The Old World

The tremor started in his left hand, small enough that Xavier didn't notice it himself at first — it was William who caught it, three days into their stay in Oris Norma, watching Xavier try three times to steady a cup of something warm and unfamiliar that Ar had brought them, the liquid trembling in small, rhythmic rings against the sides before Xavier finally set it down and pretended he'd simply decided he wasn't thirsty.

"You alright?" William asked, low, not making a production of it.

"Fine. Long few days. Everybody's tired." Xavier flexed his hand under the table, out of sight, and the tremor eased, mostly, and he told himself that was the end of it.

It wasn't the end of it. He noticed it again that evening, alone in the narrow room Oris Norma had given him, watching his own fingers refuse, for a moment, to close properly around the edge of a blanket — a small failure, barely worth mentioning, the kind of thing a person could easily explain away as exhaustion, as grief, as four million years of displacement finally catching up to a body that hadn't been built for whatever had actually happened to it. He didn't mention it to anyone. He told himself there was nothing yet worth mentioning.

The dismissal, when it came, arrived from an unexpected direction — not from Ava's faction, not from anyone actively hostile to their presence, but from a quiet, structural indifference that Xavier began noticing everywhere once he started looking for it, the way a person notices a specific word once they've learned to recognize it.

He'd gone, that morning, to the settlement's central archive with Ar, hoping to find some further trace of Priya, of the fragmented registry that had told him almost nothing and left him certain of even less — and had found, instead, a small exhibit near the archive's public entrance that stopped him cold. A curated display, clearly meant for casual visitors rather than serious researchers, cases of Old World artifacts arranged behind soft, ambient light: a fragment of fabric he couldn't place, a corroded piece of machinery labeled with a description he couldn't fully parse, and — his stomach dropping before his mind had finished processing what he was looking at — a suit. Not the one from the airlock. A different one, similar in cut, degraded in the same slow, patient way, displayed upright in a case with a small plaque beside it.

"What does it say?" he asked Ar, quietly, nodding at the plaque.

Ar read it, and Xavier watched something uncomfortable cross the historian's face before he answered. "It's a general description. Old World exploratory equipment, estimated era, recovered from an excavation several centuries ago. It doesn't name an individual. I don't believe the identity was ever recovered."

"So that's just — on display. For anyone to walk past."

"It's meant respectfully," Ar said, careful. "I want to be clear about that. This exhibit exists because a curator, at some point, believed the Old World deserved to be remembered, not forgotten. I understand that from where you're standing, it might not read as respect."

Xavier looked at the suit a while longer — someone's suit, someone's life, reduced to an unnamed artifact in a case that casual visitors walked past on their way to somewhere else, the same quiet indifference he'd felt from the moment they'd landed, dressed up now in careful, well-meaning curatorial language — and understood, with a clarity that made something in his chest go cold, exactly how small four million years could make a person.

"Does anyone come here just to look?" he asked. "Or is it only ever people passing through on their way somewhere else?"

"Both, I think," Ar said, honest even when honesty clearly cost him something. "Children, sometimes, on educational visits. A handful of people who share my particular fascination, though we're a small enough group that we mostly already know each other. Mostly, though — yes. People passing through. It isn't unkindness. I want you to understand that. It's simply that four million years is long enough for almost anything to become background. Even something as extraordinary as this."

"That's the part that gets me," Xavier said. "Not that people don't care. That caring wore out. Like it's a resource too, same as the housing and the provisions Ava keeps counting. Like there's only so much of it and everyone spent theirs a long time before we ever got here."

Ar didn't answer that right away, and Xavier understood, watching his face, that he didn't have an answer that would make it hurt less.

"It's not your fault," he said, finally, to Ar. "I don't think anyone did anything wrong here. I just—" He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't have to. Ar's expression told him he understood anyway.

The tremor came back worse that afternoon, bad enough this time that Rachel noticed it too, watching him fumble with a data tablet Ava's people had lent them, his fingers refusing to find the interface controls with the precision they should have managed easily.

"Xavier."

"It's nothing."

"It's not nothing. You've been doing that all day." Rachel's voice had gone gentle, careful, the specific tone she used when she was worried and trying not to let the worry become pressure. "Have you told anyone? Ar's people have medical facilities. Real ones, from what I've seen. If something's wrong, they might actually be able to help."

"Help with what? I don't even know what's wrong yet."

"That's exactly why you should let someone look."

He didn't answer right away, turning the tablet over in hands that had, for the moment, gone steady again, and thought about the suit in the case downstairs, the unnamed astronaut reduced to an artifact behind soft ambient light, and felt something small and stubborn rise up in him that he recognized, distantly, as fear dressed up as pride. He didn't want to be the crew member who became a medical case study. He didn't want to become, even to well-meaning people, another specimen from the Old World laid out for careful, respectful examination.

"I'll mention it," he said, finally. "If it happens again."

It happened again that night.

He woke sometime past midnight to a dizziness that didn't resolve when he sat up, a wrongness in his own body that felt, disturbingly, like the same quality of wrongness he'd felt looking at the skull in the airlock — something familiar bent slightly, uncannily, out of true. He made his way, unsteadily, to the door of the room and found William still awake, tinkering with some piece of salvaged equipment by low light, unable to sleep the same as most nights since the jump.

"Will." His voice came out rougher than he meant it to. "Something's wrong."

William was on his feet immediately, all the dry humor gone from his face in an instant, replaced by the same focused urgency Xavier had seen him bring to a failing panel on Hope , except now the failing system was a person, was Xavier himself, and something about that specifically terrified him more than anything else about the moment.

"Talk to me. What's wrong, exactly."

"Dizzy. My hand's been shaking, on and off, for two days. I didn't say anything, I thought it was just — I don't know, exhaustion, grief, I don't know what I thought it was." He sat down heavily on the edge of the narrow bed, and William crouched in front of him, taking his hand — the tremor was back, visible now, undeniable — and Xavier watched his friend's expression carefully, looking for the shape of how frightened he should actually be by reading it off William's face instead of trusting his own.

"Okay," William said, steady, deliberately calm in the specific way Xavier recognized as him working hard to sound calmer than he felt. "Okay. We're getting you looked at. Tonight, not tomorrow, not 'if it happens again.' Right now."

"William—"

"I'm not asking, Xavier." His voice cracked, just slightly, on the name, and Xavier understood, in that moment, exactly how frightened his friend actually was, underneath the careful engineer's composure. "I've already lost people I didn't get the chance to say goodbye to. I'm not doing that again if there's a single thing anybody here can do about it. Let me wake Darrell. Let me get Ar. Please."

Xavier didn't argue. He didn't have it in him to argue, not with the dizziness still sitting behind his eyes, not with the specific, quiet dread building somewhere under his ribs that whatever this was, it wasn't going to be simple exhaustion, wasn't going to be explained away by grief or bad sleep or the ordinary difficulty of adjusting to an impossible new world.

The medical facility Ar brought them to, an hour later, was gentler than Xavier had braced for — soft light, unhurried staff, none of the clinical coldness he associated with hospitals back home — but the gentleness didn't make the waiting any easier, sitting on an examination surface built for a body slightly different from his own while a technician ran instruments over him that hummed and shifted in patterns he had no way of interpreting.

"They're being very careful," Ar said, standing close by, translating what fragments of the technician's murmured commentary he could parse into something Xavier could follow. "They haven't seen anything quite like this before, is what they're saying. Not never — there's precedent in the archive, historical cases, but nothing living. Nothing they've been able to actually examine and treat."

"Historical cases of what?" Darrell asked, arriving breathless with Rachel close behind, both of them clearly having run the whole way once William's message reached them.

Ar hesitated, and Xavier watched him weigh, the same way Seli had weighed things, how much truth this moment could bear. "There's a documented condition — extremely rare, mostly theoretical in modern medicine because there's been no one to actually study it in centuries — associated with certain kinds of severe temporal or dimensional displacement. The archive calls it, roughly translated, 'unanchoring.' The body experiencing difficulty reconciling itself to a timeline it wasn't built to exist within. I want to stress that this is a preliminary read, not a diagnosis. They need more data before they can say anything with confidence."

"Is it treatable?" William asked, sharp.

"I don't know," Ar said, honestly. "I don't think anyone currently alive knows, because no one currently alive has ever had a patient to treat. You have to understand — you're not just remarkable to us because you're from before. You're remarkable because nothing like this has happened in the entire span of recorded history. There's no protocol. There's only theory, and theory that's four million years overdue for an actual test case."

Darrell's jaw was tight, his voice low when he finally spoke. "So he's the test case."

"I wouldn't put it so bluntly," Ar said, "but I won't insult you by pretending it isn't true in some sense. They will treat him as a person first. I believe that, or I wouldn't have brought you here. But you should also understand that whatever they learn from treating him, they will learn for the first time, and that carries its own weight, for good and for difficult, both."

Darrell didn't say anything else, but Xavier saw something pass behind his eyes — the same flat, careful stillness Xavier had seen him wear standing in front of the wall in Waterlake's buried shelter, the specific look of a man holding something enormous very still so it wouldn't spill over in front of the people who needed him steady.

Xavier absorbed that in silence, lying back against the examination surface, staring up at a ceiling that pulsed faintly with the same soft ambient light as everything else in this world, and thought, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful in its bleakness, about the suit in the case downstairs. Unnamed. Respectfully displayed. A curiosity from before, studied carefully by people who meant well and understood, fundamentally, almost nothing about what it had actually cost to be the person inside it.

He wondered, distantly, whether that was what he was going to become. Not a person anymore, exactly. A case study. The Old World's one living specimen, examined with careful, well-intentioned curiosity by a civilization that had spent four million years learning to be gentle with things it didn't fully understand and didn't quite know how to save.

"Hey." Rachel's voice, close by, gentle. She'd taken his other hand, the one that wasn't shaking, and held it steady in both of hers. "Whatever this is. Whatever they find. You're not doing this alone. None of us are going anywhere."

Xavier nodded, and didn't trust his voice enough to answer her properly, and thought about Priya, and a faint test line, and a sentence that had cut off mid-thought so many lifetimes ago it barely felt real anymore. He thought, too, about the tally marks scratched into the wall of the shelter, two words carved by someone he'd never know, someone else's version of exactly this — still waiting — and understood that whatever was happening to his own body now, some version of waiting was going to define whatever time he had left, whether it was long or terribly short. Waiting for a diagnosis nobody could give with confidence. Waiting for an answer about a child who might never have existed. Waiting, still, after everything, for a version of himself that got to finish the ordinary life he'd started before the sky swallowed it.

He understood, lying there under a ceiling that pulsed like something breathing, that whatever this illness turned out to be, whatever it eventually cost him, he was going to spend whatever time he had left trying very hard not to become just another artifact in someone else's careful, respectful case.

He was going to stay a person, for as long as he possibly could. He owed himself that much. He owed Priya that much, wherever the truth of her actually was, four million years and one unfinished sentence away.