The Woman in Cabin 10

Lo wakes up some time later, hearing the door click. Someone’s left a plate of food and a glass of orange juice beside her bed. Lo doesn’t trust this and refills the glass with water from the bathroom, then gradually talks herself into eating the food, reasoning that if her captor had wanted to kill her, they would have done so already.

Having no way of telling the time, Lo feels disoriented. She also notices a “weak shiveriness” in her limbs and is frightened to realize it’s been a few days since she took her antidepressants.

Lo thinks back to her first panic attacks as a teenager. Around the time she started work on her university entrance exams, “coping with anxiety had become a full-time business, and the walls began to close around me.” She saw a series of therapists, but none of them held the key to a cure.

Things seemed to improve during Lo’s university years, but after she graduated and started work at Velocity, things fell apart. She’d tried tapering off of her pills while life was going well, but “cracked” and stopped coming to work within two months. Back on the medication, she felt better almost immediately, so she’d never tried stopping the pills again.

Lo alternates between panicked thoughts and fitful sleep, unsure how much time is passing. She has a horrible nightmare about the girl from Cabin 10 peeling off her own clothes, hair, features, and finally her own skin, until she’s “just a bloody streak, muscle and bone and sinew, like a skinned rabbit.” Even though no one is likely to hear, Lo screams and screams.

As she’d expected, Lo’s screams get no response. She wonders what she’s done—“I had made myself a target, by my refusal to be silenced about what had happened in that cabin. And yet … what had happened?” Lo seemingly did not overhear a murder, as she had first thought—so who is the girl from Cabin 10, and why has she been hiding? Lo decides that, since the girl is alive and there’s no murder cover-up, it must be her identity that’s important—her relationship to someone else on the Aurora.

Lo tries the light switch and realizes the electricity has been cut entirely. She feels increasingly claustrophobic, the effects of medication withdrawal ever more apparent. But she feels a flood of anger towards the girl from Cabin 10 and clings to this like a lifeline. She realizes the girl has been in on the plot all along, after all Lo’s done for her. Lo must have seen something she wasn’t meant to—but if someone else died, then who was it?