Wake Week

The pod cracked its seal at 04:12 ship-clock, and Astrid was awake before the light came up — the way she always was, the way the long sleep trains you to be, surfacing a half-second ahead of the body so you can watch it remember it has a body at all.

She lay still and listened. Coolant ticking in the walls. The deck's low hum, a note she could have hummed back in her sleep and probably had. Somewhere two bays over, another seal let go with the same soft gunshot, and she heard the first ragged breath of a stranger learning to breathe again.

Wake week. Her wake week, by the bill — except she'd checked the bill twice before she went under, and her name had not been on it.

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She sat up. The bay resolved around her in the under-light: the curve of the hull, the racked pods running away into the dark like a card index of sleeping people, each one a life paused mid-sentence. Her own breath fogged and cleared.

On the slate clipped to the pod frame, the manifest waited. She thumbed it awake and read the wake list for the cycle, and there — third from the top, between a structural engineer and a hydroponics tech she half-remembered — was a name that should not have been there.

A name she had signed off, herself, sixteen cycles ago.

Asleep, the manifest said. Stable. As if nothing had moved at all.