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Ryland Grace haunts Carl’s dreams.
For many nights, during many years to come, Carl sees his old friend get tackled to the ground and have a needle shoved into his neck, he hears Grace’s desperate pleas to let him live and his own voice saying, “you’re going to be great,” and he feels the sun blaring down on him and the nausea twisting in his gut.
He can never talk to anyone about it, because he’s not allowed to. A few eager journalists reach out to him about the “mysterious teacher with no prior astronaut training”, but he turns them all down.
The first time Carl speaks about it is when he visits the memorial set up for Earth’s three saviors. It’s a statue of them all, Grace in the middle, located on the site where their spaceship took off from.
Ironically, he’s here to try to get rid of the ghost in his dreams, only to be faced with a ghost in the flesh.
“You knew him?”
That voice.
He whips around, even though he already knows that it can’t be him. It’s impossible.
But, god, it sure does look like him.
“Who are—?” He begins to ask.
“I’m his twin,” the ghost says, as if he’s practiced this. “Colt.” He sticks out his hand.
Carl shakes it, vaguely remembering the name from Eva Stratt, when she first did a background check on Grace.
“I knew him,” he confirms softly.
“How?” Colt asks, his gaze fixed on a tree off to the side.
“I worked security on the project. I was there when . . . When he was first approached about it,” Carl answers.
Colt nods, steeling himself, then swallows and meets his eyes. “I’ve wanted to meet with someone on that project for a long time,” he admits. “I’ve got a lotta questions.”
Now Carl nods, not trusting his own voice, which only prompts Colt to continue: “I tried not to get lost in the Reddit threads and the YouTube videos that theorized that he didn’t really want to go. It pissed me off at first, how they were treating my brother like a conspiracy.” Colt inhaled sharply, his face darkening. “Then I saw an interview with one of the other astronaut’s families, talking about the last time they talked with . . . Ilyukhina, I think it was? So I googled the other astronaut. Turns out both of their families got to say goodbye to them. But I didn’t.”
Carl doesn’t say anything. Colt doesn’t ask him to.
“You know,” Colt adds. “When we were kids, I dreamed about being a movie star. Ry would joke that one day I’d get so famous that people would walk up to him asking if he was me . . . I never thought for a second that it would end up being the other way around.”
Carl’s pretty sure that he’s being manipulated, but it works. He’s held this in for so long and now that he has a chance to let it out, he has to do it. He owes it to both brothers.
Carl spills it all; the moment he picked Grace up at his school, to bouncing ideas about Astrophage back-and-forth, going to the store with him, and then the end, when he refused to go onto the mission and was forced.
Colt’s eyes are red, puffy, and filled with tears. It reminds Carl so much of Grace’s face, smushed against the grass, and this time he’s the one who has to look away.
“You were the last person he saw,” Colt states plainly, his voice thick with emotion. Then, he steps forwards and hugs Carl.
The retired security guard doesn’t know what to do. Colt shouldn’t be hugging him for this. Carl didn’t do anything when Grace was tackled and sedated, he just stood there. Because he was scared of dying, too.
“Why are you—?” He starts to ask, his arms limp at his side. It doesn’t feel right to hug this ghost back.
“I’m glad he saw the face of someone he knew, instead of someone who was chasing him,” Colt says, shrugging. Carl realizes that maybe he’s not 100% sure why he hugged him, maybe he just needed one.
Colt looks past Carl at the statue before pulling a plastic box, with a cake in it, out of his bag. It’s a birthday cake, to be exact.
“We used to share a cake every year,” the blonde says. “Ever since the mission, I always buy a whole cake and only eat half of it. It’s probably a waste of money, honestly . . . I don’t want to have to throw away his half this time. Eat it with me?”
Carl could say no, and go home instead. But he doesn’t. How can he?
He nods. They sit down on a bench. They raise their slices of cake, and they toast Ryland Grace.