Aphelion

It was beautiful, and Eric hated himself for thinking so, hated the way the magma flowering across the Pacific looked like the roses he used to steal from gas stations for women who deserved better than stolen roses and better than him.

He was forty minutes into ascent. The viewport framed a planet coming undone. Orange seams. A smear of cloud the color of a bruise turning yellow at its edges. Somewhere under that, a federal prison he had walked out of six hours ago was no longer a federal prison. It was slag and running iron and whatever a man became when the building around him remembered, finally, that it had always been geology.

He had not fought anyone on his way out. He had stepped over a guard named Ruiz, whose left hand was still curled around a radio, and he had not taken the radio. He had walked past the chapel where three men were setting fire to the warden's office, and he had not told them that the building was already structurally gone, that Curtiss (gone two years now, heart failure in the infirmary) had taught him to read a building's bones the way other men read scripture. He had simply walked.

He had driven a guard's truck to Mojave on fumes and memory. Curtiss had described the facility across a thousand cafeteria meals in the tone other men used for their first loves. East gate. Service road. The keypad sequence that a contractor with a grudge had never quite forgotten. Eric had not asked why he was memorizing. He had told himself he didn't know.

He knew.

The rocket had been sitting on the pad, fueled and waiting, some rich man's resupply run already in final countdown. No one had stopped him. There was no one left to stop him. He had climbed the gantry with his prison shirt sticking to the small of his back, and he had strapped in, and he had let the automation do what automation does.

Above the atmosphere, he thought space would be silent. It wasn’t. It had a texture. It pushed up against him

He watched the Pacific bloom. He thought about Tom Mills, thirty-four, a security guard, the one who had stayed to lock up. He pressed the heel of his hand against his eye until colors came.

Behind him, in the cargo bay, something moved.

He stayed still for what seemed like minutes.

The sound came again. Not rats. There were no rats in a clean room. A shift of fabric against metal. A held breath, let out.

Eric undid his straps. In zero-g his body did the unfamiliar thing, and he caught the seatback and steadied himself and found the handholds along the bulkhead the way Curtiss had described them, left-right-left, a drunk's walk along a ceiling. The cargo bay hatch was keyed but unlocked. He turned the wheel.

She was sitting with her back against a crate, knees up, her father's tablet pressed to her sternum like something she was trying to keep from floating away. Navy fleece. School crest on the chest, some private thing with a Latin motto. A scab on her knuckle. Hair braided neatly enough that whoever had done it had cared.

She looked at him. She did not flinch.

He looked at her. He was aware, abruptly, of the number still visible under the grime on his shirt and of the blood along his jaw from a cut he could not remember getting and of the way a man looked to a child when the man was what he was.

Neither of them spoke.

He counted. Didn't want to. But there was nothing left but counting, and so he counted. He counted forty before she said it . . .

"You're not one of my father's people."

"No."

"Is he dead?"

He did not answer. He watched her watch him not answer, and he saw the thing happen behind her eyes that he had seen once in a dog at a shelter the week it was scheduled to be put down, the specific stillness of an animal absorbing information it had already suspected. She nodded. One nod. Small.

"Where are we going?"

"Back down."

"To what?"

He did not answer that either.

She held the tablet out to him. The screen was open to a document with her father's face at the top and the words CONTINGENCY PROTOCOLS: ORBITAL underneath in the sober serif of a man who believed punctuation could save his daughter's life.

"He wrote it," she said. "I've read it twice."

"I'm Eric."

"Devi."

He took the tablet. His hands were not steady. He scrolled. He found the section on autopilot and the section after it, the one titled EXTERNAL OVERRIDE, and he read the number in the risk column and read it again to be sure he had read it.

He read the manual for forty minutes. She watched him the whole time.

The cabin ticked the way cooling metal ticks. Somewhere behind a panel, a pump cycled, stopped, and cycled again. The Earth had rotated enough that the terminator was creeping east, and the fires along the Pacific rim were visible now as a continuous red seam, a wound stitched in light.

"Ninety percent," he said, finally.

"For trained personnel."

"Yes."

"You're not trained."

"No."

She absorbed this with the identical economy she had absorbed her father. A small recalculation behind the eyes. Nothing spilled.

"There's oxygen for the trip," she said. "I checked. And the station has supplies for six months at full crew. There were supposed to be four of them up there. I don't know if they're still."

She did not finish. He did not ask her to.

He floated to the console and braced his knees against the seat and looked at the trajectory screen. A clean parabola arcing home. The autopilot did not know that home was a griddle. The autopilot was a good dog waiting at a door that was no longer there.

"I already know what you have to do," she said.

He turned. She had the tablet angled away from him now, and her thumb was moving on the screen with the idle familiarity of a child who had grown up with glass in her hand. She was not looking at him. She was reading a cached news article.

"What are you looking at?"

"You."

He waited.

"Eric Allen Lynch," she said, in the flat voice of someone reading a label. "Three commercial properties: Bakersfield, Fresno, and Long Beach. The Long Beach one."

"Put it down."

"Did anyone die?"

He could have lied. He considered it for the length of a breath. She would have known. She was already the kind of person who knew.

"One person."

"Who?"

"Tom Mills. He was a guard. He stayed to lock up."

She took this in. She did not look up from the screen. When she did look up, her face had done something he was not prepared for, which was nothing. It had done nothing. She had filed him.

"Are you going outside to save me," she said, "or because you think dying will make you good."

He opened his mouth to talk and then closed it.

The pump cycled. The Earth turned. He did not answer her, because the answer that came to him first was both, and the answer that came second was I don't know, and the answer that came third was a memory of standing in a Bakersfield parking lot at two in the morning with a gas can and the specific pleasure of the match, and none of these were things he could say to a fourteen-year-old girl in a navy fleece.

He pushed off the seat and went aft, to where the suit was racked.

She did not follow. She did not say anything else. She stayed at the console with the tablet and began, without being asked, to read the EVA procedure aloud from the beginning, her voice pitched low and even, the way a person reads to someone who is falling asleep.

---

The airlock cycled. The outer hatch opened onto nothing, which was the wrong word for what it opened onto, because nothing was not this. Nothing was the absence of a thing. This was a presence. This was the black pressing its face against the visor and breathing.

He went hand over hand along the rail. The suit was too big at the shoulders and too snug at the wrists, and the gloves made his fingers feel like they belonged to someone else, someone clumsier, someone he had to forgive with every handhold.

"Next handhold is at two o'clock," Devi said. "Forty centimeters."

"Got it."

"The panel is past the second rib. You'll see a yellow decal."

"Yeah."

The Earth was under his left boot. He did not look at it. He had looked at it once, at the airlock door, and the look had gone into him like a needle, and he knew if he looked again he would stop moving. So he kept his eyes on the hull, on the rivets, on the small specific scuffs where some technician in a clean room in the desert had dragged a tool across the paint and been yelled at for it.

The panel was where she said it would be. He opened it. Inside: a keypad, a toggle, a screen the size of a playing card.

"Sequence," he said.

"Seven, two, two, nine. Enter. Then the toggle to MAN. Then four, zero, four, one. Enter again."

His glove slipped on the first three. The pad did not register the fourth. He tried again. His breath was loud in the helmet, loud in a way he had not heard his own breath be loud since he was a child under a blanket.

"Slow down," she said. "It's pressure sensitive. Press and hold."

He pressed and held.

The screen blinked. The screen blinked again. The screen went green.

"Trajectory locked to lunar," she said, and her voice did something then, a small crack at the edge of it, the first he had heard. "Eric. It worked."

"Coming in."

He turned. He reached for the rail. The tether, which had been floating in a slow, lazy arc behind him, chose that moment to catch on the lip of the open panel, and he felt the tug and heard a sound that was not a sound so much as an absence where tension had been.

He looked at the loose end of the tether drifting past his faceplate like a piece of ribbon.

"Devi."

"Yes."

"Listen to me."

A quiet pause on the comm. Then, especially small: "Okay."

"The approach angle is nine degrees. You'll see a crosshair on the nav screen. Keep the dot in the box. If the dot drifts, you correct with the right stick, using small taps, not pushes. Small. Say it."

"Small taps."

"The thruster sequence for final approach is on page one-forty of your father's manual. You read it to me. Now you read it to yourself. When the station's beacon pings, you answer with the handshake code, which is on the page after. You don't need me for the handshake. The computer does it. You just press accept."

"Press accept."

"The green light means the seal is good. Red means you back off and try again. You can try again as many times as you need to. The fuel is enough. Do you hear me? The fuel is enough."

"The fuel is enough."

"Say the approach angle."

"Nine degrees."

"Say the rest."

She said the rest. She said it cleanly, without a shake, the way a child says a prayer she has been taught so many times she no longer hears the words.

He was a long way from the ship already. He had not felt himself move. The hull was the size of a thumb now and then the size of a fingernail, and the stars behind it were doing the thing stars do when you are the only animal looking at them, which is to say they were doing nothing; they were only there.

"Devi."

"Yes."

"You're going to be fine."

She did not answer. He waited. He waited a long time, counting in his head the way a man counts when he is trying not to count, and then he understood that she was not going to answer, and he understood why, and the understanding went through him with a clean heat that was not fear and was not pride and was not any of the words he had for things.

She was concentrating.

---

She kept the dot in the box.

Her hands on the stick were small and cold and very sure. The cockpit smelled like plastic mixed with her own breath and the faint blood of the cut on her lip she did not remember getting. The moon filled the forward window now, gray and pocked and closer than anything had ever been, a face coming up through water to meet her.

"Small taps," she whispered. "Small taps. Nine degrees. Small taps."

The beacon pinged. She pressed accept.

The docking light was red for a long time. She did not look away from it. She did not look at the darkness behind her or the Earth behind that or the comm that had gone quiet now in a way she would learn the shape of later, in the years when she had time for shapes.

The light turned green.

A single green dot in all that darkness, and she pressed her forehead against the cold glass of the porthole, and she was here, she was here, she was here.