II

Revived aboard the century-crossing mercy ship Absent Friends, the man calling himself Darac Livu confirms that cryosleep has not dulled his memories. He learns the ship aids war survivors and that he secured passage with false papers, choosing mid-journey crew duty to truly “see” space.

Darac observes the standoff between the two other awakened crew: Erens, a drug-using tinkerer who has disabled some housekeeping functions, and Ky, who pushes Erens to refreeze. Darac listens to their looping disputes about addiction, safety, and philosophy, then wanders the vast, cold storage corridors among the near-dead sleepers.

Curiosity and darkness pull Darac into a moral brink: he opens a woman’s stasis drawer, disables monitoring, exposes her life switch and the cube storing her recorded brain patterns, and tests himself against the urge to end her. He does not, closes her away, and retreats.

Back in the lounge and viewing carousel, Erens wants confessions and drugs; Darac refuses, arguing that people rarely change beliefs by argument—only by agreeing to disagree or by fighting. Ky counters with a tale of a philosopher-king’s endless, mirrored volumes on souls, concluding that absence of closure is not absence of conclusion.

Later, alone in the central elevator, Darac plays his centering game with a floating torch and turns it into a lethal wager: if the torch’s beam does not strike his face before he opens his suit, he will remove his helmet. Memories of Zakalwe, Elethiomel, and a white chair surge as he undoes the last clips; at the critical moment, the torch dies, denying his chosen signal. He stops, stranded between intention and chance.

After a year awake, with Ky and Erens still embattled and incompatible, Darac returns to cryosleep. He will later surface in another low-technology war, learning to fly above colliding icebergs—carrying forward the same scars, skills, and precarious will to live.