Mom is right. Irate is better than afraid. My words are getting smoother with every phrase.
“How do we do fix the sail?” she asks. This is helping her, too. Color is flushing back into her face, like someone’s changing the filter on the scene.
“First, we attempt to reboot the sail deployment app,” I say, feeling the words gain velocity. “If that works, we’re golden. But what are the chances?”
“Gonna have to brush up on your optimism, kiddo,” Mom says, a wry smile coasting over the words.
“All evidence to the contrary?” I say, feeling an answering grin teasing at my lips.
She rolls her eyes and makes a tumbling motion with her hands. Keep going.
“Okay, so pessimistically, let’s assume the reboot doesn’t work,” I say, the words building pictures in my mind. “In that case, we would extend the sail by hand. There are thirty-eight joints in total. It should take roughly six hours to manually unfold them all. Exhausting. Boring. But not hard. Just like pitching a tent. On a moving spaceship. In space.”
The sarcasm doesn’t land. Or at least, not like I intended it to. Mom’s gone all pale and gray again.
“Mom, what’s—”
“I’m sorry, Jo.”
The thin veneer of humor I’ve managed to paint over my terror evaporates. I wish she’d just put the damn helmet on so I don’t have to see how terrified she is. I’m scared enough for both of us.
“You’re not the one who put the last survivors of Earth on an unfinished prototype, Mom,” I say, grabbing my helmet with both hands. I’m afraid I’ll drop it otherwise. “Everyone on the Prairie is fresh out of inso and you can’t fix that sail alone. That means I’m going outside. Which is fine. I’m okay.”
Mom turns away and grabs her helmet from the locker behind her. I still hear the little sob she’s trying to hide.
She doesn’t think I’m okay.
Neither do I.
I jam my helmet over my head anyway. At least in the featureless gray bubble I can’t see Mom looking at me like I’m as broken as I feel.
Maybe I am broken. Maybe we all are.
Earth is uninhabitable.
I know it’s true, but I’m still having a hard time believing it. Our home planet is gone. Ruined by the automated systems we built to preserve it. Once the ISA realized the end was literally nigh, they crammed as many survivors as they could into the only-mostly-finished Prairie and sent her here, under the command of my grandfather, Admiral Eric Crane.
That’s weird, thinking of him that way. He retired when I was a kid. But now he’s back in the ISA, and he’s here.
Grandpa is here.
I thought I’d never see him again, and he’s here.
The thought is like a tiny spark in the darkness.
Grandpa is here.
I get to show him Tau. That makes me feel . . . I don’t know, like I’m not just a hollow shell of skin that’s about to collapse. I just wish . . . I don’t even know where to start wishing. I wish the ISA hadn’t lied to our Exploration & Pioneering team about Tau’s inhabitants. I wish their lies hadn’t caused us to nearly wreck our new ecosystem. I wish that mistake hadn’t wrecked our relationship with the Sorrow. And I really, really wish the colony ship wasn’t broken.
“Beginning decompression.” Mom’s voice slips through the speakers in my helmet, bringing me back into the moment.
“Three-sixty mode, please,” I say, and the blank gray bubble I’ve been hiding in flickers into a 360-degree view of the airlock around me, composited from the cameras that wreathe the outside of my helmet.
Mom is standing at the airlock’s exterior door watching the hatch fade from red to green. That means the air around us is getting thinner and the pressure is falling to match the airless vacuum that’s waiting for us.
The thought makes my lungs burn, so I focus on the Prairie instead, on the task ahead of us. Mom has the airlock set to three-sixty mode now, so the view from the Trailblazer’s exterior cameras covers the wall, floor, and ceiling.
The Prairie blocks out the stars. She’s so close. And massive—a golden disk three kilometers across and five stories deep. She should be rolling through orbit like a wheel on a track, the motion creating gravity in the ship’s outer ring where the crew lives and works. But the great ship is staggering through orbit, wobbling like a top. That’s why we can’t just land the Trailblazer on her hull. She’s too unstable.
We have to jump.
Remembered pain blasts over my skin. I bite my lip, using the real pain to remind my body that I’m in a perfectly good spacesuit. The visceral memory of being frozen and fried at the same time is just that. A memory. It isn’t real.
But I can still feel myself burning.
The airlock is almost green.
“We’re T minus eighteen seconds,” Mom says.
She must have opened a shared channel between our suits and the Prairie, because Grandpa answers her.
“I’ve got eyes on, Alice.”
He’s still hoarse, even though he’s been out of inso for nearly twenty-four hours. But he’s seventy-four. Recovery takes time. And his crew has been in deep sleep for almost six months. That’s why we’re doing this, and they aren’t. Going straight from inso to EVA would be way too hard on your cardiovascular system.
A full-body memory of my heart imploding rips through my chest.
Stop it, Joanna.
My heart is fine now. The Sorrow healed it. But my brain isn’t convinced. I feel broken.
Stop it, Joanna.
The hatch starts to flash as the last bits of red are eaten up by green light. In case we didn’t get the color-coding memo, the computer chimes in, “Decompression in ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”
Mom taps the autoconnect button on her suit. Black filaments flow from her EVA harness and spin together into a tether line that shoots up and bonds with the frame of the airlock.
“Six . . . five . . .”
I hit my autoconnect. My tether flares out, twisting up to bond with the airlock beside Mom’s. The thin black cables look delicate, but they aren’t. These tether lines are made of nanoactive Kevlar. That means nanoscopic robots spin our tethers like tiny robotic spiders. This tether could hold our entire shuttle. It’s plenty strong enough for one seventeen-year-old pilot.
“Three . . . two . . . one. Lock pressurized,” the computer crows. “You are clear for extravehicular activity.”
Mom triggers the door release. The hatch swings open. I resist the urge to clamp my eyes shut.
That’s a mistake.
The endless view shoots my heart into a racing thud. My legs tense, like they’re preparing to run. But there’s nowhere to go. Nowhere but out there.
I force myself to breathe. The air is a little musty, like whoever used this suit last had bad breath. But it’s still oxygen. My suit works. I have a tether line.
I can do this.
Teddy knew he was going to die when we blew ourselves into space to save the Pioneer. He told me to do it anyway. If he could do that, I can do this.
Except I don’t think I can do this. The shuttle isn’t rotating, but in my head I’m spinning. Tumbling in every direction at once. Remembered cold burns my skin and boils my blood.
“Jo!”