Especially not those of us whose dream it is to stay.
And where would we even go? It’s only a small leap of logicbefore the board has the same idea I did, that they could send us to Radix to work with Vonn. That would be every nightmare come true—for us. For the board, it would be a brilliant, expedient solution. What’s best for everyone in the long run.
“Yes,” I say, just to saysomething. I’m starting to fray, will unravel if the silence stretches any longer. “Yes, I’ll get you a head count as soon as I can, but”—I squeeze my eyes shut, force the lie—“rest assured things are running smoothly up here.”
“Anything else I should be aware of?”
I clear my throat, dry my nervous palms on the crisp fabric of my pants. I’m not exactly sure how to approach the subject of Vonn without sounding one thousand percent panicked. I’m not sure how to sayanythingwithout sounding panicked. I need to ask about the shipment, and should probably put feelers out about mutation strategy—but the way this conversation has gone down so far has me hedging.
“In your most recent message, you mentioned sending intervention from Radix,” I begin. My voice is as even as I can make it; hopefully it sounds smooth and confident on Shapiro’s end of the call.
“Oh, yes—about that,” he says. “We’ve taken another look at the logistics of it all, and at our situation down here. Jack thinks it would be comparable in both time and expense to launch your supplies from here instead of from Radix.” Jack is on the board, according to hundreds of my mother’s venting sessions I wasn’t supposed to overhear. “Trajectory from Radix puts a shipment there at seven to eight days; ours would be less costly and wecould get it to you in just under ten.”
Relief washes over me—this is good news,verygood. Mostly. As long as we can, in fact, stretch our supplies that long.
“Don’t get me wrong, Vonn’s ready to go if you’re down to critical levels,” he continues. “But if you’re confident you can stretch what you’ve got, we’ve got you covered. Tell me honestly, Lins—do you have enough to last? Only you know how well you’ve rationed since the last delivery, but I’m worried you won’t have enough.”
It’s not even a full two weeks. I think back to my conversation with Natalin—about how we’ll be fine if we can just get people to eat what theyneedinstead of only what theylike.
We can do this. Eating vege-packs for a few days seems like a small sacrifice compared to being indebted to Vonn and potentially forfeiting our future freedom. Worst-case scenario, we find a way to get what we need fromNautilusinstead.
“We... we should be good until your shipment arrives,” I say. I shut my eyes tight, hope for the best.
“Great,great,” he says. “I’ll let everyone know. We’ll shoot to get a shipment to you from here as soon as we can—I’ll confirm liftoff within the next day or two.” He sounds almost relieved. If I had said we were critically low, would he even have been able to convince the board to go forward with the faster delivery?
“Excellent,” I say, suddenly anxious to start wrapping this up before more surprises spool out of my control. “Thank you...” Would she call him by his first name, Julian, or some sort of nickname? He began all his messages with Shapiro, so I’m notsure. Too late for me to add a name now, though, so I just close with, “We’ve got everything under control.”
“Here if you need anything, as always,” he says. “And Linsey?”
He says her name with such kindness it puts a lump in my throat. “Yes?” I force out.
“Don’t forget to take care of yourself, okay?”
“You, too.”
And then it’s over.
Don’t forget to take care of yourself.
I’m not my mother, but we shared more than the sound of our voice: I needed to hear this every bit as much as she would have.
I sit, staring at the communications screen, the call log’s07:08:43still blinking up at me. If only I could stretch time, make each minute feel as eternally long as those seven did.
22
THERE IS NO AWAY
PRIORITY NUMBER ONE: I need to keep my people alive, and I need to give them a future worth living for. No one will ever love this station more than I do. I refuse to lose a single person more—I refuse to lose ourhome. Even if it means I’ll only ever be commander for this brief, terrible moment in time, before they replace me with someone far more experienced.
Everything in me wants to prove—to myselfandto the space program—that I’m capable of stepping up and taking care of my people. If I were to tell Shapiro exactly how alone we are up here, and how desperate, the board would most definitely relocate us, possibly to the most horrendous place in the entire galaxy. We’d lose the only home we’ve ever known—our only tie to the past and, for many of us, our dream for the future.
That’s not how it will happen, though, not if I can help it.
So here I sit in my lab, digging for answers that could not only stop the mutation from spreading toourpeople, but also to those onNautilus, since it’s our best option at replenishing oursupplies, if things come down to that. I’m curled over my lab station, studying the Mila sample from earlier. Nothing about it makes any sense. I’ve stared at it for an hour now, breaking my brain over what could have possibly gone wrong in my test process, and what I could possibly do about it with nothing left of her to test.
The most sobering thing is, no amount of testing will bring her back to life.
It’s heartbreaking, when I take a step back from trying tostudyher death and remember the actual life lost—when I remove myself from the feeling that death after death is just our reality now, when I think of the individual people who are no longer with us.
