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A scream resounds through the spaceship. She recognizes the voice — of course she does. But she had never heard it scream. Not like this. Not ever.Perhaps it was her own fault. For conditioning her not to bother others. For teaching her to not expect any help. For always making her do everything by herself.'It was better for her to be independent.' Her mind tries to argue.
'Besides, that made it so she wouldn't bother you every five minutes for something as trivial as getting her a jar of cookies from the kitchen cabinets.'...It still hurt.It still hurt, because she knew.
She knew what that scream meant.Levia Barisol was dead.Levia had never had many friends, Rahab realizes.At first, she didn't understand why. Her daughter had taken after her in the looks department... Up to a certain point. She hadn't exactly inherited her figure — Levia was small, short and thin, without many curves. But it wasn't like she hadn't mostly gotten her looks from Rahab. If she had gotten something from her father, Rahab might've been able to identify the man and get the child support she'd wanted. Or maybe even give him the child and be done with it.But that didn't change the fact that Levia was extremely socially isolated.Once people began to figure out Levia was a genius, Rahab thought she'd begun to understand. Levia was far more advanced developmentally than the other children. So she thought of herself as more mature, better than them.It had resulted on a lecture about how Levia shouldn't consider herself better than her peers. One that Levia, then little more than 5 years old, had taken with downcast eyes and a tired look on her face.Now, thinking again, perhaps it wasn't that Levia was more developmentally advanced than other children. Perhaps it was a situation where she developed her abilities to learn and understand complex things, at the cost of her social abilities.The fact that she was soon sent away to a university where the only people around were adults probably didn't help much....Even so, if they were to host a funeral for her, it certainly wouldn't be empty. Tabloids, paparazzi, journalists... The coverage for it would certainly be plenty. And people who Levia associated with publicly — including Rahab herself — would probably be there, even if just to save face.There would be no funeral, though. No proper burial. Nothing. Not for Levia, not for Rahab, and not for any of the people who would die in this crash.The sky outside the window looks almost like it was filled with shooting stars. But Rahab knows they aren't — The stars aren't the ones moving, after all. They are.The ground approaches at an alarming pace. Perhaps she should continue thinking, keeping her mind busy to distract herself from the upcoming doom.... Yet she can't stop thinking about Levia.About the baby girl who she'd given birth to, 27 years ago.
About the little girl who buried her nose in books.About the girl she was once glad to be rid of—
—Damn it. Why does she not have a single good memory of her child to reminisce about?!...Perhaps she had truly messed up with the way she'd raised Levia. Maybe she hadn't been present enough for her, or maybe she should've helped her a bit more.Maybe then, the last thing she would've heard from her daughter wouldn't have been a scream of pain.If Rahab ever happened to have another child, she would know what to avoid, though. What not to do.Yes. She would atone.
Besides, Levia could've also made an effort to mend this, no? She could've reached out, explained the issues, instead of being an ungrateful brat all the time......Sirens blast throughout the ship. Emergency lights flicker.The green grass of Bolganio is very clear outside of the windows now. The hills, made by the terraforming team, are framing the sunrise, just as they'd once intended.This place — Levianta, was it? How ironic — will become their grave. A collective tomb for all of them to share for however long their corpses lasted inside this metal shell....And so, the world goes dark.