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Today was the first day and the last.
The first day for the rest of humanity.
The last day for Ryland Grace.
The first and last day Eva Stratt would admit something to herself that had to be buried deep, deep inside.
Eva’s job was over now; a comatose man was delivered to the Hail Mary in orbit, along with his suicide-bound crew mates. The last pieces of the puzzle fit together with streaking plumes of white smoke against a bright blue sky, a sight that had inspired billions in the launches that came before but had a different kind of trepidation behind it now. It would be decades before they learned if there was an answer.
If.
Eva had slain twenty-four million and counting for the hope of if. The most powerful countries in the Saharan region of North Africa had already called for her head as the death toll climbed. She would be arraigned within the week. Everything was about buying time for as many people as possible. She was prepared for a billion more deaths, anything that let humanity flourish in the coming decades, when the Beatles finally returned from Tau Ceti, the star they had hung their last dying hopes upon. Even if they did not call for her immediate slaughter on a public stage, she would never reap the seeds she had sown—only see cracks in the Earth that came with the planting.
That didn’t matter. She didn’t matter. He didn’t—
“Dr. Grace.” Eva’s eyes flicked from the documents on her phone to the slight man seated before her, a boyish, bemused smile on his slim face. She wasn’t sure what she expected from a man who fled a promising career in astrobiology to prance in front of children who thought static on a balloon was impressive. Maybe signs of a head injury. Or apparent shriveling cowardice.
But Ryland Grace had all the charm of a cat abandoned in a rain-soaked box, one that clearly wanted pets even when he was covered in fleas. You still want to pet them, despite the glaring awareness that this is the one thing you must never do. She learned quickly to let others applaud him, without letting herself enjoy the way his lips curved in a smile as acceptance put him at ease.
Do you need to be loved so badly?
The stray thought was meaningless, stuffed away as Eva processed the utility of every detail in Grace’s file. No relationships to speak of; clearly, he preferred the adoration of children to making himself vulnerable to a partner. She couldn’t determine his preferences from the rare dalliance on record, but... Not important. It wasn't relevant for a guinea pig who might die at First Contact. She watched him deflate as he determined his own value and then inflate a moment later when a room full of unimpressed scientists clapped at his small discoveries about the microorganism dining on the Earth's heat lamp. He was easy to control.
For months, there was Grace in his lab, tinkering with the astrophage, pulling astounding conclusions from slides and flashlights and whatever else he was doing. Smiling like a kid on Christmas one minute and weeping his boo-hoos about being wrong about some ancient, irrelevant idea the next. As though it mattered now what he had theorized ages ago, when actual alien life gathered in his palms. He was the first on Earth to name them and breed more of them. It was a miracle, a mystery he had solved fearlessly and with a speed the others could not muster. She wondered if he had any idea of his own brilliance. She'd save those compliments for when they were useful.
It took nothing to convince Grace to take on odd jobs and position him as second-in-command in the years of the project. She would have everyone trust him, know him. Just in case. Maybe Grace didn’t need to come along with Eva to every meeting possible, but who knew when it might be useful to have him along.
“The crew may kill each other or themselves on a four-year space flight to suicide.”
So they would have to be put in comas. Ones most people couldn't survive. One Ryland Grace could survive. But that didn't mean he had to go. She would not watch the light dim from his eyes, and so she did not tell him. Eva knew what worked when it came to Grace; a jab to his ego, then carefully applied after-care in the form of applause and gentle praise. He kept proving useful, so she did so until she had shaped him, bit by bit, into a man who could serve as the science specialist aboard the Hail Mary. If it were necessary.
“That amount of solar panels will destroy the environment of the Sahara and surrounding nations for decades to come.”
Grace had prevented an Incident with prison guards on her way to solve the problem of energy in the astrophage breeding crisis, complying with the guard's demands when she could not bring herself to back down. She found herself following his lead. His peaceful nature.
Just that once.
“Blowing up Antarctica might buy time, but then what? What happens when the Petrova problem is resolved?”
Eva didn’t know. She couldn’t know. She wasn’t a scientist, and so she had no choice but to make decisions based on the expertise of others. Every second spent grieving the losses meant more losses, so she didn’t. Blow up Antarctica. Destroy the Earth if it might last longer that way. She was willing to go to hell, as she must, for everything she had done. She walked the halls of their ship, striding from conference rooms to offices, taking pills to sleep at night, and never turning the corner of her eye towards the whispers and stares. She didn’t need to ask to know what anyone here thought about her, as stomachs turned with the latest decision. It was okay if they all hated her.
Eva didn’t grieve, but prayed. Hail Mary, full of grace. A prayer for redemption, for intercession. Even if I go to hell, let some vestige of humanity remain. Let it all be worth it.
And then there was Grace. Her saving grace. Did he know how easily he smiled around the room, even for her? He processed each decision in his own way, reasoning it through with a dozen expressions like he was acting out a play in his mind, and in the end, the same thing always happened. It took him time, but he was still on her side, following every command she gave him, rising to every challenge. Defending her when those who did not understand questioned her sanity and humanity. He still smiled for her.
So there was Eva Stratt, then Ryland Grace, then everyone else whose morale needed to stay high to make it to the finish line. On a ship of military personnel and trained astronauts, Grace was a mascot running around, cheering on every other member of the project. It didn't matter that she had a more insidious purpose for connecting him to everything and everyone.
He had to be trained. She knew it would break him to know, and so he didn't.
And Eva had started to rely on him, the one who could convince the others without crushing their morale. Grace didn’t need to issue proclamations and orders to sway the others. He was the only one she trusted with the task of asking the few selected for the mission how they would most like to die, once their work was completed. Their morale could not crumble.
And in this way, she trained him, too, should the worst come to pass.
She couldn’t ask him how he wanted to die. Just that once, she had been an optimist, hoping it would not be necessary to find out, and in doing so had done him an unkindness.
Nine days. There were only nine days left.
Stratt very rarely let herself sink into hope. That was not her mission here. Hope was a toxic, alluring thing. From the very beginning, her job had been probability. Patterns. She was a historian, who knew how people worked and looked back into the annals of time to understand the future. Anything could happen, and few things went according to the prescribed plan.
But it was only nine days. So little time left for things to go wrong. She wouldn't lose him now.
Love, Eva recalled, was as much a plague as hope. Maybe it was lust. Whichever it was, that was the reason the two candidates ahead of Grace were in the same damn place at the same damned time. They didn't need to do experiments together, but they were inseparable, and she had only mandated they separate for travel and other risky activities.
Surely, this counted.
An explosion. A crisis. Fear was acrid on Eva’s tongue when she just kept herself from screaming Grace's name, instead shouting and running outside in a robe and boots to see for herself he was uninjured, in the room she kept right beside hers—
For the mission. Only for the mission did his life matter so preciously.
The list of the dead came back. She stopped reading after Debois and Shapiro's names. Her eyes locked on Grace's face. Memorizing him. The clock had just started ticking and days were really only minutes when you think about it. Shock and horror had drained his face of color, anguish wetting his eyes for men and women he called friends, even when they were doomed to die so soon.
He didn't know.
Cry for yourself.
Eva blinked back her grief, a feeling heavier than the weight of the dozens of bodies that had been vaporized in a mere accident. She had to. Why were emotions so beastly, trying to seize control when she needed to be her own master? She swallowed down whatever choking thing threatened to overtake her and breathed.
“We’ve lost our primary and secondary science specialists. Dr. Grace. I want a short list of possible replacements.”
Find me someone else. Anyone else.
Please.
Oh.
She'd never seen that ugly look in his eyes before, pained betrayal fixed on her. Seeing her as every bit the monster so many others had seen before. It wasn't the last time he'd look at her like this. She knew it was coming already, but even then she couldn’t breathe.
“Are you made of stone or something? Our friends just died!” Grace sobbed, eyes blue and saturated with grief. He was so soft, too gentle a man.
Not you. Never from you. Pain at the sudden chasm between them overtook the grief she was fighting so hard to ignore, a feeling in turn overtaken by fear ringing in her ears at the inevitable conclusion. She was already looking at the short list of candidates, the gentle school teacher crying in front of her.
“Yes,” Eva said, as patiently as she could manage, “And everyone else will die, too, if we don’t make this mission happen. We have nine days to find a replacement science specialist.” Nine days to save you.
“DuBois, Shapiro…”
In Grace’s mind, this had all been summer camp, geeking out with buddies he had longed for in years of solitude with only theoretical alien lifeforms and children to keep him company. These had been the best years of his life, the least lonely.
The best of hers, too. God, but Eva wanted to pull Grace close and wrap her arms around him. The cat’s fleas meant nothing in the face of tears and the agony doubling him over.
“They’re dead…oh God…”
They were always going to die. And now you are, too. Eva had never touched him before, but she allowed herself to do it only once as she listened to him rant. She slapped him. “Snap out of it!”
“Hey!”
“Cry later! Mission first! You still have that list of coma-resistant candidates from last year? Start looking through it. We need a new science specialist. And we need them now!”
Now, before I have to choose you.
But there was no time. Simply no time. The demand Eva Stratt had sputtered in that desperate moment was one Grace could never fulfill—she knew that. Maybe she had come to believe in him so wholeheartedly that she thought he could find a solution she had not considered, anything but sending him up in that godforsaken sacrificial altar. Maybe she just did not want to take all the blame, to know she had given him a chance…
No, the task was Eva doing what she always did, giving Grace a coloring book and crayons to keep him calm while she steeled herself to say the words she had avoided for years now.
Hail Mary, full of Grace. It was almost funny.
Eva sat in the conference room on the worst day of her life up to then, wondering if this or launch day would hurt more. I’m going to see that look again. Ryland Grace was never going to smile for her, not after she told him the truth.
That he had been her third choice all along. There was no one else. He had a few hours to think about it, but she knew before he came back what his answer would be.
She had no choice now.
All men say despicable things when they fear for their lives. Ryland Grace was no different. For the children, he said. He had to teach them to, what, die quietly? In that moment, she had to hate him. To look upon the things that she might call beautiful with coldness. Because she was weak, too, and one soft look away from dooming humanity for a silly little man who loved aliens and theatrics.
“Do you think I don’t know you, Dr. Grace?!” It took everything in Eva's pride not to let her voice tremble. Hate him. Hate everything about him. “You’re a coward and you always have been. You abandoned a promising career because people didn’t like a paper you wrote. You retreated to the safety of children who worship you for being the cool teacher. You don’t have a romantic partner in your life because that would mean you might suffer heartbreak. You avoid risk like the plague.”
Every sentence came more personal than the last until even she cringed at the bitterness, the regret at what she could never have with a man she met too late. The swan song of humanity had already begun to sound from every corner of the globe. But the bitterness steeled her, made it possible for her to call in the guard that would take Grace to his cell, even when his eyes filled with tears and he begged, “Don’t send me off to die! Please!”
Hate him, hate him, hate him.
Eva did not let herself sob until she was all the way back in her new dormitory, following the explosion. She set a timer by the sink. Five minutes. Two years she had gone thinking he was safe, that she would never have to do this. Her ribs and throat ached when the timer rang. Her palms bled where her fingernails lanced pale flesh.
Eva looked at the ugly thing in the mirror, creased through and blotchy. She thought for the last few years that hell was a place waiting for her after the shuttle launched and officials from disenfranchised countries bore down on her. Or maybe the stories of fire that scorched souls upon death were true. She deserved both.
But hell was neither. It was Ryland Grace’s hopeful eyes turning dark with fear, the pleading in his voice, the desperation, knowing she had taken his smile from him forever and sentenced him to death.
She washed her face, and went to bed, downing the same cocktail of pills she always took to keep from losing sleep. Humanity could not afford it.
Eva felt aged when her feet hit the floor the next morning. She had been cruel, because she could not afford to change her mind. But she could explain to him everything she had told herself when his name had first crossed her list.
It would be the last time she saw Grace. It was almost more than she could bear, but she would. She owed him that. She had other things to do that day to get ready for launch; five minutes to talk to Grace meant skipping the conference call with the prime minister of India. Grace was more important. She formulated a speech in her head, rehearsing the lines. She rarely hesitated, but it took her a moment to breathe normally before she told the guard to open the door.
Eva's mind was blank from the moment she saw Grace. The blackened pupils of his eyes and twist of his mouth after a sleepless night in a Russian dormitory had rendered him unrecognizable to her. She hadn’t realized how much of his face was made up of radiant excitement and energy up to now. Something hollow and broken looked back. She spoke. She felt herself speaking.
She heard herself explaining…something. Telling him about history and the way she saw the world. If she had not majored in history, she might have done psychology. Looking at the way people always behaved going back centuries had shaped her worldview. People could not be trusted; war would come, war had begun. She would live through the worst days humanity had seen, days of the apocalypse and the kind of horrors someone like Grace was too kind to ever fathom. He would be granted a mercifully swift death out in space, studying the alien life he had always adored so much.
She could almost tell herself this was kind.
And then the final piece of her plan. Amnesia would keep Grace from going through with idle threats to scuttle the mission, yes, but more importantly, his hatred for her would not distract him.
Ryland Grace would forget, if only for a while, that Eva Stratt had ever crossed his path.
As she watched the shuttle vanishing into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, just a pinprick against the blue sky, she felt something shift in her, body and soul. A piece was gone that was never coming back. The rest could die too, for all she cared.
She had done her job.
Eva Stratt’s life looked much the same before and after that moment of death. Years were spent shuffling between meetings, in and out of depositions and court rooms. The International Criminal Court invented new laws just to see her rot in a cell. They would not execute her, it was decided, until Project Hail Mary had met its conclusion.
The four years Grace experienced in space reaching Tau Ceti stretched out on Earth; Eva counted each one, marking the passage of his birthdays spent in a coma, forgetting her. She tried to forget him, but there was not much to do in prison.
And then who knew how long it would take them to conclude their work. Their lives. On this one-way mission, the only choices were starving to death with the limited supplies they could bring aboard the Hail Mary or taking advantage of the supplies offered for suicide. Maybe he was still examining the astrophage and Tau Ceti. Maybe he was bonding with his crewmates. Ilyukhina was a beautiful, vivacious woman who no doubt had kept her spirits even in the face of impending suicide. Maybe Grace had found comfort with her in their final days. Maybe with Yao, who was honorable and strong. It had never been clear where Grace's interests lie.
Eva ticked down the days, counting out the supplies until…
He wouldn't be alive anymore, anywhere in the universe. Whether from starvation or suicide or something else, there was no possiblity Grace has lasted any longer than this. It was just a Tuesday, when she was meant to be working in the prison laundry facilities. She let herself cry over detergent and stained linens, breaking down until a couple prison guards were called to restrain her. She had never liked prison guards, even when she was a free and powerful woman on the outside. She was frail now; prisoners received little food in these days. Age was falling over her like darkness with the coming night. She could not resist, and did not care to.
Grace was gone, not just from this world but the entire universe. It was all much colder and dimmer now than even the astrophage could cause.
And still the years marched on, even when all but her body had died, leaving only a sad shadow behind. She ignored whispers about her uttered in the same breath with Hitler. She had a more prolific death toll by far, and more people blamed her than the astrophage. She was easier to blame, and little proof that the astrophage even existed remained for the public eye.
“Eva Stratt. Come with us.”
She did not stir for the voice; orders could never move her, least of all those of prison guards.
“The Beatles have come home. We have something you need to see.”
Eva Stratt recognized a few familiar faces in the conference room, a long space where tapes waited for her to watch. There was something different in their eyes from the last time she'd seen them so many years ago now. Her joints creaked as she moved to sit.
She had to bite her cheek until she tasted copper to keep herself still. Grace. Ryland Grace, smiling on camera at her. Grace. Grace.
She barely noticed the creature behind him.
“They found a kind of natural predator to the astrophage. We need to launch a new mission—to Venus.”
She looked up from the smiling science teacher prancing around on camera with a strange, moving rock formation. “A predator,” she breathed. The astrophage could be stopped. Grace had done it.
“If you're ready, ma’am? We are ready at your disposal.”
Maybe he was still out there somewhere. Maybe he wasn't. But the joy Grace had looking at the thing he called Rocky was more than she had ever wanted for him. It was enough.
“I'm ready to get to work. Let's save what's left of Earth.”