The further figure starts to draw closer, slinging her weapon over her shoulder and reaching for a case at her hip.

"I've got a medkit, but..."

The nearer figure holds up a hand to halt her comrade's advance.

"It's going gray. Medkit won't fix that."

A voice from a radio asks an indistinct question.

"Yes, the sterilization agent deployed successfully."

The soldier carrying the medkit answers the radio.

"Yes, we're past the window for full saturation of the facility."

Only one half of the conversation is legible to those nearby.

"No, there's something here." She speaks urgently into the device on her shoulder. "Something's still alive. I don't know. I don't know how but it is..."

(The airlock behind the two soldiers begins to cycle as this exchange takes place.)

(When it opens again, a third new arrival emerges onto the scene.)

Are they talking about her? They didn't answer her, maybe they can't help. At least she's not alone.

Margaret can pretty much only see dim shapes at this point. She pulls off her useless goggles, grits her teeth, and tries starscaping her eyes back how they were, silver irises and slit pupils and all. This takes a lot longer than it should, because fixing her eyes involves looking at them with the starscape's magical third-person vision and she keeps flinching away.

The two figures that Margaret has been speaking to have dark skin and soft features. They both wear contoured bodysuits, with intricately supported joints and tactical gear clipped all over the less mobile stretches of fabric. Their faces, though, are exposed. The invisible Hazard swarms around them yet they show no apparent harm.

The smaller of the pair, with the slim box she called a medkit clutched in one tight fist, has short cropped and intricately patterned hair. She glances rapidly between the others present, searching for some cue as to how to proceed.

The larger of the pair, with her rifle still at the ready, has long unkempt hair and fierce eyes. She does not look to others for guidance, she speaks with a tone of command even when her words acknowledge the presence of superior.

"I advise caution, Founder O'Cuana." She gestures for the newcomer who just entered the hallway from the airlock to maintain distance from Margaret. "We don't know what we're dealing with here. We can't risk your life. If you need samples taken while it's still alive, send me or Trinket instead."

The newcomer, his pale features angular and wrinkled with age, wears not combat gear but livery--rich silks and supple leathers and glittering silver jewelry.

Unarmed and unarmored, he leaps weightlessly past his soldiers and comes to a sliding stop a scant meter from where Margaret sprawls flinching--never taking his eyes off her as his boots find familiar footholds on the station's walls.

"You're the reason I'm here." He crouches down before her. His platinum blond hair shines like a halo in the glare of allied flashlights. "You found my library. I feared it had gone dark forever." His gaze trails down to the laptop still pressed to Margaret's chest. "Thank you."

" . . . Leon?" She assembles a shaky smile.

He nods and smiles back slightly, but his brows remain creased.

"You're hurting."

"Yes--how . . . ?" How is this happening, how can it be stopped, how are you here and real and not a movie.

"The Type Eleven Nanoecology, my magnum opus. It eliminates potential threats--lesser nanites, diseases, larger nonhuman lifeforms--and then disposes of itself before mutation occurs."

"I don't know why you're in the state you're in. If you were human it wouldn't tag you as a threat. But if it has tagged you as a threat, you should already be dead."

"What if the damage isn't from Type Eleven?"

"Maybe the creature's infested with something slower acting, something that's fending off your new concoction?"

The higher ranking soldier moves closer as she speaks, steeling herself to physically drag her VIP to safety if necessary.

"Not possible."

Leon reaches out and places a hand on Margaret's temple. The grey film bubbling up around her eyesockets rubs off on his bare fingertips... and becomes inert once there.

"No wild strain could trump my handiwork."

"I'm mostly human--can't turn all human but I can heal myself--" her wings flicker out of existence and back in again, half-demonstration half-pain relief.

"Multiple species of DNA composing a single creature..."

The woman with the rifle eyes Margaret's scaled body with a new flavor of concern.

"...like the Enemy?"

Leon doesn't back away. His hand remains outstretched; his posture remains relaxed.

He leans in closer, in fact, and speaks in a whisper.

"Did Nerys make you, I wonder, before we abandoned this place... you do look like her handiwork... you must have been so lonely here..."

"Yes, very lonely--but I don't know who Nerys is. I came from Earth, weeks or months ago." She tries to shrug; it comes out as a pained whole-body flinch.

“It’s hurting less now, isn’t it, than when it started?”

”Type Eleven is approaching the end of its lifecycle.”

”Just stay alert, keep talking, wait it out. We’re almost there. We’ll have you patched up and on the mend soon.”

"Thanks." And he's right, too, there's more space in her head that isn't full of pain, and her vision is stabilizing at "really needs glasses". "What was it for? To kill the monsters?"

“Yes. The monsters, and also any less discriminant nanocontaminants.”

He pauses. Examines the rot still filming up from his interlocutor’s extremities.

”So you say you’re from Earth? That puts you in rare company.”

Yeah that's still really gross; she'll need to ship-of-Theseus as much of herself as possible and then take a shower sooner rather than later. "Might be an alternate Earth? Mine had lots of people like me and the movies you left didn't have any."

“A fascinating conjecture.”

Leon beams, even as his escort look on in increasing confusion.

“And you asked about Nerys? She was also from Earth, made the crossing with me and the other royal scions. She was the closest to me in age, we were practically siblings...”

(“Siblings?” In the background, one of the soldiers repeats an unfamiliar word to the other.)