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In his worst nightmares, he imagines blowing up Antarctica again, Leclerc giving the command — or maybe it's him this time — and then the countdown, the shockwaves. He imagines being able to see the consequences of his actions, no longer blanketed by the safety of distance, the nuke detonating in his face in a bright orange-gold mushroom cloud as the glaciers crack in half and slide precariously into the ocean with a splash so large it creates waves not unlike a tsunami.
In his worst nightmares, it is not the Antarctica that is being blown up. The sky colours red-pink instead (and this is how he knows it's a dream, his mind insistent on letting him know exactly the cause), and he is no longer a physical entity with a radio in his hand. He exists omnisciently, like the rumours make him out to be, floating around the indecipherable hallways, a shifting amalgamation of the boat's, his undergraduate university's, the numerous research facilities he has passed through since the Project started, and most hauntingly the walls of Grover Cleveland Middle School the day he met Eva Stratt.
The blast debris blows past where his body would have been, and this is how he knows he is in a dream again, because he is not hurt and the wails of an emergency alarm does not ring in his ear but echoes around muffled, like he is underwater.
When he wakes up to the sound of the ship's siren, he thinks he is still dreaming. Consciousness kicks in a second later and he scrambles for the radio by his bedside, barks for a status update, throws his cardigan over his pajamas and rushes out the door.
Someone on the radio reports the incident in the hangar bay, so he follows the pulsing red alarm lights upwards and tries not to think about the implications of his sickening sense of deja vu. About who he keeps losing in his dreams — Yao, Ilyukhina, Dubois, his engineering team, his astrophage research team — about who he keeps looking for even though he has not lost her yet, terrified that this dream will be the one.
He orders medical to the hangar bay, gives them clearance to phone in land hospitals, getting helicopters on stand by for whoever they can save.
One by one, the flight crew and different team leads report back. Yao, crew cabin. Ilyukhina, crew cabin with Yao. His secondary flight commander and engineer, in their separate cabin on the other side of the ship. Most of the team leads report full strength, everyone woken up by the alarm but mostly still in their dormitories.
His science specialists and Astrophage research team are clearly silent. Stratt has been painfully silent.
His mouth forms her name but does not dare utter it, terrified that this is it, this will be the one. His radio crackles to life again.
"Stratt, hangar bay." There is a pause, he hears her take a breath in. "Likely an uncontained Astrophage explosion."
The relief bows hims over and he nearly trips over his own racing feet. Not this time. But Dubois is still noticeably silent. Shapiro has not reported back.
He shouts, increasingly desperate into his radio, "Dubois, Shapiro! Report!" He knows it is futile, but he tries anyway.
By the time he gets to the hangar bay turned state of the art science and research facility, the incident has been identified as contained and alarm turned off. With it goes the red glow washing his vision, and the dream-state promise that this isn't real, that he can still fix things.
He finds Stratt standing in the middle of the rubble talking on the phone in rapid fire Korean as the medical and astrophage research team work around her. The hangar bay is now mostly a wreck with ashes covering the wall and floating in the air, the yellow coat around her — his coat, he was wondering where it went — the most startling colour in the room.
He gravitates towards her like a flower towards sun, and the room shifts with his entrance, a collective sigh of relief being let out as if his presence alone meant that everything will be fixed. He gives a tight smile to the first researcher — Louis — to break away from the rubble to approach him, trying to come across as encouraging but likely falling flat.
The preliminary incident report names Dubois, Shapiro, and a number of his research team as the last people to have scanned into the hangar bay, a list he has been bracing himself to hear as the seconds ticked into minutes of silence from them.
The realisation sinks like a stone in his stomach — this isn't a dream, there is no do over — as the backup plan for his backup plan resurfaces in his mind. The failsafe idea he thought of once, late at night pouring over the list of potential science specialists with the coma gene and promptly banished from his mind, threatens him with its feasibility, traitorously.
He works his fingers over his phone, answering messages and calling for an emergency meeting with the rest of the flight crews and team leads, and tries to focus on the rest of the report instead.
Dubois' and most of their bodies are nowhere to be found, likely vaporised in the initial blast, Louis continues. And Shapiro's—
"Is in the medbay, Dr. Lamai's team is looking over her." Hope springs unbidden in his chest before Stratt can finish. "I've contacted the South Korean government, they will airlift her to their land hospital once she is stabilised."
Stratt, having finished with the phone call, turns her entire attention to him. He cannot meet her eyes, not with what he might be asking her to do, and instead turns around to head towards the conference room, knowing that she will follow him.
The silence between them, usually filled with his chatter, stretches the whole walk.
They must be expecting this, since the ship's alarm went off, because everyone is there by the time he and Stratt steps into the conference room. The briefing is fairly straightforward, the research logs pulled and sent to his tablet — a measuring mistake, the difference small enough to be undetectable, but not enough to leave his flight crew unharmed.
He swallows his guilt and grief, and files Dubois and Shapiro's faces away with the countless others who have died and will die by his hands. He knows now, what it feels like to have his worst nightmares come true and live through it, second by second.
He knows that when he falls asleep to an explosion in his dreams, he will see their faces every time— his oversight, his failure, he should have never let them get this close to each other.
But grieving is not what this meeting is for. With Dubois gone and Shapiro out for the foreseeable future, the project is down a science specialist. With slightly over a month to launch, it is not impossible to fly in the next best option in their incredibly short list — a distillery worker in Paraguay — and catch her up to speed. He says as much to the room.
It is a ridiculous, a long shot in a series of already long shots. There is no reason to complicate matters when everything is already so precarious. He is stalling, they already have a tertiary science specialist all along and—
Stratt sitting beside him is shaking her head.
"I'm the tertiary science specialist. I'll go." She is looking at him; he looks over to the room.
He already know what her face will look like, already memorised the dip between her brows and the press of her lips when she has made up her mind. Instead, he watches the room relax imperceptibly, the tension bleeding out from Yáo and Ilyukhina.
All in all, this was shaping up to be the easiest meeting he has ever had in his life.
Unnerved by her easy acquiescence, a fight bubbles up to his lips, "You're the leading astrophage specialist. The post-launch research plans— Earth needs you." I need you.
She looks at him, unconvinced. "You'll find a solution."
"You are my second-in-command." His protest rings empty, meaningless.
She sighs, and he knows she is disappointed in him. He knows the utilitarian way she sees the world — one life against seven billion, it is an easy choice. It should be an easy choice. He has it written down in his notes, locked so only he has access; he has it played out in his dreams, this conversation.
Except in his dreams, he is the one begging her to go, apologising for his failures, apologising for taking the knife to her heart, apologising that he could not find another way. The Stratt in his dream sits there and takes it, takes it and forgives him.
Eva Stratt here does not even give him the chance to beg. "You're smart, you'll figure it out."
He looks back at the table patiently waiting for him to come to the same conclusion as the rest of them. An old anger rises up in him, the deja vu of being the only one in a room stuck in his own way. A room that has already decided on a universal truth and is wondering why he has not given up yet.
But there is no staggering waste of carbon to satiate his anger, just Eva Stratt handing him the forbidden fruit she has already taken a bite from, asking to be punished for it.
In the end, Stratt is named the primary science specialist, and Annie Shapiro the secondary foregone hope.
In the wake of the explosion and the destroyed hangar bay, taking with it a chunk of their research facilities, their docking date was pushed forward. Unable to delay their launch date, he simply moved the affected the departments to Baikonur a month early, where plans and procurement for the necessary equipments were already underway.
He does not see her the whole week after, his time preoccupied with a fresh wave of paperwork to get the cosmodome ready ahead of schedule and hers with being caught up to speed with actual scheduled astronaut training, not just experiments he threw at her to be a guinea pig for.
Still, her side of the administrative work never flags, and in place of her presence he has research updates and procurement forms signed and ready at his desk every night, the ghost of her touch lingering everywhere in his office. A cup of chamomile tea, freshly brewed and still warm by the time his hands reach for it. A takeaway box with American food, when the catering rotation of the week puts that cafeteria the furthest one from their rooms.
Even though he makes her schedule and she has his memorised, he never seems to catch even a shadow of her, slipping around the corner. A stark contrast to the steadying, reliable company he has come to expect trailing behind him, unasked for but also undenied.
He does not see her around because she is avoiding him, because he is not brave enough to avoid her.
A grace she is giving him, when she is the lamb being sent for slaughter, and is yet still looking in the butcher's eyes and begging for forgiveness.
The night of the explosion, Stratt showed up in his room for their daily debriefing, another habit they picked up between then and now, working together into the hours of the night. The scratch of her pen on paper in harmony with his keyboard taps used to fill the noiseless void of his room.
This time, her hands were shaking as she sat down, clenched into fists so hard he knows there will be marks left. He grabbed her hands then, on instinct, prying her fingers apart, rubbing the crescent indents on her palm away.
It gave him something to focus on for what she had to say.
"I compiled the coma-resistant list. I know who is on it. I have years of direct training with all areas of the ship, you made sure of that." He did. "It's much better than a chemistry major who has never had astronaut training. The Hail Mary needs every advantage it can get."
The indents smoothed away, his hands take to massaging hers, his thumb rubbing over her ring finger.
"Grace…"
He looks up at her, and gets ensnared in her gaze. He breaks away, and looks at the door behind her, at his yellow raincoat hanging behind her head, a halo glowing around her red hair.
"Grace, we will lose a quarter of the world's population in the next—"
"I know!" He means to snap, but the words come out whispered, hoarse and punched out from his throat. "But Shapiro… she could still recover."
In the periphery of his vision, he sees Stratt shake her head. She doesn't have to disagree out loud, he knows. Even if Shapiro were to miraculously wake up from her coma the next morning, sending her in this state would be a death sentence thirteen years early.
"Have a good rest, Director Grace."
She leaves, and that is the last time he sees her shadow.
In his dreams, he sees Dubois standing in a hangar bay untouched by the explosion, holding an astrophage tube, staring in his direction and whispering soundlessly, "why didn't you save me?" He runs towards him as the experiment prep starts, and his hand goes through the tube. His hand flickers, or maybe it is Dubois', but he never manages to grab onto the astrophage, and the experiment starts. The world explodes around him, and he feels neither the blast nor the heat, just Dubois' eyes on him the entire time as the flesh melts off his body. Why didn't you stop this?
In his dreams, he is lying on the hospital bed beside Shapiro, entire body bandaged in casts and hooked to every machinery his mind can conjure. He reaches over to her face and fights the temptation to force her eyes open, to shake her shoulders and shout at her to wake up. Shapiro does not say anything, unlike all his other dreams, no blames and no begging. She lies, so still even her chest does not rise or fall.
He imagines her waking up, wills the hospital tubes and stark white away, wills her eyes to open and the old Annie Shapiro to come back, because this is his dream and he can do what he wants. He then feels so abjectly guilty for his selfishness, stolen in the moment and existing only in his mind, that he wakes up.
He stares at the yellow raincoat hanging by the door, still visible from his bed, the last place he saw Stratt. And then he gets up, and starts his day.
In the end, he cannot avoid her for long. While packing for Baikonur, he comes across an invoice that reminds him of the lifetime before the explosion, and a lifetime after that will never come to pass.
Hidden in his desk drawer, second from the top and under a pile of sour skittle wrappers he knows Stratt will never sift through, is an order on the 6th of January for two plain silver rings, understated in its minimalism. Paid with his own bank account from his old job with NASA, they are estimated to arrive a week before launch.
He tears it up and puts it in the trash.
Things change after that, of course they do. Mentally for him at least. He still does not know how to call back to her, how to look at her and not see a dead woman walking. A prisoner with a death sentence walking towards her own firing squad.
But late January brings with it the Lunar New Year festivities, and despite the somber mood on board with their premature docking date looming, Grace can sense the excitement from the ship's crew, for many of whom the project will soon end. They will be able to go home to their families in time to celebrate. A silver lining of the past month, he supposes.
Yáo requests a party on behalf of the crew, a Lunar New Year-cum-farewell-cum-karaoke-cum-funeral last hurrah party. Yáo asks for so little beyond absolute necessities that he finds himself approving everything on the list, and then throws in some free shirts and caps for good measure.
He stays long enough at the start to pay his respects to Dubois and Shapiro and the deceased research team members, each of them receiving a speech honouring their efforts and a little anecdote he can recall without tearing up.
By the time he finishes, his throat his tight and the room quiet. He sees that Stratt has slipped in to the back of the room, watching him from behind the crowd. He is tempted to raise the microphone again and continue his speech, scrambling for a way to honour the flight crew without dissolving into a litany of apologies, a series of I'm sorry. I'm sorry I did not save your crewmate, I'm sorry the research got jeopardised, I'm sorry I cannot predict the thousand and one ways this project can go wrong and account for all of them.
Ilyukhina, ever the brightest star of the room, swoops to his rescue and snatches the microphone from him., "And now, we celebrate our life and my death!"
In the cheers that follow, he slips out onto the deck, watching the sun set on the last day on Grace's Gansu.
Stratt finds him there, the first time she has seeked him out since the night of the explosion.
"Land ahoy," he says by way of greeting. His eyes skirt her face, as if looking into her eyes will summon the grim reaper following behind her, who will raise their scythe and cut her down where she stands.
They stand by the railings as she watches the last of the sun dip below the sea, and he watches her eyes track it down and then up again the stars winking in, no longer overpowered by their brilliant sun.
The silence stretch between them, an unfamiliar amorphous blob.
"There's Taurus," He points to a V-shaped cluster of stars. It's supposed represent a bull's horns, but he could never see it.
(He never even knew where Taurus stood in the sky until halfway through the project, stepping out onto the deck one sleepless night (of many), trying to find Polaris and chart the sky to pass the time. He was facing the wrong direction though, and the north star was not visible from his position. Instead, he looked up constellations in the west and found Taurus ahead of him. At 1.30am, the bull's imaginary legs were already buried below the horizon.)
Beside him, Stratt huffs an almost-laugh and his lips quirk up unconciously.
"Where's Tau Ceti?" She asks, though her eyes have already slid from the sky to his face.
He points it out anyway, so he can look at the stars in the sky instead of those in her eyes. "The constellation beside it is Eridanus, the river of souls."
In the myth of Phaethon, he who took over the reins of the sun god but could not control his power scorched the heavens and Earth and left behind Eridanus, a map of his path. Phaethon had to be struck down by Zeus.
He sees the souls of Dubois and Shapiro, of his research crew, of the Saharan and Antartic wildlife in the stars, littered behind him on his warpath of destruction. He wonders who will finally strike him down.
He laughs. "You should get back to the party. Not much time left after…"
The words die on his lips.
Stratt shakes her head. "We have a month left, I want to spend it here."
Here, on the ship? Here, on the deck after the light of the sun has faded, suspended in the moment before sunrise of the next day?
"Grace…" Ever since the explosion, his name out of her mouth has taken on a weird cadence. The silence lingers between them again, and he fights the urge to fill it when he can see her struggling with her next words. He hears her inhale, "I'm sorry."
He reels back, struck. Another inhale.
"I did not mean to undermine your decision. The rest of the coma-resistant list—"
"Why are you sorry?" He means to say don't be sorry, I should be, but it comes out more stop lying to me. He cannot take her apologies on top of her sacrifice, when she is not truly sorry, when she would do it all over again in a heartbeat.
"I'm sorry I—" She knows too, that she is lying. "Grace."
She says his name like a refrain; he has never heard her call out to him so much, asking for forgiveness. He would have given her himself, his mortal hand in marriage. The order invoice sits in his trashbin, still uncleared. He is no God, he cannot give her grace.
"Ryland," she tries again. "I do not want to spend our last month with you angry at me."
"I'm not angry at you," he says incredulously. It still comes out angry.
"Don't go borrowing grief from the future. I am still here."
His eyes, dancing around the night sky and the deck, now barely lit with the stern lights, fall on her face.
They end up in his room again, the chair opposite his finally occupied with Eva going through the final Hail Mary logistics, both content to drop the topic.
The rings arrive in their boxes as they were moving into Baikonur and lie unopened in the drawer, second from the top, underneath a fresh pile of sour Skittles. Three days before the launch, he takes them out and shoves them into his yellow raincoat.
He is standing behind the fence, watching the assembly of the final rocket that will be carrying the flight crew up, when he hears her approach. Eva is carrying two coffees with her as usual, and he has half a mind to tease her — coffee addiction surely isn't healthy for space — but the machinery onboard the Hail Mary has already been programmed with her order. She sent it to him then, along with her preferred method of death, public "last words" and final wishes for Earth, and miscellanous information, all printed and slotted into a manila folder.
He was already going to make a donation to middle school STEM foundations in her name, anyway. She will be remembered a hero.
"What's your plan for the next twenty years?" she asks.
You, he thinks. The rings burn a hole in his coat pocket. His plan had been to marry her, invoking spousal privilege so she would not be faced against him in court. They would have, theoretically, then be on the run together, both their names and signatures too tied with the project to be free of legal repercussions.
Selfishly, he just wanted to have one thing for himself, to exist beyond its necessity to the project.
It does not matter now, Eva will be free of Earth's jurisdiction and its mortal squabbles. She will be free of him, 12 light years away, and he will die alone. Widowed or never married, it does not seem to change a thing.
His fingers brush the velvet box.
"Not much," he says, shrugging. "Probably prison—" She glances at him sharply. "—oh don't worry, I'll get out after a while. Dimitri has contacts and, you know. We'll figure it out."
Despite the sub-zero temperature, Eva has the hood down, the slight breeze playing with the strands of her hair. She smiles at him, and morning sun sets her hair aflame. Warmth envelopes him, possibly for the last time.
The day before launch finds Eva Stratt sitting in his office, the space now double in size on land. She asks to be coma-induced early due to her lack of space flight experience. She has already informed Yáo and Ilyukhina of the change in arrangement, of course she has.
The rings sit unopened in his drawer as the doctor enters his office, now twice as empty.