Archive of Our Own

“Turner painted his own
sea monsters, but hired
someone else to do
“small animals.”
Apparently he could do
a great sky, but not
rabbits.

Much like god at the end.”

-The Tenor of Your Yes, Mary Ruefle

It is not her first memory, but it is the first memory that matters. She is seven years old. Her recollections of that strange year stretch long and tedious and take place almost solely in the back seat of the family car. Her grandmother is sick–that much she understands. She doesn’t know what that means yet, that the woman who had so patiently tried to teach her to crochet to extremely limited success in the cramped parlor room of her little blue house is now barrelling towards death. They spend most of their time on the A13 between the hospital in Freiburg and their home in East Berlin. Her father pulls Jonas and Eva from school sometimes for the trip–she doesn’t know it yet, but her mother can no longer be trusted to watch them on her own anymore. Dutiful to their education to the last, her father quizzes them on the flora and fauna they see as they zoom past (always respectably just shy of the speed limit). Sometimes his questions are in English, to which she is taking like a duck to water, or Dutch, with which she still struggles to grapple in a way that burrows under her skin. Jonas always falls asleep the moment the engine turns over, so it is her and her father volleying questions and answers back and forth more often than not. Her father is a computer scientist; he likes data. Her mother is a literature professor and a poet; she likes open ended questions. Eva is challenged by both. Pleased when they are satisfied with her answers. She has never seen pride in her father’s eyes like the way they lit up when she correctly answered what seven times seven was, years before they would begin covering times tables in school.

It is one such of interchangeable trips. They’re not five miles out from the city, the stale smell of hospital sick still clinging to Eva’s sweater–she is so sensitive to smells–still driving on a backroad that will eventually bleed into the highway, when the hare darts into their path. Her father sees it; she does not. She only registers his sharp intake of breath moments before the front of the car juts a few centimeters up as it rolls over the unfortunate thing with a sickening thump. The motion jolts Jonas awake with a shout. The car comes screeching to a halt, and Eva immediately, through the twisting vines of the seatbelt, cranes her entire body over the back seat to see a mass of fur twitching on the road through the light haze of rain. There is a smear of blood and viscera trailing from the creature to the left back tire.

Her father sits still for exactly a count of eight–she knows because he taught her this trick when she was even younger than she is now. Whenever you encounter a problem or a feeling you cannot bear to face, you close your eyes and count to whatever number you want, and when you reach the end of the count you do what you need to do. He has a fondness for base eight–a quirk he will pass on to Eva. She counts along with him–one number off, as she caught him at it once he’d already begun. Then he unlocks the car door and motions for Jonas to do the same. When Eva goes to follow, he holds up a hand to her.

“Wait in the car, Eva,” he says gently. She will only ever hear her father raise his voice through her bedroom wall, and only when her mother’s drinking devolves past the point of management. Her father and Jonas cross the few feet to the animal in the road–she can identify it as a hare now from its long ears. She cranes around again in the backseat, and the lid of the trunk briefly obscures her view. She watches her father emerge with a spade; he’s been maintaining her grandmother’s garden as though she will return to the house and has taken to keeping his tools in the trunk. She can hear them rolling around in there as they drive. He hands the spade to Jonas. She can hear their muffled voices clear enough through the back window. Her father explains that the hare’s back legs are crushed. It is likely paralyzed, it will slowly starve to death. It is a kindness, he says. A good lesson. She traces their steps back towards the hare with rapt attention and a lump calcifying in her stomach. She watches Jonas, under her father’s direction, raise the spade above his slumped shoulders. He is ten years old, but tall for his age and at odds with his body in a way that makes him appear more immature than he is. The spade comes down, and she can hear the shrieking. She has never heard a sound like that before. Her father is shaking his head and gesturing wildly. Jonas brings the spade down once more, one handed this time, and the shrieking intensifies in pitch. She cannot tell if and when it pauses for the creature to draw a breath, as the sound rings in her small ears ceaselessly. She is out of the car and screaming herself before she even decides to do so. A flash of images before her father gathers her into his arms, shuffling her so she is behind his back and obscuring her view. The tear streaks down Jonas’ face and the snot starting to bubble from his nose. The viscera clinging to the sharp curve of the spade. The hare’s twitching legs. The metallic crunch of the spade hitting the pavement. The sudden silence.

It takes a while for anyone to come find her after they return home. She is not a crier; Jonas is, so his needs tend to feel more pressing and so receive the most immediate attention. Her parents will argue about the incident for weeks–her mother will still bring it up years later, sometimes during arguments and sometimes over the dinner table. She is the one that comes to find Eva, though, who knows where to look for her. It is a childish habit, and one she will outgrow quickly; when she must hide, she goes to her parents’ closet and folds herself into a corner behind a musty suitcase. Her mother’s dresses brush through her hair, absorb her field of vision, and she breathes in her lilac perfume. It settles her in a way that other people’s presence rarely does. It is with absolute apprehension and equal relief that she watches pale sunlight cut through the comforting darkness and recognizes the coo of her mother’s voice. She knows Eva will need some coaxing to come out, and so manages to fold herself into the closet as well, reaching a cold hand through the tangle of blouses and sweaters to grasp Eva’s tiny one. Eva tries for an hour, and then again for the next few weeks, and then never again to another living soul, to explain that she is not upset because she watched the hare die. She is not quite old enough to understand death, but she is old enough to understand pain. She is old enough to understand that Jonas hurt the creature worse than the car did, even if he did not mean to. She is old enough to understand that, even with her miniscule child’s strength and lack of precision, she could have landed a clean blow.

This is the first lesson, and the only one she never has to relearn. Hesitation from a position of power is brutality. If you want to be a good person–not a nice person, but a good person–you must be able to look the horrible thing in the face and not blink.

Komorov is one of the few people from Hail Mary she keeps in touch with, or, that is to say, has deigned to keep in touch with her post-Hague. She is not insulted. She had kept people at a distance, and where she had not her image and position of supreme power had done so for her. Besides, there was very little else to do with collective guilt than to export it to a scapegoat and move on. She was used to sin-eating. She could handle it. Still, when they locked eyes from down the middle row of chairs at the Geneva conference and his face had broken out into a wide and genuine grin, it had jostled something loose in her that she had not known was still there. He’d texted her during the middle of the presentation (quite rude to the presenter, a recent PhD with an obvious gland problem given the way he was sweating) to ask if she was free that night for drinks.

The hotel bar was crowded–it had been her first suggestion, not particularly wanting to brave the ever-present cold. She found him shifting from foot to foot in the lobby and he suggested, with a loaded look over his shoulder to the crush of bodies assailing the bar, that they walk to a place he knew down near the lake. She acquiesced. Komorov was not nearly as well travelled as she, or at least had not been the last time they’d met face-to-face, but he had a knack for local haunts and seemed to sniff them out wherever they landed. True to form, the hostess greets him with a broad smile of recognition and leads them to a table near the window. A sliver of the lake is visible in the gloaming, turquoise sky dimming towards violet as night falls over their heads. The lake’s surface is still clotted with broken ice that glows in the low light–she can imagine, if she lets herself, that she can hear the jagged edges bumping up against each other as the water ripples under them, creaking like her bones do these late days.

“I never see you at these things, anymore,” says Komorov lightly. “Lost your taste for air travel?” They only ever speak in Russian when it is just them. His German is passable but less advanced than her Russian, and if her limited vocabulary leaves her stilted, it’s a small price to pay for the animated way Komorov is able to express himself in his native tongue.

“Never had it,” she admits. She’s always hated flying. It’d simply been necessary. Komorov had ordered scotch, she’d ordered a gin fizz. The egg-white congeals towards the top. She sips it gingerly, feels the bubbles popping where they stick to the pale blonde down on her upper lip. Her instinct is to wipe it off with the back of her hand, but instead she folds the cocktail napkin in four and dabs it away politely.

“The kids these days,” says Komorov, as though picking up a conversation they’d been having mid-thread, though their short walk here had been dotted only by pleasantries and comments on the severity of the mid-May snow. Eva had not been to Geneva before the Petrova Line. She could not say if this early summer flurry had been typical in the decades before it had appeared. “They have no vision.”

“Can you blame them?” Eva says, gesturing out the window towards the lake, the ice there (breaking, now, but still always there). Komorov follows her hand with his gaze, lets it trail out the window. She wonders if he sees what she sees. Progress. Always too slow. “This was their future.”

“Yes!” Komorov says, lighting up with it. He gestures with his glass. He gestures a lot. “Yes, was their future. Was! And now that they have one they cannot imagine it.”

Eva shrugs. She doesn’t know why she feels so defensive of the youth she has only ever interacted with at a distance. She is a historian. She knows that the world has always been ending, every generation, for all of recorded time and probably before. She herself was born on the tail end of a near extinction event in the form of atomic war. There is a disgust she has always felt for hopelessness, for the myopic selfishness it breeds. But with what the past twenty-eight years have been, she can hardly begrudge them, as much as she wants to shake them by the shoulders and tell them to snap out of it. She supposes that is the point Komorov is making, in his way.

“It’s an extended…” She pauses briefly to translate the word. “Adolescence. They’ll grow out of it.” Komorov sighs, defeated, and knocks back the dregs of his scotch with his own peculiar panache.

“This is your problem, Eva,” he says with the weariness of a grandfather. “You always think the best of people.” Eva laughs, and the sound nearly startles her.

“Nobody’s ever accused me of that before.”

He would have made a wonderful father. He and Lludmyla had been trying for a while there. She’s never asked if they’d stopped on purpose or not, though she can guess.

Komorov takes mercy on her after that and tucks into a long winded complaint disguised as a story about his department chair, which should, of course, be him, but he is tired of making decisions for others at this point in his life. Eva makes pointed eye contact with their waitress and waves her down for another round. She wonders if they’ll get drunk tonight. Thinks she might quite like to.

Komorov takes mercy on her in that regard, too. They do get quite drunk. They mostly talk about the conference. Lyudmila is fine, she sends her love. And how is Berlin? Quite cold, thank you. It’s cold everywhere, Eva. What do you think you’ll do the first summer, when it comes back? Well, if God allows me to see it, Madam Director, I think I’ll drink a whole bottle of champagne and fall asleep in the sun.

She sways a bit when she stands up. Thank God she hasn’t worn heels in decades, or she certainly would have tottered over and twisted an ankle. Komorov lifts his eyebrows up at her, eyes more than a little unfocused. She had better sober up, if she has to carry him back to the hotel.

“Toilet,” she says by way of explanation. Komorov tilts his glass at her, as though he’s toasting to that.

“Give them my name at the door, you’ll get a good seat,” he says with a shit-eating grin.

Eva pauses mid-turn towards the hallway. Starts unconsciously counting to eight. Komorov notices, even in his impaired state. His face collapses into concern.

“Are you alright?”

She does not answer.

“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.” Seven, eight. She releases the breath she’d been holding.

“Dr. Grace liked that joke,” she says. It comes out even enough that Komorov’s sympathetic attention wanders out into the distance, where he sees something fond.

“Did he? That must be where I picked it up. I’ve been saying it for so long now, I thought it was me.” He tears his eyes away from the fond thing and turns them towards her conspiratorially, as if she can see it too. “It’s funny how people linger.”

Eva is barely through the bathroom door before she vomits. To her credit she makes it to the toilet. It’s a respectably small amount, all liquid. Easy enough to blame on the drinking. She flushes the evidence away, but her hands still shake. She lights a cigarette very slowly, as precisely as she can with the trembling. She’d quit smoking after her third year in prison, reasoning she couldn’t account for the state of medical care within even the next five years, much less ten, much less twenty, and they will need her when the beetles land. They will not want to need her, and they will not, probably, publicly need her, but they will need her. That was, of course, true. But the other truth which she hid conveniently behind this truth was that selfishly, she wanted to be alive long enough to know if she’d been right.

And here she is. Right.

The cigarette steadies her. Lab grown tobacco is shit, and it mingles sourly with the thin coating of bile on her tongue, but it’s hard to beat instant gratification. She manages to smoke half before a different waitress comes in to yell at her that smoking is not allowed indoors, and Eva is just drunk enough to deadpan offer to crack a window. She is escorted back to the table, where Komorov is slumping into the crook of his elbow, and they are tersely invited to settle up. She has to help Dmitri (he’s Dmitri again, she’s a bit fond now) into his coat while also holding the door open for him. She tells him about the cigarette on their way home and it makes him howl with laughter. They part ways in the lobby after exchanging flimsy promises to visit and firmer promises to call. Eva escorts him to the elevator, tucks him into it like a child. The door begins to slide closed and then bounces back open as he waves his hand out towards her.

“Wait, wait, wait!” he cries, teetering a bit. She reaches a hand out to steady him but he’s back on his feet almost instantly. “You never told me. What will you do when summer comes back?”

She honestly has never thought about it. She doesn’t know why she’d asked him in the first place. Again, easy to blame the drink.

She’s taking too long to think of an answer, she can tell. The elevator door starts to slide closed again, and Dmitri has to wave his arm out to stop it. He’s slumped a bit against the wall, but he holds her gaze steadily. He really wants to know.

Finally, she says:

“I guess we’ll find out.”

During her university days, she briefly sees a married professor. A horribly boring cliche for which she will never forgive herself, but he, at least, teaches at a different university and in a different department and they meet at a bar instead of in a classroom, a small variation which softens the blow of the situation’s utter banality. He accuses her often towards the end of loving him less than he loves her. Ironically, this will be the only relationship in her adult life (save one, depending on what she is willing to admit in the moment, how late the night, how many drinks she’s had, the temperature) in which this is patently untrue. Before they exchange any declarations, he sends her very many beautiful love letters. She tries, once, to write him one back. She mails it to his office from three blocks away en route to the train in the morning. It is five days before she realizes he has to have received it, and read it, and chosen not to say anything at all. It is a week after that before she braves the subject–another future humiliation, that act of cowardice and self-minimization.

Did you get my letter? Yes. What did you think?

He laughs. “You write like a historian.”

She is out the door before it occurs to her to ask what he means.

Carl does not ask a lot of questions, though she knows him to be inquisitive and thoughtful, the way he lingers to talk to others at any given natural lag in their schedule (of which, thanks to her, there are few). But he does not ask her a lot of questions. She appreciates this. Eva is someone who courts distance, professionally. That that impulse has leaked into the personal (or is it the other way around?) will not become a true problem for years. Or perhaps it is already a problem. Or perhaps it is a problem that starts today, when they pull into the parking lot of Grover Cleveland Middle School. Looking back, she can never decide. It is not a question on which she wastes a lot of time. The future will hold larger problems. The present holds enough, as is.

Carl does not ask why she pauses to slump back in her seat after she unhooks her seatbelt, foot already half-out the open door. He just fiddles with the air conditioning–it is the action that alerts her to the fact that he is aware of her rare hesitation, and her awareness of his awareness that pushes her into action; she swings her body out of the car and follows the clicking of her heels across the parking lot. She watches Carl pull forward and away–off to look for a spot–before she doubles back through the parking lot to the sidewalk to light up. She hates smoking. Her mother smoked. But it serves a function. And while she abhors a short term solution (professionally), it’s hard for her to argue with instantaneous results (personally). Unfortunately, her choice of smoking spot grants her a direct vantage point to the cause of her momentary weakness–the playground, and the same child there with her fingers woven through the chicken wire that holds in a cluster of screaming children at recess, staring at Eva with comically large brown eyes. In the time it has taken Eva to cross the parking lot, the girl has gained a friend–slightly taller, pale skin so translucent she can make out a vein in her face even from here. Her sundress sways in the breeze.

Eva sees them in triplicate; the future she can construct from the past, over the thin skin of the present. She has seen footage (they’ve all seen footage–they can pretend they haven’t, but they have, on Twitter, on Instagram, on whatever platform you like) of children dying from malnourishment, from disease, from worse. It is horrible–she watches and it’s horrible–to see those large brown eyes picked at by flies, to watch the small bellies distend with hunger. It will not be them–they’ll be adults by the time it gets that bad–but it will be their children. She sees it now the same.

She draws the smoke into her lungs, chases what comfort she can find there all the way down through the exhale. Her vision settles back into a singular frame: the tall girl tugs at the short girl’s sleeve, and, when she doesn’t follow, turns her back on the street and skips in the direction of the playground. The short girl blinks at Eva. A little self conscious of her cigarette–bad example–Eva raises her free hand in a small wave. The girl blinks once more, then totters off to join her friend. She crushes the cigarette beneath the boot of her heel and, after a good-faith effort at scoping out a trash can–leaves the butt there.

The first time she meets Doctor Ryland Grace–not the first time he meets her, that happens in Room 119–he barges into the observation room demanding to know what her men are doing in his lab. It’s an act of bravado that makes her want to throw the tablet she is holding through the fucking window. She has coddled enough egos in her life–male egos in her life, American egos in her very recent life–to stomach even entertaining the thought of whatever this tantrum is. He has underplayed his own importance and is now wounded to find himself, ultimately, as unimportant as he’s presented. Stupid games, stupid prizes. She tells him as much.

And then he says “my children.” His children. When she’d stepped into his classroom, she’d barely looked at him long enough to register anything more than a presence in the room when her eye had been snagged by the papier-mache galaxy he’d so lovingly strung across his ceiling. Light stained red where it passed through the makeshift Petrova Line. She will look back on the memory years later when it is worn-through and distorted with time and imagine him over the summer, standing on desks to hang the planets and stars.

In the observation room, his glasses are askew, which severely undercuts the severity of his indignity.

Somewhere a light turns on that will never turn off, even when the power gets cut where they’re standing decades from now.

She gives him three astrophage without blinking, and is less surprised than she should be when he and Carl are the ones who crack it.

She thinks for a while that the trick is not letting despair catch her. Because she is human, and because to be human is to always have such things snapping at your heel, this is of course impossible. And she finds denial to be its own sort of inflammatory; if she refuses to acknowledge that it’s there it is impossible to dodge its movements, to gauge when it is sleeping and she too can rest, and it becomes easy to tire fast and spectacularly. So before she learns to manage it, despair dots her life in heightened fits of pique: in the garden at her grandmother’s funeral, crossing the overpass that one time far too late at night when she thinks about pitching herself over the rail.

The trick is, of course, that nothing can be avoided. Everything can be managed.

Midnight the day after they officially declare Hail Mary missing (wrong, she knows they are wrong, even as she despairs she knows they are wrong). In prison in the height of winter when they cut the power one night to reroute it to town and she nearly freezes to death.

If she sets a place for it at the table, she’ll be less caught off guard when it chooses to come around. Sometimes she even uses the nice plates.

Eva considers herself an acute observer of human behavior, and has been, proveably, exceptional at predicting future patterns. Sometimes, however, people surprise her. Komorov’s a little shy about telling people about the engagement–her specifically. In one day she catches him thrice wrapped up in a conversation which ends abruptly upon her entrance into the room, annoying enough that it forces her hand and she confronts him (if it were anyone else, she’d have respected their privacy and let them be, but it’s been her and Komorov since the beginning). When he tells her, she feels her mouth pop open in a perfect little “o.” There is absolutely no reason for her shock. Everyone knows about him and the med-tech (Lyudmila, she knows her name. Obviously she knows her name). But it’s only been four months. And she’s thirty-two.

On reflection, Eva does, ultimately, get it. End of the world, and all.

She toys with the idea of giving them a night away, or two. God knows they deserve it. But no one can be spared that long. The night they pick a date, she sits down and types out a memo giving everyone on the science and flight teams two hours off to attend the ceremony and reception. She then immediately sends a follow-up memo stating that the first memo had been sent in error, and the science and flight teams will actually have the entire night off. Komorov thanks her in the morning with a sly look that tells her he knows exactly what she’s doing. She brushes it off.

Ultimately, the chaos rubs off on her too and she mismanages her time, schedules a call during the block she’s meant to be getting dressed. She has to navigate her curling iron around her headphones and take a break with only one eye done to type some notes one-handed on her tablet. The issue is, actually, what to wear. She realizes quickly upon reviewing her wardrobe that her only true options are to be significantly under or over dressed; she owns at least six identical turtlenecks and a long, sleek dress she’d had to order for the congressional dinner months ago. Sensible slacks. Practical jacket. Sleepwear. She briefly considers the optics of not attending at all, and then, with a little huff of frustration, grabs the dress. The zipper, of course, catches.

There’s not much of a plan for the ceremony. Scientists–great with small details, horrible when faced with something as daunting as project management. They opt for an outdoor ceremony on the landing strip–she supposes there are few scenic locations on an airship. Komorov is Orthodox, Lyudmila is a cradle atheist–they split the difference and opt, out of the handful of available options, for the Catholic chaplain. She catches Dmitri before the ceremony starts, chatting with Yao and Shapiro in genial English. She elbows him lightly as she approaches, just subtle enough that only she knows why when he yelps in surprise. He’s glowing. Eva’s never seen him this happy; the expression almost startles her.

A Catholic ceremony, can you believe it? My poor mama is rolling in her grave.

It’s a quick event. Brief speech, love is patient love is kind, exchange of rings. They don’t even do a mass. They wrote their own vows–Eva schools her face into a carefully neutral expression to mask her internal groan. It feels publicly unacceptable to hate weddings, like admitting you don’t like chocolate or you’ve never seen Star Wars. It makes her sound like the villain in a romantic comedy. She can see the value in ceremony (she is a little disappointed they don’t do the mass), but there is something in her that cringes fundamentally and fully away from any sort of public declaration or grand gesture, and a wedding is, of course, both. Grace shifts next to her–the man is incapable of sitting still. His knee bounces; she has to restrain herself from putting a hand on it to still it. He’d come to sit down next to her without asking–no bride side, no groom side, no assigned seating, so nevermind that she was in the front row and, though they seemed to be fast buddies these days, he didn’t know Komorov all that well, really. Grace was interesting like that–as self-deprecating as he was and as much as he constantly downplayed his own importance, he never really questioned his place in any room once he was in it.

Komorov ends his vows by trying his hand at an AB rhyme-scheme. Eva’s mouth twitches ever-so-slightly. She can’t help it. Grace, swimming in her peripheral, raises his eyebrows at her: what’d I miss? The vows are in Russian, so he’s been spared the worst of it. She shakes her head: don’t worry about it. Grace is probably the sort of person who cries at weddings; he’d find this whole thing sweet.

The reception is, she has to admit, rather fun. When was the last time she had fun? She is not, particularly, having fun right now, but there is something uplifting to being near people who are having fun. Grace seems to be enjoying himself–she’s lost him to the riptide of the crowd, but occasionally his head bobs into view, always, seemingly, mid joke. Everyone really did show up, and are well into the process of showing out. It’s nice. All very nice.

She hadn’t skimped out on the champagne, which she’d insisted on paying for as a wedding gift. She didn’t have the budget for the real quality stuff for the whole night, but the first few rounds were a pretty penny and tasted like it. Llyudmila had thanked her, given her a tight hug; she smelled strongly of jasmine. Lovely girl, really. Her vows had actually been rather sweet. Eva is a little too focused on not saying something idiotic like please take care of him, I think maybe you can understand what we’re up against and what it means and what that pressure does to people, or try not to get pregnant before the launch, to say anything out loud much more than a plain “congratulations.” The crowd becomes crushing after that, and she steps outside for a cigarette. She is really trying very hard not to smoke–she’d kicked it for a few years there when she was at ESA, but, well. Like she’d said: end of the world, and all.

The clouds had rolled in heavy following the ceremony–it had been timed for sunset, but the sky was grey-cast and just slipped into a darker and darker shade of nothing as the evening unfurled, so there are no stars to look at now. Somewhere through the clouds, somewhere invisible to her naked eye, the light of Tau Ceti as it was an unfathomable number of years ago, long fingers reaching out towards earth. Here, two inches from her lips as she draws the smoke in, the red dwarf of her cherry.

It’s always a split desire, ducking outside; like hiding as a child, you want someone to come find you, you desperately hope they don’t. Ultimately, it’s Ilyuhinka that comes for her–that girl is desperate, for some reason, to drag Eva around by the sleeve. Her coming is announced by the metallic clang of the door bouncing off of the wall, a sudden swell of party noise that shatters the semblance of peace Eva has managed to draw around herself.

“She’s out here!” Ilyuhinka shouts over her shoulder instead of addressing Eva. Her words are met by something imperceptible projected at a similar volume, which makes her laugh. Ilyuhinka turns to Eva, beaming with a glint of mischief she is correct to immediately distrust.

“Come on!” says Ilyuhinka, gesturing enthusiastically from Eva to herself. “They need you for your speech!”

Eva’s stomach drops like a stone into cold water.

“Absolutely no,” says Eva, voice’s edge sharpened by her steady delivery. Ilyuhinka shrugs.

“The boss gives the speech. I don’t make the rules.”

“Oleysa,” Eva says, aiming for severe. It comes out earnest–near begging. Ilyuhinka holds her gaze evenly.

“Eva,” she replies, unyielding. When Eva doesn’t move, Ilyuhinka’s eyes go narrow, scolding. “You want to break Mitya’s heart? On the day of his second wedding?”

Eva steels her shoulders. Crushes the cigarette under her heel. Follows Ilyuhinka inside. The crowd immediately cheers as she walks in, like she’s a beloved local celebrity. She supposes she is, in some ways. She waves them off, a little embarrassed. A mic is passed along and ends up in her hands–she blows into it to test, and feedback hits her like a wave. It’s hooked up to the karaoke machine–footage of a beach plays on a loop on the screen facing her. Her eyes dart around the room, meet Komorov’s, who grins like a cat with the cream. Bastard. Eva coughs. Begins.

“Yeah, so, thank you, Dmitri, and Lyudmila, I guess, for this very impromptu opportunity to speak publicly.” About love. In English. Which feels insurmountably wrong, deeply against the grain linguistically. Absolute bastard. There is a ripple of polite laughter across the room. She continues.

“It’s a good…a really good, really happy day. A wedding is, um, always happy. Well, mostly.” Another wave of laughter, this time louder and more sincere. It emboldens her, a little bit, and she opens her mouth with absolutely zero idea of what she is about to say. Komorov snags her eye again, still grinning. This time with a shade of sympathy. An equal shade of fondness.

She’d always wondered if they’d sleep together; doesn’t want to, hasn’t ever, really, but still, she wondered. And here they are. She speaks to him directly.

“We’ve known each other a long time, Komorov and I. People don’t know this, but he used to consult with ESA, back in the day. And I hated him.” He chuckles into his closed fist, like a cough. Llyudmila’s hand cuts into view, draping over his shoulder. Resting there gently. “Really,” Eva says, again, just to him. And to the hand. “I hated him. He always showed up fifteen minutes late, and told these really, genuinely horrible jokes. He’d talk to you like he’d known you forever, except he couldn’t remember your name even though you’d met five times.

“And I knew we needed him, the second we saw Petrova. He’s the first person I–well, not the first person I called. But the first person I wanted to call. And I was right. We do need you, Dmitri. And we need this.” She goes wide with it. Someone has pressed a glass of champagne into her hand–she gestures with it out towards the crowd in a wide arc that lands on Komorov. “We need things like this. Weddings. Birthdays. Anniversaries, parties. Things that remind us…why we’re doing this. What’s at stake, what we’re fighting for.

“Thank you both. For your dedication to this project. For inviting us here today. For the open bar.” Cheers, at that. A few whoops, a good cat-call. “And for your friendship.” She raises her flute, and the crowd follows suit. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Grace–mostly obfuscated by the faces in front of him–but there. Singular attention locked on her; he notices her looking, because he is already looking at her, and smiles. Lifts his glass. She looks away a little too quickly for her own dignity.

“To the happy couple!” She drinks, and everyone follows suit. Komorov, when she looks to him again, is weepy enough that she wonders if he’s already drunk. He cocks his head at her, and she raises a corner of her mouth in response.

The gathering swallows them all. She doesn’t get a chance to talk to Komorov for the rest of the night. She ends up, for a while, talking to Shapiro and Dubois, who are both pleasant enough people to kill the time with. They act more how you’d expect scientists to act than much of the team (Grace). They’re a little quiet–not taciturn, but soft spoken, careful words. Only saying something that needs to be said, and then saying it as efficiently as possible. Dubois she enjoys spending time with especially–he’s clever in an understated way, reticent to crack a joke but confident in the ones he rises to. He’d been awkward around her for a while, a little overaware of the hierarchy she’s tried so hard to obfuscate, if she can’t do away with it outright. One morning she’d run into him in the bathroom. He was washing his hands at the sink when she’d barged in, half on her phone and half two steps ahead of herself. He’d blanched when he’d seen her, and she’d mirrored his expression. She’d pointed at her chest–me? And he’d said, shyly, as though she were about to scold him:

“The men’s?”

She’d rolled her eyes up hard enough that they’d closed, and rubbed her hand over her face. And then laughed. Dubois had, initial shock fading, joined in. He’s been much more comfortable around her after that, as though that brief glimpse at her humanity has reclassified her, in his mind, as someone he is permitted to make small talk with. He does so now, with abandon. They actually do have very little to chat about outside of work (they do call it “work,” most of them, and that is, technically, true, as she is earning a paycheck. However, it feels like a demeaning phrase for what they are doing here. Miniscule.) And the happy couple has instituted a hard and fast “no work talk” rule, to which most present, it seems, are abiding. To Eva’s great dismay. Dubois is grasping for a topic–has settled, it seems, on pickleball, which he’d like to try. Sounds fun. She nods along. Most of her attention is drifting under the table, where Shapiro’s hand is brushing against Dubois’ thigh in a way she must think is spectacularly subtle.

It’s hard, looking around, not to see couples everywhere. Looming apocalypse; no better time for it. And here is Eva Stratt, conspicuously alone at a work social event. The more things change.

She finally excuses herself and matriculates towards the bar, where she orders another gin and tonic. Third of the night–absolutely and definitively her last. The bartender asks her how she’s enjoying the evening–great, she says, just great. What a beautiful ceremony, et cetera, et cetera. It’s a heavy pour, thank God–hits the back of her throat with a sting. She barely registers Ilyuhinka, loud as it is, clouded as her judgement is (and when has she become a lightweight?). Ilyuhinka’s bangs are plastered to her face with sweat–it has gotten swampy in here, and quickly–more likely that than the drink. She makes a meal of taking Eva in, who is extremely aware, suddenly, of how bare her back is–she could not manage a bra in this outfit, and regrets it.

“Great dress,” says Ilyuhinka slyly. “Who was the girl, at the wedding?” She gestures at the bartender, who has his back turned to her and does not notice.

“What are you talking about?” Eva asks. In truth, she’s grateful to have someone to talk to. Ilyuhinka, especially. She tries not to like people over-much. But she does, it seems empirically, enjoy Ilyuhinka’s presence. Sometimes, at least.

“The girl, at the wedding. The royal wedding. The one with the dress,” Ilyuhinka continues, as if Eva’s being slow. She gets it, suddenly, a snap into place.

“Pippa Middleton?” she asks, and Ilyuhinka’s face lights up.

“Yes! That’s the one. Very Pippa. Her ass.” She tuts, as though she’s savoring a fine meal. “Anyways, good dress. Did they run out of fabric?” She gestures to Eva’s back with her drink which is at this point entirely composed of melting ice.

“Ha, ha.” Eva says, spelling it out.

“Seriously, I feel under-dressed. Can you believe it?” Here she turns to the throng, gaze going long. “Love, huh?”

“Apparently,” Eva says sardonically, and immediately regrets it. Ilyuhinka regards her, seeing too much. Always seeing too much.

“You would tell me,” says Ilyuhinka slowly, deliberately, “If Grace has a girlfriend, right?”

“What?” says Eva, and means it. She has absolutely no idea what Ilyuhinka is talking about, as per usual. At that moment, the bartender turns, and Ilyuhinka waves him down.

“Two…three?” she says, with a significant look at Eva. She shakes her head no. “Two shots of vodka. And a vodka cran. And, um…a boch, I guess.” She shrugs at Eva, as though she is in on the joke. Eva nods along, like she is, which seems to satisfy her. “Good speech,” she says. Eva scans her voice for any sarcasm and comes up empty.

“Thanks.”

“You mean it?” Ilyuhinka asks. Eva shrugs honestly.

“Sure,” she says, because it’s true enough. This seems to satisfy Ilyuhinka, who tucks into the vodka cran as soon as it’s handed to her. Isn’t mixing vodka a sacrilege for a Russian? Eva is about to ask, but ultimately decides it doesn’t matter; Ilyuhinka will do what Ilyuhinka will do. That, at least, is a universal truth. The other woman turns on her, suddenly urgent.

“The girlfriend, though?”

“Grace?” asks Eva, as though she isn’t suddenly, incisively paying attention. “No, I think.” Ilyuhinka nods, like this settles something. She takes the beer and cocktail two-handed with a wicked smile, threads the shots through her fingers expertly. If Eva recalls correctly, she bartended for a while at university.

“Beautiful,” Ilyuhinka says deviously. She leans in, inviting Eva into her confidence. “I plan to get him quite drunk.” Eva laughs, because she can picture it; Grace will go flush, he always goes quite flush the second he even smells alcohol, but he’ll comply, because he may not be shy by any measure, but he is susceptible to social pressure and he was a teacher. High stress, high alcohol consumption. Ask any doctor. Eva nods sagely.

“Wise,” she deadpans. Ilyuhinka smacks her shoulder.

“I bare my soul to you about my burning love for Ryan Grace and you come at me with this?”

“Ryland,” Eva corrects before she can stop herself. Ilyuhinka makes a face, sour milk.

“Ryland. Have you ever heard a more American name?” She hasn’t. Says as much. Ilyuhinka sighs good-naturedly. “What can you do?”

What can you do? Eva swallows down the bile that has suddenly risen in her throat.

“Well,” she says, and downs the remainder of her drink. She wonders who drank the rest of it. “Good luck.” She peels away from the bar. Ilyuhinka pouts, cartoon-large.

“You’re leaving?”

“Sorry,” says Eva. She is not. Half of her brain, all evening, has been keeping track of the urgent emails she is certainly missing. It’ll be a relief to get back. Kick off these fucking heels. Get a little work done. Maybe one more cigarette (it’s a special occasion, after all, and she only got through half of the first one). And then bed.

“Some wingman you are,” says Ilyuhinka, devastated for all of one heartbeat before she takes her spoils and disappears into the crowds. Eva takes a moment to translate before the slight lands.

She was right about the emails.

It is a relief to be back in front of her tablet and her computer, twin screens feeding her necessary information, all of it necessary. She’s shucked on her jacket–it’s cold, always cold in these military quarters, and to what end? Her finger joints ache. It’s possible she should have left hours ago. It’s possible she should have not attended the wedding at all. There’s a knock at the door, slightly off rhythm but clearly a pattern.

“Come in,” she barks, and her voice sounds a little rough to her own ears. The second cigarette had been a mistake, and she’d known it as she was smoking it but couldn’t bring herself to stop or regret the act after. She’s only half-surprised to see Doctor Ryland Grace’s sandy head peeking through the crack of the door. He smiles, just shy enough to charm her.

“Knock knock,” he says confidentially, like it’s an inside joke and not a universally known one.

“Who’s there?” she replies faithfully. The shyness of his smile cracks open, and he’s just happy to see her.

“I don’t know,” he says, shouldering his way through the door. His posture is slumped. He wore jeans, she noticed. To a wedding, for the love of God. But, to his credit, a tie and a blazer also. “I didn’t think it through.”

“You’re quite drunk,” she observes, looking at him archly (or a half-hearted attempt at archly) over her tablet.

“IIIIIII’m a little drunk,” Grace sing-songs, swaying a little bit and steadying himself with his hands on the back of the chair facing her desk. She sighs, fake put upon. Playing along.

“Ilyuhinka caught up with you,” she asks. He shrugs, more of a full-body process than it needs to be.

“She did. She did. She’s, um. Funny.” He sways a bit, like the breeze.

“Sit down,” she says, with the methodical and paper-thin patience with which one addresses a child. He acquiesces, bending his body around itself once he’s in the chair in his attempt to cross an ankle over a leg.

“You left early,” he says, an observation and not a question. She hums in agreement, and he nods along, head lolling.

“I have a lot of work to do,” she says, explanation and natural conclusion. He doesn’t take the hint–for a second she thinks he may stand, but he just leans forward to pick up the “World’s Best Boss” mug that Sonia had bought her however many years ago, another lifetime, rolling it between his palms almost unconsciously.

“Komorov was married before, right?” he asks apropos of nothing.

“Yes,” she says. She kills her tablet with a subtle button press. She wasn’t going to get much more done tonight anyway. “Some people get divorced.”

“Ha,” he says. “I just don’t get…” he trails off. She’s only aware that he’d been staring at her intently when he breaks his gaze off towards something very far away behind her. “I don’t get why you’d start something when you’re about to. You know.” It takes her a long, stupid moment to realize he’s switched back to Ilyuhinka.

“I think because you’re about to.” She gestures. “You know.” He nods, like he doesn’t quite agree but has to concede the point.

“I guess,” he says, defeated. He brightens up almost immediately, attention snapping back to somewhere in the vicinity of her forehead, aiming for her eyes and missing by a margin of centimeters. “Hey, you really should have stayed. You missed the dancing.” She scoffs.

“I think I’m fine, thanks.” If she’s a little dismissive, he either discards it or doesn’t notice. Grace’s foot taps against the desk in a way he is almost definitely unconscious of, or the sound would be driving him crazy. His glasses are, as always, askew. Her fingers itch to fix them; she stills them with intention. He actually does look nice in his suit jacket and crooked glasses and recently polished sneakers. It’s not like she hasn’t noticed before that he does, categorically, look nice. And quite often. It’s just that she doesn’t always see the trees for the forest unless she makes herself look. She’s just tipsy enough to justify it; she looks.

As always, a mistake.

“Really?” he asks, teasing lilt in his voice. “Cause we could have…” Here he demonstrates a dance that could only really be described as the white man overbite, accompanying ridiculous expression on his face. It surprises a genuine laugh out of her.

“That’s the big move?” she asks. He grins back at her, like that laugh had been the intended effect. He really does have nice teeth.

“The ladies love it, what can I say?”

“Yes” she says, “I’m having a hard time controlling myself,” and he laughs. Is this flirting? It certainly feels like she’s indulging something she shouldn’t.

“Fun party,” Grace says, lingering. She can tell that he can tell that the conversation has essentially run its course. Here is the window to shut him down, to say goodnight. She just really doesn’t feel all that inclined to do so.

“Yeah, you seem like you had a good time.” He flushes at that, just slightly. He rolls the mug back and forth between his palms, back and forth. His leg is jiggling again. She finds it irritates her less, just now.

“Weddings are always fun,” he says defensively.

“If you say so,” she counters, and he lets it drop. She thinks about him, surrounded by the Iranian science lab, clapping the nearest person on the shoulder as he throws back his head in laughter. “People like you,” she says plainly, a bit of a non-sequitur, but true. This is the wrong thing to say; he goes shy again.

“I like people,” he says, also plainly.

“I know,” she says. He looks at her dead on, suddenly serious.

“You do, too.” She laughs–he’s not joking. The sound arrives dead. “You do,” he insists. “Why would you work this hard, otherwise?”

Maybe he’s not asking, but the question seems genuine enough that she decides to actually answer.

“I think there’s a difference,” she explains as gently as she can, trying very hard to remember that he is drunk and this will hardly matter in the morning. “Between loving something and liking it.” He nods very slowly.

“So you don’t like people.” She shrugs.

“Not very much, no.” She’s a little cold, even bundled in the jacket. Bare shoulders underneath the sleeves. Bare back, she remembers with a shudder of embarrassment.

“But you love them?” His face is so sincere that it cracks something vital open.

“Well,” she says. “What else is there to love?” Grace places the mug back on her desk with a ceramic thunk. She wonders if he noticed it in his hands the entire time that he was holding it.

The next morning she takes breakfast in the cafeteria. She normally just gets there early enough to grab a coffee she will drink now, a coffee she will drink later, and a yogurt she will ignore long enough to mistrust it by the time she could conceivably have it for lunch instead of breakfast, and then takes it all back to her office where she begins her day. But the evening’s sense of camaraderie has carried over into the morning, and she thinks, as she wakes, that it might be good to prove herself to be one of the team.

She sits with Ilyuhinka and Dubois, who scoots over to make room for her and sits just slightly apart from the group, either nursing a bad mood or a bad hangover. Ilyuhinka doesn’t look much better herself, which speaks to a herculean amount of alcohol consumption the night before.

“Well?” asks Eva, feeling a little mean as she does it, but it’d be worse to say she already knows about the brush off. “How’d it go?” Ilyuhinka’s brow crinkles. “With Grace?” she clarifies. Ilyuhinka rolls her eyes. The motion makes her pinch her nose, possibly for stability.

“I don’t think I’m his type,” she says lightly enough that Eva can tell it stings a bit. Across the mess hall behind Ilyuhinka’s shoulder, she locks eyes with the man of the hour himself, wandering around half-ignorant to the world with a tray piled high with powdered eggs and a coffee that is sloshing dangerously. His face lights up when he sees her, and he repositions his tray on his forearm to free up a hand to wave. She waves back, a quick motion of the wrist that does not require her lifting her hand from the table. He moves as though to join her, and then catches Ilyuhinka’s profile and freezes; she can’t help it. She laughs. Ilyuhinka turns at the sound just in time to catch Grace turning on his heel to search for safer waters.

“Jesus Christ,” she says. And Eva really can’t help it; she laughs again.

When she is twenty years old, she studies in Copenhagen for a semester. The location is, as many of her choices are at this time in her life, seemingly at random and based almost solely on a strong internal sense that what she is doing is the thing to do. Feeling her way through the dark. She will learn to build a conclusion around facts first–she is learning that, right now, but this is the more pressing lesson, at the moment. She has a strong intuition for the best course of action that will serve her very well.

She does, it turns out, love the city. It’s a beautiful place for a budding historian. A beautiful place, full stop. She does all the tourist things you’re meant to do; Tivoli, Rosenborg, the canal, the Little Mermaid for good measure. Burns through her list in the first week. Then she branches out; a wine bar in Østerbro she begins to frequent often enough that the bartender (a man with an impressive beard and an unimpressed demeanor she is, she has to admit, a little intrigued by) starts to teach her some Danish swears; she goes to Christiania to buy weed, just to say she did (she smokes it once with her room mate’s friends and gets so paranoid she keeps insisting they take her to the hospital).

School is interesting. She’s always found school interesting, has always been good at it. History she chose, again, based on her random-seeming intuition, but it suits her, suits the way she thinks. She is becoming quite interested in statistics, and has taken enough elective credits to qualify for a minor by accident. She worries, some, about adopting a military historian mindset; there are always a few boys (always boys) in any given history class who are interested, primarily, in strategy the way she is interested in people. She understands the purpose of their interest, understands the importance of it, but doesn’t like the way they flatten the human element into some insignificant collateral. So people as data, as trends, as systems. She does worry. Her advisor is encouraging, says more social historians need to learn to zoom out, the value of a larger framework. She tries to believe this.

But she is trying to cultivate an interest in the personal. She reads a lot of biographies, for a while. Finds she doesn’t have a taste for them. It feels a little mawkish and parasocial, a little Great Man of History, to anchor your research to one person that way, to try to build a narrative out of a life. Feels like reading fiction. Switches to Derrida.

She is taking a true elective while abroad, now that all of her other electives are counting towards the minor; an archaeology class. The professor is so engaging that she briefly and insanely considers changing her major, a fantasy she talks herself down from by the end of the first lecture. Their current unit is local to ancient Danish civilizations. Her left hand cramps from her furious notetaking.

She has a free weekend. She decides to go to Silkeborg alone to see the Tollund Man. It’s a pilgrimage of sorts. Some sort of expression of her burgeoning interest in the metaphysical that she will, in her adulthood, understand as a spiritual impulse. She wants to connect the idea with the material. The human element, after all.

The train ride is not bad. Good sandwiches. The countryside is actually quite plain; it’s Panhandle Texas, it’s interior Mongolia, it’s the stretch between Freiburg and home. The heartland is the same everywhere.

He’s smaller than she expected. Curled in on himself behind the glass like a dog in sleep. He’s soot colored. It’s his face that makes him real. The explanatory displays are in Danish, but she remembers from class the stubble on his chin, the sweetgrass in his stomach.

A victim of sacrifice, or execution. It’s hotly debated. Lost to time, now, she supposes. One of those questions that just gets asked with enough distance from the fact.

It’s sunny when she steps outside; she almost forgot it was daytime.

The knock on her hotel door comes at the absolute most inopportune moment. Eva is not given towards (many) outward manifestations of anger, but she briefly considers cracking the window and dropping the phone out of it. She’s only on the fifth floor–too low to the ground to die if you jump, just high enough to break a phone. It’s her personal phone, too. Could be done.

The swinging door reveals Ryland Grace, dressed, as usual, in a button up over a t-shirt a younger man would be wearing ironically, glasses dangling from his chin. The polite grin slides off his face and his eyes bug out when he clocks her expression.

“The driver’s outside?” he says with a certain level of trepidation. Eva closes her eyes against it. Fuck, goddamn it, fuck.

“How’s your German?” she asks, covering the receiver with her hand. Jonas’ English isn’t better than fine, but it’s a small privacy.

“Uh, scheiße?” In any other circumstances she may have laughed, both at his pronunciation and the fact that it’s the only time she’s ever heard him swear. But. She gestures for him to follow her into the room, and turns on her heel, pacing back towards the window. She hears him close the door gently behind her shoulder.

“Is this a bad time for you?” Jonas asks, voice tinny over the line and laced with not a small amount of venom.

“Yes, obviously,” she snaps, because it is. Across the room, Grace is still standing in the threshold where the entry hallway meets the bedroom. He shifts from one foot to the other awkwardly, making eye contact with the ceiling, hands in his pockets.

“Well I’m so sorry to inconvenience you, Eva, really, I just thought, since he is technically your dad too–”

“You act like–” Eva starts and then immediately catches herself. Breathes sharp through her nose. Calls it. “This isn’t productive. We’ll talk later.”

Jonas laughs, a brittle and breathy and disbelieving thing.

“Right. Alright, later.” She sighs. She preferred when Kathë was the intermediary.

“Think about the night nurse,” she says. It comes out harsh, but she means it pleading.

“Sure.” The line goes dead. Eva keeps the silent phone to hear ear for a long moment, breathing through it. She pictures flipping a switch in her mind: non-work to work. Seven, eight. Switch flicked, she locks her phone and puts it in her pocket, grabs her sweater from where she’d discarded it on the couch, and slings it over her shoulders as she brushes past Grace and out the door. He stumbles over himself and has to do a goofy half-jog to meet her pace. He does a good job of not pestering Eva for a solid ten minutes of the drive, making inane conversation with himself as she taps out a steady beat on the door handle and looks out the window. She likes New York–much to see. Distracting. Bad traffic, though. They’ll only be late by a slim margin of minutes, but still. She doesn’t like the look. Too dick-swinging for her style. She’s glad Grace is here–he’s adept at smoothing ruffled feathers.

“Are you ok?” Grace asks her finally, like it’s been incubating inside him and it just has to burst out of his chest, ribs and viscera be damned.

“Yep,” says Eva, slamming that window shut as fast as she can. She doesn’t know why she bothers to try; he persists.

“Really? I mean, I have no idea what that was but it sounded pretty dang intense.” She purses her lips. They’ve slowed to a crawl, catching the same red for the second round of light changes in a row. A woman outside walking the smallest dog Eva has ever seen outpaces them.

“It’s not relevant.”

“To–?”

“To anything.” Grace must sense the danger point. He backs off.

They grab a late dinner that night just the two of them after they wrap up. This is not an uncommon experience–they actually take a lot of their meals together these days. He brings her coffee more mornings than not (juggling three in the crook of his elbow, two for her, one for him, and sometimes he still gives her the third if he takes too long to drink it). She trails him to the cafeteria just before it closes when it randomly occurs to him (always to him, never to her) that they haven’t eaten. The unavoidable necessity of acquiring food aside, she does find herself, more often than she likes, in his lab, each working silently when their attention is wrapt, taking turns working things through out loud when it wanders. There is a steady thrum under their interactions, a single resonant note that hangs on the air and doesn’t fade. A tinnitus of the heart. She spends a lot of time tuning it out.

It is rare, however, that they eat in a restaurant. That they’re on land long enough to eat at a restaurant. That it truly is just the two of them, no one to cut in with a pertinent question or greeting (polite, if directed towards her, typically animated if not outright a joke when directed towards him). No one even calls–her mail app pings at regular intervals, but a quick scan tells her it’s nothing that can’t wait until she gets back to the hotel room.

The conversation is nice. Easy. They split a bottle of Tempranillo; she intends to drink a glass and a half and then leave the rest, covertly, to him, but when her glass veers empty he leans over the table and tops her off without breaking his stride mid-sentence, and she lets him. The lights are a little warmer after that. She sheds her sweater, ever-present chill absent for once in the muggy summer heat. She wipes a thin layer of sweat from her hairline with the back of her hand. Grace has similarly abandoned his outer layer, and the armpits of his abrasively green t-shirt are soaked through. He keeps dabbing at the back of his neck with his napkin. She kind of wants to lean forward and smell him, which is disgusting, and she wouldn’t do it even if it weren’t disgusting besides. They commiserate about the heat. He bitches about the lack of air conditioning. She dances around the thought of how few summers they have left. Food’s good, Italian, settles heavily in her stomach.

He waits until the waiter turns his back to get her a box–and why, she’ll forget it in the minibar fridge anyways–before he tries again.

“So, um,” he starts awkwardly, his rare hesitation tipping her off immediately to what’s coming. She has been expecting it–dog with a bone, this one. “About earlier. At the hotel?”

She sighs. Prepared to parry it. She finds herself answering, instead:

“Ask, if you’re going to ask.” His eyebrows quirk up, surprised as she is. His mouth twists, and he squints his eyes at her. Studying her, like he’ll somehow divine the answer in the set of her cheekbones.

“Family stuff?” he guesses, one of the brief and flaming flashes of genuine insight that seems to rip through him, here and again. She frowns, a little disappointed to be found out so easy.

“Yeah,” she admits. “My brother. Jonas.” He cocks his head. This man and his active listening.

“You don’t get along?” No shit, she wants to say, but doesn’t. He’s being nice. Eva can be nice. She is nice, goddamn it.

“We never really did, to be honest. I was the favorite, they loved him better. All unhappy families. Et cetera.” She shrugs, like it means truly very little to her. Then she makes a face. She’s actually not happy to admit this (it’s childish, and she knows it’s childish), but the omission feels a bit sillier than just saying it outright. “And, he married my best friend.” Grace laughs, shakes his head a bit.

“And that was a…bad? Thing?”

“Yes!” she exclaims. “She was my friend first!” His laughter is a little infectious, and she’s grateful. It hides that she does, maybe a bit, mean it. The wave crests quickly, and Grace’s face is inscrutable, but she doesn’t like the look of it.

“You know we can actually talk about it,” he says. “Like for real. If you want,” he adds quickly. He takes his glasses off while he’s talking, like he’s preparing for a blow. But he just wipes them on his shirt, tugging up the hem so she can see a thin line of skin, the downy hair thicketing there. She does not look at it and the situation resolves itself very quickly.

She does not want to talk about it.

She does want to talk about it.

She actually does want to talk about it, but with him specifically.

She swallows down the three thoughts, which writhe and twist and bite at each other as they disappear into the depths, and continues. Says it all at once, lists it off clinically, like that will rob the truth of some of its potency.

“My father’s health is declining. Parkinson's. He lives with my brother and his wife. They want to put him in a home.”

“That’s tough,” he says simply, but with real sympathy. She gets the sense that he’s being a teacher, right now, and wants to resent it save for how it is, actually, nice to be coddled a bit. She takes another sip of wine–good year–and it coats her tongue, stifles the ill-advised garlic some.

“They think they’re being so subtle, but he obviously knows. So I’ve got him calling me on one line, telling me, literally, that he’d rather die than be in a home. And then I’ve got Jonas calling me every five goddamn minutes saying it’s too much even with the nurse, it’s worse at night, he’s getting mean, they need the spare room for Lena this summer–that’s their daughter. My niece, Lena. She’s a good kid. A bit…lazy,” she says delicately, doesn’t mean it cruelly. “I don’t know.” She lets out a breath, wind gone out of her sails. “I’m not there.” That she can’t be there hangs unsaid between them, but he knows. He nods, like he’s processing. He’s playing with a straw wrapper that had landed on the table earlier when he’d ripped off the bottom half of the wrapper and used the straw as a blow dart to shoot the other half at her head. The projectile had died mid-arc across the table, to his dismay.

“When my mom moved into hospice, I was like, twelve? I think?” He starts slowly. “I don’t know, that year and a half were kind of a blur. But um, yeah. It was hard. I was young, obviously, but I got that once she went there she wouldn’t come back. And we never talked about it, but I think she was terrified.” He flattens out the straw wrapper against the table, then folds it over and over until it’s a tight square. Then he repeats the process. “She would sit in the backyard for hours every morning, from sunrise until almost lunch. Like she was memorizing the view.”

“What was she like?” She tries to picture a woman with Grace’s narrow-set eyes, his dishwater hair. Grace’s smile is sad. His eyes crinkle. He looks younger than he is, but she can see where the wrinkles are starting to set in, can trace the paths they’ll take over the years.

“I don’t know. Uh, she was complicated. Really, really funny.” He shakes his head, throwing off the grief like water from his hair. “She loved pranks. And, uh, Kelsey Grammer.” Eva smiles. It’s almost a laugh. Their waiter comes over then, asks if they want another bottle. She’s lost track of their progress, is shocked to see that their bottle is empty. She orders a coffee after waving the question off. Grace declines. Good for him. She’s been told sleep hygiene is very important.

She expects the moment to have broken with the brief interruption, but Grace is looking at her quite openly. She crosses her arms, one over the other, the skin in the crook of her elbows a bit sticky where sweat has pooled there. A hot coffee could be, in retrospect, a mistake. He’s waiting for her to talk next.

She bites.

“My mom was a critically respected but commercially unsuccessful Dutch poet.” And a drunk, and a terrible mother, and a wonderful mother, and she never really understood me but she tried very hard. Sometimes I worry no one will ever try that hard again.

Grace, for some reason, blushes at this statement.

“I know,” he explains sheepishly. She fixes him with a look. “I kind of…read your Wikipedia page.” The grin that spreads over her face is genuine.

“Really?” She intonates a question, but it’s a statement. He’s looking at his hands–he’s moved on to fiddling with his fork.

“Yeah. I tried to find some of her stuff, but it’s not in English anywhere.” She cocks her head at him quizzically, tries to integrate this information into her pre-existing picture of the man.

“You read poetry?” He shrugs.

“Not really.” Their waiter comes back with her coffee.

They walk back to the hotel. The temperature has dropped while they’ve been indoors, not significantly but noticeably. He holds his hand out wordlessly for her sweater and, baffled into auto-pilot by the gesture, she gives it to him. He’s a little quiet–for him, so obviously not silent, but quiet. The city makes conversation enough for the two of them. And she’s lonely, sure, but it’s a different sort of loneliness tonight. Lighter, maybe.

He hands her sweater back when they get to the hotel; they’re on the same floor but his room is the one closest to the elevator (that’ll be a nightmare as far as noise level goes tonight) and hers is down the hall, so they linger in front of his door. He’s already swiped his key and is standing there, fully facing her but with his right foot cocked sideways ninety degrees to act as a door stopper. They both look for the right thing to say at the same time. They’re silent a beat too long, and she feels the window starting to close.

“Thank you,” she settles on, finally, just before it can. “For tonight. You were really, um. Sweet.” The word feels absolutely and entirely wrong, but he lights up with it.

“Hey, what are friends for?” He kicks the door open behind him and catches it with his palm. “Good night,” he says with a charming smile.

“Night,” she replies, again a moment too late. She can hear him humming Thank You for Being a Friend under his breath as the door closes behind him.

Doctor Ryland Grace died–is dying, will die–a hero. That is the party line. That she hates it is inconsequential. It has been pointed out to her by her lawyer that it is a very, very useful narrative to have out there as opposed to the one where, say, she drugged him and sent him on a suicide run against his will (there is no documentation, but if they ask the right people the right questions. And she won’t ask anyone to perjure themselves).

She supposes she does owe Grace this much. Not for sending him to die, but for the radical, horrible, bold-faced selfishness of letting him think he had a choice. Give him an occasion, just to see if he’ll rise to it. Because she wanted to be proven wrong.

That he broke her heart first by being exactly the man she thought he was is also inconsequential. And it doesn’t make them even.

Still.

In the end she gets twenty years. It’s less than she’d been expecting. She can’t say she’s thrilled.

She serves sixteen in total, and only twelve of them in the actual facility; she’s permitted to finish out the rest of her sentence at home after it becomes too much of a drain on resources to keep the prison lit and fed, resources that are desperately needed elsewhere.

She’d sold the apartment before everything, two full lifetimes ago, and all of her things are in storage so, with her assets frozen and literally nowhere else to turn, she takes Jonas up on his generous offer to come stay with them in Konstanz. They have a little house outside of town, set into the woods; there are neighbors, but you can’t see them for the tree coverage. They’d wanted something smaller, after dad died, a little farther out. Less to manage. It’s nice for the grandkids to get to spend some time at the lake. He tells her all this the morning she gets in, fussing across the small yellow kitchen with the kettle. Nevermind the lake is a sheet of solid ice in mid-May. She lets it go. He seems happy here. There’s a lightness to the set of his shoulders that she’s never seen. He’s gained a lot of weight. Grown a beard. It all suits him.

The morning wanes into the afternoon. They catch up. It’s awkward, but it’s the most civil conversation they’ve had in decades. He shows her pictures of the family–she recognizes a few of the shots from the glossy photos Kathë had sent along with her infrequent but consistent letters. How’s Lena? She’s good, she’s good. She wants to come by for dinner soon, bring the kids. You’ll love them.

He’s asleep on the couch by the time Kathë gets home; they’d flipped on the news at some point–nothing good, nothing good, nothing good in years and nothing she can do about it now either–and he drifted off after a while. It’s all happening so slowly. But it is happening. She turns off the TV. She doesn’t recognize half of the things they’re advertising, now. Any of the actors in anything. She watches the shadows stretch long and lazy as cats across the floor as the evening comes on. She doesn’t move when she hears Kathë’s keys in the door, and the other woman jumps when she sees her in the armchair, startled. They blink at each other for a long time. Then, Kathë crosses the room over towards her and pulls Eva into a crushing hug before she is even fully on her feet. Jonas had given her a hug when she’d gotten in, but it was brief and perfunctory, very them. It has been a long time–she thinks back as far as she can and genuinely cannot formulate a memory of the last time–since someone held her like this.

Kathë’s shoulder is wet when she pulls away. Eva wipes at her face with the back of her sleeve. She hasn’t cried in years, and has no desire to explain it now, even if she’s too tired at this exact moment to feel anything more than lightly embarrassed. Kathë doesn’t ask her about it. She pats her (damp) face with one hand, very motherly, and then makes her dinner.

Months roll by. A year. Two. There is a pleasant rhythm to their life. Lena comes by sometimes, more often with the kids than not. Lena doesn’t really remember her very well–she’d been a teenager when Eva’d been swallowed alive by Hail Mary, and Eva wasn’t exactly a strong presence in her niece’s life before then either–but she pretends to. Eva plays along. The kids mostly ignore her; she has never been good with kids, was born without the mothering instinct. Her mom had said to her after Jonas had announced their pregnancy: not every woman is meant to be a mother, Eva. You know, I have no regrets, but sometimes I do wonder if you’re doing it all right.

They’d never spoken about it further.

Her and Kathë stay up late into the night talking most weekends. There’s so much to say. She can’t believe she was so angry for so long, wasted so much time.

It’s nice. It’s all nice. Even though it feels like she is a ghost haunting the house and watching the new owners set up their life here. Beats prison.

Lena stops coming as the roads get bad, and then worse. She and her husband start looking for work abroad. Find it by some miracle just before the market crashes, again. They don’t talk about it, the three of them together, but she can tell Jonas and Kathë are nervous. They don’t have the money to move–they both want to retire soon, and with things as they are it’ll be nearly impossible to get another job elsewhere. And, she knows, she herself is tying them down just by being here. Every day it gets a little colder.

Finally, she tells them to go. Has her accountant redraw Lena’s trust so they can access it if they need to–Lena had agreed immediately when she’d called. She actually hasn’t even really touched it much since she turned eighteen, save paying for housing for school and one semi-lavish trip to Ibiza when she was in her twenties. She really always has been a good kid. The house will linger on the market for years, Eva is sure, but if it never sells she’ll just buy it when she has access to her accounts again, and they can get by on the trust in the meantime where their retirements come short. She’ll stay here, take care of the house. She outlines it all for them after dinner one night, hail pinging against the wide dining room window. Kathë acts like she’s just proposed they kill and eat her to survive; she looks between Eva and Jonas with her mouth agape, shocked that they’re even considering it. Jonas’s eyes tighten as they meet Eva’s. Asking. She nods.

“Kathë…” says Jonas, putting a steady hand on his wife’s arm. She throws it off.

“You people are unbelievable,” she seethes, and storms out of the room. The night they depart Eva says the first intentional prayer she has since the launch, a prayer of genuine gratitude.

They close the border four months later.

There hasn’t been a summer in years–time is differentiated only by whether it is the season where it hails or the season where it snows. They institute rolling blackouts–first just in the height of winter, and only for a few hours at a time, then for longer stretches, regular intervals. The water is fifty-fifty. She ends up with a permanent set up of a boiling pot over the firepit in the garden to boil snow; uses it to flush toilets, make tea.

One December, seventeen months before her sentence is commuted, there is a knock at her door. She assumes it’s her grocery delivery–she pays a kid from town to run errands for her and tips better and better as the weather and roads get worse—but it’s a different kid, one she recognizes from watching her and her sister run up and down the street. She’s sorry, but can they–her whole family–come over for a bit? Something died in their chimney and they can’t get it out and every time they try to light the fire the smell gets worse and it made her dad throw up and obviously no one’s had power for like two weeks at this point and her mom is sure that they’re all going to freeze to death overnight.

Of course you can. They come over, make her dinner, the eldest girl her dad’s sous chef. They’re a very cute family, the Martins, two pre-teen girls and a babbling three year old boy, dad’s from Dusseldorf and mom’s from Eritrea. They have family in Brazil they were hoping to join, but there was a problem with her visa at the last possible second and the border closed before it was resolved, leaving them stranded. They’re both nurses, met at work. Their girls are both shy, and talk only in hushed tones when Eva is in the room. One is a full head taller than the other, but they’re only a year apart and appear to be very close.

They stay one night, then two. They return to their house for a few weeks, before a tree crashes through their roof during a bad storm. There’s no way to get anyone out this far into the season; she takes them in. It’s a smaller house, but there’s a bedroom for her, for them, and for the kids, and she can’t say that she truly minds the chaos. She’s been alone for a very long time, and it’s a little painful to adjust to having consistent, constant, inescapable company. Like the ache in your joints when you hold your hands over the stove on a cold night. But she thinks it's good for her.

It helps, materially, to have them around; they’re actually relatively tidy for a very busy three-child household. They cook more often than not, which is excellent for all involved as she has not ever been nor will ever become a deft hand in the kitchen. She looks for ways to be useful to them, too, outside of just being a roof over their heads. He works days, she works nights, so one of them is always around and the kids are mostly in school, so it doesn’t become a problem until they close the school in February, conditions dangerous enough that the district cannot condone travelling even as far as town. The hospital, of course, stays open; she watches the girls more often than not, mostly making sure they are actually participating in Zoom classes and, when they lose the power and it becomes apparent that they are not getting it back any time soon, to make sure they do their reading and worksheets.

Even after months in close quarters, the girls have not really adjusted to her presence. They talk only to each other and, when it becomes absolutely necessary for them to ask her a question, the eldest girl will whisper the question to her younger sister, and she will then creep up to Eva and ask it very softly with her eyes glued to her shoes. The younger girl is sick today, and the toddler is laying down with his mother, so it’s just Eva and the eldest in the kitchen. The girl is sat at the kitchen table hunched over her biology worksheet in concentration, her pen scraping in a pattern that is distinctly not writing. Eva is making them both tea. There is a clot of ice on the inside of the window a few centimeters thick–she reaches out a finger and touches it, comes away wet.

When she brings over the mug of oolong, she can’t help it–she peeks over the girl’s shoulder. A ballpoint drawing of a young woman with bug eyes and triangular hair tied up in bows in the style of those Japanese cartoons she and her sister are always watching on her laptop. The girl catches her and starts, reflexively moves to cover the page from view with her arm.

“Sorry!” says Eva, trying to sound as placating as possible. She does feel a little bad–she remembers how achingly humiliating everything felt when she was that age. She places the mug down very gently so as not to startle her. “You don’t have to hide that, you know. You’re very good.” The girl looks fastly at her hands, hunched in embarrassment, but she’s wearing a flattered smile. She looks up at Eva.

“You think so?” she asks sincerely. Eva tilts her head, considering.

“I mean, I didn’t get a very good look…” The girl bites her lip, thinks about that. Finally, she slowly moves her arm and leans back so Eva can get a proper look.

She is quite good, actually. Her style is age-appropriately juvenile, of course, but there are indications of natural talent.

“You’ve got a good eye for perspective,” she says seriously, nodding with approval. “That’s hard to learn.”

“It’s stupid,” the girl says shyly, starting to tuck the paper away again.

“It’s not stupid,” Eva says, and the girl just shrugs. Eva sits down across from her, pulls her own mug of tea towards herself, lets it warm her hands. She brings it up close to her mouth but does not sip it, just lets the steam tickle her chin and her lips and the tip of her nose.

“You know, I’m a historian?” she says. The girl blinks at her, clearly unimpressed. Eva continues on undeterred. “And when you study history, you learn that the only thing that really survives us, not just us, you and me.” She gestures between the two of them. “But us, civilizations, eras, is art.” She taps the worksheet for emphasis. She then leans in a little conspiratorially. “And science,” Eva says. “So make sure you do the back of this, too.” The girl rolls her eyes, but when Eva gets up to go to the living room, she hears her flip the page over.

Their time together is, actually, brief. Eva still has some strings to pull here and there. She’s been taking calls lately; her phone is still heavily monitored, so she’s not talking to anyone specifically, just people’s aides, their friends of friends. No information is ever exchanged–they will simply chat about current events and Eva will make observations about how certain things may or may not unfold if certain actions are or are not taken, and that is it. She calls a few of those friends’ friends now, and by September she has their visas approved and arrangements made. She gets a postcard from Rio a few months after they emigrate; it comes in an envelope, which she is confused by, until she realizes there is another folded up piece of paper tucked behind the card. She unfolds it–it’s another girl with big eyes, colored in lovingly with marker and pen. It’s unsigned. She hangs it on the fridge. She gets a Christmas card every year without fail.

When her sentence is up, she moves back to Berlin. Moving north is idiotic, but she doesn’t like her chances of getting across the border and frankly, there is simply nowhere else on earth she wants to go. It’s worse there than she had imagined; she gets used to stepping over frozen bodies on the sidewalk on her way to the store, rolling ankles on black ice. But it doesn’t mean nothing, to be home, even if that home is in the midst of emitting a death rattle.

She thinks all the time, every day, about Tau Ceti.

“How are you always this sure?” asks Komorov. They’ve been talking on the phone at least once a month since she stopped being considered an international security risk. They rarely discuss anything real, but he’s in a maudlin mood tonight. She shrugs, though he can’t see her. The lights flicker in her apartment, and she bites at the tender skin of her inner lip.

“I would feel it,” she says. “If we failed. I would feel it.”

He pesters her further, deeply unhappy with the unscientific nature of her answer, but she can’t really provide him with anything else because it is what she genuinely believes. When she bolts upright in the middle of the night, heart hammering in her chest, it is the only thing that meaningfully talks her down. She would feel it. She’s certain.

“I like you,” Ilyuhinka tells her once. One of the rare nights she’s been able to drag Eva out to the bar—they’d been drinking long before Ilyuhinka’d thought to seek her out, and there is a thin sheen of sweat on the cosmonaut’s upper lip. Eva will stay for one drink and Ilyuhinka will lead the group in booing as she stands. “You’re the only one here who doesn’t give a fuck that I’m about to die.”

Of course she doesn’t mean it like that. Eva understands. It’s like having a terminal disease—people look at you and they only see a clock ticking down to either nothing or eternity. Both options unthinkable.

She does not lie to Grace when she tells him that it is not a hard decision. Most of the decisions she makes are actually not that hard, in the end. But they are painful.

You pay it all back, one way or another.

Eva has had a spectacularly bad day. Is still having a spectacularly bad day–it’s only 23:30. There’s still time for things to get worse.

It has been a series of tough meetings. Contingency plans. Contingency plans for contingency plans. Every unthinkable decision rendered not only thinkable, but logistically workable.

And on top of that, now she’s got definitive proof of her favorite pet theory for her own inevitable conclusion: she is going to prison. Legal has said as much; they’ll wait until it’s over, of course, but the ICC will move hard and move fast. She is not surprised. She is not even upset, really–she’s had time to make a certain peace with it. But there’s some part of her that can’t help it. Maybe there was a small, stupid sliver of her heart that thought she might live to watch this whole thing play out from the comfort of her own home like everyone else.

She makes it halfway down the hallway from the conference room before she stops short with the realization that she is very purposefully walking nowhere in particular.

Where are you going, Eva?

She shifts her weight from one foot to the other. They ache even in her practical shoes.

Where do you want to go?

She wants a smoke, and when she wants something this strongly it is usually a good idea to deny it to herself. She wants to never speak to another living soul ever again. She wants to not be alone tonight.

The path to Grace’s lab is well-worn by now. She follows her own feet there. Finds it empty. This is not inexplicable, given the time, but it is a bit surprising. There are a few other places he could be: the coffee machines on the second floor of the admin suite which he swears make the best coffee on-base, the bar, the makeshift basketball court they’ve set up in hangar B. She checks every place except the bar, her strong desire to remain as invisible as possible outweighing the awful and debasing and incessant need she has to see Grace, now and immediately.

She’s not happy that she knows where Grace’s quarters are (it’s never been anything untoward–she knows where a lot of people live, and their work necessitates near constant contact. And yet). She is not happy that she is standing in front of his door. Not happy that she is knocking. Not happy that, when there is silence and then some vague stirring following her first volley of knocks, she fires out another round instead of taking the hint from God and walking away.

Grace answers the door with one hand, the other fully occupied with pulling the left side of his sweatpants the rest of the way up his hip. His hair is a mess, and his glasses are conspicuously missing, exaggerating the sleep he is blinking out of his eyes. She feels a little guilty–sleep is a rare commodity around here. But he blinks at her and then smiles when her image coalesces into something he recognizes, and she immediately dismisses the initial guilt and the other feeling that follows in the wake of that expression.

“Hey,” says Grace. His voice is rough with sleep, lower-pitched than his usual tone. He clears his throat like he notices it, too.

“Hi,” says Eva. The sensation of missing a stair as she realizes she does not actually have an excuse as to why she is here. There is always, every time, something readily available that she can point to and make a (legitimate or otherwise but passable regardless) case as to why she needs his immediate insight. However, if she could tell him any meaningful percentage of detail about the decisions she has had to make today, she would not need to be here seeking him out. And it’s not as though she can say anything as ludicrously honest as “I just wanted to say hi.”

“You’re the one who snuck in the Cuban rum, right?” she improvises. Not her best. He blinks at her, sleepy, surprised.

“Uh,” he says. His feet are bare, which she cannot understand–these metallic floors leech heat–and he scratches one foot with the big toe of the other. “I thought there was sort of a don’t ask don’t tell policy with booze?” Knew it.

“Say I’m not asking.” He quirks an eyebrow up at her, which she matches with one of her own.

“Mi casa, su casa.” He steps aside with a wide sweep of his arm. She ducks under it into the room.

She knows for a fact that the dimensions of their rooms are the exact same. His just looks so much smaller. It’s not that he has more stuff–he actually doesn’t have too many personal effects beyond his knit beanbag and assorted graphic tees. No photos of family, friends, just a few postcards that don’t look like they’ve ever passed through the mail. It’s something about the way that stuff is arranged, or not arranged, or artfully un-arranged. It’s driving her a little crazy, actually, that she cannot make definitive sense of whether or not he is a slob. He catches her surveying.

“Oh yeah, sorry, it’s uh,” he says, kicking a pair of boxers under the bed. Actually, he is a slob, she decides. “I can’t lie, it’s been better.” She knows from his background check (he does not and cannot know that she knows) that a few years ago he shared a lease with one Sarah Jessler which was mutually broken after a brief six month stint. She feels a small pang of sympathy for Sarah, seeing his quarters. Men. Scientists.

“This rum you don’t have?” she presses, making herself her version of comfortable which mostly just involves taking one step further into the room.

“Right!” He snaps into action after a brief lag, and she is once more deeply aware of the fact that she has woken him up. He opens the wardrobe and crouches down to rummage. He emerges with one of his hideous green wellies, from which he produces a three-quarters full bottle of amber liquid. He looks at her like he is about to make a horrible joke, and then he does.

“It’s bootlegging,” he says, and pauses like that was deserving of a laugh. She lets her silence answer for her. If he’s crestfallen, it’s only for a moment. It’s the desk’s turn to be leafed through–he rinses the two mugs he finds there in the sink, which does not inspire confidence as to their cleanliness. He hands her a mug with a solid three fingers of rum in it. The logo is for Grover Clevland, and bears a cartoon of a pirate mascot. Drink acquired, she is faced, then, with the dilemma of where to sit. The desk chair is piled high with, you guessed it, shit, which truly only leaves the bed if she is unwilling to touch his things. She opts to sit on the bed, forcing him to be the one to decide about the chair. He doesn’t seem troubled by the decision himself, just sits down next to her, maybe a bit close. He raises his own mug towards hers.

“Sláinte,” he says, butchering it. She clinks their rims together and takes a sip. It’s great fucking rum. She does not want the rest of it. Sets it in her lap and wraps both hands around the mug.

Carl is right; she knows that, morally-speaking. Grace deserves to know that a decision has been made, or at the very least that he has the gene, a fact that would lead any reasonable person to jump to the conclusion that this is a possibility, at least. Carl had not pulled her aside after the meeting, but he had lingered by the doorway until she had passed him and had fallen into step with her immediately.

Just say it, Carl. More abrasive than she normally is, which he is generous enough not to rise to. He says it. It’s wrong. Not to send him–he doesn’t even pretend to question that–but to not tell him that they plan to (if everything goes wrong, she wants to correct him. Only if everything goes spectacularly wrong. They already have an alternate for a reason. Nothing is happening now. It’s only a hypothetical. Just in case they need a just in case). He should know. He’s a person, with rights. He’s a good guy. Carl would consider him a friend. She hears him out. Waits for him to finish. He quiets, but doesn’t back down, which she respects about him.

If we tell him, she explains plainly, he leaves. We can’t afford for him to leave. We can’t afford for him to doubt the mission for even a second. The moment is too critical. You cannot tell him without potentially compromising everything. Do you understand?

Carl won’t tell him. She knows that without needing to hear it. But she thinks he needs her to give the order explicitly so he can tell himself later that she had. He nods, and she doesn’t see him for the rest of the day.

Grace is studying her closely–quite literally closely. He actually has sat down very near to her. The bed is unmade–a sin she can forgive because she is the one who made him vacate it–and there’s something a little clandestine about sitting on his bare sheets. She can tell he’s about to ask her what’s wrong, and if he does she is going to absolutely lose it; in which direction she has no idea, but it will, with absolute certainty, be lost. She decides to pre-empt him.

“I have a really shitty job.” Explanatory enough and impossible to refute.

“I know,” he says immediately and with a certain amount of counter-levity. “I’m really glad I don’t have it.” She doesn’t laugh outright, but it’s a brief gust of air through her nostrils. Do you really not understand your position here? she almost says out loud. She wants to shake him and ask how, this far into it, he can possibly remain this willfully blind. For a wild, wide-eyed moment she actually acutely hates him. Hates that he abdicates his responsibility by denying its existence, hates that he can, hates that he is a coward, hates that she has not liked anyone more in years and years and yet he makes it impossible for her to respect him. She takes another sip of her drink to steady herself, and then remembers that she does not want to drink this right now.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says because she can feel Grace’s eyes boring into her skull.

“Okay,” he says, sniffing at his own drink, similarly disinterested in its contents. “What do you wanna do? I’ve got cards and a whole hard drive of movies, if the don’t ask policy applies to pirating, too. And a Switch. I don’t know if you get down with Stardew Valley, but...” She taps at her mug with a nail–she’s let them grow a little long. Adds a trim to her to-do list for the morning.

“Got anything stronger?” she deadpans, nodding to her drink, and he laughs.

“You say you’re not good at jokes.”

“Who’s joking?” She feels the moment stretch taut around them, isn’t sure what’ll happen if it snaps. It was a mistake to come here, she knows it, because now she’s dug herself into a neat little hole of care and concern from which she has no idea how to emerge except to viciously claw her way out, and she doesn’t want to do that. Not with Grace. He hasn’t, she reminds herself, actually done anything wrong, save possess the unfortunate combination of his genes and his brain and his absurdly rotten luck.

She feels him shift on the bed next to her, and looks up to find him already looking in her direction.

“I’m sorry,” she says, quieter than she means to. “For waking you up.”

“I wasn’t asleep,” Grace lies obviously. The moment remains strange–she cannot name the charge, but it is there.

“Sure,” she says. In her periphery she watches him lean down to put his mug on the floor; she can’t quite gauge the exact amount he’s drunk but it doesn’t look like much. Clink, clink, clink goes her nail against her own mug. Grace straightens and wraps a hand around her own–she thinks, for a moment, to still her–but then he gently tugs the mug out of her hands. He leans past her, places the mug on the nightstand, and leans back, still in her space. She is opening her mouth to ask him what he is doing when he reaches up to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear.

Oh, she thinks. That’s the energy.

She is both delighted that he is finally making a move and deeply disappointed that this is the one. It’s very boy-next-door; not surprising given his general schtick, but not exactly what gets her going either. Still, she doesn’t stop him when he leans in, and is excited in her own way for what will certainly be a tentative, chaste question mark of a kiss. He surprises her. Tilts his head right, and starts planting kisses into the soft skin under her ear. She is so shocked at the sensation that she gasps. No one’s done that in a minute. He moves down her neck–she’s still wearing that goddamn turtleneck, and he has to pull the fabric down with two fingers to reach her skin which does sort of break the illusion to a degree until she feels his teeth graze her throat and her hands go immediately to his hair. She yanks him back, not gently, and she wants to swallow the noise he makes whole.

He looks at her. His eyes are blown wide open and she’s not catalogued every expression every person she has ever crossed paths with in her life has made, but she is certain she would remember if anyone had ever looked at her like that. A great pit of terror opens up in her stomach.

She has to do something. Right now. She can get up and leave, or she can shut him down verbally, or she can laugh it off, but she has to do something immediately.

It’s a reasonable list. She ignores it and opts to straddle him instead. His face when he tilts it up towards hers is a mask of pure shock, but his hands fly instinctually to her hips. She runs a thumb over his jawline. They haven’t even done anything yet properly but they’re both breathing on the heavy side, his chest rising and falling almost in tandem with the beat of her heart. They are on an incredibly delicate knife’s edge right now between sex and whatever this current atmosphere is, and she reasons that if she can tilt them towards sex then she can maneuver this situation into something salvageable in the morning. It’s that or cut things off entirely, and she can sit here all night and tell herself that that is what she needs to do and what she is going to do but the truth is she is incredibly tired, at this point, of being the only person who is not allotted a certain amount of mistakes. She presses herself a little more solidly into his lap, feels his body rise to meet hers as she does. She thinks for a moment that maybe he’ll lean in again, but he’s waiting, needs her to decide for both of them.

She does.

“I sort of think, just, fuck it?” she says. She threads her fingers through his hair again, not to manhandle him, just to feel it because she has always wanted to. It’s a little greasy. Very soft.

“Okay,” Grace says. “Yeah, I’m. Yeah. Okay” He kisses her properly then, like her word was the only thing holding him back and has been all this time. She almost sighs in relief when he opens his mouth for her tongue, tension sliding from dangerous to something, if not exactly familiar, maybe a bit more explicable and immediately manageable. The constant thrum of this is a bad, bad idea, Eva is easy enough to tune out when his hand slides under the hem of her shirt and up the bare small of her back, sending a shiver through her full body.

He’s good at this (although in retrospect it’s easy to wonder if he actually is all that good at this or if she really does just like him that much), calls her every bluff, ups the ante when and where she needs him to. She gets him on his back and shirtless quicker than is necessarily dignified for him narratively and laughs into his mouth when he whines as her thumb passes over his nipple.

He’s a quick study, experimental. Wants to give her what she wants. The enthusiasm makes her heady. It’s so much better and so much worse, the slide of bare skin after she finally stops pretending to have any sense of patience and permits him to undress her (which takes too long–he’s nervous, she thinks insanely and then catalogs the thought into oblivion–so she mostly does it herself). When he finally stops prevaricating, trailing maddeningly light kisses up and down her inner thighs, and licks into her, her vision goes white and she briefly reevaluates her position on marriage.

After she comes the first time she–maybe a little cruelly–slows their pace. She can feel it, even from the very far away place to which her brain has temporarily vacated, the inevitability that this cannot and will not happen again. Not before the launch, and after that–well, if she thinks of prison she will think of the rest of it, and if she thinks of the rest of it, with him underneath her, solid and warm and looking at her like that, then she will permanently lose something vital and irreplaceable and all of this will have been for nothing. So she doesn’t think about it. When he moves inside her, she doesn’t think about anything. Loses herself in the rhythm, the closeness. He asks her breathlessly for permission to come and that gets her halfway there again herself.

She makes a show of thinking about it. Runs her thumb over his bottom lip and, when his mouth falls open incrementally, pushes it inside. Just to see what he’ll do. He takes it in deep and sucks on it, tongue swirling around the knuckle. He comes before she’s even done telling him to do so. His fingers find her clit as he pulls out–she loves the effort, but he’s a little clumsy what with the post-orgasm daze and she has to take over, holding his hand still so she can ride it. He kisses her as she finishes again, and she’s uneasy to find that that same undefined electric tension from earlier is still there, lingering like a bad cough.

After, he lays with his head in the crook of her neck, stray strands of hair swaying with the breeze of her breath and tickling her nose. Not all that unpleasantly. She rubs a small circle into his shoulder with her thumb until he stills beneath her, breathing slowing. He isn’t asleep, she can tell. Just pretending. It’s alright; she is too.

She looks up at the violet arc of the ceiling. He’d turned off the lamp when he’d come back to bed after disposing of the condom (and who knew he had those on him–good on you, Doctor Grace), a move to which she’d almost protested because she is not staying the night, but she’d let him wrap himself around her anyways. The last time she checked her phone, she had two hours and twelve minutes before she needs to be Eva Stratt again. Before she returns to a world with consequences, most of them dire. She closes her eyes, relieved to find she is tired but not at all sleepy. She focuses on synching their breaths until they are exhaling in chorus, and drifts.

After some time, Grace gives up the pretense of pretending to sleep; he winds a strand of her hair around and around his finger, lightly, like he believes she is sleeping and he doesn’t want to wake her. He hums something to himself soft enough that she can only catch every other note, even pressed close against him as she is. She can’t pick out the melody, but sometimes, in the years to come, she’ll get it stuck in her head.

Later she wakes him up digging between the mattress and the wall for her bra. Explains that this was a mistake–not that she regrets it, just that it was a mistake. That she cannot afford any distractions at this key juncture. Neither of them can. And he says okay. No distractions. Totally. And then when she is dressed and standing to leave he tugs her down by the wrist and kisses the living hell out of her and she lets him because she has fourteen minutes to spare before it becomes too late in the morning to dry her hair before her 06:30 and because why not, after all that. His eyes are still closed when she pulls away, one hand trailing down his chest and coming to rest there, just under the collar of his t-shirt. ‘I HAD POTENTIAL.’

“I hate this shirt,” she says, pinching the fabric and letting it go.

“You hate all my shirts,” he argues. She tilts her head in a simulation of a shrug. That’s not true, but she doesn’t argue it.

“Children have potential,” she explains. “When you’re an adult, you are something or you’re not.” He looks at her like she just said something incredibly charming. Probably ten minutes, now. It’d be rude to check, but she will in a second.

“Do you like Vietnamese food?” he asks. She sighs deep. Straightens his glasses. She’s already explained this.

“Grace…” she starts. He cuts her off.

“No, no, I don’t mean–I hear you. Distractions. Complicated team dynamics. I–I get that, I am totally, one hundred percent your Huckleberry for the platonic vibe.” He holds up a hand, like he needs to defend himself. “It’s just, we’ve got five months till the launch, right? And then home? And I was just thinking, there’s this Vietnamese deli in my neighborhood that makes the best banh mi I’ve ever had, and I hear the tofu one is pretty good. And we could go to the pier. Get some agua frescas, or something. I don’t know.” He seems to run out of steam then and goes a little sheepish around the edges, like a child who is trying to explain away his own misbehavior. “I was thinking, after the launch. I could ask you.”

She thinks about Komorov’s wedding, what Grace had said about Ilyuhinka. Why would you start something if you know there’s no future?

She does the second stupid, unforgivable thing of the night. She plays along.

“Yeah, okay,” she says, a laugh tucked into her voice. “After the launch, you can ask me to travel internationally to eat a deli sandwich on a dock with you.” He beams. It’s hard to look at directly, so she focuses in on his bottom lip. Still a little swollen, she notes with some small measure of pride.

“Well,” he says. “When you say it like that.”

Her mother never leaves Berlin once she arrives in the seventies. Something they share, her mother and her: an intrinsic honing signal pointing towards home. Still, despite sharing a city they don’t see each other much before Heleen gets truly sick. Eva ends up spending most of her increasingly diminished free time in the hospital; it’s too far for Jonas to get here reliably, and since the divorce and the subsequent uptick in the drinking, Heleen's social circle has shrunk; for everything between them Eva does not want her to be lonely. It happens very slowly, and then very quickly. Heleen starts slipping in and out of memory, in and out of consciousness, only vaguely aware of Eva’s presence and clearly not of the fact that that presence is Eva. The nurse tells her that her mother can still hear what’s going on around her when she dips into unconsciousness for the final time while Eva takes a call in the smoking section (she isn’t smoking herself, but she needs privacy and the second hand smoke scratches the itch somewhat). So she reads to her. First some of her own poems, then some Rilke, some Brecht, some Glück. She reads her all of De ontdekking van de hemel, a bit of Swan’s Way. Eva doesn’t read fiction anymore, hasn’t in a very long time, but she knows it’s what her mother would read if she got to choose. Finally, out of ideas, she starts reading her the articles she’s catching up on for work–always good to stay abreast of the most recent literature.

She thinks about that, sitting by Grace’s bedside on his second to last night on Earth. She never actually verified with anyone if it’s true that coma patients can hear you; it’s a bit like her belief in God. It doesn’t really matter if it’s true, in the end. Belief, like anything, is a tool. Simply put, it makes her feel better to think that he can hear her. That he knows she’s there. She is quite angry with him, deeply disappointed if unsurprised. She wants to wake him up and scream at him. She wants to take him far away from here. She wants to get this over with. She does not want him to be lonely.

It’s veering towards late. Her last call for the night wrapped up hours ago. She’s been sitting in the medical bay since then with one knee propped up as a table for her laptop, typing away silently and breathing slowly through her nose. She absolutely despises the smell of hospitals. After a while, she hits a wall. Takes a break.

She reads to him, then. It feels a bit silly, and she pauses when the med tech walks past. She doesn’t know if Grace was serious about her mother’s poetry, but she keeps Heleen’s sophomore collection with her when she travels and she slowly and painstakingly translates the poems into English for him. Why are you using a translator? she’d asked Heleen when she was publishing in Germany. I can do it for free. You’re too literal, Eva, her mom had replied.

Ultimately true, she is finding now. She doesn’t have a natural inclination towards Dutch, and though she is fluent her vocabulary is relatively limited, so she struggles to get the flow of the poems to coalesce. Without a consistent structure, the heart of the matter is missing. Still, she tries.

She isn’t aware of Yao’s presence until he clears his throat. She flinches, snaps the book shut quickly.

“Hey,” says Yao. “We’ve been looking for you. Olesya thought you might be here.” Caught, she is caught out. Ilyuhinka, always seeing too much. “Poker night,” he explains when she just looks at him blankly.

“Right,” she says. Considers it. She feels completely drained of blood, emotionally anemic. All she can think of is the launch. Her dreams are operatic and operate at a high volume; she wakes up every morning with her heartbeat thundering in her ears. It is absolutely imperative that she sleeps tonight. The possibility feels so far away. Maybe it would be good to go to poker. Get out of her head.

Still. “I think I’ll sit this one out.”

“You sure?” he says. He usually doesn’t press. “Last one.” Eva lets out a slow breath.

“Sorry,” she says sincerely. It’s better, she thinks, when you do something for the last time and aren’t aware of the fact until after. They’d had fun last weekend; that was all she needed to remember. “You can keep your money for once.”

“Hey,” he says with a smile. Something she likes about him: he smiles often. Laughs freely. “You can’t take it with you.” She can’t argue that.

She expects him to leave, but he lingers. They don’t spend much personal time together, and she doesn’t know if they’ve ever had a one-on-one conversation outside of work. Yao is someone she respects, and that respect is mutual. That he lingers means that he knows, on some level, what she is doing here, or at least he has a theory about it. Ilyuhinka too, apparently. She feels peeled open. She doesn’t like anyone seeing her like this, and Yao is not the person on base she would have chosen to walk in here if she had to. Of all the gin joints.

Yao picks out his words carefully. He is not someone who is afraid of silence, so he takes his time with it.

“I think he’s ready for it,” he says finally. “Whatever he says. And he won’t be alone. Small comfort, I know.” She remembers that he’s a father; he’d shown her and Shapiro a video once of his teenage daughter playing Stairway to Heaven on electric guitar, mostly feedback. She knows almost nothing else about his personal life, but she knows he is so, so proud of her. She doesn’t understand how you could sign up for this mission, knowing you have a child you will never watch grow up. She doesn’t understand how you couldn’t, when you know your child won’t have a future if you don’t. She nods.

“Thank you,” she says sincerely, because there is really nothing else to say. He makes a sort of non-committal nod and clasps his hands behind his back.

“I think it’ll go late, if you change your mind,” he says, and she offers up a small smile.

“We’ll see,” she says. He says his see-you-laters and leaves her be. The silence feels cavernous, dotted with the beep of heart monitors. Maybe she should go to bed.

She doesn’t for some hours yet. She gives up on the poetry, and just starts reading him her emails. He’s got the proper clearance level, she figures. When she starts nodding off in the chair, knee propped up with her foot on the seat and her forehead pressed into her slacks, she decides it’s time. She has no idea what to say to Grace, so she just brushes a lock of hair off of his forehead and leaves without ceremony.

It’s quite cold outside. She draws her jacket tight around her. Can’t really resist a cigarette. There are so many stars out here in Baikonur. It’s a frigid night, crisp and clear. She decides to go for a long walk along the fence. It’s hard not to be paranoid about the weather–from the reports, it’s five degrees lower than the average for this time of year. They have time. But not all that much, really.

A memory pops up unbidden. Grace’s first week on the airship. She has a spot where she goes to be alone, mostly at night, sometimes in the grey or brilliant dawn. Sometimes she smokes. Mostly she has a coffee and stands or sits or leans on the railing and practices being very still. Being present. So much of her life has been dedicated to the past. Now and forever it will be dedicated to the future. It’s important, she thinks, to forge a certain truce with the present.

Grace comes to find her. He’s been looking for a while. Got a tip off from Komorov that she might be out here. It’s quite early in the morning. He has a coffee, just one, and a paper bag clutched to his chest. He waves when she sees him.

“Hey!” he says when he reaches her. “How in the heck did you find this spot?” He’s brought the coffee for her. The bag contains a ham and egg sandwich, verging on lukewarm but edible. The breakfast goes quick, he says, like that explains anything. She thanks him. Waits for the inevitable work question, but it doesn’t come. No one seeks her out personally, not even Komorov. She wonders what it is exactly he wants. He answers unsatisfactorily.

“You want some company?” he says after lingering for too long for it to be anything but intentional.

“Sure,” she says. Isn’t sure if she means it yet or not.

It occurs to her that Grace likes to know people. She has noticed a pattern, because it is the thing she is best at, in which Grace pulls stories and details and good natures out of people without revealing anything of himself. He holds himself apart. But his interest in others is genuine. He wants to feel he is a part of something larger.

It could be good to let him know her a bit. Might put him at ease, make it easier for him to shoulder the responsibility she is about to heap on his shoulders if he knows that she can carry that same weight and be human too. She isn’t hungry, is never hungry in mornings–she’s always had a furiatingly slow metabolism. She unwraps the sandwich anyway.

“I’m a vegetarian,” she tells him. She starts peeling off the ham. It’s sticky with cheese.

“Oh shoot,” he says with genuine disappointment. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I can take it off.” She demonstrates. Recreates the sandwich sans-ham. Problem solved. He watches her stuff the ham back into the bag with the air of a dog begging for scraps.

“If you’re not gonna eat the ham…” he says with some genuine longing. She hands over the bag and he tucks into it gratefully. Hm, she thinks. He’s something.

It’s a nice memory. She thinks of it often.

In Baikonur she shivers–it climbs up her spine and sends gooseflesh up her neck. She walks past the ruins of the lab where Shapiro and Dubois had died. She crosses herself as she passes.

She checks the time on her phone. It’s tomorrow. One full day left, and then the launch. A Hail Mary pass. She tries not to think about the odds. Believes in the mission the way she believes in God. As an inevitability, not necessarily a truth.

When she dreams that night it is of a vast ocean spread out on all sides. She can’t tell where she is, if she’s in a boat or the water, but sea is all she sees. It is completely still, reflecting perfectly the unbroken black night sky above her. No stars. No movement. Suspended.

She wakes up five minutes before her alarm goes off, already running through her to-do list.

The first day it hits twelve degrees, she dons her lightest sweater and walks down the block to the wine shop to get a bottle of champagne. It takes her some time now, getting around. City living is hard on you, requires a level of mobility that she is watching wane in herself. But it’s good for her to get out. She refuses to become a hermit with age.

She chats with the manager of the wine shop for a while, a striking woman around ten years younger than her that spent her career as a sommelier in Provence. Eva has become a bit chatty with age. She’s spent the last few years since the beetles landed easing back into the world. She has fought so hard and given up so much for the future. It’s about time she explored it.

The manager pulls a bottle from the back–it’s a 2012 Delamotte. Unbelievable maturity, excellent grape health and acidity. It’s quite expensive–she buys it anyway. There was, in fact, money in saving the world, and she makes a decent salary now lecturing at the university. Kathë has been encouraging her to retire soon. She does not like Eva’s plan to die at her desk. But it is Eva’s plan, not hers.

Champagne in hand, she returns home and opens the door to the back garden. She pauses in the threshold with a jacket in hand, fence-sitting. She ultimately discards it. The cat winds through her legs and bolts for freedom. He never goes farther than the back ledge of the stone walls that fence in her small square of sunlight.

She is not quite sure how to relax. She’s new at this. Give her a little time.

She sets up a speaker and plays some music while she reclines in the lawn chair she has set up so deep in the garden. She’s still a secret fan of pop, honestly the lighter the better. Grace had made fun of her once, coaxed her phone out of her hand (her personal one, she’d never put this music on any device that could be conceivably black boxed in the future) and scrolled through her music app. He’d gotten a real kick out of Olivia Rodrigo.

She has a book in her lap that she ignores. She pops open the bottle of champagne with minimal fanfare, licks the bit of liquid that sloshes down her hand and forearm from the small propulsion. She drinks straight from the bottle. Hardly her style, but it’s Komorov’s. He’s been dead for two years. Pulmonary embolism. She didn’t attend the funeral–she got the pardon, but she still doesn’t quite trust in her ability to travel to Russia without some difficulty. She sends beautiful flowers and a long letter to Lyudmila. She reads it over before she sends it–she does write like a historian. It’s all anecdotes and dispassionate synthesis.

She adds a few lines at the bottom of the page–she hasn’t signed it yet.

I think that love transcends time, she says. If she’s sappy, she’s sappy.

I think that love transcends time. There are people that I love that are buried in space, rotating somebody else’s star in perpetual stillness. I love them. I carry them with me. I think about the way they smiled, the jokes they told, the ways they showed care. The other day in the grocery store I was looking at produce and I started laughing thinking about Mitya making fun of my pronunciation of картофель. And Mitya is a part of history now. Not all of him will live on, not the parts we love, the things only we know about him, but the things he did. He did great things. I know you’re on the fence about the oral history project and I will leave it alone after this, but I think you should do it. It’s a way to keep some of those parts of him around. I don’t know, Lyusya. There’s nothing really you can say to grief, except that I share it with you. Come visit soon, get lost in the city. Take care of yourself in the meantime. People will bring you food. Try to eat it.

With love,

Eva

The champagne is, she must admit, exceptional. She normally avoids champagnes and wines, steering towards clear liquor, but the bubbles spark something a little childish in her. Her first drink was champagne actually, at age thirteen and at a distant cousin’s wedding when she was handed a flute for the toast. She indulges in nostalgia for a complicated childhood for a count of eight, and then snaps out of it. She is here to focus on the moment.

The sun is out–it’s close to noon, and it casts strange puddles of shadows. The roses are starting to peak out of their buds. City sounds and birdsong mix with the tinny music coming from her speakers, a fugue she finds soothing rather than overwhelming.

There’s a chill on the air, despite the near-warmth radiating from the unshielded summer sun. There will be a chill on the air, she is sure, for the rest of her life. It stirs her hair–she’s kept it long. It’s how people recognize her, when they do. Less these days.

She gets through half the bottle before she places it on the cobblestones underfoot next to the lawnchair and reclines back. She is dizzy drunk, fizzy and delighted. She tips her head back, leans against the mesh back of the chair and takes off her sweater, letting the wind stir up gooseflesh on her arms and the sun soak into her skin.

She slips into a half-sleep without noticing. Vague dreams, for once, gold tinted and dappled. The world. And here she is, in it.