03:27, Fifthsol 1st M6, 2226

I raise my arms. My innards roll with Shiro's betrayal.

I'm no longer afraid of dying at the hands of wardens, nor afraid of IndoChina guards executing me for aiding and abetting a thief. I just don't want Shiro to be the one to hurt me.

"Keep your hands up." He stands at the foot of my bed, still naked, clutching the pulser in shaking hands.

"W-where did you get a p-pulser?"

"Shut up. Put your shirt on." He waves the pulser's collimator in front of my eyes. "Keep your hands where I can see them."

I flinch at the pulser's motion. Ever so slowly I grope for my shirt and slip it over my head.

Shiro's features shift in a harrowed mix of rage and desperation. "What did you do to those guards?"

"I d-didn't take much. They'll be OK."

"Did you kill them?"

"No!"

"You don't eat!" Shiro pulls at his hair, swinging his pulser arm wildly around the pod like he wants to tear down the walls. "You don't have a fridge! You don't even have fucking plates!"

Had he awoken and crept around the pod trying to find food? Is he hungry? Is he in pain? My heart melts.

And then recrystallises in terror as Shiro presses the pulser hard against my forehead.

"What are you?"

"I d-didn't take much. They'll just be tired for a few days. I didn't take much."

"Take what?"

"Their energy. I'm so sorry, Shiro. I'm disgusting. I'm an energy vampire. A parasite."

The pulser retreats a few millimetres. "What's your name?"

"Himanshu Singh. Heems."

"Where are you from?"

"I was born in Eris-6."

"How did you take the IndoChina guards' energy?"

"My meatware's all broken, Shiro. Yes, it stops me from getting radiation sickness and heals me quickly and regulates my sleep and all that usual stuff. But... It's glitched. It makes me drain energy from other people when I touch them. I'm a parasite."

The pulser remains sighted between my eyes but Shiro steps away, as if trying to view the whole of me from above. "Does it hurt them?"

"No. But if they're awake they can feel themselves weakening after a few seconds. And if I do it too long they..."

Shiro's face performs grim contortions as fury fights with incredulity. "You can't touch anyone without draining their energy, but you can touch me."

"Whatever meatware malfunction you've got makes you immune to me. I don't know why." Lactic acid burns in my shoulders. I can't keep my hands up anymore. "Shiro? Can you please put the pulser down? I'd never hurt you. Is Shiro your real name?"

He grunts, "Yeah," but doesn't lower the pulser. "What were you going to do in the 'porter? Drug me? Strap me down and stick a scalpel in my head?"

"No! I was... I was so hungry. I was going to feed on you. But when I touched you..." The admission has me close to tears. I want to curl under my crumpled sheets and sob for my parents.

Anger whips up like a storm in Shiro's eyes. "You wanted to feed on me?"

"I wouldn't have taken much."

"You tried to steal my energy!" Shiro squares up to me. The pulser's collimator digs into my forehead. "And when you realised you couldn't, you decided to capture me and operate on my brain!"

"No! I'd never do that! I don't even know how your meatware can help me. It probably can't. It just... feels good to be near you."

"Stop playing innocent!" Shiro shakes his head as if banishing terrors flitting around his mind. "You were going to blackmail me into going to Kida Biotech with you to get your meatware fixed."

"No!"

"Of course you were! You'd have threatened to turn me in to IndoChina unless I handed my brain over to Kida!"

His words are the cruellest knife in my heart. How can he not know how much I care about him?

"I could never hurt you. All I want is for you to be safe. You know that."

This," Shiro sweeps the pulser around the pod, "was your plan? Some attempt to seduce me so I'd willingly give up my brain to fix yours?"

The truth of it scalds me. I've been too scared to admit it to myself until now, but in my heart I know that Shiro's right. He's guessed my sordid little plan, but with one tiny error.

I'd wanted us to fall in love.

"I... I was planning to bribe you. To let you name your price to visit Megumi Kida with me."

"Then why haven't you done it? You saw me in the 'porter. You saw me yesterday outside Kida Biotech. You've been with me tonight. Why haven't you bribed me?"

The past sols of pathetic mad fancies about Shiro shuttle through my head. Reveries that we'd become friends and somehow I'd confess my vampirism without Shiro finding me utterly repellent. And we'd miraculously fall in love and would go to Kida together. And the wardens would be sympathetic to the horrifying facts that I'm a murderer and Shiro's a thief.

How could I have been so stupid to yearn for that?

"I don't know why I haven't bribed you. I just... wanted to stay close to you."

Shiro nudges the pulser against my drooping shoulder. "Keep your hands up. The only reason you're with me is to take advantage of me."

"No. Maybe when I first met you I was interested in what was special about your meatware, but now...."

"Most of it was about what you could squeeze out of me. Everyone on this fucking Dwarf is the same. Everything's fake. Fake sunlight, fake heat, fake metaverse, fake reality."

"Are... are you going to kill me?"

He dodges the question. "That's why you were running to the Spaceport. And why you're less afraid of a thief than a warden. How haven't they executed you yet?"

"I can last five sols without having to feed. I feed on unconscious hospital patients. I hang around shade dens and drain destitute people when they're high. The wardens are too busy combatting the riots to care if a shade-brain is found unconscious in an alleyway."

I expect Shiro's face to warp in disgust, but he looks numb, as if the horror of what I am hasn't quite hit him yet. "You can't eat. Or maybe you can, but food doesn't give you energy."

"The glitch has cut off my body's normal metabolic pathways. I can eat but it costs me energy to metabolise food. I can't afford to waste energy on digestion, so I haven't eaten since I left my foster parents. Before then I only ate tiny portions, and I avoided eating in front of them as much as I could."

"You should have told the wardens sols ago when your meatware first glitched. You should—" Shiro's face falls. Haunted eyes stare back at me. "Did you say foster parents? Your meatware's been broken since you were a kid?"

"Since I was born," I whisper.

Shiro's face is a crawling picture of horror. "Why haven't your parents helped fix you?"

"Because... "

I can't tell him. I fear the thought of Shiro hating me more than I fear death. But this is my curse, to crave Shiro's love more than life, but to never be loved by him. And for good reason, too. Those who dared to love me were subjected to the worst of fates.

The pulser falls to Shiro's side. "Tell me. Please."

I clutch at my hair. I can feel Shiro slipping away from me, and my parasite heart splintering. But I owe him the truth. He needs to know how monstrous I am.

"My parents didn't help me because... because I killed them. When they held me as a baby. And then my grandparents. And then my aunt. And my sister must have held me for too long..." I pick at the red thread of my sparkling new rakhi. "And then I was fostered. My foster parents died soon after, and I was fostered again, and again. When I was four I worked out what was wrong with me. I didn't let anyone touch me after that, and I wore gloves when I could."

Shiro staggers back from the bed as if he's taken a blow to the head. "Heems, you couldn't have killed your family. How do you even know you killed them? You were just a baby."

"As soon as I qualified as a doctor I gained access to the medical records of everyone on Eris. I looked up my parents' death certificates, and those of my first foster parents. They all died of sudden cardiac arrest, or major organ failure. As if they didn't have ATP for basic bodily functions. All within weeks of my birth. It's obvious that I parasitised them as a baby."

Shiro looks bilious, like he's straining at every muscle to prevent himself from vomiting onto my bed. "Who else knows?"

"Nobody. I didn't want anyone to take me away from my new foster parents, so I've never told anybody, especially not them."

"Why not? They could help you!"

"I ghosted them when I turned nineteen. I got a scholarship to Eris-3 Hospital's academy for sim training. They said they'd visit me the next sol, but I left Eris-3 that same night. I got a new lens number. They don't know where I went. I transferred to another hospital training programme as soon as their trail on me went cold. I've been moving around every nine months since I qualified."

"At least let them know you're safe."

"They might get executed by wardens for hiding me, or get accused of being my accomplices if I accidentally kill anyone whilst feeding." My face contorts in an almighty effort to stave off tears. "It's better this way."

"They need to know."

"Know that their foster child is a murderer? It's amazing that they didn't guess from the start that I'm a parasite."

The pulser falls limp in Shiro's hand. "You're not a parasite, Heems."

"That's exactly what I am. A vampire. A parasite." I tear off my rakhi and fling it to the bed. "Why do I even wear this? I'm just reminding myself that I murdered my sister."

"No." Shiro fumbles amongst our blankets to find it again. He pulls my wrist towards him and ties the red thread slowly, knotting it over and over again. "You wear a rakhi to remind yourself that you love your sister. Never take it off. None of this is your fault."

"It's my fault that I've let it get this far. I'll go to Kida tomorrow."

Shiro exhales a long-held breath. "Kida can't do anything for you. They can barely control functioning meatware, let alone a glitch as complex as yours. They'd tell you that you're unfixable and push you out of the door."

"I'm so tired, Shiro. I might kill someone, like I killed my family, like I hurt Ying, like—"

"Ying?"

"My ex-partner, Ying Chen. She's IndoChina's Head of Security."

"Of course, I'm being hunted by your ex. This can't possibly get any worse." Shiro rubs at his temples, his pulser forgotten. "What did you do to her?"

"I accidentally put her in a coma. Then I ran away."

"Fuck." Shiro rises abruptly and dresses. He peers through the pulser-hole in his pink shirt before tossing it to the bed. "I can't deal with this. I'm already ill. I can't get hurt more."

"I'd never hurt you." After the horrors I've revealed to Shiro, I have no idea where the sudden burst of courage comes from, but it drives me across the bed on my knees. "You're special to me."

Shiro shrugs his jacket over his naked torso. "I'm just a tool to you."

He can't possibly think that. He must have an inkling of what he means to me. He's everything. My throat begins to roll in an effort to hold back tears. "I love you, Shiro."

He speaks in a whisper, not unkindly, as if gentleness will make it easier on me. "It's obsession, Heems. You think you're in love with me, but it's all because I'm the only person on Eris you can touch. It's not real."

"It is real."

I know it's real.

It's possible to love someone I've only met three times. Improbable, but possible. Isn't it?

Or, could Shiro be right? He has more experience in these matters than me.

Is this the opposite of paranoia? Could it be that the only person on Eris I can touch has driven me mad with empty obsession, and I'm merely perceiving beautiful things that don't exist?

A horrid dread nucleates in my heart and pulses with a force that makes me clutch at my chest.

Shiro's right. It can't be real.

My face crumples. Huge teardrops roll, soaking my shirt.

"Come on, Heems." Shiro nestles next to me on the bed. "Don't cry over me."

I paw at my cheeks but I can't stop myself from weeping. Words finally make it through the tears. "It feels so real."

Shiro mutters on, as if trying to convince the both of us. "Our brains play tricks on us. Feed us with comforting ideas. Anything to make Eris more bearable."

That same grief resurfaces. Grief I haven't felt since I was four years old, when I first realised that I'd killed my family.

Shiro dries my tears and tucks me under a blanket. "I need to get to Earth. I may have one last chance."

I swat at my tears. "How?'

"I'd kept money aside to spend on Earth. I'll use that to bribe my way onto another 'porter."

"Then how will you survive on Earth with no money?"

Shiro springs up from the bed so quickly that one would be forgiven for thinking he wasn't freshly pulsed and radiation-sick. "I'll work something out."

"Can I see you before you go?" I reach for him, but he manoeuvres away from my grasping hands.

"You can't see me again. I'm so sorry, Heems. I really am."

Shiro steps warily out of my pod, leaving me shattered.

I've ruined everything.

My one chance to stop feeding on Eris's weakest, my one chance to get my meatware fixed, my one chance to be with Shiro, and I've lost it all.

I can't trust my feelings, nor my skin. My love for Shiro isn't even real. All this time my mind has been tricking me, feeding me delightful reveries to help me to endure eternal fucking Eris. To tease me with a few sols of fantasy before plunging me back to the reality that I'll be a parasite until the day I die.