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Baikonour explodes three months out from launch, and Ryland receives the news through a frantic text, then a stilted email, then the tumbling murmurs of the crew as its shockwaves reverberate all the way out of Kazakhstan, past China, and into the sea. He’s out on an immediate flight along with the rest of the core team but it is too late.
It didn’t feel real reading it through the screen, but standing on the very ground that took the lives of his crew and friends, grief washes over him in a familiar wave and floods his mouth, his lungs, warming the hollows behind his eyes. It’s forgotten for an instant, when Eva folds into his arms like a letter finally delivered, her heartbeat against his ribs proof that the universe has not emptied itself entirely. He sobs into her hair. She shakes against his collarbone. Grief, joy, grief, joy—a perfectly cruel pendulum, doubled and given to the same person.
Martin Dubois. Annie Jane Shapiro. The brightest and bravest minds of their generation, and their saviours. There is no time nor capacity to find another. He knows what’s coming before she has to ask, sees it building behind her eyes as she cannot meet his gaze the entire week—the calculation she has to make, the terrible arithmetic for their collective survival.
So he forces her on a walk to the field beyond the temporary housing one late evening where the grass grows wild and ungoverned and the sky stretches unbroken and blue. The stars are out, indifferent and numerous, and as he rubs against her thumb with both of his tears well up suddenly, pendulum turned into a hammer through the pressure of the week. There has been too many tears and too little time.
"Eva," he says, and his voice cracks, earth after drought. "I know what you have to ask.” She makes a sound, small and wounded, and he kisses the confirmation away.
“Ryland—”
"I know, I know,” he whispers, pressing his forehead to hers, breath mingling. “There’s no one else. I know.”
Eva tries to say something, but her voice breaks and she buries her head into his shoulder, silently trembling.
“Eva,” he starts again, as gently as he can. “You don’t have to ask it. I’ll go.”
She shakes harder in his arms.
"But,” and he pauses to ease her delicately off of him, just enough so he can look into her eyes. “I want to leave something good behind.” He drops to one knee, just like his father in the portrait he regretfully left in San Francisco. Clasps her hands together, then takes them both in his.
“Eva Maria Stratt.”
And she has been so strong all week, tears fought back by sheer will ever since she broke apart from that first hug, but now her eyes (beautiful, glimmering even in darkness) swim and she bites her lip to keep from gasping.
“Marry me in the time we have left. Three months. Three months as my wife, and I will carry your name into the dark like a lantern."
"Yes," she breathes, and then louder, into the dark field, into the waiting sky, "Yes, yes, yes—"
He spends Project funds on the ring—an embezzlement of love, Dimitri comments fondly—and it arrives seven days later, a gorgeous pale blue almost big enough to embarrass her. He waits until he’s coaxed her into bed that night (she already slept so little, even less now with the circumstances) and slides it onto her finger there in the dark, neither of them speaking. The diamond catches what little moonlight filters through the sliver of the curtains and scatters it back at the ceiling in a colourful smattering of stars.
The idea for a wedding doesn’t come until a while after, until they’re back on the Vat, making the last preparations to fully move the team to Baikonour.
The Vat notices Eva's ring before they notice anything else. It catches the fluorescent light of the halls, the pale blue diamond throwing prisms against the walls, a small symbol of hope amidst their loss. Ryland is announced as the replacement scientist on a Tuesday, though the days have begun to lose their meaning, bleeding into one another like watercolors on an oversaturated page. The announcement comes in a short email and the silence that trails him for a week after is filled with the weight of what everyone knows but no one says.
She has bought him a ring too, by then. His is simpler, a silver band engraved with her love. He wears it on a chain around his neck during training, against regulations, the cool weight of it resting in the hollow of his throat.
It is Olesya who asks, because Olesya is always the one who asks the questions others are too afraid to voice. She is young—only twenty-six, though the crisis has aged her in ways that have nothing to do with years—and brilliant, and beautiful. She would have had a wonderful life, Eva thinks when she looks at her now. She would have had decades of mistakes and triumphs, love affairs and heartbreaks, perhaps children, perhaps a small house with a garden, perhaps a Nobel Prize, perhaps all of these things and more. She would have had time.
But the crisis exists, so she will have none of it.
She corners them one afternoon following a meeting. "So," she says, and her eyes go to Eva's hand, then to the chain at Ryland's throat, then back to their faces with an easy smile. "When's the wedding?"
Ryland feels Eva stiffen beside him, feels the automatic recoil from the question, a desire to protect what is private, what is theirs, from observation and commentary. He puts his hand on the small of Eva's back, a gesture that has become instinct.
"There isn't one," he says, and his voice is gentle, almost apologetic. "We're already married, in every way that counts."
Olesya nods, but the nod is too quick, too sharp. She starts to turn away—Ryland does too, already looking back down at his report—but then she stops and turns back, looking at Eva.
"Really, no big white wedding?" she asks. Her question is meant to be sly—she’s almost famous for it, her ability to disarm and extract information with a touch of humor—but it does not land that way. Something in her voice has shifted, some fundamental register that usually stays hidden beneath the bravado. There is something naked in her voice, something that sounds almost like yearning, and Eva—perceptive Eva, who notices everything, who catalogues the micro-expressions of her crew like a librarian sorting indices—catches it.
Maybe it’s a stretch and she’s just projecting her own fears onto her astronaut, but Eva’s reads are rarely wrong. She notices the way Olesya's gaze keeps drifting to her ring. Maybe, it’s a symbol of something she will not have, a ceremony she will not perform, a future she will fight for but not keep.
The realization arrives like a physical blow, settling heavy and cold. If sweet, brave Olesya needs to live vicariously through them, even for a moment—if she can witness a wedding, participate in the planning, hold the memory of joy however she wishes when she ends up alone in the dark then Eva will give her that. She will give her that and more. She will give her everything she has.
"We could," she announces, and reaches to nudge Ryland’s elbow. He turns to her, surprised, but she does not meet his eyes. She is watching Olesya, watching the way her face lights up just a bit, hesitancy wiped in an instant.
"But we don't have—" Ryland begins.
"We'll make time," Eva says.
She lets Olesya hire whomever she wants—lets her fly planners in from Tokyo and Paris and Buenos Aires, a small army of professionals accustomed to orchestrating fairy tales for the very wealthy, now tasked with creating beauty aboard an aircraft carrier. They do not have the downtime to indulge in the luxury. The launch window approaches with the inevitability of an eclipse, and every hour is accounted for, every minute spent in simulation and calculation and preparation for the impossible.
The wedding is scheduled for their last night aboard the Vat—the final evening before most everyone is relocated to Baikonour, before the reality of the launch supersedes everything else and Ryland climbs into the capsule that will carry them to salvation, him to certain death.
It becomes a whole thing, as these things do, larger than even Eva had anticipated but she does not have the heart (nor the time) to rein it in. The crew needs this, and maybe she does too. The planners, thankfully, move through the ship like ghosts in linen suits, measuring spaces, negotiating with the captain, and the flowers woven into the railings of the ship grow seemingly organically by the day.
One of them—a woman named Alexandra with silver hair and a lilting accent and eyes that miss nothing—finds Eva during one of her mandated breaks, Ryland conveniently tucked into her side.
"Madame," Alexandra says, "we must discuss the dress."
“I’m not particular,” Eva says after a beat, but Ryland perks up beside her. She feels for his hand, question forming in her gaze.
"I have been thinking," he says, and his voice is hesitant, uncertain in a way she rarely hears now. He squeezes her hand. "My mother. Her dress. It's—it's in storage. I kept it. After she died. I kept everything, but the dress especially. I don't know why. I thought maybe someday..."
He trails off, unable to finish the sentence, but Eva understands.
"Yes," she says immediately, without hesitation. "Yes. Fly it in."
The dress arrives three days later, encased in preservation film, handled by white-gloved attendants who treat it like a relic, which perhaps it is.
His late mother, bless her soul, had exquisite taste.
The dress is weightless lace over silk, clouds on a clear day. It has been stored for almost three decades and yet is resplendent through Ryland’s meticulous upkeep. It needs only minor alterations—a tuck at the waist, a shortening of the hem for Eva's height, all of which he agrees to with stars in his eyes. The tailor insists on Ryland’s presence for the one fitting, and he stumbles in sweaty after an EVA simulation just in time to see her walk out of the makeshift fitting room.
"You look," Ryland says, when she does a little twirl for his amusement, and he cannot finish. He puts his hand over his heart, over the ring on its chain, and he bows his head—silly and ridiculous and so very Ryland.
(The gesture contains more devotion than anything he might have said aloud.)
The scientists and staff who spent their lives worshipping at the altar of data, who trusted only what could be replicated and peer-reviewed and built careers on disproving the unprovable become overnight, the most devoted practitioners of folk wisdom the world had ever seen.
A prohibition against the groom seeing the bride was declared the day of the ceremony and became the most serious and rigorously enforced protocol aboard the Vat. Ryland found himself the subject of a surveillance operation more elaborate than anything the ship's security systems had ever mounted; corridors were cleared by advance scouts, doors were wedged shut with improvised barricades, and a complex network of hand signals developed among the crew to warn of his approach. Dr. Sato, who had once designed algorithms for predicting solar flares, now devoted her considerable intellect to mapping his probable movements through the ship. It was all so absurd. So stupid and so absurd.
Olesya finds Eva an hour before the ceremony (they’ve allotted six precious hours to it and the afterparty, everyone putting in one daily extra the week before to make up for it), tailed by the few other female scientists and staff which Eva might almost consider friends if friendship were still a luxury permitted by their circumstances.
They crowd her into one of the nicer meeting rooms, now cleared of its usual furniture and lit by warm bulbs instead of the usual harsh fluorescence. There is champagne, though no one drinks it. There are mirrors, angled to catch her reflection from every side.
"Sit," Olesya commands, and Eva sits.
They work on her with the efficiency and detail she hired them for. They do her hair—Olesya's fingers gentle as she styles the loose curls, braiding the front strands back into a crown. They do her makeup, though Eva is fully capable, has done her own face since she was fourteen, but this is not about capability. She knows, accepts—the transfer of care from one set of hands to another, the ancient language of women preparing women to pass this particular threshold.
Dr. Amelia Kostakis, whose professional quirks Eva knows intimately but regrettably little else beyond her title as head of chemical engineering, steps forward when they finish. She carries a box, simple and wooden.
"There is a tradition," Kostakis says, and her voice carries the weight of someone who has witnessed many ceremonies, who understands that traditions are not empty gestures but containers for meaning too large to speak aloud. "Four somethings. Very Euro-centric, so I’m sure you know it.” She does.
Kostakis opens the box.
"Something old," she says, and lifts from the box two delicate sprigs of olive branch, the faint smell of a Mediterranean hillside on a hot summer day emerging softly. "to provide protection. Traditionally, for a baby to come.” She pauses, her eyes meeting Eva's in the mirror. “These are from the oldest olive tree in the world. In Greece. It has been alive for over four thousand years. It watched empires rise and fall. For you, it will protect against everything. Because of you, maybe it will live on longer still.”
Eva feels her throat tighten. But her scientist is looking at her with knowledge in her eyes, and Eva swallows the sting and understands that hope takes many forms, that protection can be offered even for futures unguaranteed.
"Thank you," she whispers, and Kostakis weaves it into her hair, and she smells vaguely the sun and endurance and time itself. Her loving and caring team, kept too distant all these years, have traversed the largest distance to gift her with such a gesture. It fils and breaks her heart all the same.
"Something new," Kostakis continues, and Olesya produces another box—inside is a necklace, simple and fine, a silver chain from which hangs a single star. Not a gemstone, but metal worked into facets that catch the light and throw it back in sharp, bright points—“offers optimism for the future. A gift from the groom.”
Eva takes it in her hand, the star small enough to sit on a fingertip, barely heavy enough to feel real. Olesya helps fasten it around her neck and it the star falls into the hollow of her throat, twin beacon with where Ryland's ring rests, a new constellation for her to navigate by.
"Something borrowed, to provide good luck.” Kostakis continues, smiling a bit sadly. “The dress. Your groom's mother and father. They were happy, yes? They loved each other well?"
"Yes," Eva says, though she has never met them, knows only what Ryland has told her in fragments—his mother's laugh, his father the cause, their death in a car accident when he was nineteen. The way their love had been the benchmark against which he measured everything else. "They loved each other very well."
"Then it will provide immense luck," Kostakis says firmly, as if sealing a contract. "The happiness of the borrower flows from the happiness of the lender. You carry their joy with you. You add your own to it. The debt is paid forward, not back."
Eva closes her eyes for a second, takes in her words and etches them into her heart. For the Graces, but for Annie and Martin too. Their love, paid forward. She swallows the grief in her throat and takes deep breaths until her heartbeat steadies once more.
"Something blue," Kostakis says finally when she opens her eyes again and the other women in the room laugh softly, girlish giggles startled out of them by whatever rests in the woman's hand.
It is a hacky sack.
Small and worn, the fabric faded to a color between cornflower and sky, between the blue of Earth's oceans and the blue of its atmosphere. It has been used, clearly—kicked and caught and kicked again, the stitching visible in places, the filling lumpy and uneven.
"Signifies purity," the woman says, her eyes twinkling now, the solemnity breaking into something tender and amused. "And fidelity. I will not attempt to understand what this means to the two of you beyond, well. Just Earth.”
She places it in Eva's hand, and she laughs, bringing it up to sniff for old time’s sake. Lavender. She slips it into the little pocket in her hem, a slight weight to ground her.
"He gave it to me this morning," Olesya confirms. "Said a student in one of his first classes gave it to him. Said he wanted you to have it to remember that love is something you have to keep in the air. Something about lava, too, I didn’t quite catch that part."
Eva does not cry. She has cried enough tears for a million lifetimes.
When it is finally time, her crew walk with her up through the ship and all the way to the radar building, from where they kiss her cheeks and wish her well before exiting to find their seats, giving her space to make her entrance onto deck alone.
Two sailors open the door for her on cue and she spots Ryland first. Standing in a suit of white at the end of the aisle, turned now to watch her approach, his face crumples the moment he lands eyes on her. He tries to hold it together—she watches him try his very best, jaw tightening and hands clasped white-knuckled at his sides—but the tears come anyway, spilling over before he can catch them. He looks so small there, despite everything. Eva takes twenty one slow, measured, dignified steps and feels the wrongness of it growing with each one. This is not who they are. This is not what they have, and the distance between them is an insult to the time they don't have.
She breaks into a run.
She covers the distance in long strides, and collapses into where he meets her halfway with enough force that he staggers back, catching her around the waist, her arms his neck, her face buried in the hollow where his jaw meets his throat. Their crew erupt into hoots, hollers, cheers and sobs.
"Hi," she whispers into his skin.
"Hi," he croaks out, laughing wetly against her ear. "Hi."
"You’re crying already," she teases, pulling back just enough to see his face, his beautiful ruined face, tear tracks glistening in the warm light. "Pathetic."
"Completely," he agrees, and kisses her before the officiant can clear her throat, before the ceremony can properly begin, kisses her with the desperation of a man who has already said goodbye a thousand times in his mind.
He sets her down eventually, though his arm stays banded around her waist as they walk back the rest of the distance together. Eva tightly grips his other hand with both of hers. The officiant, a priest she was distantly acquainted with in her youth, smiles at them with the weary patience of someone who has married many couples but none like this.
"Dearly beloved," she begins, and her voice carries through the hush that has fallen, "we are gathered today, in the shadow of extinction to witness the oldest magic humanity has ever conjured. Marriage is not a solution to the problem of loneliness, nor a guarantee against loss. It is simply the decision to face the uncertain together, to bind one's uncertainty to another's hope. And so, in the presence of this congregation, I ask you to state your intentions.”
She lets the silence hold for a moment, like a breath before diving deep, filled by the ever persistent sound of waves against the hull.
“Ryland James Grace and Eva Maria Stratt, have you come here to enter into marriage without coercion, freely and wholeheartedly?”
“I do,” they say together.
“And are you prepared, as you follow the path of marriage, to love and honor each other for as long as you both shall live?”
“I am,” they say together.
“Since it is your intention to enter the covenant of Holy Matrimony, join your right hands, and declare your consent before God and this gathering.”
The vows are not the traditional ones. He’s written them in stolen moments between training, a neatly printed page crumpling with sweat, while hers took form on napkins and the margins of technical manuals, their roles reversed. Eva speaks first because Ryland is still crying.
"I, Eva Stratt," she says, and her voice is steady, the voice that has commanded rooms of generals and scientists and terrified politicians. Take you, Ryland James Grace, to be my husband." She reaches up to touch his face, thumb brushing the wetness from his cheek. "I promise to love you in the time we have and for all the time after. I promise to remember that you are mine and also not mine, that you belong to the world even as you belong to me. I vow to fiercely love you in all your forms, now and forever. I promise to never forget that this is a once in a lifetime love. I vow to love you, and despite the challenge that will carry us apart, we will always find a way back to each other.” Her voice has dropped, carried by the ocean breeze to maybe his ears only. “I promise today to be your navigator, best friend, and wife; honor, love, and cherish you through all of life's adventures. And through our union we can accomplish more than we could alone.”
When he speaks, his voice is barely audible at first, cracking on the first word, building as he goes. "Ich, Ryland Grace,” and the crowd gasps almost comically when they realise, “nehme dich, Eva Maria Stratt, zu meiner Frau.” Whatever composure Eva has left crumbles in an instant as he continues in stilted German.
“I promise to be faithful to you, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, to love you and to honor you all the days of my life. I will carry your name into the dark lovingly," he says, the words familiar now, practiced in the dark of ship corridors night after night, "and I promise to spend my last moments loving you, which is a simple promise because it require no effort at all. I promise that my last thought will be of you, and whatever light I find in the dark and send back to you will be proof."
“Your pronunciation sucks,” Eva sobs into his shoulder, collapsed into him sometime between Tau and Ceti and his proud laugh rings out clear and joyous. “Ich verspreche, auch auf dich zu warten.”
They exchange rings, simple silver bands blessed with the sea water that carried their love, and Ryland presses a kiss to her knuckles as he slides hers on. The officiant nods after and steps forward carrying a coil of rope, a rough hemp-and-synthetic weave used for securing cargo on the exterior hull rated for sun exposure and salt wear, strong enough to hold a ship together.
"The knot," the officiant says, "has been the symbol of marriage since sailors first crossed oceans. It tightens under strain. It holds."
Ryland takes one end, Eva the other. Their hands meet in the middle, fingers tangling, and the officiant wraps the rope around their joined wrists in a figure-eight pattern, the infinity symbol, an orbital path. She pulls it tight, the rough fibers pressing into their skin, and ties it with a bowline knot—the king of knots, the one that holds under load but releases easily when no longer needed.
"What you has joined, let no circumstance put asunder. May the Lord in his kindness strengthen the consent you have declared before the us and graciously bring to fulfillment his blessing within you," the officiant says. "And by the power of your own choosing, I pronounce you married. You may kiss—"
They already are.
Ryland drinks her in until they toe the line of indecency, and then some more, and she laughs into his lips as he dips her, picture perfect. He slips the knot off, figure eight steadfast as he hands it to Carl (waterworks central, protector of Eva and her heart) to safekeep and pulls her into the cleared space as the first song begins—Night Changes, so American yet so sweet, something his parents might have enjoyed to in whatever version of reality of San Francisco where they are still alive, something Ryland was fully prepared to have to beg for but was surprised with a resolute yes on first ask.
They fit together like practiced partners, his hand at the small of her back, her fingers laced through his, swaying and spinning on the four and a half acres of steel as the Atlantic rocks them gently, salt spray catching in their hair. Eva had been wild in college, spending weekends in basement clubs where the music was too loud and partners too numerous, learning the way bodies could communicate without words. Ryland's parents had believed in the power of a good slow dance in the kitchen. They are pelted by various objects throughout the night—rice, sugar cubes, coins, flower petals. It doesn’t matter. It matters so much. Eva surprises him with her beautiful voice—Sign of the Times, Harry Styles—and he laughs and cries and cries some more.
At some point—midnight by the ship's clock, though time has long started feeling theoretical—they find themselves alone at the ship’s railing, the rest of the crew having collapsed into chairs or against walls or into each other's arms, the party continuing in whispers and small touches. The ocean turns below them.
"One more month."
“One more,” Eva agrees.
"And then forever."
She turns to look at him, this man who who has given her this night, the rope, a promise. She thinks of the tin can waiting for him, the fire that waits in the sky, the silence that waits beyond the atmosphere and she chooses actively and with her whole heart to set it aside. There is only this, only now, the weight of his hand in hers and the press of his shoulder against her own and the vast indifferent sky above them.
"And then forever," she says, and pulls him down for another kiss as the stars twinkle on, unbroken, numerous, almost watching.
The Hail Mary launches on schedule.
He finds her four somethings gradually, as the mission unfolds.
Something blue is easy, right at the top of his personal bag. Lava.
Something old is confusing when found a week later. It’s dry, and he can’t figure out for the life of him what it means.
Something new is found by Rocky, who after dropping all pretenses with him after almost dying together asks politely if the big chunk of loose carbon rattling around in the wall is a loose engine component. That—the big blue diamond, around the star-less chain, makes him remember almost everything.
Something borrowed is found on the way to Erid, next to Yao’s gun and Ilyukhina’s heroin. A square of lace, nestling his chosen method of death, from the two people who loved him the most.
(There is a fifth verse to the poem, he realises, when he pulls up the Wikipedia page to explain the tradition to Rocky. “And a [silver] sixpence in her shoe” is a symbol of prosperity or acts as a ward against evil done by frustrated suitors, he reads aloud, and Rocky bristles with the idea of evil needing to be warded off of Grace’s mate.
He turns over the silver later, and places it with the rest of his heart.
St. Christopher, warding off evil, with him forevermore.)