Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

if she thinks back, she can pinpoint one or two moments, quite early on, where she realized she was in trouble.

the first one was almost immediate. right away, when they had him in that suit in the argon room, first ever to analyse the astrophage.

“you won’t believe this,” he’d said, looking right at her. “nothing happened!”

in another world she would have barked out laughing, even smiled with all her teeth, but she was standing there with a half dozen of the world’s most powerful leaders and the mood was deadly serious in that cramped viewing room, so she bit down on it, licked her lips for a moment to buy herself time and barely let a flicker of the smile out. oh no, he’s funny, she thought, not just brilliant and unconventional and irreverant. and tall. with good hair. he doesn’t seem to care that i’m in charge - he’s talking to me like a normal person, a peer. i don’t scare him.

in another world she’d have fallen for someone like him back in grad school. let him be the one who’s good at jokes, a force of joy, spontaneous, a little wild. to balance out her staid german practicality and her ever-present desire to avoid risk. and he’d let her help him figure out how to get things done: efficiency, habits, control.

later she meets him when he arrives on the gansu and she really feels for him, paralyzed by social anxiety, still motion-sick, fearfully standing there in front of the command center table. he steps out of the projector light reaching for her and she lets him do it, holds his hand and guides him back to their empty seats, as if he is there as her friend, not a stranger she just kidnapped.

she barely resists the urge to put one arm around his shoulder, feeling the acute discomfort coming off him in waves. he probably feels like he has no business being there, even though everything he’s saying is true and actionable, and everyone’s hanging on every word of it, absolutely locked in.

he trusts her already, she realizes, when he leans toward her.

“that’s why they’re going to venus,” he says, into her ear instead of into the microphone.

“please say it to them.”

he looks at her. he won’t. she clears her throat and speaks into the mic. “that’s why they’re going to venus.”

he smiles like a fool, wipes it off his face when she gives him a pointed look. he’s obedient.

under the table she grips her own leg with one hand, right above the knee for a second to avoid reaching for him. tells herself the excitement she feels is due to the advancement of the mission.

-

as he gets to know her, he goes from being a little scared of the whole thing to interested in the work, and desperate to impress her. he wants to know more about who she is for real, but the pace of their work is like drinking from a firehose, and her focus is unwavering, relentless; it is all he can do to just try to keep up. he closely studies her habits, her body language, as they are together so much, and now he’s the barometer of her mood to others on the ship. they start to come to him first.

days pass and then weeks. for most of them he’s the first person she sees in the morning and the last at night. when he leaves at night, he stands on the other side of the door and wishes he’d put his hand on her shoulder or nudged her with his elbow or leaned into her space or made her laugh, maybe, like a real laugh, the sort she only lets out when she’s alone with him. and then he puts it out of his mind, fails at that too.

they’re on a plane and hit turbulence. she gets hot, panicked, flushed. peels off her oversized wool sweater to strip down to a black tank top underneath it and tightens her seatbelt. he’s terrified of the whole situation, he hates flying, but seeing her short circuits that for a moment; he feels his mouth get dry. he grips the hand rest between them and the cabin lights dim. the pilot makes some sort of announcement, which comes through to his mind as gibberish. she reaches over and wraps her warm hand around his forearm and he forgets to breathe for a second. when he looks over at her again she has her eyes closed and appears to be praying. so he covers her hand with his free one, his thumb brushing over her wrist over and over, until the flight path smoothes out, finally, and she lets go, pretending it all never happened. she never mentions it after that but they always sit together on the plane and he stops putting down the arm rest between them, inching closer.

a couple of times a month, it just gets to him. he goes back to his room and jerks off in the shower thinking about her on top of him. comes so hard, and then is filled with guilt, thinking about her wedding ring, her stern professional face when other people are around them, how reserved she is. she doesn’t want this, he thinks. he hates himself for it, a little, but he can’t fucking help it. they’re practically in each other’s pockets all day long and he knows what her hair and her clothes and her hand lotion smell like, and sometimes she touches him, casually, and the more she does it the more he feels like he’s going to explode, or freeze, or light on fire, but he tries his best to be good and not show it. tries to channel it all back into their work, into doing a good job, for his team, for her, for the race to the finish line, for the fate of the world.

-

first he asks carl: has he ever met her husband.

“what is he like?”

“director stratt and eva are two different people,” carl says, cryptically. “i have never met her husband, and i never will.”

carl makes pointed eye contact with grace. grace squints, trying to decipher it.

“uh,” he begins, unsure. “never? really? you’re with her, like, every day, as much as me, even before we got on the boat. does he live elsewhere?”

“that would be one way of saying it,” carl replies, cryptic. almost letting himself smile. he won’t elaborate.

so grace finally gets it together to just ask stratt.

they’re on a jet coming back from europe, and he took benadryl and an ativan before the flight, was passed out in the aisle seat, reclined almost flat, accidentally trapping her against the window, but she hasn’t moved or tried to get him to get up. he wakes up on his side, eventually, facing her, with his back to the aisle, to find she moved the armrest upright out of the way and he has inched close alongside her, nearly into the gap between their seats. he has one forearm in front of his face in the gap, pressed along her thigh.

he jerks back, startled, when he awakes enough to realize the position they’re in, and she looks down at him, suddenly, a little wrinkle in her brow. the noise of the flight drones on around them. everyone else is asleep, lights already dim in the cabin.

he feels like they’re in their own little world there in the back row. she always likes to board first, be able to see everyone and the door.

grace sighs. rolls onto his back.

“sorry,” he whispers. maybe she thought that was over-familiar, touching her like that in his sleep.

“it’s okay,” she replies quickly. she looks down at him, mildly curious, as he moves the seat upright again and resettles himself. “are you alright?” she asks.

no, he thinks, i was inches away from wrapping my arm around your leg in my sleep like we were in bed together, in front of your whole team, and i genuinely can’t tell if you would have stopped me…no, i am not alright.

“yeah, uh. just was hoping those meds i took when we departed would last me a bit longer,” he tells her.

“well, please do not take another dose now,” she cautions, not looking up from her tablet, but setting it down on the tray table to reach over with her right hand and pat his thigh. he feels himself get warm, tries not to show it. “it’s only a few more hours now and we have to work when we land,” she adds.

he can’t even remember what time zone they’re in right now. he looks down at her hand, the glint of the gold ring she has on.

“where does your husband live?” he asks, almost whispering. “you must miss him, right?”

“there isn’t one. this is a decoy,” she tells him, also looking down at her right hand. “i never married.”

he feels a wave of immense relief. jesus. resolutely files that away for later.

“oh,” grace responds, dumbly.

now he understands what carl was telling him. director stratt and eva are two different people. he is talking to eva now. she slips the ring off her finger for a moment and flexes her hand. takes her hair down, runs her naked fingers through it. he tries so hard not to stare, and mercifully she closes her eyes, rubs her scalp now with both hands, like she’s getting a headache.

“i was engaged once, in university, but i didn’t go through with it. this is my grandfather’s wedding ring,” she continues. “family heirloom. i have to meet a lot of powerful men in this job. now that you and i work together, i find no one asks me the questions i use the ring to avoid, but i’ve kept it on anyway. it seems it would be more work at this point to explain why i took it off.”

“oh,” he repeats, softly. he feels like a fucking idiot. she watches his face out of the corner of her eye. a cycle of expressions passes over his features, almost too quick to catch. shock and a realization, a pleased satisfaction, then a smile, and then he tries to revert to neutral, somewhat unsuccessfully.

“what?” he says, catching her eye.

“you’re a filter, like the ring,” she says. “because you’re always looking out for me.” he watches her slide it back on, put up the tray table. now that he is awake she doesn’t want to work anymore. she looks over at him, soft curtain of her hair covering part of her face. “i’m going to get up for a moment, but do you want to watch a movie?” she asks.

“only if we can put on the subtitles,” he says. “or you have to translate for me.” this has come up before. his auditory processing is shit and she likes to watch euro films and translate in her head.

“for you, the subtitles,” she confirms with a nod, even though she’s in the mood to lean in toward his ear and translate for him today, but it seems dangerous to do it after what she just said.

he wants to reach out and brush the hair out of her face so badly. he wants to lay down in her lap. he wants to punch the air and yell with triumph; she’s not married. but he holds still, remains calm, smiles. lets her inch past out into the aisle, as she trails her hand over his far shoulder: electric shock of pleasure. she gets up, she comes back to her seat, and slips off her shoes for the rest of the flight, the signal of It Is Time To Relax. he lets her choose the movie.

-

he listens to her sing at the party, the tinny karaoke music underneath her beautiful voice. she has the vocal prowess of a near-professional. the molten copper of her hair almost glowing in the low light of the bar as she closes her eyes and concentrates, throws her voice to the back of the room.

usually he tries not to stare, not too much, anyway, but this time he really lets himself watch her, doesn’t even try to stop. he feels a wave of goosebumps pass through him as she softens into the chorus.

is there anything on earth this woman cannot do, he wonders, and why does it feel like she’s singing to me specifically? just when he feels like his heart is going to burst, she suddenly stops, declaring the moment over in her typical abrupt, german way, and strides toward the exit. he’s jolted back to the present moment. he sets his half-empty beer down on the bar and follows her.

the cold wind is bracing. the line of the horizon at sea. the dying stars, all beautiful.

she looks at him for a moment then turns back toward the water and stares down at it, as if she’s been caught.

“permission to come aboard, captain?” he ventures.

“you’re already aboard,” she says, and really she means it as a joke, but it comes out flat, literal.

he smiles anyway. she really isn’t good at jokes.

“your voice is beautiful,” he tells her, looking at her momentarily, then away. “i never knew you could sing like that.” she follows his gaze out to the water, so they’re side by side.

“thank you. when i was a child, i sang in a choir in east germany.”

“well, i thought it was great. just, uh, kind of a sad song.”

“it’s how I’m feeling tonight,” she says softly, which stops him because she almost never talks about her feelings with him like this. not directly, anyway. she talks about efficiency, about solutions, the logical next steps, the schedule.

“oh,” he replies, lamely.

“look, orion,” she says, pointing. nautical twilight bringing out the stars. grace comes to stand close behind her, peering up to follow her hand.

“ursa major,” he adds, and then she turns to watch him point.

“it’s a weird party, right?”

“is it?”

“we’re all going to die, and everyone’s in there drinking and hooking up.” he scuffs one foot on the deck, restless.

“the camaraderie helps them to do their jobs. not so much me.” she pauses. “eventually we all die, grace. what we are trying to do is limit the suffering before that point.”

“i know that, but it’s dark to say it,” he sighs. “do you want me to go back inside and let you be?” he asks.

“no,” she murmurs, shaking her head. “no, i don’t.” it takes all of her self control to not reach for his hand. she never really wants him to go, and it’s a real goddamn problem.

she turns so she can lean back against the railing and look at him and he steps in toward her.

“do you think we’ll pull it off?

“the whole thing?”

“yeah.”

“god willing.”

“you believe in god?” the surprise in his voice is genuine.

“it beats the alternative.” she pauses, then meets his eyes. a little smile. “the choir where i learned to sing was in a german catholic church. it’s kind of the whole way i was raised.”

“at least you have something to hold onto.” he takes a deep breath. “you know, i never see you show - i never see you show any of the stress of all of this,” he says, suddenly, and lets himself touch her briefly, his hand on her upper arm for just a moment. “how do you manage that, to never show it? what’s the secret? i try to put on a brave face for the team, make them laugh, keep everyone motivated, but,” he stops for a moment, and looks past her at the horizon, “when i’m by myself i lose it.”

and i hear you doing it, she thinks.

there are so many things she wants to tell him and won’t: i don’t sleep very much. i have nightmares all the fucking time. i cry, too, like you do. i pray, which i actually haven’t done since i was a little girl, but because of this project i do it everyday now. i drink all the coffee you bring me, and force down most of the food you bring me, and i try to get my work done but it never ends. i take some pills, i drink gin, i pray more. sometimes i come out here and look at the water and the sky. i look at the sun, while we still have it, and in my mind i say thank you for its warmth on my face.

“i can’t show it so i just don’t,” she finally says flatly, and crosses her arms. “and you do make them laugh, by the way. everyone likes you.”

“everyone?” he asks, skeptical. he doesn’t think that’s true.

“yes, not just me,” she replies, and she can’t stifle her smile anymore, though she looks down and away from the intensity of his gaze fixed on her.

“you like me?” he repeats back, and he seems confused. “i mean, i know you need me here for work. but you like me?”

“we’re not working right now,” she says, “are we?”

grace begins, halting, “in another world - we’d…” then he stops himself, shakes his head. in another world he would spot her hair whipping in the california wind like a beacon while she’s on vacation, and make an excuse to walk over to her, introduce himself, strike up a conversation, invite her out like a normal person. it would be a world where the sun always rises and she lets herself smile more. “never mind. i’m sorry to bother you.” he steps back, but she steps forward, following him, and he freezes.

“you don’t bother me,” she says, seriously. you never bother me, she wants to tell him. “in another world, what?”

“well,” he says, sighing, shaking his head. they fall silent and she turns back to the sea and they just look at the water together for a bit. he adjusts the angle of his body to block the wind from her, ever mindful. he takes a deep breath. “i guess in another world i’d like to have met you in a normal way. so we could have gotten to know each other in a normal way. because we’re here in this emergency together now, and it’s so far from normal. but i like you, too. i wish that’s all i had to do is like you instead of deal with the emergency.”

her eyes widen, then, and her mouth opens for a moment, closes.

“should we go back in?” he asks again.

“no.” she cuts him off. “no point to rush.” she sighs. “they all already think we’re sleeping together.” i want to stay here and stop time until i’m too cold, she doesn’t add.

“they do?” he says, incredulous.

“oh, sure,” she replies, dry as ever, and allows herself to look up at him over her shoulder for a moment. she shrugs. meets his eyes briefly. watches his jaw drop, a tiny amount, watches the way his eyes pop open, indicating his surprise. surely he can’t be that oblivious? “and you really do make me laugh, but i can’t always show it,” she adds. “i have many eyes on me, and so do you. surely you understand that?

“i - i thought i was hiding it better,” he stammers. “i mean, i was - i was definitely, uh, trying to.”

she tips her face up toward the stars, shaking her head.

there is still a little light on the horizon, a layer of soft blue that will fade to navy at nightfall. “oh?” she says, for something to say.

a sound that means i am still here, next to you.

“eva,” he says, barely audible. “please.”

she freezes. what is he asking for? for her to turn and face him. maybe also for everything.

for a moment she’s terrified he’ll deliver some kind of dramatic declaration, such an american thing to do, like a bad romance movie, or worse, another clumsy apology that would pop the moment like a balloon with a pin. but he doesn’t, he just looks at her, naked want on his face, so she turns to kiss him. she has to stand on her tiptoes, her palm against his cheek to get him to lean down to her. she feels the frames of his glasses bump into her face and pauses to slip them off, tucks them into the pocket of that horrible sweater he loves to wear, and then he’s got both arms around her, kissing her again.

the end of the world is coming. the death knell of the whole planet. infinite loss, infinite grief. their whole species, and so many others, about to be snuffed out like a candle flame. but grace’s hands are warm on her face and her neck, and god can he kiss. she feels like she’s going to melt against him as he gently takes her jaw in one big hand and positions her just so and even groans a little against her. maybe she just misses this in general, the feeling of kissing a good looking man who’s desperate to get his hands on her, because it’s been so long.

you can have this one thing, she thinks. just this one thing. when all of this is over, and the mother of all hangovers is due, then you’ll pay the price. but not now. not tonight.

he seems hesitant, so she leads him. they keep kissing for few minutes as it gets dark, but otherwise it seems like he barely has the nerve to touch her. like he’s waiting to be given an order, to be told, which makes her feel insane, catastrophically turned on. she wraps her arms around his neck and digs her fingers into the mess of his hair, pulls him down against her roughly, and he sighs. the wind picks up and swirls around them both until it starts to irritate her.

“let’s go,” she finally tells him, and takes his hand. the wind is starting to feel too cold anyway. she’s going to lose her nerve if she doesn’t do something right now. then it will strand them in no man’s land between fully going for it and pretending this never happened.

they’ll have to be the ones who make sure nothing changes.

the work comes first.

she feels her heart pound, turns away from him.

“eva,” he says, again, his voice tilting up perilously. she doesn’t want to talk about it, doesn’t want to look at his face, so she doesn’t respond, just heads back for the door, and he follows, grips her hand like his safety depends on it as he goes with her.

in her room she tugs away his sweater and keeps kissing him and then urges him into the shower, because he’s drunk, and kind of sweaty, and he smells like cigarette smoke from all the chinese sailors and ilyukhina, and it’s making her want one too, making her feel on edge. her sheets are clean from this morning and she cringes at the thought of imprinting them with this sensory moment, then going through the agony of sleeping alone on them for another week if he gets scared and starts avoiding her.

she tells him to take his time. she needs a minute to think. she takes off her wool outfit, puts on a silk robe over her practical black underwear and paces in a little circle.

when grace gets out of the shower, he’s standing in his tshirt and boxers and he looks frozen as soon as he walks back out of the bathroom.

“do you want me to go?” he asks, warily, eyeing her robe and her posture, the way her arms are crossed. maybe he thinks she’s regretting this already. he has his sweater and jeans slung over one arm, still, like he might bolt out her door and head back to his room. (he leaves it unlocked all the time, comically unconcerned about his belongings. much more worried that he’ll lose his keys.)

“please will you stop asking me that,” she says, shaking her head, and she means it to come out as a question, but he takes it like an order immediately, eyes dropping to the floor.

didn’t i hold your hand and bring you here? she wants to cry out. didn’t i just kiss you first? are you going to make me say that i want you? can’t you see what i’m doing?

“it’s just this doesn’t seem real,” he adds, as if that clarifies, “like i might be dreaming.”

she crosses the room to him. she holds the side of his face in one hand, lets the other rest on his chest, over his heart.

“you’re drunk,” she says.

the heat’s coming off him in waves and she wants to sink into him like an animal on a warm rock. he looks down at her now that she’s close enough to be sharply in focus without his glasses on.

“i am.”

“the work comes first. before any of this. always. do you understand?” she says.

“i do.” he swallows. “yeah.”

“i will never put you above the work,” she adds. “no matter what. knowing that, you still want this?”

“yes. jesus, god, yes,” he can’t open his eyes. lets his head drop down onto her shoulder.

“you show everything.” she’s always loved this about him, inconvenient as it is. he’s as transparent as glass, and fearless in certain ways despite all his anxieties. but as much as she loves it she knows it can be a liability. “what do the americans call it - you have your heart on your sleeve, that’s the saying? but you cannot have what is between us on your sleeve, grace. it will get in the way of the work.”

“i don’t have your composure,” he admits. “but i could - i’ll work on it.” he kisses her once, gentle, careful. “i can learn. i’m a fast learner.” he kisses her again, a little longer.

i’d do anything for you, he wants to tell her, dropping his clothes onto the floor at their feet so he can hold her. he kisses her again, urgent. desperate. makes a sound of shock against her mouth when she suddenly reaches for the back of the neck of his tshirt and tugs it up over his head, walks him back toward the sofa and lets him sit, straddles him, shrugs off her robe.

“what do you want?” he asks her, a little breathless as he’s trying to unclasp her bra, fumbling with one hand and looking up at her. she pushes his arm away then and he’s completely still for a moment as she takes her bra off herself.

“anything,” he tells her, earnest.

“anything?” she echoes. kisses him. feels him nod. thinks about it for a moment.

“i think i just want you to make me stop thinking,” she says. he gets his mouth on her tits and his hands around her waist, and she lets her head fall back. “take these off,” she says eventually, her fingers hooked into the waistband of his boxers.

she rides him until she comes, gripping his shoulders hard enough to leave red marks from her nails along his shoulderblades. she’d thought about this before, what it would feel like, and it feels unreal to bring it to life. after she finishes he carries her the few steps to the edge of the bed, and fucks her fast and hard, and she comes again, more of an aftershock, crying something out into his neck that sounds like german and then his name, which is so hot that he doesn’t even care that she’s pushing him off of her, over sensitized. he comes all over his hand while she holds his face in both hands and kisses him into a mess, stopping to pull away long enough only to tell him how good he’s doing.

“next time i won’t - i’ll last longer,” he says, looking up at her as she’s moving back to the head of the bed, and for once she lets her real smile appear.

“next time?” she scoffs. “presumptuous.”

they clean up, lay down, get comfortable. it doesn’t even cross her mind that she would want him to sleep elsewhere. for a little while, she’s out and he’s just there holding her, awake, afraid to say anything or do anything, lest she change her mind. and then a wave of panic sets in. he can tell it does, because he’s draped across her, both of them on top of the duvet, feeling her heart and breathing speed up, her body suddenly start to get tense.

suddenly the weight of his arm and leg draped over the side of her body is intolerable and claustrophobic. she’s pushing his limbs off. she needs to find her robe again, needs to move, to pace. anxiety crashes through her in waves. she considers a shot of gin from her desk drawer. considers maybe a benzodiazepene or a beta blocker. doesn’t want him to know she keeps a supply of any of these things. she doesn’t have her watch on but she can feel her heart going too fast nonetheless.

“i need to - let me up,” she says, suddenly. “let me up.”

“what?” he says, but he lets her up. he rises to his feet with her, and grabs his boxers, and she’s pacing now, the robe back on, her arms crossed protectively. “wait, what happened?”

“it’s not you,” she mutters. she won’t meet his eyes. “i get like this. sometimes. at night.” then the understanding crosses his face. he can deal with basically anything as long as she isn’t regretting this and kicking him out, he thinks.

“i have an idea,” he says, and then he’s pulling a throw blanket off her sofa and laying it on the floor like a beach towel. “eva,” he says again, and she wonders how long it will take her to get used to hearing him say her first name like this. “c’mere.”

he lays down on his back and gestures for her to lay on top of him, her head against his chest. he knows something about physiological entrainment; if he breathes slow, and slows his heart, hers might follow, matching it. he tucks one hand behind his head, relaxed, and lets the other fall to her waist, moving lightly up and down her back.

“what are we doing?” she asks, confused.

“floor time,” he says. “we’re doing nothing, we’re breathing. follow my breathing.” he closes his eyes and concentrates on slowing his body down so she can too. “i always lie on the floor when i get overwhelmed. always works for me. just try it.”

for a moment he lifts his head, enough to kiss the top of hers, then lets it thud gently back to the ground with a sigh.

“okay,” she says softly.

she’s seen him do this, in conference rooms, laying on the floor with his feet up on a chair until a solution comes to him. laying on the ground in the lab with his legs up the wall, arguing with a colleague, fidgeting restlessly while tossing some little item in the air and catching it over and over trying to work out a thorny engineering problem. once he laid down on the floor in her office while she was on a call and napped for twenty minutes and when he got up he was invigorated, renewed, and she remembered being jealous, irrationally, almost to the point of snapping at him over it.

what made her mad was the fact that he was like a little kid sometimes, so good at figuring out what he needed, reaching for it without hesitation. un-self-consciously. and that she could never do that, constrained as she was by her role and her psychology and her personality. she knew if she did snap at him he would just graciously try to get her to take a nap on the couch, and all anger would drain out of her like water into bottom of the sink.

she closes her eyes and tries to concentrate on the way her body shifts up gently when he inhales and relaxes down into him when he exhales. he feels very solid beneath her, comforting. so warm.

“see?” he whispers after a while, feeling her softened against him. he rubs her back. she doesn’t say anything but she doesn’t move away, either. eventually he drifts off and his hand on her back stills. the room is dimly lit by just one lamp next to her bed and the music and talking from down the hall have long gone quiet.

stratt finds herself thinking about the waves outside the boat, imagining the reflection of the moon, what they look like tonight. when will they lose the bright reflected light from the moon, she wonders - how many years away is that? she should spend more time out there looking at the world before it is stolen.

for a couple hours they sleep and then grace wakes up, and she wakes too from his movement. they get back into bed properly and he wraps himself around her as they lay on their sides, pulls her into the curve of his body without hesitation. for almost four whole hours she sleeps without waking, or dreaming, some kind of record, and for the first time in a while she doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night cold.

when the alarm on her phone goes off in the morning, she almost feels rested.

he sits up, then leans down to kiss her cheek.

“i’ll see you later,” he whispers in her ear; it all feels very conspiratorial. he cannot hide the smile in his voice, not one bit.

she opens her eyes and turns to him.

“next we go to baikonur to launch,” she says, her voice morning hoarse. he sits on the edge of the bed and can’t look away from her, her hair a tousled mess, eyes a little puffy. “in a month or so. depending.”

“okay. is that in russia?” he asks. she looks so soft-eyed, like another person compared to her public face. he reaches out to brush her hair behind one ear and run a thumb over one cheekbone. she doesn’t move.

“no, kazhakstan. the cosmodrome.”

“long trip.”

“yes. i’ll see to it that we are next door neighbors in camp.”

she’s trying to look stern, but it’s not working.

“i’d really like that.” he smiles at her like she’s just told him she loves him. like this is a monumentous declaration.

when he goes back to his room to shower and get the day started he’s still smiling like an absolute idiot.

later he brings her coffee, as he usually does, and she briefs him on various things on the walk to the lab.

if anyone can tell a difference between them, they don’t dare to say anything to him about it.

-

in the evenings she often finds herself waiting for him to knock. sometimes she goes to his room and he gathers up his things and heads back with her, knowing they won’t ever be disturbed there.

around ten when she’s contemplating going to his room, there he is at her door, hair still kind of wet from the shower, a little stack of shortbread cookies from the mess wrapped in a napkin for her tucked in the pocket of his sweater.

“why do you bring me food all the time? you don’t think i eat?” she asks.

he nods.

“i just don’t think you allow yourself much,” he says, shrugging, “but we can’t burn up your deprivation and suffering for fuel, can we? like, it’s not going to get the work done any faster if you starve yourself. you might as well have the cookies.”

“i have to remain focused.” she won’t finish them. but she has two and leaves the last one for him on the coffee table.

“you could never be anything other than focused. i don’t think you even know how to stop being focused.”

“oh?”

“yeah.”

“we weren’t very focused last night.” she’s smirking, but it’s so subtle that only someone who knows her as well as him would see it.

“watch it,” he says.

“excuse me?”

“i mean, uh, sorry. i just…i wish you rested more.”

“we don’t have time. we can rest when we’re finished.”

“we have a saying in the lab,” grace tells her, “that if you don’t schedule time for maintenance your equipment will schedule it for you, and it’ll pick the worst moment imaginable. so yes, i wish you ate more and slept more and took a break once in a while. you don’t have time to be sick out here. none of us do.” it scares me to consider what would happen if your body starts scheduling the maintenance for you, he thinks.

“i can worry about myself,” she insists.

“i know that. but i can worry about you too.”

he takes the responsibility of tending to her very seriously. notices little things. can tell when she needs a break or needs a distraction or needs a coffee or needs a water. or is spiraling and needs his hand on her back, on her shoulder, on her arm, for two seconds to short circuit her mind back into the present moment.

and she can tell some of that about him, too. when he needs to get up and walk somewhere, rather than look at the screen more. when he needs to call it quits for the night. when his back hurts. when he needs to fidget or he’ll combust. when he’s especially anxious about traveling and needs to be pre-medicated for his weak stomach like a carsick dog.

there is not another person on the project who would be able to tell either of them to stop what they’re doing to eat or sleep, but he can tell her to, and vice versa.

there are times when she pushes herself too far, of course, or he pushes her too far, and she gets mean. he thinks of it like the red zone on a pressure gauge, in human form, a warning for him or anyone else who might be around and is familiar enough with her to notice it - carl, dmitri, lokken.

the problem is the red zone also turns him on, if he’s honest.

they were alone in a conference room after a meeting, once, because he was complaining about something stupid and wouldn’t shut up, although she’d asked, politely, a few times, but he was so fixated on it and he kept going on. she was just sick of hearing it.

she grabbed him by the face, rough, thumb along one side of his chin and fingers pressed along his opposing cheekbone, and jerked his head right toward her. “enough,” she’d said, sharply. his entire brain blue-screened from that, rendering him slack jawed, simultaneously apologetic and a little embarrassed and, he quickly realized, also viciously turned on.

“sorry,” he’d croaked out, stunned.

for a second they just stared at each other in silence, both shocked, and then he let out a breath he didn’t realize he had been holding and she dropped her hand and stepped back, suddenly. he had to resist the urge to fall to his knees at her feet and do something insane like grab her thigh and plead with her. his heart was pounding.

“outside. two minutes,” she’d said, looked him up and down and realized what was happening, her eyebrows raised for a second before the professional mask settled again. he just nodded, otherwise standing very still. could practically feel the gears turning in her head from five feet away. she walked into the hall. he stood there like an idiot for two minutes trying to redirect the blood away from his dick, failing at it, mostly.

later that week she laughed about it in bed while she rode him, slipped her thumb into his mouth for a second and gently lifted his face up to her. he felt like he was headed out of his body, hearing himself beg, garbled, until she told him to come.

afterward they took a nap and she curled herself close into his side, uncharacteristically affectionate.

-

there is a moment of truth later that year, at lunch.

he’s in line for the mess behind ilyukhina, and she just asks him straight out. russian bluntness in action.

“you’re in love with her, aren’t you?” she says, apropros of nothing.

“what?” he blurts out, head snapping up, brow furrowed. “me? with who?”

ilyukhina laughs, her head tossed back.

“stratt! what do you mean with who? stratt. who the hell else would there be, grace? i get it. she’s hot. just a little scary, but she likes you.”

“no,” he lies, shaking his head, forcing half of a laugh, “we just work together way too much, that’s why you think that.”

“oh? she turned you down?” ilyukhina says, skeptically, eyebrows raised. “so sorry.”

“no - no - i don’t know what you’re talking about. there’s nothing going on.” he’s aware he isn’t being convincing, and panicks a little. concentrates on looking at the buffet options.

“don’t worry, i’ll keep it between us.” she winks, leaning in toward him. she definitely won’t. “anyway, i think it’s good for her. she needs to let loose and she likes you.”

grace feels himself getting embarassed, heat rising up from his chest. he imagines he’s turning red in the face like a cartoon and he tries to change the topic to something else. they sit down and eat their meal, talk shop, joke and laugh about unrelated things. but he leaves the mess hall feeling guilty and anxious now, like a kid who got caught cheating on a test or something.

that night he goes to see her in her room, almost midnight. she’s the one fresh out of the shower this time, with wet hair, still wrapped in a towel. about to get ready for bed.

or try to get ready for bed, but she’ll lie down, find herself grinding her teeth with anxiety, lying awake, and just end up working for a couple more hours until her eyes are dropping closed against her will.

“what’s wrong,” she says, immediately. she can tell something is just by the look in his face, how he’s standing, turned halfway away from her, a weird, troubled look on his face.

“nothing - how do you even…” he trails off, “god, i didn’t even say anything.” he takes off his glasses, irritably rubbing his face, shaking his head, then reaching for her hand.

“ryland,” she bites out, curt. squeezes his hand once. he stands up a little taller, at attention. “i know you.” she softens her voice.

“yeah.”

“come inside,” she says, drops his hand and grabs him by the hip, at the hem of his latest ugly t-shirt, and tugs him a couple of steps into her room so she can close the door gently behind them. “we can’t - do whatever this is - with you standing in the hallway. did something happen?”

“ilyukhina knows, she asked me right out.”

“she knows what?”

“about us.”

“oh. well. i assumed as much.” stratt rolls her eyes, lets him go, then, relieved. sits on the edge of the bed and opens a jar of lotion for her legs. she gets as far as setting it down on the bed next to her before he’s kneeling in front of her and picking it up, so she tugs her towel out of the way, extends one leg toward him.

he drops his face to kiss her thigh, almost reflexively, and rests his forehead there for a moment.

“you’re not mad at me?” he asks against her skin.

“no, no.”

she allows herself the luxury of running one hand through his hair and down the back of his neck, digs her nails into his nape for a moment, watches him incrementally shiver and sigh against her. “why would i be?”

“let me do this,” he says about the lotion, looking up at her. his hands are so warm. “you’re not worried about it then?”

“i don’t care,” she insists, sighing. she leans back onto her hands on the bed. “ilyukhina, she’s always gossiping. that’s what she does for morale, and if she needs it, i don’t care. we must work. nothing changes.”

he wants to grab her by the shoulders and shake her: nothing changes? what would it take, for something to change for you? what would i have to do, to find out if you feel this too?

“she specifically asked me if i’m in love with you,” grace says, looking up at her. she can see the apprehension in his eyes.

“hm.” stratt waits.

“i think it would be less weird if she’d asked if we were hooking up.”

stratt opens her eyes to look down at him, feels the pressure of his fingertips sinking deliciously into the back of her calf, just below her knee. she sighs and lets her eyes flutter closed again, exhaling. “maybe. what did you tell her, then?” she asks, her heart pounding, betraying her. she can’t look at him now. at once she feels a twist of anxiety and then the heat sweeping up her body from his touch.

“i lied. i said no.” his hands move up and down her legs and around each foot, slow, his thumb digging into each arch, sore and satisfying, making her sigh. methodical. he does this, too, with the same focus he gives a math problem or a data array or a smear of astrophage on a slide. when she sits up again and leans down to kiss him, he surges up toward her and lays her out on the bed to give it to her. she falls asleep in his arms that night, exhausted, her hair still a little wet, her pillow damp.

-

stratt has the best cabin on the boat; it goes without saying. a private bathroom, with a bench built into the corner of the shower that she can sit down on to shave her legs or dissociate early in the morning or finish a glass of gin while her conditioner sits in her hair.

when she pulls grace in there with her the first time, they’re in a rush. the night before they'd stayed up late and she's bossed him around and slapped him a couple of times and sat on his face and then let him fuck her from behind and they'd fallen asleep hard, like a couple of drunks, naked, a mess. now it was morning, and they needed to get to the deck to catch a plane to asia.

they wash each others’ hair, flushed, invigorated, hurrying to get out and get dressed and get on their way. but later it’s the most relaxed she’s seen him on a plane yet. not white knuckling for once. still medicated but holding still for takeoff with his eyes closed. she runs her hand over his arm a few times, checking on him, trying to be unobtrusive to the others, and he just smiles over at her.

-

once in a while, infrequently, she has to do an all hands meeting in person. stratt dreads these events because she never feels she can quite capture everyone’s attention, there’s always someone talking in the back, usually in a non-romance language just far enough out of earshot that she can’t tell what they’re saying. it fills her with frustration.

when they have one of these meetings on deck to let everyone know that baikonur is their next stop, she uses a microphone and the PA system but it doesn’t quite work. she wishes this could just be an email.

for a moment grace steps up to the foot of the stairs, below where’s she standing, facing everyone. he hooks his pinky fingers in his mouth, lets out a deafening shriek of a whistle that silences the whole room like a gunshot. then he’s briskly walking away to the edge of the group, wanting to blend in with the others.

later she asks him where he learned to do that, and he explains he used to coach soccer, kept practicing until the whistle got loud enough to shoot across the pitch and get all the grade school kids to come running so he wouldn’t lose his voice yelling.

“that’s my halftime whistle. it can stop a crowd.”

“oh,” she says, which as close as she gets to a laugh in public. it makes her genuinely delighted. she has to shove down the mirth at the mental image of mr grace the futbol coach.

somehow he gets ahold of a soccer ball, after that, so the last few weeks on the gansu when the weather cooperates, they find a few minutes to pass it back and forth on the lower deck, jogging around in their beat up sneakers, trying to imagine they’re at home in a park instead of floating in the middle of the ocean at the end of the world.

-

he walks into her room right after lunch, two minutes before she’s supposed to be on a call with someone in france - a team of someones - and immediately, he feels uneasy. she has a look on her face, unsure, tense. he doesn’t recognize it.

“what happened,” he says, flat. dreading.

“just, uh, a tough day,” is all she can get out. her voice breaks a bit on the last word, and she won’t look at him. she won’t fucking look at him. he doesn’t know, specifically, what she is referring to - he was working on his own all morning - it could be any number of things - but these people in france have money they need, people they need. she really needs to take this call.

one of her phones begins ringing. grace watches her press her hands over her face and take a shuddering breath, trying to shove it all down. he makes an executive decision and snatches the phone off the corner of her desk.

“bonjour,” he says, bright, fake, “director stratt will return in five minutes to join the call! merci!” and hangs up, setting the phone face down on the desk.

“your accent is terrible,” she begins, exasperated, her face once again in her hands. he shakes his head.

“five minutes.” he circles her desk and reaches for her. gently grasps her forearms to bring her hands down and pulls her against his body, her face pressed into the front of his shoulder. “they’ll still be there in five minutes,” he says, barely whispering, and she shakes a little against him. silently crying, or trying not to; he isn’t sure. he keeps one hand on the back of her head and the other tight around her shoulders, until she stops shaking. until her breathing slows down.

“eva?” it has been three minutes. he knows her hand is itching for her phone. he leans back just enough to kiss her forehead.

“yes. okay.”

she takes the call with her camera off, on speaker. they sit on the sofa and she leans against him the whole time.

-

in baikonur everything is gray and the food is more plain. grace misses the sunsets at sea. they can’t get some of the things he likes, candy, the noodles. one of the cooks sources post-soviet instant noodles, that are supposed to be beef flavored but they taste like horse. he can’t keep them down. she orders a few special deliveries. stuff from japan and china. for morale, she rationalizes to herself. for morale, not just something for him. and he shares everything with his team, selfless. always a little desperate to be liked, forever scanning the room looking for someone who gets his jokes, smiling like a beacon to the world.

she starts drinking turkish coffee, because it’s the easiest to get, and has to cut back to only one at a time because it’s so much stronger. it burns her gut like acid. leaves her with heartburn if she overdoes it. in the evening he makes them tea, muddy tasting herbal concoctions from the local soviet laborers that are supposed to reduce stress, do something for her immune system, support her liver and kidneys, soothe her, help her sleep.

“you’ll outlive all of this,” he reminds her, reclined on her couch one night while she’s doing a last round of email before bed. “you have to take care of yourself.”

“will i?” she asks. she sets her tablet down to rub his shin with one hand, tilts her head and looks over at him fondly. “maybe. i don’t know.” she isn’t sure she will outlive it, in the end. sometimes she dreams that they will launch and she’ll die of a massive heart attack in the back of a car the next day, finally too exhausted to keep going.

“are you done with that?” he asks, nodding at the forgotten tablet. “c’mere.” he sits up and opens his arms to her. she climbs into his lap and straddles him. leans down to kiss him as he slides his hands under her sweater and silk undershirt, to her waist.

“i’m distracted tonight,” she whispers. feels his mouth on her neck, tips her head back. his hands are so warm.

“tell me.”

“i don’t know what will happen when this is over,” she says, soft, and his hands grow still. “to me.” she drops her head to his shoulder.

“you keep working,” he suggests. “on other projects. there’s enough other stuff for us to do.”

“or i get arrested. or killed.”

“they won’t do that to you,” he says, quickly, almost stumbling over the words. “no way.”

“i make a good target,” she says. leans back to look at him. “a good scapegoat. it’s my name, on all these acts of god we’ve undertaken.”

“what can we do?” he asks.

“call on connections in high places, or i can run.”

“we can run?”

“if you joined me, you’d be in danger,” she shakes her head. “i said i can run.” he notably doesn’t let go of her.

“oh, i’m in danger right now,” he says, almost laughing. “i’ve been in danger for some time. you think i care?” he cranes his neck up to kiss her again as she settles down into his lap and lends her weight to him. “you think you can scare me into giving this up?”

she curls one hand into the longish hair on the nape of his neck and pulls, hears him moan, lets her other hand grip at his shirt.

“true,” she says. she takes her time kissing him. “you’re still here.”

“well, you kidnapped me,” he mumbles.

“you begged me to stay after that part,” she reminds him.

“yeah, and now i want to go wherever you go,” he tells her, “and i beg you to let me,” he adds earnestly.

“you only say that now,” she objects. he cuts her off, kissing her.

how can i possibly make myself more clear, he wonders.

“then i’ll say it again later,” he insists.

she pushes her hips down and rocks against him.

“oh, god, oh, let me take these off.”

“don’t move.”

he is obediently and immediately still. she grinds her hips down into him again, driving out a strangled gasp that she loves. he’s so hard. she wonders if she can come on him without taking his clothes off, make him desperate for it. make him beg.

she climbs off of him for a moment and strips down to her panties and the silk shirt and sets herself back on top, tilts her hips just so. “maybe i should use you like this to get off and just go to sleep,” she muses. he gets ridiculously turned on when she’s a little nasty to him, a little mean and dismissive, then affectionate and sweet afterward. he’s hyperventilating a little, mouth dropped open, looking up at her, but he dutifully does not move at all as she rubs herself along the length of him through his clothes. she tries to come. gets ever so close, but can’t.

“fine,” she sighs, rolling her eyes a little, as if it’s an inconvenience, to be this turned on, this wet, to want this badly, to lead him to bed like this. she stands and takes him by the hand. “you’ve been very good. come along.”

the sex they have after that shifts into something very affectionate, slow and tender, almost too much; she can’t look directly at him. he gets on top and buries his face in her neck as she wraps her legs around his waist, urging him to go faster. he tells her he loves her. he calls her eva. he sounds like he is under a spell, his voice raw. when she comes she sinks her nails into his back, a sharp and purifying feeling that he likes, and then he joins her, out of breath.

she can’t bring herself to say it back, not then, but she holds him for a long time, until they fall asleep.

-

she’s debilitated by anxiety as they approach the orbital window. cannot even force a smile most of the time, but he is somehow still light and laughter. still dr grace and mr grace the teacher. high fiving everyone, telling jokes of the most ear-grating puns. pacing restlessly around the table when he’s not doing math in front of the whiteboard or working on something hands-on, glasses hanging off his face askew, ever smiling at his colleagues, ever smiling at her.

every few weeks he gets a bunch of the latin guys from the lab together for a pickup soccer game and they run around on the grass by the main entrance to the cosmodrome property like kids, hollering at each other in english and spanish and portuguese all mixed up, passing the ball around, aiming for a single makeshift goal that is just a pair of orange cones at one end of the field.

she would have loved to know him before, far away from the present grief. sometimes she thinks she just doesn’t deserve it.

he sneaks a requisition for an electric blanket past her, and then brings it to her like a gift, even though it’s clearly her name signed on the purchase order.

“you’re always so cold,” he says, folding it around her shoulders, leaning in to kiss her. “i don’t approve. so i had you buy yourself this.” he laughs.

“i’m not cold when you’re here,” she counters, frowning. he runs hot, and when they’re alone together undisturbed, he’s glued to her, warm as a human furnace. she likes to keep her icy feet against his legs. he never complains about it.

“but what if i’m gone?” he asks.

stratt just shakes her head, won’t reply.

won’t allow herself to think about that, not now.

-

he finds out in baikonur that his mother has passed away in a nursing home, after a battle of many years with dementia.

the nurses first call him when she develops pneumonia from aspirating and begins deteriorating, a common final stage of the disease. he knows what is coming as soon as he gets the call. it is the middle of the night, Kazhak time.

he gets up and leaves Stratt alone in bed to answer, switches to a video call, then comes back to her room with tears silently pouring down his face. he had changed her level of care over the phone; palliative only, no CPR, no heroic measures. took one last look at her face, jaw slack, death rattle coming from her airway because she was too weak to swallow her own saliva, now.

it would be soon.

“what’s another horrible thing, right?” he chokes out, trying to be tough, sitting on the edge of stratt’s bed. trying, already, to move on. but he soon finds himself curled forward with his elbows on his knees, sobbing indelicately into a hand towel from her bathroom. bordering on inconsolable. she pulls him toward her and holds the whole mess.

“ryland,” she whispers.

“the whole world to grieve and now this too,” he mumbles into her shirt.

“do you want to go back?” she asks, her cheek pressed against the top of his head. the nursing home is in fremont, just on the other side of the bridge from where he lived in san francisco. she wants to tell him that she loves him, but doesn’t want the first time she says it to be linked to this moment. “say goodbye?”

“no,” he insists. “she might pass while i’m traveling there - and she won’t even know who i am - she hasn’t known who anyone is. not for a while.”

“just for a few days?” stratt cannot offer him anything else, as much as her heart is breaking. “i could make arrangements,” she says, softly. not really even enough time to get past the jetlag, then on a plane back to asia, back to work, but something is better than nothing. she feels her stomach clench. wishes she could go there with him.

wishes, like she does every day, that she could stop time.

“i can’t.” he means that he can’t because of their work and he can’t because of his own soul which will take a critical hit from this.

he is her right hand. every day is 16 hours and everyone is exhausted and they are so close to launching, so close to closing this chapter, one step among others in the fight for a last hope.

he doesn’t want to go alone either. in another world he would go with her. in another world he’d have married her already and his mom would be clear headed enough to know who they both are.

his mind latches onto that idea, the thought of the two of them together in the vestibule of his mother’s room in the nursing home, holding hands, and he feels a wave of grief so thick it’s physical, enough to get him up and pacing. he walks the length of the room twice while stratt watches him, then goes into the bathroom and throws up, nothing but bile and water and tea. he’s seated against the wall, sweating, covering his eyes with one hand, when she brings him a glass of water so he can wash out his mouth. he brushes his teeth slumped over the sink on one forearm.

“come here,” she says, “lay down.”

it’s an order; he follows.

for a little while they sleep and then he wakes up again, unsettled. she wakes up too, rolls onto her side and props herself up on one elbow and runs her hand through his hair, along the side of his face, down to his sternum.

“do you have a picture of her?” she asks. he opens his phone and swipes up to his old photos, finds an even more ancient folder of starred favorites. shows her a photo of a photo that he took while looking through one of her old hard copy albums; the two of them at a science fair, where he won a medal one year, probably in grade 7 or 8. she is looking down at him, proud, smiling. “she’s beautiful, but you don’t look alike,” stratt observes. “do you look more like your father?”

“i don’t know. maybe. she adopted me,” he explains. “it was just us.” suddenly stratt understands it, the free fall of grief he’s in. years ago she probably read this, in a personnel file, and forgot about it; there’s only so much one person can hold in their head.

she takes the phone out of his hand to set it on the night table and hugs him hard.

“i tried so hard to prepare myself for this,” he says. “i knew it was coming for so long - i tried, but it’s not making it hurt any less.”

“i don’t think anything would.”

eva thinks about her own parents, gone now. she is a bit older than him, and feels much older still some days. “it’s almost morning. do you want to walk or try to sleep?” she asks. he can’t imagine sleeping, so they get dressed and walk.

here the sun goes from the orange and gold of pre-dawn directly to daytime blue, somehow, missing the pastel rainbow stages of sunrise he recalls from the ocean, like how it is in san francisco. grace feels unmoored watching the light arrive. he holds her hand as tightly as he did the night she first kissed him.

“really i said goodbye a long time ago,” he explains. tells stratt some of the story there, about the fairly early onset dementia, that she adopted him at 43, was older than other parents in their cohort anyway, and how in the last couple of years, things went really downhill fast. how he visited for the final time (without knowing it would be the final time) just two weeks before stratt showed up to his classroom. that day, his mother had no idea who he was, thought she was at home, and he was a stranger breaking in, and he had to ask the nurses to sedate her, just so he could stay at the bedside for a while.

he remembered getting on transit to go home and letting himself cry behind a pair of sunglasses, not caring if anyone saw.

“i don’t know why this hurts so much,” he wonders. “i thought i - i thought i was ready.”

“it just has to hurt,” she says. “there is no way to be ready.”

they walk back to their quarters and when he looks over at stratt, he see her lips are moving without sound, praying the hail mary, the thin gold chain with a cross on it that she hides under all her sweaters held gently in one of her hands.

no one says a word to either of them about how exhausted they look that day.

-

grace also plays soccer in baikonur with stratt in the grass along the driveway. there’s only a handful of times they can, but he still wants to, even if it’s just once. carl stands watch, black coat flapping in the window, like the spook that he is. out of earshot.

stratt passes grace the ball and he passes it back, trying different tricks, tripping over his converse at one point and tumbling onto the ground. she lets him retie his shoelaces and then reaches for his hand to help him up, smiling.

something about the way he looks up at her, the wonder on his face for a second before he gets ahold of it.

“get up,” she says. “we have three more minutes for this nonsense diversion then it’s back to work.” she takes a breath. looks up and eyes carl standing at a distance, and breathes out a sigh. “come on.” so he does, and he dribbles the ball over. she’s sliding around on the dewy grass in her beat up adidas low top sneakers, the same pair she wore in the parking lot of his middle school back in san francisco.

she grabs onto his arm and shoulder to try to kick the ball away from him until they start to fall against each other laughing. she leans into him, whispering into his neck.

“i love you,” she says, and he stops stock still for a second, his mouth open.

she kicks the ball away from him.

“cheater!” he cries out, goes after her in pursuit.

he doesn’t bother to check if carl is watching them before he kisses her.

-

the whole time they’d thought they had tight security, redundancy after redundancy, but they didn’t realize someone they worked with was targeting stratt herself. the day it happens she’s walking with grace back to the lab and he realizes, as he often does, that he forgot something.

she tells him she’ll wait for him, stops to lean against a storage building, preparing to sneak a cigarette. so he turns to jog back to his desk, find the notes he needs for their meeting after dinner. no sooner has he crossed the threshold of the side door to the building where his office is than he hears an explosion go off, a defeaning bang and a pulse of air that throws him to his knees, hands braced against the wall. he’s rendered half deaf, ears ringing, and there’s dust and smoke. but he can think enough to get up and run toward her. her radio and tablet are on the ground, the tablet shattered, the sturdy chinese military radio intact.

he kneels on the ground in the debris and shouts in stratt’s face, trying to wake her. she’s bleeding kind of a lot from the side of her head, red mixed into copper silk, and she won’t open her eyes. he checks for a pulse and breathing, and calls for help on the radio, presses on her cut with his hand until he’s bloodied, then takes off his beanie to use it as a makeshift bandage. her pulse is slow, but strong, steady.

when the first of the crew gets there they find him still kneeling over her, holding her face in his hands.

“eva,” he says, over and over, increasingly desperate, a little incoherent, and they have to pull him away.

they end up at the hospital in the city. grace is triaged for a mild concussion and a blast injury to his eardrums. he has some temporary hearing loss, tinnitus that rings in and out from one side to the other. it fees like something inside his head is vibrating if he turns his head too fast. he throws up twice in the waiting room and then they feed him various painkillers and anti-nausea medications and a couple liters of fluid, which helps a little.

later, the perpetrator, some low level lackey with an agenda, will tell investigators he wanted them both. ‘the snake and her dog,’ he’d called them, in his confession interview before he went off to some kazhak prison cell. grace would hear this via the rumor mill in the mess hall later, and instinctively wonder why the perp didn’t have a better analogy - really, a snake? she wasn’t so cold blooded! he had no argument over being compared to a dog, however. loyal, affectionate, easy to train, happy with some form of companionship. sounded about right.

stratt is in and out of consciousness, confused, speaking a mix of languages, on a cardiac monitor and in a hospital gown. her hair is wet and stiff, soaked from copiously irrigating the gash on her head with saline before the doctor stitched it up. they scan her head and then they scan it again. grace is half-sitting on a chair pulled up next to the bed, his head down on his crossed arms, one hand over hers.

the nurses can understand her broken russian, but none of the german. when she wakes up grace has to use his phone to translate.

eventually one of the nurses takes pity on him and brings a recliner into the room from the pediatrics floor, so he can sleep on his back because he won’t go home. where even is home if she is here, he thinks. would he take his keys and sleep in her room without her? would he sleep in his own room, alone, which he hasn’t done in more than once or twice for midday naps in weeks? it seems unfathomable.

he holds onto her arm with one hand, lays back like a corpse in the recliner and fades in and out of sleep. a nurse comes in and covers them both in warm blankets, checks stratt’s vital signs and pupils, asks her some questions, and leaves.

he wants to pray like she does. he feels mired in anxiety and superstition, looking for anything to hold onto. but he grew up without religion and he only knows the first few phrases. so he just repeats whatever he can remember in his head like a mantra until he falls back asleep: hail mary, full of grace, the lord is with you. blessed are you among women. amen.

carl is in and out every few hours; he does not seem to have any kind of normal sleep schedule either. he brings paperwork for grace to look at and sign, a tablet with emails and messages that need to be reviewed urgently. he forces grace to eat and drink. grace feels like his thoughts are moving through molasses. maybe it’s the concussion. when his team at the lab calls him he has to put them on speaker and shut the door to the room because holding the phone to his ear makes him feel like he’s being stabbed in the face.

“are you praying? i thought you weren’t a believer.” carl asks, after noticing his repetitive mumbling at one point, eyes closed.

“i’m not. but she is, so it seems like what i should do, right now. i don’t know. i can only remember the first part,” grace adds.

“praying for the mission? or for her?”

grace pauses. looks up at carl.

“for everything,” he says, shrugging. “i think we’re going to miss the window.”

“we are NOT going to miss the window,” carl replies, emphatically. “why do you think i keep bringing your concussed ass all this work to do? it’s so we don’t miss the window. i’ll be back tonight. come on, man. pull yourself together. we’re so close. we’re almost there. imagine what she’d say to you right now if she was well.”

he claps once, sharp, calling back to their experiment together, and nods at grace’s sudden smile, before he finds his way out of the ward.

stratt does eventually wake up, brain swelling under control, but for a while after that she isn’t herself - amnesiac at times, starting a thought in german before he gently reminds her to switch to english. nevertheless the non-operative crack in her skull heals, the stitches come out and she gradually returns to herself.

“was ist passiert? was ist hier los?” she asks him over and over, in the last couple of days as an inpatient. he’d taken over a great deal of her work, then, with the help of others, almost to the point of slapping her hand away from the tablet now.

“english? sorry.”

“what do i have to do right now?”

“nothing. just rest. nichts zu tun bis später.”

“your accent is so bad,” she tells him, disappointed, and it is, because he’s reading from a translation app on his phone, stumbling over the consonants, just doing his best. “i don’t believe you,” she adds. “i always have something to do. i have - i have so many things to do, all the time.”

“yeah, but not today,” he explains, shaking his head. “not now.” german is her native tongue and as brusque as it can sound to an american, he always thinks she sounds younger, softer when she speaks it. “rest, baby,” he says, and kisses her face, because there’s no one in the room with them to see this, to hear him say it.

she’s too confused or too tired to argue with him about the pet name.

this is the month he actually truly realizes how hard her job is. he loops her in when he can, when he has to, but he begins to develop a sixth sense for when it’s too much, and she needs to rest. the launch date is pushed back, but not by much, due to the orbital window limitations. it’s the busiest few weeks of his life.

-

she isn’t very good at slowing down, but her body will now force her. sometimes a migraine, a wave of nausea, vertigo. the desperate urge to be in a dark and quiet space with something covering her eyes, earplugs, her head in grace’s lap, one of his hands gently pressing into her forehead or rubbing her scalp as he scrolls through projections and calculations.

if she tries to push it she’ll get so sick she can’t stand. she doesn’t know that, at first, keeps trying brute force to keep going, because it’s always worked for her in the past, and he finds her in her office sitting against the wall puking into a little trash can, sweating and shaky. eventually there’s nothing left to come up. he gives her a zofran to dissolve under her tongue and gets her settled on the couch laying on her side, holding a vomit bag from the clinic just in case.

“the equipment is going to keep scheduling the maintenance,” he gently reminds her.

“god,” she whispers, closing her eyes, “shut up.” but she reaches for his warm hand with her cold one and squeezes, which he knows means thank you.

sometimes he stays up working, and she falls asleep against him, negotiating and then losing the battle with herself.

“i’m just going to close my eyes for 20 minutes,” she says. he kisses her forehead. he goes from the desk to the sofa and waves her toward him.

“get in here.”

“maybe half an hour at the longest.”

“okay.”

“seriously.”

“alright. i’ll set an alarm and wake you up.” he absolutely won’t.

he pulls a blanket over her and keeps reading as she rests.

carl walks in on them like this once, sees eva sighing in her sleep curled into the fetal position half in grace’s lap, and his hands in her hair, moving idly. grace just holds a finger to his lips, librarian style, and nods at carl, who nods back, excuses himself.

-

she is cleared to return to work by dr lamai well before the launch but she doesn’t feel the same. on the worse days, she considers that she might never feel like she did before, and then sets the thought aside as fast as she has it, terrified. grace stays at her side like a guard dog, keeps intercepting people trying to reach her and triaging their requests in order of importance. some can be delayed indefinitely, others he has to deal with right away, others are somewhere in the middle. he essentially moves himself into her quarters, and finally he starts locking his own door, since he doesn’t sleep in there anymore, it’s more of a storage unit.

for the first time in her life she realizes maybe she doesn’t prefer being alone. it’s a strange feeling.

people look to him to figure out what to say to her, how to act.

one afternoon when dmitri came to the door of her office, she opened it for him, fully ready to entertain whatever he needed from her, despite feeling increasingly unwell all day. dmitri had looked up surreptitiously toward grace, standing back behind her desk, as he spoke with her, quietly, in the doorway.

grace just shook his head vehemently, silently mouthing tomorrow! tomorrow! while making a ‘cut it out’ gesture at his neck. grace could tell she was about to get a migraine and whatever this was, if it wasn’t a five alarm fire, it would have to wait. dmitri demurred, capable of taking a hint.

at night grace dreams about finding her on the ground covered in blood and dust. in some of the dreams, she opens her eyes and reaches up for him, whispers in his ear that everything is going to be okay. other times she dies, her pupils fixed, her jaw slack and open, and the blood coming from her head doesn’t slow, just gushes improbably over his useless, fumbling hands. those are the worst dreams, after which he spends a couple of hours awake and unsettled, surreptitiously listening to her heartbeat and her breathing instead of actually resting.

he has moments, brief and debiliating, when he suddenly remembers this will all come to an end, and he won’t live with her anymore in baikonur. he will have to go home.

where is home, he wonders. where is it for either of them. will she go back to germany? he can’t go to germany. he doesn’t have a visa. he can’t speak german. the coffin of the hail mary will vanish past the horizon, and then what will he do? pretend this all never happened? pretend he doesn’t love her? go back to california alone? she doesn’t even like americans, she’d never go there for free.

he really needs to ask her what she wants to do now. if she still wants him around when he isn’t so useful anymore. if she really — really *wants* him. but there really isn’t spare time to stop and do anything else, think about anything else. they press ahead with their work.

-

launch day they’re both a wreck. neither sleeps the night before. coffee at 4am. stratt tears at her cuticles and her head throbs and grace finds himself taking her hands in his a few times to stop her so she doesn’t make herself bleed.

when everything goes as planned, all he can do is stand and watch the instrument panel, the metrics, the vital signs, arms crossed, frozen.

he concentrates on comitting as much detail from this moment as he can to memory. willing his brain to stay in place just for once, as he looks around the room, takes in the sights and sounds of it. the names and faces of the people there with him. the stale smell in the underground command center from a thousand cold war era cigarettes smoked inside over the years. the faces of his colleagues.

he looks over at stratt and studies the line of her profile, gazing up at the screens.

prays he won’t ever forget this.

when the ship reaches orbit stratt finally sinks down into a chair and rests her elbows on her knees, leans forward to hold her head in her hands. lets out a breath she feels like she has been holding for years, and doesn’t stop the tears that come to her eyes for once. she’s been more emotional since the brain injury. but this would be a tough day for anyone.

as the room empties, she says her thank you to many people, shakes hands with those who are leaving. after a while it’s just her and grace left, and a few long suffering staff who are taking the post-launch night shift until they hand over in the morning to the remaining command center skeleton crew.

he waits for her at the back door of the control room under an exit sign, leaning against the wall in the dark, his glasses hooked under his chin, smiling.

“we did it,” he whispers to her, nudging her shoulder happily, a grin on his face. “hey what’s wrong? you ok?”

“yeah.” but she lets the tears keep coming, doesn’t tell him what they’re for, lets him assume it’s the launch, the relief of the pressure coming off finally. she tries to light a cigarette and predictably he takes it out of her hand, puts it in his pocket and grabs her hand instead, kissing the back of it.

“everyone smokes in here,” she insists, looking up at him. “it’s soviet.”

“i don’t care, those aren’t good for you, and if you got a headache?” she nods at him. “that will make it worse.” she puts her other hand in her coat pocket and walks close to him. “so what do you got planned for the next 20 years?” he asks. she shakes her head, noncomittal. “i thought maybe we can get a little place together somewhere & watch the world end from our front porch,” he adds, opening the door for them as they exit. “y’know, grow old together. i can teach and you can do world changing global diplomacy from the kitchen table. i can kiss you goodnight every night.”

“sure,” she rasps, gutted, heartbroken.

when they get all the way up the stairs and outside, the light slaps her in the face as soon as the exit door opens. it’s a clear day in baikonur. what’s left of the sun is high in the vivid blue of the sky, and a couple of predator birds are playing in the updraughts of warm air, looping and plummeting and rising in the sky. hunting nothing but speed. stratt looks up, squinting at the brightness, and feels thankful for it even though it hurts.

-

she has never spoken about her impending arrest with him in detail, knowing he would panic. she had two phones, three email accounts, and three tablets; even when he was helping her with her work, sitting next to the hospital bed, he only scraped the surface. ilyukhina had very high level connections, which bought her some time. she finally breaks down and shares it all.

“they’re going to lock me up. i need to be out of here by the end of the month, to a country that doesn’t recognize the ICC. and preferably not a world power. somewhere without extradition treaties.”

“wait, what?” he’d thought they would stay until they stopped hearing from the ship.

that they had plenty of time to decide what to do next.

“i’ll be arrested, but,” she begins, “i can get you a pardon, if i agree to - if i turn myself in,” she says, “that’s why i didn’t tell you. i didn’t want to negotiate all this. they see you as the second in command. especially after i got hurt. they see you just the same way they see me.” her voice hitches.

he hadn’t been involved in any of this diplomatic and political manuevering, focused as he was on the technical and logistical side.

she offers an explanation. the rest of the story unspools from there, and he’s shocked, horrified.

“turn yourself in? for what, for trying to save the world? you’re going to go to prison for the most significant public service in the history of freaking humanity? this is a witch hunt - it’s political - it’s not fair. we can’t give in. you never said anything to me! you didn’t think i needed to know?” he’s suddenly as angry as he is afraid.

you were going to leave me, he thinks, shocked. after all we went through together, you’d leave me. he’d been fantasizing about taking her back to california. going with her to europe and seeing where she grew up, meeting her family, if she went back to the ESA. now he felt at once terrified and heartbroken and humiliated.

“if i go willingly, they’ll let you and everyone else go home,” she insists. “for me it’s manslaughter charges, crimes against humanity, treason, i’m told. depends which country’s prosecutors you ask.” he stops his pacing in front of her and grasps both of her upper arms, forces her to look at him. “i’d save your life,” she insists, “by giving mine. because you’re an accomplice now.”

“no.” his gaze pierces her. “it’s my decision what to do with my life.”

“ryland-”

“no. i won’t - i don’t want to be without you. and if the beetles come back then all will be forgiven. you’ll be a hero. we will both be heroes,” he sputters. lets go, rips off his glasses in one hand and rubs his eyes, musses up his hair, brimming with kinetic anxiety. “i don’t care if i never go back home. this is my life now. you showed up one afternoon and changed everything, you can’t just decide you’re done with me and it’s over and change it back!”

“and your students?” she tries.

“there are enough other teachers. i’m not going to - i’m not going to lose you after all this.” he shakes his head, paces back over to her, pulls her against him. she presses her cheek into the notch of his throat and squeezes her eyes closed around her tears. “we have to run. we have to try to fight. your spanish is good, right?” he asks.

“passable. yours?”

“poor. but i’m a fast learner - i can learn. can we go to Santiago? i’ll call Rodrigo from propulsion, and ask if he knows of somewhere to stay, if he has any government connections through the university. he’s from there. we used to play soccer all the time. he likes me, i know he does. it’s got a medical school, maybe they have good neurologists there for your head? maybe we go on a boat instead of flying? they don’t recognize the ICC. we can try finding a shipping vessel. we can - we can ask for favors, right?”

“grace, slow down. i don’t need a - a neurologist. i need to make sure you stay out of this.”

“you have a brain injury. you have migraines. i worry about it,” he insists. “and i don’t want to stay out of this! can’t you ask for favors?” he’s frantic. “there have to be people who owe you - owe us - something. they can’t all want you in prison. someone has to be able to help us.”

“it might not work, and what if it doesn’t? the safest bet is i turn myself in and you go home.”

“then they’ll have to go through me,” he says. “i thought you were going to die the day of that explosion. i was staring down at you with your blood all over my hands and you wouldn’t open your eyes. i am not doing this again in slow motion.”

“stop,” she says, muffled against him, but she can feel him shaking his head. “stop. grace, enough.”

“no.” am i taking crazy pills, he wonders. are we speaking english? can she understand me?

she feels his lips press against her forehead. she is the only person in the world he loves. they had bent the world to their will, as she had all these months, all these years, through sheer determination, but now the launch is over; the work is done; there is no more they can do, tethered as they are to the ground. nothing to do but watch and wait and pray. and, apparently, run. but he’d assumed he would spend the rest of his life waking up next to her, watching everything go dark.

“you could end up dead or in prison yourself for obstruction,” she tells him, and he throws his hands in the air, uncaring.

“then so be it!” he says, almost yelling, “i’d rather try, i’d rather try than to lose you now and just give up. if we need to, we go somewhere else. we can keep running. no one will expect us to go to santiago. we run until the beetles come back.”

“if they ever come back! you’re not listening to me. it’s not realistic.”

“nothing we’ve ever done has been realistic,” he says. “was the hail mary realistic? are the induced comas realistic? is it realistic to take the most explosive, dangerous alien substance we’ve ever discovered and use it to power the whole species, at every level of technology? is it realistic to sleep with your second in command? eva. do we still have the charter?”

suddenly he’s moving around the room, yanking open the door to her closet, looking for their bags.

“if you come with me now you might never be able to go home,” she tells him.

“i understand that,” he snaps, impatient. “where do you think that is, anyway? i won’t be able to go back to my old job. i haven’t seen my friends or colleagues there in years. i don’t have family. where do you think home is for me?”

“is that a rhetorical question?”

“it’s wherever you are,” he almost yells, exasperated, and the urge to cry hits her all over again. “do we still have the charter?”

“only for two more days.”

“then get us a flight,” he says. “now. i don’t want to wait.” he is charged with energy, animated. “let’s just go tonight.”

“i need to think,” stratt cautions, but he startles her, does something she hasn’t ever seen him do. he turns to her and actually raises his voice, gets visibly angry, dropping her bag on the floor with a thunk.

“WE’RE GOING.”

“wait,” she tries, again, weakly, but still trying to inject authority into her tone.

“please don’t do this to me,” he begs, then, and the anger turns quickly to fear, pleading, twisting like a knife in her guts.

“grace-”

“tell me you don’t love me,” he challenges her. “tell me - tell me all of this means nothing to you, everything we’ve been through. all this time we spent together. tell me it’s finished and you won’t miss me and i don’t matter to you and you’d - you’d rather be alone in prison.”

she’s silent.

she can’t even fucking look at him, can’t raise her eyes.

“you can’t.”

“ryland, please.”

“you can’t even say it, right? you can’t,” he repeats, shaking his head. “and you know how i feel, so. we leave tonight.”

later, when they’re well out of jurisdiction, and she isn’t holding her breath anymore, she realizes on some level it was gratifying, in a way, to see him like that, fighting for her, fighting not to lose her.

all her belongings fit into the duffel and a backpack. still having the charter means they can depart via the emirates instead of through moscow or western europe, the more risky itineraries for her. they fly to dubai and stay overnight near the port. she wears a headscarf and covers her face. grace gives himself a neat buzzcut in the hotel bathroom and carefully trims his beard, a nominal effort to be less immediately recognizable.

when she gets out of the shower, he watches her take the ring off her right hand, finally, and thread her necklace through it, where it lays next to the gold cross and her medal of st christopher. she tucks all of it under her shirt, hidden.

in the morning they board a huge tanker as passengers, off manifest, cash fare, and try to make themselves comfortable for a long, boring trip south. in cape town they change to another similar vessel destined for valparaiso in chile.

grace is often seasick, of course. stratt feeds him dramamine and zofran and compazine, makes him ginger tea, talks to him to distract him, until he can sleep fitfully between storms. her stomach is the stronger of the two, but the anxiety of the whole situation takes away most of her appetite. she stays awake longer and runs her fingertips over his velvety short hair until he sighs and falls asleep.

they manage crackers, toast. coffee and tea with milk and sugar. the occasional hard boiled egg. fruit. she forces them to go up to the deck to get sunlight every day unless the sky is pouring down, or the water is choppy.

they do laps on the deck, cross paths with the mercenary security guys who work detail on these vessels. former military from all around the world, automatic weapons on their backs, radios in hand, long magazines of ammunition slung over one shoulder.nic otine pouches stuffed in their lips, reflective sunglasses on. universally big guys, stoic looking and intimidating. ready for pirates, mutiny, or worse.

stratt holds onto grace’s arm and avoids their eyes in passing. but grace is still just grace, ever unable to shut the hell up, infuriatingly likeable in almost any situation. so of course he befriends a few of them, learns how to shoot a kalashnikov by playing target practice with the patches of garbage floating in the water. tells a long and winding semi-true story of how his research takes him all over the world. he says she is just eva from germany. and they don’t ask about her beyond that.

when he isn’t feeling seasick and completely beset by vertigo, they can finally talk. there’s not much else to do. in the absence of work, with no cell service, no internet, she finally is able to ask him everything she wants to, all the questions she thought about and never mentioned, because she knew it would be distracting, knew it would bring her close enough to him to cloud her judgment even more. her good judgment is long gone, now. grace, her genius, her wild card, her right hand, her solution - never wants to let go of her, and he’s leading her to a strange place, as surely as she led him to her room that night on the gansu.

she tells him stories about her life before the petrova line. growing up in east germany, studying history, almost getting married and then leaving the country to work for the ESA.

he has so many questions for her. about her childhood, her family, her friends, how she learned so many languages. he still seems awed by the fact that the easiest thing for her was learning the languages.

“what do you remember from the hospital in baikonur?” he wants to know. “you were so confused. you kept forgetting what was going on and speaking german to me.”

“not a lot. i remember being in pain,” she says, haltingly, “specifically the light was quite painful. people kept shining such bright lights in my eyes. i thought i was being abducted by aliens at first, or held hostage, like a bad dream and i was trying to wake up but i couldn’t. maybe that was when i was drugged up and they stitched my head? i was sedated - is that why it was so hard to wake up? then i remember after i did wake up you were there, which made me feel safe. and they told me i was so confused over and over, that first week - but i’d look over and see your face and my body just knew that i was safe.”

“oh,” grace replies, stunned into silence.

“thank you,” she adds, as if just saying it could ever be enough. “thank you.” she leans into him, wraps her arm around his waist.

when they arrive in valparaiso, grace feels incredibly tired, gasping a little to catch his breath even just from the meager effort of carrying his stuff down the stairs and across the gangway. he’s lost weight from the nausea and his back is killing him. if he wasn’t so exhausted, he imagines himself falling to his knees and kissing the ground, he’s so thankful to be off the water and back on land.

“i love you, you know i do, but i’m never doing something like that again,” he tells her as they wait in the line at customs. she just smiles, leans up to kiss him, as relieved to be done with this trip as he is. “next time we run, we gotta fly.”

“deal.”

they hire a driver to bring them two hours inland to sprawling urban santiago, and grace sleeps on her shoulder most of the way. she looks out the window at the scenery, wonders how long they’ll stay.

-

her spanish comes back fast, immersed as they are, but right away people think she’s from spain. her accent is wrong.

no, i’m from germany, she explains. by way of basically everywhere else in the world, she leaves out.

the first night they spend in the country is in a hotel, and that’s home for the first week.

they check in, toss all their stuff on the empty desk in the room, shower and go out for a huge, satisfying meal, to the first place close by that the front desk recommends. it serves chilean, peruvian and argentine food. grace eats himself into a coma on south america beef and yucca and plantain and ceviche. they are no longer motion sick, suddenly ravenous. he lets his phone die, useless anyway with no sim card, and she doesn’t set an alarm either. throws all their electronics in a faraday pouch in her duffle.

they crash, exhausted, determined to sleep as long as they can. no one knows where they are. they could be any two tourists.

they sleep so long the next day that the sun is already softening into midafternoon when stratt wakes up, all of a sudden, confused and overheated, nearly coughing. covered in a thin layer of post-nightmare sweat. she feels vaguely guilty about having wasted a day, cracking open the curtains to gauge the time by the position of the sun even though grace is still sound asleep. she brushes her teeth and gets in the shower, trying to reset.

grace corners her, her back to the sink, when she gets out of the shower, and kisses her.

“you know where we have to be tonight?” he asks.

“where?” she puts her arms around him.

“nowherrre.” his voice pulls the end of the word out slow, as he kisses her again, slow, his hands on her waist.

“mhm,” she’s almost melting into him, already so relaxed from the hot shower. “i know.”

“and you know what we have to do tonight? it’s really important, ok?”

“what?”

“this,” he says, presses his mouth into hers before he pulls away the towel and gets on his knees in front of her, going down on her agonizingly slowly. she half-sits on the bathroom counter, head thrown back against the mirror, panting, one of her hands braced on the edge of the sink and the other in his hair. he still has a pair of boxers on and rubs himself through them, hard as a stone, because he wants her to come first. she does, swearing at him in german, fluttering on three of his fingers. he always feels like he’s winning a gold medal when he can tease her all the way back into her native language, render her incoherent and overcome.

“oh, my god, thank you,” she says, coming down from it. “what was that. my leg almost cramped.” he feels flush with pride. they go back to bed and they doze for a few minutes as he idly grinds against her hip, face buried in her neck. but she reaches for him and they fuck with him on top, until she grips his hair with one hand and jerks his head back. she tells him he’s so good, she can’t take it, it’s so good, god, he’s so good, he’s doing so good, and that pushes him over the edge.

-

the lull of mostly staying in bed at the hotel and leaving only for food and a sim card and coffee only lasts for a few days, and then they have to face reality.

rodrigo, as promised, helps them find a furnished rental, and manages to arrange them a meeting with someone in immigration, to buy them lead time before they have to either get permanent status somehow or leave for another country. he has a few university connections from his phd. grace offers to consult, gets brought onto some projects in the environmental engineering department and picks up a second job adjunct lecturing biology and microbiology classes to undergrads.

despite his shitty spanish and AI translations, the students like him. there is local a facebook group version of rate my professor that stratt finds one day while reading up on his department. she makes a profile posing as a student to get into it. when she reads his first set of glowing reviews, translating line by line, grace’s smile is million-watt effervescent. she isn’t surprised that he can teach adults as well as he taught kids, even if he does need someone to help him translate. he’s a natural. probably was put on earth to teach.

stratt starts writing a book. to remember it all. who knows who or what might survive on earth long term to read any of this, she thinks, as she writes at her computer by candlelight at night, sitting at the kitchen table after grace is already asleep. maybe it’s just therapeutic, to get it out, to finally grit her teeth and expose her thought processes, even if the manuscript dies a secret with her one day. maybe it’s the right thing to do. to try to tell the whole truth. to process it all.

they wait for the beetles. stratt prays the hail mary, sometimes she recites the rosary, which feels apt for latin america, apt for the name of the mission, apt for her desire to be rescued, saved, loved. forgiven.

their rental is full of a senorita’s colorful belongings. an icon of the virgin hung above the stove in the kitchen and worn rosewood rosary beads draped over the inside handle of the front door. brightly painted dishes and mugs, faded but colorful rugs, prints of the mountains in the southern tip of the country and the atacama desert up on their walls in the living room. for a temporary situation it’s comfortable, much more homey than the institutional settings they’re lived in for the last several years.

sometimes stratt walks to the catholic church nearby to attend mass. sometimes grace comes with her.

“you can understand mass in spanish?” she asks him, confused, on the first sunday morning he says he’ll join her. there are no english services of course. “and i thought you don’t believe in god?”

“i can’t and i don’t,” he confirms. “i just want to listen to you sing.”

-

grace develops a sort of separation anxiety that she assumes comes from fear, a feeling of being on the run, her medical history, their temporay legal status, life measured out in 90 to 120 day chunks of temporary employment, still living out of their bags and sleeping in a vacation rental. or maybe he’s just adjusting to have a different job than her where he can’t follow her around all day like the last four years.

she was always such a solitary person before she met him, but now he wants her with him all the time, follows like her shadow to a degree that almost feels suffocating. he wants to be sure he knows where she is when they aren’t together. he’s forever offering her little gifts, inviting her places, asking if she’s ok, does she have a headache, what’s wrong? just…hovering.

“i’m not going to be snatched off the street,” she insists at one point, irritable, frustrated.

her whole life she functioned best alone, but he is not deterred by this.

“how can you be sure? it’s fair that i’m worried about something happening, right?” he insists. “given, you know, uh, basically everything about the situation we’re in right now,” he replies, gesturing widely with both hands. “we don’t even have papers.”

“i can only assume no one here in santiago cares to try to snatch me off the street or they would have attempted that already, it’s been months.” she sighs. “you need to figure out some way to cope with your anxiety. we do have papers, they’re just temporary. but we’ll get new ones, i’m working on it.”

“my anxiety is normal.”

“grace. nothing about you is normal,” she laughs. that’s why i love you, she thinks. “that goes for both of us by now.”

“i just would feel better if you would come with me to Concepcion next week. you can work from the hotel.” he has to give a lecture at another university, present findings with a group of colleagues. “i want you to meet a few of my co-authors. they keep asking about you. and the school paid for the hotel anyway, so why not.”

“thank you for inviting me, but i was going to just stay here. you won’t leave me alone.”

“correct,” he says, “and the first four words of that sentence are ‘i won’t leave you.’ please focus on that part.”

“the less they know about me the better.” she has turned into a bit of a hermit, life a cycle of home, restaurant in the neighborhood, trip to the library, walk in the forest, home again.

“they don’t know about the project. they don’t even know your last name because i don’t tell anyone your last name, i let them assume it’s my last name. they just know you’re eva from germany and you have red hair and you speak, like, ten languages. please,” he adds, in a certain tone of voice that always makes her weak. “they’ll love to meet you.”

“not really ten,” she says, dismayed. but he kisses her, then, and predictably she gives in, sinking against him, always magnetized.

in Concepcion she briefly meets a few of his coworkers, tries to stay polite, smiling on his arm. has a single drink. says goodnight early to head back to their room to write at dusk, barefoot on the cool saltillo tiles of the balcony, staying out there until she shivers. she sits with her laptop balanced on a little metal patio table, watches the sun go down. makes it through another five thousand words and smokes a cigarette. she’s too tired to wash it off in the shower, goes directly to bed.

later he comes back to the room a bit drunk and collapses into bed with her, feeling worn out from all the socializing.

“christmas eve, those kids can drink. wait, you’re smoking again?” he asks, nose wrinkling as he tries to kiss her neck. “oh, no. i wish you wouldn’t do that.”

“it was just one,” she sighs.

“you can’t smoke, baby, you have to live forever,” he tells her, his speech a bit slurred from the wine. he never calls her pet names like this, unless he’s drunk or talking in his sleep, and she’ll never admit it, but it’s growing on her. she turns toward him, lets him pull her against his body until he’s out like a light.

-

the weeks and then months pass. stratt measures them in coffees and matés, in bowls of cazuela for dinner. in grace’s disgusting chilean completo orders that he eats standing on the sidewalk like a starved animal on weeknights after forgetting to eat at work the whole day because he got busy. they are piled high with weird junk food toppings despite the fact that this part of the world still has a decent amount of fresh ingredients.

he still loves to eat ramen noodles, still carries candy around with him everywhere, not twizzlers or red vines all the time, these days, usually some kind of local tamarind gummy thing she also thinks is not technically food. she has no idea how his teeth don’t fall out.

home alone during the day she makes herself german lunches of dark bread and deli meat and cheese with mustard that he would never eat. she plays music nonstop. she tries to write and finds herself grinding her teeth with anxiety all the time, giving herself headaches, so she starts singing home alone because she can’t clench her jaw and sing at the same time. she makes a singing playlist on youtube.

years ago, grace had told her something about vagus nerve stimulation using vocal output - particularly humming - and whenever she finds herself humming along to instrumental music she thinks of it for a moment. he used to be full of tips and tricks to help her relax and recenter and focus, before the explosion and the crack in her skull. now he’s just on pain management and sleep duty.

sometimes when he comes home from work she has the kitchen window cracked open and she’s singing something, unaware he’s there. it’s a hymn or an old german choir song or something by mitski or julien baker or jeff buckley or emmylou or gillain welch or samia or lucy dacus. he can hear the music under her voice from the computer, just barely, as he sits on the steps to the house and leans against the railing and closes his eyes and just listens. even if it’s cold to sit there and his hands ache from the chill. he knows that the moment he turns his key in the door she’ll fall silent, locked back within herself. fortified against everything all the time.

grace measures time in the research papers he helps publish, the lab work he grades, in the lectures he is invited to give both in person and over video conferencing. application after application of astrophage in environmental and energy science. she measures time in the iterations of sunday mass, the progression of the church calendar. in chapters of her book completed.

every week she puts away the trail of his clutter around the house, a little irritated by his lack of organization, the trail of chaos. she makes their bed in the morning, shaking her head while he always protests that there’s no point because they’ll just mess it up again tonight.

he brings her home little gifts: flowers, sopaipillas, humitas, so many coffees, a thrifted cashmere sweater that looks like the ones she liked to wear on the gansu. he surprises her with herbal tea from a german friend at work when she has a cold, the smell of home hitting her right in the feelings when she brews it. raw honey from a local farm. a silk scarf from the lost and found in one of his classes, unclaimed after a whole semester and a half, in a blue-gray paisley pattern that he says goes with her hair. she’s made him so many dinners, but he never gets less excited or thankful when she cooks.

he never stops trying to make her laugh, and he never stops asking her what she thinks. he tells her about his work constantly, as if they’re still together, pre-launch and problem solving. sometimes it’s beyond her - or she has a headache, so she can’t function or reply meaningfully anyway - but still she loves to hear about it. she wouldn’t dream of discouraging him.

every few weeks he asks her if she will let him take a look at the draft of the book and she refuses, putting him off.

“you can read it when it’s done,” she keeps telling him.

“but how long is that going to be? you haven’t even found an editor yet! come on, i was there with you! you gotta let me,” he insists. she shakes her head. surreptitiously changes the password on her computer, just in case.

-

“i want to get married,” she tells him one night as they’re walking home from dinner.

“what?” his shock is genuine.

he stops in the middle of the sidewalk and turns to face her. above him, the streetlights are coming on.

“so it’s a no?” she lifts her chin.

she makes the same face he recognizes from when she’d get into some kind of subtle drawn out diplomatic argument, back in the day.

“it’s not a no. i’m just - in shock,” he says, backpedaling. “obviously my answer is yes, it’s been yes for a long time. once i wanted to ask you but i never did, because i didn’t think it would even be possible for us. or that you would want to. but why now?” he’s gesturing a lot. anxious.

“hold on - you wanted to ask me?” she says, reaching for her keys. “when?”

“in baikonur after my mom died,” he says. his voice breaks. he clears his throat, looking down.

suddenly, all of her confrontational posture and tone is gone.

“oh, ryland.” tears prick her eyes.

“that month was when i really started thinking about it seriously. then you were in the hospital, and everything seemed so impossible. just getting from the beginning of each day to the end felt impossible. i thought we were going to miss the launch window, i was worried about that, i was worried about you, i was trying to mostly do your job. i was exhausted, we had concussions. even when you got better, when i imagined trying to talk to you about it, i figured you would write me off as having a crazy grief reaction or something, you wouldn’t take it seriously. so i just tried to, uh, make myself stop thinking about it.”

“and did you stop thinking about it?” she asks.

“no,” he admits, letting out a noise that’s half cry and half laugh. “no. i didn’t.”

“we couldn’t have. not then.”

“i don’t agree! we could have done it in secret. we’d have needed one witness and one civil servant in baikonur. carl would have been the witness if i’d asked him. he knew what was going on the whole time. he was my friend.”

“there were legal issues,” she says softly, and reaches for his arm with her free hand, clutching her keys in the other.

“well, i didn’t know that, because you hid it from me,” he snaps. this is still a point of pain for him, months later. “your whole plan was that you were going to go off to prison and do penance for the entire human race and leave me to go back to california alone, to pretend like my old life would be enough, pretend like i never met you. and there i was, dreaming about being your husband. it’s humiliating. at the very least they wouldn’t have been able to use my testimony if we were married but you thought you didn’t need that either, i guess.”

“i wouldn’t do it just for that,” she says, taken aback. “and you never told me this before, so i don’t know what you want me to say now.” she sighs. they stop in front of the door and she reaches up, puts her arms around him.

“i’m sorry. i’ve told you that i’m sorry, and i still am.” i’m going to be sorry forever, she thinks. “i’m just used to doing everything alone.”

“but you’re not alone,” he tells her. “you’re not. how long now that you haven’t been! you’ve got to stop with this. my answer was always yes,” he repeats, his face muffled in her scarf, her hair.

-

they marry at a city office before they file immigration paperwork later that month. she keeps her name.

at the restaurant by the house they go to every week, she’d made friends with one of the waitresses, marta, because she sits at the bar and writes for hours there sometimes. they get to talking. that’s how she learns chilean slang, fixes her accent. learns about wine, where to shop in santiago, where to go to church. marta lends her a green linen v-neck dress with ornate vintage buttons down the front. it doesn’t quite fit, so she safety pins the waist snug in the back and wraps a scarf around her shoulders to hide it, curls her now-long hair, hoping it looks good in the few photos they take.

she imagines what her mother would say about this for a wedding outfit, then imagines what her mother would say about this for a wedding in general, actually. no church, no priest, no guests, and no reception. nothing.

grace makes his most formal attempt: black wool slacks and a button down white shirt. he was never the kind of man who owned a suit jacket that matched his pants anyway. their rings are cheap, because he’ll have to take his off in the lab all the time anyway, or wear a silicone one, and she doesn’t care for jewlery, mostly. she wants to put it on her necklace later, but he tells her he likes to see it on her hand.

an immigration lawyer that that grace finds through a work colleague helps them apply for their long term status. it is a refugee claim. eva’s political persecution, and grace with her. they pay for translations of various letters of reference from old project hail mary colleagues, university colleagues, grace’s old boss back home. gather together copies of her bank statements and his, notarized copies of their passports, police checks bearing their fingerprints. they do medical exams, pay application fees. she submits legal documents but doesn’t let him read any of them.

they attend an interview and the judge can see they are in love because as soon as they walk into the room for the meeting, grace moves his chair closer to hers and reaches for her hand. then he turns to the front of the room, as if to indicate: us against the world together.

when saturday finally comes, after such an exhausting week of appointments and waiting on lines in ancient government buildings, grace sneaks out of bed and leaves the house early in the morning, comes back with flowers and coffee.

he knocks on the bedroom door before opening it, just the same way he used to knock when he was visiting her on the gansu.

“is my wiiife home?” he calls out, exaggerated, smiling his best big dumb smile that she loves, glasses starting to fall off his face per usual as he comes into their room. he’s shoving the bedroom door open with one of his elbows because his hands are full.

she lifts her head up off the pillow to look at him and smiles. “your wife is still trying to sleep,” she mutters, trying for stern, failing.

“i have cafecito,” he replies. he puts the flowers on top of the dresser.

“oh.” she sits up.

“i wonder if ilyukhina’s looking down on us now,” he remarks, “knowing she was right all along.” grace shakes his head, because it’s funny, sure, but sad too. all the people they knew when they first met are either presumed dead or just not really in their lives anymore - he didn’t bother trying to arrange a reception in a country full of people who barely know them, aside from work colleagues and their rare interactions with neighbors or the bartender and waitress at the neighborhood spot.

grace climbs back into bed with her. she finishes her coffee first and rests her head in his lap and closes her eyes, almost going back to sleep.

“if we were at home, i’d take you to my favorite beach,” he says, quietly. “beach picnic. japanese food, really good matcha drinks. i’d introduce you to my friends from grad school, to my favorite neighbor. to my kids at school eventually. i’d invite you to the science fair.”

“feeling homesick?” she asks. “i’d love to go to the science fair with you.”

“yeah. all the time. every day. you’re not?”

“i’m sorry,” she says, “maybe not as much. i think i just learned not to feel it. force of habit.” she pauses, trying to think of a way to meet him halfway, he who always has his emotions on display, so dramatic, so loud, so american. “we could get japanese food here, you know,” she tries.

the problem is if she opens the door to the grief for everything she misses, even for a moment, she’d be paralyzed by it. flooded. unable to do anything, whether it’s clean the kitchen, or finish a book chapter, or do her consulting work, or get out of bed in the morning without crying for fifteen minutes first and scaring the hell out of him.

“you gotta stop apologizing, eva. i volunteered for this, remember?” he says, resolute. gently runs his fingers through her hair, feels the bump of the scar on her head, a reminder. “even if you were arrested tomorrow, worth it. and now, check it out, i got a ring now. i don’t even have to testify,” he adds, tucking her hair behind her ear, his fingertips resting on her cheek. “you want to have a honeymoon? we could go to maipo.”

“wine country?”

“we don’t have to drink. or just wine tasting. i think there’s a hot spring. some good hikes.”

“we don’t really need to,” she says, sighing.

grace rolls his eyes. he thinks of a line he read in a self-help book that his ex-wife gave him so many years ago, when he was spiraling out, in the trenches completing his phd: “basing value on how much you sacrifice is a great way to resist receiving.” for years they suffered and now that things are a little more easy, a little more simple, she can’t enjoy it. he wonders how long she’s been like this, and was it for her whole life?

maybe after the Project she couldn’t ever go back, now. maybe she was stuck this way. but it’s still early in the morning, and he doesn’t have it in him to get introspective, knows she’ll deny this about herself. maybe she’ll relax when they get their decision from immigration, finally, and they decide whether to stay here or move on. maybe next year will be different, he thinks.

“come on,” he whispers, grinning, leaning down to her. “just a couple nights.” between them they still have US dollars and euros. they can afford it. he sets his coffee cup on the night table and flops down further into bed, wrapping an arm around her waist and tugging her on top of him.

-

a real honest to god vacation with her is a dream, even with the apocalypse looming. loud sex in the massive hotel bed, hiking together, going to the wine bar and walking home unsteady and laughing, stars blurred above them, grace feeling dizzy, holding onto her like a lifeline, pulling her close as they make it back to where they’re staying.

on their last night in maipo, they’re drinking - well, grace is - and eva is in his lap, arm slung around his shoulders, craving a cigarette but refraining, dutifully, and thinking about what she’s going to do to him upstairs in the room later.

grace starts a conversation with a guy from canada who’s cutting his trip short to go back home and deal with some family drama. grace can get anyone talking; sometimes to the degree that it pisses her off, because of how much unwanted attention he can get. but this time, the guy is friendly, pleasant, and sort of makes her laugh, despite her sobriety, so she doesn’t mind.

he gives them a pair of tickets for an architecture tour in the city. “go ahead,” he tells her. “i won’t be able to use them, and i can’t get the money back anyway.”

so stratt cancels her meetings one afternoon after they get home to walk around and look at churches and monuments with grace. they can play at being tourists, for once. they end up in the basílica de los sacramentinos where stratt has her neck craned back, staring up with fascination at the ceiling and the intricate detail on every surface. it’s beautiful. she realizes it reminds her of the german cathedrals at home, and she feels a sudden wave of sadness, nostalgia.

“the acoustics in here must be just incredible,” she says. she hums a note into the air, experimentally, and feels the whole cavernous room vibrate back to her. oh, wow, she thinks. suddenly she’s a little girl in germany again, practicing a choir solo in a cathedral.

“you want to try them out?” grace asks, eyes suddenly alight, grinning at her.

“i don’t think that’s allowed. we should be respectful. hey - where are you -”

grace is already walking away from her to ask the guide if she can sing before she can finish the sentence.

“ah, your wife is a singer?” the guide asks. this is an interesting turn of events; around them the other guests gather, also intrigued.

“yeah, she’s incredible. she’d never tell you that but she really is. she wants to see how the - como se dice - uh, the acoustics are.”

“i don’t see why not,” the guide says, shrugging, “there’s no service or confession right now.” then the whole group is turning, with interest, to face her standing there alone in the aisle down from them. they all shuffle closer.

stratt sets her bag down at her feet and stands up straight. sweeps her hair out of her face and turns toward the altar, away from them. she cues up the studio version of Julien Baker’s “Rejoice” and puts in one headphone, because that one always sounded to her like the most desperate prayer.

*But I think there's a God and He hears either way*
*And I rejoice and complain*
*Lift my voice that I was made*
*And somebody's listening at night*
*The ghosts of my friends when I pray*
*Asking, "Why did You let them leave*
*And then make me stay?"*
*Know my name and all of my hideous mistakes*
*I rejoice, I rejoice*
*I rejoice, I rejoice*

by the last line of the refrain her voice fades back to normal volume. this song always takes it out of her but it feels good to sing.

grace feels the hair stand up on the back of his neck. he’ll never get tired of it. next to him, an older gentleman, evidently a mexican guy, whistles and calls out - a-yaaay! - a real mexican grito, bordering on totally inappropriate for the moment, because it’s such a sad song, but he looks absolutely fascinated by stratt.

“sabe cantar,” he says to grace, knowingly.

“increíble,” grace replies with a nod and walks over to her.

“we have to come back here,” he says, grinning. “really.”

“i could come back for mass,” she shrugs.

“well, i don’t want to hear everyone else at mass, i just want to hear you.”

the old mexican man who whistled at her is following grace over, now, a smile on his face. “disculpe, señora,” he says, coming to stand beside them. “tengo un bar con música y necesitamos una cantante. porfa,” he hands her a card. “mi informacion.”

“gracias,” she says to the older man, accepting his card. “te llamo.” and really, she isn’t planning on calling him, but grace doesn’t get off her back about it, and eventually she gives in.

-

so this is their life now: work during the week, evenings at the restaurant sometimes. eva singing on the weekend at the bar, either on friday or saturday. she has a relatively normal job in an environmental group during the week, where she project manages and tries to keep a low profile.

grace is teaching. publishing. every loving nickname from a student or expression of confidence from a colleague at the university is healing, piece by piece, the trauma he carried with him from his original phd experience. he finds himself on friday nights sitting in the back of the bar drinking a beer incrementally slowly and watching his wife sing. a group of musicians are backing her, rotating in and out depending on who is in town.

she tries to request songs. the band doesn’t know them but sometimes they are willing to learn. she has to learn the mexican ones. all the songs they want her to sing are love songs, songs about going away, or about returning home, which she also considers love songs, in a way. the drums are simple, steady, and she doesn’t find it very difficult. she tells them they’re pushing it when they want her to cover natalia lafourcade, that’s a bit past her ability, but she likes to practice at home anyway. people come to eat and drink and dance but they don’t dress up. it’s not that kind of place.

on stage she closes her eyes and turns off her mind and concentrates on remembering the words and she doesn’t think about anything else. not a single fucking thing, until the band is done for the night: that’s why she comes back every week.

the owner’s wife cooks. she makes grace a plate of tostadas with pinto beans and queso fresco drizzled with some kind of addictive black salsa every time he comes in. it’s a snack you give your kids after school, not even enough to feature on the menu, but it always makes him feel special. she calls him gringo at first, and then eventually decides she likes him and switches to hijo. he tips aggressively. she makes eva tea with honey to drink on stage, braids her hair neatly so it doesn’t fly around in her face and irritate her when they point the fan right past her to get some fresh air to the drummer.

we have a real life, grace realizes. sometimes he doesn’t even think about how all of this started. sometimes he can go a whole morning on a saturday, not thinking about how any of it started, until he suddenly has to do something for work and his mind is on astrophage once again.

in the early hours he folds himself against her in bed and whispers good morning and tells her he loves her. she falls asleep every night with one hand on his body like a tether. she gets migraines. they have nightmares. he tries takes medication to sleep, but she won’t. turns out it just makes his nightmares worse, so he returns what’s left of it to the pharmacy, and she tells him i told you so, rolling her eyes. he puts up blackout curtains. he buys a TENS device for her neck. he buys a mask that is an icepack.

grace chains together three or four days of broken sleep sometimes, until he starts to feel insane, and then he cancels his class and hikes in the foothills until he’s exhausted. he sleeps like the dead when he finally gets home for 13 hours, debilitated by soreness the next day, but happy because his sleep schedule is back to normal.

he suggests they try cannabis for pain management so they get kinda stoned in the shower together one evening. maybe it does work, sort of, just enough. her headache fades into the distance - still with her, but over in the corner of the room instead of sharp like an icepick directly behind her eyes.

they wash each other’s hair in the shower, and she feels like someone else has taken over her body. she’s borderline giggling with laughter, falling against grace’s chest as he tips his head back under the showerhead and closes his eyes to rinse. she tries to calm herself down and hold onto his shoulders and be still. but a moment later he kisses her, water raining onto them both, and she can’t stop herself from touching him all over. they end up having the slowest most delicious sex, teasing each other without even bothering to come before passing out asleep.

another day she tries to get high home alone to get a migraine to stop, and instead of giggling and happy and half numb, she just gets anxious. she calls grace, asks him to bring home dinner, and tells him this is just like a lot of other things, it turns out: she doesn’t enjoy it unless they’re together.

that night he doesn’t get up from the table with her until he can be sure she’s had about a third of her food. it feels like they’re in baikonur again. he sits down with her in the living room and rubs the back of her head when she lies down in his lap on her side, staring at the window.

“i wish you’d work less,” he tells her. “we’re getting to be too old for this.” he sighs. even as the words leave his mouth, he is fully aware they will both probably work until they die.

“speak for yourself,” she says, irritably, even though he is younger.

“i could pay for everything we need here for the rest of the year, it’s just a few months. you could rest for a while, take a break. go on leave.”

“no.” her refusal is abrupt, not even a moment of pause to think about it.

“why not?”

“because if i don’t work i’ll think and i don’t want to think,” she tells him.

her book is almost finished. the transition time is provoking some kind of ptsd flare, probably, but she doesn’t call it that, doesn’t want to admit to anything. she reaches for grace’s hand, sets it gently on her forehead, covers it with her own and presses down a little to show him what she wants him to do. then lets the weight of his touch sink down behind her eyes as she tries to breathe.

she waits until he helps the pain subside just by being there. that she can count on.

-

they don’t know it right as it’s happening, but many light years away an alien civilization is working with ilyukhina and yao and dubois to gather and store taumoeba, to figure out how to harness it, and grow it, to eat the astrophage. earth was not the only civilization that realized something was going on in tau ceti, or sent a mission there, as grace once said, “just to see what’s up.” it’s an astral pandemic, and the universe’s most sentient life forms are on it.

the beetles come back sooner than expected, fortified with more information than humanity could ever need, wrapped in a strange alien armor that doesn’t burn up upon re-entry, powered fast, by incredibly efficient and small astrophage engines. a literal gift from the heavens.

there are video logs after video logs from the team. they were succesful, and mourned as heroes by the alien race at the conclusion of their adventure, celebrated in places humanity may never travel.

at this point stratt’s book is done, in final editing. she contemplates writing a final chapter now that the world has forever changed but her editor talks her out of it, telling her she’s about to experience her second book right now.

grace’s spanish is much improved, and he’s seeking tenure in santiago, trying to publish more, juggling adjunct jobs.

greenhouses are being built everywhere, insulation retrofitted everywhere. buildings moved into the curves of hillsides, geothermal heat and light and water rigged up. hydroponic farms are all the rage. synthetic grow lights and sunlight-mimicking lamps for personal use are being made by the millions in every factory in asia.

their lives will split into a few distinct pieces: before the petrova line was discovered and after. before the launch and after. before the beetles came back and after. before they met one another and after.

dmitri is the one who calls her first. he puts her on facetime and cues up the first of the video logs on his tv, so they can watch them together for a bit. she talks to him in russian. they both cry. he’s not even drunk. she’s so, so happy.

then it’s the other scientists, and some government people from the US calling…some from germany, some from india, some from china…even a russian official, despite their many conflicts. her inbox is awash in unread messages, a cascade of them pouring in. she answers her phone, to keep the lines open for diplomacy, but pushes off everyone in the end. thank you so much but i’ll have to think about it, she says over and over, in every language she knows how to speak.

carl calls when she’s in the middle of cooking dinner and her hands are full, so grace answers for her, puts her on speaker and says, “hey carl, go ahead, my wife and i can hear you,” and suddenly carl’s just whistling and clapping and whooping for grace, happy to hear it.

“your wife!” he crows, laughing. “finally! congratulations, brother!” because eva stratt is no longer his boss, he can be a little unprofessional, and ryland grace will always be his friend, so of course he can be a little unprofessional.

“they want us to come back to the states,” carl explains. “to one of the NASA centers, Houston. they want you both to work on the mission to deliver the taumoeba to the sun. are you going to join me?” carl asks. “that’s where i am now.”

“only if eva gets her record cleared first. otherwise we stay put. there’s hundreds of qualified people who can work on it. ask shapiro. we got permanent residency here, finally.” grace says.

“they did ask shapiro and she asked for you,” carl replies, like this is the most obvious thing in the world. “will you consider it?”

“well,” grace says. “we have to think about it.”

“i’d get to be your fixer and your muscle again. unlimited budget. unlimited mandate. unlimited twizzlers. come on. for old times sake, stratt.”

“don’t tempt us,” stratt chimes in. she turns down the stove and turns toward grace, crosses her arms, following him with her gaze as he paces restlessly in the kitchen, holding out his phone.

“you could go without me,” stratt ventures, hesitantly. “short term.”

just as grace says “absolutely not,” carl says, “that’s not the idea,” both of them emphatic and sudden, talking over each other, jumbled.

she sighs. “i don’t want to be in charge.”

“how about in the middle?” carl asks.

“depends what you mean by the middle,” she replies.

if the taumoeba are going to save them it has to be done right. there will be no chance to do it over. there will not be enough time.

“you’ll take orders from someone else?” carl asks her. “i can’t imagine that, stratt. not in a million years.”

“it hasn’t been a million years,” she corrects him, ever so literal. “it’s been barely nine.”

but when she thinks about it, who she’d want to take orders from, who she’d trust that much - she can’t really blame carl, because she also draws a blank.

“tell them clear her record and get a green card so we can travel together, and then i’ll consider it, okay?” grace says, finally, before they hang up.

“oh, *you’ll* consider it?” she snaps at him, after the call, a little annoyed at his assumptive conclusion there.

“and you won’t?” he replies. she avoids his eyes. “i know you.”

“you make it sound like you’re deciding for both of us.”

“i’m not. i just know you. don’t you want to help?”

“i do, but i have reservations,” she says, and they sit down to eat dinner.

-

that night they lay in bed facing each other, curled on their sides. grace reaches for her hand.

“i can’t believe they’re back.”

“yeah, we did it.”

“do you want to do the next phase? they’d probably let you run it. this is such a triumph, honestly.”

“yes and no. i thought i had more time. sometimes i don’t want to, other times it’s all i want,” she says uneasily.

“no one on the planet has more time,” he whispers, and his face looks so serious. “i think you should. you were incredible last time. i can be in the background.”

“i don’t want you to be in the background,” she tells him. “i have to confess something.”

“what?”

“you’re going to hate me. you’re going to…god. i shouldn’t have opened my mouth.” on some level she knew this would come, when she’d finally confess, if the beetles came home, reopened all her old wounds.

“there’s someone else?” he looks horrified.

“no!” she barks a laugh, squeezes her eyes shut. “no, never. i don’t even talk to people, no. it’s something else. from a while ago. do you remember when we did our blood tests on the gansu?”

“sure.”

“you had - you have it. the coma gene. if something had happened to the others, i would have sent you.”

“what?”

“yeah. you would have been our best chance. i actually don’t know how the others did it. lamai and i thought they were probably going to die en route. there are some who would have tried to force me to send you, if they had known, but i kept it a secret and i justified it to myself, by telling myself you were the back up plan only. my last resort.”

that was the real secret, she thinks.

not that we were sleeping together, or in love, but that he was really the one who should have gone.

“you’re telling me this now?” the color drains from grace’s face. he gets out of bed, scrubbing his hands through his hair. “you never said anything to me…would you ever have said anything to me? if the beetles never came back?”

“i don’t know,” she whispers, and turns onto her back, covering her face with one bent elbow. it’s too much. she can feel herself starting to cry, now, can already imagine, viscerally, the gripping tension headache that will follow. “this is why i asked carl about being in the middle, instead of at the top. i don’t want to be at the top, i have something to lose now - i have you. you’re the only reason i’m even here right now. if not, i would have turned myself in.”

“eva,” he whispers, his voice raw. he considers this: so first she thought she was going to have to send him on a suicide mission, potentially, while he was cheerfully was taking her to bed, oblivious, nagging her to relax. and then she hid the information that would have made that happen from everyone else. and then even after the successful launch she thought she was going to go to prison alone. and all of that she thought she had to carry on her own. he feels his throat closing.

"why didn’t you say anything to me?” he chokes out.

she just shakes her head a little.

“you couldn’t have done anything. neither of us could have. i did all i could, by hiding it. there would have been no point, to tell you.”

he feels like he’s going to throw up and goes downstairs, to the hallway bathroom, where he kneels on the floor for a moment in apprehension of it. the room spinning.

and then suddenly he has to get out of there.

my own wife would have killed me, he thinks.

he remembers the first time she kissed him and brought him to her room on the gansu, what she said, that nothing could happen between them that would make her choose him above their work. that the project would always come first.

he thought he understood it at the time.

if i lose my shit right now she’ll just tell me that she tried to warn me, he thinks. exhales heavily. grabs his keys from the hook by the door and goes out into the street, starts walking due north, otherwise aimless.

it’s late - he should have his phone, but he can’t face going back inside.

when he gets to a park in the neighborhood where there’s a bench, away from the streetlights, he sits down and puts his head in his hands and sobs.

he wants to be angry, he wants to resent her, he wants to get righteous about it. but beneath that, on a deeper level, he just wants to be with her. he just wants to go home.

-

by the time he comes back, she’s still in bed, curled on her side with her phone dark in one hand, held against her sternum like she was waiting for him to call, not knowing he left his own phone behind. when she hears him come in she turns over and looks at him in the doorway, eyes hooded.

“hi,” she whispers.

“hi. i’m sorry,” he begins, but she shakes her head fast, refusing whatever he feels needs to come after that, and just holds out her arms to him, wordless.

he lies down next to her and holds her.

“i’m sorry,” he repeats.

“forget it,” she tells him, shaking her head. “i should be sorry, but i didn’t have a choice. you know, it wasn’t like this before,” she says, feeling her throat tighten. “i had - i can’t - there’s so much more fear now. i can’t risk losing you now. in baikonur i would have been heartbroken, but i could have done it. now i don’t know how i would even live, i don’t…i can’t,” she repeats over and over. “i can’t. i can’t.” she turns onto her side again and covers her face in her hands.

it is so tiring to cry; she doesn’t have the energy, the time, for this feeling, or for the headache after, the exhaustion, the hollowed out feeling. but her body doesn’t care.

“you don’t have to,” grace says.

he lays down next to her and grabs her by the shoulders, turns her toward him forcibly, puts his arms around her.

“i was not sure if you would come back,” she says.

he inhales, sharp.

“i just needed to think. but i’ll always come back,” he says. “i’m here now, right?”

“always?” she sounds like she doesn’t believe him.

"i'm here now."

she still has her face in her hands, now the backs of her hands pressed into his chest, too, as she makes herself small against him. she imagines the whole world ceasing to exist outside of the two of them, outside of their room, and eventually she can’t cry anymore and they fall asleep.

-

the problem they have: there is no one else who will do what they are being asked to.

she is apprehensive, tired, brain-injured, but she is also still herself. still deeply stubborn with a sense of duty that has never gone away underneath it all. still widely knowledgeable in a unique way. the others who are called upon to do this work are largely people from their original staff, who already know and trust both of them. shapiro and dmitri and carl. grace’s mates from the lab. rodrigo, too, who is understandably desperately excited to help propel another rocket or five into space to save the sun.

he takes grace out for lunch at the university and begs him to come to houston. he has an open work visa and a one way ticket booked already, a room waiting for him in an airbnb near the facility for the next four months.

grace takes a day off from work and goes off the grid somewhere in Apoquindo to day hike, in solitude, with his sat phone and a full backpack. he needs to think.

his thoughts feel enormous, and he finds they get smaller, more manageable, when he goes somewhere where the landscape is much, much bigger than he is.

when he comes home exhausted, after dark, he’s standing in the kitchen, drinking a big bottle of icy cucumber lime agua fresca with salt in it and then a cold beer in quick succession, nearly giving himself the hiccups.

“how was your hike?”

“beautiful. my legs are absolutely thrashed.”

“take tomorrow off and stay in bed with me.”

“is that an order?”

“it is,” she says, stern, and nudges him with her elbow, leaning over from the sink where she’s cleaning up. after all this time he still likes that, feels himself get half hard for a second, and then his brain redirects.

“here’s how we can do it,” he announces, no preamble.

“what?”

“i will stand at the top with you. if we go down we go down together.”

“grace, what?” she sets down the dishes in her hands and looks at him. “what’s this?”

“we go to texas, and we run the taumoeba project together. get the band back together, our people and whoever else you think we need. that’s our condition. not you under me or me under you, but both of us, together, joint leadership. you do the diplomacy and international relations, and i do the science. we get the taumoeba to the sun.”

“you think the governments of the world will go for funding and mandating that?” she squints a little, skeptical.

“i think there’s a lot they’ll go for to get you into the hot seat again,” he says, shrugging. “why not use it to ask for everything you want. we are heroes now. for example, i’ve got a list of dream equipment and dream personnel, and they’re going to have to be okay with it. also with your papers. no more active warrants. no open cases. a green card.”

“you’ve been thinking about this the whole time, haven’t you?” she says, slowly.

“the whole time.” he nods, meeting her eyes. “extensively, honey.”

“you cannot be my co-director and call me honey in front of people, ryland.”

“says who?” the smile spreads over his face, because if that’s her only complaint right now, he knows he already has her. “what are they going to do? fire me? you’re my wife.”

“i can’t believe you still trust me,” she’s shaking her head. “after everything.”

“i trust you. of course i do,” he says, and his voice is even, calm. he steps toward her, takes her face in both of his hands. kisses her, filthy, hot. he tastes like the cucumber, lime, beer, salt. she wants to devour him.

she leaves the dishes in the sink and follows him into the shower.

-

for the trip to houston, the itinerary is long and exhausting. they are crossing from one end of the earth to the other it feels like. she has an advance copy of the book from her editor. she gives it to him in the lounge, after they make it through security.

“oh!” he cries out in surprise, “oh, no way!” he all but leaps toward her to pull her into his arms, almost knocking over a glass of wine waiting at her elbow, and she has to laugh.

the people in the lounge across the coffee table from them look up, startled.

she kisses his cheek.

“i wanted to wait until you weren’t expecting it,” she says, smiling. he has such a proud, fond look on his face.

he starts reading it right away, eating his plate of little things from the buffet with one hand, while she tries not to laugh. in the first long flight from santiago to cdmx, they have a row of three seats to themselves so she lies down in his lap to sleep at least for a few hours, earplugs and eye mask on. he threads a hand in her hair gently and reads on. intermittently and openly cries.

the flight attendant passes by to check on them, gently tucks a stack of little drink napkins into the tray table locked in the upright position near him since she doesn’t have a box of tissues.

“estas bien?” the attendant asks grace, her head tilted inquisitively, a look of concern on her face.

“oh, it’s just a really moving book,” he says, nods. “todo bien.” he blinks away the tears. she loved me the whole time, he repeats in his mind, as he takes a break and lets his head fall back against the headrest, eyes closed. she loved me the whole time. eva’s warm and pliant in his lap. he strokes her hair. below them the carribean glitters, unseeable. he might be the luckiest person on the planet.

-

in mexico city, stratt strides into their arrival gate with confidence, but when they clear customs and it sinks in what’s coming next she has a full on panic attack waiting for their next flight. starts hyperventilating, feeling sick and dizzy.

“i can’t get on the plane like this,” she insists. grace is close at her side, trying to get a good look at her face. “i - i can’t do it. please.”

“you gotta slow down your breathing,” he says. to hear the pleading tone of her voice scares t the hell out of him. “here, come on.” he walks them to a more hidden corner of the waiting area by the gate where there aren’t as many people, and stands in front of her, so she isn’t visible from the concourse. “listen. we’re okay. i’m here with you. everything is fine right now. we’re good. you’re good. i’m right here.”

“i know,” she mutters, frustrated, heart racing, “i know that up here,” she taps her temple, “i just don’t think it matters right now to my body.” she grips his arm, and under the pressure of her fingers his capillaries occlude, turning the skin of his wrist pale. “we have to get out of here. cancel the flight. i have to get out of here.” she sounds increasingly panicked.

“ok, we can go to a hotel for a night.” she looks up at him and the expression on her face is pleading, despondent. “we can fly up tomorrow.” he’s starting to get a little scared now too, having never seen her like this. “or the day after.”

is this the extensive ptsd bill finally coming due from over a decade ago?

if so, terrible timing, he thinks. but of course it usually is.

he prys her fingers from his arm; her grip is starting to hurt a little. he gently folds her into a hug, feels her ribs expand and contract beneath him, rapid. “we can stay for a few nights. rebook the flight. we can do whatever you need. everything’s okay. we’re okay. we’re okay.” but i’m not going to cancel, he thinks. “i’ll just tell them we got delayed or missed the connection or something. don’t worry, it’s fine.”

they get a room at one of the chain hotels not far from the airport terminal. grace books it for two nights. they shower and get a ride to a restaurant in the city center where they can walk, because he knows she will feel better if she can walk. she barely eats.

“talk to me,” he begs her, at a bar, over tacos and mezcal with lime.

“the people in houston,” she begins, carefully, “will remember a version of me that no longer exists. and i fear they want that version to lead them, but she’s gone. i’m like this now - i can’t do what i used to. i’m weak now.”

“what? none of us can do what we used to,” grace sputters. “we’re older. we’re tired. we went through so much. it catches up to us all. you’ll see, when you see them. it caught up to them too. you think they’re all going to be the same? dmitri alone looks like he’s aged at warp speed. i saw you with him on that video call.”

“no, that’s not what i mean. i mean - they remember me as cold, right? i never showed anything.” he thinks back to the night she kissed him, what she said. “but now, look at me,” she whispers, shaking her head. leans back and pushes her plate away toward the center of the table, sighs. “i can’t hide it all. i cry, like, every week, i’m going to forget to hide the public displays of affection between us, i’m walking around humming mexican love songs, i…how am i going to do this now?”

“you’re going to do it with me,” he tells her, as if the whole explanation, the whole story of their lives, could be comprehended and contained in just these two words. “with me.” he finishes his drink in one go, chases it with his agua fresca from the kids menu. “you don’t have to hide anything. we aren’t a secret anymore.”

she takes the glass out of his hand for a moment, sets it down on the bar and leans toward him, puts her arms around his neck and hides her face there, overcome.

they take the next day to go to a museum and a coffee shop and a bar and then back to the hotel. they walk and walk and stop for a bunch of different snacks and agua preparada and beers, at intervals. grace tells her, for hours, his ideas. she asks him to explain it in simpler terms, and like usual, he distills some of the most complicated shit in the history of space travel into words she can easily understand and even some jokes that make her smile. the man was born to teach.

when they get back to the hotel, she gets in the shower and sits down in there, curled into a ball under the soft rainfall of the water, and allows herself a few minutes to freak out in private away from grace, who is already understandably concerned about her, hovering even more than he normally does.

she thinks about his face when he said ‘with me’ - the total openness there.

as if it would all work out as long as they did it together.

god, she thinks, how does he believe that? how has he convinced himself? how can she convince herself?

-

houston, post-astrophage, is sort of wet and cold. they find a place to stay near the space center, in Seabrook, a two bedroom apartment with a gym on the first floor. grace is overjoyed at the access to the water, even though Galveston Bay is pretty gross. his ugly yellow raincoat makes an appearance. stratt compromises and gets herself a dark green one, even though the plastic feeling of it makes her teeth hurt if she’s extra sleep deprived.

they spend the first morning of their first workday in a celebratory reunion with the rest of the staff, having a big meeting and feeding everyone breakfast and coffee. after that the delegation of work and the logistics begin.

she has to admit it feels good to have a purpose like this again, even though she’s so tired she almost doesn’t make it from the couch to the bed that first night.

“pace yourself,” grace tells her, sleepily brushing his teeth. “goes for both of us. it’s a long haul. it’s an endurance sport.”

the basic idea is to replicate a fleet somewhat similar to NASA’s Parker probe in 2018 but tactical, and launch to try to line up with the closest orbital window in January. a series of interstellar crop dusters, to spray the sun and the petrova line with taumoeba. the Parker probe took three months to get there in travel time, but grace thinks they can do it faster.

there is a debate about nuclear versus astrophage based propulsion. grace designs a parameter, checks the math, then checks it again, then checks it a third time, on a whiteboard instead of on his laptop. these are likely his factory settings, stratt thinks, when she’s bringing him an early lunch and finding him sitting on the floor talking to himself out loud, whiteboard marker in hand, two junior people helping him.

“i am a machine that turns noodles into proofs,” he says to absolutely nobody, opening up a container of good restaurant ramen while still sitting on the floor.

“you don’t need to eat down there,” she reminds him. “there’s a whole table. there’s four chairs.” he makes a placemat out of his plastic bag and crosses his legs.

“i’m good,” he says, happily. “thank you for noodles. love you so much. see you at one thirty for the meeting.” she can’t help the feeling in her belly, a wave of warmth, euphoria. last time they had to sneak around for this, and now she can buy him real ramen instead of the dried instant stuff, and he can tell her her loves her right in front of their staff, instead of sneaking to her room at 11pm. it feels absolutely wild. it might never get old.

the two guys working with him are young and they look up at her for a moment. starstruck new hires. she lets herself smile.

the hope is to send a series of probes over the course of a year, enough to make a noticeable dent in solar energy output, and if it works they’ll be funded again as needed, to keep doing it, until the climate recovers. there are a million variables: space debris, orbital mechanics, radiation, heat, solar wind, equipment breakdown, whether or not the spray of taumoeba will even make enough contact with the astrophage to actually work, or if everything will drift apart into nothingness.

the debate begins over whether the initial wave of the fleet should be launched together from earth orbit in a huge shuttle, or launched one by one from the surface of the planet.

arguments ensue over whether it’s necessary for anyone to go up there to monitor them, and if so, who, and how.

a public call is put out for volunteers for the mission.

stratt is given a list of candidates from the world’s elite space programs and various air forces.

that’s a very tough day.

alone in an empty meeting room, she opens up the binder, the information so classified that someone had to hand deliver it to her, and flips through the pages. feels a wave of nausea and anxiety hit her like a wall so abruptly she closes it again, gets up and paces around the big conference table in circles a couple of times.

when grace comes back in, she is just sitting in front of the closed binder, looking at it as if something will jump out at her.

“what happened,” he says, looking down at it and then back at her face.

she sighs. pushes it toward him.

“i cannot look at this. i feel like they’re here in the room with me.” they rarely talk about the hail mary’s crew by name. grace understands. “it’s not a suicide mission, but maybe someone else should do this.”

“yeah, we can ask someone else to do this,” he says, quietly.

“you could do it.”

“no,” he replies, immediately, “i can’t.”

“we can form a committee.” she suggests.

“odd numbered committee. so there’s a tie breaker.”

“sure, distribute the guilt,” she agrees.

“did you even flip through, make it through the list? even briefly?” he wants to know.

“no,” she says, and chokes out a singular, hard laugh, at the idea that she could do that.

“i’m not, uh, sure there even is a heaven,” grace says, coming around to stand behind her at her chair, so he can lean down, put his arms around her and drop his head to her shoulder. “but when i think about them, i picture them there.”

she nods.

-

the color coded meeting calendar grace and stratt share begins to look like a terrifying out of order rainbow.

she takes to blocking off chunks of time for them to discuss things and make notes and chip away at their ever growing to do list.

he brings her two coffees, light and sweet, every morning.

“i don’t take sugar in my coffee, grace,” she tries to insist.

“yes you do.”

“what?”

“otherwise why would you start to drink mine before noon whenever i don’t put sugar in yours? just go ahead and have it. we’re in america now. you have to eat like you’re trying to get diabetes, it’s our culture,” he laughs. “when in rome.”

they try texas barbecue from the famous pit room with carl, going out of their way for it on a rare day off. but stratt misses chilean food, shockingly. she misses germany too. and the argentine germans in santiago. she misses how much they’d traveled together before for the hail mary project; asia, europe, everywhere, hours in planes, in liminal spaces where she felt like time stopped and the two of them were held in a bubble together, leaned against each other in the back row, whispering about work or a movie, close enough to feel the heat coming from each other’s skin.

now she’s stuck here, often in the purgatory of a car’s back seat, waiting in traffic. living near a cold wet beach next to the most polluted gulf water. infuriatingly, grace is sort of having a genuinely good time. he works on breeding taumoeba, which he is just as good at as breeding astrophage, and he starts developing a piece of language software with a linguistics professor from california in order to decode the rest of the information they got back in the beetles, which he is a thousand percent sure contain “untold gems of science, engineering, and design” from the alien species who helped the hail mary crew. he does astral math. he sits in on propulsion meetings. he sees her every day for a stand up at lunch.

he plays indoor soccer when it rains and front lawn soccer when it doesn’t. he goes out for a beer with carl. he goes out for a beer with rodrigo. he drags eva to a mexican restaurant and she covers the one natalia lafourcade song she knows well enough to sing, and he’s drunk and emotional, whistles at her. he wants to dance with her at the end of the night but she just takes him home instead.

she misses singing with the musicians. she also misses being home alone singing and writing, if she’s honest, exhausted from constantly being in meetings with people, but she never says it to him. she remembers what his face looked like when he said “with me,” in mexico, and there isn’t a universe where she would want to take that way from him.