Draw a rectangular shape. Put a cylinder around it. Add a few small rectangles to any lines, such that they straddle them. At least one on the rectangle, and another on the cylinder. These are airlocks. The engine should look like a lighter stacked on top of a pack of cigarettes; don’t take too long drawing it, but make sure you color it in red, and then draw over it with a black marker. Redact it. Because that engine might not be alive, but it sure ain’t dead.

• • • •

The message didn’t make complete sense, but it was being broadcasted on the old emergency signal, so everyone on the Eurydice drew straws. Sure enough, the new guy and the taciturn butch were the ones who’d be in the star yacht while the tenured folks sat pretty a hundred clicks out. Charlie was surprised when I offered to go in her stead, but I wasn’t one to turn down danger pay.

As soon as we were alone, I hit up Denny on the local channel. “If we find anything good that fits in my pocket, I’m keeping it.”

Denny grunted. “Won’t catch me saying shit. Hold on, the mag beam is rusty.”

The yachty’s controls were a little finicky—Denny bumped us against the station like it was a pier, painfully grinding us against the station’s massive hull, but we didn’t even budge it.

According to the Eurydice, nothing showed on the scans, so we hooked up the yachty to the airlock, suited up, and flung ourselves into vacuum towards the doors.

• • • •

What’s one of your most selfish emotions? That’s what took you here. Draw a perimeter in a long meandering line. Write the emotion on the line, over and over if you have to; stretch the letters so they fill it right up. Roll a die—draw that many flickering stars nearby, then lick your finger and blur their lines as best you can.

• • • •

The impact of our maglocks on the floor echoed through the station, but there was no gravity so nothing else to do about it. The walls were inlaid with lifeless panels thick with dust, ancient pictographs barely visible. At each junction, I turned to Denny and he decisively pointed. I didn’t know much about him, just that he was serving two years to pay for his downplanet girlfriend’s FFS and not interested in playing cards. He had the right of it, I decided. Love didn’t last without a steady supply of cash. Maybe my man wouldn’t have left if I’d had my accounts in better order. Part of me wanted to fill the silence, talk about it, but Denny seemed to know his way around, and I didn’t want to distract him.

“How’s it looking down there?” Kit Parker asked from the Eurydice, too loud in the darkness—Denny nearly jumped out of his boots.

“Nothing so far,” I said back.

After the third turn, something about the shapes we’d been passing at intervals twigged something in me. “I don’t think this is a station,” I said, dropping onto a local frequency.

Denny slowed down while I wiped away a thick rind of dust. The shape of a crash couch gradually became more obvious.

“Doesn’t meet regulations,” I acknowledged. “But this isn’t a station.”

Denny whistled, the high note of it briefly muted by the mic as the top of its range. Before I could ask him to, he switched local. “Holy shit. It’s a ship.”

• • • •

A cursed ship is only like a time capsule long enough to let entropy in. Think of the meanest part of you, least open. What color reminds you of that feeling? If you have one, use a colored pencil to fill in the space between the cylinder and the rectangular shape with tight, crisscrossing crosshatches. That feeling is in the walls. Draw an eye right in the middle of everything, beside a dozen seedlike ovals, and then X it out. The stars haven’t been able to look directly at this ship in centuries.

• • • •

By the time we got to the hold in the center of the ship, Denny and I were throwing back dumb ideas like popcorn shrimp, but pretty soon we were going to have to say something more substantial to Kit.

“Too impractical,” he called my idea of attaching some of these crates to the hull of the star yacht, just long enough to get back to the ship. “And what if they wanted to jump as soon as we got back? Everything inside would be obliterated.”

I nodded, drifting over to a console. “You’re right, you’re right.” I could’ve sworn it flickered yellow.

The other man kept talking while he popped open cargo pods, but I was only half-listening, surprised to find that the screen blinked alive. A moment later, the display shone with schematics. The output from the outdated UI made me look around the hold with new eyes, then pull up a star chart. If it still worked, the ship had an automated cargo shuttle, keyed to three different trade hubs. And at least one was still active, all these centuries later.

“Yo, Cooper,” Denny said, exasperated. “I’m talking to you.”

“Hold up. What if we didn’t have to bring it back to the Eurydice at all?”

• • • •

At the edge of the paper, you need to give a warning. Roll another die, then roll it again. Use the bigger number to determine how many words you can use, and hold the message in your mind. The signal has been corrupted—use the smaller number to replace that many words. Look behind you, or inside. Look closely. That’s where you’ll find the words that worm their way in, take over your warning. Write the warning over and over at the edge of the page.

• • • •

Kitty pinged me for the sixth time, so I cycled back to the right channel, but I had to switch past that emergency signal, broadcasting over and over again from this behemoth of a ship. One of the phrases in that signal caught my attention—when I ran it through my translator, it read This place is a message. The phrase was emblazoned in orange over more than half of the pods in this hold, alongside a string of numbers.

“Hey Denny, what’d you find in these orange yokes? Anything good?”

“Those ones were mostly empty. Had to pry them open, the hack codes weren’t working. Just a bit of grav-suspended trash in each one.” Denny reached into one of the open pods and drew out a thin filament of metal, about the length of a forearm.

Featureless, still. Gray. Even before I asked Kitty to do another scan, I knew what it was.

My plan fell away like the husk of a cicada.

• • • •

The ship’s computer is even more corrupted than the signal, but this close to the other side, prophecy juts bleakly from its memory. Use the predictive text on your phone to find it. Type “The ship is dying, soon it will” and use your phone’s answers to learn what is to come. Ask three times, writing down each answer beside a different emoji. Text [Inquiry] followed by those emojis to a friend. Interpret their reply—do your best to illustrate it.

• • • •

This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

By the time we understood the message, it was too late. Denny had wedged himself into the corner and started humming an old folk song. He wouldn’t switch off his mic no matter how Kitty begged.

Nausea rose in me like a wave, but the suit adjusted the cocktail of drugs being released into my bloodstream and the wave receded, though my tongue was still swollen and hot blood slid from my sinuses down my throat.

• • • •

Decide what shape contagion reminds you of—this is heads. Do the same for radiation—this is tails. Flip a coin and draw the appropriate shape around the ship until your hand starts to hurt. Then use something messy like a paintbrush or the side of a marker to draw a great sweep of color: this is the ship’s dead trajectory. Hold your grief close. Clench it tight beneath the raw meat of your jaw. When you are ready to scream or sigh, write a name at the end of that line. Stare at it. Say it aloud.

• • • •

Give it all to Charlie, I decided. The Eurydice lingered long enough to confirm the beneficiary of my will. It felt fitting, that I’d be worth more dead than I amounted to alive.

I wasn’t one for the opiate of the masses, or even manifesting good fortune. But in those last moments, that was what I found myself doing in that hollow place I once thought would find love again. I imagined myself an emanation of emotion, flowing outward. A love that could still be present, in some future time, as it was in mine.