*2025 Refractions: Genre Flash Fiction Prize 2nd Place Winner*
“Choose to disconnect—yes or no.” The doctor turns a tablet toward Glettus.
Glettus scans the med-bay, his hatchmates circling him, the other ailing bodies beyond his bed. He wants to feel angry—that delicious rage the hatch could stoke within each other ahead of a mission—but the medicine has numbed him. He can’t even feel the pull of the tumors inside of him.
“Ahm.” The doctor, efficient and analytical by design, shakes the tablet.
“Give’m a moment,” Glist snaps. Of all his hatchmates, Glettus has remained closest to Glist.
The doctor eyes Glist warily. The GL hatch is an unruly, brute-bred hatch, born to—
Protect, secure, defend—
Flashes of missions flicker through Glettus’ mind. Wrangling moon colonies, herding surface scrubs, carving borderlines into rock. He makes a gesture at Glist. Born to—
Fight, he finishes the mantra in his head. But there’s no fight here. Just the tick of machines waiting for him to surrender.
The fight—whatever that may be today, whatever the command hatch determines—has continued without them. Glist is no warrior now. He’s a toll taker on the surface, called up to the orbiting med-bay to witness Glettus disconnecting. Aging in service, their hatchmates are janitors, cargo runners, tinkerers. By last season, only Glettus was deploying, moderating a new hatch of brutes. He’d still been reliably intimidating until this cancerous node sapped his strength.
He has struggled to accept this flaw in his body, but here again, the numbing medicine has had an effect.
“Ready to disconnect,” Glettus murmurs. Glist has to help raise his finger to the tablet, so he can tap “yes” on the screen.
“Excellent,” the doctor says. “By flame or by wave.”
In fine print—too fine for Glettus to make out, but he knows what it says just the same—the tablet states that nine out of ten hatches choose flame. A straight shot into the heart of the sun. Because Glettus is the first to disconnect, the rest of his hatch will, by custom, make the same choice when it’s their time.
Glettus searches the rind-ridged faces of his hatchmates. Faces tough enough for war, but as crumpled as space debris in their grief.
The hatch didn’t discuss the options, perhaps because flame is the obvious way to go. The brutes are flame personified—hot and quick to act. The sun is even tattooed across their biceps. But, perhaps they’d avoided the subject because it’s hard enough to watch tumors eat away at Glettus’ legendary strength without also having to face their own mortality.
“Wave,” Glettus whispers.
The doctor exchanges glances with the hatchmates, expecting them to protest. This is the abnormal choice after all. But Glist kisses Glettus’ hand.
“You heard him,” Glist growls.
###
Disconnected, secured in his pod, Glettus’ body rockets toward Nort, a ghost planet, a water realm. “All wave, no shore,” it’s said. A body can float there for eternity. Float over underwater cities until a crevasse swallows them whole.
In what remains of his consciousness, Glettus remembers an old heretic’s words about Nort. An age ago, his hatch had landed to imprison his village of mystics, only to find half of them swept to sea. The brutes had few to push around, only debris to clear and bodies to recover. They started digging earth graves, for no one would spare pods to send them into the heavens.
Glettus lifted a drowned boy when the old man yelled, “Stop! Leave them. Breya saved them from you. She’s blessed us! Breya winks and sends a wave.”
The heretic pointed to the night-darkening skies, to Nort, which he called Breya. The planet shimmered.
Glettus thought this dogma was a pithy way of explaining the heavy tsunamis that plagued the surface, but he released the boy back to the water. He nodded to his hatch to do the same for others. These un-“bred” people, born into chaos (as far as Glettus could tell), were finally at peace.
The heretic touched the child’s face. “Thank you, Breya!”
Now, with stars whirring past his porthole, Glettus thinks of the boy’s placid face floating away. When he splashes into Nort, he wants that serenity.
“By wave,” he whispers to himself. By wave. By wave. He repeats the phrase until he falls into cryogenic sleep, a merciful pause to his suffering.
###
Light. Consciousness. Rocking. Gurgling. Water washes over the pod window.
Glettus groans. His pod rolls. He’s reached the heavens, but his mind and memories have followed him. Pain as well. His skin, already mottled by disease, is bruised further by the tossing seas of Nort.
He cries out. His atrophied muscles ripple in fear. All the fights he’s won, yet courage fails him now. He wheezes and shakes.
“Flame! I want flame!”
The pod submerges and bobs back up again. Glettus wants to curl into a ball, but this is a coffin. He can only lie prone. The waves bat at him, toss him high, so high he cracks his head and faints.
###
Light. Consciousness. Stillness of body, but his blood and brains roil like the ocean.
His pod is pried open, and a mouthless face stares in. Shhhh, its call. Comforting, like the shush of a hatchling nurse.
Glettus weeps.
Shheeeeuuu.
Its nut-husk armor clacks as it walks. It drags Glettus on a pallet to an open shelter woven of ferns.
Tears course down his face. “Flame,” he whispers. “I should have chosen flame.”
“Don’t say that.”
A female with a wan face lies on a pallet next to him.
“RO hatch. Rotopa.” She offers her hand.
Glettus is too weak to reach for her. “What are they?”
“The cure.”
The Sheuu’s concoctions taste like the mud Glettus crawled through in war games. The grit lingers between his teeth, dissolving as he sleeps. He fights gratitude, for he no longer thinks he should live.
Each morning, they drag him to bubbling vats. More mud. Glettus’ leathery skin becomes even harder, crusted with the cure, dried by the sun. It hides his scars, evidence of the life he lived. Only in sleep are his violent memories reconstituted.
One dawn, he discovers that the mud cure envelopes him, pins him to the beach so that only his eyes can blink and lips part in wonder at another Nort sunrise. He studies the horizon, which taunts him with the flame he didn’t choose. Is the disease punishment? Is this cure further torture?
“What does the RO hatch do?” he whispers to Rotopa.
A sigh interrupts her determined breathing. He can even hear the click of her throat as she swallows some unspoken thought.
“Fetch,” she says. “I was a fetcher. Transports, deliveries.”
“Do you like it?”
“It had its moments,” she replies, again in the past tense.
“Sounds peaceful.”
“I suppose.” She doesn’t ask Glettus what his hatch was bred for. Perhaps she knows just by looking at him. Or, hopefully, she knows he doesn’t want to speak of it.
If he looks at her, his chrysalis of mud will crack, so he stares at the sunrise until he’s forced to close his eyes. He wants to turn his head to smile at her, but before he makes up his mind to do so, the Sheuu come to chisel him out and slather him anew.
###
On the day Glettus can reach Rotopa’s hand, she’s able to sit unassisted. Her face fills out—wrinkled but beautiful.
On the day Glettus sits, Rotopa walks to the shore, mud flaking off her naked body.
On the day they can walk together, Glettus finally meets the healed who live in a village of frond huts nearby. He’s never seen a hatch so old. He’s never lived among non-brutes.
That night, Glettus and Rotopa look at the sky together, finding their planet winking in time to the waves.
“Home,” he says.
Rotopa’s glance of pity craters Glettus, shames him. Anybody can see they won’t return. The Sheuu caretakers clack among the handful of moaners on the beach. The healed sleep on their side of the island. Some of them rise to stir the mud pits, others fish or gather. Just that morning, Rotopa and Glettus began making plans for their own hovels overlooking the lagoon where they’d met.
Rotopa takes his hand, sensing the sadness in him. “Your hatch will choose wave.”
She says this as if it’s a comfort, but only once did they hear a pod getting pulled to shore. The poor hatch inside was too dead to heal, and the Sheuu released the body to the waves, much like the heretic did the boy all those years ago.
Glettus doesn’t expect to see his hatchmates again. Wouldn’t know what to tell them if he did. He’s been un-bred like the surface mystics, re-born from the chaos that improbably tossed him onto this shore.
No, he won’t see his hatch again. The sea is endless, the island small, the cure lasting.
