It takes her a while to process his words, for them to go through her skull and into her mind. Other people—? Im Jaehee is dead, how can she think of other people—

No. No. He, he's right. And he saved her life, by the looks of it—he's so small, she didn't know there were children this small on any of the ships. And he's all alone, or maybe he wasn't, but...

...what happened to this boy, to make him so, so... stoic. Calm. Cold.

She leans forward and shivers, because of the cold of the desert night without her blanket and because of her fever and because Im Jaehee is dead and she can't, can't picture a world without him...

"Im Jaehee," she says, and it's the last time in her life she ever says his name.

Zash's food and water sit untouched when Luida next visits him.

"... You know you're not saving resources by not eating or drinking, right?" says Luida, upon observing this.

"Yes I am. If other people eat then you don't need to ask the plants to make more..."

"Yeah, no. We do not have a plant engineer that made it alive out of cryo. It's a binary choice of 'yes food' or 'no food' situation; we're following the computer's directives, and don't know how to do anything fancier, or easier on our plants, or only nonperishables to build a stockpile. The alternative to you eating this, is this goes into the thing we've set up to process the waste into compost, or hopefully feed the mushroom farm, if we can manage to get that working. Which, by the way, it would still ultimately be going to if you ate it. Because your toilet, like every other one we've got, is also set up to process the waste. So. No. You're not, actually, you're making things harder on the mushrooms that want to eat your feces."

"...I don't do that."

"... do what? Eat feces???" says Luida, bewildered. "None of us do??? That's why we want mushrooms????"

"Make them. From food. I don't... use the toilet. Like humans do."

"Oh." Luida is briefly distracted by some mild biomass calculations. "- Yeah, no, one person's loss of fecal matter isn't going to make a huge difference, and is worth it to keep you alive." She should probably tell Brad that the kiddo is uh, some kind of non-pooping science experiment, because this is the kind of thing Brad would like to know, but alternatively: she does not want to deal with that, thanks. He'd have some kind of paranoid conniption and want to throw the kid out to the desert or something.

He shakes his head and looks away.

"It is!!! Especially if you don't poop!!! ... Wait, do you not need to eat, either, is that why you're being self sacrificial??"

"I don't need to."

"Huh. Okay. .... I think I'm still going to feed you though, because I don't want to deal with Brad's conniptions over you being, uh, whatever you are. So if you could just help me out and scrape that food directly into the toilet, that'd be great."

Headshake.