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In the spring semester of Ryland’s sophomore year at University of Chicago, he met Eva Stratt.
Well, at first, he just observed her.
They only shared one class together, a required history course. Eva and their professor, Dr. Ryker, mutually hated each other, and the animosity started the very first day she walked into the room. The classroom was set up in a circle, with desks and chairs all facing toward the center to facilitate “Socratic discussion.” Dr. Ryker had come from Oxford, and made sure that everybody knew it. He liked to bring up his education and qualifications, all with the implication that he was much too good to be teaching an introductory course in U.S. history.
Eva was a senior History major who had her introductory credit screwed up by an advisor. Not only did she know most everything taught in the class, she also probably knew more than their professor, who thought of himself as a European History scholar.
On that first day, Ryker lectured on the introduction of colonialism to the Americas. Directly across from Ryland, Stratt raised her hand and politely informed Ryker, with an elegant European accent, that some information on his slides was outdated.
Ryland honestly didn’t care if things were accurate or not since he was playing Tetris on his computer through the lecture, but the way Ryker got red-faced and incomprehensible was very noticeable, and the entire class perked up to pay attention to their exchange. While student corrections like this had happened in Ryland’s engineering and biology courses before, it tended not to happen this publicly, in the middle of class.
Looking back, Eva liked to say that she should’ve said it privately, should’ve spoken to Ryker after class and posed it more as a question. But at the time, she was an accelerated Master’s student about to go work for the United Nations, and she was very sure of herself. She thought everyone was as interested in the right answer as she was.
This was one of the rare ways in which she and Ryland were similar.
Ryland didn’t talk to her that first day, or any class after that, but by the end of the semester, he felt like he had a good assessment of who she was. She was evidently passionate and intelligent, and she had a reputation beyond the classroom from being involved in various human rights student organizations.
By May, he had come up with the brilliant concept of asking her out, but they hadn’t even said a word to each other yet. He almost spoke to her after class a few times, but he had always chickened out.
Then, at a party at the end of that year, he saw her again, bracketed by the girls she was always with. This time, he was emboldened by the power of extremely potent jungle juice, so he pushed his way through the dense crowd and talked to her, half-yelling over the loud music.
He felt like there was a spark between them, which his friends called delusional, but she was a week from a flight to move back to Europe, so it wasn’t even realistic to date.
He did ask about going out on one date before she left, just in case she was interested in one night of conversation. She let him down gently, and he took the rejection in stride.
It just wasn’t meant to be.
—
Six years later, he was presenting at a conference in Denmark on his theories of water-based life forms. Fueled by the self-righteousness of someone in their twenties, he got a little carried away with insulting the people who had spent half a decade talking down to him. At the time, it felt like vindication. He had been so sure that he was right—just like Eva had been in history so long ago. In the same way she had made her righteousness public, so did he. Except, instead of one Dr. Ryker, he was standing in front of a thousand Dr. Rykers.
It didn’t go well. Obviously.
After most of the attendees had gone to their hotels for the night, Ryland ended up sitting on the steps outside the main entrance of the auditorium, fuming. He had lost the point of his thesis conclusion in his anger, and instead of communicating what he wanted to about his project, all he had done was potentially screw his career over.
Appropriately, it was raining. Thick, heavy drops fell onto the concrete, sparse but large. Occasionally they hit him and he took it, unmoving. He stared at the concrete, his hands clasped behind his neck, until a pair of heels clicked up toward him.
He lifted his chin and met Stratt’s eyes. Older and more sturdy, but definitely the same girl from sophomore year. Her reddish-blonde hair was bracketed by the black umbrella over her, making it seem impossibly bright in the grey weather. For a second he was in a stupor, wondering why the girl of his college dreams was at a UNESCO conference, and then he wondered if he was just having a mental breakdown.
“You’re not a scientist,” was the first thing he said, a bit dumbly.
Eva smiled, and it made her features soften. “Thank God for that,” she said. “No, I’m attending on behalf of other interests.”
He stared at her.
“I could see you sulking from my window,” she told him, pointing back to the tall hotel across the street with the extra umbrella in her hand. “I have a spare.” She held it out to him.
Ryland took it gingerly, but didn’t open it. “Do you…remember me?” He pointed at himself.
“Of course.” Apparently realizing he wasn’t going to use the umbrella, Eva sat down on the steps next to him, holding hers over both of them.
“So, how have you been?” Ryland said awkwardly, unsure how to ask if she had witnessed the utter humiliation ritual he had put himself through.
“Well,” she said primly, “I liked your presentation.”
He groaned and put his head in his hands. He could hear her laugh next to him. “It was terrible,” he said into his palms.
“It was,” she agreed, “but I thought the information was interesting.”
Ryland nodded into the silence, then lifted his head and looked over at her. “Why are you talking to me?”
She frowned. “Why not?”
“We were never even friends,” he said, soft. “We were never even—we’re basically strangers.”
She shrugged a little, making her black sweater wrinkle at her shoulders. “If you don’t want me to talk to you—“
“No—wait,” he said, sounding painfully desperate. “I do. I just thought you would’ve forgotten me by now.”
“I don’t forget people,” she told him, blinking at him as if he was being dramatic.
“Well, I do, but I don’t forget people like you,” he said.
He must have surprised her, because she leaned back from him with a smile dancing on her lips.
Fuck it.
“Do you want to go get a drink?” he asked. “Because I really, really need a drink.”
Her smile grew, and she nodded. He stood, opening his umbrella, and offered her his hand to stand.
Soft fingers slipped into his.
The next day of the conference, Ryland wasn’t in attendance. Neither was Eva.
They spent most of the morning lazing in his hotel bed, talking about nothing and everything, never getting bored.
At some point she pulled out a cigarette as they sat there against the headboard, lighting it with the burning candle on the nightstand.
“That’s super against the rules,” he said, raising his brows.
“The window’s open,” she said flippantly, taking a long drag that hollowed her cheeks.
It was humid and dim in the room because of the storm clouds collected outside, and the fiery red of the cigarette tip illuminated her cheeks, making them glow softly. Ryland had always found the habit gross and damaging, but in her steady fingers, it felt as much of a sin as sex did.
“Aren’t you afraid of dying?” he asked her, gesturing to the half-empty pack on the bed.
She exhaled, eyes focused on the far wall. “It’s bad form to ask the women you sleep with about their existential fears.”
“I don’t sleep around,” he assured quickly.
She arched her brow. “I’m honored, then.”
“I…” he trailed off. He didn’t tell her that he hadn’t slept with anyone since his ex, and she was the second person he had ever been with. It didn’t mean the same thing to her as it did to him. He didn’t think someone as beautiful and headstrong as Eva would want him beyond a one-night stand. He pressed a smile into his expression, moving closer to her to nudge the cigarette away from her mouth to take its place. She went with him, lips melting together.
If you had asked him at the time, Ryland would’ve called what he was feeling then love—but now he knew it wasn’t. Now he knew what love really felt like, and she had been the one to show him. But that wouldn’t come for some time.
When she left to go back to Venice at the close of the conference, he dropped her off at the airport.
She gave him a perfunctory hug at the terminal entrance, and after, she leaned close to his ear, surrounding him with the addictive scent of her perfume. “I put my contact number in your phone. Don’t hesitate to call me.”
Then she was gone, disappearing behind the automatic doors to the terminal.
It took four days for him to work up the courage to call, but he did. He was sitting on a bench outside his Berkeley lab building, nervously tapping his foot as the dial tone rang. It clicked.
“Stratt,” she greeted shortly over the phone, and then, before Ryland could say anything—“Ryland?”
He grinned, and resisted the urge to pump his fist in the air. “Yeah, it’s me. Hey, so you said I could call, so here I am, calling…”
—
Things happened quickly from there. Ryland’s mom had always thought that he and Eva had moved too fast in their relationship, but to them, it didn’t feel fast. It was just natural, like entropy. It was so easy to fall in love with Eva Stratt.
A year after they started talking, she was getting a United States job placement, and Ryland’s academic future was mostly turned to dust. He finished his PhD and moved to Washington, D.C., where she was going to be located.
Against all advice, they moved in together.
Considering his dwindling postdoc prospects, Eva encouraged him to find an alternate career path. He looked into engineering or going back to academia to study something else, but that was going to take time to plan out. In the meantime, he became an elementary school teacher—and he really liked it.
That wasn’t surprising. He had TA’d every semester during his upperclassman years, but he liked teaching even more with little kids.
Unlike undergraduates, kids never pretended to know anything. They were upfront about where their knowledge ended and expected you to fill in the gaps. It was like their brains were puzzles, and all they did was spend their time trying to find the pieces so they could build a complete picture of the world.
He did well enough with elementary school that he was moved up to teach middle school, seventh-grade science. His classroom was full of trinkets from students and science projects covering every surface. He had a mini library full of science books, ranging from ones with just pictures to ones with dense text for all kinds of students.
He loved getting graduation letters in the mail from students he had taught years ago.
“Eva, look!” he exclaimed, showing her a postcard from one of his old students. “Henrietta’s going to Yale for biomedical sciences!”
She smiled softly at him. “Congratulations,” she said, low and warm, always understanding his pride.
While Ryland was working a regular 8-6, Eva was almost always busy with meetings, conferences, and trips; events she could never tell him anything about. Eventually, he stopped asking. The specifics of her career were a mystery to him, but he let that go in exchange for figuring out the mystery that was Eva herself.
They spent two years in that little apartment in DC, working constantly, until it was financially reasonable to move into a larger place.
Ryland proposed when she got a new job in New York City. He told her to take it and she did, but before she left they made sure that in the eyes of everybody and the law, they were partners.
They took their honeymoon in Europe, going to cities Eva seemed to know so much about but could never tell him why.
His mom asked them both once, a thin smile plastered on her face, about the timeline for kids.
“No kids,” Eva said vehemently, making a disgusted face. This was before she fully learned to school her expressions, back when she had visual subtitles on for how she felt. “Hm. No.”
Ryland smiled at her, then his mom. “I feel like she summarized our timeline pretty well,” he added cheerfully.
His mom didn’t stop asking, but he and Eva knew where they were, and that’s what mattered.
They celebrated their birthdays over wine and too much cake, had lots of sex, went to museums and traveled on their combined salaries. They fit this into the days they actually saw each other, which was tight, but they made it work.
They had a relatively weird life, but a good one, and Ryland wasn’t going to trade it for the world.
—
He didn’t really learn what Eva did for work until the week after the Petrova Line sample retrieval.
They watched the newscast together, sitting on the couch with their backs pushed straight from anxiety. Eva’s left hand was clasped in Ryland’s right.
Grainy footage showed the retrieval of the Petrova samples, and then the live coverage of the dots moving. They looked alive.
Ryland sat there in shock, heart hammering from simultaneous excitement and fear.
Eva’s hand pulled away.
He turned to her to say something about how cool this was for science, maybe to provide some context on biology as he was always happy to do, but she stood abruptly.
“I have to take a call,” she told him, and disappeared from the living room.
In her absence, the TV continued on. Newscasters marveled on and on over the alien that was threatening to kill them all, while Ryland stared down the empty hallway to the closed door of his wife’s office, uneasy.
The next morning she was on a four AM flight out of the city. Ryland drove her, even though she wanted him to sleep and wanted to Uber.
It felt like something big was encroaching on their little pocket of bliss. Ryland was trying to hold onto every little moment they could share, before whatever it was hit them.
Nine days later, Eva showed up to his work.
The kids were just let out for the day, and he was thankfully free from pick-up duty on Wednesdays, so he was working alone in his classroom. For a moment, when she entered, he thought maybe this was a surprise visit and rose to greet her with a smile—but she didn’t reciprocate.
She looked haggard and tired. She pulled her bag further up her shoulder and pressed her arms to her stomach. This was always how she posed when she was nervous.
But she wasn’t supposed to be nervous around him. They were open books with each other.
“What is it?” he asked immediately, crossing the room to hold her arms, squeezing softly when she didn’t respond. “Eva…”
“Can you sit down?” she asked stiffly.
He did, easing into one of the little chairs that was meant for a student half his size. His knees were bunched up uncomfortably, but he didn’t complain.
Eva stayed standing. “I’ve been promoted.”
“Okay, that’s great,” Ryland said slowly, likely coming across as uncaring but simply too filled with dread to properly congratulate her. “But…that’s not all of it.”
“That’s not even a sliver of it,” she said quietly, continuing: “In response to the Petrova Line, a combination of international agencies assembled a group to save the Earth called the Petrova Taskforce.”
“That’s good; they’re taking it seriously,” Ryland said distractedly, waiting for her to tell him what he’d already just deduced.
“And I was chosen by a unanimous vote to lead it.”
“Geez,” Ryland muttered, leaning back against the desk hard. It hit his ribs, sharp pain splitting against his heart. “Eva—that’s, that’s so much—“
She took a steady inhale and then forced a tight smile. She usually turned that expression on around people she didn’t know well, not him. “I knew this was coming. I am the only person they will…put in this position.”
“Why isn’t anybody else doing it?” he demanded. “This is so much weight to put on your shoulders. They should give it to—to some UN guy, or ESA or NASA. Someone else. I’m not saying you’re not qualified; you’re the most qualified woman I know—“
“They don’t care enough.” She shrugged one shoulder, expression wry. “They don’t care about the Earth. The current solutions to the sun dimming is underground bunkers or greenhouse domes for the cities. But none of that is possible at scale for billions of people. And they know it. They don’t care.”
“So, what. We can’t do bunkers, we can’t do domes. What’s the solution?” he asked, now urgently curious. This question had already kept him awake every night since Eva had left.
“We’ll see. For now, we need to know what the Petrova Line actually is. The samples will arrive soon, and we need someone to examine them.”
“Okay,” Ryland said slowly. “Who’s that gonna be, you?” he asked, half-joking.
“It’s you.”
He pointed at himself, incredulous, and then laughed. “Okay. Come on.”
She opened her mouth to respond—the school bell over their heads rang, and he sighed. “We have to get out of here,” he said. “Let me grab my bag, and then we’ll talk. Okay?”
She waited patiently for him to pack his bag, then walked with him outside.
“I wanted privacy,” she told him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to ambush you in your classroom.”
“Why not home?” he asked, and then realized the large black van with four ridiculously obvious government security agents standing next to it. They had black sunglasses and ties and jackets; the whole look. “Huh.”
“I have an extensive security detail,” she said. He looked over at her, and she smiled wryly. “If I die, a lot of things fall apart.”
“If you die?” Ryland asked, aghast. “Why would you die?”
“Never mind,” she said tightly. “I’m serious about analyzing the Petrova dots.”
“And I’m seriously telling you that I’m not the guy to do it. You saw my disgraceful crash from academia, remember? Right before we slept together?”
She nodded. “And I was impressed. Why do you think we slept together?”
Ryland walked in silence for a moment, following Eva’s subtle guidance towards the van. He wanted to say no, wanted to turn a blind eye towards what was probably going to literally wipe out all of humanity. All of its history, its art, its innovations. All of its people.
But Eva was working on it. Leading the project to solve it. Saving the world.
He stopped before they got too close to the guards and spun to face her. “I don’t want you to deal with this alone.”
“It’s my job.”
“I know, I know. But you can tell me anything,” he told her. “This is unprecedented and seems like a huge mental weight. I’ll help you with this if you promise to keep me updated. You can’t sit on this all alone, Eva.”
She took a deep breath and looked away from him towards the school. He followed her gaze. Children were running towards their parents' cars, tossing their backpacks in before hopping in themselves.
Eva turned back to him, eyes pinking at the edges. “Okay. Deal. I need your help,” she said softly, so quiet that the bodyguards behind him couldn’t hear. “Even if we weren’t married, I still would’ve come to you.”
He was ninety-nine percent sure that was false, even if she believed it, but he nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “What do I have to do?”
—
Ryland discovered the cells—astrophage, he coined—were mostly made up of water. Maybe he was the waste of carbon.
Devastated, he sat in the tunnel outside the lab, clutching his thermos from the lunch he had packed for school and stuffing lukewarm pasta into his mouth to soothe the hurt.
Eva appeared from around the corner and walked up to him. This all felt reminiscent of sitting outside the UNESCO conference, but this time she was wearing boots, having long since given up the pretense that heels were comfortable to stand in all day.
Her hands were in her pockets, and as she looked down at him, strands of her hair fell into her face. Ryland had the urge to stand up and sweep them away from her cheekbones, but didn’t.
“I’m sorry,” was the first thing she said. “That you were wrong.”
“Me too,” he muttered.
But with her here, he felt less like he could feel sorry for himself. She had that effect on him. He wasn’t able to throw a pity party when she was around. It was embarrassing.
“So now what?” he asked, squinting up at her. He had left his glasses somewhere in the decontamination room.
“I have almost four hundred scientists across the world ready to look at these samples,” she said. “Thank you for helping. None of them wanted to touch it because they were scared to die.”
“Right,” he said, huffing humorlessly. “Yeah, I was wondering. Is that what I was there for? Was I expendable?”
She went still, as if he had insulted her. “It’s already been thoroughly tested with human DNA and on human cells. I never would’ve put you in the room if I thought there was a serious risk to your life,” she told him vehemently.
“Then…why me?”
She gestured back in the direction of the lab. “For this exact reason. You figured out so much in only a few hours. You’re curious,” she said. “And you poke and dissect things and people until you figure out why they are the way they are.”
“…Are you talking about yourself?” he asked, smiling slightly.
“No,” she scoffed, looking away. “Don’t even start.”
He laughed a little. His chest felt lighter.
“I’ll be home much later,” she said, sobering. “But I left you three cells. Plus the one you killed. I think it’s enough to keep you busy while I’m gone.”
“How many cells are the other scientists getting?” he asked.
She raised her brows and pressed her lips together, suppressing a smile. “Oh, what—you want to know if you’re getting preferential treatment?”
He raised his hands in surrender. “No, no, I was just curious.”
She walked to him, leaned down, and dropped a kiss on the top of his head.
“I’m sure you’ll discover something great,” she murmured.
Then she was walking off.
“Wait. What?” Ryland stared after her, then stood. “Eva!”
He jogged out to the tarmac and was met with hundreds of people moving from planes to the warehouse to the lab. And there his wife was, walking away from him with her dark coat swaying around her knees. It was fascinating to see how government officials, security, and pretty much everyone gravitated toward Eva, like she was a planet they orbited. Or no—a sun. She was the center of the solar system, and for a moment Ryland couldn’t help but feel like just another one of the planets.
But he wasn’t.
He squeezed through people and her security to get to her. “So that’s it?” he asked, matching her stride as best he could. “How long will you be gone?”
She sighed through her nose and looked up at the sky. “I don’t know,” she said, then darted her gaze back to him. “It could be a while.”
“Could I…” he started, but trailed off. He couldn’t go with her. This wasn’t his world. It wasn’t even his job. He gave up. “Okay.”
She gestured with her chin toward the security guard towering behind Ryland. He whirled around and looked up at the tank of a guy.
“This is Carl,” Eva said. “He’ll take good care of you.”
“I get a security guard?” Ryland asked, raising his brows. “Okay—that is pretty cool. Um. Security from what?”
Eva couldn’t answer; a sleek black helicopter was suddenly approaching from overhead, getting louder as it neared the landing pad.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” she called, hair whipping in the waves from the chopper. She walked backward a few steps so she could look at him a little longer before turning away.
Then she disappeared into the helicopter with the other important-looking officials.
Ryland watched her go, feeling something twist tightly in his gut.
Then he looked at Carl.
“We’re married,” he said, holding up his left hand in case the statement wasn’t clear. “That’s my wife.” Even with the nervousness about the Petrova line, there was that age-old pride.
“Congratulations,” Carl said flatly.
—
Ryland figured out why the Astrophage were going to Venus, promptly lost all three of them, then found four of them, which made him realize how they bred. These rapid-fire discoveries were interspersed with Home Depot and Sonic runs with Carl, who was becoming his new best friend.
Despite the excitement of those few days of initial research, each night, he went home to an empty, cold bed.
—
His heart was pounding as he dialed Eva and slid to the floor, clutching his phone to his ear.
“Hi, darling,” she said, sounding tired.
“Carl and I made a baby,” he burst out, giddy.
A pause. “What?”
“Platonically,” he added. “I figured out how astrophage breed.”
She said something illegible away from the receiver, then returned, breath crackling over the speaker. “I knew you would be brilliant,” she said warmly. “Stay there.”
“Stay where?” Ryland asked, and then the door to his breeding room (terrible name) was opening and Carl was in the doorway, telling him to grab his stuff.
The line was dead when he looked back at his phone.
—
Top three worst experiences of his adult life:
- A few years back, getting the call that Eva had been in a car accident in Denmark (she was just bruised, but that was a horrible few hours.)
- That one time he accidentally ate weed brownies and thought people were going to come down from his ceiling tiles and eat him.
- Flying in an 18F Super Hornet to the Petrova Taskforce aircraft carrier. (New addition)
Which said a lot about how privileged of a life he’d had. But in the jet, stomach in his throat and head separating from his body, Ryland couldn’t think of anything worse than this.
He stumbled out of the plane with bile rising in his throat, and holy thanks, his wife was waiting right there with a worried expression.
“Do you have—thanks,” he mumbled, taking the proffered traffic cone. He coated the insides with rancid-smelling vomit, careless of how he looked to the people around him. He could barely stomach a car ride, much less that.
“I would have avoided that if we had any time,” Eva told him lowly, discreetly rubbing his back. The people around them were giving them a wide berth, but certainly they would’ve noticed her comforting him so intimately. “I’m sorry.”
“Mmhm,” he managed, giving her a thumbs up. When he was upright, he almost leaned in for a kiss and then remembered what his mouth was just doing.
“Do you guys have water?” he asked hoarsely as they started walking to the interior of the carrier.
Eva was handed two large coffees from an assistant, as if on cue. She handed him one, telling him to sip at it for now while she asked someone to grab him a water bottle. They pushed through the heavy metal door and ended up in a cramped ship hallway; people moved out of Eva’s way as she walked.
“Wait, so what are we doing here?” he asked, and she abruptly said, “Turn in here.”
“Turn in where?”
Eva pushed open a random door in the hallway and ushered him in. None of the many people that were with them went inside, so when she shut the door to what was evidently an empty meeting room, it was just the two of them.
“What is going on?” he asked her, still nauseous and unable to interpret his environment as a result. He sounded so loud in the room—but then he realized his ears just hadn’t popped yet. He set the coffee down and pressed at his ears with his palms to make a suction and yanked his hands away, releasing the pressure.
“Did they pop?” she asked him, softer.
“Yeah,” he answered, some of his dizziness fading. “Um. Did you fly me here for something in specific, or…?”
“In five minutes, I’m going to put you in front of some of the brightest minds in the world. And some idiots, but they’re some of the most powerful people in the world. And you’re going to tell them exactly what you did.”
“O…kay,” Ryland said slowly. “Couldn’t this have been a zoom call?”
“No. We have a lab here, where you’ll continue your research.” She cocked her head to the side. “Please.”
“The ‘please’ doesn’t really make this feel optional,” he said.
“You asked me to keep you in the loop,” she said with a shrug. “I can do that by giving you the most clearance I can offer you.”
“There’s a joke about nepotism to be made here,” he said with a small laugh.
“Can you do it?” she asked him simply.
Could he present his work to a crowd of people who could crush him in an instant? Could he truly make a return to research? Could he abandon his life for this, for the world?
For Eva, he could. For the Earth, he could. He wasn’t sure which one was influencing his decision more.
“I can,” he said, nodding. “If you never put me on one of those jets again. Any advice for this meeting?”
She laughed, despite how weary she seemed. It was a beautiful sound. “As long as you don’t call any of them a waste of Carbon, I think you’ll do fine,” she said wryly, patting him on the shoulder.
—
They told him the plan.
It was a terrible plan. But Ryland also had no better ideas, so. That was the plan.
Project Hail Mary, they all called it, very on the nose. Eva coined it, of course she did; she pretended to the rest that she didn’t, but Ryland knew her better.
That first year of work moved incredibly fast, packed with legal troubles, a lot of preparatory research and the beginning of astrophage breeding. It was also the easiest that their lives were ever going to be.
At first, Eva was never around on the carrier. Eventually, neither was he. He was always at an international lab or another, learning or teaching to get the brightest minds of the world up to speed.
When they did overlap, they fucked like it was their last time touching each other. They always finished with Eva curled against him, breathing hard, her ear pressed against his hammering heart. There was little he loved more in the world than having her against him, soft and drowsy. They both slept better when they shared a bed.
—
Getting to witness both polarizing sides of Eva within less than an hour was at times, unnerving.
“Of course this will work,” she said in meetings in the face of doubt, back ramrod-straight with confidence. “We have the best minds on Earth saving this planet. I have no doubt in our success.”
And then she would break down crying in their room, head limp against his shoulder. He would ask her what was wrong, and she would never articulate it. Sometimes all she would do was tug him into a kiss, into bed, and let go with him inside her.
She didn’t need to tell him what it was. He knew what fear tasted like.
Eva had a very vivid and respected reputation with the rest of the ship, and she worked hard to maintain it. It wasn’t just the ship. The entire world saw her as a passionate, confident woman. There were people that hated her for that, but the general public perception of her was positive. She was invited to do interviews that she rarely accepted, though Project Hail Mary’s budding PR department—originating from a series of poor taste tweets from one of their American sponsors—had her sit for a few. Ryland watched them from her room, on his phone with his knees pulled to his chest. She always looked so effortlessly regal, copper air cascading down her back and swaying every time she shook her head in response to the interviewers.
“I’m her husband,” he said quietly to himself, in a bit of awe.
They kept their relationship as lowkey as possible while still maintaining healthy amounts of time together. They weren’t going to sleep apart for the sake of image, so Ryland slept in her room when she was on the ship, though he technically had his own bunk in the officers' portside quarters. It was one of those things you didn’t talk about. They didn’t PDA all over the place in public, so people not on the ship had no idea they had ever known each other before the Petrova Line appeared. Even those on the ship played oblivious.
Ryland was naturally falling into step as the lead in the science division of the project, which was ridiculously terrifying. But it had less to do with Eva and more to do with how people just started coming to him for context on Astrophage physiology or intricacies in the project, causing a cascading effect where the new hires assumed he was in charge, and when he didn’t know the answer to a question, he went and learned it. The next person that asked him about it, he could answer them.
It felt a little like his middle school kids and their puzzles, trying to piece together the project. He even found himself slipping into his “teacher voice” sometimes, to the scientists’ consternation.
He even did it to Eva sometimes, unintentionally, and got gently whacked for it—or, if they were in public, a side-eye. She didn’t mind learning new things from him, but she disliked any hint of ‘talking down,’ as she called it.
Over the first year and half, he was essentially voted into higher positions, until he was slapped with a title that was longer than he cared to say fully. Effectively: director of the research and engineering initiatives.
“Do I get my own office?” he’d asked Eva, who’d rolled her eyes.
Two days later, he had a brand new office near the labs. She’d left a sticky note on the bare desk, which said: Director Grace, PhD. (official plaque on door coming soon. love you.)
—
When everyone was tested for the coma gene, Ryland knew Eva was one of the first to get her blood drawn. When it came back negative, he was privately relieved. She had been frustrated, he knew—but how could he be blamed for hoping she would never have a reason to sacrifice her life?
Leclerc had asked her, once, if it was hard asking people to give up their lives.
“No, not really,” she said, shaking her head and scrunching her face up the way she did when she was pretending not to care.
As if she hadn’t fallen to pieces in her office over having to choose a commander with children, because he was the best chance of success. As if she hadn’t fought tooth and nail when they told her to send five people with less food and personal items. As if she hadn’t been the one to insist the crew would get to choose the way they died. Eva was pragmatic to a point that she was known as a cold, machiavellian person—but she was also human to the point that only she could make Project Hail Mary succeed.
Ryland had stood there in that conversation and said nothing.
And then he tested positive, and she had looked up from the test score he handed her and looked at him with an unreadable expression.
He went to her and held her hands in his, squeezing. “Luckily,” he said, “I’m like, not even close to qualified to be a crew member. Nobody’s sending me up there.”
Her mouth had turned up in a facsimile of a smile, but her gaze was hollow.
And maybe even back then, Ryland knew.
He knew, and he pretended not to. Give us time, he had prayed, as if he had attended church at all after moving out of his parents’ house. Still, he begged God. Let me grow old with her.
—
Yao, Ilyukhina, and Dubois were awesome. Both them and the backup crew became the life of the party, somehow, despite being the ones actually giving up their lives for the project.
Maybe that was why. Who cared about workplace professionalism when you were giving up your life for the Earth?
Ilyukhina, in particular, was a ball of sunshine with enough English cobbled together to speak her mind. And also nosy.
“You and Stratt,” she said to him in the breakroom, over a beer she had offered him. Now he knew it was a trap. “You’re fucking, eh?”
He coughed. “I would say we’re…more than fucking,” he said awkwardly. “We’ve been together almost ten years.”
She glanced at his bare hand. He held it up and said, “I don’t wear it because of sterility. Eva doesn’t wear it because she doesn’t want people thinking of her as somebody’s wife. It’s never mattered that much to us.”
She shrugged. “If you love each other, who cares?” She leaned in and smiled at him, teeth glinting underneath the fluorescent light running along the low ceilings. “Besides, no ring gets you free drinks at bars, eh?”
She stood with a scrape of the barstool.
“Wait, that’s it?” Ryland asked, blinking. “I thought you wanted to talk about something.”
“That was it. Thank you! I win a big bet,” she said cheekily, before slipping out of the breakroom.
Ryland watched her go, a little flabbergasted. “There’s a bet?” he asked the still air.
Apparently, there was a huge bet. Eva knew about it, of course, so Ryland was the only person on the entire ship who had no idea how much money was being wagered over his relationship. The outcomes ranged from them being strangers to being friends with benefits to them being childhood best friends to lovers. Ilyukhina was one of the only ones who voted on plain old marriage, which Ryland suspected was because it was one of the most boring options.
It was obvious they had something going on, from how they were stuck together when they could be. Their quiet support to each other in touches to shoulders or thumbs ups from across the room.
But they had spent so much time apart over the years of the project, that even they sometimes felt adrift from each other. At least their love was always unwavering.
—
They had to make hard decisions.
Eva, specifically, had to make hard decisions. Nuking Antarctica while trying to minimize damage, paving over the Sahara, taking money away from dying agriculture and social systems to continue pumping money into a last ditch attempt at survival.
And with every new decision, she grew more sallow and tired, haunted by the lives she had traded for the rest of them. Ryland helped her where he could, but it felt like trying to control a puppet with fraying strings, first the limbs dropping away, then its head drooping down towards the ground, until the whole thing fell to a heap, unmoving.
—
Dubois and Shapiro died in an explosion that caked Ryland and Eva’s faces with heat, and then a few seconds later, smoke. The world was on fire around them, and he instinctively grabbed Eva’s wrist to pull her blindly away from the direction of the explosion.
But she slipped out of his grip and started running towards the explosion, with long, desperate strides. He ran after her; but she pulled far ahead of him, screaming herself hoarse into her walkie.
He had never seen her run like this, running for her life.
No, he realized, watching her stop when Carl intercepted her, like a tank was the only thing that could keep her from pushing forward—she dropped to her knees, sobbing wordlessly into the air.
She had been running for his life.
—
They sat in silence in her office.
She hadn’t even officially told him yet. He sat on the chair across from her, flexing his hands into the air. He hated this. He hated that he had let it come to this. He hated that the sky was so bright outside.
He hated that she had to be the one to sign off on his death.
“Are we still leaving at the same time?” he asked wetly. The tears had been building in his sinuses for a while, just waiting to be let out.
“Yes,” she responded quietly. “On the 28th.”
Nine days from now.
They only had nine days together, after nine years.
“Oh my god,” he said dumbly. “I can’t—I can’t—Eva, I can’t do this.”
She reached across the desk, pleading, and he grabbed her fingers like a drowning man, clutching on for dear life. He bowed his head and let it thunk onto the desk.
Her thumb ran over the ring that sat on his finger, slid on this morning to soothe himself as they waited for confirmation of the scientists’ deaths. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I’m so sorry. There’s nobody even close to your expertise and drive. I wish—I wish I had kept you far from this project. I wish that you weren't the best option now. In fact, you have been the best option, a singularity, but I made excuses, using you to teach them instead of simply sending you.”
Blaming herself. He had to pull himself together and stop it.
As had always been the case, he had never been able to wallow and pity himself when she was nearby.
Ryland lifted his head and forced a smile, unable to swallow around the rising dread in his throat. “It’ll be okay,” he reassured her, flipping his hand to hold her fingers.
“I’ll be okay,” he lied.
—
They took a lot of walks.
In between their respective last-minute duties, they scrapped together as much outdoor time as they could possibly manage, so that Ryland could see the Earth and etch its beauty into his mind one last time. They walked in silence along the foot-beaten paths in the woods near Baikonur, Carl or another guard trailing behind. Ryland wracked his brain for something to say, knowing he had so little time to tell her what he needed to, but in his fear, his brain was blanking.
Once, they were far out enough from the complex, Ryland paused and turned to her. Thoughts had been swimming in his brain for a while, taking shape into something she wasn’t going to like to hear.
“I’m scared of myself,” he admitted. “I know I won’t…jeopardize the mission. But we both know the coma causes disorientation, all these issues…I think I might do something stupid if I realize what I left behind.”
She was quiet for a long, long moment.
“We have a, a French drug,” she shared haltingly, pressing her head backwards as if she was a turtle trying to hide inside its shell. “An amnesia drug. We considered using it on the crew, so that they didn’t know what they had lost.”
“Is it permanent?”
She shook her head vigorously. “No, God, that would be inhumane. It lasts a few weeks but its potency drops, and occasional memories begin returning within 48 hours of delivery.”
He stared at her, then exhaled. “So I take this drug, and I can…I can focus. And then I’ll get to remember you before I die.”
Her face crumpled for a second, a brief and ugly loss of composure, before she reassembled her expression and nodded stiffly. “Before you…die,” she echoed. “Yes.”
“I picked a painless option,” he told her quietly. “It could be worse.”
She barked out a short laugh, looking at her boots. “It could be worse,” she muttered sarcastically under her breath, so quiet he could barely make it out. “Right.”
She didn’t say anything for so long, eventually Ryland started to take tentative steps along the grass. Silently, she followed.
—
They packed for him together. She tucked in photos of them, from their honeymoon, their travels, their quiet moments at home. She included letters she wouldn’t let him read.
“To help you remember,” she said softly. “I want you to read them on the ship. I want there to be a few memories of me that are new to you, just in case.”
“I won’t forget you forever, Eva,” he told her gently.
She pursed her lips and went to pack his shirts, back facing him. All he wanted was to go to her and hug her, but every time he tried she ducked away. So he just watched her suffer from afar, helpless, drowning in the same ocean of fear that she was. If they grabbed onto each other, they would only sink faster.
—
Ryland was put down like a dog, trembling in her arms. He kept asking if he could pee or get more water, anything in a desperate and human plea for more time. Eventually he was reluctantly settled in the bed, on two calming pills, and Eva sat by him, holding onto his hand like it was the only thing tethering her to Earth.
What will she do when I’m gone, he thought half deliriously. Float away?
They could do nothing but kiss and whisper nonsensical pleas to each other, heedless of the medical personnel in the sterile room. His wedding band was on her thumb; hers on his pinky.
She came down and pressed her lips to his, over and over again, a mourning refrain. Salty tears were coming from her cheeks and touching his tongue, and he carefully turned his head to kiss up the glistening streaks along her cheeks. She made a strangled noise at the touch.
“I can’t do this,” she confessed to him, as quiet as a breath, face trembling over his. “I’m sorry I didn’t—I wish I hugged you, Ryland; I should have hugged you more, I should have taken more pictures and spent more nights with you and—”
“Director Stratt?” one of the nurses said quietly. “We need to start if you want them all loaded by the right time.”
She shut her eyes, pained, and pressed her forehead to his. “I love you,” she said. “So dearly. And I will still love you when you wake up in eleven years, even when you cannot remember us.”
Ryland swallowed thickly, nodding. His own tears were blocking his vision, and he swiped at them clumsily with his free hand. “I love you so much, Eva,” he told her. “So fucking much.”
She held herself there just a bit longer, as if trying to stretch the seconds into minutes, hours. He was doing the same, but time was indifferent to their game of pretend, and eventually she had to pull away. “Do it,” she said thickly.
He squeezed her hand tightly. “I’m gonna squeeze until I can’t anymore,” he told her softly. He was afraid, but he would be brave for her. This wasn’t about him, not anymore. “And when I stop squeezing,” he said softly. “You don’t let go, okay? You can squeeze me as hard as you need to.”
She nodded wordlessly, more tears trickling down her cheeks.
And he did. As the nurse injected something white into the IV in his skin, he took steady, measured breaths, and kept his eyes on hers.
“I love you,” he said, to keep himself from breaking down into panicked crying even as his body was chemically signalling to shut down, even as they got ready to intubate him, tubes in gloved hands hovering over him
He repeated it with a numbing tongue. “I love you,
I love you, I love you”
He squeezed until he could feel the connection
“I love you”
between his brain and his fingers fading, like he was just a mind
swimming alone in the darkness
i love you
we got nine good years, right
eva?
i love you
the last thing he saw before he lost was
her
“What’s two plus two?”