a level four or above Igo feeding event. She had known it intellectually the way she'd known the distance to Earth on day one.

  Standing on the surface was different.

  The scar ran across a significant portion of the visible horizon — a concave absence where the planet's geometry simply stopped following the rules, a curved gouge so large that she had to turn her head to see both edges of it. The material that had been removed was orbiting overhead as the asteroid field she'd flown through to get here. The edges of the scar were smooth in the way of things shaped by force rather than erosion, still visible after however many thousands of years it had been sitting here.

  Something had eaten this.

  Something level four or above, which meant continent-sized or larger, which meant something so vast that this — the gesture she made was small and helpless, at the horizon, at the scar, at the absent chunk of planet — had been incidental. The galactic equivalent of grabbing something off a shelf without checking what you were grabbing.

  She stood on the surface of a half-eaten world in a school uniform with a head wound and 13% hull integrity behind her and the gravity pushing down on her shoulders and looked at the scar on the horizon for a long time.

  Then for the first time in her 100 days of memory she said, with complete sincerity:

  "Fuck."

  It echoed slightly off the nearest rock formation.

  The orange star continued its low-energy indifference overhead. Gerald flickered through the window behind her, yellow light on red-brown dirt.

  She turned back to the box.

  There was work to do.