the city on the edge of forever

She still wasn't home, not anywhere close to home. But Kate wasn't stuck in a cell any longer, so at least that was a start.

This place felt too big and too small at the same time; some places opened like a cathedral and others felt as tiny and boxed in as the place she’d arrived in. The light was a soft white glow, soothing but undeniably artificial, and nowhere was there a hint of the sun. But there wouldn't it, would there? Not if they were in fucking space.

Kate had spent the…she’d been thinking of it as morning, but that was wrong. No mornings, no nights, just hours stretching ahead endlessly. But she’d spent a few hours wandering the parts of the space station that were open and mentally mapping it in her head. Medical bay, full of equipment she didn’t know how to use, spaces to work out, places to relax. Living quarters, some of which were bound to be occupied. But she hadn’t seen much in the way of people.

She told herself they were sleeping, told herself that there were actually just oodles of people sleeping, families with kids and old people, so many that it was actually annoying like a park on a crowded Sunday. It was a whole little space village. Anything to fill up all this emptiness.

Kate scratched the healing injection wound on her wrist and wondered again just what the fuck they’d put in her. She’d looked for microscopes and slides so she could look at a sample and reassure herself there weren’t little alien bacterium turning her into some kind of E.T. hybrid, but there wasn’t anything to be had. Nothing she knew how to use, at least, because this Jetsons space shit didn't come with an instruction manual.

She wanted to scream. No, what she wanted to was punch something in the face really hard, maybe break a couple teeth. All she did was grit her teeth and scuff soft shoes (not even boots, where were her boots, where was her goddamn suit) along the too-smooth floor. Kate swallowed down the edge of panic rising up her throat again and shoved her hands into her pockets.

It would be easier if people were around. Easier to put on a brave face when you’re scared if there was someone to reassure. Years of practice, and Kate was still shit at feelings without someone to share them with.

Just when she’s thinking she should head back to one of those gym rooms and beat a punching bad to hell, Kate wandered into a room, narrower than the others but with high, high ceilings. Anything else in it was dwarfed by the huge window spanning full of space dark sprinkled with stars and streaked with the dust of a galaxy.

Beautiful. Past beautiful, you’d call it beautiful if you saw it in an astronomy class or a planetarium. Breathtaking in a glorious way, not a punch-to-the-plexus way. Kate felt something a little magnificent bloom in her chest. Her feet drew her closer to the window until she was nose to the glass, except that it couldn’t be glass and had to be some super future high-tech nano plastic. And yet it was all that separated her from deep space.

“Wow.”