20:11, Firstsol 12th M5, 2226

I shoot up the three methane-slippery rungs to the hatch and throw myself in, slamming it behind me. The misted silica window clears a little to reveal the silhouette of a slim figure slumped on a makeshift bed, possibly asleep. Possibly ill.

As if acutely aware of the implication, my guts writhe with hunger. The homeless woman had barely been a bite. I need to feed. I'm getting weaker. If the lone miner in the cab is ill, perhaps they won't notice if I feed a little. I'd only take a little from them.

Monster, filth, parasite.

The miner leaves me in the pressurised airlock for long minutes. I bang on the hatch. They sit up with a start, then shuffle to the console and hit the hatch mechanism. It opens with a pop and I step inside.

The entire cab stinks of shade. The miner — perhaps a man — gazes up at me with red shade-eyes. A gaunt face bears the shadow of a sparse beard. Slender arms adorned with Japanese tattoos fold over his chest, as if he's furious that saving my life has interrupted his shade-sucking.

Faded clothes hang off his skeleton, his shirt and trousers a mix of Edge neons and darker tones decorated with intricate embroidery that are fashionable on Earth. He slumps back onto the mattress he's constructed from two foam cabin benches, and extends a long pale leg onto the console dashboard with a groan. His ankle is purple and swollen.

I hold up my medical bag and point at the hairless leg on the console. "How'd you do that?"

He closes his eyes, I guess falling deeper into shade-brain. Perhaps he thinks that I'm a figment of his imagination. I'll wait until he sleeps, then I'll feed a little. He won't notice. I won't take much. Then I'll find an ammonia cannister and flee back to the hov. He's so shade-addled he won't even remember seeing me.

Like he can hear every thought in my parasite brain, the miner sits up, his previously shade-glazed eyes sharpening. He draws a long rattling breath as if he's just breached the surface of the shade ocean he's been drowning in. He has the look of those with a meatware malfunction: the look of the dying.

He grunts, "The 'porter's broken."

Transporters are designed to run the length of the planetoid day-in, day-out, laden with tons of ore destined for Earth, each carrying a bank of backup fuel cells. 'Porters never break. He's lying, or mocking me.

"Which mine are you from?"

The man laughs.

"Is your meatware not fixing your ankle?" I shrug off my counterpressure suit and smooth out the creases in my shirt. "Are you eating enough?"

"My ankle's fine. And I eat enough." He looks me up and down with a furrowed brow like I'm a splatter of tholin grease on a hov window. "Are you eating enough?"

Does he know what I am? Does he know what I feed on?

I try to suppress a shiver. "How cold is it in here?"

"Fifteen degrees."

"Fifteen? That's too cold for our meatware! Megumi Kida says—"

"Fuck Megumi Kida. I'm saving the heat supply." He eyes my medical bag. "Doctors often wander around the sandflats in a storm, do they?"

"I'm going to the Spaceport. I'm needed on Pluto."

"So you said."

"The storm wrecked the two ammonia stations between Eris-1 and the Spaceport. You got a spare cannister I can buy?"

The miner leans back heavily against his pillows in response. I take his features in. We're around the same age, yet he looks like he's seen decades of hardship. He's probably avoided going underground to save money, eking out the last of his defunct meatware. My stomach writhes in anticipation of feeding from him. Once he sinks more deeply into shade-brain, I'll make my move.

"I won't be any trouble. Just pretend I'm not here. I'll refuel my hov as soon as the storm lightens."

"The storm has probably thrown your hov hundreds of metres away under a methane drift. You'll die trying to get back to it. You're stuck here."

"So I'll take a cannister and spacewalk to my hov when the storm clears. I'll pay the mine back for the ammonia."

"The storm's killed comms. Can't contact the mine until comms are back."

He doesn't need to contact the mine. My recent work treating radiation-sick miners has taught me that all 'porters are tracked, their paths across Eris checked to the nearest centimetre. The mine knows he's here. 

Paranoia uncoils like a snake in my viscera. Is this an elaborate trap to hunt me down?

I choose my words carefully. "So... when this transporter doesn't turn up at the Spaceport the mine will send someone to rescue you."

The man nestles onto the mattress and shrugs a blanket over himself, tattoos disappearing under fabric. He squirms under the covers as if in pain. "Yeah."

I take a guess that he's being evasive because he's afraid of losing six months' wages — or losing his job — if I were to report to the mine that his meatware isn't protecting him from radiation anymore.

He sits up again, sending blankets unfurling around him. "Your hov is tracked by the hospital, right? So they'll know you need rescuing."

He thinks that my hov is one of the many medical vehicles loaned out to doctors. I've refused the hospital's offer of a free medical hov three times in as many months. Medical hovs are tracked, too big a risk for me; the wardens would find me in a heartbeat.

I stammer, "No. The tracker's... broken."

The man's eyes lose their shade-glaze momentarily, and he stares at me for long moments. A smile blossoms on his face as if in realisation that we're both lying.

I scramble to change the subject. "How long do 'porter heat supplies last?"

"We're on the backup supply now that the fuel cell is dead. Four hours left. I'll turn the thermostat down to twelve degrees."

"Our meatware won't work when it's that cold!"

"If it extends the heat supply, it's worth it."

A wave of nausea washes over me. I need to feed. I don't have the energy to argue. "Which mine do you work for?"

The man's eyes settle on my face again. "IndoChina."

"So, we wait it out." I nestle down on the steel sheeting that makes up the 'porter cab's floor. "The storm will clear, and IndoChina will collect us soon."

The man asks, "You suck shade?"

"No."

He clicks manically at a shade pen before wedging it between big lips. "Shame."

Two hours of silence later, and my prickly miner has still not fallen deeply enough into shade-brain for me to feed on him safely. Either he has a superhuman capacity for shade, or he's too distressed to sleep; he keeps looking at me with wide-eyed intensity. I'm so unbearably hungry that it's hard to keep track of my thoughts. I need to feed soon or I'll faint.

His meatware's really messed up. He won't last many more weeks. All he's done is nibble at dumplings and suck shade since I arrived, just like the other miners, foundry workers and quarriers that have been admitted to the hospital's underground radiation sickness facility in the past month. In two years as a qualified doctor I'd never seen a single radiation-sick patient. This month I've seen seven. Why is their meatware suddenly failing?

The miner is constantly offering me food. Maybe this is an ambush and he's taunting me, knowing that I can't eat. I try to decline for the third time, but paranoia wraps around my throat. "No" finally emerges as a dry croak.

"Why are you not eating?" He proffers yet another oily dumpling. "Isn't your meatware regulating properly?"

Paranoia's snake almost throttles me. My mouth snaps open and shut a few times before barbed words pour out. "Your meatware's not regulating properly! It's not even fixing your ankle! You should be underground!"

Fucking parasite. My hunger is driving me insane; I'll give myself away at this rate.

"Forget it." He holds his palms up to placate me, then settles back on the mattress. After a few minutes his eyelids begin to droop, the shade pen falling from his hand with a clatter. 

Finally, I can feed. I crawl over from my side of the cab.

I whisper, "Let me take a look at that ankle."

The miner's glassy eyes and lack of reply can be taken as weary consent. I brush his foot with the gentlest fingertips, and wait for the bliss to hit.

Something's wrong.

I can't feel anything.

I slide my fingers against his swollen joint. No energy flows into me. No delicious life-force.

I prod his ankle.

"Ow!" He flinches and retracts his leg.

My breath stops dead in my throat. For some reason I can't drain his energy. I can't feed. This host is... immune to my parasitism.

He returns his ankle to me gingerly. I blurt out sorries and guide his heel back to the mattress. No blissful energy flows from his skin into mine. I stare at his foot. And keep staring.

Worried eyes meet mine. "Is my ankle that bad?"

I force my gaze up. "Torn ligament. You need to rest it for weeks. I'll bandage it."

I make a show of rooting in my medical bag for a bandage, but my mind is a hurricane that rivals the blizzard outside. I cup the man's heel, sliding fingers back and forth along his joint as I wrap it in a perfect herringbone bandage. No bliss. No hunger sated. Not even a tingle of energy. I can't feed on him.

He inspects my work with raised eyebrows. "So, you are a good doctor."

I break into a sweat, the previously frigid cab air suddenly cloying and foetid. Why can't I feed on this host? What glitch in his meatware has made him immune to me?

I need to find out everything I can about my miner.

As if my panic is starting to bleed into him, he sits up, no longer shade-ridden and sleepy. "You got anything in your lenses? Any rescue teams in the area?"

"No." I peel off my lenses and stow them in their box, rubbing at dry eyes. "The storm's killed all lens signals for the past two hours."

"Is the hospital at least tracking your equipment?" His eyes are piercing, and bright with disquiet.

"No." Not only have I refused the loan of tracked medical hovs, I'm careful not to borrow the hospital's items of larger medical equipment fitted with trackers, always making the excuse that heavy kit is too cumbersome. "How long do you think that the storm will last?"

"I don't know." The man's voice shakes with minute tremors. "Anything between six hours and six sols."

I'd thought that the storm would move on within minutes. The man's restrained panic tells me that he knows better. His rising terror begins to leach into me.

"Did you say we only have four hours of heat?"

"Two now." He searches my face, as if he'll find our salvation there. "You'll be OK. Just use the 'porter's remaining power to charge your suit's heaters. You'll keep warm for hours."

"Don't you have a suit?"

He responds with a tight laugh.

"Then you'll have no heat supply! You'll die! No way I'm taking your heat." It hits me, slowly at first like gentle methane flurries before an avalanche of dread buries me. "We're... both going to die in two hours, aren't we?"

He buries his face in his hands.

My mind's storm clears. I've been so fucking gullible.

"You stole this 'porter, didn't you? IndoChina Mining found out, and they immobilised you in this storm to kill you."

Whatever he is, with his shade-brain and his glitched meatware that renders him immune to my vampirism, he certainly isn't a miner. There isn't anyone coming to save him. The mine will wait until he dies before rescuing their precious rhodium ore from the sandflats.

When he finally responds his voice is quiet, like creaking ice. "How much did she pay you to come here?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You came here for me."

"I'm going to the Spaceport. I'm leaving Eris."

"Who are you running from?"

Paranoia tightens around my neck. He knows that I'm running. He knows that I'm a parasite. He knows everyone I've fed on. 

I latch onto the one truth that remains between us. "I'm a doctor."

"Doctors, wardens, governors. You all have too much power, and you all abuse it."

What does this thief know about power? I'm so powerless that I don't even have control over my own fucking skin. A hot furious ember begins to smoke inside me. "What power do I possibly have?"

"At best you can report anyone's metabolic implant as faulty and they'll be forced underground, or even lose their job. At worst, you have access to all of your patients' medical data. Who knows what you could blackmail them for?"

"I'd never do that."

He whisks a blanket over himself. "Doesn't matter. We'll be dead soon."

I clutch at my hair and wail at the cab ceiling.

The Goddess has delivered me from a lethal storm, right into the hands of the only person on Eris whose meatware holds the key to curing my condition. Unfortunately he's a criminal in his death-throes, and in two hours we'll both be frozen by eternal Eris.

News Flash by zoe_grimm (she/her)