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Ryland Grace found the gun on the forty-third day.
He’d been reorganizing the storage bay — not because it needed reorganizing, but because his hands needed something to do and his brain needed something small enough to manage — when his fingers closed around the case at the back of the cabinet. Compact. Heavier than it looked.
He knew what it was before he opened it.
Yao’s gun. Captain Yao, who had died in a coma before the Hail Mary reached Tau Ceti, along with Ilyukhina. Who had carried a gun on the mission for reasons Grace understood too well.
He stood in the storage bay for a long time holding the case.
Then he put it back. Exactly where he’d found it. Closed the cabinet.
He went back to work.
-
The food situation was simple math, and Grace was good at math, which meant he understood it completely and wished he didn’t.
He’d turned the ship around for Rocky. He’d known when he did it that the numbers didn’t work — that the Astrophage he had would get him to Erid but the food wouldn’t last, not really, not if he ate what he was supposed to eat. So he stopped eating what he was supposed to eat. He ate less. Then less than that.And taumoeba just tasted bad. He tried to eat more of it instead of real food, but he couldn’t really eat much.
He told himself it was rationing, which it was, and that he was fine, which became less true over time.
Rocky noticed within months.
“Grace is smaller,” Rocky said one day, in the middle of a routine systems check.
“I’m the same size I’ve always been.”
“No. Rocky has measured. Grace is smaller.”
“Rocky has measured.”
“Rocky measures everything. Grace knows this.”
Grace did know this. “I’m fine.”
“Grace says fine. Grace does not look fine.” Rocky tilted. “Grace is eating, question?”
“Yes.”
“Enough, question?”
A pause that lasted slightly too long. “Yes.”
Rocky made a sound that his translator didn’t catch — something low and unconvinced — and didn’t push further. But Grace noticed, after that, that Rocky started finding reasons to talk more. To ask questions. To fill the silence that Grace had been letting grow around himself like a second atmosphere.
He didn’t say anything about it. He was grateful in the specific way of someone who can’t quite bring themselves to ask for what they need but recognizes when they’re being given it anyway.
-
The days got longer.
That wasn’t literally true — the ship kept its schedule, lights up, lights down, regular as a metronome — but something in Grace’s perception of them stretched. He would finish a task and look at the clock and be surprised by how little time had passed. He would sit down to eat his reduced ration and find he’d been sitting there for twenty minutes without touching it.
He lost track of things. Small things at first — where he’d put his stylus, whether he’d run a particular check — and then larger ones. What day it was. What he’d been working on. Whether he’d slept.
Rocky pulled him back, every time.
“Grace. Grace. What is two plus two, question.”
“What?”
“Answer.”
“Four. Rocky, that’s—”
“Good. Grace is present. Now tell Rocky what we were discussing.”
It was such a specific and Rocky way of caring — practical, direct, slightly absurd — that Grace sometimes laughed, which he suspected was part of the point.
He was losing weight visibly now. He could see it in the way his clothes fit, feel it in the new angles of his own wrists. He told himself it was manageable. He told himself he would make it to Erid and the Eridians would figure out how to feed him and it would all be fine.
He believed this less and less as the days stretched.
-
The gun was always there.
He didn’t take it out again. He didn’t need to. He just knew it was there, the way you know the location of something without looking at it — a peripheral awareness, a weight at the back of his mind that matched the weight of the case in the cabinet.
He thought about Yao. He hadn’t known Yao well — hadn’t known him at all, really, had just woken up to his absence and grieved it at a distance, the way you grieve people you didn’t get the chance to know. But he thought about him now. About what it meant to carry something like that on a mission.
He thought, I understand that now.
Then he thought, that’s not a good thought to be having.
Then he thought about the food he hadn’t eaten today and the day before and the growing suspicion that he wasn’t going to make it regardless and whether it mattered how the math resolved itself in the end.
He went to the Don’t Go Crazy Room. He sat in front of the fake ocean. He watched the waves and thought about his mother’s kitchen, and his classroom, and Rocky on the other side of a xenonite wall saying, “Grace is smaller,” with the focused concern of someone who had decided, without being asked, that Grace’s continued existence was important to them.
He thought, I’m so tired. What if everything was just something my brain invented to get through the fear, and there’s nothing at the end of this?
-
He held the case for a long time without opening it.
The ship was very quiet. Rocky was in a sleep cycle — Grace had checked, had waited for it, and then spent twenty minutes sitting with that fact and what it meant that he’d waited for it before coming here.
He thought about Yao.
He thought about Ilyukhina.
He thought about Rocky saying other things grow around it, make it less of everything and whether that was true, whether that could be true, whether he would live long enough to find out.
His hands were very thin. He could see the tendons moving when he turned the case over.
He opened it.
“Grace.”
He went very still.
Rocky’s voice, through the translator — not from the xenonite wall but from the small speaker unit they’d rigged up months ago so Rocky could move freely without losing communication. Which meant Rocky was awake. Which meant Rocky had not been in a sleep cycle.
Which meant Rocky had been watching.
“Grace,” Rocky said again. Quiet. The quietest Grace had ever heard him.
Grace didn’t move. He was sitting on the floor of the storage bay with the open case in his lap and he didn’t move.
“Grace is holding something,” Rocky said. “Rocky cannot see clearly. But Rocky has been listening to Grace move through the ship for many hours. Rocky knows the sound of Grace not sleeping. Rocky knows the sound of Grace not eating.” A pause. “Rocky knows the sound of Grace going somewhere alone when Rocky is supposed to be sleeping.”
Grace looked at the case.
“Rocky should go back to sleep,” he said. His voice came out wrong. Flat and distant, like it was coming from somewhere further away than his own mouth.
“No,” Rocky said. Simply. “Rocky will not.”
“Rocky—”
“No.” Not loud. Just certain. The tone Rocky used for things that were not negotiable. “Grace will talk to Rocky. Grace will tell Rocky what Grace is holding.”
Grace closed his eyes.
“It’s a gun,” he said.
The silence that followed was the longest Rocky had ever been quiet.
“Put it down,” Rocky said finally. “Grace will put it down and move away from it and talk to Rocky.”
“Rocky—”
“Please.”
That word, in Rocky’s translated voice — Grace had heard Rocky say please before, but not like this. Not stripped of everything else, just the word alone, just the asking.
Grace looked at the case for a long moment.
He closed it.
He put it back in the cabinet.
He sat down on the floor of the storage bay with his back against the cabinet and his knees pulled up and his head back and he didn’t say anything. Rocky didn’t say anything either. The ship hummed. The stars moved past in the dark outside, the way they always did, indifferent and beautiful.
“I’m so hungry,” Grace said finally. It came out smaller than he meant it to. “I’m so hungry and I’m so tired and I don’t know if I’m going to make it and I don’t — I don’t know if—”
He stopped.
“Rocky knows,” Rocky said quietly. “Rocky has been watching Grace get smaller for many days and has been — afraid. Rocky does not like this word but it is the correct word. Afraid.”
Grace pressed his fingers to his eyes.
“Rocky can’t do anything about the food,” he said. “Rocky can’t fix it. There’s nothing—”
“Rocky cannot fix food,” Rocky agreed. “Rocky knows this. Rocky cannot make Grace’s body need less or make supplies appear. Rocky cannot fix the problem.” A pause. “But Rocky can stay. Rocky will stay. Every cycle, Rocky will stay awake with Grace and talk and make sure Grace knows Rocky is here. This is what Rocky can do. This is what Rocky will do.”
Grace didn’t say anything.
“Grace is not alone,” Rocky said. “Grace thinks Grace is alone. Grace is wrong. Rocky is here. Rocky is always here.”
The ship was very quiet.
Grace sat on the floor of the storage bay for a long time, back against the cabinet that held the case, and let Rocky stay awake with him. Rocky talked — about Erid, about engineering problems he’d been thinking about, about the Taumoeba behavior patterns they’d been analyzing, about a construction technique Eridians used that he’d been wanting to explain for weeks. Filling the silence the way he always did. Pulling Grace back by the collar of his attention.
Grace listened. He didn’t say much. He didn’t need to.
At some point he moved to the xenonite wall and sat with his back against it, on his side, and Rocky settled on the other side with the comfortable asymmetry of someone arranging themselves around a barrier so naturally it stopped being a barrier.
Two beings. One wall. One ship. The dark outside going on forever in every direction.
Grace ate his ration the next morning. All of it. It wasn’t enough — it was never enough anymore — but it was something, and Rocky watched him do it with the focused attention of someone witnessing something important.
Neither of them mentioned the storage bay.
Neither of them needed to.
-
He didn’t go back to the cabinet.
Some days the math got loud again, and the hunger made everything feel thin and distant, and the hope of getting to Erid felt like a dream—unconvincing in the specific way hope becomes unconvincing when the body has been hungry long enough.
On those days Rocky talked more. Asked more questions. Found more engineering problems to explain in elaborate detail. Once, memorably, spent four hours describing an Eridian architectural technique with such enthusiasm that Grace fell asleep against the xenonite wall and woke up to Rocky still going, undeterred.
“Rocky,” he said, groggy.
“Grace is awake. Good. As Rocky was saying—”
“Rocky. How long was I asleep.”
“Four hours and twelve minutes. Rocky kept talking so Grace would not be alone even while sleeping.”
Grace looked at the wall. At the faint outline of Rocky on the other side, settled and patient and entirely serious.
“You talked to me for four hours while I was asleep.”
“Yes. Rocky will do it again if needed.”
Grace put his forehead against the xenonite wall. It was cool and solid and real.
“Okay,” he said quietly. “Okay, Rocky.”
“Yes,” said Rocky. “Okay.”
-
He made it to Erid.
Barely — thinner than he’d ever been, moving carefully, rationing not just food now but energy, everything turned down to the minimum necessary to keep going. The Eridian scientists met the ship with a focused urgency that told him Rocky had communicated the situation ahead of time, in detail.
He didn’t ask what Rocky had told them.
The gun was still in the cabinet when he left the ship for the last time. He left it there. He didn’t know what else to do with it. Some things you just — leave behind, in the place where you decided not to use them.
Rocky found him later, on the beach — the beach that smelled like California, that the Eridians had built for him with meticulous care, getting the smell right, the sand almost correct, the waves moving in their slightly-too-slow rhythm.
Grace was sitting in his chair. He was thin and tired and eating something the Eridian scientists had made for him that was not quite food but was keeping him alive while they worked on something better. The amber sky stretched out above him.
Rocky settled beside him without speaking.
They sat like that for a long time. The fake waves moved. The amber sky did whatever amber skies do.
Grace put his hand flat against the ground beside his chair — against the almost-right sand — and felt it solid under his palm.
Still here.
Rocky made a sound. Low and warm and quiet. The one that meant content, but underneath it, something else — something that had no single English word but that Grace understood anyway, had understood for a long time, through glass and xenonite and the impossible distance of everything between them.
I’ve got you.
I’ve always got you.
Grace kept his hand flat on the sand.
The waves moved.
The sky was amber.
He was still here.