what?

This earns an exaggerated eyeroll as you look at him in the mirror. “Ha, ha. At least take me out to dinner first.”

“Well, we’re doing that in about,” he checks an imaginary watch on his wrist, “forty-five minutes, so I’m already halfway there.”

You say nothing at that, simply smiling and returning to straightening your hair. You’re almost done, but there’s some stubborn strands that won’t stay flat. The back of your head is probably not so great, too, but that’s not your problem. Only God can judge that portion of your hair.

He watches you idly for a few moments before he speaks. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you with straight hair before.”

“Really?” The spot you’re on will simply not stay straight. Maybe you need to up the heat more? You start to mess with it as you continue. “I guess it makes sense. I used to straighten it all the time in high school—I don’t know why kids decided that curly hair was something to make fun of—but then I kind of just…stopped. It’s a lot of effort,” you grind out, running over the same spot again. “As you can see. But, I don’t know. I guess I wanted to look nice for our date night. Change things up.”

He gently takes the straightener from your hands and fiddles with the dial that controls the heat setting. “You already look nice. You could be wearing a garbage bag and look nice.”

“Thanks?”

“You’re welcome.”

Ryland lets it heat up for a little longer before gently taking your hair in his hands and running it through the flat pads of the straightener. The lock falls, perfectly flat. “How do you…?”

“It’s just simple thermodynamics.” He moves on to another piece at the back of your head. Well, maybe God won’t be judging you today. “And. I might have had a phase.”

You are about to jerk your head up in surprise, but then you remember that he has a very hot tool in his hands, so you refrain. “A phase? I need details. And pictures. I need so many pictures.”

The tops of his ears are tinged pink, but he remains focused on his task. He is so attractive like this, when he has decided to commit to a thing and will give it his undivided attention until he is finished. “It was—look. I grew up here in California. I surfed. It was a thing. And all of those pictures have since been purged from existence. Believe me.”

“Sure.”

“…You’re going to look as soon as I’m done, aren’t you.”

“Uh, duh?”

He doesn’t say anything else, but he smiles and continues straightening the last few sections of your hair. “Okay, all done.”

You take the straightener from his hands and set it on the counter to cool off before you put it away. Ryland is a man of many talents, you think, running your hands through your now silky-smooth hair. “Well, what do you think?”

He looks you over for a few moments and then hums, “I like it. It’s different.”

“Good different?” You hesitate for a moment before you continue, “Better different?”

His hand comes up to drape your hair over one shoulder so he can press a soft kiss to your neck. “Just good different. I think you could be bald and I would still not know what to do with myself when I see you.”

You laugh and then sigh as he kisses your throat again, his mouth lingering a little against your skin. “Okay. And I have no plans to go bald anytime soon, so.”

“That’s probably for the best. I like your hair.”

Part of you would like to suggest that you just skip dinner, because now one of his hands is resting gently on your hip, but you did kind of just spend all of this time getting ready, so you push him away. “Alright, alright. I still have to finish up in here.”

He groans but acquiesces (though he gives you one last kiss, just below your ear). “Fine, fine. I’ll be out here.”

You start putting product in your hair to prevent it from frizzing out when you walk outside, then touch up any makeup that was smudged from the heat. At one point, he calls out from the other room, “There was one picture on my Facebook. I got rid of it.”

“Aw, Ryland, why’d you do that?”

“…After saving it to my phone.”

You finish getting ready in the bathroom. It takes him less than three minutes to brush his hair. You cycle through a few different outfits; he likes them all, so he is not very helpful on that front. (He is even less helpful when he sneaks in a few squeezes while you change.)

You go to dinner. He shows you the picture. It is simultaneously the funniest and the best thing you have ever seen. You beg him to let you straighten his hair. He says no, but in the way where you can tell he will probably let you do it anyway.

Her pen does not stop moving. This is an interrogation tactic. You know this because you have seen it performed countless times over your career, and countless more since the project began. She knows that you know this, and that you will wait until she is done.

The pen stops, and then it is set down gently. “Yes?”

“Eva.” You repeat. “What is this.”

“Your next project. What else would it be?”

You look at the sticky note in case the words on it have changed. They have not. “I gathered that. Why is my next project ‘team-building activities.’”

She simply shrugs and starts reading the next thing on the top of her never-ending pile of paperwork. “Comradery is helpful in this kind of situation.” Eva looks up at you, then, and you would not even need to look to know that the ghost of a smile is playing on her lips. “Are you concerned that you won’t be able to figure out how to do it?”

This is another interrogation tactic. It is, unfortunately, one that you both know works on you. “Am I—it’s team-building, not rocket science.” Actually, you would probably be able to help out with the latter, too. ESA, and all that. You sigh. The sound means that she has won. She rarely loses. “Did you have something specific in mind?”

Eva has returned to her paperwork. “No. I’m sure you’ll come up with something.” You are fairly certain she does have ideas, and that these ideas will be quietly forwarded to you at some unspecified point in time. There might even be something in your inbox already. You haven’t checked your email yet today.

You don’t say anything else, because you’re pretty sure the conversation was over before you even walked in. You simply turn around and walk back to your tiny office. The sticky-note is placed on the edge of your monitor. There is a new document opened, and after a few short seconds it bears the heading ‘TEAM-BUILDING ACTIVITIES.’

--

A forwarded email-chain lands in your inbox a few hours later, detailing the delivery of a karaoke machine, which will have every karaoke catalogue installed on it regardless of copyright.

This is less annoying than the fact that karaoke had already been one of the first ideas you’d thrown on the document.

Okay. Karaoke. At least the logistics are taken care of already. The problem is, you think, taking a bite of your sandwich, karaoke is the kind of thing you have to work up to. This needs to be deliberately planned and carefully timed. Free alcohol will only do so much. Well, it will do a lot, actually, but you do not do things in half-measures. You will need to prime everyone for this sort of thing to maximize results.

Trivia. Definitely trivia. The boat contained humanity’s smartest minds in any and every field remotely relevant to the project. You won’t even need to offer a prize pool. Trophies will do. Perhaps ones that are engraved with the label “Project Hail Mary’s Best and Brightest.” You could even throw in first dibs on the dessert line for the top three teams, because the mess hall is always running out of those delicious little finger-cakes.

Another problem occurs to you as you are typing up an email to Eva, which contains a link to a site with personally-engraved trophies. (You decide to go for the ones shaped like a star. The rocket ship seemed a little too on the nose.) This brings the potential for intense rivalry between different factions of specialists.

The cursor blinks while you turn this over. A little competition is good. Too much is dangerous. Perhaps you could randomize the teams each week. That way no one team would continue to dominate, and people across disciplinary lines will be forced to work together. Yes, this is good.

You hit send. Thirty minutes later, another email chain is forwarded to you, this time about a shipment of engraved trophies which will arrive via jet in a few days. Wonderful. This gives you time to design the flyer. Everyone loves a good flyer.

But this will require deliberate recruiting. You will need to select specific individuals to deliberately target, people who will get their friends and colleagues on the carrier to participate. The list is drafted within the hour, and then you get to work.

--

You are standing in front of the door which belongs to your final target. The ship was already buzzing about tomorrow night’s first weekly trivia event. It hadn’t even been that hard. This will seal the deal, because he is well-known and has just the right balance of ego and likability to create exactly the atmosphere that you want to make this successful.

You knock. There is some amount of scrambling, a half-whispered, half-yelled ow!, and then, “Uh—yeah?”

The door swings open. “Dr. Grace.”

“That’s me. Can I…help you?”

He looks like he might have been taking a nap. You do not feel bad. This is more important. “There’s a project-wide trivia event tomorrow night.”

“I might have heard something about that, yes.” Dr. Grace is looking behind you, then, at the colorful flyer taped up on the wall across from his door. This is a little something you like to call ‘subliminal messaging.’

“Perfect! I expect to see you there.”

His brows furrow. “…why?”

“Because you’re an important member of the project, so it’s important that you attend. For morale.”

“Morale.”

“Yes.”

He leans against the doorframe and looks at you like you have sprouted a second head. This is already not going as well as you had hoped. “You want to raise morale on a project designed to send three people to their deaths, on the slim possibility that they might find something to prevent humanity from dying out.”

“Great, you already see why this is important. I’ll see you there?”

You are smiling brightly, trying to be nice and perky, because this is a tactic that often works on men. It is unclear whether it is currently working, because he simply says, “I’ll think about it,” and then closes the door.

Hm. Rude. This may require further planning.

--

The first trivia night is a massive success, and you should be very proud of yourself.

The tables in the cafeteria were full, everyone was happy, and all the participants took the competition very seriously. You had very carefully selected the categories and questions to strike just the right balance between pandering to people’s preexisting knowledge and keeping things fair. There was a pop-culture section. You took suggestions for future categories to ensure that people had a reason to return each week, to see if the one they had submitted would be selected.

You have every reason to be proud of yourself.

You are not, because Dr. Ryland Grace did not show up.

Alright, you think to yourself as you pack up the microphone and extra answer sheets, fair play, Dr. Grace. Fair play.

Your strategy simply needs some adjustments. Bright and perky had not worked. It was only a matter of time until you found the right buttons to push, because this is what you are good at. You know how to get people to do what you want, and you can do it without them even knowing. All it takes is making them realize that what you want is actually something that they wanted the entire time.

So, a few days later, when you are taping up the next batch of flyers, you plan your route to pass by his lab when you know he will be there. You wait just around the corner, barely peeking out until you can see him stand, and then you walk by like you had been walking this entire time. (This is not stalking. This is called being efficient.)

You tilt your head down toward the stack of flyers in your hands, then barely glance up at him. Next move: you return your gaze to the paper, like you hadn’t even seen him, then do a planned double-take. “Oh, Dr. Grace! Sorry, I totally had my head in the clouds. How are you?”

He looks at you, then at the flyers, then back up at you again. His eyes narrow. Perfect. You want him to be curious. “…I’m fine?”

“Good, good. I’ll let you get back to your work. I’m just putting flyers up for the next trivia event.”

You move to keep walking, but he pipes up behind you. In your mind, you are smiling, and it is only a tiny bit evil. “I take it the first one was a success? Morale raised, and all that?”

“I think people had a good time, yeah. The trophies went over really well, which was a relief. I was worried they might be a little silly.” You think you might hear a muttered trophies? behind you. It is almost disappointing how easy this is. “Oh, actually, while I’m here,” you say, as if the thought had actually just occurred to you, before you turn around and hold a flyer out to him. “Could you give this to Dr. Lokken the next time you see her? I haven’t been able to find her, and I really want to make sure she participates again. She did a really great job.”

He gingerly takes the flyer from your hands as if it were about to explode. You watch him read it. You can tell the exact moment his eyes reach the advertised categories for the next event, one of which is ‘Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?’. Finally, he says, “Yeah, sure.” The words are slow, like he is carefully turning something over in his mind.

Hook, line, and sinker.

--

He attends the next event. He is on the winning team. You cannot stop smiling.

You are organizing the notecards which have suggestions for next week’s categories when Dr. Grace walks up to your table, holding his trophy. You wait to look up at him until you’ve finished wrapping a rubber band around the stack of cards. “Dr. Grace, thanks for coming! And congrats on first place.”

He just stands there for a moment. “I know what you’re doing.”

“…Hosting trivia?”

“You know that’s not what I’m talking about. I know that you know.”

You smile, and it is purposefully just a touch confused. “I really…don’t?”

His eyes narrow. You like this expression on him. You like that it makes his lips purse a little, that his thought process is so clearly written out on his face. “I’m a middle school teacher. I know all the tactics.”

“Really, Dr. Grace, I have no idea what you’re referring to.”

“Okay. Sure. I see.” He gingerly sets the trophy down on the table. “Well, thanks for hosting. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make the next one.”

You leave the trophy on the table, busying yourself with your bag as if you hadn’t seen him put it down. “That’s too bad, but I get it. A lot of science to do and everything. It’s probably for the best, anyway—gives the other teams a chance to win. You were pretty dominant out there.”

“…Thanks.”

“And really, if you didn’t have fun, you shouldn’t force yourself to come,” you continue breezily. “Kind of defeats the whole purpose.” You stand, then, and walk around to the other side of the table to put your hand on his shoulder. “I really appreciate you coming, anyway. Even if it was just to this one.” This is only sort of a piece of the strategy. You are actually thankful that he came.

When you stealthily return to the cafeteria later, the trophy is gone.

--

There’s a rapping on your door, just a few quick taps, so you call, “Come in!” You are busy with the next flyer as well as putting in motion some plans for other kinds of events. It still wasn’t time for karaoke yet, but things were progressing toward it nicely.

Dr. Grace walks in. He sets the trophy on your desk. “You forgot this the other night.”

“Oh.”

“I told you I knew what you were doing. Like I said, middle school teacher.” He is looking entirely too smug.

You pick up the trophy and turn it over in your hands. “I’m…sorry,” you say quietly. You only feel like a little bit of a monster, because really, this is just about team-building, and you are manipulating him like putty in your hands. “I just really wanted the event to be a success. But you’re right. I won’t bother you about it again.”

This is clearly not the response he was expecting. He looks like he’s torn between feeling bad and asking if this is another ploy. “Well. Okay. Great.”

He’s still standing there. You put the trophy down. “Was there something else?”

“No, that was it.” He does not leave.

“…Are you sure?”

He gestures at your computer. “What are—what were you doing before I came in.”

“Making a flyer. Planning some other events.”

“There are going to be more?”

“Well, yeah. Variety is the spice of life.”

Dr. Grace’s fingers are tapping against his thigh. Then he sighs and sits down in the chair you have positioned invitingly on the other side of your desk. “Alright. I am going to ask about them, and it’s not—I’m not RSVPing to anything.”

He listens attentively while you detail your list. More trivia, movie nights, an open mic (he tells you to remove this immediately), all culminating in the crowning series of events: karaoke. Specifically, karaoke with an open bar. He agrees that the open bar is necessary.

Now you are actually feeling a little bad, and this is strange, because this does not normally happen. There is a surface-level recognition sometimes, sure, that perhaps your methods are a little extreme, but they get results. Someone has to be willing to do the dirty work to ensure that things get done. Historically, you have been fine with doing it. He is making you feel a little less fine about it.

And then you realize—this is his next move. He knows that you are playing him, and he wants to make you feel bad about it. There is simply no other reason why he would be doing this, why he would suggest movies that he is insinuating he will not watch, why he takes the trophy off of the table when he leaves.

Oh, he’s good. But you’re better.

--

It becomes clear, very quickly, that Dr. Grace is enjoying the game the two of you are playing. This is fantastic, because this is the whole point.

He enjoys feeling like he has figured you out, that he knows your next move, and most of all he likes that you know that this is happening. He will come to events randomly, sometimes in response to whatever ploy you have concocted, sometimes not, and the entire time he thinks that he is in control of the situation.

He is not. Because he is still coming to these events, even if it isn’t all of them. You are still working on upping that success rate, but these things take time.

You find that you are starting to obsess over this more than the thing itself. You, too, are enjoying the game. The events are great; morale is up, people are having fun, whatever. It is not about that anymore. It is now about carefully laying traps and leaving the tiniest bit of them out in the open so he thinks that he is one step ahead.

You purposefully pick a movie that he said you should not play. He shows up. He tells you that the movie is very, very bad after.

He leaves the trophy on your desk. You take it, and you do not say another word to him for the next week, and he shows up and wins it back again.

The crowning jewel of your plan is approaching: karaoke. You plan to hold this a few times, with the final karaoke night coinciding with commemorative hats that you have already emailed the order link for to Eva. Dr. Grace has been extremely adamant the entire time that he will not be attending any of these. You tell him that you understand, that not everyone is comfortable with standing in front of others and singing. He says that this is not the point. Of course, it’s not, you reply. You’re just trying to make sure that he understands that you understand.

If anyone notices that the two of you are starting to spend a weird amount of time together, no one says anything. Sometimes, Eva walks by your office—you’ve started leaving the door open so Dr. Grace can come in whenever he ‘happens’ to be passing by—and simply gives you a look. You ignore the look.

He wins at trivia again.

You play the movie he highly recommended, and he does not come. The next day, he nonchalantly asks you how it was. You tell him that it was terrible.

It is all very exciting. It is possible that there is something deeply, deeply wrong with you.

The tactics start to slowly change. He brings the chair that normally sits on the other side of your desk next to you, instead, and leans close to inspect your plans for the next event. He reaches his arm over you, brushing against your shoulder, to take a flyer down that you have just put up on the wall, and then gives it back to you so you can tape it up again. He sits right next to you when he comes to movie night.

You are vibrating with excitement at finding out whatever he is planning to do at karaoke.

He tells you he is not coming, again, as you put a flyer up on the wall across from his room. “I’m not going to that.”

“I know, Ryland, you’ve already told me.” This is another tactic, because you can tell that saying his first name affects him in some kind of way. It is a little unclear if this actually fits into your larger plan, or if you simply just enjoy messing with him that much.

“Good. Because I’m not.”

“Mm-hm.” You walk down the hallway. He takes the flyer down but does not throw it away.

--

The first karaoke night comes, and you are starting to worry that he actually might not show up.

There are only fifteen minutes left in the scheduled time, and you are sitting at the front of the room, and Ryland is not there. (It is simply easier to call him this in your mind rather than having to switch back and forth whenever you want to use it against him.) This is fine, you tell yourself, as long as he comes to the last one with the hats. That’s the most important one. That is where you take the king, and you finally win.

Another song passes. The event is decently well-attended. The free alcohol has helped.

You can sense when he has entered the room. There is a buzzing in your stomach. You are fairly certain that it is because you get to resume playing the game now.

There are definitely still people left in the queue, but you have host privileges, so you put a song in the very last spot. And then you wait. You do not look at the bar, at the corner where he is sitting.

You finally look when you are on stage, and you sing Closing Time right at him, so he knows that the event is over and you are kicking him out.

You are very, very pleased with yourself, even if it’s a little on the nose.

Then, you are delighted when he stays, when people are filtering out of the room and you are packing up the karaoke machine. “Thought you weren’t coming,” you say cheerfully. You had meant it to be nonchalant, but you think this will still work anyway.

“Had to get my free beer.”

You hum but still do not turn to look at him while he stands just behind you. “Maybe I should change the policy. You have to do a song to get a free drink.”

Ryland laughs, and you think it’s a genuine thing, not the next move. It has been getting slightly more difficult to distinguish the two. “That’s a terrible idea.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” You finally turn around, then, because there is only so much more fiddling you can do when the karaoke machine has been securely packed away for the past five minutes. His shirt has a picture of a cat with a top hat and cane. You think it is possibly the most relevant shirt he could find for tonight. “The point of karaoke isn’t so that everyone sings. It’s so—”

“Roughly 30% of the people in the room sing, as long as the room is decently full, because otherwise the queue will be too long, and most people actually just enjoy watching others make a fool of themselves,” he finishes for you. “Yeah. Might have heard that from someone already.” He drinks the last bit of his beer. This is slightly impressive, because he only just got here about fifteen minutes ago.

“Well, whoever it is, they sound incredibly intelligent. And very capable. Witty, too, probably.”

He says nothing at this, simply rolling his eyes playfully and fiddling with the edge of the label on his bottle. You shoulder the karaoke machine, and then take a peek at the bar. You hadn’t been able to have a drink, because you’d been too focused on making sure everything went smoothly as well as monitoring the door. For reasons.

You pause by the bar instead of continuing on to the exit. “Ryland. Would you like another drink?”

“Isn’t it closed?” The way he’s looking at you suggests that he is trying to figure out if this is another tactic, or if you are simply just asking him to have a drink with you. You are not actually sure yourself, but that’s fine; you can always retroactively fit it into your strategy later if need be.

“Sure, but I have my ways.”

“Yeah, I’ve begun to realize that.”

You ignore him, though secretly you are glad he is verbally acknowledging it. “And I didn’t get to have a drink all night. I want one now. Maybe something horribly fruity.”

You sit on one of the barstools. He stays standing. “Fruity? Really?”

“Mm-hm. Do you think they’d do a Mai Tai?”

He slowly slides onto another stool, as if he is not even thinking about the movement and is instead entirely focused on the conversation. “A Mai Tai? That’s not even the best tiki drink. That’s, like, the most basic one out of all of them.”

“It’s a classic.”

“Everyone knows a piña colada is better.”

“Ew. Also, you cannot say that a Mai Tai is the most basic tiki drink and then have the piña colada as your next example.”

“‘Ew’? Have you even tried one?”

Meanwhile, the bartender is simply just standing there, watching all of this unfold. Finally, you order a piña colada. Ryland orders a Mai Tai. (Both of these are carefully explained in Mandarin. Ryland does not even seem surprised at this point.)

The two of you take a single sip and then switch drinks.

You very deliberately make a loud slurping noise through the straw. “You enjoying yourself over there?”

“Yep.”

He smiles and shakes his head, taking another sip of his cocktail. You did not think that he would be a cocktail kind of man, but seeing him drink a bright yellow drink through an absurdly long straw was kind of perfect. “How’s your drink?” You ask between obnoxiously loud slurps.

“Better than the Mai Tai. Yours?”

“Better than the piña colada.”

It’s quiet after that as the two of you slowly sip on your drinks. You have a few different trains of thought running, because how else would you keep multiple plans in motion at the same time? The next batch of flyers for trivia need to be made, then the ones for movie night; you had picked Alien, and Ryland said that this was possibly the worst decision ever, because why would you show astronauts—who are about to go farther than any human has ever gone in the history of space flight—a movie about being brutally killed by aliens, and to that you simply responded that a lot of people like that kind of adrenaline rush. You also need to set a date for the next karaoke night. And, of course, parallel to all of this is how you will continue to play this game with Ryland to see which of these events he will come to.

It is possible that you are the happiest you have been in years. This fact should probably be slightly troubling to you, because it might mean that you are just a little bit insane, but it is not.

It seems as if he can sense that you are rapidly flipping through all of these plans in your mind, because he suddenly blurts, “I just. I have to ask—why are you like this?”

This makes you laugh, and the sound is ripped out of your throat, which is bad because the straw is in your mouth and you are taking a sip of your drink, and it all means that your Mai Tai is now spewing out of your nose. It’s a little bit painful, but it makes you laugh even harder as you hold your hand over your mouth and grip the edge of the bar. You think that you must look slightly deranged, but Ryland is wheezing right along with you.

The bartender comes over to wipe up the mess. You try to apologize, but you cannot catch your breath long enough to do so. “Sorry,” he finally gets out, still wheezing a little. “That was not a normal way to phrase that question.”

“Oh no,” you wave him off. Your cheeks are starting to hurt. “It’s the only way to ask it. I don’t like to half-ass something. When I say I’m going to get something done, I mean it. And I’ll do what it takes to maximize results.”

“We’re still talking about team-building activities, right?”

You shrug. “Yes and no. I’m not here because I’m good at HR. I just—I know how people work, and I know how to get them to do what I want. Simple as that.”

Ryland is silent at that, and you are worried that this has finally crossed the line from being fun to being weird. You do not want the back-and-forth to be over.

Relief floods your body when he finally says, “The thought of you and Stratt in the same room is actually terrifying.”

“Oh, yeah. You wouldn’t stand a chance.”

--

He wins (again) at trivia the next week. He gives you the little finger-cakes from the cafeteria the day after, because he ‘doesn’t even really like them.’ You are fairly certain that the cakes he is giving you are from his second trip to the dessert line, but you do not say anything.

--

Approximately fixty-six minutes and eight seconds into Alien, Ryland drops onto the couch next to you. This is exactly when the chestburster scene is, and you think he must have looked up the timestamp for it and then timed his walk over to come in right at this moment.

He looks smugly at you when someone gasps. You look right back, because then Ilyukhina is cackling and clapping her hands.

He rolls his eyes. Then he reaches over and steals popcorn from your bowl. He licks his fingers when he’s done with that handful and then grabs more with the same fingers.

--

Second karaoke night. There are even more people this time around. Ryland is not here yet. You know it is only a matter of time. You wonder, vaguely, if this is what edging feels like.

You are mentally considering your options for what song you will insert into the queue when he shows up, though you are fairly certain you already know which one you will pick. This is more to pass the time than anything else. You are starting to get antsy.

It is unclear just how you’re able to tell when he walks in; you chalk this up to another one of your amazing abilities. You do not look until he is standing next to you and handing you a beer. You wrinkle your nose but take a sip anyway. He is drinking a piña colada.

Oh, this is just perfect.

“Hey there,” you say, trying not to wince at the taste of the beer. It is not very good. He is smiling because he can tell that you do not like it. “Thought you weren’t coming.”

“And miss out on this?” He holds his drink up and then takes a sip. “Not a chance. Are you doing a song?”

“Absolutely. It’s important to lead by example.” You pull your phone out and queue your song up next. The two of you watch in silence, then, as the engineer on the stage sings incredibly off-key and then stumbles back to his buddies when it’s over. Your name is being called.

You grab the microphone and sing Escape (The Piña Colada Song) and stare at him the entire time, particularly during the chorus, when you are asking if he likes making love at midnight. You are so, so happy that he ordered that drink. His hand is clutching it a little tighter, and first his ears turn pink, and then his face, because everyone in the room is looking between you and him.

When the song is finished, he does not wait for you to leave the stage. He simply opens and closes his mouth a few times, chugs the rest of his drink, and leaves. This is the first check, you think.

--

He does not come to trivia. The trophy is on your desk when you stop by your office to grab the stack of answer sheets thirty minutes before it starts.

--

He does not come to movie night, either, even though you are showing Rocky, because he said it was one of his favorite movies.

--

You are starting to worry that you might have overstepped.

--

The final karaoke event is in a few hours. The time on the carrier was coming to an end, and this was meant to be a kind of final party. You have distributed the hats. People are very excited.

You are feeling a little lost.

The final advertisement for the event, an email sent out to everyone on the project, has just been sent. You hung up the flyers a week ago. The one across from Ryland’s room has not moved. This is fine, you think. As long as he shows up, even if it’s for a few moments, it is still a win, and then you will be satisfied, and the game will be over.

You do not know why this is all leaving such a sour taste in your mouth.

The speakers are set up. You had Eva order party decorations. There are streamers and themed napkins. You are on your second Mai Tai. People start to slowly filter in, and a few minutes after the scheduled start time, you take the microphone and thank everyone for coming and remind them to get a free hat if they have not done so already.

This karaoke night already has a weird energy, probably because everyone is tired after months and months of work and planning. The alcohol is flowing. People are getting frisky.

Your special power seems to have failed you, because Ryland has snuck in without you noticing, and he is sipping a beer while sitting at the bar and reading a book. He is wearing the hat. You should feel extremely satisfied with yourself, because it means you have finally won. The feeling is not coming to you.

“Hey,” you greet him quietly. You order another Mai Tai. He does not look up from his book.

“Hey.”

“I think you are the only person who has brought a book to a karaoke party.”

He simply hums and turns the page.

This is—he is using an interrogation tactic on you, and it is working, even though you know that it is happening. “Are you—how have things been? Busy?”

“Yep.”

“I see.”

He takes another sip of his beer. “You doing a song?”

You drum your fingers nervously on the bar top. “No. Not tonight, I think. Don’t want to abuse my host privileges too much.”

Ryland does not say anything. You take a long drink of your Mai Tai.

“Well—I’ll just—enjoy the party,” you say lamely. Then you take your drink and walk away, and everything is feeling slightly off-kilter, and this is all very new to you, because normally you are the one who makes others feel this way. You pass Shapiro and Dubois, who are apparently very much taking advantage of the free alcohol.

You plop down on one of the couches, and for the first time in your life, you are wondering if you might be a bad person.

--

Eva is singing. Eva is singing, and it’s the perfect song, and Ryland is smiling, and you did not realize that the game had a third player this entire time. But of course it did, because you learned a lot of your tricks from her, and she learned a lot of hers from you.

You sink a little deeper into the couch. She leaves and everyone is whooping and clapping, and you take your phone out and cut in front of the line. Whatever. This is all fine. Everyone is having a good time, and you will sing a song that everyone knows so they all sing along, and then you will get another Mai Tai—you should probably switch to water, or at least something less sugary, but the hangover is already going to be a bitch tomorrow anyway, so who cares.

Bohemian Rhapsody is perhaps a little too sad given the circumstances, at least in the first part of the song, but everyone shouts “I don’t want to die,” and people are swaying, and then everyone gets into the call-and-response bit, and you try to tell yourself that this is making you feel better.

You stumble off the stage. People pat you on the back as you walk by and thank you for putting together all of these events. You do not order another Mai Tai, but you also don’t order a water. You settle for a vodka soda with a lime.

Ryland is still reading his book. You return to the couch and do not put in another song.

--

The event goes two hours past its scheduled time. You did end up switching to water, because someone has to clean all of this up, and the room is kind of a disaster.

Once the last few stragglers have finally filtered out, you walk around with a trash bag to throw away the commemorative napkins and empty beer bottles. You put one of the least soggy napkins into your pocket.

“Seems like everyone had a good time,” he says behind you. He has also grabbed a trash bag and has started tossing things in.

“Yeah. Great success. Really happy.”

You wonder if you should say something else, but—look, you are simply too stubborn, you have too much pride, and you do not want to be the one to make the first move here. So you keep putting trash in the bag, and then you’re realizing you don’t even know where you’ll take the trash bags once they’re full.

“Hey.” Ryland drops the trash bag on the floor. You do the same and turn around.

He looks like he is running through several variations of something to say, and you are about to pick the trash bag back up again, but then he just mutters, “Screw it,” and grabs your face and kisses you.

You don’t even realize that you are parting your lips until it’s happening, and this just makes him groan a little bit and kiss you harder. Then he pulls back and looks at you, eyes searching your face, his hands now grasping your shoulders.

“Is this…is this a part of the game?” You ask weakly.

“Is this a part of—you are really something else, you know that?”

“Early. Go back to sleep.” It’s a Sunday, and there’s nothing either of you need to get up for, and you want to savor the rare morning where the two of you can stay in bed together, when he doesn’t have to get up to go teach so early. He pushes his face against your hair, breathing deeply and then sighing. His hand moves up to cup your breast, and his hips just barely rut into yours, enough where you can feel the slowly-hardening length of him brush against you.

His hand squeezes a little. “Don’t want to.”

“Mm,” you hum, because his thumb is already starting to circle over your nipple through your shirt. It’s his shirt, actually, because you like wearing his clothes to bed, and you know that he likes it, too. “Thought you wanted to sleep in.”

“That was then. New information has come to light.”

A soft gasp leaves your lips as he rolls the bud between his fingers, and you clench your thighs together. “Yeah? Like what?”

“You, mostly.”

You say nothing at that, simply enjoying the feeling of his hands on you, the way your pleasure rolls through your waking body. His hand starts to glide down your stomach, and you gently grab his wrist to stop him. “Wanna make you feel good,” you whisper, letting go of his wrist and moving your hand behind you to palm him through his boxers.

Ryland whines a little as his hips jerk forward. “But—making you feel good makes me feel good.” He sounds a little petulant, but his hand does not dip underneath your shorts like you know it wants to.

“Please?”

He inhales roughly, his cock still twitching beneath your hand. “…Alright.” Your hand slips beneath his waistband, and he lets out a choked gasp as you graze your fingers over him. “But—I’m—I’m making up for this later.”

You run your thumb over his tip, collecting his leaking precum and twisting your wrist to grasp his length. “Yeah? How so?”

“I’m thinking—hah—the kitchen counter, probably. Or the couch. Or maybe both—” The last word is a little garbled, because you’re gripping him a little tighter, setting your rhythm as you move your hand up and down. “Both, definitely both.” Ryland’s hand moves back up and starts teasing your nipple again, because he’s kind of a brat who likes it when things are done his way.

So you withdraw your hand, and the sound he makes at the loss is so good that you take a moment to try and etch it into your brain. Then you’re turning over, pushing his shoulders so he lays on his back. You straddle him, and he blinks a few times, trying to push away the lingering sleep in his eyes and the fact that he cannot see you without his glasses when you’re so close. You press a loving kiss against his forehead, then both of his cheeks, his nose, and then you slide down, deliberately skipping his mouth in favor of his neck, his chest, his stomach. You take a moment to run your fingers through the hair that trails across his lower abdomen, marveling at how his muscles contract at the touch.

“Please,” he whines, shifting his hips upward.

You smile. “Please, what?”

“Please, just—something, anything—”

You decide to show him some mercy instead of pressing for a clearer answer. Your hands grasp the waistband of his boxers and slowly slide them down as you shift even further, until you’re face-to-face with his leaking cock. It’s so pretty, you think, grazing your nails over it and listening to the way he moans. You press your mouth against him and then lick, tracing the vein that runs from its base to his tip. He’s already a mess, tipping his head back against the pillow and moving his hand to clutch at your hair.

On any other day, you might tease him for his eagerness, but right now, you just want to make him feel good, just like you said you would, so you take him into your mouth and revel in the sounds he makes as you swirl your tongue, the way his fingers tighten around your hair. You can already sense that he isn’t going to last long. It makes you wonder if he had dreamed about you, dreamed about your body and your cunt and the way it all feels against him. The thought makes you rub your thighs together, and you can tell that he has lifted his head to look at the motion by the way he groans and twitches in your mouth.

“You are so—love the way you take care of me, I love you,” he babbles, and you hum around him, taking him into your mouth so deeply that your nose brushes against his hair. The hand that isn’t grasping the base of his cock grips his thigh, so tightly that you’re sure you’ll be able to see the crescent shapes your nails have pressed into him when he makes you both breakfast later, because even though he hates cooking, he will do it for you.

You hollow your cheeks and move a little faster, because normally you would draw this out, but right now you just want to hear him when he comes in your mouth. You do not have to wait long; his hips start stuttering, and he’s still babbling, fisting the sheets and squeezing his eyes shut as he spills into your mouth. You make sure to swallow every drop as you guide him through it, until he twitches from the overstimulation, and you move back up the length of his body and kiss him properly.

Ryland sighs into your mouth and grasps your hips. “Alright,” he says against your lips. “Your turn.”

You laugh as he flips you over, your back pressing into the mattress. “I thought you said the counter. Or the couch. Or both.”

His voice comes through the coms once he’s fully inside the EVA suit. “Take it up with Mary. She asked me, not you.”

You roll your eyes and then realize he can’t see it. “I just rolled my eyes, by the way.”

“I figured.”

“Just wanted to keep you informed.”

You glance at the screen where you’ve pulled up the EVA suit’s bio-monitor. His heartrate is a little elevated—probably to be expected—but otherwise everything looks good. “You know,” he says over the radio as he hits the button to depressurize the airlock, “I am weirdly very familiar with this.”

“Uh, yeah, I would hope so. You were basically the guinea pig for testing all of the EVA tools on the Vat.”

A beat passes. “I don’t remember that at all.” Another beat. “I think I might have brain damage from the coma.”

Right. That was the other thing that you’ve so far chickened out of talking to him about. To be fair, you were not a medical doctor, and four years is a long time to be in a coma, so maybe it was nothing to be too worried about. Well, a little worry might still be warranted. A normal amount of worry. You decide you’ll talk to him about this when he’s not floating outside of the ship, so instead you say, “Are you sure it was from the coma? You weren’t dropped on your head as a child or something?”

“Ha, ha.” The depressurization finishes. “Okay. I’m opening the hatch now.” And then he pauses. “Actually. Maybe we should revisit the conversation about who should go get the cylinder.”

“Grace.”

“Yes.”

“How badly do you want the alien tube?”

“Very badly. More than I have ever wanted anything.”

God, he’s so dramatic. “You’ll be fine.”

“Yeah. Yeah!” He repeats confidently. “I feel like I’ve done this a million times. So it can’t be that hard, right?”

“That’s the spirit.” Grace finally opens the hatch, then, and carefully tethers himself to the side of the ship. You bring up the exterior cameras on another screen so you can watch as he slowly sidles away from the hatch, reflexively ensuring that he constantly has multiple points of contact and two tethers hooked in at all times. It occurs to you that the recording you had set up earlier is still going, and that maybe you should be saying something. “Dr. Ryland Grace is currently performing an EVA to retrieve the cylinder, possibly humanity’s first communication with an intelligent, alien species—”

“Who are you talking to right now?” He interrupts. He sounds slightly winded, but he continues moving down the ship. “I know all of that. I’m Dr. Ryland Grace.” It almost sounds like he’s reminding himself of that fact, too.

“I’m recording, remember? For science.”

“Oh. Right.” He stops moving for a moment. “It wasn’t recording when we threw up, right?”

“…No.”

“Okay, great.” Grace resumes moving and then pauses again. “What about when I swore?”

You smile. “Yeah, it was recording then.”

Through the external camera’s feed, you can see him drop his head against the exterior wall of the ship. “I hope that doesn’t make it into the documentary they’ll make if all of this actually works out. My students will think that I’m such a hypocrite.”

“I think you’ve now just ensured that it will.”

He simply groans and continues on. Once he reaches the middle of the ship’s length, he starts to climb upward, before finally stopping at the top and settling into a sitting position (as much as one can sit on the outside of a spaceship in zero gravity). He’s made it there with plenty of time to spare—he really is good at this—so all you can both do now is sit and wait while the cylinder slowly drifts closer. “Uh.”

“What? What is it?” You look more closely at the camera feed, but he’s still just sitting there. His heart rate has settled, too, so you have no idea what’s going on.

“I think I’m going to have to jump.”

You pan the camera toward the cylinder and then slowly move it back, estimating its trajectory. Hm. He’s right; unlike Blip-B, Blip-C is going to pass just a little bit above the ship instead of hitting it. “Maybe they thought we were offended that the first one hit the ship?” You offer.

“Maybe. Okay. Alright. I can do this.”

“You can do this,” you reaffirm, and you find that you sincerely mean it.

Grace double- and triple-checks his tethers. Once the cylinder has drifted even closer, he squats down, clutching one of the handholds near his feet. This is starting to stress you out. Well, more than you already are. Then he jumps.

It starts out quite graceful—ha—but then it quickly becomes clear that he’s jumped a little too early and with a bit too much force. Thankfully, the cylinder catches him in the middle, and he brings his arms around it tightly before the tether grows taught and yanks him back down. He hits the side of the ship, and his ach! comes loud and clear through the comms. He manages to keep one arm around the tube and uses another to grab hold of one of the railings.

He lays there against the ship for a moment too long, so you start to speak. “Grace? Grace, are you—”

Then he’s grasping the cylinder and lifting it up triumphantly. “I got it! I—oh, ow, ow, wow, this thing is hot, very hot.” You watch as he hot potatoes it around carefully and then wedges it between his knees to grab the loop of rope attached to his belt. He winds it carefully around the cylinder and reattaches the makeshift sling to the suit. “I don’t know how it’s still this hot after drifting through space for forty minutes. Their ship must be…” You can tell he’s trying to do the math, but because he doesn’t have a good enough estimate of the cylinder’s temperature other than ‘hot,’ especially through the gloves of the suit, he lamely finishes, “…really warm.”

“For the people back home watching this,” you say, “let the record reflect that Dr. Grace’s official scientific opinion is that the alien spaceship is, and I quote, ‘really warm.’” Grace merely laughs and begins moving back down the side of the ship and then laterally toward the airlock. You continue narrating. “Dr. Grace is now returning, the cylinder secured after some very careful and well-thought-out maneuvering. Again, the cylinder is, and I’m still quoting here, very hot. We’ll update you with some numbers after Dr. Grace finishes moving very slowly toward the airlock and the sample is secured within the ship.”

“Are you mean to all of your friends like this?”

“No, just you.” He probably finds the response endearing, but you realize with a little sadness that it’s kind of true. Lesya had always been the one to tease you more—though you did your fair share of it during your programming lessons—and your list of close friends ends there. You used to tease your brother like that, you remember, before… “Also, stop interrupting. You’re ruining the material.”

“Did you like the thing I did, holding it in the air? I thought that would be some good footage.”

“It was great. Very Breakfast Club.”

“Oh, good movie. So if I’m Bender, does that make you Claire?”

You’re silent for a moment. It’s unclear if he made that comment understanding the implication of it. “Uh, sure.” You don’t really know what else to say, so you simply watch as he nears the hatch.

“You know,” he huffs after a few moments while transferring one of the tethers, “you have a really good narrating voice, by the way.”

Your stomach is starting to feel weird again. You really hope you’re not about to throw up again, and, man, when was the last time you had any water? “Thanks, I guess?”

“No problem. Just reached the hatch, opening it now.” You end the recording. Once he’s out of the suit, he switches to the ship’s intercoms and says, “It’s still extremely hot. And also smells kind of bad. I think it’s ammonia.” Gross. “I’ll have to leave it in the airlock to cool off.” He must have floated out of the airlock, because he says nothing else into the intercom. And then his voice crackles through again. “Okay, just one little test and then I’ll let it cool off.”

You snort and turn your attention back to the screens. Oh, right—the spectral analysis. That should be done by now. You pull it up and then stare at it for a while.

You are not an expert in spectroscopy. You are also not an expert in physics or chemistry, though your knowledge is definitely much more extensive than most. You know enough to say that the reading you are getting is not a reading that should exist. You double check the optical spectrometer’s calibrations, then the program which spits out the cleaned-up reading extrapolated from the raw data, and it all looks fine. There’s no way for you to tell if the data itself was bad, or something, because this is about where your knowledge ended. (Admitting this to yourself puts a bad taste in your mouth.)

You turn on the intercom again. “Hey, Grace? Can you—”

“What?” He responds, and he sounds incredibly frustrated.

“Jeez, sorry. I was just asking if you could come up and take a look at something for me.”

“Sorry—I’ll be right up.” A few moments later, he’s floating up the ladder shaft and grumbling to himself in annoyance. “Sorry, again. I think some of the equipment is broken.”

“Broken? What do you mean, broken?” You turn to look at him and then narrow your eyes. “Is that possibly due to the fact that nothing was secured before we went zero-g?”

“No! No, the stuff turns on, the readings are just total garbage. The handheld spectrometer is telling me that the cylinder is made of xenon. I don’t think any of this stuff is made to work in zero gravity, the rest of the lab is set up like there’s supposed to be gravity, and I don’t…” You kind of stop listening after the word xenon. Wordlessly, you gesture toward the spectral analysis you ran, and this makes him go quiet. “Oh. So the whole ship is broken, then. That’s great.”

You scoff. “It is not broken. And if it was, I would fix it.”

“Okay, well, looks like you have a lot of fixing to do, then, because xenon should not be a solid. Not without an insane amount of pressure.” He groans and rubs his hands on his face, which pushes his glasses out at an extremely amusing angle. “What I would really like is to have a lab that actually works.” Grace lowers his hands and looks at the screen again, his glasses still barely on his face, and then his gaze slides towards some of the controls on the walls. His eyes get that faraway look again. “…right. Butter. Civil War.”

“Uh, what?”

“Nothing, don’t worry about it. I just remembered the centrifuge. That makes the giant metal ring I climbed over earlier make a lot more sense.”

Oh. Oops. You keep forgetting that there’s a whole lot that he still hasn’t remembered yet. You are not being a very helpful crewmate. Now might be a good opportunity to bring it up, but then he’s flipping some switches and engaging the ship’s centrifugal configuration. An alarm sounds, and the pilot’s chair slowly swivels on its vertical axis as the habitable compartment detaches and the entire ship begins to spin. The Petrovascope has locked out, but the telescopic cameras are still on, and the feed accounts for the spin so that the image is still relatively static. He looks impressed by this, and you puff your chest out a little. That had been one of the trickier things to program.

Then you notice that Blip-A is spinning now, too. Oh. Hopefully they weren’t trying to figure out if the whole spinning-thing meant something.

Grace floats gently down until his feet are firmly on the ground. Mary announces that the configuration is complete. He smiles and claps once. “Science time.”

He turns around and then promptly trips over the lip of the hatchway.

--

You walk into the lab from the dormitory. Grace had sequestered himself immediately to run a million different tests, so you had taken the time to eat (your food was getting more and more solid, which was exciting) and wash your hair while the centrifuge was engaged, which had involved squeezing water out of a plastic pouch while you held your head over the incredibly small toilet behind one of the panels in the dorm. You had it wrapped up in a spare shirt, and your flight suit was tied around your waist, revealing your white tank top. It made you feel very Sigourney Weaver-esque. Minus the chest-bursting aliens. You would like to avoid that, if at all possible.

He doesn’t even look up from the cylinder as you approach. “Still xenon,” he says as you stand behind him. “And that’s somehow not even the most frustrating thing.”

You walk forward and heave yourself up to sit on the table so you can look at him. His expression is both deeply frustrated and also, somehow, still very excited. This seems to be his happy place: not just in the lab running experiments and trying to solve a tantalizingly difficult problem, but getting to explain his thought process to someone else. No wonder he loved teaching so much. You think about how soul-crushingly alone he must have felt in those first few days he was awake. “What is?”

“I can’t get it open. It’s definitely hollow, so I’m assuming it has something inside, but I can’t get the darn thing to open.” He bangs it on the table a few times for emphasis and then hands it to you.

It is pretty light. You carefully rotate it in your hands. It has, fortunately, cooled down, though it still smells vaguely like cat piss. You grasp both ends and twist, hard, the motion straining your biceps, but nothing gives. “Huh. Yep, that’s a real head-scratcher.”

Grace doesn’t respond at first. He’s staring at your arms, and you glance down to see if there’s a leftover vomit stain or something on your skin before handing the cylinder back to him. He blinks a few times and slowly grabs it. “Uh—yeah.” A cough, and then he’s back in scientist mode. “No seam, either, as far as I can tell, so nothing to wedge open.” He turns it over a few times and then casually says, “Have you always had that tattoo?”

That makes more sense. He must have been distracted by the ink on your forearm. Why it caught him so far off-guard is beyond you, but whatever. “Yeah, I got it in grad school. It’s my brother’s handwriting.” You run your fingers over it reflexively. “He died when I was in my third year.”

“Oh. Gosh, I am so sorry.”

You shrug. That was the thing, about losing someone and having to tell other people about it: you never really learn how to respond when people apologize for it. “Thanks. You’d think it would mean that I’d be used to all this death by now, but…” You give a weak laugh before waving your hand. “Sorry. Please go back to your science.”

“No, it’s—actually, what you said made me think of something. Not the death part, but the ‘being used to stuff’ part.” Your expression must be a little confused, because he continues, “I’ve been trying to open this thing while operating under Earth assumptions. What we’re used to. But it’s not from Earth, it’s an alien object from a completely different planet, probably with completely different rules. I wonder if…” Grace grabs it by both ends but twists the opposite way. The cylinder hisses as both ends detach slightly. “Huh. No kidding.”

And then the cat piss smell intensifies, and you’re holding your nose and gagging while sliding off the table to stand away from it. “Oh, that is disgusting, do not open it any further before—”

“Yep, I’ve got it, I’ve got it—” He rushes to over the fume hood in the corner and places the cylinder inside. Once the hood is closed, he sticks his arms in the rubber gloves and continues twisting the ends until they pop off completely.

Two hunks of metal fall out of either side, and one of them springs open when it lands, forming a kind of half-sphere made up of thin spokes of various lengths. Grace jumps at the sudden motion and grabs the more solid hunk first. You move closer to the hood so you can watch as he turns the object over in his hands. It looks like two spheres of different sizes, connected together by a thin, arcing line.

“It’s a Petrova line,” he murmurs with awe, and his hands start shaking a little. He looks at you, then, and there are tears in his eyes. “I think we’re all here for the same reason.” He sets the model down gently and pulls his hands out of the gloves. The next thing you know, he’s hugging you, arms around your middle, and then he lifts you up and starts to spin, laughing into your shoulder. “It’s a Petrova line!”

You don’t know why he is awake at this hour, but whatever it is, it is likely important, because he is, after all, the world’s leading expert in astrophage biology.

“Of course, just let me finish up here.” By ‘finishing up,’ you mean making sure the pump of the HPLC-MS will not fall over when you turn around. You look at it for a second, marveling at the fact that it is there, sitting on a table on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific. Your doctoral lab had had one, and it had essentially been a glorified decorative object, because everyone was simply too scared to use the thing, and now here one was.

You follow him out of your workspace and into the maze of labs that populate the expanse of the main hangar deck, turning corners seemingly at random until he stops, suddenly, and then turns around to look at you. “I just realized I didn’t even say who I am. I’m—”

“I know who you are, Dr. Grace,” you say with a small, polite small. Then you give him your own and offer him your hand to shake, which he just looks at for a second before muttering oh, right and shaking it.

The two of you resume walking. You are starting to get the suspicion that he does not actually know where he’s going. “So, how’d you end up here? I mean, besides the whole getting kidnapped thing.” You wonder if this is a tactic to distract you from the fact that he is most definitely lost.

“Kidnapped? No, my PI from grad school got involved with the project pretty early on and reached out to me.” There is a distant sense of embarrassment at admitting that you are, basically, a nepo-hire, but that’s just how research and academia operate.

“And you just—showed up? Dropped everything?”

“Essentially, yes.”

Dr. Grace makes an appreciative hum. His stride starts to get a little more purposeful, and you think this is a good sign. “That’s…admirable, of you.”

You shrug, and then you realize after doing the movement that he can’t see it, because you’re walking behind him. “Well, it was this or staying in my dead-end postdoc. And the former involves saving the world. It wasn’t really much of a choice.”

“Yeah. Makes sense. Okay, here we are.” He’s turned the corner just ahead of you, and you wonder what exactly he needs help with. He had figured out how to breed astrophage in just a few days, by himself, or so you understand, so whatever he’s working on must be particularly tricky.

When you turn the corner, Dr. Grace is standing in front of the doorway to his lab space, which is currently filled, almost wall-to-wall, with boxes.

You look between him and the boxes, and then back again. And then at him once more for good measure. You must not be doing a very good job of concealing the pure and utter confusion on your face, because he smiles sheepishly and rubs the back of his head. “So. Yeah. You can see the problem I’m currently dealing with.”

“…what is all of it? More equipment?”

“Ah, no, not exactly, but you know, really, it is just as vital. It’s. They might be. Twizzlers.”

You blink slowly at him and then slide your gaze over to do some quick math. “There are about ninety-six boxes of…Twizzlers. In your lab.”

“That is correct.”

“Okay. Can I ask why?”

“Well. I might have made an off-handed joke about needing brain fuel. And I think that this is either Stratt’s version of a joke, or she is just that thorough.”

Hm. You hadn’t had much of a reason to interact with Stratt before, but she didn’t seem like the type to play practical jokes. Or maybe she and Dr. Grace were simply that close? They did sit next to each other at the very few meetings you’ve been asked to attend, and your PI had told you he had been the very first one to handle the astrophage when the ArcLight probe returned from Venus, so clearly she must trust him.

You decide not to ask him about it, and instead step forward to carefully grab a box from the top of its column. “Alright. We should probably find somewhere to put these. We could ask one of the naval officers if there’s a spare room?”

Dr. Grace grabs a box of his own and looks at you with one of his eyebrows just barely raised. “Do you know Mandarin?”

“No. Do you?”

“Can’t say that I’ve picked it up yet, no.”

After a bit of brainstorming, the two of you decided to distribute the boxes across the lab spaces in the hangar. Everyone would wake up to free Twizzlers, apparently, courtesy of Eva Stratt. You think that Dr. Grace is about to keep five boxes for himself, but then he hands one to you—not that four is really much more reasonable than five—and smiles. “Thanks.”

“Not a problem. I suppose if you ever go to your lab in the middle of the night and it’s filled with boxes of candy again, you know where to find me.” You are fairly certain that he does not, actually, but it doesn’t really matter, because you cannot imagine any scenario where he would need to seek you out again. “It was nice to officially meet you, Dr. Grace.”

“You, too. Thanks again for your help. Enjoy, you know, your bulk Twizzlers.”

You nod and walk away, confident that this was probably the only time you would ever speak to him.

--

It is not, apparently.

You are sitting at the very end of the long, square configuration of tables that the project used for most of its meetings. You don’t even notice when Dr. Grace comes in late and looks at his normal seat next to Stratt, which is now taken, nor do you see him scan the room until his eyes land upon the empty seat next to you, because you are too busy taking notes and turning something over in your mind. There’s something not right about their analysis of the microbe’s structure, you think, but it was an offhand comment, and you are not really sure that it’s relevant.

The sound of the chair next to you dragging, very loudly, across the floor makes you finally look up. He winces at the sound and offers an apologetic smile, ignoring the several heads in the room that have turned to look at him. There is a Twizzler hanging from his mouth, and he takes it out for a moment and holds it up for you to see in case you, somehow, hadn’t noticed it.

You simply nod and return to your notes. You think it’s something that they said about one of its intracellular membranes, so you jot your line of thinking down quickly before you fall behind in the presentation.

Then, suddenly, the Twizzler is on your notebook page, pointing at what you’ve just written. Dr. Grace has at least had the wherewithal not to use the end that was just in his mouth. “You should tell them that,” he whispers. A few people glance up and shoot a glare at him. He does not appear to pay them any mind, or if he does, he is simply choosing to ignore them. “I’m serious. Raise your hand.”

“No. It’s fine, it’s not that important,” you hiss under your breath, because suddenly he has decided to raise his hand for you.

“Dr. Grace? Is there a question?” One of the presenters asks, breaking off in the middle of their sentence. He simply points his thumb over to you, and then every single person in the room is looking at you expectantly.

You clear your throat. You have only had two interactions, now, with this man, and you somehow understand him even less than when you hadn’t spoken to him at all. “Sorry. You mentioned, briefly, symbiogenesis when you were explaining the membranes of the astrophage’s organelles, and I was wondering if you could clarify that. Because we don’t know if any symbiogenesis occurred. It’s possible, of course, but it sounds to me like you are basing this off of the assumption that we can fruitfully compare the astrophage with, for example, eukaryotic evolution on Earth to explain its structure, when I’m not sure that we can, particularly because astrophage appears to predate such events in our evolutionary history. Because of the. Mitochondria.” You run out of steam there, at the end, so you simply stop talking.

The presenter shifts uncomfortably at the front of the room, while a few people nod and mark something down in their own notes. Dr. Grace nudges your arm with his elbow and gives you a thumbs-up underneath the table. “Well, yes, that’s—that’s right. It was more of a theoretical suggestion, because as you have pointed out, we don’t have the data required for more concrete analysis of the astrophage’s evolution.”

It’s a moot point, because as they have just pointed out, it really is all theoretical; without knowing the conditions of wherever astrophage originated from, there was only so much you could tell about the microbe’s evolution from the cell itself. But it still feels satisfying to have contributed something.

You do not say anything else for the rest of the meeting, but you can feel Dr. Grace reading your notes as you take them. It makes you want to cover them with your arm, and you are not sure why you are suddenly so self-conscious.

“Nice job, earlier,” he says when the meeting has concluded and the other attendees are shuffling out of the room.

“Thanks. I was strong-armed into it.”

“Are you a microbiologist?” Dr. Grace asks, ignoring your insinuation.

You start to pack up your things, but he doesn’t move. “No. Biochemist.”

“Hm. That’s close enough.”

“Sure.” Your notebook is now in your bag, and he is still not moving. “Was there something else?”

He takes another bite of his Twizzler. You are not sure if it is the same one from before or if he has produced a second one from his pocket. “You seem to have some thoughts on evolution.”

“…I suppose?”

“What are your thoughts on, you know, water?”

Ah. You smile a little and turn to face him, deciding not to stand up just yet. “Is there a particular reason why you ask?” You know the reason, but you would like to find out if he will say it himself.

“No, no,” he replies, a little too casually. “Just, you know, curious. Scientifically speaking.”

“Of course.”

“So?”

You take a moment to consider what you will say next. “I think that, hypothetically speaking, it is not necessary to assume that it is a prerequisite for all life—”

“Thank you—”

“But,” you continue slowly, “it seems a bit like an endless thought experiment. To remove the parameters that we know allow for life isn’t just like trying to find a needle in a haystack, it’s like trying to find a single grain of sand in the Sahara. Worse than that, probably.”

He blinks at you, then. “But. You just said—”

“I know what I said. Hypothetically, it’s a sound idea. But it’s also a little like trying to answer the question that, if God is omnipotent, could he make a burrito so hot that he can’t eat it? You’ll spend a long time trying to answer it, and not a lot to show for it,” you finish, and with that you stand up.

Dr. Grace gets up from his chair, too, and is silent for a few moments before he mumbles, “That was a fun analogy. The burrito.”

“Thanks.”

He looks as if he is going to say something else but elects not to. And then he follows you out of the room, all the way to the mess hall, and he sits down next to you, and the entire time he is talking about evolution and waving around a third Twizzler for emphasis. You don’t even know where he’s storing them on his person.

--

Contrary to your initial belief, you are suddenly seeing a lot more of Dr. Grace. It is made even more quietly infuriating by the fact that the more that you talk to him, the less that you seem to understand how he ticks.

And you do not like not understanding things.

One moment, he will be saying the most insightful, technical, detailed thing about astrophage, because he has now taken to bouncing his ideas off of you, and then he is following it up with an example so inane that you cannot possibly think of how it occurred to him to say those things together in the same sentence. Or he will ramble on and on about some absurd opinion that he holds, to the point that you’re not even sure he knows that he is saying it all aloud, and then he will interrupt himself to comment on something that you are doing because he is somehow keeping track of your every movement in your lab while monologuing.

The worst part about it all is that you are finding yourself becoming obsessed with tracking all of this information about him, despite the fact that each new piece creates an even more distorted picture.

You haven’t seen him in about a week, and it has been a very dull week, because you have no new data to add to your model, and the notion is a little troubling to you.

Then, suddenly, it is moving down the list of things that are troubling, because you are standing in front of your lab, and your equipment is gone, replaced with someone else’s things, and a person you have not seen before is standing there working on something.

They turn to do something else but stop when they see you. “Oh, hi. I’m supposed to give this to you,” and then they hand you a note written in Mandarin, so you have to track down one of the naval officers on the carrier, who then leads you back into the maze of workspaces, until you are standing in front of the makeshift room next to Dr. Grace’s.

He’s back, apparently, and is fiddling with one of his astrophage samples when he looks up and sees you. “Hey! You got the note,” he greets, gesturing to the piece of paper still in your hand.

“I did. After I walked to my lab to discover that it was no longer my lab.”

“Sorry about that. I was just getting kind of annoyed at having to find my way there every time.” He says this as if it is a logical explanation for uprooting your workspace and plopping it right next to his.

Then it looks as if he is going to say something else, and this, this is the thing that infuriates you the most: when you can tell that he is saying something to himself, and you know that he knows that you can tell, and yet he will not say it, and you do not know why.

You really, really want to know why.

“Twizzler?” He finally says, holding another one of those godforsaken candy ropes up, as if this is the thing he was thinking about, even though it is most certainly not.

And you do not want a Twizzler. You have consumed so many of the things, and the box that is now sitting in your new lab barely has a dent in it, and on top of that, you have also watched him eat so many that you are starting to get concerned about his dental health.

You take the Twizzler.

--

You are trying to analyze the opaque cellular membrane of the astrophage, because no one has gotten any closer to understanding the cell’s super cross-sectionality, when Dr. Grace says, “I think we’re about to blow up a chunk of Antarctica.”

Your head snaps up to look at him. He is currently spinning in his chair just outside of your doorway, and at this point you should not even have to note that there is a Twizzler hanging from his lips, but you note it anyway. “Come again?”

“Sorry, I should have been more specific. We’re going to plant multiple nukes into Antarctica, and then we’re going to blow it up.”

“Oh.” That seems a little…extreme, you think, to put it mildly, but then you think about it for a little longer. “To try and trap heat with the methane? As a sort of stop-gap.”

“Ding-ding-ding.”

“And…how do you feel about that?”

He stops spinning, then, and slowly takes the candy out of his mouth to look at you. “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

“Doesn’t it?” Because everyone on the ship knows that Dr. Grace is, essentially, the second-in-command on the project, that Stratt takes him everywhere she goes to meet people and review utterly insane proposals like paving the Sahara so extensively that it’s visible from space. “She trusts you. Trusts your opinion.”

“Who, Stratt?”

“Who else?”

This is another one of the many things that you simply cannot figure out about him. How he can be so perceptive and yet so blind all at once. You have long passed the point of being annoyed; now you simply just want to know how it all works.

You have not, however, reached the point where you acknowledge why that is. You can see it coming, and you are simply choosing to wait until it happens on its own.

“What makes you say that?”

The look you give him is flat and a little exasperated. “Ryland,” you say, because one of the things that you have managed to figure out so far is that his first name will really make him stop and listen. “She takes you everywhere. She has you review pretty much every new addition to the project. You explain all of the science to her that she doesn’t fully understand. You’re testing the EVA tools in the pool.”

He considers what you’ve said for a moment. He does that thing, again, where you know he has something he could say but won’t, and you watch him do this until he starts spinning in his chair again. “I don’t like it,” he finally answers, “but I don’t think we have many other options.”

“Okay.” You look back at the astrophage.

The spinning stops again behind you. “‘Okay’? Well—what do you think?”

“I think that, unlike you, it actually does not matter what I think.”

Despite the fact that you cannot see him, you can hear that he is thinking something that he will never say. He rolls his chair back into his lab.

--

The two of you are sitting on the top deck of the carrier, watching as the sun dips below the Pacific and paints the sky in a rich array of color. Grace is uncharacteristically quiet, and you think it’s probably because he has just finished meeting with the primary and secondary crews about their preferred methods of suicide.

“Would you do it?” He suddenly blurts.

You look over at him, then, but he’s still staring out at the horizon. “Do what?”

“Go to space. On a mission that might not work. And will only end with you dying.”

“Well,” you shrug, “I don’t have the gene, so it doesn’t really matter, I suppose.”

He turns to you at that. “But if you did.”

You hum and consider your answer for a little while, searching his face. His glasses are crooked on his nose, and the way your fingers twitch is so normal at this point that you do not register it as something interesting. “I don’t know. Probably.”

“‘Probably’? That—that doesn’t—you would probably go on a suicide mission,” he finishes flatly.

You do not understand why this is bothering him so much. “It’s such a deeply hypothetical question, Grace. You know how I feel about those.”

“Yeah. God. Burritos.”

You try to give him a small smile, but he does not return it, instead looking back out as the sun continues to dip. The two of you have been out there long enough that Venus is visible, a bright prick of light, and for a moment you can pretend that it does not currently serve as the breeding grounds for humanity’s biggest challenge in the history of the species.

“I don’t think I could do it.”

The admission is so quiet that it is almost lost in the sound of the salt water cresting and lapping against the aircraft carrier. It is, you think, perhaps the first time that he has ever said a thing he has been thinking of saying but normally would not.

You do not know what to say in response. You simply put a hand on his shoulder, and after a few moments, he places his own hand on top of yours, still staring at the line where the sky meets the ocean.

--

It is not often that you agree with Ryland on something without any arguing or pedantry or devil’s advocacy. But you agree with him right now: this party is very, very strange.

Most people are wearing hats. It is unclear to you why they were purchased. They’re the sort of thing a company buys when they had a little excess room in the budget at the end of the fiscal year and did not want to disperse this excess to their employees. The project had the budget of the entire world, so there was probably always going to be an excess.

There is also a lot of making out. This is more understandable than the hats, because the bar is open tonight, and everyone has been taking advantage of it, including yourself, because the time on the Vat was nearing its end. You watch this all unfold as Ilyukhina and Yao sing in the background, sitting next to Ryland and nursing your third drink.

“This is so weird,” he mutters, again, and you turn to follow his line of site to Shapiro and Dubois, who are practically sitting on top of each other and whispering into each other’s ears. They’re probably dirty-talking about genetics, you think idly, and might be trying to figure out how to incorporate their doctoral diplomas in the bedroom.

This leads to another thought which would normally be troubling to you but currently isn’t, because there is a reason you are nursing your drink rather than sipping it enthusiastically. It has been a long time since you have had sex, and you find that you would really like to as you watch Shapiro and Dubois laugh at something one of them has said.

You look back at Ryland—he has been this in your mind, not Dr. Grace or even just Grace, for some time, and you find that you cannot pinpoint when exactly that happened—and suddenly the moment you had been steadily watching as it approached has finally arrived. You have been in love with him, probably since you watched him stand in front of those boxes of Twizzlers and realized that he was frustrated not because he suddenly had an entire store’s stock of candy in his lab, but because they were simply in the way of the work he wanted to do. You still do not understand how he ticks, and you know now that this has been part of the appeal the entire time, and that you would like to keep trying and failing to work it out as long as he will let you.

This lands exactly how you expect, which is to say with very little fanfare, because you have known it was coming for months, and every single one of those little Twizzlers that he has been pulling out of different places has been acting like a countdown.

You carefully place your hand on the bar top, close to the hand that is holding his beer, still watching him, waiting for him to notice. It is a quiet invitation, one that can be ignored, but it is an invitation nonetheless.

He glances at you after a while, and then down at your hand, and then back up again. He is doing the thing, the thinking thing, and you think you would be able to know that he was doing it if you were on the other side of the world. His fingernail idly scratches at the label of the bottle, and the corner peels off, just a little.

Ryland does not say the thing he is thinking. Instead, he quickly finishes his beer and stands, muttering, “Need some air,” and then he is gone.

You finish your drink and signal the bartender for another before getting up and moving to another seat to watch the next song. You are not sure who is the bigger coward between the two of you.

Later, when you watch him as he smiles at Stratt, you wonder if you have been framing your research question wrong this entire time.

--

The time at Baikonur is slow and full of anxious energy, the kind that exists just before the first drop of a rollercoaster, the hush of a theater when the curtain begins to move.

It is extremely clear that you do not need to be there. It is also clear that Ryland is part of the reason that you have not been shunted back to your old life yet, why you have been given a little trailer and some mindless paperwork to do.

You spend most of the time thinking about what will happen when all of this is over. Having the project on your CV guaranteed you pretty much any tenure-track job you might desire, but it is debatable how long the higher education system will continue to function as it does, along with the rest of human society.

Perhaps you could teach at a lower level, you muse, staring at the launch tower in the distance and feeling the cool breeze bite at your cheeks. Not that it had much more job security than a position at a university. But it could be a nice change of pace. You hear that the Bay Area is nice this time of year.

Nothing has changed between you and Ryland. He is still working on finishing his stash of Twizzlers. You have been secretly putting some of yours into the boxes in his trailer. The two of you do paperwork together, sometimes, speaking about nothing and everything, but never broaching the subject of what life will look like after. You continue to mentally note his behaviors, his words, his affect. You are still no closer to understanding how it all fits together, and this is no longer troubling to you in the slighest.

You cross your arms to keep in some body heat. There is a part of you that is certain that with a little more time, he will say the things that he has been thinking. That if you are patient enough, he will let you in just a little bit more.

There is an explosion in the distance, and after a few seconds you are knocked to the ground by its sonic wave.

--

You find him on the roof.

There had been a naïve part of you, one that you didn’t know was still there, that had hoped he would come to find you. After an hour, when this did not happen, you resolved to do this yourself, instead.

Ryland is holding his head in his hands, clutching his navy beanie and staring down at the concrete at his feet. The wind whips the flaps of his raincoat. You stand in front of the roof access door for a few moments before quietly walking over and sitting down next to him.

He does not look up at you as you settle onto the roof. He simply keeps staring at a spot between his shoes. One of them is untied. “I can’t—I don’t know if I can do it. I’m just a teacher, I’m not…”

You want to point out that he has not been ‘just a teacher’ for a very long time. You do not. Instead, you gently take one of his hands and hold it between your own, rubbing his knuckles with your thumb.

This makes him raise his head and meet your eyes. They are bloodshot and wet behind his glasses, which are almost at the point of falling off his face completely. “Tell me—tell me what to do. What should I do?”

It occurs to you, suddenly, that you could ask him to stay. That you have also been doing his thinking thing, not saying the things that you could but have chosen not to. You could beg him to tell you the things he has not been saying in return.

You also know, with deep-seated certainty, that you cannot. He has to choose this for himself, he has to decide that he wants to share those things and wants to share them with you, because you do not think you could live with yourself if you told him to stay and then have to wonder for the rest of your life if you have doomed the planet in doing so. And—and you want it to come from him. You want him to be the one who does this, because you are too scared to voice it yourself, you have been scared ever since you watched him sit at the bar and look on with a smile at Eva Stratt singing.

“I can’t do that,” you finally whisper, and you clutch his hand a little tighter. There are tears gathering and then spilling over your lower lids, and you cannot remember the last time you cried. “You know I can’t do that.”

Neither of you speak, then, and you keep holding his hand until the sun grazes the lip of the rooftop, and someone has come to collect him so he can deliver his decision. You stay there, sitting on the cold concrete, as Ryland walks to the stairs.

He turns around in the doorframe and just looks at you. You do not even need to articulate in your mind that he is doing it again.

The door closes.

--

You do not stay at Baikonur. You return to your tiny apartment and watch the launch on your TV, alone, listening to the countdown, looking on as the rocket clears the tower.

There is a small comfort in knowing that he finally made a choice. You are happy to be the coward, out of the two of you, even if it means that you will carry it with you for the rest of your life.

It’s not necessarily some kind of fear of public-speaking that was getting to you in the moment; you had, after all, delivered plenty of papers like this in grad school, and now you stand up every day in front of middle schoolers, which had actually been more nerve-wracking at first than your dissertation defense. Rather, it was more that you felt a little…rusty. It had been a while since you’d given a talk, but you simply could not pass up the opportunity to submit a proposal, not when the annual meeting was being held right on your front doorstep in San Francisco. Because while you loved your job, you really did, you also missed the research, being able to present your ideas and hear others give theirs, getting to ask questions; you missed being an academic.

So when you had gotten the email that you had been accepted to the conference, after your initial shock had worn off (because it was quite difficult for anyone to get into, much less someone who had been out of the game for a few years), you had abandoned your class mid-quiz—on Latin adjective-noun agreement, which was very important for them to understand before you introduced the third declension—to run across the school building and press your phone up against the window of Ryland’s door.

And then he had helped you in the following months, listening to you practice your paper and giving you feedback on your handout, which had been an incredibly foreign concept to him, because apparently STEM talks exclusively used slides. You had similarly been aghast to learn that it was the norm in the sciences to give papers without a word-for-word script, which was very much not the norm in classics.

You’re thinking about all of this behind a fixed expression of attentiveness, on top of your paper, how you plan to hold the mic while you read, what sorts of questions you might get asked afterward. Maybe a back-up plan to sink into the earth if you did end up hurling. You glance up from your script, briefly, to see Ryland sitting there in the front row, because of course he was going to come to the conference with you and hear your paper (as if he hadn’t heard it approximately one million times by this point), because he was just that kind of person. He had also been pretty excited when you told him that there was a bioarchaeology panel the next day.

He smiles, then, and gives you a little thumbs up, careful not to lift his hand out of his lap and risk drawing attention to himself. It is really difficult for you to describe all of the feelings that flit through your chest, but you can at least discern that one of them is relief. Relief that he had spent all that time on this thing with you, that he was here now, despite the fact that you had reassured him he didn’t have to, because you know his last experience at a conference had been—well. Not great. Career-ending.

But he’s here, and he’s still smiling at you, and then you’re being introduced so you have to look away and focus on not falling over as you walk to the podium. But you find him again when you start speaking, and suddenly you’re not sure why you were even nervous in the first place, because right now it just feels like you’re practicing the paper again for him in your living room. Ryland is nodding at all of the right places, looking down at the handout when you reference it, even taking notes.

You have to fight to keep yourself from smiling as you continue reading.

--

You don’t want to brag, but you’re pretty sure you knocked the ball out of the park.

There had been so many questions, and Ryland hadn’t even needed to ask the one you had him prepare, just in case no one raised their hand (because there was no worse feeling than when the panel moderator opened the floor for questions and everyone stayed silent, looking blankly at you before awkwardly shuffling through the conference program to decide where they were going next). In fact, there had been so many that the panel was starting to go over its allotted time, and the moderator had to step in and thank everyone for coming, and then you’d been held up by several different people stopping you to ask a question and give you their emails, and you’re not sure you’re capable of smiling any harder.

When you finally manage to extract yourself, you head over to Ryland, who’s waiting for you with your bag and water bottle. Before you can even take them from him, he presses a kiss to your forehead excitedly. “You did amazing.”

“Really?” Suddenly you’re feeling a touch self-conscious, because Ryland had actually been in academia, had landed the tenure-track job, seen countless talks and conference papers, and you want to know that he means it and isn’t just saying it because it’s you.

The two of you start walking to the back of the room as he continues. “Uh, yeah, did you see how excited the room was? I don’t think I’ve seen a group of academics that energetic since—you know. The thing.”

“The carbon thing?” You smile and bump your shoulder against his as you near the exit.

“That would be the one.”

You’re about to respond that you hope that it hadn’t been for the same reason as his whole debacle, but then a man you don’t think you’ve met before intercepts the two of you in the hallway. “Excuse me, I wanted to introduce myself. That was a fantastic talk.”

You smile politely and shake the hand that he’s offered as he tells you his name and university. “Thank you!”

“And I wanted to give you this,” he says, handing you a business card. Hm, he must be kind of important, because most academics in classics settled for their handouts to serve that function. “This isn’t public knowledge, yet, but we’re posting a job ad soon, and you should think about applying. We’re hoping to hire someone in your research area. You can use that email to contact me with any questions.”

“Oh—that’s—wow, thank you, I will.”

The man nods and shakes your hand again before leaving, and then you’re turning to Ryland, holding up the card just in case he had somehow disappeared during all of that. He’s smiling, but he also seems to have some kind of nervous, restless energy, and you’re not completely sure if it had been there the whole time or if this was a more recent development.

You are simply too excited to pay it much mind, so you keep walking while he trails a little behind you. “There was a panel I wanted to go to in the next session,” you muse aloud, “but honestly, I think I’m starting to crash a little and would kind of like to lay down.” Thankfully, your room was in the same hotel that the conference was being held in, so you turn into an empty hallway to head to the elevator.

“Mm-hm.”

This makes you pause. Normally he would have some kind of follow-up question. Or something to say at all. You stop walking and turn to face him. “Are you alright?”

“Peachy.”

You snort. “Yeah, because that sounded genuine. What’s up? You seemed fine after the talk.” Then you look down at the business card still clutched in your hand and then back up at him. “…are you jealous of that guy?”

“What? No. That’s—that’s not even. No.” And you can tell that he means it—he doesn’t sound defensive in the slightest, and, okay, you can admit that your suggestion had been a little bit of a longshot, because the entire time you’ve been together Ryland has never been weird or over-protective of you.

“Alright.”

He breathes out through his nose, long and hard, and he looks a little uncomfortable. A pink tinge is slowly starting to creep onto his face. “This might sound—stupid.”

“You don’t have to preface with that, I’ve already come to expect it.”

“Ouch.”

“Sorry. That was a joke. Please keep going.”

Ryland steps a little closer to you, and you have to tilt your face upward slightly to meet his eyes. “I am. Trying very hard. Not to be all over you. At this moment in time.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“…can I ask why?”

He looks at you like he can’t believe you’re asking this, because in his mind you should already know the answer. “It’s. You. You did a really good job up there.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you were answering questions very capably.”

“Right.”

Ryland makes a frustrated sort of noise and rubs the back of his head with his hand. “Please don’t make me keep explaining this.”

Wow. Okay. This is new. You don’t think you have ever seen him balk from explaining something, because it’s basically one of his favorite pastimes. “Hey,” you murmur, placing a hand on his upper arm, “I was just teasing you. You’re fine. Let’s just head back—”

He interrupts you by sliding his hands through your hair to cradle your head, his thumbs resting on either side of your jaw, and then he’s kissing you, desperately, licking into your mouth as if he might simply combust right then and there if he cannot taste you. The hand you had placed on his shoulder moves to grip the lapel of his jacket, and you press yourself closer to him, and—oh, you think, he’s already hard, and you are standing in the middle of a public hallway and finding this latter fact to be alarmingly irrelevant.

“Okay, okay,” you murmur against his mouth. “Let’s—we should—”

“Yep, yes, way ahead of you.” He takes your hand and the two of you start half-walking, half-running down the hallway, and you both begin to laugh as you race toward the elevator.

Then, he evidently decides that this is all taking far too long, because he tugs you by your hand and walks you against the wall to keep kissing you, and when he dips down to teeth at your throat, you gasp, “Ry-land, this, we are in a hallway, there could be people,” and then you have to bite the inside of your cheek to prevent yourself from making anymore noise, because his hands are squeezing your waist as he presses his mouth against the curve of your neck, right on the spot that he knows will make you whine.

As if the universe would like to prove your point (and normally, you would be very happy at this happening so immediately, but right now it is just frustratingly bad timing), you hear a group of people chatting around the corner at the end of the hallway. Ryland lets out an annoyed whine against your skin and raises his head to look around. He tugs you toward a bathroom, and thankfully, the universe still seems to be on your side, because it’s one of those single-occupancy ones, so you lock the door behind you quickly.

And it’s just in the nick of time, really, because as soon as you turn the latch he’s pressing you up against the door, untucking your blouse so he can splay his fingers against your stomach and grip your sides. “You don’t even know,” he mumbles into your throat, pressing open-mouthed kisses against it, moving upward until he reaches your ear, “the effect that you have.”

“Hm?” It’s not that you can’t hear him; you are just more focused on running your hands through his hair, playfully tugging because you know that he likes it, likes the feeling of you gripping and pulling, and then on trying to wrestle his jacket off.

He rests his forehead against yours, then, and stares intently into your eyes, moving his arms away from your body for a moment to let the piece of clothing you’ve been waging war against slide off and crumple onto the bathroom floor. “You are—you—I don’t even have the words, and I need you to know that this is not normal for me. Because it is very much not normal. You know this. I know this.”

You smile and press a kiss against the corner of his mouth. “My talk really did it for you, huh?”

His nose comes forward to brush against yours, and the two of you stay like that for a moment, shuddering breaths mixing in the air between you, hot and heavy and wanting. You can feel his hands slip underneath your blouse again and his fingers twitch against your skin, like he’s torn between wanting to stay like this forever and fucking you right against the door. “Well,” he breathes. “obviously. Because it’s you.” He says this so simply, like it is an unwritten rule of the universe: that you could do something, anything, and Ryland will be right there, watching and needing and desiring. Action and reaction. “And. It was pretty attractive.”

“Yeah?” You whisper, and it feels like you can sense the word drifting in between you.

“Yeah.”

“Ryland.”

“Yes.”

“Please,” and it’s all you have to say, but instead of desperately pushing forward like you expect him to, he slowly presses his mouth to yours, like he’s savoring the way the two of you slot together, taking his time to commit the feeling to memory so he can replay it over and over and over again whenever he wants.

But he’s still a little impatient, like he was in the hallway just minutes ago, and so his movements slowly become more hurried, more frantic, and you feed into it until he’s groaning as your tongue slides against his and you palm him through his jeans. He pulls your bra down, not even bothering to unclip it, and the feeling of your shirt and his palms brushing against the buds of your nipples makes you arch into him, head pressing back against the door. He leverages the movement and returns to your throat to lathe his tongue on your skin, right at the base of your neck, just above your collarbone. He stays there, feeling the buzz of your moan, licking up the sweat that’s starting to accumulate because, really, you both still have way too much clothing on.

“I can’t—I want to wait, but I just,” Ryland says, and you can’t tell if it’s to you or to himself. He presses another kiss into your neck before suddenly dropping to his knees, fumbling with the button and the zipper of your slacks. He doesn’t even bother with taking them all the way off, simply dragging them down along with your underwear while mouthing against your stomach, your hip, the seam of your thigh.

The position is a little awkward, but you find that you simply do not care, can’t care, not in the slightest, not when his face is pressed against your cunt and he’s looking up at you because he simply cannot stand the idea of not being able to see you as you squeeze your eyes shut and tip your head back, grasping at his hair and skewing his glasses awry in the process. “Hah, oh, fuck, please, that’s—it’s—you—it’s so good, you are so good, so good to me, please,” you keen. The praise makes his eyes flutter, but he still doesn’t look away, doesn’t close his eyes while he whines and sucks at your clit, scraping his teeth ever-so-slightly against you in a way that makes your hips roll against his face and your hand clutch his hair a little tighter.

You bring your other hand to your chest, rolling one of the buds of your nipples through your blouse, and this drags a feverish moan out of him as he watches you add to your own pleasure. The sounds of him licking into your folds mix with your sighs and echo around the tiled room, and you are fairly certain that anyone walking by can hear every single second of this, and at this point you are not even surprised that this does not register as a concern.

“Ryland, I—I’m, please, I don’t…” You are starting to feel a little shy, but, fuck it, he’s on his knees and his face is between your thighs and he is still looking up at you when you manage to open your eyes, and it doesn’t really seem like the time to be suddenly timid. “I don’t want to come without you inside me.”

This causes his eyes to shut, just for a second, and then he’s pressing one last, long, broad lick against your cunt and standing, helping you shuffle over to the sink. Really, in any other situation you would laugh at having to do this, but he’s carefully moving your hair so he can kiss the back of your neck, the side, while your hands grip the sink, and you can just barely smell yourself on his breath.

You find yourself wanting to say so many things in that moment, watching the reflection in the mirror as Ryland looks at you, the way your hair falls, the set of your shoulders, the line of your spine, the swell of your hips pressed against him. None of it is enough, so you simply stare, trying to tell him all of it with a single, desperate, wanting gaze. And you know that he understands it, when his eyes finally meet yours in the mirror; because he always knows, because he has catalogued every look and sound and tell that you have. Because he has always, first and foremost, just wanted to understand everything there is to know about you.

“Please,” you breathe again, “please.”

Ryland nods, quickly, frantically, and works at the button and zipper of his jeans behind you. You feel the heady weight of his cock slide against you, and when the head brushes against your clit you buck your hips against the pressure. “I don’t,” he pants, idly grasping your hip, “I don’t think I could ever say no to you, even if I wanted to.” He drops his head, briefly, and places a gentle kiss onto your shoulder and looks up at your reflection while he does it, his eyes just barely peaking over the lenses of his glasses. “And I don’t, by the way, in case, you know, you were wondering.”

You smile and hum, which turns into a gasp as he slowly presses inside you. The drag of it makes you grip the sink even tighter, and there is a distant part of your mind that wonders if you could make it crack. Your head dips down at the feeling, and maybe you should have been more patient, let him prepare you with his fingers, but the stretch is so good, and you feel so full as his hips finally meet yours. There’s a trace amount of discomfort, but it’s the good kind, the kind that you like, that you know he likes, when you pull his hair and stamp crescents into his skin with your nails and lovingly bite his thighs.

He stills, then, and one of his hands draws up your torso, past your breasts, resting upon your neck just below your jaw so he can pull your head back up to look at him in the mirror. The sight makes you clench around him, and his fingers squeeze a little against your pulse points. “Want you to look,” he murmurs. “I—I want—I just want you to see what I see.”

You nod, and the motion causes just a little bit more pressure at the sides of your throat. His glasses are still crooked, and you raise your arm to fumble with them and push them up, because you want him to be able to see, too, want him to see how he makes you feel, how your body reacts to his touch. “Ryland,” you gasp again, begging, shifting your hips back to take him even deeper inside of you.

The hand on your neck flexes, barely, and you know he can feel his name vibrating in your throat, and he finally moves, slowly, carefully, so you both can feel every inch as he draws back and then forward again into your cunt, and you have to fight to keep your eyes open so you can watch the look in his eyes while he sets his rhythm. “Feels so perfect, so right,” he chokes out, because he knows that you love the sound of his voice, “I don’t, I just, I don’t think I can ever have enough, want to be like this all the time. And, and it’s, it is such a problem—you already know—I can’t even—you make me so—”

“I know, I know,” and suddenly you so desperately need him to know that you feel the same, you need it so badly that, when drops his head to press another kiss into your shoulder, you raise your hand again and yank at his hair so he can’t stop looking at your reflection, at the way you use the sink to drive your hips backward, fast and sloppy and uncontrolled. “Always want you. All the time, just like this.”

His hand moves away from your throat, grasping at your breasts, while the other dips between your thighs, gathering your wetness on the pads of his fingers and circling your clit. It is incredible, you think, how good he is at this, how much he just wants to make you feel good, that he has committed to memory the exact pressure and movement and speed that you like, as if his own pleasure was merely an afterthought, a chemical byproduct of your own.

One of his knees nudges your leg, barely, and the shift in position causes your eyes to close involuntarily, and you want to keep them open, you really do, but he is simply so deep, his cock is dragging just right and his fingers are moving exactly the way that you like, that you simply can’t, and you let your head lean against his as he drives into you. “Oh. That’s, please, Ryland, please do not stop, it’s so—just like that, you are so perfect, so fucking good, I can’t,” you babble, turning your head to whimper into his cheek.

He moans and wraps one of his arms around your torso, hugging you close, and you can feel when his rhythm starts to stutter, and your toes curl at the thought of him coming inside of you. “I’m—I need you to, please, I want to feel it, I don’t want to—not before—”

You are so close, so close, and you tell him as much, begging him to keep going, and then you open your eyes again and tilt your face slightly to look at him as his brows furrow and the hand at your hip squeezes, and something white-hot sears through your body at the sight of him so lost in you, and you have to fight to keep watching him as it cascades, as your thighs tremble and your legs threaten to give out and your cunt flutters around him. “Want you to, want to feel you come inside me,” you sob, “please, please, Ryland, I need it, just want you to feel good, please let me make you feel good.”

He doesn’t say anything, then, he can’t, as he spills inside of you, hips pressed flush against yours, burying his face into your neck and crying out against your skin. The two of you stay like that for a moment, savoring, basking in the closeness of it all, until he slowly moves back, and you clench while he does it, mourning the loss.

After admiring you for a moment, the way you’re still gripping the edge of the sink with your legs spread and your face flush, he grabs a towel from the dispenser and gently cleans you up, and you shudder at the contact.

“So,” you breathe, trying not to laugh, because you are suddenly very aware of the fact that you are half naked in a hotel bathroom.

“So.”

“I take it that more conferences are in our future?”

“…it’s possible. I think we might need a little more data. Just to be completely sure.”

“Agreed.”

You let him float down through the ship in front of you before following closely behind. It’s a little tricky with only one arm available to guide you around, but having your vomit floating around was less ideal than banging into a few walls and the various crap floating around in the lab on the way to the dormitory. All modesty is gone once you get there, and you’re both stripping down and doing your best to bunch up the puke into your jumpsuits before Grace calls for waste removal again. He seems to be collecting himself emotionally much quicker than you are. You chalk it up to your hangover.

Then you’re both scrubbing yourselves down with sponges. There were no showers on the ship, and even if there were, spraying water in zero gravity is not exactly the smartest move. He’s getting impatient, and you can tell because he’s completely missed a patch of vomit that somehow managed to get stuck in the hair trailing between his belly button and his chest. “Wait, Grace, you’ve still got—” You wipe it away with your sponge and pause to watch his abdominal muscles contract at the touch.

Not the time. God, you must be so starved for touch and attention if cleaning puke off of someone’s stomach is enough to do it for you. You chuck the sponge into the waste chute and push yourself toward your bin, which is currently floating in the corner of the room. It’s an entire ordeal to pull on new underclothes and another jumpsuit before leveraging yourself to turn back around with the help of the wall. Grace is currently trying to wiggle into a suit that is definitely too small for him, so you swivel around again to scan the different pieces of clothing floating through the room before locating a suit that’s actually his size. You fling it toward him. “Here, take this one.”

“No time, I want to look—”

“I’m pretty sure you’re trying to squeeze into one of Yao’s suits, and you’re not—okay, look, I’m just going to say it, you are way more jacked than I remember, and that suit is not going to fit.”

He groans impatiently before shucking off the too-small flight suit. “I know, and it’s so weird, I keep noticing it.”

Once he’s got the suit you had passed to him on, you follow him back up to the cockpit. While he seems to have gotten his excitement back much quicker than you, you’ve acclimated to zero-g better, and you wait patiently while he bumps into a few walls on the way back to the cockpit.

“It’s Petrovascope time,” he says while strapping himself into the chair. “Are you pumped? Because I’m pumped.”

You float over his shoulder, gripping the back of the chair, and simply watch as he pulls up the controls for the Petrovascope. There’s a moment where you both sit there, holding your breath, until he finally toggles it from ‘VISIBLE’ to ‘PETROVA.’

The both of you gasp as the display changes, the previous brightness of Tau Ceti diminishing to a faint red corona. He starts fiddling with the controls, and then you shout, “Wait!” You pull up a program on another monitor to record the screen as well as turn on an internal camera to capture both you and Grace. It was important to document the entire process, not just so they could replicate whatever solution you found here back on Earth once you sent everything on the beetles, but for scientific progress more generally. And, yes, okay, part of you was secretly envisioning a documentary about all of this if you succeeded. This would be good footage.

Once you confirm that both recordings are working, you motion for him to continue. He carefully adjusts the view to pan around, and—there it was. A Petrova line, just like the one on your sun, arcing from the star’s northern magnetic pole to a planet within the system. Tau Ceti-e, you’re fairly certain, though there are a couple possible candidates. Tau Ceti-f, maybe. You feel a little lightheaded, because no matter which planet it was, you and Grace are confirming the incredibly debated existence of any exoplanet around Tau Ceti, on top of being one step closer to finding a way to halt the apocalypse currently happening back on Earth.

“Yes!” He shouts, and then he glances back at you with barely-contained glee, all previous panic forgotten. You’re smiling so hard that it hurts, and it feels so good, the sense of collective discovery. It was one of the reasons you had wanted to work at NASA, all the way back in your childhood, and actually experiencing it now with someone as equally excited as you were was making your stomach do an entire gymnastic routine. You both return your attention to the screen, simply watching the red arc in front of you. Grace is practically buzzing, undoubtedly planning experiment after experiment to perform.

And then something strange happens.

“Did you—did you see that?” You’re worried that you’re going crazy from a lack of sleep—it feels slightly insane to think that after being in a coma for four years—or that your hangover is messing with your eyes.

But Grace is leaning forward, too, peering closely at the screen. “The flash? Yeah, I saw it.” It happens again, and he flicks the controls around to center it. “Could be more astrophage, maybe?” He thinks aloud. “A clump seeing our ship and trying to move toward it?”

“It’s possible,” but you don’t sound convinced, because the spin drives have been shut off for a while, and presumably if there was a chunk of astrophage headed your way, there would be a relatively continuous prick of light getting closer rather than these intermittent flashes—the little microbes were quick and had a tendency to keep moving until they got where they wanted to go, not start and stop randomly on the way there—the last of which slowly grows brighter until it vanishes completely. You both wait with bated breath for it to reappear, and after a while, when it’s evident that nothing’s happening, you say, “Go back to the Petrova line.”

“Already on it.” He pushes the controls to move the camera again. “Well, first step is to find out where the planet it’s connecting to is, and then we figure out how to get there.” He pauses and looks back at you. “Do you know how to fly this thing?”

“Theoretically speaking, basically.” This answer is very clearly not the one he was hoping for, so you offer, “I’m a quick learner?”

But his attention is already elsewhere, fixed back on the Petrova line. “Um.”

“What?”

“Either something is wrong with the scope, or there’s now a gap in the Petrova line that was not there a few seconds ago.”

You hastily pull up the sensor readouts for the Petrovascope on another screen. “I’m not seeing any physical obstructions here.”

“Okay. Okay,” he breathes, still staring at the gap. “We could have interfered with their migration pattern, but that doesn’t make any sense.” He pushes his glasses up as he puts his face even closer to the screen.

“Toggle it back to the visible light spectrum?” You suggest, but his fingers are already moving before you can finish speaking.

The silence that settles once the view switches is palpable, and it stretches on until he finally says, “Holy fucking shit.”

This is, strangely, more stunning than what you’re looking at on the screen. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you curse before.”

He shushes you. “Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.”

What you’re seeing is undeniable: there is a massive structure, floating incredibly close to the Hail Mary, cutting a diagonal line through Tau Ceti’s Petrova line. And it’s a structure, alright, nothing that could occur naturally, and you know because you’ve worked at NASA long enough to be able to tell the difference. And, well. Look at the thing. You probably could have told the difference even if you worked at an ice cream store. (Which you had, briefly, in college.)

“This is…” Grace is breathing quickly, almost hyperventilating, but instead of from panic it’s from pure elation. “This is first contact. That is an alien ship. There is an alien ship right in front of us. Unless,” he looks back at you for confirmation, “we sent another ship for redundancy?”

You shake your head. It took the entire planet coming together and years of preparation to send the Hail Mary here. No, there was no other ship. “We don’t even have the capability to communicate with another ship, not via radio,” you finally say. “Just a short-distance system for communicating with crew while they’re doing EVAs.” Then you pause for a moment. “Actually, I think I could fix that.” Your mind is already thinking through how you’d do it: adjust the orientation of the radio transceivers, go out and make the dishes wider with siding harvested from the ship’s body, write a program to scan for different frequencies until it found one to latch onto. Hm, but you’d need to do some math on adjusting the size of the dishes, because that would affect the strain on the ship’s exterior where they were attached, and the beamwidth would decrease, meaning they would need to be very precisely positioned and calibrated to receive a signal…maybe a larger array instead? It would alter the readouts, but you could probably automate that…

He interrupts your train of thought, which is probably for the best, because the pounding in your head has returned. “Well, before we go putting the cart in front of the horse, how about…” He clicks through another few menus before turning the radar on, and suddenly an alarm blares through the ship, making you both wince. This is not helping the hangover.

“Blip-A detected,” Mary says over the alarm, and you reach over his shoulder to press a button to mute it.

You both sit in silence as he glances over the readings from the radar. “Well,” he finally says, “I did promise that you could name the next thing we found.”

In any other situation, like one that wasn’t, you know, humanity’s first encounter with an alien species (well, after the astrophage—intelligent alien species, then), you would have laughed. Instead, you settle for, “I think Blip-A is fine,” because really, you’re being put on the spot, and you don’t think you can come up with something that isn’t totally lame.

Grace amusedly huffs through his nose before mentally retreating to do some quick math based upon the radar’s current readouts. “It’s matching our velocity exactly,” he murmurs. “And it is, like, so close. It all has to be on purpose.”

“This is going to sound really judgmental,” you preface as you study the structure more closely, “but I feel like I’m allowed to say it. The design of it is—”

“Terrible?” He finishes for you. “Yeah. I don’t even know how you’d maintain a stable atmosphere in it. Maybe it’s a probe, then, not a ship?” Your eyes meet, and it is very clear that this is just as, if not more, exciting for the both of you than the prospect of it being an alien ship.

You’re struck by how much Lesya would have loved this. She would have had so many thoughts about all of the flat surfaces this thing was made out of, which would have been immediately and loudly shared. And then she probably would’ve spacewalked right over and knocked on the door (you can’t actually see at the moment if there’s a door, but you assume there is) to tell the potential aliens exactly what she thought about their ship before inviting them over to yours.

You realize, quietly, resignedly, that it is going to be like this the whole time, no matter how tightly you shove it all into a box. That you’ll keep looking over your shoulder, hoping that she’ll be there, probably right up until the moment you die.

Grace’s fingers tapping rapidly around the screen brings you back into the moment, and you watch as he pulls up the ship’s manual navigation system. “Uh, what are you doing?”

“Testing something.”

“Okay, that’s not vague at all.”

He hits the ‘yes’ prompt to allow manual control, and then groans when a second prompt pops up requiring him to type in ‘yes.’ “Seriously?” He gives you a quick glance.

“Just because I was one of the software engineers on the project does not mean every single annoying thing is my fault.” Actually, this one had about an 80% chance of being your fault, but you’re not going to tell him that.

While he inputs some values to send the ship forward a short distance, you pull the radar back up on another screen. You think he must not be used to having multiple monitors—which, how is that even possible, you wonder, because you would simply die if you were forced to only use a computer with a single monitor. Grace takes a deep breath before finalizing the command, and the Mary drifts forward.

And then Blip-A moves forward, too. You both look at the radar and arrive at the same conclusion simultaneously. It has matched your velocity exactly. Grace hurriedly inputs more commands, shooting the ship forward in bursts of various lengths, and each time, the Blip-A immediately mirrors the movement. Then, for good measure, it maneuvers a little more to return to its initial distance from the Mary, around 217 meters.

“Grace.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what this means.”

He’s nodding very, very fast. “There’s someone—something—on there. It can’t be a probe. It’s not a probe,” he repeats. You think he might simply combust from excitement. “I want. There are so many things I want to do right now, but most of all I want to look closer at an honest-to-god spaceship.” Grace tabs back to the Petrovascope and tries to zoom in. “Uh, how do I—”

“Here, switch to the telescopic cameras—” You go to reach over him to do it yourself, but he smacks your hand away. “Hey!”

“Sorry.” He does not sound apologetic in the slightest. Once the display is up, he zooms in on Blip-A, and you both stare in wonder at the mottled color of the flat sides of the ship which meet each other in points.

You would really like to know what this thing is made of. The splotches of colors give the impression of some kind of alloy; perhaps the variations in color were akin to a patina, or a general wear from traveling through space. There’s some light blue patches, and the color gives you an idea. You float up a little to a different screen and pull up the array of spectrometers fitted to the ship. They really hadn’t spared any expenses when it came to the Mary’s instrumentation—every kind of spectrometer under the sun was available to you. You settle for an optical spectrometer and wait for the spectral analysis to return.

“Look at this,” Grace says below you, so you push yourself back down. He’s focused the cameras on a pair of arms on the side of the ship. One has a sort of crystal disk, and the other is more properly an arm, ending in a claw-like hand. You both watch as the hand tilts back and then flings forward a small, cylindrical object.

“Blip-B detected.”

“Thank you, Mary,” the two of you chime. Then you say, “It’s your turn for naming.”

“Blip-B has a good ring to it.” The chair in front of you turns as he swivels around to face you, and suddenly you’re floating quite close to his face. “Okay, so.”

“So.”

“I think they’re friendly. And I think they’re trying to communicate.” A beat. “Or it could be a bomb.”

“It could be a bomb.”

He turns the chair back around, and the movement sends a miniscule gust of air toward you, making you start to drift a little, so you grab the back of the chair to still yourself and look at the cylinder steadily moving toward the Hail Mary. “A very slow-moving bomb.” His finger presses against the screen, first at the arm which flung the cylinder, then sliding over to the cylinder itself and finally the camera’s resolution at the bottom of the screen. “It’s moving at the exact velocity that I had the Mary at,” he concludes in wonder.

“I don’t think it’s a bomb.”

“Me neither. But, uh. Just to be safe—does this thing have any shields? Mary, shields?”

At the same time that the Mary intones, “There are no shields aboard the Hail Mary,” you say, “No, there aren’t any shields—what do you think this is, Star Trek?”

“I don’t know!” His shoulders are slightly hunched against the back of the chair, and you can tell that he’s torn between pure panic and sheer joy. “Okay. Okay. Here’s what I’m thinking: we wait to see what it does. And if it’s not a bomb, they seem to be trying hard enough to communicate with us that they’ll send another. And if it is a bomb, well…”

“We’ll be dead,” you supply helpfully, “and then it won’t really matter, and everyone on Earth will also die.”

“Yeah. I’m really hoping it’s not a bomb.”

With that settled, all there is to do is wait.

For forty minutes.

It is simultaneously the fastest and the slowest forty minutes of your entire life. As the cylinder steadily grows closer, you can feel every muscle in your body start to tense. When it’s about a minute away from contact, you unthinkingly clutch his upper arm. He grabs your hand and squeezes tightly.

Thunk.

You can just barely hear it hit the ship, and you both watch as the Blip-B moves away in the readings before disappearing entirely. Grace lets go of your hand as he exhales shakily, and you draw your arm back, stretching out your fingers to relieve the soreness from his vice grip.

He adjusts the camera back to the arms on the side of Blip-A, and sure enough, the claw-hand one is flinging yet another cylinder forward. “Blip-C detected.” He looks back at you with raised eyebrows as if to say, I think it’s your turn again.

You huff. “Just—the blip naming convention is fine.”

Then he’s unclipping from the seat and floating up. “Alright. It’s moving at the same velocity, so we have another forty minutes to catch it.” You watch as he looks around for something before settling his gaze on you. “If we wanted to catch an alien cylinder floating toward the side of the ship, how would we do that?”

The Mary answers before you can. “Dr. Grace, would you like to go on a spacewalk?”