Sanctuary
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 2: What He Did While I Slept
I woke to the sound of my own breathing and knew immediately it was wrong.
Too fast. Too shallow. The kind of breathing the body does when it’s fighting something it hasn’t told the mind about yet. I’d heard it before, in field hospitals, in the aftermath of chemical exposure during the Margrave campaign. I’d never heard it from myself.
The pod’s emergency lighting had cycled to its dawn setting, thin green-gold filtering through the cracked viewport. Jungle pressed against the transparasteel like something curious. Like something waiting.
He was already awake.
He sat cross-legged on the pod’s sidewall — we’d landed on our side, which made the geometry of the interior absurd, every surface wrong — with the medical scanner in his hands and three sealed sample containers arranged in front of him with the careful precision of someone who’d been working for hours. He hadn’t heard me surface from sleep. Or he had, and he was pretending otherwise to give me a moment to orient without witness.
I wasn’t sure which possibility irritated me more.
I pressed two fingers to my throat. Counted. My pulse was faster than it should have been, even accounting for injury, even accounting for the broken leg that had announced itself the moment consciousness fully arrived. My skin felt hot through my own fur.
“How long was I out?” I asked.
He looked up without surprise. “Six hours. Maybe seven.”
“How do you feel?” I asked.
The question came out wrong — I’d meant to ask about the pod’s systems, about his assessment of our supply inventory, about anything except the thing I was actually asking. He heard what I meant anyway.
“Like I crashed on a death world.”
He almost smiled. Set the scanner down. “The spores are already working. I can see it in your vitals from here.” He held up the scanner briefly, showing me numbers I didn’t need to see to believe. “Your immune system is treating them as a pathogen. Mounting a full response. The inflammation is in your lungs first — that’s why the breathing.”
I made myself take a slow breath. Felt the resistance in it, the faint catch at the bottom of the inhale. A week, I’d said. Looking at his expression, I wondered if I’d been optimistic.
“The respirator—”
“Buys time. Not much.” He was already moving, pulling the medical kit closer, fingers sorting through its contents with the ease of someone who’d done this several times already. While I slept. “I’ve been looking at the spore samples I collected last night.”
“You went outside.”
“Briefly. While you were unconscious.” He didn’t look up. “I was careful.”
The thought of him moving through that jungle alone, in the dark, on a world that had been designed to kill — I catalogued the feeling and identified it as something I had no useful category for. Not quite anger. Not quite the thing that lives adjacent to fear.
“That was foolish,” I said.
“Probably.” He held up one of the sealed containers. Inside, something pale and fibrous shifted with the motion. “But look at this.”
I looked. Fungal material, spore-heavy, the caps releasing visible clouds even through the container seal. Ordinary, to the uninformed eye.
“The structure is wrong,” he said. “For a naturally occurring organism, I mean. The protein architecture is too consistent. Too purposeful.” He set the container down and met my eyes. “Someone built these.”
The bioweapons program. Of course. I’d known, in the abstract way one knows classified information — names without faces, capabilities without consequences. Sitting on the floor of a crashed pod with my lungs tightening around engineered death, the abstraction became something else.
“Engineered organisms have exploitable weaknesses,” he continued. “Whoever designed these had to make choices — optimize for lethality against Kathari physiology, which means they emphasized certain protein interactions at the expense of others. If I can identify the right enzyme, the right compound to bind to those proteins—”
“You’re speculating.”
“I’m problem-solving.” The distinction seemed important to him. “There’s a difference.”
I studied him in the thin morning light. He had a cut along his jaw from the crash, already healing. His shoulder moved carefully when he reached — the wound there still tender beneath its seal. He’d treated himself and then treated me and then spent the remaining hours of darkness collecting samples and running analysis, and he looked at me now with the expression of someone who had a plan and was waiting for permission to execute it.
I was the ranking officer. I was also the one whose lungs were failing.
“What do you need?” I asked.
“Shelter. Somewhere sealed, while I work. The pod is compromised — too many gaps in the hull. Every hour we stay here you’re pulling in more spores.” He glanced at the viewport, at the jungle beyond. “I saw a rock formation when we came down. Maybe two hundred meters. Natural chambers, elevated, defensible.”
“You assessed the tactical value.”
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