I let out a long exhale. It doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t have to mean anything except that he’ll be able to help me. I push aside the lingering thoughts that say otherwise. Choose faith.
Meet in Control ASAP, I reply.
For once, I don’t bother to clear my lab island, except for the sensitive materials that require proper storage. I pause briefly to make sure the door is locked behind me, but what good is a coded entry if the code isn’t secret anymore? A broken door would almost be better—then, at least, it would obviously rule out the people I trust most.
The station is still and silent at this early hour. Even Control is empty when I arrive, and dark; I’m alone in a field of backlit panels. Still no new-message alerts on our comm system, I observe on instinct. I look through the wide window into the endless sea of stars, wish I could press pause on this moment without ever having to take a hard look at reality. In reality, the axis of my world has tilted, suddenly and drastically, and everything I thought I knew is in the process ofsliding out from under me. I don’t want to know who has it in them to take life. I don’t want to know if my fears have played out against this very backdrop of stars, if Zesi and Heath and their bee exploded into one more ball of flaming fire amid the millions that will outlive us all.
But there is no way to stop time. I would have stopped it a long time ago if there was.
I hear the door slide open behind me, hear the rustle of Leo’s pants as he enters. I don’t turn around, and he doesn’t say anything, and for a long moment it’s like the night we sat by my window, soaking in the truth of all that had happened. He comes to stand by my side. Watches me like I watch the stars.
“We... have a problem,” I say finally. I steal a glance at him, see his profile lit up by the glow of the control panels. Once I meet his eyes, I can’t look away: he would not have done this. Not with his own mother’s blood—not at all. In this moment, I choose to believe I can trust him.
What is trust if you know all of the answers?
Hopefully it is not a mistake.
“Did they—did Zesi and Heath—”
“No,” I say quickly. “Not that. Well, not yet—I haven’t seen anything, good or bad.” We’re at thirty-seven hours and counting now. “They should be back any minute.”
They should’ve been back already.
Leo’s concerned, too, and trying to hide it on his face. Not that he’s trying to hide it fromme—it’s himself he’s trying toconvince. He’s probably not even aware he’s doing it.
“So,” I say, when the silence has drawn on for too long. My voice is crackling and low, barely more than a whisper. “I made a breakthrough today.”
I want to say more, but the words curl up in my throat. I want to protect him, because after I tell him, there will be no going back to the not-knowing. I want to protectmyself, in case I’m wrong and this is a huge mistake.
“About the virus? How it spreads—how to end it?”
He sounds so genuinely hopeful. It’s enough to put me at ease, at least a little.How to end it: if only.
I take a deep breath. Whisper, because even I don’t want to hear what I have to say. “It isn’t the virus this time. Someone—somebody—” Tears spring up without warning, and it is such a foreign feeling I’m caught completely off guard. “Someonekilledthem, Leo. On purpose.”
My words hang between us, heavy and hovering, like they could fall and crush us at any moment. Maybe they will. We are already being picked off by a threat we can’t see; even if spoken word doesn’t have the power to kill our bodies, what about our hope? Words hold more power than people give them credit for, I think.
“But the blood... ?” Leo says after a long pause. He’s turning the problem over in his mind like I’ve been, I can tell. Trying to reconcile fear with surface-level fact.
I shake my head. “Your mother’s blood,” I say, staring outinto the stars, not at his face,anywherebut his face. “Someone pulled it out of storage and used it to stage the whole thing. They only made itlooklike the virus.”
He’s still, too still.
It’s the sort of stillness that comes right before an explosion.
But instead of exploding like Leo does—all at once, very rarely, extremely supernova—I feel the full force of his energy surge through me as he takes my hand, as he laces his fingers in mine, as he holds on for dear life.
We’ve not done this before, and now that we have, how have we never?
So often, we sit back-to-back when working through our mutual discomforts. Side by side, if not that.
I turn, face him. His lips find mine, perfectly soft against his days-old stubble, and I don’t pull away, definitely donotpull away. If anything, I pull him closer, my free hand at the back of his neck. I kiss him harder, taste a hint of sweet spearmint on his tongue. In this moment, when everything else in the world feels like it’s slipping away, it is everything to me to have Leo here, now, close and closer than we’ve ever been. Like we can stop tomorrow, if only we commit to keeping this present moment alive.
So we stay in it, keep it alive. Until the radar blips behind him, anyway,blip blip blip blipblipblipblip, and we break ourselves back in two. His eyes are as bright as I feel, because of the radar and... everything else.
“They’re back,” I say, one part breathless, one part relieved. It can only be Heath and Zesi, and the radar log confirms it. “They’reback. They made it!”
As far as bad days go, this one could be worse.
