LITTLE EARTH HAD begun to seem very small now that the actual Earth was filling the view from the cupola with its big blue girth. But they felt safe on the centrifuge, spinning inside their own familiar little world. They knew what to expect here, while their home planet had become a mystery in the time that they’d been away. After traversing the unknown, they’d only returned to more of the same. The mood over vacuum-sealed oatmeal and hot coffee was somber. It was time to discuss reentry.
“It’ll have to be random,” Harper said finally. “A lottery, drawing straws. Something like that. I’m not sure how else to go about it.”
The rest of them nodded assent.
Harper made eye contact with each of them, gauging their support for the idea, then returned his gaze to the table, licked his lips, and swallowed. Sully watched the nub of his Adam’s apple dip and rise in his throat, moving sluggishly, as if the effort pained him. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s bear in mind that we don’t know what we’re going to find down there. We might not even make it, but if we do, who’s to say we won’t be able to launch another Soyuz? So. Straws, I think. Might as well get on with it.”
There was a stockpile of straws in the kitchen; Harper rounded up five of them and Thebes shortened two with his utility knife. Harper swept them off the table and into his fist. Short straws for a life sentence in space. Long for an uncertain descent.
“Okay,” he said again. “Who’s first?”
There was a pause and then Tal reached out across the table. He plucked a straw from Harper’s hand and let out the breath he’d been holding when he saw that it was full length. He laid it down in front of him. Thebes, to his right, went next and drew another long straw, which he examined with an indecipherable expression. Ivanov chose, and it was short. The others gasped involuntarily and tensed, waiting for his reaction, but after a long moment of stunned silence he smiled. Gloomy Ivanov, smiling, like a marble statue suddenly altering its pose.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I think I’m relieved.”
Thebes laid his broad hand on Ivanov’s shoulder. Harper swallowed again and offered the two remaining straws to Sully. She drew. It was short.
THEY SCHEDULED THE reentry sequence for two days after the drawing. Tal needed time to figure out the trajectory of the pod, the angle at which they would enter the atmosphere, and the coordinates where they hoped to end up, all of which were incredibly complex without the assistance of a ground team. The crew decided to aim the pod for the Great Plains of Texas, where the weather would be temperate, the open space would be considerable, and they hoped to find some kind of answer from Houston. It seemed like their best chance—but for the first time in two years, the they had become fractured. Three would descend, two would remain. Their futures were suddenly divided.
After the meeting, Sully went to Aether’s cupola and peered through the swirling layer of feathery clouds as they zipped over the rich green of Central America, the deep, rippling blue of the Atlantic, the tawny deserts of northern Africa. She stayed there for a long time, watching the continents fly by—long enough to see the sun rise and set along the hazy rim of the planet’s atmosphere a few times over. Maybe staying up here was for the best. Maybe she didn’t belong on the surface anymore. She thought of Lucy, her glowing beam of know-it-all sunshine; she thought of Jack, the way he was before the divorce—mischievous, brooding, brilliant, and in love with her. She thought of Jean, pointing to the sky when Sully was little, the stars, the desert, introducing her to the electromagnetic spectrum and all of its magic. Her family. She watched the sun rise and set, rise and set, rise and set. As she watched the fourth sunrise flood the darkened planet with light, she let go. Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, wisps of pink cloud moving over blue water, she released her memories and her plans for the future—she let them float out through the cupola and down to the atmosphere, where they sizzled against the hazy blue shell of a planet she would never return to.
That night, Sully returned to the centrifuge long after the others had closed their curtains and turned out their lights. She felt lighter than she had in years. She brushed her teeth and padded along the curve to her bunk, her feet whispering against the floor. As she passed Harper’s compartment she heard him turn over inside, the rustle of his bedding and the frustrated sigh unmistakably his. She stopped short. Sully stood still for a moment, not thinking, just pausing, then adjusted her direction. Her feet moved and she followed them, climbing into his bunk before her brain had a chance to object. His face was barely visible in the dark, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t need to see his features to know what he was thinking. This connection had unsettled her before, had kept her away, but not anymore—not now that it was her last chance to be near him. He moved over and she lay down next to him. She could smell him: the musk of sleep, Old Spice deodorant over stale sweat, antibacterial soap, tomato plant sap, and another scent, one she couldn’t name or describe, but that she recognized as his.
“Hi,” she whispered.
“Hi.” He put his hand on the curve of her waist and she laid her head beside his. They looked at each other in the dark, unseeing. She understood: everything, even the failure, even the loneliness, had led her here—it had prepared her and taught her and guided her to this. She felt a warmth rising, beginning in her toes and flooding up through her body, like a thousand doors swinging open all at once. She thought fleetingly of the house in Montana she had imagined for them, with his dog, Bess, waiting on the porch, and then she let it go, along with everything else. There was only the warmth, the opening in her chest, the unfurling of a quiet intuition, a reservoir of love that had never been touched. She moved closer until her mouth was against his prickly throat and she felt the throb of his pulse on her lips, the ridge of his jugular. They didn’t speak or sleep or move, they just melted into the combined warmth of their bodies, the sum of their life force.
IN THE MORNING, just before the artificial sunrise, Sully slipped back to her bunk and slept. She heard the murmurs of activity as she drifted in and out of her dreams, but she kept her eyes closed and didn’t get up until Thebes pulled back her curtain and laid his hand on her shoulder.