Good Morning, Midnight

TWELVE

“NICE MORNING FOR a walk,” Devi said, grinning at Sully through her helmet. Aether’s reflection moved across her mirrored visor. Although she could barely see Devi’s face beneath the reflected image, Sully could make out her teeth as she smiled, wide and white beneath the glare. The stillness of the space around them was complete, like the quiet of morning before the birds begin to chirp, before the sun wakes the earth—only out here there was no daybreak, no high noon, no gloaming hour. Just this eternal moment of hush. No before, no after, just an endless sliver of time between night and day.

She felt peaceful. She felt capable. Propelling herself and the comm. dish through empty space, feeling the soft vibration of her propulsion unit, hearing the occasional transmission from Devi or Harper. The aft of the ship was looming closer—almost there. The minutiae of the installation would take hours, but she had time. She had tools. She had a plan, a partner, a team; she had a damn jetpack. It would be fine. She saw Devi touch down on the installation site in front of her and brought the payload in for a gentle landing. Devi was ready with the tethers, clipping them into place as soon as Sully got close enough, so that the new dish could float a few yards away from the ship while they reconfigured the wiring and then connected its mast to the hull. The dish swayed against its restraints, a long arm with a big round paw, waving at them. Devi and Sully tethered themselves to the site too. Loose wires floated out from the connection point like Medusa’s snaky curls. Devi arranged them meticulously and intuitively, splitting and splicing them to match the mechanics of the new comm. dish. Sully supplied the tools as Devi asked for them, clipping the spares to her utility belt.

Hours passed as they worked, mostly in silence. Occasionally, Devi would reach out and request a tool from Sully’s belt, but there was no chatter between them. Devi was immersed, as she should be, and Sully was alert, as she should be. Everything was progressing as planned. And yet—something was not quite right. Sully took a gulp of water from the straw inside her suit and rolled her neck from side to side within the cramped confines of her helmet.

“Aether, time check, please,” she said.

“Six hours since EVA commenced,” Harper responded. “You’re doing great, guys.”

“Almost ready to connect,” Devi said. “Sully, could you bring the mast down to, say, four inches above the connection site?”

“Copy,” Sully said, and began to reel in the dish with the tethers. When she could reach it she grabbed the mast and let go of the tethers, tugging it down toward the hull of the ship and letting it hover just above the area Devi was working on.

“Perfect,” Devi said. “Now keep it right there while I hook it in.”

It was another hour before the electrical connection was established. By then Sully was beginning to feel antsy. Together the two women lowered the dish, Devi packing the wiring back into the aperture, Sully directing the movement of the mast, until finally the new system was in place and ready to be secured, bolted onto the hull of the ship. Nearly finished now. Sully took another sip of water and laid her oversized glove on Devi’s shoulder.

“Good work,” she said. Devi didn’t respond. She stayed motionless beneath Sully’s hand, and the cloud of apprehension that had been following Sully since they began the walk solidified, condensed into real fear. “Hey, are you okay?” Sully kept her voice steady, but inside her head she was repeating no, no, no over and over, like thumbing the beads of a rosary.

There was a blast of static over the ship’s frequency and a muffle of expletives, poorly disguised by a hand over the microphone.

“Devi? What’s the matter?” Sully maneuvered herself closer, still holding on to the mast of the dish, so that she could peer behind the mirror of Devi’s visor. There was that static again.

“We’ve got a carbon dioxide problem in Devi’s suit showing up here—Devi, are you feeling okay?” Thebes asked from inside the ship. “The oxygen level in your suit just took a nosedive.”

Sully looked past the reflection of the ship on Devi’s visor and knew that something was wrong. Devi seemed dazed, her eyes beginning to lose focus, to roll back in her head. She was already fighting to stay alert.

“Respond. What’s going on out there?”

The two women looked at each other for a long moment, Devi struggling to enunciate her words. “It’s the scrubber,” she whispered. “The lithium hydroxide cartridge failed. I didn’t notice, because—” She inhaled as deeply as she could, but there wasn’t enough oxygen to sate her lungs. She was suffocating inside her helmet. “I should’ve noticed.”

“Get back to the airlock,” Harper said, almost a shout.

“I don’t think there’s time,” Devi said. Her arms had begun to convulse, twitching and shivering, and Sully watched as the tool she had been holding fell from her thickly padded fingers and spun away from them, out into the emptiness. It was happening so quickly, Sully barely had time to react before Devi was unconscious, swaying against her tether like a tree following the whims of a breeze. Sully froze, her hands locked around the mast of the new comm. dish.

“Devi. Devi.”

Sully squinted past the reflections on Devi’s visor and saw her face, her features more relaxed than they’d been in months, as though she were asleep, having pleasant dreams. No more nightmares. No more fear, no more loneliness. Shocked silence from Aether as the rest of the crew checked her vitals. She knew it even before Thebes’s voice confirmed it in her ear.

“Sully—she’s gone. She was right, it’s too late. You couldn’t have…There’s nothing you could have done.”

She was only vaguely aware of the words that followed, anxious demands coming from within the ship, from Thebes, from Harper, but she couldn’t make sense of them. The words meant nothing to her. She stared into Devi’s helmet, watching her friend dream. She kept her hands locked onto the mast, instinctively keeping the dish secure, but there wasn’t room for anything else. Waves of shock rolled through her, pressed her thoughts down, muffled the voices, and by the time the undertow released her, the voices had ceased, she wasn’t sure how long ago. Minutes? Hours? And yet—there was still work to do. She had to finish.

“Aether,” she said.

“Sullivan,” Harper responded immediately.

“I need…” She stopped and swallowed. Took a sip of water. Swallowed again. “I need you to tell me what to do now.”

She could hear his measured exhale on the other end of the comm. and Thebes mumbling something she couldn’t make out.

“You have the drill?” Harper asked.

She checked her belt. “Yes, I have the drill.”

“And the bolts?”

She checked her utility pouch, patting it with her free hand.

“Yes, I have the bolts.”

“Just like we practiced. The first two will be tricky because you need to keep hold of the mast, but after that you can let it go and use both hands. Copy?”

She couldn’t move. “I think—” she began, but Harper interrupted her.

“No,” he said, “no thinking. Just one bolt at a time, Sully.”

She did exactly that, and when she was finished she detached Devi from her tether without asking Harper’s permission. She knew it was what her friend would have wanted—what any of them would want.

Sully stared after her as she drifted away, growing smaller and smaller, shrinking to the size of a star and then disappearing altogether. Would she drift forever? Or would she fall into the sun? A distant star? Sully thought of Voyager, breaching the solar system and embarking on an infinite sojourn. She hoped that Devi might follow—that she might remain intact, somehow, her lifeless body traversing the universe on an infinite, incomprehensible journey. Sully didn’t move for a long time, just looked out into the dark emptiness, silently asking the void to hold her friend close.

THE NEXT MORNING she woke up screaming. A terror more intense than anything she’d ever felt before. It clung to her long after she opened her eyes, humming in her bones. She watched Devi drift, a tiny speck of white in an endless black void, over and over. At first, she tried to reimagine it, envision a different ending to the story—conjuring scenes in which she rushed Devi back to the airlock just in time, in which she sensed that the CO₂ scrubber was failing long before it became poisonous—but there was no solace in these reenactments. Devi was gone and Sully was still here. It seemed nonsensical, but it was the way things were.

She had done as Harper told her, put aside her thoughts and installed the bolts, one by one—an hour of work masquerading as a lifetime—then gotten herself back to the airlock. She had slipped out of her suit and into the ship, where the remaining four waited for her in silence. She’d propelled herself past them without a word, back to the centrifuge, back to her compartment, and drawn the curtain. She’d slept and not-slept. She’d thought and not-thought. The nightmare of the spacewalk followed her mind wherever it hid, unconscious, subconscious, conscious. She couldn’t escape it because it was literally all around her: the vacuum she had tumbled into just hours ago. The poisonous, frozen, boiling blackness that was their road, their sky, their horizon, surrounding Aether and everyone inside with violent indifference. They were not welcome here. They were not safe. After a while Sully stopped trying to escape the terror and let the throbbing ache of it align with her heartbeat, let it ebb and flow with her breath. It sank into her physiology and became part of her. She would never be safe again. She knew that now.

Devi’s death had stirred something deep and dormant in Sully’s subconscious. No longer moving chronologically, her brain began to replay everything horrible that had ever happened to her, everything that had ever wounded her. Lucy’s tiny heart-shaped face looking back, framed by Jack’s shoulder as he walked away from her in the airport—the day Sully left them behind for Houston, hoping that the separation might work, knowing that it couldn’t, and leaving anyway; boarding her flight with the damp of her daughter’s tears still soaked into the collar of her shirt. Then leaving them behind again just before the launch of her first spaceflight, when Jack had already served her with divorce papers and Lucy was so incredibly grown-up, speaking in full, eloquent sentences, the blond in her hair beginning to darken, the innocent trust in her eyes beginning to fade; the knowing slant of her eyebrows when Sully couldn’t help but say things like I’ll be back before you know it.

Then her return: knocking on a front door that used to be hers, being greeted by what’s-her-name, although of course she knew all along her name was Kristen, those letters emblazoned on her brain as permanently and painfully as an unfortunate tattoo. Watching her daughter fold herself into what’s-her-name’s lap, feeling Lucy’s reluctance to leave the house with her when they went out to a movie, the slight but discernible roll of Jack’s eyes when she said she had to be back in Houston by Monday, the sight of the three of them sitting on the sofa together in the living room as she showed herself out, knowing that her family was loved and safe and appreciated and that she had absolutely nothing to do with any of it. Knowing that she had been replaced, and that her replacement was an improvement—a better mother, a better spouse, a better person than she could ever be.

She had visitors that day. Each of the other crewmembers stopped by her compartment, some more than once, but their voices, the tap of their knuckles against the wall, seemed far away. Harper and Thebes went so far as to sweep aside the curtain and look at her with mournful eyes, but all she could say was “Tomorrow,” because what she really needed was to finish this day and get to the day after. It was the only way she could escape the day of and move beyond it—not even a real day, just a sliver of silence between light and dark when she’d held tight to the radio dish while Devi died beside her. She was vaguely ashamed to dismiss her crewmates, her friends, seeing the hurt hiding in the lines around their lips, above their eyebrows, and turning them away with just a single word: tomorrow. It couldn’t be helped. Today was full.

WHEN HER ALARM clock buzzed at the usual time she was exhausted from a sleepless night, but she got up anyway. She couldn’t spend another day in hiding, not that she knew how to spend it any other way, but something had to give. They had work to do, a mission to complete. She needed to configure the new comm. dish—the reason all of this had happened. She sat up and changed her shirt, her underwear. She scooted into a fresh jumpsuit and zipped it up to the neck. Running her fingers over the stitching of her monogram, she traced the initial of her first name—a name that not even Jack had called her. She’d been Sullivan since college, Sully for short. The name she’d inherited from her mother. She closed her eyes and pictured Devi’s monogram, white thread against the burgundy she’d always favored for her Aether uniforms: NTD. N for Nisha.

“Nisha Devi,” she whispered. Then she said it again. And again, like a chant—or perhaps a prayer.

In the kitchen she found Tal, eating oatmeal paste straight from one of the nonperishable pouches that most of their food came in. His black hair rocketed away from his head in unwieldy curls, so thick and wiry that it looked the same in Little Earth and zero G.

“Hi,” he said cautiously.

“Morning,” she responded, and sat across from him with her own serving of oatmeal paste.

“I’m glad you’re up,” he said.

She nodded. They ate in silence, and when Tal had finished his breakfast and disposed of the wrapper he stood behind Sully and laid both his hands on her shoulders.

“It was awful, and it wasn’t your fault,” he whispered, then squeezed, gently, and let his arms fall to his sides. Sully forced herself to keep eating the oatmeal even though it tasted like mud and she felt sick to her stomach. There would be plenty of things she didn’t want to do today, things that made her feel ill, but she would do them. All of them. She owed Devi that much.

On the table in front of her sat the deck of cards she and Harper used to play with. Used to? She wondered if this feeling would ever lift, if she would ever be able to laugh with her whole body or exchange silly banter with Harper again, shuffling the deck into a waterfall as they had just a few nights ago. It didn’t seem possible. She remembered again that day in Goldstone when her mother taught her how to play alone. How to stay occupied, she’d said at the time. It was useful—the hours Sully had spent playing alone in her mother’s office seemed to overshadow the rest of her childhood. School was a blur, her elementary school friends faceless, nameless entities that wove in and out of her memories. It was only that office that was crisp in her recollection, the mornings at the kitchen table listening to her mother read the newspaper headlines, the nights driving out into the desert. It was only the snap of the plastic cards against the plastic desk, the groan of the air-conditioning, the muffled voices emanating from the control room that seemed real. She had been so proud of Jean, never for an instant begrudging her the time that could’ve been spent teaching Sully how to swim the breaststroke or ride a bike or cook an egg sunny side up. One year Jean got a promotion, and it was a thousand times better than any A+ or gold star, it was their hard work, their joint sacrifice, coming to fruition. Sully didn’t mind being sequestered in the dark, dusty office because she knew that Jean was doing important work—practically changing the world, just down the hall. As a child, she admired Jean more than anyone else. From the moment she understood what her mother did for work, Sully knew that she wanted to follow in her footsteps.

The mythos of her nameless, faceless father was similar. The work he was doing was bigger and more important than any one family. Whenever Sully asked about him, Jean would tell her he was a brilliant man, that he was so smart and so dedicated to his work that he didn’t have any room left in his heart for them. Jean told her to be proud of his calling—to know that she didn’t have a father because the world needed him more than they did.

“Little bear,” Jean would say, “your daddy is too big for one family, but you and me, we’re the perfect size for each other.”

Then she turned ten, her mother got married, and the ratio shifted. Shattered. They moved to Canada with her new husband and Jean was pregnant before the year was out, giving birth to twins a few months after Sully turned eleven. Jean stopped working, gave up her research, and fell into motherhood, became immersed in it. She was absorbed by her newborn twins in a way she had never been absorbed by her firstborn. The pride Sully felt in her mother dissipated. What had all those afternoons alone been for, if this was what came of it? All the work, all the sacrifice? The twins got bigger and bigger—they started talking and Jean taught them to call her Mommy. Sully had never called her that. There was nothing left for her, no room for an angry teenager in their new family, so she applied to boarding school and returned only when the dorms were closed and there was nowhere else she could go. At first she hoped for some kind of argument from her mother, pleading phone calls, groveling letters—some recognition of Sully’s anger—but her absence was accepted without disagreement. Sully graduated, skipped the ceremony, and went south for college, back to where she’d been happiest.

Jean died before Sully got her degree—an unexpected fourth child, stillborn. She never woke up from the surgery and Sully didn’t make it back in time. The embalmers made her up to look like someone Sully didn’t recognize. At the funeral she sat next to the twins, little girls with honey-brown eyes and auburn hair, like their father. She realized she was an orphan. What remained of this family had never belonged to her.

Harper sat down next to her. He slid a cup of black coffee toward her. She jolted back to attention, ashamed; she was mourning the wrong person.

“You look like you might need this,” he said.

She smiled, to make him feel better, but the expression felt foreign on her face, like a mask that didn’t fit.

“I do,” she said, and took a sip. It burned the roof of her mouth, but she didn’t mind. It was a relief to feel something tangible, something immediate and uncomfortable to distract her from everything else, even if it was only for a moment.

“I’m sorry. About yesterday,” she said, and took another sip.

He shook his head slowly, his lips pressed together. “That’s not something for you to be sorry about. We all need different things. You needed time. You seem better today. I’m glad.”

She shrugged and wrapped her hand around the mug in front of her. “I guess I’m coherent, if that’s what you mean.”

“Ha,” he said, a joyless laugh cut short. He chewed on his lower lip, embarrassed. Laughing was not allowed, not yet. “It’ll do for now.”

Sully stood up and left her coffee mug on the table, still full. She hovered for a moment, unsure what to do next, where to go. “I’m going to work,” she finally said.

“Work,” Harper agreed, nodding. “I think Thebes is already in the comm. pod. He’ll be glad to see you.”

“Then that’s where I’ll be,” Sully replied.