JESSIE

I stalled, staring down at the sinkhole which reflected the image of the hole in the cave miles above above. It felt like I was looking into a portal as I weighed my options. The sound of dripping water from the cave's roof and the occasional screech from small winged creatures that blended into the darkness of the pits and crevices of the interconnected cave system made my ears ring.

I can't do this anymore.

The thought pressed at the back of my mind as I kept staring down at the water. All I had to do was jump, and I would sink 300 feet into the pit of nothingness. The avian apex species on this planet saw the sinkholes that were scattered across their worlds as the entrance to the underworld — it would be nice to take a shortcut to hell and just forget what could have been...

My purpose here.

The colony was supposed to land on one of the many moons of Equiano. It would have had a thicker atmosphere and the gravity a little bit higher than Earth's but it would have been mostly geographically similar. A colony of 50,000 humans, but ionic storms and human nature had other plans, and the starship crashed on Equiano itself.

Roughly less than half of us survived, and the six years that followed the crash had been reverberating with chaos, infighting, and mutiny. I joined the colony project back on Earth right after graduating from university. Armed with a microbiology degree, and not much else, I'd made the cut for the science arm of the extensive project via lottery. We had trained in preparation for about a year. I trained as a vet aid and first aid medic. It had been the only time in my life that I felt like I fit somewhere...

It felt like I mattered, even though I wasn't that close to my crew. I did my work and felt accomplished.

It had been the one place where my string of highly toxic romantic relationships, academic anxiety, and family issues hadn't followed me.

I remembered the day he stepped into my cryo chamber. I remembered smiling at a teammate across from me as my eyelids grew heavy. Samantha had smiled back. She'd had an equally tired look in her eyes as one of the ship's crew read off something from a clipboard as they walked around to inspect each cryo chamber. It didn't matter what they were saying — we'd probably heard it in some variation over the year they'd prepared.

I could remember the exact moment my eyes had closed. Samantha had still been smiling at me — her brown eyes piercing mine with her excitement. We’d roomed next to each other in the mixed dorms all year. We sat together at meals and talked so much. I knew everything about her. She felt like my sister. She was in the program because she loved space and had recently graduated with an aerospace engineering degree. Just the prospect of being on the third colony ship ever to leave Earth had deeply excited her.

But she never got to set foot on Titan-1 — none of us did, but she never made it to Equiano either.

I remembered the first thing I saw when I woke from form cryosleep. Samantha was still across from him in her cryo chamber, but her dark skin had looked wrong — it was grey, and every orifice on her face was oozing with dry black blood. I had been confused for a while, not immediately taking in the blaring sirens, red lights, and white gas that was gushing from the vents above, but when I did my stomach sank.

The worst had happened.

What the team on earth had calculated as a .025% probability had happened.

I remember standing in my cryo chamber, intently staring at Samantha's face as I waited for someone to rescue me. I refused to look around and inspect the damage. The only way I knew the person beside me was still alive was the deep cry they'd let out after we must have been standing for hours listening to the siren's sound. Someone did come for us eventually — a whole extraction team, saving the only four people in the room of twenty that had made it. I was unsure how other parts of the ship had faired, but the intensity in the air as we walked out to the clearing in the canyon we'd hit told me not very well.

I couldn't think of anything immediate that was different about where we were besides what I was seeing in the sky. On Titan, we would have seen the ringed planet engulfing most of the sky, and the other four moons that orbited it in the distance, but from where I was I saw five bodies in the sky, as well as a thick dark ring that banded over the illuminated blue sky.

I stood there in the cold for hours as more and more people emerged from the wreckage. People weaved around me, talking, crying, and hugging each other as the only person I was close friends with decayed in the burning ship up ahead. When the last set of people emerged, the crowd was hailed by military personnel who had climbed onto higher ground to get a better view of us. An officer, who didn't look more than forty cleared his throat as he stared down at a microphone in his hands.

"We're not on Titan," he said in a low voice, causing the crowd to erupt into a buzz of murmurs, "but where we are is livable, we'll make it work," he added, urging someone standing behind him to step forward. I recognized them — a geologist from my department who doubled as a consultant for the agriculture department.

"We're in Equiano," the geologist said, shifting on his feet. He didn't seem used to public speaking. "The planet Titan orbits. It is livable but there are key differences."

The man folded his hands over his chest. "Equiano was initially the pick for the colony, but we selected one of its inhabitable moons as an alternative due to key concerns."

"The gravity as well as the atmosphere is thicker than earth's. There are surface water bodies, but they are mostly relegated to the multiple sinkholes and natural hot springs deep in caves and are hard to access. There are a few water creaks and seasonal streams. The wildlife is sparse either living deep in the sinkholes and cave systems, or high above ground. Most of the plants can't take proper hold on the soil and grow in canyon and mountain grooves—"

"So we can breathe, but can't find something to eat?" A woman said from the front of the crowd. Conversation erupted around her as people seemed to debate the implications.

The geologist coughed into his hand. "No. It just means we'll have to be more creative."

He paused for a bit before continuing.

"The nail on the coffin for why Equiano wasn't chosen was its ring. It will be hard to fly satellites and effectively communicate over large distances..." the man trailed. "Also, the planet has a native pre-space flight intelligent species."

The murmurs were concentrated now. This was info already known to most of the science and military departments — but it wasn't anything the civilians knew.

"They are few and far between — a solitary species that lives mostly in the upper biome. We're unlikely to have contact with them if we stick to the ground," the geologist continued. "It is just something worth mentioning."

The geologist was still elaborating on details when I felt a hand clasp around my shoulder. I looked over it, glancing up at the taller man who was holding onto me. He was in military gear, and standing right beside him was a middle-aged woman with red hair peppered with grey.

"Jessie English?" the man said.

I raised a brow, wondering what this was about. "Yes?"

"You're a medic, right?" the woman asked, squinting. "Sorry, I'm going off memory, not a lot of our documentation survived."

"I did train in first aid, but I'm mostly a veterinary aid—"

"Well, that's enough — you'll be joining us in surgical..."

I blinked. "Excuse me?"

The woman tucked her hands into her coat, farrowing her brows as she looked around the crowd. "I'm not sure how much you know, Jessie, but there aren't many of us left. Most of the life stock is gone. Most of the science team is gone... You learned to help birth cows and stitch minor wounds. I'm going to put you up to speed so we can use that to save some lives now..."

My body shook, but I nodded, understanding the scale of the issue, and just like that I was a surgeon and lead researcher with little more than a microbiology degree.

The first year had been hard, but there was a semblance of routine.

And then the second year say a mutiny with the military overtaking 70% of human settlements and purging what was left of the scientific consultant class. The politics of the third year crept into the population slowly. It started with downplaying domestic violence and sexual assault. Maintaining that there were bigger things to worry about.

And then they banned abortion and decided teaching civilians anything was a waste of resources. Hostility for the out-and-open queer people came right after. It was something about catching up to crash numbers, and it pained me to look at woman after woman and tell them no over the next three years.

Our sinkholes were constantly getting infected. There was a limited amount of food to eat. Our bodies had barely gotten used to the planet, and we had lost more than half of the resources meant to get us through acclimatization. It wasn't ideal to bring children into this, but that hadn't been my call.

Then...

A teenager had begged me. Eyes blood red and hands shaking. It was for an officer. She didn't want it. She was afraid.

I had offered my assistance.

Then I had been found out, and here I was standing by a sinkhole days away from the nearest human settlement with nothing to my name but the first aid kit in my bag and a week's worth of food.

I was going to die.

Slowly and painfully in a few weeks. Or... I could just die now...

I looked down at the water, staring at my reflection. My dark hair had grown longer here, curling at the nap of my neck and framing my eyebrows with bouncy wisps. The rest of me was the same as ever, although with deeper eye bags than I would have anticipated. I bit my bottom lip, taking a deep breath as my fingers curled around the straps of my backpack. I edged closer to the sinkhole, feeling my heart rate pick up as I debated with myself.

Drowning would be painful. I could swim, but I wasn't a strong swimmer. The weight on my back and the impractical clothes I was wearing would make sure I drowned. I hadn't eaten in a while — I was tired, and besides that, I wasn't particularly athletic in the first place...

Just do it.

I told myself, shutting my eyes.

There's nothing to live for anyway.

And then, I jumped.