Archive of Our Own

It was interesting, Stratt thought, that it wasn’t the terrified cries of Dr. Grace that kept her company through the long, cold nights. All the nights, and days too, were cold now. For more reasons than one. 

She had heard him, his pleas and panicked shouts feeding tinnily through Carl’s earpiece as he’d stood by, and into hers. 

“You’re going to do great.” 

She believed Carl’s words, fundamentally to her core. But it hadn’t made her feel any better about sending the one person who might have considered her a friend off to die.  

No, it wasn’t those cries that ran circles through her head as she watched the snow fall, crystalline flakes illuminated by the harsh white light of the prison perimeter. It was the tearful, embittered calls from Helen Grace, her voice lifting over the furore of the courtroom as Stratt’s final sentence had been passed down. 

Stratt had pleaded no contest to the reams of charges levelled at her. There would be no point, she knew. She was to be the world’s whipping boy, and she had to be content with that. It was a fair price to pay, also having tried to be the world’s saviour. A pyrrhic victory.  

The courtroom had fallen deathly quiet as Helen’s words rang out, the silence rippling around her as the gathered populace realised who she was. 

“Why didn’t you talk him out of it?” 

The audience parted for her, and she came up to the barrier, leaning over it as if mere proximity could force the answers Stratt refused to give. A man, William Grace, stood behind her, his hands on her shaking shoulders. Tears on his cheeks. 

“Please, Ms. Stratt. Please. Why didn’t you tell him ‘no’? You had the power to make that happen, didn’t you? There was someone else who could have gone, wasn’t there?” Helen gazed into Stratt’s eyes. She knew Dr. Grace and Helen weren’t biological family, but the shining blue of her irises suddenly belonged to a man she had once known, who wore stupid science pun t-shirts, who spouted off random facts when he was nervous. Whom she had betrayed.

“Why didn’t you save my boy?” Helen broke down, covering her face with her hands as she wept. 

She knew her lack of answer came across as calculated coldness. As uncaring and unfeeling, but really it was a shield. Stratt wasn’t sure who she was protecting with it, though. Helen and William, from the truth of what she’d had to do? The world, who had so readily taken up the phrase ‘saving Graces’ when the news had broken that Project Hail Mary was now a family affair? 

Herself? 

“Entschuldigung.” It was all she could muster. She wondered vaguely why the bailiffs hadn’t marched her away, had allowed this conversation to happen in front of the eyes of the hungry and watchful public. The answer was, as the answer had been throughout this entire case, spectacle. 

Another couple appeared at the Graces’ side, the man setting a comforting arm around William’s shoulders, the tall woman drawing Helen close to her as she looked at Stratt. She knew these people too. Colton Seavers’ adoptive parents. Karina’s eyes held no fury, no desperate need for answers. Only grief. Stratt thought they should all take a modicum of comfort that Dr. Grace hadn’t gone up alone, with strangers who would become even stranger the moment he woke up. She knew though, that it was hollow. 

The other two people that had been in the brothers’ orbit were conspicuous only by their absence. Jody Moreno had been immovable in her decision to retreat from the public eye. Claire Fitzroy was to be surrounded by family, and hidden from view. Grief could be private, as well as public, Stratt acknowledged. 

The loss of two sons, and a third, no one’s son, but very nearly a father. The price deemed necessary for the survival of the world. Stratt had singlehandedly ended the Gentry bloodline. 

And if, somehow, she was to wake up on the first day of the Project, rather than in her small cell, she knew she would do it all over again. 

The court had awarded the Graces and Seavers reparation money for their losses. It was, the judge told them, the literal least any of them could do for the sacrifice they’d had to endure so suddenly. A token of unwanted gratitude, the judge had called it. Another hollow comfort, but one Stratt tried to find solace in: Colton and Dr. Grace’s families would be very well looked after in what was to come.

As the temperatures dropped incrementally, year by year, Stratt put her time to good use. She agreed to interviews, documentaries, meetings. Considerably less so in number than in her days as the Project lead, and she found the change of pace simultaneously wonderful and grating. She read books she had always said she’d get around to. She drank less coffee, whilst the coffee supplies still lasted. 

On the day that Courtland, Colton and Dr. Grace would wake up, having arrived at the Tau Ceti system, Stratt found herself facing cameras in one of the meeting rooms. She had no prepared speech – in fact, she had been content to let the day pass her by entirely. The sheer terror and panic Dr. Grace must be feeling, a star system away, was the only thing she could envision. 

Was he running? Were his first moments aboard the Hail Mary eerily replaying his last on Earth? 

The cameras rolled: Stratt let her mask descend and addressed the world, telling them that they were, with some luck and much hope, halfway through this ordeal as a planet. Things would either get better, or … No one was really talking about if they didn’t. It didn’t bear thinking about. 

Helen Grace visited. Often. Stratt gave her the time she deserved, time that she had in reams now. Sometimes Helen was tearful, sometimes she was furious. Sometimes she came with William, Karina, Dean. 

She always asked why Stratt had not said no to Dr. Grace’s supposed heroic volunteer. 

“I am not a mother,” Stratt had said. “I felt there was no depth to it, outside of Earth needing a saviour.” 

“It’s not about being a mother, Eva. It’s about being human.” 

Those words lingered with her for weeks afterward, and Stratt wondered dispassionately if she was indeed human. She came to the conclusion that she was, and that everything she had done was born of love for humanity. Surely that, if nothing else, allowed her a place amongst the others? 

After fifteen years, her sentence was commuted. After fifteen years and two months, her sentence was thrown out entirely. Her climatologist’s predictions had been wrong, but thankfully in a direction that was palatable. They hadn’t lost half of Earth’s population. They’d lost a quarter. 

Food, resources, power, all became rarities. Social order was upheld as best as possible, but one by one, countries turned on their neighbours and the plundering began. Full blown war didn’t occur, but violent skirmishes and raids raged across the world. Society didn’t collapse, but modernism did. The more powerful countries turned insular, looking after their own before offering what meagre aid they deigned they could to others. 

Holding Stratt prisoner simply wasn’t worth the effort anymore. Everyone had cared that she would, invariably, take the fall for the wrongdoings of Project Hail Mary. But now in the throes of an unprecedented ice age, the name Eva Stratt became synonymous with cautionary tales. Fly too close to the sun, and get burned. Take the fall, and hope there is, and will be again, an ocean to catch you, or else smote yourself on the thick, undulating sea ice. 

She wondered if the tales of Icarus made no sense to the generation born into this era. Why would the sun burn? 

They gave her a place on a ship, a research vessel the purpose of which she never quite understood, and Stratt quietly blended into the crew. It wasn’t the Vat, but some old faces resurfaced around her. 

Ilyukhina had given her a hug when she’d spotted Stratt in the mess. It had been unlooked for, and Stratt wondered why the erstwhile astronaut had done so, knowing as she did what Stratt had done to Dr. Grace, what her choice had then forced his brothers to do. Yáo, Ilyukhina and Carl had all kept their silence. As for the doctors and guards who had held Dr. Grace down, she didn’t know. She suspected that if they hadn’t, their word wouldn’t hold enough weight for anyone to believe them. 

“I am glad you are here now,” Ilyukhina had said, drawing away. “I did not like that they locked you up for doing your job.” 

Stratt supposed that Ilyukhina might feel indebted to her. She had, after all, in a very roundabout and certainly unwilling way, saved Ilyukhina’s life. It simply did not cross Stratt’s mind that, perhaps, Ilyukhina wanted to be her friend. A known face in such an unknowable situation, a past spent together forging an unlikely relationship now. 

Ilyukhina had been working with Bob Riddell, making the black panels they’d carpeted over the Sahara desert into a renewable energy source that could see them through the perpetual winter.  

“You have to admit,” she said one night over a paltry dinner. “Grace’s brother – the clone, yes?” She laughed, and continued, “He was right at least that leaving myself and Yáo behind was a clever idea.” She raised her glass, a toast to Colton’s long ago words. “Send the jackasses to space!”

Yáo was not present aboard the research boat Stratt was now confined to. She kept tabs on him via Ilyukhina. When he wasn’t with his family, the Commander – she would always think of him as such, despite never bearing the mantle – was helping nations sort out their differences, advocating the need for peace in order to foster prosperity. Morally upstanding, to the last. 

Astronomers turned their eyes to the skies after a quarter of a century. Any object that entered Earth’s atmosphere was immediately and thoroughly looked into. The most common causes of death now were hypothermia, or starvation. The rest died from lack of clean water. There were hardly any elderly, and seeing a child below the age of five was considered a rarity, and a miracle. 

When four pinpricks of Petrova wavelength IR light were spotted, the news broke messily and all at once. One way or another, an answer was coming home. The boat immediately changed its meandering heading, and set a course for the splash-down intercept. Stratt had started this whole affair, and by some unspoken consensus, Stratt got the first honour to see how it ended. If it ended badly, well. She had been the world’s scapegoat once. There were no rules that she couldn’t be so again. 

Ushered onto the bridge, the Captain tersely showed her how to work the hard drives containing either their salvation or doom, and left her. The four main bodies of the beetles were to stay sealed until the video logs had been watched in full. Whatever was contained within would need verifying first by the crew of the Hail Mary. The last thing they needed was some unknown pathogen released into the air. 

Stratt’s hands shook, ever so slightly, as she pressed play on the first log. She ignored the unbidden motion, and allowed herself a single, bittersweet smile as a face she had not seen in twenty-six years, but had never forgotten for a second, flickered into view on the screen before her. 

She was the first to learn that Dr. Grace had been alone, that her careful planning had failed. She was the first to learn that they were not alone in the universe. She was the first to learn that they had been saved. 

“Hopefully it all makes sense. And if not … you’re smart. You’ll figure it out.” 

The smile returned, and this time it was warm. She turned the little model over and over in her fingers, and even though she had no idea what it was made from, she knew it was supposed to be Dr. Grace. He would never be here again, but his legacy would walk the planet for the rest of time to come. 

Stratt picked up the phone that tapped into the ship-wide broadcasting network. The waiting silence on the other side of the door, throughout the cabins, corridors and hold, was palpable. “Let’s begin.” 

On a boat, in the middle of an ice-encrusted ocean, cheers, laughter and relieved tears erupted.         

Her words were not only for the next, and now final, stage of the Project. They were for humanity. Let’s begin, again. 

***

“Hello, Stratt. Bet you thought you’d seen the last of us.” 

She was pleased to find that Dr. Grace clearly hadn’t remained alone. Because here was Courtland and Colton on her screen, just as righteous and protective as the day she had first met them. They were joined by Rocky the Eridian, and Dr. Grace was nowhere in sight. She had a feeling she knew what was coming next. 

“We know Ry sent you a very nice last message with the beetles, but he will have left out the most important thing,” Colton began, smiling innocently. “Which is that you absolutely fucking suck.” 

Stratt began to laugh. It felt good, and she tipped her head back and missed most of the next sentence. It wasn’t supercilious, it didn’t stem from any ill feeling toward Dr. Grace’s brothers, quite the opposite. Courtland and Colton had every right to cuss her out, and the distinct lack of dancing around the issue was refreshing. 

The video continued, Stratt watching amusedly as they all threatened her with things they could never possibly achieve, being eleven light years away. Rocky had a lot to say on the matter, but the majority of it was untranslated. That didn’t particularly matter; she could guess. 

Dr. Grace’s logs had been almost instantaneously declassified after Stratt had confirmed their contents. Cinemas, stadiums, anywhere that had a screen that hadn’t cracked and buckled from the intensity of the cold, reopened their doors. Emergency power had been rerouted, and generators were brought in to make certain the feeds didn’t glitch or die halfway through. Tickets were unrequired, and the places were all packed.

The Saving Graces Logs, as they had come to be known, were seen worldwide. The very first people to see them though, after Stratt, had been the Graces, Seavers, Ms. Moreno and her daughter. It had been a difficult experience for them all. Stratt still harbouring the secret knowledge as to why Dr. Grace remembered nothing, as his parents watched him struggle, find his footing, and never mention their names once. Courtland and Colton not appearing in a single log, only talked about in passing, first as the unknown ‘C. Gentry’ and ‘C. Seavers’, then as ‘my brothers’, and finally as ‘Court’ and ‘Colt’.   

The Graces had received confirmation Dr. Grace was alive, but irrevocably changed. The Seavers, Ms. Moreno and Claire received confirmation that Courtland and Colton were remembered, but still missing in a fundamental way from their youngest brother’s life. 

Hope was a fickle thing, and the logs confirmed what everyone had already known, but hadn’t wanted to acknowledge. None of them were coming home. 

Despite all that, however, Stratt knew this particular log would never see the light of day. She intended to watch it, in full, once, and then scrub its existence from the data banks. Although she would never release the log itself, what it revealed could be – very carefully – shared. She knew that the families left behind deserved closure. Whatever she told them would most likely seep out into public knowledge, but all anyone had to know was that Dr. Grace had found Rocky, alive and well, and that the four of them were traversing the stars toward their new home. Stratt was a woman of determination, and she was resolute that her sacrifice of Dr. Grace would never be known.

Colton was better at insults than threats. Courtland excelled in dark looks. Rocky sounded very angry and occasionally shook his fist at her. She took in their hurt, their rage and upset, knowing she deserved every last bit of it, but the log was almost ridiculous in places, and Stratt found herself feeling fond of the two men and little alien shouting at her.  

With less than a minute of the log left, the tone changed considerably. Stratt felt her chest constrict a little as Courtland looked directly into the camera and said, “You had no right to take him away from us twice.”

“I know,” she murmured. 

Would she have had to wipe his autobiographical memory if Courtland and Colton were going up in the first place? If they had been pulled from the list of viable personnel, would their places have been switched, Dr. Grace insisting he go as the scientist? She would never have a satisfactory answer for that, and Stratt knew it would eat at her, if she let it.

“Ry might have forgiven you, but we haven’t. And we won’t.” Courtland went on. “The only thing I can say is thank you for sending us all, because at least up here he’s safe. Safe from you.” 

She nodded, because it was true. Dr. Grace had been, somehow unbeknownst to him, her second in command. The world would have turned its bared teeth and claws on him just as quickly as it did on her, directly post-launch. 

Suffering was not something that was comparable. It happened to everyone at some point and in some capacity, but Stratt was infinitely glad that Dr. Grace’s suffering had been, at least, brief. She knew they had a long road ahead, knew they would face hardships and dangers. But they would do it as a family. 

That was all she really could have hoped for. 

***

Claire Fitzroy once had a mother and a father. She lost them. Claire Fitzroy had an uncle. She lost him, too. 

And then, despite her perfect track record of loss, Claire dared to hope she might have found someone who would look after her. A nearly father, and she was quite sure that, on late nights, half asleep on the couch, she called him as such. 

Her relationship with Six – or Court, as he had then preferred – came with two more uncles inbuilt. Court reassured her before meeting them for the first time that it was okay if she got them mixed up. But the only thing they shared was a face, and Claire knew the difference instantly. 

Uncle Fitz had loved her, she was utterly sure of that. But he hadn’t been around all too often, and his love seemed designated to late nights. He would come home from wherever it was he had been, tuck the blankets more firmly around her, press a gentle kiss to her head, and then retreat behind the locked door of his office.  

Uncle Colt and Uncle Ry, however, were so starkly different to him it made her head spin a little. She found herself hoisted up into the air immediately by Uncle Colt, and she’d grabbed a handful of his hair in a slight panic, a solid two feet higher up than she was used to being. 

Uncle Ry was quieter, and he would sit by her side as she battled homework, his presence not watchful, but dependable. He was prone though, she noticed, to bursts of mischief. She followed his lead one rainy afternoon and, when instructed, ran a pen along the length of Uncle Colt’s nose as he took a nap. Uncle Ry had filled Uncle Colt’s lax hand with nearly an entire can of shaving cream. They both booked it, laughing, when he’d woken up, covered in white foam, and yelled after them. 

Claire’s family had always been small. Mom and Dad, Uncle Fitz. Now, it sprawled uncontrollably outward, the people closest to her bringing more people into their little ecosystem. She adored Aunty Jody from the moment she’d met her. It was nice to finally have another girl to talk to, and Jody taught her many things, from how to plait her own hair without looking, to how to frame a scene in a movie so it told a story without words, to how to throw a good punch. 

Court told her he didn’t have parents. She was confused about that, because his little brothers did. Even more confusingly, they didn’t share those parents. She asked him about it, and had been brushed off with a “when you’re older”. Not one to give up, she asked Uncle Ry. He liked a good question. He told her that his parents were his adoptive parents, same for Uncle Colt. When Claire pressed for more, he’d gone very quiet. 

“When I’m older?” She asked, wondering if she’d made him cross. 

“I think … I think that might be for the best,” he said, smiling softly. He’d then helped her with her maths homework. 

Older, it turned out, was going to happen without Court, without Uncle Colt, without Uncle Ry. 

The day they left would never lose its vividity. She came home from school to find Aunty Jody in the living room, biting her nails and staring expectantly at her phone, placed on the coffee table. She wordlessly pulled Claire in for a hug. 

It was a gesture she was all too familiar with. Someone had left. Gone from her life, irrevocably and with finality. She only hoped that whoever it was had a gravestone near to her parents’. 

Aunty Jody sobbed down the phone when it eventually rang. Claire had never seen her like that before, and the numbness changed into fear. 

She begged, she shouted, she swore. And then, worst of all, she went silent. Nodded, pressed a hand to her lips, and closed her eyes. “Don’t expect me to forget you, Colt Seavers,” she whispered. “Don’t you dare ask that of me.” 

Aunty Jody passed the phone to her, then. 

Court really had done his best to explain, she knew that. She could hear how this was tearing him apart, could picture the set of his jaw and the glint in his eyes of tears he refused to let fall. 

And she hated him for it. 

It was only later that Claire remembered she had screamed down the phone that Uncle Ry could go up alone, but Court had to stay here, with her. It made her feel sick to think about, looking back, but she knew that Court wouldn’t have taken it badly. She knew he would have understood. 

Aunty Jody was going to look after now, and Court made her promise to behave, to look out for one another. To do her homework, and be in bed by nine, latest. Claire promised, thinking that if she said it with enough fervour, that Court would see how hard she was trying and would choose to stay after all. 

They watched the launch with the rest of the world. Uncle Colt and Uncle Ry’s parents were in the room with them, and Claire found herself surrounded on all sides with people she didn’t want. Three pictures appeared as a billow of white smoke took over the entirety of the screen. The photograph on the far right was of Court, and she knew it had been the one she’d taken on their first day together. 

Despite not wanting any of them there, Claire curled up in the lap of Uncle Colt’s father, and sobbed until she’d fallen asleep. 

And so life had carried on for Claire. She went to school, she did her homework, she held onto Aunty Jody when she cried in the kitchen, and let herself be held in return when Aunty Jody found her nestled in Court’s small walk-in closet, hoping to catch his scent just one last time. 

Nothing and everything had changed. It was only as Claire reached her middle teens that she fully understood what was happening to the world around her. Summers were less bright, spring never really came, and the first time it snowed in August, she knew something was completely wrong. 

School stopped altogether. There were no universities to apply to. Living became an exercise in survival. Aunty Jody tried to make as many films as she could, but soon money wasn’t what people wanted to be paid in. Food. Viable seeds. Medicine. All things that couldn’t be used as currency because it was too busy being a necessity. 

Claire was helping at a local street kitchen, resolutely refusing to feel the coldness in her hands, when someone mentioned in passing that the astronauts sent up should have woken by now. It would have been four years for them. It had been thirteen for Claire. Her count of years without Court now outweighed the ones with. Claire hastily dashed away tears, turned back to the too long line, and served a ladle of steaming broth into a waiting cup. 

She laid out her plan to Jody – the ‘Aunty’ now long gone, ‘Mom’ sometimes taking its place – that evening. Jody agreed straight away, and said she would get in touch with the Graces and Seavers. She also suggested the library as a good place to start her research. Arrest and adoption records often had a paper trail. 

As Claire’s stack of handwritten pages grew taller, and the coldness seeped a little deeper into the very soil, Jody decided she had had enough of merely surviving. Setting aside her work for a while, Claire helped her renovate, as best they could with limited supplies, an old run-down theatre. They patched the moth-eaten chairs with clothes that no longer fit them. The stage lights wouldn’t work, so they saved jars and then filled them with candles. They searched through junk heaps and thrift stores for costumes. Claire passed out handmade flyers at the kitchens she worked in, and stuck spares to lamposts.     

On the first night, Jody placed as many of their jarred candles as she could on the steps, burying them half into the perpetual piles of snow so that the very ground seemed to be glowing. People passed by, hunched and tired, spotted the lights, and stopped. The theatre steadily filled, and a hush passed over the waiting crowd as the old velvet curtain lifted. 

In those early days they had no cast to speak of, so it was just readings of passages from old plays, whirling and wild words from Shakespeare, snippets of poetry that tugged at something visceral deep inside. 

The Beacon, as it became to be known, was a success from day one. 

Claire completed the book in the middle of a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In a slight daze, she set the manuscript on the chair beside her and watched the rest of the play. The ending lines she scribbled down as the epigraph. 

‘If we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended, that you have slumbered here, whilst these visions did appear.’ 

Traditional publishing was limping along, somehow. Claire supposed it was because the archaic printing press could be used without electricity. Books were more common than televisions now, even though they were considered a luxury. Five publishers nearly ripped her arm off for the chance to represent her, and after some conversation, they had all come to a unanimous decision that this work would be published by as many houses as would take it. 

It was, after all, humanity’s story. 

Now, and at the Hour of our Death, by Claire Fitzroy, became the biggest publishing effort since the sun went cold. 

She had worked meticulously to gather as many details as she could. Extensive interviews with Helen, Will, Dean and Karina. She had tracked down the brothers’ old social worker, Marie. Claire had even visited the ill-tended gravesite of Theodore Gentry. The Sierra Program had been declassified in her third year of writing, and she poured over Six’s logs and reports. Brushing her fingers against the page, Claire could almost imagine that the ink was still wet, that Court’s hand had been here but a moment ago, penning these very words. 

She had no interest in talking to Eva Stratt. This wasn’t about her, it was about Court, Uncle Colt and Uncle Ry, and everything they had gone through.

Claire was thirty-nine when hope came back. Jody heard first, raced from The Beacon mid-show, and breathlessly told her they’d been summoned. Messages from the Hail Mary, alongside the beetles, had splashed down a few days ago. 

Uncle Ry had done it. 

Claire fell in love immediately with the little rock spider creature, named Rocky, and watched the logs with her eyes shining and something unlocking in her chest. Court wasn’t there, but she knew he was still alive. That had to be enough, for now. Uncle Ry would look after him, she was sure. 

After the relief, came a wave of bitterness. Of grief, unearthed once again. They could have come back, Claire could have been held again in familiar arms. She was, due to some strange quirk of physics, now officially older than Court, than either of her uncles. But she knew Uncle Colt, had he come home, would still have lifted her into the air. Uncle Ry would still have sat quietly by her side, a gleam in his eye that meant there was fun to come. 

“It’s not fair,” she said, sitting beside Jody that night. A bottle of wine sat on the table between them. They’d put it away especially nearly a quarter century ago for this very day. “I know why, but still –” 

“Our planet’s survival shouldn’t mean the extinction of another’s,” Jody said. “But you’re right. It’s deeply unfair.” She raised her glass, waiting for Claire to do the same. “To Ryland’s stupid kindness.” She smiled, and although they were both still missing someone dear, Claire saw it reached Jody’s eyes. 

A few months later, Jody received a message that a log had been intercepted that was meant for her. 

Claire waited for her at home, ready to hold onto her mother in the kitchen, expecting tears to be shed, and hoping she would feel lighter for it. 

***

“Hey, Jodes.” 

He looked the same. 

Jody pressed her fingertips to the screen. That was her Colt. Same shaggy hair, same light scruff across his jawline and chin. Same softness in his eyes that she knew was only reserved for her. 

“I – uh. I don’t really know what to say.” He shuffled in the seat, and then smiled. “I could do this and you wouldn’t be able to hit me.” He gave her a thumbs up. 

Jody laughed through a sob, feeling tears collect at the point of her chin and then fall. 

“I just … I needed to talk to you. Or I guess at you, since you can’t respond. Man, I’d love for you to respond.” His smile wobbled. “Sometimes I think I’m forgetting the sound of your voice, and then I can just … hear you, all over again, in my head. Telling me to stop being stupid.” 

“Stop being stupid, Colt,” she said. “Talk to me.” 

“It’s been … ha, yeah, that about sums it up. It’s been.” Colt sighed, reaching up to ruffle his hair. “You’ll know the majority of it all from Ry’s logs, I expect. But some more stuff has happened since then. And I –” His voice broke. “I just really need you here. And you’re not. And you won’t be ever again, and I don’t think I know how to deal with that. I’m not –” He steadied himself. “I haven’t been dealing very well, recently.” 

Jody felt a weight settle beneath her ribs. 

“Ry’s … Yeah. Court’s told me he’s going to be okay. I have to believe that, because I’ll go mad if I don’t. I feel so useless. And I thought, if I never heard his voice again, I think it would just about finish me off. So I guess I’m sending you this because I don’t want the same to happen to you. That’s selfish, I know. You might have a whole new life now, and that would be fine – good, even.” He smiled sadly for her. “You should be happy, Jodes.” 

She had, not once, even thought about another partner. Claire had gently encouraged her, told her it was fine if that’s what she wanted. But Jody knew it began and finished for her with Colt. She wore around her neck one of his rings, in lieu of the one she had never had the chance to receive. 

Colt cleared his throat. “Ugh, god, okay c’mon, Seavers.” 

She rolled her eyes. 

“Anyway. What else can I tell you? I live with an alien in the weirdest sitcom you could imagine. It’s nice to spend time with Court, even if he is a completely overbearing annoyance sometimes. I’m glad to be here for Ry.” 

His voice cracked over his brother’s name, and Jody knew that whatever had been occurring aboard the Hail Mary when this log was sent, had been bad. But Colt wasn’t speaking about Ryland in the past tense, and she drew meagre comfort from that. 

“I’m gardening.” 

“Bloody hell,” she said, an incredulous laugh breaking from her. 

“I can hear you laughing at me, Jodes, and I’ll have you know I’m an excellent gardener.” Colt said haughtily. 

She almost forgot for a moment that this wasn’t a video call. 

“Food will be tight getting to Erid, but we think we can manage it.” Colt leaned in and conspiratorially whispered, “Court cried when I gave him our first space-grown strawberry the other day.” 

The log was nearly two hours long. Colt rambled through a series of unconnected thoughts, topic hopping as he always did. Jody hung on every word. It was clear to her that Colt had needed this, just a simple opportunity to talk without judgement, without interruption. 

She felt a lurch when she saw that the little playback bar at the bottom of the screen had nearly reached the far end. 

“This is really long, isn’t it?” Colt said. “I should stop soon … but I really don’t want to. I wish you were here. I wish I was there. I wish a lot of things had never happened, and that others had. I think about you every day, I want you to know that. I never stopped loving you, for all those years I wasn’t in your life, and now for all these years coming.” 

The air in the room had long since vanished, and Jody found herself desperately trying to snatch a breath with lungs that didn’t seem to work anymore. 

“And who knows,” he said through tears. “Maybe one day, stars willing, you and me can drink spicy margaritas in swimming costumes together somewhere.” 

He reached out and pressed a hand to the screen. Jody did the same. 

“See you around, Jodes. I won’t say goodbye, because it isn’t. How can it be goodbye when you’re always with me?” Colt gave her his blinding grin, a wink, and the screen went black. 

Something jagged inside her shattered all over again – and then smoothed out entirely. Glass to shards to sand. She kept her hand on the screen for a long time. Only after a few deep breaths, tilting her head back to let the warmth of the sunlight play on her face, did Jody finally feel able to let go. 

***

They met every other Friday for coffee, even through the coldest years. Coffee hadn’t been a rarity when they started this tradition, the way it later became. Hopefully, now though, the climate might support the plant’s growth again, and the cups of hot water they were used to could be swapped out for sugary caffeine. 

That was how Marie liked her coffee. With enough sugar to make her teeth hurt. Amir preferred his with just a dash of milk. 

They both retired after the beetles had splashed down. It marked the end of an era for them. Despite the coldness that had ravaged the Earth, their jobs had been remarkably unchanged. They both still helped people, in whatever capacity they could. 

Some cases stayed with you, no matter how many years ago they occurred, no matter how far removed you were from whatever outcome had happened. 

For Marie, that case had been the Gentry kids. 

From the moment she laid eyes on the twins, curled up together in a starched-white hospital bed, she knew they’d always occupy a fraction of her daily thoughts. The feeling had only intensified as the case went on, as she met Courtland, heard how he had lived his day to day. Saw what an impossibly, incredibly good job he had done raising his little brothers. 

The outcome had been not at all what Marie, nor Amir, had wanted. She didn’t often like to think in terms of ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ in her line of work – it was a sure fire way to become jaded. But she absolutely considered the Gentry case a loss. 

Courtland had been sent down for murder. Colt and Ryland had been split apart from their protector, and then from one another. 

The Graces and the Seavers had done a truly wonderful job with the twins, and Marie knew she couldn’t have asked for better foster parents. But it hadn’t been right, and she could still hear Ryland, small, soft-spoken Ryland, yelling at her with everything he had, from the backseat of her car. That she had promised, and had now failed to deliver on it. 

Amir had been devastated at Courtland’s verdict. It had been one of the only times she could remember him crying on the job. After it had been passed down, Marie and Amir held onto one another in a side room. Justice, that day, whilst adhering to the letter, had failed. Then they stitched smiles back onto their faces and pretended for a little while longer that Courtland might be coming home to the twins.  

She had to care for and love all the kids in the casefiles that passed across her desk. Because if she didn’t shout loud enough for them, didn’t show them that people were still capable of love, then who would? She had cared for the Gentry boys, because that had been part of her job. 

She had loved them, because they were impossible not to. 

Looking at the three pictures on the news as the space shuttle took off, Marie didn’t see the convict, nor the carefree acclaimed stuntman, nor world’s leading expert on Astrophage. 

She saw a tall young man, with dark circles under his eyes and steel in his core, standing just ever so slightly in front of his brothers. She saw two twin boys. One, grinning and covered in bruises that hadn’t come from fists, knees muddied and hands grasping for the next thing to climb. The other, glasses too big for his face, a solemn expression there and clutching a book that seemed far too thick for one so young, but would be read to completion in a matter of days. 

She knew they were going off to die. They had sacrificed everything for one another as children and, somehow, they were about to do it again. But Marie watched the launch with a smile. Because despite the end these three boys now faced, they were, finally, together. 

Now Marie, older, hopefully wiser, and with no less love in her, sat on the bench and waited for Amir to arrive. The days were still cold, but the bite of it was weakening steadily. She sipped her drink – not coffee, but tea. She was trying to wean off the caffeine anyway. 

The memorial garden had been designed to be beautiful no matter the season or climate. If there wasn’t enough warmth in the sun for plants to thrive, the eye could be drawn to the rock sculptures, or else the windchimes strung from hardy tundra pines. None of that interested Marie, however. Her eyes were for the statue, and the statue only. 

“Oh, Ryland would be so embarrassed,” she had said, on the day of the unveiling. 

Amir had grinned at her. “And Colt would adore it.” 

Carved from dark stone, the three saviours of Earth stared out into the garden that surrounded them. Courtland stood between Ryland and Colt, a hand on each of their shoulders. At their feet, the alien – Rocky – had been sculpted, one of his claws open in a greeting. Somehow, the artist had managed to capture the difference between the twins. Marie didn’t know what reference photographs they had used, but Ryland’s glasses were ever so slightly skewed. Colt’s nose bore the distinct shape of having been broken several times. 

Their names were written on a plaque beneath, the dates of their births followed by a dash, and then – for which she had been deeply grateful – an infinity symbol. Even if they had died en route to Erid, or when they did eventually die a star system away, the Gentry boys would never fade on Earth. 

“Hey,” Amir sat down beside her. 

“Do you think,” she said thoughtfully, “that they were always going to stay together, no matter the odds?” 

“What, like fate or something?” 

“I don’t know.” Marie turned to her erstwhile colleague and long time friend. “I’d maybe like to think so.” 

“Well, they always say that the strings of fate are red, don’t they?” Amir pointed to the arc of the carved Petrova line that framed the figures. 

Marie smiled. “They do.” 

“Ryland says hello, by the way.” Amir grinned as Marie stared at him. “Got a call from Will the other day. Another log was picked up a couple of weeks ago. Ryland made it for him, and Helen. Mentioned us.” 

“He was always so considerate,” Marie said softly. “Unless, of course, Colt was ragging him. And then he was a terror.” 

Being remembered was not high on Marie’s priority list. She hadn’t done her job for all those years for glory, nor accolades. She’d done it because it was the right thing to do. But the fact that Ryland mentioned her, and Amir, despite everything that had happened, despite the malfunction in the technology that rendered his memory useless for months, breathed life into a small ember within her. 

She tapped her paper cup against Amir’s. “To the kids who made it.” 

“And the ones that didn’t,” Amir finished their old mantra. 

They drank in silence. And then Amir said, “Oh, and Ryland says that Colt’s still mad about the motorbike.”  

They laughed together under an eggshell blue sky, and Marie thought, for the first time in years, that she could smell spring in the air again. 

***

Helen longed to hear his feet, one last time, coming down the stairs for breakfast. He had never thundered his way down, the way Colt did when he’d stayed the night. Every footstep was light and measured, and Helen knew it was an ingrained habit. 

She hoped he’d felt safe with them, though. She hoped he felt safe now. 

Colt, the sweet man he was and that he tried so very hard to hide behind smirks and sunglasses, gave both her and Will lengthy run-downs of his weekly video calls with Ry during his time on Project Hail Mary. Saturday morning would roll around, and if Helen knew Colt was in the area, she’d get up and have a pot of tea brewed by the time a knock sounded at the front door. 

He tried to answer her questions as best she could, and occasionally Will would place his hand over hers, giving it a light squeeze in an effort to calm her. Was he eating enough? Did he get enough sleep? Were people being kind to him?

She missed Ry’s bi-weekly visits for dinner on Sundays, during those months. Helen would always set a place for him at the table, though. Just in case. 

It had been an ordinary day when the news broke. She came home from work, papers to grade in her bag and a lecture to write for next week. She hadn’t heard from Colt about the last video call, and it was weighing on her a little. Will, too, seemed concerned, but he reassured them both saying that if something was wrong, surely the woman in charge, Stratt, would reach out. 

The phone rang. Will answered it, and Helen had been pulling out her folder and pens when she’d heard him cry out. 

He stood at the bottom of the stairs, a hand pressed over his mouth and hunched over, eyes wide and staring at nothing. 

“Will? Will, what’s happened?” She came over, looping an arm around her husband’s shoulders and peering into his face. “Will, you’re scaring me.” 

“It’s Ry. He’s going.” 

And the world fell apart entirely. She hadn’t needed to question what ‘going’ meant. 

Twenty minutes later, the front door burst open. Helen hadn’t moved from where she’d slumped to the floor, her whole body numb and feeling continual tears trickle over her cheeks. She watched with detachment as Will had paced up and down, shouting into the phone, begging for someone else to go instead. For someone else’s child to be sacrificed in Ry’s place. Helen thought she should be more perturbed by that. 

Dean and Karina halted as they took in the scene before them, Helen lifting her face upwards. She knew immediately what news they brought with them. 

“Colt – he’s …” Dean began. “He’s –” 

“With Ry,” Helen whispered. She leaned into Karina as she came to sit beside her, two mothers caught in unfathomable grief and clinging to one another as best they could. 

Will threw the phone, its plastic casing cracking as it hit the floor. Ry would have flinched, Helen thought. Will had been so careful with him, always gentle, always softly spoken. 

“It’s all of them,” he said. “I don’t know how, but … it’s all of them.” 

Helen had met Court only twice. A few months after his sentence had been commuted – for reasons none of them fully understood – he’d simply appeared on the porch. There had been something about his eyes Helen had, at first, been wary of. They saw too much, a distance lurked in them that she couldn’t name. All her misgivings had disappeared instantly the moment she watched Ry’s face light up, and hurl himself with an enthusiasm she rarely saw at Court. Court had reached out to catch him. 

The second time he’d appeared had been for Christmas when the twins were seventeen. It had been the Seavers’ turn to stay with them, and a polite knock at the door on Christmas Eve halfway through dinner had them all puzzled. 

Dean had gone to answer it, and came back with a dour expression. “All our presents are going to be crap now,” he said. 

And Court stuck his head around the doorframe, and Colt and Ry were out of their seats so fast the table had moved. 

He’d thanked them all that night, the twins both asleep beside him – worn out with sheer excitement – for keeping them safe, and showing them they were deserving of love in his absence.  

On launch day, Helen found herself unable to look away from the news broadcast. Colt’s girlfriend fumbled for her hand, and Helen wanted to pull away. When she was this upset, this distressed, she didn’t like another’s touch. She needed to be able to crumble, to fly apart at the seams and couldn’t do that if someone was relying on her strength to bolster their own. 

The girl, Claire, had been distraught. 

Helen couldn’t bring herself to care. The shuttle lifted off, and she watched her boy leave the Earth for the cold, unknowable reaches of space. Gone were the times she could fuss with his hair, straighten his glasses, slip granola bars into his workbag. 

It took a while for the rest of the world to catch up, but Helen’s life had frozen over that day. 

People left them flowers. For days, they’d wade through wilting petals and stems just to cross the porch. Dean and Karina had the same issue; tributes from people who were performatively sad, secretly grateful inside that it hadn’t been them, and that they might be saved. 

Each year on the anniversary of the day Ry had been given into their care, Helen would leave the lamp on all night in the living room window. There would be a cup of hot chocolate on the table. Just in case he ever needed to find his way home in the dark, in the cold. In case he needed warming up when he got there. 

The hot chocolate would be stone cold by the morning, untouched. 

Helen allowed herself these things, because at heart she was a practical woman. She kept lecturing, whilst the universities were open. She visited Stratt and tried to get the answers she knew the erstwhile Project lead was concealing. She sat down with Claire for endless interviews, most of which ended in tears, bittersweet nostalgia reopening wounds with every story she told. 

Often, she would find Will sitting on Ry’s childhood bed, something inconsequential he’d left behind when he’d gone to college in Will’s hands. Helen would brace herself, step foot inside, and sit down next to her husband. The room still faintly held Ry’s scent. 

They were well looked after, in the worst of it. They had food, they had water, they had enough coal or burnable wood to get through the deepest winter. They lived comfortably because it was what made the rest of the world feel better about the situation they’d been left in. 

Probes landed in the ocean, twenty six years later. 

Twenty six years of misremembering his voice. Twenty six years without her son. 

Helen, Will, Dean and Karina simply held onto one another as the logs played out. Helen broke down entirely the moment Ry’s face appeared on screen. Later, she would be able to look back and shake her head fondly at the sheer unkemptness of him, all long hair and scraggly beard. 

He didn’t remember them. All those years together, all that connection steadily built, all that love. Gone. Gone, and left in its wake an empty, heartbreaking void. Ry mentioned that he must have had parents in one of the logs. Their names, their faces, however, were lost to him. He said he was sure that they’d been kind, however. 

“I can’t explain it, but I can just kind of feel that they were, y’know? I’ll add that to my list of facts, actually. ‘I was raised by kind people’.” 

It was worse for the Seavers. Colt’s absence haunted the logs. They had to make do with Ry’s halting confirmation that his twin was still alive. She wondered if, at any point watching, they tried to delude themselves that it was their boy talking to them, not the Graces’. 

“I owe him ten dollars,” Will said as the screen went to black. 

“Hm?” Karina ran swift hands over her face, dashing the tears there away. 

“I bet him ten dollars that aliens didn’t exist,” Will said with a smile that then disintegrated into sobs.

The sun came back. The warmth did not. Helen would never be warm again, she knew this, made her peace with it. She had people to hold onto, let others hold onto her when she felt able. Helen Grace could be okay, just okay, and most days that was enough.

Jody let Dean and Karina watch the log Colt had sent back for her. Their joy at seeing him had been wonderful to witness, but that night in bed, Will and Helen huddled in anxious silence together. Something had been very wrong with Ry, and neither of them were there to help fix it. Ry needed people around him if he was unwell, both as a source of comfort and to make sure he was getting rest. Will murmured that Court would be that comfort, that Colt would make sure he was being well looked after. It sounded empty in the dark. 

And then, as if he had heard them all the way out amongst the stars, Ry soothed their fears.   

“Hi, Helen. Hi, Will. This is not exactly what I had envisioned our last contact to be.” 

As one, they’d both slipped from the couch and to the floor, kneeling like children as close to the screen as possible. The nameless government officials that received the incoming logs from the Hail Mary allowed them to watch this one at home. 

He had thanked them for the so easy, so simple task of loving him. 

“Sweetheart, you never have to say that,” Helen breathed. “Never.” 

“It’s our pleasure, kid.” Will’s hand was in hers.

When Ry teared up, Helen wanted nothing more than to have him in her arms again. To shush him, pull him in close like she’d done when he was no taller than her elbow. Tell him it was all going to be alright, there was another day to do tomorrow, and she was sure it would be brighter. 

Ry told them where to look for him. Eridanus. 

Helen didn’t need to know that, she already knew where to look. He was in the dogeared books on their shelves. He was in the pencil marks that lined their kitchen doorframe, each one labelled with an age. He was in the way Will wore his glasses, precariously hanging from an ear. 

But he wasn’t here. 

“Because, after all, a wanderer must have a drink when they first arrive, don’t you agree?” Ry smiled, and he was just a ten year old boy again. She had first seen that smile as he’d pulled out a battered book about space, opened it and told them how stars were formed. 

Helen was determined to hang on until the boys reached Erid. She would rise on this morning, years from now, and she would take out Ry’s favourite mug. She would set it on the counter, and watch the garden where her boy used to play with his brother, waiting for the kettle to boil. She would measure out too much hot chocolate powder, because Ry liked his treats sweet, and she would sit at the kitchen table. 

He would never gently pad down the stairs for breakfast. He would never drink hot chocolate having arrived, scared and pale and in need of a home, again. 

All parents had to let their children go eventually, and Helen knew she was no different. So, she would sit, hold the mug, and drink. Sure in the knowledge that he would be out there, thinking of them, doing the same. 

Love, after all, was still love. Even a star system away.