Read As You Wake, Break the Shell Online Free by Becky Chambers

Darkness wasn’t real, and space wasn’t empty. It was merely full of things humans couldn’t perceive.

Cora couldn’t see the colors she had no words for. But as she sat on the bathroom floor, her hands tangled in her hair, her breath quickening in a way that had become far too familiar, her brain was desperate to find them. The room looked wrong. The world looked wrong. Dissonance took her. She couldn’t see the nameless colors, but they were there, somewhere, she knew they were there, they were everywhere, all the time, always, just outside of her reach. Her eyes darted, because eyes were what her body used to find colors, but she wasn’t supposed to be using her eyes, she was supposed to be able to see through her skin. Her skin was wrong. Her body was wrong. The air was wrong. Air wasn’t supposed to envelope you, trap you, compress your fragile flesh into maintaining shape. Air wasn’t supposed to feel heavy, and you weren’t supposed to suck it in and out in these horrible shallow puffs that drew in one poison and exchanged it for another. Air was a pond you were supposed to skim the surface of. You were supposed to eat it. Consume it. And not oxygen, pure oxygen was foul. But helium—god, yes, helium, ammonia, yes, yes, yes, she wanted to gulp it all down and drift with her body sated as nourishment bled into every cell.

Bled. Bleed. She bled. She, Cora, had blood, and could bleed. Blood needed oxygen; there was no argument to be made otherwise. She breathed oxygen, and she, Cora, did not eat helium, and she did not see with her skin. She knew the names of the colors she had access to, and maybe that would help, maybe they would bring her back to where she should be.

In order, then: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, blue. Blue, and—it was okay, it was okay to start over.

Red, orange. Yellow.

Yellow.

Blue, and . . . blue.

Blue.

Blue was beautiful. She knew blue. She loved blue. Blue and green both, even though there was precious little of either on this planet. But something in her—something human, something true—was supposed to see blue and green more often. She was deficient in blue and green. She hadn’t known that about herself until Colibri reached inside her and asked What are these colors that your mind craves and cannot find?

Cora started laughing at that memory because, fuck, that was ironic now. She didn’t crave blue and she didn’t crave green. She craved the colors of solar wind and of radio waves and of—oh, oh god, where were the magnetic fields? No, no, no no no, this was wrong. She’d never been able to feel magnetic fields, but she couldn’t feel them, and now everything in her was screaming that they were gone, and she didn’t know where she was. She was lost. She was lost, she was lost. She was sitting on the floor and she was hugging her knees and she was tumbling through nothing because the graceful road map that guided her around the currents and eddies between planets had been callously ripped away.

She was sitting on the floor and she was hugging her knees, and gravity held her there, and that was wrong, too, because what the fuck was a floor? What the fuck was down? Gravity was the thing you avoided when it began to pull too hard. The thing you skipped around in order to speed yourself up. It wasn’t supposed to shackle you like this. You weren’t supposed to need it. She was trapped in the grip of a sphere, swallowed by an ocean of crushing poison, and she could not see the path out.

There was no way out.

What there was was a trash can pushed against the door to the bathroom. Cora scrambled over to it and threw up. She laughed, because hey, at least she could tell Twig honestly that she’d puked. But oh god, it was disgusting. Eating was disgusting. Consuming living beings and dissolving them down in order to access the nutrients locked away in their cells was disgusting, inarguably. The universe was brimming with energy, it was nothing but energy. And yet, she existed in estrangement. She was a scavenger, a violent thief that couldn’t exist without tearing other organisms apart. Her body churned out a whole suite of acids made for the specific task of breaking down tissues other than her own. Her mouth was filled with teeth, grown for tearing and grinding. Teeth were bones, and bones were a nightmare. Porous living rocks branching through muscle, resulting in a form not endlessly soft and pliable, but grinding, crunching, popping—

Oh, she hated it, she hated it. She wasn’t supposed to be in this body. This wasn’t where she was meant to be.

“Stop,” she whispered, pleading with herself. Her voice—another alien thing, another strangeness—came out small and shaking. “Please stop.” She had to whisper, she had to sob silent, because if somebody heard her, it was all over. She checked the door, made sure it was still locked and blocked. They’d kill Colibri if they found Cora like this. Oh, they’d try another pilot, they’d introduce her to a few more minds, but fifty-fifty was bad, bad, bad, odds no sane person would risk on something beloved. Someone beloved. Cora didn’t know if she still counted as sane, but some part of her remained human enough to remember to stay quiet, and surely that counted for something.

Space was quiet. Colibri was quiet. There wouldn’t be any sound as they sealed off her pen and replaced her food with poison. They said it didn’t hurt. But how could they know that, how could they have any idea what goes on in another being’s body? Had somebody really paused the whole process halfway through to ask, On a scale of one to ten, how much pain is your failing body currently experiencing? Could anybody definitively say that death didn’t hurt, or was it merely a reassurance everyone clung to so they could enjoy the time before it happened?

Cora held herself and tried to ignore the bile coating her tongue. She held herself because she, Cora, was human, and holding was as human as it got. She liked her body, she told herself defiantly. She liked her hands, strong and soft. She liked her eyes, big and warm. She liked the things she could do with her hands, the things she could see with her eyes. Others told her she had a nice smile, even though she’d always thought it was too big. And food, food was good. Food was love and laughter. Food was life. Blood was life, and blood was red. Red.

Red, orange, yellow.

Yellow.

Yellow, and . . . and . . .