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“Stratt!”
“Grace.”
“Oh my god, it’s like talking to a robot. I give the prompt, you give the regurgitated response. Where’s the energy?”
“It is hard to bring enough coffee for two Ventis every day on the Hail Mary, Grace.”
“Eh. One packet a day is better for you, anyway. Don’t die on me.”
Stratt couldn’t really control what her face did next. It was like two hooks had caught the ends of her mouth and pulled, so she resisted as much as she could. But with Grace being Grace, who taught—had taught children, she’d taken that from him among a million other things, regrettably—and could catch whatever a face was hiding, caught hers.
“That’s very nice.”
“I’m a nice guy. What, don’t you think so too?”
Of course she did, and he knew that she did. After all, they’d been in the same room when Stratt had done what she had to. When she’d told him about the fundamental good she saw in him, the good that hopefully he would see in himself too one day.
That room had haunted Stratt, nipping at her heels like a fox determined to bring down its much larger, much sadder prey, until she’d relented to the wounds. Cunning.
Or at least, that was how she believed she’d ended up on the Hail Mary with Grace. She didn’t remember how exactly she must’ve given the other mission specialists heart attacks by going to space herself, but it must have been one hell of a day.
“Eh.” She rotated her hand in the ‘so-so’ gesture. “Hard to say.”
Grace rolled his eyes. Stratt wanted to flick him whenever he did that. Annoying ass.
“Fine, just say you don’t like me,” he groaned. “I’ll go kiss my lab equipment then. They don’t need coffee.”
“They also backfire on you. I hear you cursing at them almost every day. But yes. Go kiss your spectro—what is it—spectro…photometer? Yes. I am sure metal tastes much better than the meal packets I signed off on.”
And oh, the way Grace gawked at her finally melted her resistance to the hooks on her mouth, and she laughed in his face, because she could find her laugh easier aboard the Hail Mary than anywhere on Earth, because Earth was not where Grace was and she had begun to think that maybe this was not such a horrible decision after all.
And if she were to die in space, she would not die alone. That was her saving grace, even if she was selfish for thinking so.
He was her saving grace, and she was being selfish about him, too.
“Eva Stratt.”
She awoke, eyes blurring, focusing on the wall in front of her.
“Eva Stratt, please step out of the cell. Failure to comply will result in consequences.”
She didn’t bother responding, but pushed herself off her bunk. The jail cell was cold inside. She imagined the Hail Mary, with its three sleeping passengers, was not.
She hoped, more accurately.
The arraignment hearing for her crimes had arrived, and she could not find anything to feel bad about. It was quite idiotic of the world governments to turn their focus on her and prosecute her for the actions she had to take in order to ensure that humanity had a chance of surviving a very, very long winter to come. Everything she had signed, starved, staved, and spoke for was all for the good of Earth herself.
She could find nothing to feel bad about except the way a middle school science teacher’s eyes dimmed as he was stabbed with a needle, his body going limp as she watched from her office window, surrounded by papers and furniture and nothing she needed to make herself an option for the mission instead.
Ryland Grace would be a hero.
He always was a hero to her.
She wasn’t sure that if he returned, he would look at her the same way she had in that office: unable to, eyes cast downward, vision blurring.
The human mind was a strange thing.
Add to it the French drug, and it would become a forgetting thing.
Stratt was horribly selfish for hoping that Grace would remember just enough of her.
She knew she was not an entirely good person. Of course that was true.
She had never known herself to be this wanting. To dream of a man she’d met at the brink of to apocalypse was foolish; he was probably dead. She didn’t think he was dead.
She hoped he wasn’t dead.
The jail guard led her to the courtroom, her post-nap haze clearing with every step. She wished her selfishness, her wanting, her hopeless hoping would go away just as easy.
She didn’t know if she wanted those dreams to go away. The universe could spare her some mercy, even if it couldn’t spare her Ryland Grace.