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The thing is that people had been bugging her about it for months; Come on, Stratt, you can’t just drop that you were in East German fucking youth choir and not give us one goddamn verse! She’s declined My Heart Will Go On. Livin’ on a Prayer. The first time they put on Wind of Change like peanut butter on a mouse trap was when she started to avoid the rec room altogether, preferring instead to watch white caps seethe and perfume her face with steaming coffee.
Whether or not anyone on board would believe it, it is true that Stratt possesses an alarming amount of knowledge on Harry Styles’ discography. If anyone presses later she’ll say it was only that she’s heard it a hundred times before in the mess hall. When the director waltzes in stone cold sober and scoops up a stray mic and puts on a performance that would make her choirmaster roll in his grave, blame the cooks, not imminent global glaciation.
Her eyes float around the room and snag on the scrappy biologist. He watches her sing, eyes gleaming, wearing open surprise and delight on his face.
Must be hard, he said. Hope turned him more boyish than even the hat did. Having to send everyone to their—you know.
Well. Besides the big, life-altering stuff—like sending people to their you know—he had to know that her mind works in tiny little sacrifices and obligations for everything else, too. Indulging her crew in this trivial way is just another one. Some distal part of her twitches in measured embarrassment, but it doesn’t feel accessible to her, in the same way that all the other emotions that have long packed themselves into boxes don’t feel accessible to her. There’s no reason to bring any of it to the surface. There hasn’t been since she started this job. She sings the song because she must sing it.
Actually it isn’t. She could see shock and dismay ripple across his expression, and it occurred to her that might have been what drew them together as friends. She liked that he never pretended his response to her brute pragmatism was anything but flat rejection, no matter how many times it hit him in the face like cold water.
The room is buoyant. Her crew raises their bottles and stomps their feet and whistles and hollers. Grace has one hand on his hip, the other angled to prop up his head, and there’s a small smile on his lips that some weaker part of her imagines is reserved for her. Maybe he understands after all, that it’s for them, that in the end her image hardly matters.
In thirty years no one in this room will be dwelling on this moment. If they weren’t being sent to their deaths on this suicide mission, ice death would probably get the rest of them.
“Good morning, Dr. Grace. Please report on the status of your mental wellbeing.”
He might be more receptive to the ship’s invasiveness if the others were still alive, and if they were driving each other crazy and wanted to kill each other and needed Mary to play pacifist. But the universe played cosmic dice and rolled solo on him, and so as it is it just feels insulting. A little morbid, too, knowing that someday any answers he provides will be part of the inquest on how exactly the lone astronaut faded away, light years from home and consumed by his own madness.
Is this madness?
Fragments of someone else’s life stream by at a constant acceleration of 1.5 g. He vaguely recalls a face though he isn’t confident that he could pick it out from a crowd. The lilt of an accent strikes him at odd moments as though it rests on the tip of his own tongue. And then there’s that feeling, coursing like freezing water beneath it all: that he had wanted to take a step closer—towards…?—that as weeks turned into months the sea sickness subsided but something else—what…?—churned in his stomach.
It hurts his brain to think about—and also just hurts, even if he can’t say why—so Grace dithers or otherwise makes up an answer. Sometimes a mild emergency will arise at the perfect moment, a stray asteroid or something in Mary’s path, and she’ll drop it in favour of diverting to life preserving measures for her lone astronaut. Her timing this time isn’t bad though. He’s been despondent, putting around the hull aimlessly as she coasts towards Tau Ceti.
Feeling a little guilty about his avoidance, Grace tells her, “I mean, I’m doing pretty much the same as last week.”
“Insufficient detail. Please elaborate.”
“I don’t know, Mary. It’s confusing. It’s a feeling. Famously difficult for a computer to understand.”
“Insufficient detail. Please elaborate.”
“Wish I could. Just one major problem: I can’t remember.”
“Retrograde amnesia is a known symptom following prolonged anesthesia. The window of amnesia is expected to shorten over time. In the meantime, practicing self-care is critical for your recovery. This includes but is not limited to eating a balanced diet, maintaining good sleep hygiene, and practicing yoga.” A pause. Sometimes he swears she gives herself ideas. “Would you like to engage in a guided yog—”
“Uhhh. Not really.”
He watches them spin away from stars into more stars, more incomprehensible black, and thinks maybe he should be nicer to the closest thing to company he has.
“Maybe later.”
“It is my pleasure to be at your assistance, Dr. Grace.”
Stratt stands at the edge of the highway and spends a few minutes staring at the house. It sits alone on a hill that slopes down to the surf, the rugged outcropping rising forebodingly behind it. Up here the wind is already severe. Stratt traces the least lethal route from point A to B, mutters a string of swear words, and gathers her hair into a bun before she starts the descent.
The bun lasts all of five minutes and she works up enough of a sweat to have to take her coat off by the time she reaches the bottom. She finds him on the raised deck at the back of the house, lying in a hammock with a book in his hands. He wears a linen shirt and jeans and no shoes and those same flimsy glasses, somehow, one side hanging out of his mouth. From a distance he looks healthy enough, but Stratt knows the truth, which is that it’s somewhat of a medical miracle that the biologist survived the trip home at all. Erid’s gravitational force was never meant to sustain squishy human flesh. The journey home was long and dark, and zero g led his muscles to waste away to scraps.
Midday sunlight reflects off Grace’s hair, which is more silvery-white than blond these days, and he looks so peaceful lying there with the ocean glittering in the background that she almost considers turning around and making the trek back up to the van. Stratt flicks the thought away and climbs up the deck stairs.
“Hello again, Dr. Grace.”
He sets his book down as she approaches and pushes his glasses up his face to peer at her, wearing no particular expression on his face. “I thought I heard the sound of someone approaching, muttering what I can only assume were really lovely German pleasantries.”
“I think I nearly saw God three times trying to get down here,” Stratt returns dryly. She takes notice, for the first time, of the enormous mottled dog sleeping at his feet.
“Insurance,” Grace says, tracking her downward glance, “so you don’t send me up there again.”
The most she lets the pain show is a slight twitch of her mouth, but she’ll play along, why the hell not. “I’m not sure a dog would have actually stopped me.”
“Really? It wouldn’t have given you even a moment’s hesitation?”
She considers this. “It’s possible.”
“An extra hour for me to decide if I wanted to die.”
“Ten minutes at most.”
Grace snorts out a laugh, and Stratt feels a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth too. “I found him out here one day just sitting on the rocks,” he explains. He seems to hesitate a moment before hauling himself up, face screwed in a preemptive grimace like he has to brace himself for it. He swings his legs out over the side of the hammock, landing them on the deck with a soft thud. “Guess someone didn’t want him anymore. Their loss, huh, boy?” he coos, bending to pat the dog’s head. “Keeps this old bag of bones feeling youthful.”
Grace straightens from this position, listing as he moves to stand. He does not look at her while this happens. Stratt bites her tongue, resisting the urge to help him.
She clears her throat. “What is he called?”
“Craig,” he answers. Grace grabs the cane resting against the deck railing and finds his balance eventually. “Craigy sometimes. Like rocks, you know? Craggy? Anyway, it’s dumb.”
Standing at his full height, Stratt can’t keep pretending not to look at him. His jeans hang loosely off of too-gaunt hips. His shirt completely swallows his frame, and the collar is buttoned low enough for her to see the deep hollow above his clavicles. But, swallowing around some mysterious lump in her throat, she realizes there’s something else that’s different about him, too, contradicting all of it: that unmistakable look of surety about him, and a steadiness glinting in his eyes that wasn’t there when she knew him.
It takes another moment for her to catch on that he’s saying something to her. “Kinda rude, don’t you think?”
Stratt blinks. “What is?”
“Two things. First of all, I’ve been imagining this moment for years and I was half-expecting another knock knock joke entrance. Secondly, it’s been, what, a year since I got back, and you’re just gonna go radio silent till now?”
She frowns. “I sent you a cake. Did you not receive it?”
“I did. It was delicious, thank you. Kind of felt like a cop-out though, if I’m being honest.”
“You wanted to see me?”
“Yes,” he says exasperatedly.
“Is there something you wished to discuss?” Her thin gray brows scrunch together seriously. “I presumed you were connected with my people. If anything pertinent ever arises, Dr. Grace, you should never hesitate to—”
“Wha— no, it wasn’t for work stuff. Jesus, Eva. I just— wanted to see— that you were—” He barely resists the urge to throw his hands up in the air. “You know. Well. Functioning. Alive,” Grace mutters. “You really don’t exist on the internet you know.”
“I know,” comes the automatic reply before Stratt pauses to consider everything else. And the fact that he tried to search her up on the internet. “I am well,” she allows. Another pause. “Thank you.”
“Yeah. Okay.” Grace lets out a long breath. “Great.”
“And you yourself are—” The once-over she gives him for the second time is almost involuntary. The slight wince from her almost certainly is. He watches her take in the sight of him, and the laugh he gives is raspy and self-depracating.
“Looking like a million bucks. I know.”
“I would really prefer if you actually showed up to your physiotherapy appointments, Dr. Grace.”
He doesn’t seem surprised at all to know she’s somehow privy to his self-destructive habits. “Maybe I would if they actually did something. And it’s a pain to get from here to anywhere.”
“I can arrange home visits.”
“’Course you can,” says Grace, huffing out a laugh. “Sure, fine, if it helps you sleep at night.” Then his words seem to reverberate back to him in a shock, and a wince briefly crosses his face before vanishing. “Stratt,” Grace says, a bit more seriously, “I’m fine. I didn’t make the decision blindly. I knew what it would do to me, coming back.” He adds, with a smile, “I don’t regret it, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
She pauses. Then, unsure of what else to do, she laughs, because it’s so absurd that the awkward biologist who cringed during mandated blood draws and hated walking above deck after hours is so self-possessed in a way she’s never seen before. But Grace has always surprised her. It warms her through to see how he’s changed. She shakes her head. “No, Grace. No, that’s not it.”
It’s all a bit less terrifying when he starts to remember more: All the sounds lost in the tumult of the day became salient at night, the gurgling of the steam pipes that ran along the corridors and the strange ticking and clanging from the engine room, and it made the ship seem unnervingly alive. He didn’t mind it, though, and came to find it pleasant when he had to spend long nights in the lab alone. Sometimes she would show up at the door with two cups of tea. He watched their shadows move down the corridor in tandem as the ship breathed and rumbled and worked dutifully along in the background, and he thought about how something terrifying and larger than life could stow away all its gentleness.
… yet they are memories still, relentlessly, tempered by a coldness.
Cold ocean spray on his skin as he stood starboard. Cold wind biting into his face as she ran towards a burning building, and he ran after her. Always a coldness, even when they moved off the air carrier, sticking to his skin like saltwater, chilling the air in his lungs. Something holding him back. Something between here and there.
They decide to take a walk along the beach, Grace at the shore’s edge so that the water weaves between his toes, Stratt an arm’s length away, just out of the tide’s reach. Craig sprints ten strides ahead, a bundle of muscle and power that feels unfair to watch. They talk about his time on Erid—his classroom, the food there, the ecosystem. She lets him talk, happy just to listen to the first-person accounts of stories she’s heard a dozen variations of by now.
“I told Rocky about you, you know,” says Grace. “I mean, I told him about everyone,” he adds, cheeks coloured slightly red, “you, the crew, everyone… definitely made sure to tell him about Carl. Who would love the hell out of Rocky, by the way. You didn’t come here with him, did you? I ought to buy that man a drink or something.”
“No, I came alone.” Stratt hesitates, then tells him, “Carl is dead, Ryland.”
“Oh.” Grace blinks, slowing down his pace. “When?”
“A long time ago. Fifteen years, nearly.” It isn’t like her to speak in redundancies, but the wound feels fresh enough that she avoids talking about it if she can. A year before the beetles touched down he’d left her, left their crew, to go back to his family. She never said goodbye. He never made it home, caught in a record-breaking blizzard that swept through the midwest.
“Fifteen years,” Grace echoes sullenly. He stops mid-stride, forcing Stratt to turn around to face him. The setting sun flares from behind his darkened figure, and for a moment she is struck by how he seems giant: Doctor Captain Ryland Grace, saviour of planet Earth. “No one told me.”
“There is a lot no one has told you, Dr. Grace. ”
He tightens his grip around his cane and his eyes flick frustratingly to the side. Through gritted teeth he says, “That’s the part that really sucks, though. I feel like I’m being kept in the dark, constantly. Not to sound like a pompous jackass, but don’t you think I at least deserve to know—”
“Your part of the mission is over. You’ve paid your price,” Stratt says, quiet and commanding. “Enjoy your quiet life here. That’s what you deserve.”
Grace looks at her like she’s just struck him. “Oh, come on, Stratt, don’t bring that anywhere near me.” His mouth curls nastily with the force of his words. It doesn’t do much to deter her. “What, are you going to tell me to be grateful next? Or that it’s a privilege to still be here?”
She stares at him and thinks, Isn’t it? He was supposed to be a dead man. What a miracle he isn’t. “No, Grace. I’m not here to tell you how to feel.”
“Just came to shoot the breeze, then?”
For a bemused moment she wonders if this is what being a middle school teacher is like, grasping at straws for questions she didn’t have the answers to. It is a fair question, California not exactly a hop-skip-jump away from Geneva after all. She contemplates how to answer him and meanwhile feels her age in her knees, in the balls of her feet pressed against the soles of her boots, in her damp stinging eyes. Stratt looks at the sun flaring from behind Grace’s shoulders because it’s easier than looking directly at him.
“I came to see that you are well,” she supplies finally, drawing on his answer from earlier. For humorous effect, Stratt supposes, but also, secretly, because she doesn’t have any better reason.
Grace doesn’t seem amused by this. “You could have called,” he fires back.
“To know that you are well,” says Stratt. She forces steel-blue eyes to find his.
That gets him to pause. His jaw unclenches, his shoulders sag, and he is small and human once more. “I am,” he says softly. “All things considered I really am. And I’m glad you are too. Hey,” he says, “are you okay? You look— Eva.”
She opens her eyes, having closed them without realizing, at the sensation of his something brushing her arm. She didn’t hear him close the distance between them. His hand is warm and reassuring through the thin fabric of her blouse. “I’m just very tired.”
“Let’s go inside. I’ll put on some coffee.” His smile is frayed but warm, warm like the sun—forget coffee, Stratt thinks, that alone could be energizing enough—belying the low-frequency anxiety buzzing through his voice. “How does that sound?”
On the walk back he keeps her arm looped in his, steadying her. It’s a terribly funny picture they paint: the bone-diseased astronaut and the frail old lady hobbling more than walking down the beach, each step awkward and listing. The betrayed and the betrayer. The world would be up in arms if they saw it.
Xenonite sprays rainbows across his visual field and refraction in every direction sends his sensory receptors into overdrive. He’s not sure if it’s that, or the universe having its own gotcha moment, that triggers the memories of how it all started—or, rather, ended.
Her voice rings through his head as it did in her office, strident as church bells, though back there he couldn’t focus at all on what she was saying—betraying you, believing in you, and that harsh note of desperation in her voice as she commanded— asked— entreated him— sit down and we do it differently.
It didn’t matter. He couldn’t see it then. Terror turned his blood to ice as he stumbled away from unfamiliar suits armed with tranquilizers. Somewhere a whisper of a thought brushed by—so it was all nothing, all of it—but adrenaline and survival instinct overrode and the thought was crushed before it could fully form.
He sees it now in a way he couldn’t then, but there’s no reason to dwell on it. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t anything. The journey back to Earth will be long and dark, and for now he simply allows himself to lament the fact that he won’t be there to see the look on her face when the beetles arrive. He allows himself to feel a tinge of embarrassment that that was their last ever interaction. He allows himself to contemplate what it will be like to see her again, if she’s still alive.
The Hail Mary cruises through the depths of space, burning through Rocky’s astrophage with a healthy appetite. Ryland Grace closes his eyes, dreaming of the ocean, and of warmth, and of life on Earth.
She doesn’t realize how cold she is until they enter his house and warm air envelops her and eases the damp chill on her skin. His living quarters are open and bright but just as cluttered as she imagined, piles of books and xenonite artifacts stacked wherever there seems to be room, but it’s more cozy than cramped. There’s also some sort of soft thing covering any remaining bit of floor and furniture—rugs, cushions, tartan throws, and, of course, the good luck quilt. It’s threadbare now, but she runs her fingers along it anyway: the fú square that Yao’s wife made, and the striped rainbow planet from Ilyukhina’s nieces.
“Make yourself at home,” Grace announces with a quick flash of a grin before he ducks into the kitchen. Stratt’s spirits lift even more when he puts coffee on the stove, the house filling with an aroma that is warm and familiar and makes her want to burrow somewhere and hibernate for a year.
They don’t stay inside for long though; Stratt gets the sense that Grace spends every possible moment he can outside. She doesn’t protest. The wind is more unforgiving than before so Grace grabs blankets and they carry their mugs of coffee to the deck and settle on his outdoor armchairs. He lights the steel fire pit, which provides them their own little bubble of visibility in the darkness.
Waves crash onto shore—whoosh—and recede into the arms of the ocean—hiss. Stratt pretends to be mesmerized by it. Grace watches her sidelong.
“So,” he says eventually, breaking the peace they accidentally created, “what’s next? For you, I mean.”
“Next?” Stratt repeats, mentally flicking through the never-ending list of fires she’s trying to put out. “Well, I’m waiting for an update from our friends in Russia, who hopefully decide to get their shit together in the next twelve hours and figure out why an unidentified alien species has been monitoring their goddamned satellite for the past week.”
“Oh.” He nods. “Yeah, of course.” Grace stares into his mug of coffee, then sets it down on the arm of the chair. “But what do you want?”
The last time he pursued a similar line of questioning an entire laboratory exploded and killed half a dozen of their scientists and two of their best hopes of saving the planet. Stratt casts her eyes skyward, searching for signs of rain against all rational faculties in her head.
There’s the moon, thin and bright. Woodsmoke spins up in curlicues and dissipates into the air. And stars, of course, smattered bold and clear across the cloudless atmosphere.
“That is what I want,” Stratt answers.
She looks back down at him and smiles encouragingly.
The look that meets her is one that startles her with the depth of its sadness, and damn her, she used to be good at this, her smile is already slipping away from her. His eyes are a fiery blue. She flicks her head sharply away, unable to bear hearing him say whatever he’s about to say, and hears the words wrested from her mouth, forceful as a chisel working against brittle marble—“It’s too late, Grace.”
“Why do you think this is only your cross to bear?” he says, like it’s such a simple thing, like it doesn’t threaten to unearth the exact pain she’s spent years learning how to bury.
And what of you? thinks Stratt. You whom I sent across the universe to bear the same cross. Beneath it a shakier, smaller voice says, You can’t want this. You can’t want this still. But it’s always easier to pretend that that’s not what this is about. Stratt collects herself now as she collected herself then, when she watched her men tackle Grace to the ground, his arms pinned to his back, cheek pressed to the dirt.
She rearranges her expression feature by feature. She takes a shallow breath.
“Do you think it’s some great, big burden to me?” she muses. “Inefficiency makes me angry. The state of”—Stratt gestures vaguely to the ocean—“it all makes me sad, more often than I like to admit. But it doesn’t hurt. Maybe it did once. It doesn’t anymore. I told you this is what I want. I’ve made no unwilling sacrifice, Dr. Grace.”
“I think you’ve gotten so used to it that it hardly feels like sacrifice anymore.”
One corner of her mouth tugs down sympathetically. “Grace, being semantic about this won’t help you.”
“What do you want?” he asks again.
“It hardly matters.”
“It matters to me.”
“That’s not enough.”
They let the roar of the ocean fill the silence between them again. Whoosh. Hiss. Craig dances in and out of the white froth with his long graceful limbs, nipping at bubbles and razor clams.
Grace’s mouth opens, another pointless remark ready to tumble out. If it were anyone else she’d be inclined to cluck her tongue in disappointment. Write them off. Wave a hand and make them disappear. Hold her tongue and her grudge and never say goodbye. Anyone else. But it’s Ryland Grace, and she’s tired of always being the one to disappoint him.
He holds it back this time, which Stratt is grateful for, because even though the kindest thing she can do is be honest to him at the end of the day she’s human, too.
“When are you leaving?” he asks instead.
Her own voice sounds very far away to her. “I’m on the first flight to Moscow tomorrow morning.”
It gives her a few more hours in California at most. Grace nods. A moment passes and then, beside her, he shivers beneath his blanket.
“Should we go back inside?” she asks pointedly, brows arched.
“No, no,” Grace refuses instantly, shaking his head, though even his voice rasps. “I like it out here. Air’s fresh.” His body gives another convulsion, shaky hands curling around the tattered edge of the blanket to pile it up higher around his shoulders.
Stratt stands up. She gets close enough that their knees brush, looks down at him, and says, “Move over.”
Grace looks up at her. Then he breaks out into a jaunty grin and suddenly he could be forty again, the scrappy biologist and the perpetual black sheep in their fold, even as the fire glints off the rheumy whites of his eyes, in their fiery blue, in his teeth and his ash-blond hair. “That an order?”
“Yes.”
He does as he’s told; it’s not hard, there’s plenty of room on the chair for both of them. Grace lifts up the blanket for her to join and she folds herself neatly next to him, layers her blanket over his, and wraps her arms around him. Stratt gives a gentle tug and Grace complies, allowing himself to follow that line of motion, and as he rests his head somewhere between her neck and shoulder his body releases all of its tension at once. His limbs are freezing but Stratt is pleased to find his core radiating warmth against hers. She holds him until he isn’t shivering anymore, but then there’s no reason to let go quite yet, either, so she keeps holding him.
He hums. “Hey, why didn’t we ever do this back on the ship? It was always cold as hell.”
She laughs quietly into his hair. “Shush, Ryland.”
His eyes start to slip closed. “I like it when you call me that.” After a moment’s silence he says, soft as the beach grass shivering in the breeze, “Eva.”
“Yes?”
“You’ll wake me if you go, won’t you?” he murmurs.
She finds his cold hand under the blankets, tangles her own warm fingers into his.
“Yes,” she promises. “I’ll wake you.”