When the parasite overran Ariana, Wildwing finally reached his limit.

He had an attachment to her that he could not explain. She had been the first person he had meaningfully spoken with in over a year, that was neither the people that he saw every day, nor someone attempting to kill him.

It was illogical to have put such weight on her, because her presence changed nothing. But it seemed a renewed failure to have lost her to the creature as well. He had known her for such a short time that it was not clear to him, upon later reflection, if she was actually the innocent and child-like qualities he attributed to her, or if they were merely what he had chosen to see her as.

Her end was less attended than the previous, and came some time in the middle of the night. For Ariana, the last people she would ever see were Tanya, her fellow patient Emily, and Wildwing himself, who had come at Tanya’s ping, as before. Tanya had no need to explain, because he already knew, and had been expecting the call all afternoon. She had not announced a miraculous cure, so there was only one thing left that she would call him for.

There was something insulting about the progression of the disease, that the delirium at the end robbed the victim of any dignity, but also any attempt at closure. Wildwing felt responsible for everything, and was denied the ability to apologize for it. He donned the gloves that Tanya handed him wordlessly, and decided against grasping a hand covered in red bandages. He settled for a light hand resting on a shoulder. She did not thrash as Tank did, or scream, rather she contorted slowly. Her face was beaded with sweat, and her breathing gave a burbling sound that he did not care for.

She did still babble, as the two before her had. She stared at the ceiling, straight through him, as if she were cloud gazing on a summer’s day, murmuring words below hearing in wide-eyed wonderment.

“It’s all so small, so small,” she said, sightseeing.

Tanya did her best, which remained not enough, but Wildwing would not fault her for it. Never. Her best when exhausted was still beyond reproach. She moved from treatment to pain management, and when that was handled as best she could, to documentation. She silenced every alarm that was supposed to spring the medical team they did not have into action. Tank had died too suddenly, and the creature had begun to decay immediately, and now she knew to focus.

Emily, the final patient, stood by Wildwing’s side, but pretended not to notice him whenever he gazed at her. She said nothing to him, and had barely spoken to him this entire time. She was still and nearly trance-like, until she blinked and looked around confused, as if she had forgotten where she was, and looked concerned as she remembered.

He could not decide what to say to her, though not for a lack of things to say. He should have asked her a great number of things, especially as the time was running out to do so—those mission things that Nosedive would find boring but were far more important than the mundane things that made up conversation. Only he couldn’t make himself do it, after watching the two of them sitting in the hallway, Ariana crying, and Emily staring at him with the dead, hollow eyes that, aside from their color, looked like every other empty pair he had seen in the work camps. He needed to interrogate them, should have done so hours ago when there had been three of them, and could no longer find the will to do so. It was too late, and the moment it would have been even remotely appropriate or useful had passed.

She stood dutifully with the two Mighty Ducks and waited for the inevitable, and true to her word, she still did not cry. She did not touch Ariana herself, only watched her from a respectful distance, eyes occasionally narrowing as Ariana contorted or slowly writhed, as if she could sympathetically feel each blister and tear herself. The medical bay was silent aside from the gurgling breathing and occasional mutter, and Tanya's gentle tapping at recording and observation.

They stood that quiet vigil, until the clock began pushing into daylight hours again, and Ariana sat bolt upright, pushing aside Wildwing entirely, and grasped at Emily’s arm with bandaged hands. Emily tried to pull away in terror, but could not break free.

“What do you see?” Ariana said, with sudden clarity. “When you sleep, what do you see?”

Emily ceased trying to wrench herself free, and instead tried to pull Ariana’s fingers away.

“Does it sit in the sky there, too?”

Emily stopped, and stared at her, suddenly intense. “Sand. A desert of white sand. And a dead city. And writing.”

Ariana seemed to mouth something that none of them heard, transfixed on something beyond all of them.

“What do you see?” Emily asked in turn.

“A frozen lake. In a ring of trees with golden leaves.”

Emily gave up on trying to extract her arm, focusing on the girl.

Ariana held firm. “It’s there behind the trees, reaching and watching.”

“What does it want?” Emily asked.

“Space,” Ariana said, and then was gripped by some wave of pain that necessitated letting go of the arm, and instead curled up, arms wrapped around her own torso. “Stars,” she whispered, “the forest is too small.”

“Did it-” Emily began.

That was the absolute end. There was the final crack as the parasite burst through Ariana’s sternum, and she slumped on the medicom, silent, and still staring at something in the distance. It was some small comfort at least, that her death had not been as visceral as the previous two, but the branches of the creature still pressed out of her as an ugly, twisted tree, and then started cracking and desiccating after, falling to the ground.

That ringing in Wildwing’s ears came back, the sort of rushing sound that blotted out all other sound and all other things, until in a few short seconds, for all he could tell, the only two things on the planet were him and a roiling ocean in his head. It scalded his ego, just a bit more than it should have, that the last things she had said hadn’t even been to him.

Even now, he had thought, had imagined foolishly, that they would have come up with some sort of answer. A cure. A treatment. Something. Even after losing two of them, he had, somewhere deep in that elusive thing called a soul, believed that they were going to be able to save Ariana. Because she was special, somehow, she was the first proof he had ever seen that his planet, or maybe it was best to say his people, were still alive.

And being special had not saved her.

“What was she talking about?” Tanya said sharply, bringing his focus back to the room.

“I think,” Emily said, looking down at her own forearm, where Ariana had grasped it, and blood had soaked through the bandages and stained her feathers. A wound had opened immediately, exposing the muscle underneath as if it were a laceration from an animal, and the skin around it turning that same, blackened necrotic shade. “I think she’s told me that it’s my turn.”