Ivo’s eyes were open before his brain caught up, some old stowaway instinct clocking a presence in the room a half-second ahead of thought and then he placed her: Judy, tablet in one hand, medical kit already open in the other.
“Up,” she said.
“Med-bay. Now.”
He blinked the fog off and sat up too fast.
The bunk tilted.
Judy’s hand caught his shoulder before he had to catch himself.
“Easy.” She let go.
“That’s what I thought. Come on.”
The med-bay was a fold-down station in the aft compartment, barely wider than a closet.
A padded bench.
Overhead storage.
A diagnostic panel that had seen better days.
Judy pointed at the bench and Ivo sat.
She pulled on gloves and went straight to work.
“Arm.”
He gave it to her.
She wrapped the pressure cuff, pumped it tight, and clocked the readout without a flicker.
Her face stayed neutral but something behind it shifted.
“One-thirty over ninety,” she said.
“Elevated. Pulse is ninety-eight. Also elevated.” She peeled the cuff off.
“Open your mouth.”
Ivo opened.
She clicked a penlight on and leaned in close enough that he could smell soap and something faintly antiseptic.
The light tracked across his gums, his tongue, the back of his throat.
“Gum inflammation. Metallic staining on your molars.” She clicked the light off.
“When did you last eat a meal you didn’t have to be handed?”
“Yesterday,” Ivo said.
“A real meal. Protein. Carbs. Not scraps.”
He didn’t answer.
Judy made a note on the tablet.
His cover story was thin sick before boarding, bad rations, nothing to chase and he could feel it stressing under her attention the way a bad weld stresses under load, one evasion at a time, waiting on the crack that would finally show.
“Blood draw,” she said.
She pulled a needle from the kit, prepped his arm with a swab that smelled like alcohol and iodine.
“This’ll sting.”
It did.
He watched the vial fill red and held his gaze there.
Judy labeled it, slotted it into the portable analyzer, and set the machine running.
It hummed.
She leaned against the counter and studied him.
“You’re dehydrated,” she said.
“Malnourished. Your blood pressure says your body thinks it’s under attack. And your symptom profile matches heavy-metal poisoning, except we’ve been planetside for less than two days and you were already sick on the Resolute.”
Ivo said nothing.
“So either you were exposed before we launched,” Judy continued, “or you’re still being exposed. And if it’s the second one, I need to know what it is before it spreads to my family.”
Her voice was calm.
Clinical.
She had already decided the question mattered more than whether the answer would be easy to hear.
He’d walked in with a plan give the right answers, let her land on the wrong conclusion on her own.
Her steadiness kept knocking it sideways.
“It’s not contagious,” Ivo said.
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m the only one sick.”
Still running.
“You don’t get to guess at this. I do.”
A low hum filled the silence while the machine worked.
Ivo’s arm ached where the needle had gone in.
The taste of iron sat on his tongue like it always did, faint and ever-present, and he wondered if she could see it the way he could feel it.
A beep from the analyzer.
Judy tore the readout free, scanned it once, then again slower, like the numbers might change on a second look.
“Chromium, nickel, lead, aluminum all elevated. Copper’s through the roof.” She looked up.
“This is what I’d expect to see in someone who spent six months in an unshielded smelting facility. You’ve been aboard a colony ship with air filtration and potable water.”
She set the tablet down.
“So. Try again. What did you eat?”
Ivo met her eyes.
Steady.
Composed.
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“The truth would be nice.”
“I’ve told you the truth.”
“You’ve told me a truth,” Judy corrected.
She pulled a sealed pouch from the med-kit something clear and liquid inside.
“Chelation agent. It’ll bind to the metals in your blood and help your kidneys flush them. You’ll feel like hell for about six hours, then better. Probably.”
She prepped another needle.
“This only works if you stop putting more metal into your system. So whatever you’re doing stop.”
Ivo held still.
Judy leaned in, slid the needle into the port she’d left in his arm, and pushed the plunger slow and steady.
The burn spread up his vein like cold fire.
“There,” she said.
She withdrew the needle, capped it, stripped her gloves.
“Drink water. A lot of it. Avoid anything you’ve been eating that you think might be making you sick.”
She sat on the counter across from him, arms folded.
“I’m not reporting this to my mother.”
Ivo looked up.
“Yet,” Judy added.
“Because reporting it means I hand you off to her, and she’ll make it a systems problem air quality, water contamination, the whole ship under quarantine while we rule out environmental exposure. That’s three days of work we can’t afford and a lot of questions you clearly don’t want to answer.”
She held his gaze.
“So instead, I’m keeping you. You check in with me twice a day. You tell me every symptom. You let me run blood work whenever I say. And if I see anything that says you’re a danger to this crew, I escalate immediately and you don’t get a vote. We clear?”
Ivo’s throat was dry.
“Clear.”
“Good.” Judy hopped off the counter, turned to clean the instruments.
Her back was to him, her hands steady and methodical.
“Why’d you stow away?”
The question landed soft.
Ivo didn’t answer right away.
“Everyone else had a reason to be here,” Judy said.
She didn’t turn around.
“A skill. A family. A ticket. You didn’t.”
“No,” Ivo said quietly.
“I didn’t.”
“So why risk it?”
He could have deflected.
Should have.
Instead he offered the one honest piece small enough to stand on its own, far enough from the rest to be safe.
“Because staying wasn’t an option anymore.”
Stopped.
Her back was still to him but her shoulders eased by a degree.
“Yeah,” she said.
Softer.
“I get that.”
She finished packing the kit, turned, and handed him a water pouch.
“Drink the whole thing. Then drink another one. Then sleep if you can.”
Ivo took it.
Their fingers missed each other by a quarter inch, and somehow the space between them felt smaller than when he’d walked in.
“I’m going to figure it out,” Judy said.
Not a threat.
A promise.
“Whatever you’re not telling me. I’m good at this, and you’re not good at lying. It’s only a matter of time.”
“I know,” Ivo said.
She studied him.
Suspicion crossed her face, then frustration, then a third thing he couldn’t name and that one unnerved him more than the other two combined.
“You don’t look scared,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“You should be.”
“I know,” Ivo said again.
Judy shook her head, half a smile pulling at the corner of her mouth before she caught it.
“You’re a terrible patient.”
“Noted.”
She stepped past him toward the door, stopped in the frame, didn’t look back.
“Twice a day. Morning and evening. Don’t make me come find you.”
“I won’t.”
The door slid shut behind her.
Ivo sat on the bench with the water pouch in his hands and the burn of the chelation agent still crawling through his veins.
His pulse was settling.
The gray at the edges of his vision had pulled back half an inch.
The Assay painted the med-bay in ghostly lines.
Aluminum panels.
Steel bracing.
Titanium fasteners.
Digestible, all of it, and his molars ached.
He drank the water.
All of it.
Then he stood, steadier than he’d been in two days, and made his way back to the bunk John had given him.
The taste of iron faded barely, the way a tide pulls back a finger’s width and you only notice because you’ve been staring at the waterline.
Judy Robinson could lower the toxicity.
Which meant she could also tell when it rose.
She’d just made herself the only person aboard who could keep him alive and the only person who’d know the moment he slipped.
Worse and this was the part he kept circling back to he didn’t want to lie to her.
Not because she’d catch him.
Because something in that quiet exchange about having nowhere else to go had felt like standing in open air after months in a sealed room.
Ivo lay on his back and stared at the ceiling and tried not to think about how much easier it had been when no one was watching.
How much harder it was going to be now that someone was and that the someone was her.
He closed his eyes.
Sleep wouldn’t come.
The hours until the next check-in stretched ahead like a hallway with no doors, and he lay there trying to decide whether what he felt was dread or something uncomfortably close to relief.