Chapter Text
Eva Stratt is not a person to hide from her decisions, and neither is she one to leave before the task is done. So she is there, that day. The day that the shuttle launches, sending the three astronauts into orbit, carrying all of humanity’s hopes with them.
Well, two astronauts and one Ryland Grace.
She is there, when they bring him out. She shouldn’t be — she has other more important places to be, other last minute things to arrange, important people to maneuver into place and endless last minute variables to account for.
But she owes him this, at the very least.
The transport truck rumbles down the dirt road toward the launch site, and she raises a hand to flag it down. It grinds to a stop, gravel crunching under its tires, and a soldier in a blue jacket steps down to help her up. She waves him away and clambers onto the transport by herself, the metal bars ice cold beneath her bare hands.
The truck is crowded. Technicians are braced against the sides, equipment strapped down in tight rows, and soldiers positioned at the edges. At the center of it all, Grace lies surrounded by medical personnel. Nearby, his case of personal items sits wedged among the other cargo, sealed and waiting.
“He’s stable?” Stratt asks.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She nods once. “Good. Keep it that way."
Grace lays unconscious, an oxygen mask strapped over his face. His glasses are gone, already tucked into his case of personal items, and his face looks bare without them. His hair flutters over his forehead in the chill wind sweeping across the steppe. She has never seen him so still.
She looks at him for a long moment, then shifts her weight, steadying herself against the jolting movement of the truck and looks deliberately away.
Dead grass and barbed wire blur past her vision as they drive past storehouses and stations, past trailers and the endless satellite dishes clustered all throughout the facility. The launch is on track—barely. Preparations are barrelling towards completion at a barely contained speed which might still stumble into disaster at any moment. Despite the turmoil of the crowds of scientists, soldiers, and media all swarming across the facility the landscape still somehow manages to feel lonely.
The smell of rain is in the air. She wishes she had coffee.
It feels surreal, to be here at this moment. She had built her life around it, piece by piece, until there was nothing left that wasn’t this. To have dedicated her entire being to this desperate project without pause for years, and finally have come to the end.
She almost turns to the space beside her to say it out loud, the reflex as automatic as breathing. Then she remembers.
Somehow, she keeps forgetting. The empty space beside her pulls at her like gravity, aches like a phantom limb.
She ducks her head into her coat collar away from the stinging bite of the wind and she sticks her hands in her pockets. Her fingers wrap around the objects that she had placed there earlier that day. An emotional impulse, sentimental. Silly.
The little fox had been something she picked up on a whim a few weeks ago. A moment of distraction—Grace’s influence, bleeding into places it had no business being. She had meant to give it to him at some point.
She never had.
The medallion is older, its edges worn smooth with age. It’s small surface depicts an image of Saint Christopher: the patron saint of travelers. Stratt doesn’t know if she still believes in that sort of thing. But she gives it to him anyways. At the very least, maybe it will bring some luck.
Grace’s case sits where it had been secured among the rest of the cargo. She places the fox behind the name tag, and tucks the medallion close beside it.
As she straightens, her gaze catches on him. She steps closer without fully deciding to. Her fingers brush the shoulder of Grace’s white uniform, just for a hairbreadth of a second before she pulls her hand back, turns, and steps away.
The truck jolts to a stop, the shuttle looming ahead. Stratt climbs off the bed of the truck and drops down to the ground. She stands watching in its shadow as the scientists swarm around Grace, preparing him for the transition to the shuttle.
“Ma’am?”
She turns slightly. A technician stands there, headset askew, eyes flicking between her and the shuttle. Other trucks have already arrived, and people are busy loading the shuttle, making last minute checks and shouting instructions. She sees Yao and Ilyukhina’s small figures off in the distance, speaking to one of the many media teams swarming the site.
“Yes. What is it?”
“Control is ready for the final sequence prep.”
Stratt looks back once more as they finish securing Grace for transfer. She watches as they fasten the final restraints, committing the sight to memory before she looks away.
Enough. It is time to move on.
“I'm on my way,” she says, and reaches for her radio.
——
The live broadcast has taken over every screen—news channels, livestreams, doctor’s offices, the muted TVs bolted into corners of cafés and airports.
It repeats everywhere: the launch of the shuttle to the Hail Mary, Earth’s last desperate hope. Footage of the launch preperations alternate between prerecorded statements from world leaders, a scrolling bar of names and credentials sliding across the bottom of the screen. The astronauts’ portraits are displayed in sequence, their faces and names proudly displayed, honoring those brave ones willing to give their lives for the future of Earth.
Yao Li-Jie. Olesya Ilyukhina.
And Ryland Grace.
7,130 miles away, Colt Seavers looks up at the Starbuck’s television screen and drops his coffee.
——
“What the fuck?” Colt says blankly.
The paper cup drops from his hand and hits the floor with a dull thud, coffee splashing out in a widening stain across the tile. The smell of it rises immediately, sharp and bitter.
“Shh!” someone nearby snaps immediately, turning to fix him with a glare. The woman’s hair is sprayed into place, face fixed in a frown that displays the kind of polished irritation that suggests she’s spent the morning already deciding what is and isn’t acceptable.
Colt barely notices her.
His eyes are locked on the television above the counter. This can’t be right. His mind races as it tries and fails to comprehend what his eyes are seeing. Thoughts whirl through his head faster than he can catch hold of them: maybe it’s a mistake, maybe it’s some other Ryland, some coincidence, some bureaucratic error that will get corrected any second now. Something, anything, to make this make sense.
The livestream keeps rolling like it hadn’t just destroyed Colt’s entire world. The launch pad. The countdown. The astronauts’ faces in clean, official frames. He waits as the images cycle through. The photos of Yao, Ilyukhina. Clips of them in yellow uniforms, of them training, captured by the media. Shots of them with their families as tearful broadcasters discuss the upcoming mission.
Then Ryland Grace’s image appears again.
The same face. The same eyes. Glasses hanging slightly crooked on his face and that yellow raincoat that Colt has seen a hundred times. The photo is blurred, Ryland facing slightly away from the camera. It clearly hadn’t been taken at the same time as the other two astronaut’s photographs.
The woman follows his gaze to the screen, still showing Ryland’s face, a face he knows is a mirror of his own.
She stares at him, the irritation draining out of her expression in real time. It would have been funny if Colt had been able to pay attention to anything else other than the photograph filling the screen, the name in unyielding letters stamped across it.
Her hands fly up to cover her mouth, her eyes wide.
“Oh my God,” she breathes. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t—is that—”
“That’s my brother,” Colt hears himself say, the words catching halfway in his throat.
He doesn’t look away from the screen.
He doesn’t understand.
The broadcast keeps moving: names, credentials, mission data looping like it has no idea everything has shifted, that his entire life has just been separated into everything before this moment, and everything after.
The woman hesitates, then gently touches his arm.
“I’m… I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Colt lets out a short, empty sound that almost becomes a laugh, but doesn’t quite make it.
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I guess so.”
He moves away, too aware of the women's pitying glances as she turns her attention back to the news.
Colt’s heart is pounding in his ears, and he is gripping the counter so tight his knuckles are turning white. The room falls away, his vision narrowing, fixed on the screen as the rocket begins to rise.
It happens slowly at first. Fire blooms beneath the shuttle, bright and violent, swallowing the launchpad in light. Smoke pours outward in thick, rolling clouds.
For a second, it looks impossible, like it shouldn’t work, like something that large shouldn’t be able to move at all. Then it does. The shuttle lifts. Inch by inch, then faster, climbing into the sky, leaving the earth behind in a pillar of flame and smoke. The broadcast cuts between angles. Wide shots of the launch, close-ups of the engines, commentators speaking in urgent, reverent tones flash across the screen, but Colt doesn’t hear any of it.
All he can see is the fire. The way the shuttle is slowly shrinking into the distance beyond the reach of the cameras. The impossible fact of it all.
His brother is on that. The thought lands, sudden and solid, and everything in Colt seems to drop out from under him.
Ry is on that ship, and he’s not coming back.