Dusty didn't go down to the core again for a while. It lurked outside his workshop for a long time, but the green light had faded, and the ship had been working. He wondered if he might unbalance her by some critical mistake if he entered, which he would fix either with duct tape or by hurling himself into her position. He wished he had volunteered. He wished he had volunteered again. He had stopped sleeping in the workshop, because he could hear her pawsteps in the pipes late at night.

She wasn't alive. He wasn't superstitious. There was a disparity between those two facts and the conclusion, which had rudely intruded first (that he had been hearing her pawsteps in the pipes nonetheless) that bothered him. As did having to leave the workshop. He usually wouldn't even make it into the workshop. Unless Alexa said something, which she didn't, or wouldn't yet (she would be back around for him, and he dreaded it), he would stay in his bed all day and stare up at the ceiling.

There was nothing there except for the long scar he had also patched with duct tape. The vents tended to break out like that. The design was so rigid Dusty didn't understand how it worked. Dusty sometimes went over the tomes he'd brought from home, trying to deduce if their stylings were closer to archaic Evelescan (prior to the dynamic, flexible models that Evelsca now used to contend with their shifting landscape) or stoic Opphemrian, which was beautiful, yes, but also only used for ceremonial buildings and not spaceships. It was, regardless, an edifice, a home, but one that had been constructed irregardless of magic, and Dusty hated it on principle.

Alexa passed him in the morning when he went down to check on the dashboard. He hadn't messed with it in weeks, and several of Alexa's favorite buttons had been stuck in the down position, including the one for manual control, even though it appeared manual control was off at the moment. What was Alexa using as a workaround for the control board?

"There's a virtual console, and you can map buttons to other buttons," Alexa said, entering with a tray of food. She had not brought a second, and she leaned it on the arm (they had never used it, but the ship was not made for their particular circumstances) and began eating, levitating one strip of meat at a time. "There are surprisingly versatile features if you just look for them," she explained. "Not that you ever tried particularly hard."

Dusty gave a soft laugh. "Are you just here to insult me?"

"I'm here to my job," Alexa said. "You can go."

"How long to number eight?" asked Dusty.

Alexa leered over her controls and pulled up a widget that appeared in the corner of her view. "Maybe ten days," she said. "Maybe less, but I'm giving the ship's engines a break. Different systems, but it's all connected."

"No it's not," Dusty said. "The organic integration on this ship is deplorable. Any real Opphemrian ship--"

"I always found it strange how many of your designs were based on living things," Alexa interjected. "The Tabula's. Given that you all hate living things on principle."

"Do not," Dusty said. "I hate a select number of living things, from a carefully curated list."
"Me," Alexa said.

"I wish."

"Yourself?"

Dusty blinked. "I suppose."

Alexa nodded. "Well. I can not imagine it's been easy being privy to half the information you've picked up. No secrets need to be kept anymore. Shrug it off your shoulders."

"You're talking about her," Dusty said.

"Only if you want to."
The two of them gazed out at the stars. It was the most intimate they'd been in a long time. "You haven't seen her?"

Alexa shook her head. "I feel like she's appeared to the others as some sort of phantom. Pechi mentioned her, and then pretended I couldn't hear her. Might have been madness. Might not. I don't think she wants to see me."

"I should feel worse about that, but it's not what's been on my mind."

"Pechi?"

"Of course, but also every other loss we've had. It's been hard watching us fail," Dusty said.

"We're not going to fail," Alexa said. "You give up far away from me, do you hear that? We might be friends, but you will never, never, have the right to throw me around with your pity act. All of you are terrible at your jobs. All of you! Am I supposed to nod along, dumbly, while your incompetence continues to plague us? Is that what this is about? Doesn't that seem a little outrageous to you, Dusty?"

Dusty looked blankly up at Alexa. "I should have been taken at some point."

"No ultimatums--"
"Oh, please. It's too lazy to take me. I've asked it a thousand times, and the darkness never answers back. It just gets a little tighter around the neck, I draw a little closer to the knife, and it waits for me to hang myself like everyone else on this ship has. I don't need to feign nobility anymore. Everyone went down, in some part or another, because of our bad decisions, because of our cruelty, our prejudices, and our spite, let alone our incompetence. How can I even pretend I had any degree of care or concern in my heart for Pechi, when I snuffed the light out of her with which might as well have been my own paw? There were so many moments at which I could have saved her life, day after day, and I said nothing of worth to her. I miss her, but I won't even retrieve her from the core. The worst part is that I can't even bring it to myself to say I would have changed anything if I could do it all again. I don't know if I was too stubborn, or too stupid, or if I'm just being tested, as has been the implication for a disturbingly long time, and I sit here, pacing, wondering, and the weight only grows heavier, Alexa, I can't fix this ship, Alexa, you know that it's unfixable, and that we're living inside of a corpse--"

"Go back to bed," Alexa said.

"I've been in bed for the last three days," Dusty said.

"Read a book. Lie down. I'll handle the rest of the world," promised Alexa. "But leave."

Dusty entered the elevator. He waited with the door open sign for a long time, trying to see if Alexa might turn around, if there was anything left to say. He had enjoyed conversation, he realized, as it closed on him. He wished vainly for someone to whom to explain the delicate structure of the spine of their ship, the dense chemical composition of the glass that served as their windows, or how things worked back home. He ran through ships in his head, a promenade of larger ships, and returned to the workshop for the first time in days. It was still silent in there, with scraps of metal thrown like wads of paper about the desk.

With incredible precision, he began to unwrinkle one, so that it folded back into a small plane in his hand, a prototype for a better machine.

Dusty's mind was too empty to make another, and the tomes of speculative astral technology lay splayed against the desk, contents exposed. Dusty had too many practical things to do that he couldn't bring himself to do, and he no longer had even the pensive, nervous energy within him that had once inspired him to at least make something beautiful with his frustration.

---

Dusty prodded the comms with his paw. "Alexa. Read, Alexa!"

"Read you," said a curt voice.

"You're going?" asked Dusty.

"We're in orbit," Alexa said. "You're welcome. I will be back."

Dusty's head spun. It must have been days, but time had gotten away from him a long time ago. He grit his teeth again, trying to hold the rage under his tongue back, but even that was so fleeting that it eventually washed back into silent disappointment as well. A few monitors mewed like young Felids. Dusty, observing them in turn and grimacing, asked Alexa, "Are you going to be okay without trackers?"

"Absolutely," Alexa said. "I don't need your monitors. Don't worry about me."

"I don't worry about you," Dusty said. "And you don't worry about me. That's why this works."

"I don't know about that, lately," warned Alexa.

Dusty heard the static scream through as the landing procedure, well, proceeded. Buttons flickered on and off as Alexa guided the inner ship through its paces, and Dusty's eyes grew dull watching them. In near silence, he pressed down autopilot, and it dawned on Dusty that all along, no matter what he thought of the others or their near non-existent jobs, there were things that they did that would have been impossible to do without them. There was a warmth Cassie could bring even when her schedules were poor that made you want to participate and work, there was a fierceness Benn had that no weapon did, Tabai had an unconventional, brilliant mind, even if it was one that often set its sights on goals opposite their own, and Pechi... no machine would ever be Pechi, that was for certain.

"Oh Aurum," he said, looking at an old picture of the Tabula Periodica. The ingenious inventors of the past leered back at him, and he had, once, had some faith in their principles, but never once did he add his own to the fray. Had he so much as a modicum of creativity within him, perhaps he could have joined them, but he was something that executed orders, and now it would appear that he was broken altogether.

He wandered into the core room the conventional way, a crude, old, rusted metal rod levitated close to his head, and he jammed open the core with it. It was stabilized, all the energy running through a newly fixed conduit, and Pechi was there in the vent, curled around it. It would be difficult to get her out without affecting the core itself, but Dusty had not succeeded in a puzzle for a long time. He wanted to. He wanted, desperately, to use his mind, in some small way, to devise a solution, and with a series of needlessly intricate small shifts, he got the ring-like figure out, so that Pechi now lay on the ground. He tossed the rod aside, bending down so he was even with the Sentient, and began to drag her to her room. It was the last decent thing he had done in days, and he could tell that most of the rooms were just teeming with small maintenance issues. Old ashes had stuffed up the ventilation, so all the vents shifted and shuddered and spat, and the water had finally given out. Once he had placed Pechi, haphazardly, in a corner of her broken room, he looked at her plants.

Someone would need to water them today.

The task seemed like climbing a mountain. Dusty urged his head forwards towards the pail, and then he moved back. "I have other things to do," he said. "I'll go do them first. Pot later."

Dusty also didn't believe in speaking to himself. That made this situation curious as it was unfortunate. He would have to knock that out.

"I could go to the refrigerator--" he told himself.

Knock it out.

No. Fridge was more complicated than it looked. Frustratingly intricate. He'd start with something easy. Then there was the ventilation. That would take more trouble than it was worth, and it was a small issue, not a serious one. He could mess with the water, but he might just break it altogether, and flood the entire outer ship. That should be left alone.

Dusty was stuck. There was just nothing worth fixing, even when everything was broken. He could hear the clicking of thousands of little mechanisms, now, and he heard it like the crackling of a fire, like a warmth he had loved but not understood when he was young. He knew a thousand ways to tame fire, now, but he could execute none of them. He felt his paw turn to stone, and entered Pechi's room again, looking for some kind of answer in the superstition he could not understand. Upon finding only glass, he exited and found Alexa's barren room.

He wished she was back, but she wouldn't be, and gone were the days when they could afford him a companion, who he would proceed not to talk to. He had been diligent in his ignorance of everyone else. A robot would not have needed companionship, and it would have been content to keep working, indefinitely, never knowing the emptiness that was the inside of his body, which was likely dying, like the ship he hated so much. "I could have just as easily been replaced by a machine," Dusty told its hull.

It couldn't find it in itself to answer.