Lily Brooks-Dalton - Good Morning, Midnight

After the meeting, Sully went to Aether ’s cupola and peered through the swirling layer of feathery clouds as they zipped over the rich green of Central America, the deep, rippling blue of the Atlantic, the tawny deserts of northern Africa. She stayed there for a long time, watching the continents fly by—long enough to see the sun rise and set along the hazy rim of the planet’s atmosphere a few times over. Maybe staying up here was for the best. Maybe she didn’t belong on the surface anymore. She thought of Lucy, her glowing beam of know-it-all sunshine; she thought of Jack, the way he was before the divorce—mischievous, brooding, brilliant, and in love with her. She thought of Jean, pointing to the sky when Sully was little, the stars, the desert, introducing her to the electromagnetic spectrum and all of its magic. Her family. She watched the sun rise and set, rise and set, rise and set. As she watched the fourth sunrise flood the darkened planet with light, she let go. Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, wisps of pink cloud moving over blue water, she released her memories and her plans for the future—she let them float out through the cupola and down to the atmosphere, where they sizzled against the hazy blue shell of a planet she would never return to.

That night, Sully returned to the centrifuge long after the others had closed their curtains and turned out their lights. She felt lighter than she had in years. She brushed her teeth and padded along the curve to her bunk, her feet whispering against the floor. As she passed Harper’s compartment she heard him turn over inside, the rustle of his bedding and the frustrated sigh unmistakably his. She stopped short. Sully stood still for a moment, not thinking, just pausing, then adjusted her direction. Her feet moved and she followed them, climbing into his bunk before her brain had a chance to object. His face was barely visible in the dark, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t need to see his features to know what he was thinking. This connection had unsettled her before, had kept her away, but not anymore—not now that it was her last chance to be near him. He moved over and she lay down next to him. She could smell him: the musk of sleep, Old Spice deodorant over stale sweat, antibacterial soap, tomato plant sap, and another scent, one she couldn’t name or describe, but that she recognized as his.

“Hi,” she whispered.

“Hi.” He put his hand on the curve of her waist and she laid her head beside his. They looked at each other in the dark, unseeing. She understood: everything, even the failure, even the loneliness, had led her here—it had prepared her and taught her and guided her to this. She felt a warmth rising, beginning in her toes and flooding up through her body, like a thousand doors swinging open all at once. She thought fleetingly of the house in Montana she had imagined for them, with his dog, Bess, waiting on the porch, and then she let it go, along with everything else. There was only the warmth, the opening in her chest, the unfurling of a quiet intuition, a reservoir of love that had never been touched. She moved closer until her mouth was against his prickly throat and she felt the throb of his pulse on her lips, the ridge of his jugular. They didn’t speak or sleep or move, they just melted into the combined warmth of their bodies, the sum of their life force.

IN THE MORNING, just before the artificial sunrise, Sully slipped back to her bunk and slept. She heard the murmurs of activity as she drifted in and out of her dreams, but she kept her eyes closed and didn’t get up until Thebes pulled back her curtain and laid his hand on her shoulder.

“There is something we must discuss,” he said. “About the lottery.”

Sully rubbed her hand across her eyes. “What’s there to discuss?”

“Much,” he replied. “Will you come?”

“Let me get dressed.”

When she climbed out of her bunk she was surprised to find the other four already assembled, waiting silently at the table. She was confused.

“I don’t understand,” she said, and sat down with them. “What’s this all about?”

Thebes clasped his fingers together and rested his chin on his entwined knuckles. “I’m staying here,” he said. “On Aether. On the space station.”

She looked around the table and saw the others watching her. They already knew. She looked at Harper. He nodded.

“So you want me to go instead?” she asked. “But, Ivanov?”

Ivanov shrugged. “I will stay also,” he said. “I have decided.”

“But why?” she said. “Your family—you want to go back more than any of us.”

He shook his head. “I want things as they were. This is not our choice. We know only one thing about what lies below: it is not what we left behind. Everything has changed. My family is not waiting for me—this is no time for half-truths. Thebes and I, we are the oldest. We are tired. We are—how do you say? Old dogs.”

Sully opened her mouth to speak and nothing came out. Thebes put his arm around her.

“We have a lot to do today,” Harper said. “Thebes, if you could check the Soyuz pod’s seal. Tal, I know you have your hands full with plotting our course, so Ivanov, perhaps you could help? Let’s run a landing simulation before the end of the day, then another in the morning before we launch. I’m going to check out the survival gear in the Soyuz, and Sully—could you give the comm.s one last try? Am I forgetting anything?”

“I don’t think so,” Tal said. “Let’s get to it.”

Sully remained at the table after they had gone, letting her thoughts, which whirled through her head like a dust storm, settle. She knew she should eat but couldn’t manage it. She put a protein bar in her pocket for later and left the empty centrifuge. When she floated through the node into the greenhouse corridor she found Harper there, pretending to inspect the plants while he waited for her.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Fine,” she said. “Just surprised. A little…scared, I think.”

“Of what?”

“Of what’s down there, I guess. I was all set to power down, you know, just eat and sleep and watch fifteen sunrises a day, but now—now it’s all going to change.”

He touched her arm, cupping her elbow in his hand. Again, the warmth: a thousand doors opening a little wider. He turned his wrist up to glance at his watch, and that simple gesture almost undid her. She eyed the thick blue veins in his arm, just beneath the skin, and imagined that she could feel his pulse again.

“I should go,” he said. “Lots to do.”

She nodded, her head whirling. “Of course,” she said, and he moved off down the corridor. She stayed in front of the tomato plants for a while, thinking. She picked one of the yellow ones and it tasted like sunshine.

In the comm. pod, she set the receivers to scan. As she listened to the rise and fall of the static, the whistling of atmospheric disturbances, she thought about how by this time tomorrow she would either be en route to Earth or already on its surface— if all went well, she reminded herself. The levity she’d felt yesterday, the liberation of releasing everything that had come before, the choices she’d made, people she’d loved—that was gone, and heaviness crept back into her limbs like the return of gravity. The future, which just hours ago had seemed so beautifully empty, became crowded with unknown possibility. Her monotonous spacebound destiny disappeared like a fluid, shadowy creature. She thought of Harper, and the way the bittersweet finality of the previous night had suddenly cracked open into a beginning—an unknowable, untenable dynamic.