Fully Sated
Solace
Sleep was all I could ask for. I needed more of it. More of him—his touch. Especially now that his voice consumed me. I was laying on a wide bed that was low to the ground, staring out into darkness. The room was sterile, all cold bone-white walls and a strange hum somewhere in the paneled ceiling. Beside me, Jude ran his fingers across the bare skin of my hip, slowly tracing circles until goosebumps rose under his warm touch.
“God, you’re stunning.”
I rolled toward him, propping myself up on my elbow. I smiled when he leaned over to press a kiss to my neck, mouth trailing lower.
“You taste even better.” His tongue carved a slow path back up to my ear. “Don’t wake up,” he whispered. “I want to try something.”
“Never,” I breathed. I wasn’t sure I could wake up, even if I tried. I was exhausted. We’d talked for hours the last few days, and between that, I had been working to find a solution to my water shortage. If I wasn’t talking to Ransom, I was reading textbooks and banging on pipes I had absolutely no business messing with.
Outside of that, I slept. More and more lately. Longer, too. I had nine days left. Nine days before the bunker ran dry.
I still hadn’t told Jude.
Instead I kept things light, and like always—whenever I avoided the hard stuff—we talked about movies neither of us got to see, how much we both missed cereal and energy drinks, and debated music like we did when we were kids. It was like building scaffolds of nonsense, so that neither of us had to stand beneath the weight of what was coming. Occasionally, when the lull lasted a second too long, Jude would ask the hard stuff. Like about Milo, or our parents. It was oddly therapeutic to remember my little brother with someone who loved him almost as much as I did.
“He’s out there somewhere,” he had said lightly. Sometimes it was easier to believe our lost loved ones had only gone ahead of us on some longer journey, and that their absence was only the distance between stops. “Wherever he is, whatever he’s doing, I know he’s doing it well.”
Yeah. I grinned. “Milo would have killed to go to space.”
“It kind of feels like we all killed to go to space…”
I couldn’t help the pain in my chest whenever Jude’s voice took on that sorrow-filled, wistful, hardened edge. He’d seen it all happen, albeit from space, but it still happened. I couldn’t imagine the horror.
I mean…
I guess I could. I’d dragged dead bodies into essentially a broom closet.
“How is Adam?” He had issues with his dad, probably even more than he had when we were little, but at least he still had him.
He groaned between beeps on the relay. “He’s fine, I guess. Looking old.”
“Aren’t we all.” I was going to be thirty-one in a few months… well, if I made it that long.
“He’s been trying to connect more and more. His wife made it to the shuttles and they’re still together, surprisingly enough.”
“Wow, that must be tough.” Imagine the person you despise the most, the person who made you feel little all your life, wound up floating in space with you for eternity. Now imagine that person was actually your father who abandoned you as a child.
“I’ve got a little brother.”
What. “No way. How old?”
“Seven. She was pregnant when she got up here. First baby born on Echelon One, actually. His name is Dylan. It’s still kind of weird because I’m old enough to be his dad, but despite it all, I enjoy spending time with him.”
“Cherish it,” I told him. He moved on to ask about Bridget and Paul, then went on a full rant when I told him Paul never got around to installing a hydroponic garden. I was vindicated, even if Paul wasn’t here to hear it.
Jude still had work to do, but when we could spare the time, he told me what life in orbit was like—how humanity was faring after the end of the world. Elias said hello. His wife, Kit, popped in too, long enough to tell me she admired my strength. To which I had to laugh. She was the one pregnant in outer space. A fact that seemed to stress them all out.
No one wanted to mention the obvious problem: nine stations and one habitat was not enough to support a widely growing population.
That was where SOL and Ransom came in.
What had once been survival-prediction software was now a fully autonomous system monitoring Earth’s atmosphere. According to its data, the radiation levels in my region were not nearly as high as they’d once believed. At least… that’s what his numbers said. The problem lay within the ARS-7 readings, which I had no clue about. Turns out, the atmosphere above could still kill me in minutes.
So that was cool.
