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The sun has dipped below the horizon by the time you make it back to the living quarters.
Yes, you. Ever since your men tackled me to the ground and sent me to spend my last few days on Earth in an induced coma, my soul or whatever has been floating around the base like a one-man production of A Christmas Carol. Welcome to your own personal haunting, Eva Stratt.
It’s almost astounding how composed you are as you walk down the hallway. Your hands don’t tremble, your gait doesn’t falter, your gaze is steady. Guess you’ve had the world on your shoulders so long that you’re used to its weight. Am I the first casualty to your cause? Or are you used to making that call too in service of saving the world?
God willing, you once told me.
Guess you’re God, because I sure as heck wasn’t willing.
You pause in the open doorway of Ilyukhina’s room. Inside is a mess, clothes and papers and knick-knacks scattered across the whole of the room like an explosion has gone off. Okay, that was a bad description, given the events of the last several days, but you get what I mean.
An open case sits on Ilyukhina’s bed, half packed with what you know are the few treasures she’ll get for the rest of her life. You can’t help but notice with a zing of pride that she’s including a small disco ball, which you’d purchased for Ilyukhina after overhearing her mourn the loss of her usual dance club back home.
For all your austerity, you have a knack for keeping spirits high. Karaoke machines on warships, coffee options on base, disco balls to sad astronauts who will never dance again. Knowing some part of you is capable of caring almost makes this whole thing worse.
Yao leans against the doorframe, arms folded tight against his chest. You know he should be packing too. You also know he can’t be alone right now and Ilyukhina is the only person in the world who can fully understand why.
Well, one of the only people in the world who understands why. His other option is currently in a hospital bed, tucked away like a dirty secret. Though you think that other option wouldn’t have been much comfort even if he’d been awake.
You’re probably right.
Ilyukhina holds up a silky floral skirt, swishing it for effect. “This one might be nice. When we send our success to Earth, I want to look hot. For the news and the history books, ya?”
“You can’t bring that!” Yao protests, “It would be impractical in space. You know, because of the—” here he mimes the skirt floating upwards, then adds, a little embarrassed, “We’ll see everything.”
She barks a laugh. “And when you catch sight of my very nice thighs, you can think fondly of your lovely wife and thank me for it.”
Ilyukhina really does have a gift for coaxing a smile out of anyone: you don’t remember the last time you saw Yao laugh outright. Ever since he accepted the role of Captain of the Hail Mary, he’s adopted a more focused demeanor. That’s probably the ideal reaction, someone who not only takes their impending death on the chin, but rises to the responsibility of it.
Does it bother you that you’ll never see me laugh again?
You curl your fist, pausing for a fraction of a second over the doorframe. Wow. I don’t think I’ve seen you hesitate to do anything. Heck, I think your hand was probably already poised over the phone you used to call in my doom before I’d even sat down. But I guess you probably figured there’s a benefit to fostering as much team camaraderie as possible before the big launch.
Lucky for you, the moment of weakness passes swiftly. You knock, three sharp raps against the fake wood. Yao and Ilyukhina quiet. Their smiles fade as they realize they have company, schooled quickly into the resigned duty that’s been in the air here on base.
“Doctor Grace?” Ilyukhina asks, sliding into attention almost without realizing.
“He’s coming,” you reply, as cool and casual as you might say he’s grabbing a coffee.
Yao and Ilyukhina share a look, both sets of shoulders unclenching in an infinitesimal expression of relief. It’s the same emotion you had when you first saw my body, a relief so heavy you almost regret feeling it.
“Good. That’s good,” Yao nods, already back in captain-mode, “Is he taking a moment to compose himself, or can I speak to him?”
“Unfortunately, there were complications.” The lie comes so easily it feels like truth when you say it. Then again, I guess it is: there were complications, after all. “Grace has already started the coma induction process, monitored by trained professionals to maximize his safety ahead of launch.”
You hold their gazes, almost daring them to question this story. But while Ilyukhina wrings her hands, shiny skirt still hanging in her grasp, and Yao slowly exhales, neither say anything, much less accuse you of murder.
What’s that like, by the way? Getting away with murder? When you pressed a hand to my tear-stained cheek as they hauled me up from the dirt, did you feel anything? Or were you just admiring your handiwork? God’s perfect idiot, the mission fail-safe you started building from the minute you yanked me from my classroom.
“He’s very brave,” Ilyukhina breaks the silence, “To go under alone. I know it’s silly to be nervous about that, given the mission I’ve signed up for, but—” she swallows shakily, sharing another glance with Yao, who inclines his head in agreement, “I’m glad we’ll be sedated together.”
“He is a brave man,” you agree. Most of your lies seem carefully packaged, but this one comes with a spontaneity that is downright casual for you.
Holy crap. This might actually be a lie you believe. Despite your cold-blooded pragmatism and acute understanding of the human condition, you’ve actually convinced yourself that Ryland Grace is anything more than a cowardly middle school teacher.
“You all are,” you add in lieu of a proper goodbye, which just seems like an insult to the two actual astronauts in the room.
Ilyukhina nods. Yao salutes. And then you are off again, walking down the hall with that purposeful stride I used to admire. What’s next? A press conference to coordinate? An inspection to oversee? Wait, no — is that my room?
You let yourself in.
Sure, make yourself at home. Not like I’m gonna have much use for the place anymore. Heck, might as well steal yourself a souvenir, isn’t that what some murderers like to do? Snag a little trophy to mark their achievement?
Then again, the world will do you one better: they’re gonna build you statues. Not statues of you, obviously, but Project Hail Mary is your baby. It has you woven through every strand. Whatever the grateful populace constructs, there’s no separating Eva Stratt from humanity’s last ditch survival attempt.
So with that in mind…maybe don’t steal my little globe again?
You flip on the lights, inspecting the space. Like Ilyukhina, there’s a soft case sitting on my bed, Grace scrawled carefully on a paper label. You really do think of everything. Unlike Ilyukhina, though, my room doesn’t exactly look lived in. No pinned photos or bits of artwork here. There’s — how’d you say it? — no sign of immediate family. Not even any sign of a dog.
With a sigh, you open the pack. The zipper sounds harsh in the silence, the case looking pathetically empty in my pathetically empty room. You stare into the depths of my pack like you’re going to find something there. My courage? Nah. A conscience? Even less likely.
Whatever it is, you don’t find what you’re looking for. Instead, you take a few slow breaths, steeling yourself for whatever you’re about to do next. Which is…oh. Opening my drawers. Sure, you already kidnapped me, why not add insult to injury?
Not like it’s that exciting in there. No dirty mags here, no state secrets, just a jumbled mess of clothes. I spent basically all my time doing science to literally save the world, so I think I can be forgiven for being a slob. You pull something out, holding my I wear this shirt periodically shirt up to inspect it.
“I think this might be inaccurate,” you say to my empty room, “Given how often I saw this shirt in your rotation.”
Well, I could only pack a backpack’s worth of clothes, so whose fault is that?
You fold the shirt with a sort of gentleness I didn’t think was possible, transforming it from wrinkled blob to neat square before transferring it to my pack. In fact, you make short work of my wardrobe. The only time you pause is when you find my favorite fox cardigan hung in my closet. There’s almost a reverence to the way you prepare it for its space journey, you fold and refold it three times until it looks pristine. The foxes on the back are perfectly framed as you press the sweater carefully into my case.
Seems like you should have better things to do than laundry Tetris.
Seriously, you’re the leader of the Hail Mary project. You, of all people, know just how disposable I am. Yao and Ilyukhina have family and friends and communities — people who love them and will miss them the second they leave the atmosphere. You know I’ll be halfway to Tau Ceti before anyone even thinks to ask what’s Ryland Grace up to these days? And half the people asking will probably think I’m still working at some public school.
Point is, you know nobody cares. You don’t care.
But for some reason, you, the leader of the Hail Mary project, are doing my packing anyway.
Granted, there’s not much to add beyond my clothes, but you give it the same attention you’d give any project, poking through my bedroom with the scowl you wear when you’re thinking. When you come up empty-handed, you don’t even miss a beat as you whip out your phone. “Carl? I need you to tell me those candies that Grace liked.”
You’re not going to buy my forgiveness with Skittles, Stratt.
Doesn’t matter. You’re on the move again. This time, no doubt, to do your actual job instead of this masochistic penance process. Except, no, that’s not the case because you’re retracing your steps to Ilyukhina’s bedroom. The playfulness of earlier has evaporated, Ilyukhina and Yao chatting in low tones you can barely pick up.
“Even if he said yes, I’m concerned he will not be mission-ready upon waking,” Yao paces the room in slow, purposeful strides. “And now I don’t even know what to say or how to lead him.”
Ilyukhina inspects a Cats t-shirt while she talks, though she cannot match your precision with folding it. “Grace is scared, not unkind. Once we’re all in space together, maybe the kindness will outweigh the fear?”
“Speaking of Grace,” you interrupt, mercifully sparing us all from discovering whether Yao would refute that statement about the weight of my kindness. I know there’s an ulterior motive, I know you want to keep my cowardice out of sight to maintain crew cohesion, but…I appreciate it all the same.
Yao and Ilyukhina once again snap to attention.
“Do either of you have any photographs of him?” you finish, oddly vulnerable on both our behalfs. I don’t understand it, how your voice can dip and wobble but your body can remain so steady. Ever mysterious, even in this.
Yao shakes his head. “I only have pictures from home.”
“I might…” Ilyukhina says slowly. She drops her shirt into her case, turning to pick through polaroids piled haphazardly on her dresser. You step inside, peering over her shoulder to inspect the options.
Her collection reveals a side of Stratt’s Vat entirely foreign to you. There’s many shots of the astronauts preparing for the mission, including a great one of all three original teammates looking purposefully dejected and soggy after pool training. But there’s also plenty of photos of team bonding. Ilyukhina’s arm slung over a guard’s shoulder as they raise a drink, the crew carrying a birthday cake to an unaware Yao, Dubois and Shapiro posing on the bow of the ship in the classic Titanic pose. There’s even one of you singing karaoke.
For a moment, you don’t see highly skilled pilots and engineers and scientists, you just see people.
You spot my sole photo first. Unlike the others, which are practically bursting with life, mine might just win the award for “lamest possible polaroid.” I’m alone in my lab gear, glancing up at the camera with a look of confusion. Your heart pinches as you reach out for it.
“Can I take this one?” you ask, “We’re trying to pack for Grace, but there wasn’t much time to coordinate.”
Another lie. You could have done more. You knew from the second we got the casualties report that I would be going in their stead, you had time to mobilize something, anything, for my final journey. But that would have meant wasting precious resources and risked alerting me to your plans. So you’d—
—You’d pinned your hopes on me accepting willingly. A seriously big oversight on your part.
“He always seemed so busy with you,” Ilyukhina half explains, half apologizes.
You wave her off. “This is perfect. Thank you.”
As you make your way back to my room, you keep glancing down at my polaroid, mixed emotions roiling in your gut every time you do. It’s funny. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you might actually miss having me by your side. Eva Stratt, world’s most powerful dictator, suddenly feeling vulnerable at the loss of the random middle school teacher she kidnapped.
It actually takes effort for you to relinquish my sad single photo to my case, you even make several false starts before finally laying it between the two foxes on my cardigan. You press two fingers to the edge of the photograph, close enough to nearly touch the edge of my lab coat, not enough to mar the image with your prints.
“Safe travels, Doctor Grace,” you murmur.
It feels a bit like that night at karaoke, when you held my gaze and shared something mostly meant for the both of us. You hum this like I’m going to understand you now, or later, I guess, whenever I finally wake up.
Only, I don’t think I ever understood you, Stratt. I knew you were ruthless, but I never quite figured out what that meant until you put me down like a dog. I know you’re capable of seeing us as human beings, but that doesn’t seem to stop you from moving us like chess pieces across your board.
I’d say go to hell, but you’d probably just oust Satan and run that place too.
Your phone rings, wrenching you from your reverie. In the mere seconds it takes to answer, you’re already out the door. Your conversation lasts only a minute, held exclusively in sentences no longer than five words apiece: Yes — I see — No — I’ll be right there.
You don’t look back at my room.
The energy on base is a muted buzz, the so close and yet so far jitters that probably accompany any launch are dialed up to eleven now. This isn’t a typical space launch. Even you try not to think about what it would mean if the launch of the Hail Mary crew failed. The potential loss — of expertise combined with coma resistance, anyway — lodges in your throat.
You almost prefer the icy bite of wind when you exit the building. The sting keeps you present, focused on the tasks of today rather than the risks of tomorrow. Your gaze drifts to the edge of the base, tracing the whorls of the barbed-wire fence which marks the last thing I’ll ever see on my home planet. If you sniffle, it’s only because of the chill.
The few people outside don’t pay you any attention as you make your way to a small building that I don’t recognize. I’ve been pretty busy with the science preparations, so I mostly just know the routes to and from the lab, the cafeteria, and my bedroom. You swing open the door and—
Oh.
It’s the medical area.
I don’t like where this is going.
The interior is a flurry of activity, doctors and nurses and scientists all zig-zagging around each other like cars in rush-hour traffic. You pass through the chaos like a hot knife in butter, people melting out of your way with practiced ease. Is it weird, living like this? Like you’re not quite one of them?
There’s an irony there. All this is happening because of astrophage — or more to the point, because of aliens — and here you are becoming a bit more alien yourself. Or maybe you’ve always been this way and the world has finally created a place where you fit.
One of the doctors falls in step beside you.
“Doctor Lamai, what is the timeline?” you ask, already prepared for this dance.
“Twenty minutes,” she says, “My team is getting everything ready now.”
You nod. “Anyone in the room?”
“Just one of yours. We’ll enter to start final preparations in…” she checks her watch, “About ten minutes.”
“That’s plenty of time, thank you,” You nod at Lamai and just like that, the conversation’s over, the doctor melting back into the crowd of people.
As the person who’s spent the most time by your side over the course of this project, I’ve known this is what your life is like. But I don’t think I ever realized how lonely it must be. I know I’m one to talk, Mr. No Family No Dog over here, but still. At least people act like people when we’re in the room together.
Then again, you never seemed to care one way or the other. You never got too anguished about how lonely your quasi-dictatorship could be, but power didn’t really go to your head. Heck, you had a knack for people, greeting everyone from heads of states to assistants by name. If you felt like this was anything but an ordinary day job, you didn’t show it.
Even though the clock is ticking, you pause for a full eighty-two seconds outside my door. Yes, I counted. The Mississippi method, if you’re wondering, though you’d probably have questions about the scientific accuracy of that approach.
Anyway, we both know what you’re gonna see when you open the door. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you’re afraid to face it. Tsk tsk, Stratt. If you can't face an unconscious man, how can you face anyone?
You take a long, deep breath, then turn the handle.
Carl sits near the bed. When he turns to see who has entered, you can't help but notice his eyes are red, cheeks shining ever so slightly. Annoyance flares in your chest, though you already know what it masks. There's not enough time left to pretend you're anything more than jealous.
He will get to have regrets. You aren't afforded that luxury.
“It’s almost time,” you tell him.
“Can I—” Carl croaks. He exhales a shaky breath, though his lip still trembles when he asks, “Can I have a minute to say goodbye?”
“You have thirty seconds.”
He nods, turning away from you to face the body in the bed. The miracle of such close quarters is everyone has gotten used to fabricating privacy. You help in that matter, reviewing your ever-expanding to-do list in an attempt to tune out Carl’s quiet last words to me.
There’s an odd crinkling sound, and then Carl’s up, saluting you with wet cheeks. “I’ll wait outside,” his voice husky from tears.
He’s gone before you can respond, leaving you alone in the room.
Just you and me.
The chatter of my medical machinery cuts the silence: even in unconsciousness, I still can’t help but say more than I intend. You stretch the journey to my bedside into methodical steps in time with my breathing, hesitating only when you reach my bedside.
It’s surprising how ordinary I look. Sure, there’s several wires and tubes that lead to various monitors, and yes I have a breathing mask strapped to my face, but other than that…normal. In fact, you’re reminded of the times you’ve caught me sleeping on the job. Just remove the mask, add glasses dangling precariously from my ear and this could be just another day together.
You sway on your feet at the thought, landing in Carl’s chair with a thud.
Closer to my body now, you notice Carl’s final gift to me: a bag of sour Skittles tucked under my hand. You shake your head.
“He was always such a pushover with you,” you tell me, retrieving the candy to slip into your coat pocket. “I’ll make sure we pack you more of these.”
Easy conversation already finished, you fall silent again. My medical equipment fills the gap, telling you my breathing is steady, my heartbeat is strong. At least my body is reliable.
“Doctor Grace,” you say finally. No, that doesn’t seem to match the gravity here. You try again. “Ryland—” You make a face like you’ve just bitten into an overripe peach, finally correcting to, “Grace.”
“This is not an apology. It is important to me to set that expectation: I feel no obligation to apologize to you for my actions. To be even more blunt, I do not regret murdering you, not with how many lives we have at stake.”
Well. That’s not what I expected. Glad you’re taking the time to tell me how right you are about killing me. Really a thoughtful send off.
“I do not expect you to agree, or understand, or forgive my decision. At the end of the day, I am still responsible for your death. But Doct— Grace. I want to send you into the unknown with my conviction: I truly believe you can do what it takes to save our world. You are brilliant, and capable, and—” Here, your voice actually catches. “and kind.”
“You know me well enough to know I say none of these things lightly. And I know you well enough to know you still won’t forgive me for what I’ve done.”
Damn right I won’t.
“That’s okay, Grace,” you add softly. Hesitantly, you reach out and take my hand. “I’m not asking for absolution.”
I should be reveling in my righteous fury. I should be wishing hellfire and damnation on you. But honestly? All I can think about is that this might just be the last time someone ever touches me this gently. All I can think about is the fact I thought you were my friend — maybe my only friend, definitely my closest friend — and I’ve lost you forever.
All I can think is I might have been your only friend, your closest friend, and you’ve ruined that, but in the wreckage you’re giving me the only thing you can: my anger. I can’t begrudge the people Earth or the astronauts I’m working alongside, but I can be angry at you.
Even though I’m going to miss you.
“I’m going to miss you,” you say too, and gosh, if we didn’t make a strangely connected pair here on Earth.
You lean forward, my hand still gripped in yours, and press a soft kiss to my forehead. “Godspeed, Ryland Grace.”
There’s a knock at the door, perfectly timed for you, as usual. You should snap to attention, hop to your feet to give a brisk briefing. Instead, you pause, brushing my hair from my eyes, before calling out, “Come in.”
Doctor Lamai enters, a few nurses at her heels. “We’re ready to start the coma induction process, if you are?”
You only nod.
“Would you like to stay while we do it?”
I hate you.
Please stay.
"Yes, please."
I hate you.
I'll miss you.
Your hand does not leave mine.