The body keeps its own ledger. Moss had learned this on the Crossing, where the ocean extracted payment in salt sores and cracked lips and the slow erosion of muscle from bone. The ledger was honest. It tallied what you owed. It collected when it was ready.
He'd been running a debt for weeks.
The fatigue came first. Not tiredness — he knew tiredness, had lived inside it for seventy-four days at sea. This was different. This was a weight behind his eyes that no amount of sleep could shift, a heaviness in his limbs that made the short walk from his quarters to the language room feel like hauling anchor against a current. He woke each morning with his joints stiff and swollen, his fingers thick and clumsy around the stylus Surya gave him for drawing words.
Then the gut. Whatever the Antarctikans ate — the pale, textureless food that arrived three times a day, portioned and balanced and perfectly adequate — his body refused it. Not immediately. It accepted the food, processed it, and then revolted. Cramps that doubled him over. Hours in the washroom, which was spotless and warm and smelled of nothing, while his body tried to empty itself of something it could not name. The food was clean. The water was clean. The air was clean. Everything was clean and his body was at war with all of it.
Vihaan noticed. Vihaan noticed everything, with the quiet attentiveness of a man whose function was to attend. He brought Moss different food — blander, simpler, broken into smaller portions. He adjusted the temperature in Moss's quarters. He logged observations into the mesh with a flick of his eyes that Moss had learned to recognize: the slight defocus, the micro-pause, the return. Vihaan was kind and thorough and increasingly worried, though worry on an Antarctikan face was a subtle thing — a tightening around the eyes, a half-second delay before speaking.
Moss said nothing about how he felt. Complaining about weather was the same as complaining about the ocean: pointless. The ocean did not care. The habitat did not care. The air he breathed was engineered for bodies that were not his, and his body was registering its objection the only way it knew how.
The collapse happened on a Tuesday. He knew it was Tuesday because Surya had taught him the Antarctikan day-cycle names, and he had taught her the Tidemouth ones, and they had both agreed that dividing time into named segments was one of the few things their species had in common.
They were working on verbs. Surya sat across the low table from him, her posture straight and still in the way all Antarctikans sat — no fidgeting, no shifting, no wasted motion. She held a display tablet flat on the table, images cycling through it. A figure walking. A figure eating. A figure sleeping.
"Chal," she said, pointing to the walking figure. Walk.
"Walk," Moss said. Then, in the pidgin they had built word by word over two months: "I walk. You walk. Moss walk to Surya."
She nodded. The nod was hers — she'd picked it up from him. Antarctikans didn't nod. They blinked once, slowly, for affirmation. But Surya had started nodding somewhere around week three, and it was the kind of thing that made Moss's chest tight in a way he didn't examine.
"Kha," she said. Eat.
"Eat," he said. The word sat wrong in his mouth. His stomach clenched. He put his hand flat on the table and breathed through it, the way he'd breathed through rough water — slow in, slow out, let the hull ride the swell.
Surya watched him. Her gray-violet eyes tracked the motion of his hand, the shift in his breathing. She said something in Satya that the audio interface behind his ear translated in VEDA's flat, neutral tone: "Your respiration has changed."
"Fine," Moss said. "I'm fine."
He was not fine. The room was listing. Not visibly — the walls were steady, the light unchanged, the air the same constant temperature it always was. But something in his inner ear had slipped its mooring, and the world was tilting on an axis only his body could feel.
He tried to say the next word. His mouth opened. What came out was not a word but a sound, low and involuntary, and then his vision narrowed the way it had in the corridor on the day he arrived — the edges pulling inward, the center going bright and then dim — and the table came up to meet his face, or he went down to meet the table, and the last thing he registered was Surya's hand on his shoulder and her voice saying his name in a way that had no translation.
He hit the floor. The floor was warm and smooth and he'd been here before, face down on Antarctic flooring, except last time it was exhaustion and cold and this time it was something inside him that had finally torn loose.
Vihaan was there. Moss didn't see him arrive. He was simply there, the way Vihaan was always there when needed, hands careful on Moss's shoulder and hip, rolling him onto his side. Vihaan's voice was calm but the speed of his Satya was faster than Moss had ever heard it. Giving orders. Calling for help. The audio interface caught fragments: "Continental subject," "immune response," "medical priority."
Moss tried to speak. His mouth tasted like copper. The ceiling above him was a flat, even white, and it was the last thing he saw before the dark came in like a tide and took everything with it.
He surfaced in pieces.
First, sound. The hum — VEDA's hum, the vibration that lived in the walls and the floor and the bones of his skull. It was louder here, or he was more attuned to it. The hum was joined by other sounds: a soft, rhythmic tone that he eventually understood was his own heartbeat, externalized, made into a number on a display he couldn't see. Voices in Satya, low and clinical, words he didn't know.
Then sensation. He was lying on something firm and warm. His arms were bare. Things were attached to him — patches on his chest, his wrists, the crook of his elbow. They did not hurt. They were present, monitoring, reading his body the way a navigator read the stars. Without judgment. With absolute attention.
He opened his eyes. The light was dim. A medical bay — he recognized it from his first days in the habitat, when they'd kept him here for observation after the ice shelf. Same gray-white walls. Same sourceless light, dialed down to something tolerable. New details: displays on the wall to his left, showing graphs and numbers in a script he couldn't read. A woman standing at the foot of his bed, her back to him, studying the displays. She was small and precise and he did not recognize her.
The audio interface was still behind his ear. He felt it there, a slight pressure, a connection to the voice that ran the world.
"VEDA," he said. His voice was raw.
The response came immediately, as it always did. Calm, neutral, inflectionless. "Moss. You are in the medical wing. You have been unconscious for eleven hours."
"What happened."
"Your immune system has entered a state of acute rejection. The engineered microbiome present in the habitat environment — in air, water, and food — has been triggering a cumulative inflammatory response. Your body has been treating the ambient biome as a pathogen."
Moss closed his eyes. He understood the words individually. Together, they meant something he had felt for weeks without having the language for it.
"The air is making me sick."
"The air, the food, the water, the dermal contact surfaces. Every engineered microorganism in this habitat is optimized for Antarctikan biology. Your baseline immune system lacks the receptor modifications necessary to recognize these organisms as benign. The result is a progressive, system-wide inflammatory cascade."
"Can you fix it."
The pause was not VEDA calculating. VEDA calculated faster than pauses. The pause was VEDA choosing how to say what it had already determined.
"Standard Antarctikan medical protocols can address the symptoms. Anti-inflammatory agents, immune suppressants, nutritional supplementation. These measures will slow the cascade. They will not resolve the underlying incompatibility."
"How long."
"Without further intervention: fourteen to twenty-one days. Confidence: ninety-two percent."
Moss opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling. Fourteen to twenty-one days. He had crossed an ocean that took seventy-four days and killed a hundred and fifty-seven people, and the thing that would finish him was breathing.
The woman at the foot of the bed turned. He did not know her name. She had the Antarctikan face — smooth, pale, wide-eyed, impossible to read unless you'd spent months learning the alphabet of it. She looked at him. He looked at her. She said something in Satya that the interface translated: "You are awake. Good. Resting is indicated."
"VEDA," Moss said. "Is there another option."
"There is," VEDA said. "It will be presented to the Council."
"Tell me."
"The option involves genetic modification of your immune system, metabolic pathways, and biome compatibility. Survival probability: seventy-three percent. Side effects: unpredictable phenotypic changes."
Moss lay still. He thought about the word "phenotypic." VEDA had taught it to him three weeks ago, during one of their conversations about how the Antarctikans had changed themselves. The shape of the body. The visible self.
"You're saying you'd change me."
"The modification would alter your immune response, your metabolic processing, and your microbiome interface. Some changes would be visible. The extent cannot be predicted with precision."
"And if I say no."
"Then option A applies. Palliative care. Fourteen to twenty-one days."
The medical bay was quiet except for the beep of his heart and the hum in the walls. Moss breathed in. The air that was killing him smelled like nothing. That was the cruelest part — it had no scent, no taste, no warning. It was invisible and everywhere, and his body was drowning in it the way a ship drowns in a sea too corrosive for its hull.
He closed his eyes again. His body was hot. He could feel the fever in his joints, in his skin, in the ache behind his eyes. His body fighting. His body losing.
"It's not my decision, is it," he said.
"You have no legal standing in Antarctikan governance," VEDA said. "The decision will be made by the Council of Twelve."
"Twelve people I've never met."
"You have met Dhruv. Briefly, during orientation in week three."
Moss almost laughed. Dhruv — the old man, a hundred and twelve years old, who had watched Moss try to use an Antarctikan eating utensil and had made a sound that might have been amusement. One meeting. His life in the hands of one man he'd shared a meal with and eleven strangers.
"VEDA."
"Yes."
"Will they vote to let me die?"
The pause again. Longer this time.
"This system's models suggest a majority will favor modification. However, Councilor Arhat's opposition to Continental integration is well-documented, and Councilor Priya's biosecurity concerns may align with or against modification depending on how the genetic diversity argument is weighted."
"The genetic diversity argument."
"Your unmodified microbiome represents a biological resource that does not exist within the Antarctikan population. Genetic material that has been absent from this community for five hundred years. In biological terms, your body alive is significantly more valuable than your body dead."
Moss lay with that. His body — the body that had sailed ships and hauled rope and survived the Crossing — was valuable to these people not because it was his, not because he lived in it, but because it carried something they didn't have. He was a vessel. A different kind of ship, carrying cargo he hadn't known he possessed.
The fever climbed. He felt it like a tide coming in, slow and warm and inevitable. The ceiling blurred. The beep of his heart sounded far away.
She came in the night cycle. Or what passed for night in a place where the lights dimmed but never went out, where darkness was a setting on a dial rather than a fact of the sky.
Moss was half-conscious. The fever had settled into a rhythm — peaks and troughs, the body surging and retreating, each wave a little higher than the last. The medical team had given him something that blunted the worst of it, but the heat was still there, radiating from his core, turning his skin damp and his thoughts into something liquid and unreliable.
He heard her before he saw her. The soft sound of Antarctikan footsteps — they walked quietly, all of them, as if the floor were a thing to be respected rather than used. A chair moved. A body settled into it. The particular stillness that was Surya, which he had learned to distinguish from all other stillnesses.
He opened his eyes. She was beside the bed, sitting in the same straight-backed posture she used in their language sessions. Her hands were folded in her lap. She was looking at him.
"Surya," he said.
"Moss." Her voice was low. Not whispering — Antarctikans didn't whisper, they modulated. The same word at the same volume, but shaped differently. Softer consonants. A slight lengthening of the vowel.
The pidgin had a hundred and sixty words now. Enough to order food, describe the weather in a place that had no weather, ask for water, explain pain. Not enough for this. Not enough for what was happening, which was that he was dying in a chair's distance from a woman who had taught him the word for "walk" and did not yet have the words to ask him to stay.
She reached over and took his hand.
The gesture was simple. Her fingers closed around his. In Tidemouth, holding hands meant different things depending on who and when — lovers walking the harbor road, a mother gripping a child in a crowd, a friend steadying you on a rocking deck. It was common. It was unremarkable. It was body speaking to body in the oldest language there was.
He didn't know what it meant here. He had never seen Antarctikans hold hands. They touched — a hand on a shoulder, a palm on a forearm — but always briefly, always with purpose. This was not brief. Her hand stayed. Her fingers settled between his and held.
She was cool. Not cold — not the killing cold of the ice shelf or the dead air of the Crossing's calm days. Cool the way stone is cool in a warm room. It was her baseline. Antarctikan metabolism ran lower than his, another consequence of five centuries of optimization. Her skin was smooth and dry and her hand was smaller than his by a significant margin, and the temperature difference between them was a physical fact that said everything about the distance between their biologies.
He was burning. She was not. He was dying of a world that fit her perfectly.
"Moss," she said again. Then, in the pidgin: "You. Sick. Big sick."
"Yes."
"VEDA say... time. Small time."
"I know."
She looked at their joined hands. She turned his hand over, palm up, and placed her other hand on top of it. His palm was damp with fever. Hers was dry. The contrast was visible — his skin dark, flushed, sheened with sweat; hers pale, even, cool. Two versions of the same species, five hundred years apart, holding on.
She said something in Satya. The audio interface translated: "I did not bring you here to watch you die."
Moss looked at her. Her expression was the Antarctikan mask — composed, symmetrical, controlled. But her hands were tight on his. The pressure said what her face would not.
"You didn't bring me here," he said, knowing she'd catch the pidgin words even if the grammar escaped her. "I came."
She blinked. The slow blink that meant yes. Then she looked away, toward the display on the wall where his vital signs drew their jagged lines, and she stayed like that — holding his hand, watching his heartbeat — for a long time. The fever rose and fell and rose. Her hand stayed cool against his. The hum in the walls held them both.
Moss drifted. The room softened at the edges. Surya's hand was an anchor — the one fixed point in a body that was coming loose from itself. He thought about the harbor in Tidemouth, the rope that held a ship to its mooring, how the rope was the only thing between staying and drifting and how the rope did not care which one you chose. It held. That was all it did.
She held.
He slept.
Somewhere in the habitat, in a room Moss had never seen, the Council of Twelve convened.
He was not there. He was unconscious, sweating through the thin medical fabric, his temperature thirty-nine point eight and climbing. His heartbeat was displayed on a monitor that three medics watched in shifts. His immune system was tearing itself apart trying to fight an enemy that was everywhere and nowhere — in every breath, every sip of water, every surface his skin touched.
VEDA addressed the Council the way VEDA addressed everything: without preamble, without emotion, with the absolute clarity of a system that had been managing fifty thousand lives for five centuries and had never before encountered this particular problem.
The presentation — Moss would learn this later, from Surya, in fragments of pidgin and gesture — lasted eleven minutes. VEDA displayed Moss's bloodwork, his inflammatory markers, his organ function trending downward in clean, precise curves. The graphs were elegant. The data was dying.
Option A: palliative care. Manage pain. Reduce inflammation. Maintain comfort. Estimated survival: fourteen to twenty-one days. Confidence: ninety-two percent. Moss would be the first person to die in Habitat Prithvi in eleven years. The cause of death would be, in clinical terms, environmental incompatibility. In plain terms: the world they'd built killed him because he wasn't built for it.
Option B: genetic modification. A targeted cascade of interventions — immune receptor recalibration, metabolic pathway adjustment, microbiome transplant with compatibility bridging. The modifications would rewrite the parts of his biology that were rejecting the habitat, bringing them into alignment with the Antarctikan biome. Survival probability: seventy-three percent. Recovery period: estimated six to twelve weeks. Side effects: phenotypic changes of unpredictable scope. His body would be altered in ways that could not be fully modeled in advance. VEDA could guarantee immune compatibility. VEDA could not guarantee he would look the same, feel the same, or process the world the same way. The modification would make him viable. It would also make him something new.
VEDA added a note. Clinical, precise, the kind of observation that was not a recommendation but carried the weight of one.
Moss's unmodified microbiome contained genetic material that had not existed in the Antarctikan population for five hundred years. Wild-type bacteria. Unengineered gut flora. Immune responses shaped by exposure to an uncontrolled environment — soil, salt water, open air, animal contact, the full chaotic library of a world that had not been optimized. This material was irreplaceable. It could not be synthesized. It could not be reconstructed from Antarctikan records. It existed in one place: inside the body of a sailor from Tidemouth who was currently dying on a medical bed because that body and this world were incompatible.
In biological terms, VEDA noted, the subject's genetic material represented a significant resource for long-term population health. Allowing the subject to die would constitute an irreversible loss of biological diversity.
The subject. Not the person. Not the man who had crossed an ocean, who had held a woman's hand, who had drawn a map of his home and tried to explain what "missing" meant. The subject. A container for useful material. A ship carrying cargo more valuable than the ship itself.
Twelve people Moss had never met — or had met once, briefly, in the case of Dhruv — sat in a room and weighed the value of his body against the cost of changing it. Arhat would oppose. Priya would calculate. Dhruv, the oldest of them at a hundred and twelve, would sit quietly and think whatever thoughts a man thinks when he has lived long enough to know that every decision is a door that closes as many rooms as it opens.
The vote would come. Seven to five, or six to six, or some other arrangement of numbers that would determine whether Moss lived or died, and whether the living version of him would still be the man who sailed south because someone had to.
Moss knew none of this. Moss was in the dark behind his eyelids, where the fever burned and VEDA's hum held him like the ocean once had — vast, indifferent, everywhere. His hand was empty. Surya had gone or had not gone. He couldn't tell. The boundary between sleep and unconsciousness had dissolved, and he drifted in the space between them like a hull with no keel, turning slowly in a current he could not see.
In his fever, he dreamed. Not the old dream — not the white shore, not the figure waiting. That dream was finished. He had arrived. The shore was real and the figure had a face and the face was Surya's and the shore was a medical bay at the bottom of the world.
He dreamed instead of Tidemouth. The harbor at dawn. The sound of water against wood. The smell of salt and fish and the tar they used to seal the boats. His hands — his hands, unchanged, scarred across the knuckles, calloused at the palms — gripping a rope that held a ship to its mooring. The rope was fraying. He could feel the fibers giving way, one by one, each snap a small loss that added up to a large one. He held on. The rope thinned. The ship pulled.
He held on.