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“Where did you get it?” Dad asked warily.

“My house. It’s my own family emergency shelter.”

“Shit,” I said. “You didn’t have to do that, Bob.”

“I knew Ammar wouldn’t want me stealing one. Besides, you’ll buy me a new one.”

“Apparently I will.” Dammit. That’d set me back a few thousand slugs for sure.

Dad inspected the shelter with his experienced eye. He walked a lap around it, looking every detail up and down. “This will do.”

“All right. I’ll leave you to it,” said Bob. “Let me know if you need anything.”

Bob walked around the temporary wall and out of the room. That left me and Dad staring at each other.

I picked up a welding mask from the cart. “Just like old times, huh? Been a while since we did a project together.”

“Nine years.” He threw a jumpsuit at me. “Wear the safety gear. All of it.”

“Oh, come on. The suit’s hot as hell and—”

He cut me off with a look. It’s like I was sixteen again. I grudgingly climbed into the jumpsuit and started sweating immediately. Ugh.

“How are we doing this?” I asked.

He reached into the cart and hefted out a stack of aluminum sheets. “We’ll cut the hole in the back. We’ll have to move the tanks and batteries but that won’t be a problem.”

I put the welding mask on. “And then what? How do we make a connection point?”

He leaned the panels against the vessel. “We’re going to weld these around the new hole to make a skirt.”

I picked one of the panels up. I spotted the manufacturer’s logo stamped in the corner. “Now, that is ironic. This is from Sanchez Aluminum.”

“They make quality material,” Dad said.

“Landvik Aluminum will make quality material too.” I put the panel down. “Will a corner weld hold against a vacuum?”

He took out a Sharpie and uncapped it. “We won’t have a corner. We’ll soften the panels with unfocused torches and bend them over the curvature of the pressure vessel. We’ll assemble them into a cylinder.” He looked up at me. “And how many panels will that take?”

Always a goddamned quiz.

“Well,” I said, “we shouldn’t bend five-millimeter stock more than a fifty-centimeter-radius turn. I’m guessing about six to make the full arc.”

“Six would work,” he said. “We’ll use eight to be safe. Now, hand me the tape measure.”

I did as he asked. He carefully measured and marked points on the shelter.

“So when’s the lecture coming?” I asked.

“You’re an adult. It’s not my place to lecture you on anything.”

“But you’ll continue the passive-aggressive barbs, right? I wouldn’t want to miss out on those.”

He stood up. “I’ve never pretended to approve of your choices, Jasmine. I have no obligation to. But I don’t try to control you either. Not since you moved out. Your life is your own.”

“Yay me,” I said.

“This is a terrible situation you’ve landed in,” he said. “I’m choosing the lesser of two evils by helping you. I’ve never broken the law before in my life.”

I winced and looked at my feet. “I really am sorry to drag you into this.”

“What’s done is done,” he said. “Now, put your mask on and hand me a cutting head.”

I put my mask on and gave him the desired tool from the cart. He fixed the head and checked it twice. Then he meticulously checked the gas-mixture valves. Then he rechecked the cutting head.

“What’s up, Dad? You’re slow as snot today.”

“Just being thorough.”

“Are you kidding? I’ve seen you fire up a torch with one hand and set mixture levels with the other at the same time. Why are you—”

Oh. I stopped talking.

This wasn’t a normal job. Tomorrow, his daughter’s life would rely on the quality of these welds. It slowly dawned on me that, to him, this was the most critical project he’d ever done. He would accept nothing short of his absolute best. And if that meant taking all day, so be it.

I stood back and let him work. After more fastidious double checks, he got started. I assisted and did what I was told. We may have our friction, but when it came to welding he was the master and I was the apprentice.

Very few people get a chance to quantify how much their father loves them. But I did. The job should have taken forty-five minutes, but Dad spent three and a half hours on it. My father loves me 366 percent more than he loves anything else.

Good to know.

I sat on the edge of Svoboda’s bed and watched him set up.

He’d really gone all out. In addition to the normal monitor on his desk, he’d mounted four other monitors to the wall.

He typed on the keyboard and magically brought each monitor to life.

“A little overboard, don’t you think?” I said.

He continued typing. “Two cameras on your EVA suit, two on Dale’s, and I need a screen for diagnostics. That’s five screens.”

“Could have been windows on the same screen, though, right?”

“Pfft. Philistine.”

I flopped back onto the bed and sighed. “On a scale from one to ‘invade Russia in winter,’ how stupid is this plan?”

“Risky as all hell, but I don’t see what else you can do. Besides”—he turned to me with a grin—“you have your own personal Svoboda. How can you lose?”

I snickered. “But have I covered every angle?”

He shrugged. “No such thing. But for what it’s worth, you got everything I can think of.”

“That means a lot,” I said. “You’re pretty thorough.”

“Well, there is one thing,” he said.

“Shit. What?”

“Well, it’s half of a thing.” He turned back to his computer and brought up the Sanchez bubble schematics. “The methane tanks bother me.”

“How so?” I walked over and hovered behind him. My hair dangled on his face a little, but he didn’t seem to mind.

“There’s thousands of liters of liquid methane here.”

“Why do they need methane?”

“The rocket fuel they manufacture is about one percent methane. It’s needed as a combustion regulator. They import it from Earth in big-ass tanks.”

“Okay, what’s your concern?”

“It’s flammable. Like… super-duper flammable.” He pointed to a different part of the schematic. “And there’s a huge staging tank of pure oxygen over here.”

“And then I’m going to add a bunch of molten steel to the room,” I said. “What could go wrong?”

“Right, that’s my concern,” he said. “But it shouldn’t be a problem. By the time the smelter melts, there won’t be anyone around.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And if the tanks do leak and explode that’s great. Even more damage!”

“I guess,” he said, clearly not convinced. “It just bugs me, you know? It’s not part of the plan. I don’t like things that don’t match a plan.”

“If that’s the worst thing you can think of, I’m in good shape.”

“Guess so,” he said.

I stretched my back. “I wonder if I’ll sleep tonight.”

“You crashing here?”

“Eh…” I said. “Ngugi isn’t going to sell me out again. Have I mentioned she’s a bitch?”

“It’s come up.”

“Anyway, now no one can track me down by my Gizmo. So I can pay for a hotel. I’ll probably be up late fretting, anyway. I wouldn’t want to keep you awake.”

“Okay,” he said. Was there a hint of disappointment in his voice?

I put my hands on his shoulders. Not sure why, but I did. “Thanks for always being in my corner. It means a lot to me.”

“Sure.” He craned his neck around to look up at me. “I’ll always be there for you, Jazz.”

We looked at each other for a moment.