“There is something we must discuss,” he said. “About the lottery.”
Sully rubbed her hand across her eyes. “What’s there to discuss?”
“Much,” he replied. “Will you come?”
“Let me get dressed.”
When she climbed out of her bunk she was surprised to find the other four already assembled, waiting silently at the table. She was confused.
“I don’t understand,” she said, and sat down with them. “What’s this all about?”
Thebes clasped his fingers together and rested his chin on his entwined knuckles. “I’m staying here,” he said. “On Aether. On the space station.”
She looked around the table and saw the others watching her. They already knew. She looked at Harper. He nodded.
“So you want me to go instead?” she asked. “But, Ivanov?”
Ivanov shrugged. “I will stay also,” he said. “I have decided.”
“But why?” she said. “Your family—you want to go back more than any of us.”
He shook his head. “I want things as they were. This is not our choice. We know only one thing about what lies below: it is not what we left behind. Everything has changed. My family is not waiting for me—this is no time for half-truths. Thebes and I, we are the oldest. We are tired. We are—how do you say? Old dogs.”
Sully opened her mouth to speak and nothing came out. Thebes put his arm around her.
“We have a lot to do today,” Harper said. “Thebes, if you could check the Soyuz pod’s seal. Tal, I know you have your hands full with plotting our course, so Ivanov, perhaps you could help? Let’s run a landing simulation before the end of the day, then another in the morning before we launch. I’m going to check out the survival gear in the Soyuz, and Sully—could you give the comm.s one last try? Am I forgetting anything?”
“I don’t think so,” Tal said. “Let’s get to it.”
Sully remained at the table after they had gone, letting her thoughts, which whirled through her head like a dust storm, settle. She knew she should eat but couldn’t manage it. She put a protein bar in her pocket for later and left the empty centrifuge. When she floated through the node into the greenhouse corridor she found Harper there, pretending to inspect the plants while he waited for her.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said. “Just surprised. A little…scared, I think.”
“Of what?”
“Of what’s down there, I guess. I was all set to power down, you know, just eat and sleep and watch fifteen sunrises a day, but now—now it’s all going to change.”
He touched her arm, cupping her elbow in his hand. Again, the warmth: a thousand doors opening a little wider. He turned his wrist up to glance at his watch, and that simple gesture almost undid her. She eyed the thick blue veins in his arm, just beneath the skin, and imagined that she could feel his pulse again.
“I should go,” he said. “Lots to do.”
She nodded, her head whirling. “Of course,” she said, and he moved off down the corridor. She stayed in front of the tomato plants for a while, thinking. She picked one of the yellow ones and it tasted like sunshine.
In the comm. pod, she set the receivers to scan. As she listened to the rise and fall of the static, the whistling of atmospheric disturbances, she thought about how by this time tomorrow she would either be en route to Earth or already on its surface—if all went well, she reminded herself. The levity she’d felt yesterday, the liberation of releasing everything that had come before, the choices she’d made, people she’d loved—that was gone, and heaviness crept back into her limbs like the return of gravity. The future, which just hours ago had seemed so beautifully empty, became crowded with unknown possibility. Her monotonous spacebound destiny disappeared like a fluid, shadowy creature. She thought of Harper, and the way the bittersweet finality of the previous night had suddenly cracked open into a beginning—an unknowable, untenable dynamic.
She kept scanning, hoping the man in the Arctic would hear her, but their frequency had been empty for days now. There had been something about talking to him—something that thawed her, just a little, a softening of the part of her that had been icebound since the launch. Or maybe even before: since she realized she’d lost her family, that they’d never been hers to begin with. That tenuous connection with the man in the Arctic, across such an incredible distance, had reminded her that even the fleeting things were worth their weight in sadness. Even a few words could mean something. The receivers caught nothing but atmospheric disturbances and white noise. Eventually she shut it all down and floated back to Little Earth one last time.
The crew ate a subdued dinner together. No one was in the mood for talking. Sully went to bed early while Harper and Thebes went back to the ISS to run a landing simulation sequence. Tal and Ivanov played videogames together one last time. She turned out the light in her bunk and lay awake for a long time, thinking. On the other side of the curtain she heard her crewmates getting ready for bed: the opening and closing of the lavatory door, the whisper of curtains being drawn, the rustle of bedclothes. Thebes cleared his throat; Tal coughed; Ivanov wept quietly; Harper scribbled in his journal. It was easy to tell which sounds belonged to whom, and where they were in the centrifuge. She knew her crewmates and their home through and through—but not for much longer, she reminded herself.
In her dreams that night, she was floating above Earth, no spacesuit, no propulsion pack, just wearing her navy blue jumpsuit, the arms tied around the waist, her gray T-shirt tucked in. She looked over her shoulder at the space station and saw a crowd of faces watching her from the cupola, waving to her. Saying goodbye. She saw Devi there, smiling, her brown palm flat against the glass. She saw Lucy, sitting on Jack’s shoulders. She saw her mother, Jean. Everyone was happy for her, everyone wishing her well. Sully turned and dived toward Earth, speeding through the vacuum, her arms above her head, her toes pointed, ready to plow through the atmosphere like a diver piercing the water’s surface. Her body became warm, then hot, then suddenly she realized she was on fire, hurtling through the atmosphere like a comet streaming across the sky. She woke up before she hit the ground. Her mouth was dry, her neck ached. She looked at her clock. It was time.
THE FIVE CREWMEMBERS of Aether crowded around the entrance to the remaining Soyuz pod. They all hugged one another and lingered in the doorway a few minutes longer than necessary. Finally Tal announced they had better get going with the undocking sequence if they wanted to make their reentry window. He dropped down into the pod and began strapping himself in. Harper gave Thebes and Ivanov one last handshake and whispered something into each of their ears. Sully hesitated. She gave Ivanov a hug, the third one in the last five minutes, and he kissed her on both cheeks. Droplets of water floated between them—tears, she wasn’t sure whose. She turned to Thebes.
“Are you sure?” she whispered in his ear as he embraced her again.
“Positive,” he whispered back, and then gave her a gentle push into the pod.
“Safe travels, my friends,” Thebes said. Ivanov waved, and together they pulled the door shut.
Sully strapped herself into the remaining seat, on Harper’s left. They heard the seal being winched shut on the other side of the door, then nothing. Just the sounds of their own bodies: anxious breath and restless limbs. Tal began clicking on the pod’s systems. He took out the reentry sequence manual and tucked it between his legs while he adjusted the instruments. He took his time, until finally he decided everything was ready. Tal slid down his visor.