The ship shuddered around them as if just a second, a lurch of fear and speed, away from shearing away to reveal the black, breathless emptiness beyond. They stumbled, holding what might be the last breath they would ever take, and a hand between their shoulder blades shoved it from their lungs, shoved them onward.

“Keep going! Right turn, cryo’s just ahead!”

They knew. They knew it all too well, and that was why they slowed their steps, craned their neck, searching for stars between the ship’s tortured seams. Wanting to at least face the last moment of their life, if this was going to be it.

Better to watch the starlight rush in than to sleep that moment away, if it was going to come. But their life was too precious to too many other people for them to be allowed to end it how they chose. The guard shoved them through that doorway, just ahead on the right, and the cryopods stood like stained-glass windows in winter, in breathless silence of their own, lit dreaming blue from within.

“Take off any metal you’re wearing,” the guard told them, panting, not enough air, even with the ship still there to precariously hold it. “It’ll burn your skin otherwise.”

They almost said there was none, so accustomed were they to the weight of the sigil around their neck. So much a part of them, it shouldn’t have been any more capable of burning them than were their own hands or breath. But they slipped it off regardless, and it was gone from their hand in an instant, the guard tucking it away somewhere out of sight even as he steered them towards the closest of the pods.

“We’ll try to keep the ship on course,” he said. “Even if life support goes out, backup power and plain old momentum should still get you where you’re going.”

“What about the rest of you?” they asked, had to ask, though the answer was plain, too, for anyone to guess.

“We don’t matter,” he said. “If you don’t make it to Atesa, we’re all dead anyways. Just…promise you’ll get this deal done, all right?”

He had no right, by rank, to demand promises of them. Just as he had no right to lay hands on them or tell them what to wear or take off, but the sounds of star-eyed, hungry vacuum tearing at the hull of the ship changed a great many things. It tore apart other boundaries, making the things they protected small in the face of the universe.

“I will,” they promised, and stepped up into the cryopod’s winter-silent embrace.