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The first thing she does—the first real thing Eva Stratt does after the explosion, after that instinctive lurch of looking for her people and finding nothing but a crater where they should have been, after running into Dr. Grace's trailer just to prove one of them was whole and hale and alive, is demand that she be re-tested for the coma-resistance gene.
The doctors—only the best of the best to save the astronauts who will save Earth—frowned at her, like maybe the explosion had shaken her mind out of it's place in her skull. As if she wasn't clear-headed, laser-focused, unable to think of anything but the problem at hand.
"We already checked, Ms. Stratt," they said. "Remember? You were the first. You don't have the gene."
She'd snarled at them, or she'd wanted to but hadn't, only demanded they run the tests again and again and again. She wondered what they saw in her. If they were kind, maybe they would see her only as a woman mad with grief, doing whatever she could to save her people, to save people, period, to save everyone.
Eva Stratt knows that the world is rarely kind to women like herself.
But if she had the gene—oh, if she'd had the gene, maybe she could have prevented another sacrifice. She wasn't a scientist, only a scapegoat, but she'd been there when Grace had discovered the Astrophage were alive and she understood the mission and no, she wasn't perfect and had never pretended to be but there wasn't time for Grace to teach anyone else the inner workings of the Astrophage the way he'd taught them to DuBois and Shapiro, the way he—
It crashes over her, slow and sudden, in the way that things one already knows but does not want to make real always do.
Stratt would go if she could, but she cannot—and there is only one soul she trusts enough to go in her stead. There was a reason she kept him around so long, and it was not solely softness.
She breathes, staring out at the empty ocean. How long until the waves freeze over, until the air cools to the point it cannot sustain life, until every one of the people Eva has tried so hard to save dies, waiting on a prayer that might never be returned? Hail Mary, she thinks, half-hysterical and delirious, full of Grace.
Her hands do not shake. She was chosen for her steadiness, and the thing that doomed her will not fail her now. And yet. And yet.
The interns don't make her coffee right. Too much sugar, or too little. They don't run to her side each morning, glasses caught on their jaw, struggling to balance three styrofoam cups and a sheath of papers in graceless (ha!) hands.
They don't remind her to take breaks, to spend time with the people she know won't survive, to be a person instead of a purpose before she loses the chance to be either.
They do not look at her with sad, sad eyes that will never forgive her for what she's done. God, he will never forgive her, and she knows this, even as she prepares the drugs and her office and the room in the medical wing tucked away from everything else because if she cannot give him his freedom or his life she will at least give him dignity. It was bad enough asking for sacrifices when she didn't know them. It was bad enough when they'd wanted to go.
If Stratt were an optimist she might pretend that he would say yes, might tell him to pack his bags instead of telling security to be ready for him to run, might ignore her own cruelty.
But her cruelty is why they chose her. There is no place on Earth for a savior who pretends to be kind.
She hopes the stars hold space for kindness. She hopes, even as she hates him for his cowardice and his freedom of never having to make this choice, that what she does will not harden Grace beyond recognition. She hopes he finds the heroin or the gun or the tube of nitrogen before he starves, because a hero at least deserves a quick death. She hopes that Ryland Grace never remembers the years they spent as friends. She's forcing him to carry their future—the least she can do is relieve him of the past.
She'll do her best to track down all of his students. She knows all their names, though she can't match them to faces; has read over their grades, the encouraging notes he leaves on their report cards. She knows that Ryland loved—loves them, knows that he'll save the world for them, knows that he will never agree to leave them behind. She'll write to each of them, before the launch: your teacher was very brave, she'll say, he's going to save the world, she'll say, he agreed to go because of you, she'll say, and hope they never sniff out the lie.
Dignity. Dignity, and a death among the stars. It's all she can offer him, now—she knows it will never be enough.
He walks into the briefing room with the same awkwardness he always does. But not fear. He's rarely afraid, anymore, not like the first time. She wants him to be afraid. His eyes dart around the room, quick, cataloguing Yáo and Ilyukhina and the security and the empty chairs. She looks away before his eyes can land on her, like a weight, like an anchor, like unsteady ground he has learned to trust.
She is not sorry, because she would do anything to save humanity. And yet. And yet: please don't make this harder than it has to be.
Later, in the medical wing, his voice ringing like tinnitus even as he sleeps:
You're murdering me!
You're murdering me!
You're murdering me!
She bends at the waist, a well-oiled machine, a tool; presses her lips almost to the shell of his ear. She does not apologize, because she is not sorry. And yet:
"If I could—" she swallows, an entire future waiting in the high point of that pause, "if I could, I would go instead."