✨Belle✨

Jet. It was technically a jet. Plane felt too generous for the thing he had been shoved into. Planes had magazines in the seat pockets and little trays and attendants who asked if you wanted refreshments. When Stratt’s people had said they had a jet for him, he’d had ideas. Not unreasonable ones, either.

Something with a luxury interior. Plush seats and soft lighting. Windows with shades he could draw down when the exhaustion hit him. Maybe champagne, not that he particularly needed champagne, but it would have been nice to be offered. A little toast to himself. Congratulations, Dr Grace, you have made scientific history. Please enjoy this sparkling wine. He would have settled for orange juice; he wasn’t fussy. 

But no.

It had to be a military carrier jet, a brutal contraption that was fired across the sky. He had been bundled into the back, strapped down by someone who said almost nothing, and then hurled halfway across the sea. The jet dropped and his stomach dropped with it. The uniformed man in front of him did not react.

He turned his head very slowly toward the reinforced window and immediately regretted it. The world beneath him was blue. Too much blue. A moving, endless, glittering sheet of ocean stretching out beneath them in all directions. He squeezed his eyes shut as the aircraft banked sharply. His shoulder hit the seat as the angle suddenly changed. The jet took a slight dive, just enough for his entire digestive system to follow suit. He could see where they were, in the middle of the ocean.  

Fantastic. 

The carrier grew larger beneath them, the waves heaving around the grey carrier. Or maybe he was heaving. Hard to tell. Everything had become one connected system of motion. There was a roar, a brutal slam, a force that threw him forward against the straps, and then the jet stopped abruptly, so much so that he thought his soul had continued without him.

The hatch opened, spilling bright ocean air and noise into the cramped interior. The openness made his head swim. A stern-looking gentleman in uniform appeared, already moving.

“Dr Grace,” the man said. “This way.”

Ryland lifted one shaky finger.

Please.

No such luck for respite as the straps were released, and then he was being encouraged upward with firm hands. He opened his mouth to object, or ask where they were, or perhaps say something elegant like: I am going to be sick.  

The deck outside was loud. People moved everywhere in uniforms and headsets, communicating through gestures and shouts beneath the howl of engines. He watched as other people made their way down the ladder to his left, already knowing his shaken body would be forced to follow suit. He began his descent. One rung. Then another. 

Don’t look at the water. 

Don’t think about the fact that the ship is moving. 

His shoe hit the deck, and he took three unsteady steps forward before a familiar voice cut across the chaos.

“Dr Grace!” Eva Stratt called from somewhere ahead of him. “How was your flight?”

He turned toward her, which was a terrible decision as the world turned with him. Stratt stood across the deck in her usual state. Ryland tried to give her a response, but all he could manage was the raising of one feeble hand as he gave her a weak thumbs up, already eyeing up a traffic cone to the side of him. 

Orange. Beautiful. Possibly the greatest object on Earth currently.

He staggered toward it, bent over, and dry-heaved as he clutched it. Nothing came up, which was a blessing. His body was apparently satisfied with the performance of vomiting without offering the catharsis.

This is mortifying. 

The good news was that nobody seemed to be paying him too much attention. He wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand, straightening slowly. His eyes skimmed beyond Stratt, searching the cluster of people behind her, the doorways, the railings, the moving shapes of officers and technicians. Not looking for anyone, obviously. He was a scientist; he was merely observing.

He did not see you.

Thank God. 

For one thing, he was pale, sweating, and clinging to a cone. Not exactly the heroic return of the man who had cracked the reproduction code. Stratt approached him without slowing. 

“Can you walk?”

“Define walk,” he said hoarsely.

She ignored that and turned, expecting him to follow. He did, because that was his life now.  

“Where are we?” It seemed like a good place to start. 

“The ocean,” Stratt replied.

He should have known better.

“Yes,” he said, swallowing carefully. “I did gather the—uh—wet part.”

“The astrophage reproduction,” she continued. “Can you do it at scale?”

Straight to the point as always. 

“Oh. In theory, yes,” he said, perking up. “You just get a bunch of elbow-shaped pipe, put sunlight at one end and—” His stomach squeezed. “Excuse me for just one second—”

He turned sharply toward the cone still in his grasp, bent over, and dry-heaved again. Ryland breathed through his nose. 

“And infrared-lined carbon dioxide in the other,” he groaned, voice only slightly wrecked. “Repeat.”

There. Excellent explanation. 

Stratt resumed walking, and he matched her pace badly. His eyes continued to flick around the deck. You had to be around here somewhere, right?

Maybe he was being clingy; that would have been an accurate assessment. He had only met you once, for God’s sake. But his mind couldn’t help but wander. 

You were one of the most intimidatingly kind people he had ever met, and he worked with teenagers. Everyone here was so stoic, even Carl to an extent, bless his heart. They lacked a warmth that you somehow possessed, something kinder behind the assessing gaze you wore. You were surrounded by power, yet seemed unfazed by it. It was baffling. 

Or, you were just the only person in recent months to compliment him in earnest. 

Pathetic. A schoolboy crush at his big age. 

“Anything else you need for this?”

What had they been talking about?

“Uh—the guy gave me a pill and it’s—uh—still in my throat,” he said. “Water?”

He had just needed to get that out there. A man appeared at Stratt’s side.

“Venti. Two coffees,” he said, handing over two enormous cups before immediately walking away. 

“Or coffee would work?” he offered, eyeing the contents of the woman’s hands.

“I need both,” she said without looking back.

Or not…

She led him toward a bulkhead door and down into the ship’s interior. His shoes squeaked faintly as he followed her through the corridor. 

“Okay,” she said. “This is kind of a tough room. Don’t take it personally.”

Ryland frowned. That was a strange thing to say before showing someone a place. 

“Oh, I don’t need anything fancy,” he said quickly.

He had spent years in academia and knew how to survive in bad accommodation. His dorm at college a core memory. Compared to that hellscape, anything with a bed and functional plumbing was a luxury.

“As long as there’s a shower and somewhere to lie down, I can make it work.” 

Maybe a towel, too. That would be fantastic. 

Stratt pushed the door open and ushered them both inside. The chatter instantly silenced as their figures entered the room. Rows of people sat or stood around, packed into what appeared to be a briefing space. Scientists, military personnel, officials, engineers—he could not classify them fast enough. There was a screen on the wall, papers spread over tables, maps, diagrams, too much information, too many eyes. A low murmur died instantly as he entered.

Oh, God. Please not again. 

His hand drifted instinctively toward his throat, where the pill still sat in protest. His face felt hot and his hair was probably terrible. He was almost certainly still grey from the flight. His eyes darted across the room. Stratt was already moving ahead, comfortable with the silence. 

He tried to assemble himself into the shape of a professional adult man. Shoulders back. Chin up. Do not vomit—again. 

His gaze caught on someone seated near the front, slightly to his right, a slight familiar face that made his chest slightly unravel. A warm expression behind tired eyes gazed back at him, lips curving up into a soft smile.

There you were. 

The only kind eyes he had seen in days. 

He looked at you for too long, long enough for you to hold eye contact as you swivelled to face him, your whole attention settling on his form. The weight of your gaze felt heavier than the others in the room; in fact, the other faces seemed to blur in the background. You did not wear the assessing look you had back in the tunnel. If he dared name the emotion behind it, he would have used the word pleased. 

You looked pleased to see him.

He couldn’t imagine how he looked currently, windswept, lightly dishevelled, nauseated beyond dignity. But you didn’t seem to mind; that alone made the tension in his stomach ease ever so slightly. 

“Hi,” you mouthed.

He looked away, then back at you, giving you a tiny wave. You bit down on your smile at his bashfulness. You started to mouth something else, your body leaning a fraction more, your lips shaping the beginning of words he did not get to read before a hand pressed firmly into the small of his back.

“Everybody,” Stratt began, steering him forward, “this is Dr Ryland Grace from the United States.”

He was positioned in front of a large projector screen before he had time to object. The light from it hit the side of his face, bright and too white after the grey deck and the dim corridors. He blinked hard.

This was much worse.

People were looking at him again. All of them. He could feel every single set of eyes like little points of pressure against his skin. He turned his head instinctively, looking for you.

Help.

You, sadly, were in no position to rescue him. You only kept looking, steady and warm, eyes bright that made his stomach do a strange twist unrelated to motion sickness. Your hair was slightly loosened from what he assumed had been a long day too, a few soft pieces falling as you leaned forward, and the sight of it caught him stupidly. 

“And,” Stratt continued, “he figured out how to breed astrophage.”

The clapping started and he felt even more bewildered. The sound gathered around him, spreading through the room. His mouth twitched before he could stop it. He tried to hide the bashful smile by looking down, but that only made him aware of his wrinkled shirt, his unsteady shoes.

“How did you do it?” A man raised his voice from across the room. 

“How long does the process take?” Another voice cut in before Ryland could answer. 

“Was it reproduced by mitosis or meiosis?”

“What is the incubation period?”

“How much energy was required to trigger the reproductive behaviour?”

“Can you maintain the conditions outside a lab environment?”

Left. Right. Front row. Back of the room. Questions. One after another, overlapping just enough that he could not separate them cleanly. Each one reasonable. Each one important. Each one another hand closing around his shoulders.

“Uhhhh…”

He looked over at you again before he could help it, and you seemed to notice the exact second he started to drown. Your expression changed, not by much. The amusement softened. You sat up slightly straighter, catching his eyes with deliberate calm. Then you gave him a small nod, a thumbs-up, discreet enough that no one else would probably notice, along with some more mouthed words of encouragement. 

You got this. 

He really hoped so.

“Carl and I made a mini Venus out of a plywood box,” he began.

A few people tilted their heads. Not his problem. 

Keep going.

“We replicated the atmospheric conditions. High carbon dioxide, appropriate pressure and temperature ranges, and then we introduced astrophage samples.”

He gestured with one hand, the movement a little too loose.

“The key wasn’t just the CO2. As soon as the samples recognised the spectral signature of carbon dioxide, they—uh…”

Do not say it.

“They—”

Don’t.

He was going to say it.

“They were like, ‘whoomp, there it is.’”

Silence.

Yeah, he expected that. 

Ryland Grace, PhD, former specialist in molecular biology, current leading expert on humanity’s first confirmed extraterrestrial organism, had just explained astrophage reproduction to the Petrova Task Force using a song by a band named Tag Team of all things.

Kill him now. 

He was about to apologise before he heard a bright giggle to his side.  It cut through the room before anyone else could react. Not at him. With him, maybe. Or because of him. Either way, it reached him like sunlight through glass.

You had one hand pressed lightly to your mouth, but it was too late to hide it. Your eyes were lit with amusement, your whole face briefly transformed by it.

Huh. That was the second time this happened. 

Maybe you liked terrible jokes.

Hope sat up in his chest and immediately made itself comfortable. He didn’t have time to question it before Stratt started to move. 

“Dr Grace, please take a seat,” she said finally. 

Ryland’s eyes were still on you as he gladly obeyed her command. Before he could hover uselessly at the edge of the room, you reached over and patted the empty chair beside you. He moved toward it with perhaps too much gratitude. You leaned in slightly, keeping your voice low enough that only he could hear.

“‘Whoomp, there it is?’” The teasing whisper was obvious.

He looked down at the table, fighting a smile.

“It’s not the technical term,” he whispered back.

“No?” Your brows lifted. “Shame. Very accessible.”

He let out a quiet breath that was almost a laugh.

“I was aiming for scientifically rigorous.”

“You missed.”

“Yeah. I noticed.”

You were interrupted before either of you could continue. A man’s voice came through the microphone system with a sharp crackle. 

“While your experiment was crude and clumsy,” the man began, and his head lifted immediately, “our scientists have replicated the results.”

Crude and clumsy?

Wait. 

Replicated what now?

He leaned forward too quickly, one hand catching the edge of the table. The microphone in front of him seemed unnecessarily official. He tugged it a little closer.

“Sorry, uh—” His voice came out louder than expected through the speakers, and he flinched at his own amplification. “Sorry. How did you?”

The man across the room did not seem offended by the question. If anything, he seemed pleased to have something useful to say.

“We estimate an eight-day doubling time under optimal conditions,” he said. “Dr Grace is right. It is the CO2.”

There it was.

“That’s why they’re going to Venus,” he whispered to you.

“You want to say it to everyone?” you asked in return.

Yes. No. Maybe.

You leaned toward your own mic, deciding for him. 

“That’s why they’re going to Venus,” you said clearly. A few faces turned toward you. You let out a chuckle, not quite hiding the softness in it, and angled your head toward him. “Is what Dr Grace wants to say.”

He felt warmth climb behind his ribs.  

“They’re going to breed,” he told the room.

“Whoomp, there it is.” The man opposite you agreed. 

It was now both of your turns to have a giggle. He turned to you, and you were smiling down at the table. There was a brightness in your expression now that made the exhaustion around your eyes seem less severe. You looked lighter when you laughed. 

Yeah, he really had to stop whatever this was in his mind. 

A woman several rows back raised her hand, though she began speaking before anyone officially called on her.

“How long to make two million kilograms?”

Huh?

“Two million?” The words left him before he could make them sound less horrified.

That was not a lab culture. That was not even an industrial batch. That was mountain range logic. 

“Uhhh,” he said into the microphone, buying himself one absolutely pathetic syllable of time. “Why on Earth would you need that much astrophage?”

“Nobody told him?” she asked.

Another man, older, severe-looking, answered from the opposite side of the room. “He had no clearance.”

Ryland’s gaze moved from the man to the woman, then to Stratt.

Clearance?

He had discovered how the alien life form reproduced. He had been flown across the ocean in a military jet. He had just been put in front of a room full of people and introduced as the man who had made scalable astrophage production possible.

And he still had no clearance.

His eyes found you. You were not looking at the woman anymore; instead, you were looking at Stratt. Something silent passed between you both. Not a full conversation, but close enough that he felt the edge of it without understanding the language. Stratt’s face remained almost perfectly still. 

You began to stand; the movement was smooth.  Your hand touched his shoulder lightly and he almost flinched at the contact. It was barely anything. A tap, really. Two fingers against the fabric of his cardigan. But after the noise and pressure of the room, the contact felt startlingly clear. He pushed his chair back and rose beside you as you looked at him gently. 

“I hereby grant you top secret clearance to all information pertaining to Project Hail Mary.”

Who on Earth were you?

“What’s Project Hail Mary?” he asked softly, hoping that you would at least give him a stright answer. 

“I’ll tell you,” you said.

Thank God.

You turned and began walking toward the board at the front of the room and he watched you go. Ryland straightened, dragged in a breath, and made himself focus.

He needed keep up. He had to.

This had to be his favourite room on the ship. It might have been a pathetic thing to have; he didn’t even know if you could even call this a room. 

The screens covered every wall, wrapping around him in an imitation of somewhere that was not here. A beach stretched out in every direction with grey-blue water, the horizon blurred softly beneath a sky heavy with cloud. Waves rolled in slow lines and broke around nothing. Sometimes, if he looked down for long enough, he could almost believe the foam was curling around his ankles. If he focused even harder, he could imagine the cold breeze brushing over his skin, the sting of salt at the edge of his mouth, the weight of damp air settling into his lungs.

Almost.

The pixels always gave themselves away eventually.

A faint flicker in the corner of the sky and the too-perfect rhythm of the water. A gull that passed overhead on the same loop every nineteen minutes and twenty-six seconds. He had timed it. He leaned back and watched the next wave come in.

It had been a few days since the two of you had woken up. Earth days, anyway. The ship measured time in ways he understood, but none of it felt real. Sleep happened when exhaustion finally won. Coffee happened whenever the machine allowed it. Memories arrived without warning, then vanished before he could ask anything useful of them.

They never came at once and were rarely generous. It offered fragments, slipping through his fingers before they fully materialised. Before, it had been his life prior to the mission, but now they all had the same subject matter. 

Your hand touching his shoulder in a briefing room. Your mouth curving around a joke you were trying not to laugh at. Your voice beside him, low enough that no one else could hear. Your face softening when you looked back at him. 

There was more between you than he had first thought; he was certain of that now. When he remembered you, his chest hurt. It didn’t feel like fear; it was more like pressing on a bruise and finding it slightly tender. The feeling came with almost no context; it was simply a pull in your direction that made him want to trust you. He wanted you to trust him in return too.  

The two of you had spoken about it after the next few memories surfaced. Briefly and awkwardly—completely on his part—all the honesty of two people standing on either side of a locked cabinet pretending neither of them had seen the key.

He had watched your face as you spoke, searching for the thing beneath the thing. You were better at hiding than he was. You had told him you remembered the carrier. The briefing. The board at the front of the room. But that was only when prompted by himself.

You had not told him everything. He knew because he hadn’t either.

He disliked it, the secrecy of it all. Though, it did not feel malicious. Malice would have given him something to distrust or resent, something to dull the ache when he looked in your direction. He had remembered the mission two sleeps ago. Enough for the worst part to step out of the dark and announce itself. The fact that this was a mission that neither of you would be returning from. 

This was a one-way trip. 

He should have been angry with you. You had known, or some part of you had known. But all he could think was that he might have done the same thing. If the positions had been reversed, if you had looked at him with that exhausted expression and asked him what came next, would he have told you? Would he have placed that truth in your hands while you were still shaking?

No.

No, he would not have.

He would have let you exist for just a little longer in the merciful dark before switching on the light. Cowardly, maybe. Kind, maybe. Two things can be true at once.

He had not told you he remembered. Every time he looked at you, he wondered if you could see it there. You probably could, he didn’t think he could get anything past you. Speaking it aloud felt too heavy for the current state of things. The sentence itself might crack the fragile structure that the two of you had built over the past few days.

It was made of coffee and nods and shared glances over bad food packets. It was made of him explaining lab equipment while you pretended to understand. It was made of you sitting near him but not too close, and him pretending not to notice when you chose the seat beside his anyway.

It was made of routine, mostly. That's what he was going with.

He woke a little before you most mornings, or what passed for mornings. The ship dimmed and brightened its lights according to some schedule that might once have mattered to mission planners back on Earth. He would open his eyes, wait a moment for the ceiling to stop being unfamiliar, and then turn his head.

You were usually still asleep, bunk was across from his, not far enough for privacy, close enough for him to know when your breathing changed. In sleep, the sharpness left your face. There was softness there too. He watched you longer than he should. Sometimes your brow furrowed in your sleep, your hand twitched against the blanket, you whispered things he could not catch.

On those mornings, he would force himself up before the urge to reach over and wake you gently became too strong, he didn't know where that came from. He would make coffee for both of you, because that was something he could do.  He usually left your cup near your bunk, then he would head down to the lab and try to pretend he was a competent scientist 

You joined him sometimes, not always. Sometimes you came down and leaned against the counter while he worked, asking questions that were too precise to be casual. Other days, you stayed in the upper compartments, busying yourself with whatever felt manageable. The mission files. The control readouts. Inventory. The endless, tedious rituals of staying alive in a place that had never been meant to be a home.

More often than not, he found you here, in the screen room. He’d come in looking for somewhere quiet and found you sitting in the middle of the fake treeline, knees drawn up, staring out at the leaves with an expression he had not known what to do with.

He stopped himself from uttering your name. There had been something so raw in the stillness of you that even he knew not to disturb it. You had looked like someone standing at the edge of a memory, trying to decide whether stepping into it would drown you.

He sighed and let his head rest back. The beach continued around him. Another wave came in, another wave went out. You had gone to rest a few hours ago. He had watched you hesitate at the door before leaving the lab, your hand lingering against the frame as if there was something you meant to say, then you seemed to think better of it.

“Don’t stay up too late, Grace,” you had said instead.

“You keep telling me that as if space has bedtime.”

“It does if I decide it does.”

“Right. Of course. Sorry. Forgot you were in charge here.”

You always seemed to be.

Now he was alone in the screen room, the ghost of your smile still sitting somewhere in his mind. His eyes began to feel heavy. As the moving water blurred slightly, he let himself imagine Earth.

A classroom. A whiteboard. The squeak of a dry-erase marker. A grocery store aisle. Rain on pavement. The smell of soil after watering a plant. A child laughing at something stupid he’d said because children were generous like that. You, in a briefing room.

His throat tightened.

What were you to him?

It felt like friendship. It felt like more than friendship sometimes, but he did not trust himself there. He was lonely. Terrified. Missing huge portions of his own life. Feelings under those conditions were probably not admissible in any serious court of emotional law.

But you had seen him. Hadn’t you? 

He looked to his right. For a moment, he thought he saw someone standing near the edge of the water. No, not someone. Two figures.

They were barely there, caught in the grey distance where the artificial surf met the artificial sky. One taller, shoulders slightly hunched. One beside him, head turned toward the sea. The image flickered as the screens adjusted, but Ryland sat up anyway.

The figures did not move with the loop, and he stared harder. The taller one lifted a hand, pointing toward the horizon. The other tilted their head, listening.

A memory. Maybe.

He shifted, palm braced against the floor, ready to move closer. His breath caught in his chest. If he focused, if he held still enough, maybe the scene would sharpen. If he tried, perhaps he would hear the words. Perhaps there had been a beach once, a real one. Maybe you had stood beside him somewhere with salt air in your hair and told him something he had promised not to forget.

The ship woke before he could reach it. The alarm blared through the room, and the beach vanished beneath flashing warning lights, the screens flickering from soft grey waves to urgent system displays. Ryland flinched so hard his shoulder hit the wall.

“Approaching Tau Ceti orbit. Prepare for engine cut-off.”

Oh.

Oh, that did not sound like a beach-room problem.

The alarm pulsed again, red light washing over the walls.

“Engine cut-off in twenty seconds.”

“What?” he asked the ceiling. “Why engine cut-off?”

The ship, as usual, did not care.

“Engine cut-off in nineteen seconds.”

“No, no, no, wait—” He pushed up immediately. “That seems like something we should talk about.”

“Eighteen.”

He stumbled toward the ladder. 

“Seventeen.”

His hands found the rungs clumsily at first, but urgency improved him. Terror was apparently an excellent personal trainer. He hauled himself upward, shoulders protesting as he dragged himself through the narrow opening. 

“Sixteen.”

“Okay. Great. We’re counting.” He took off toward the control room, half-running, half-lurching. 

“Fifteen.”

He continued upward and grabbed the back of the pilot’s chair.

“Fourteen.”

“Stop saying numbers like that!”

“Thirteen.”

He looked at the panels. There were many panels, all covered in labels he did not understand. Switches sitting in neat banks. 

“Twelve.”

“You know,” he said, voice high as he circled the chair, “when people say count down, usually there is an understanding that someone explained what we are counting down to.”

“Eleven.”

The chair sat in the middle of the room like a dare. The screens were flashing. The alarm was screaming. You were probably still in your bunk, asleep, exhausted, finally getting a few hours of rest after several days of being very brave and very sharp.

He had to handle this. He could handle this.

Probably.

No. Not probably. He would handle this. For you. He could be brave for you. He sat down.

“Pilot detected.”

“Nope!” He shot straight up again, hands raised. 

“Ten.”

Noise from below the ladder echoed behind him. Ryland spun around so fast his foot caught on the chair base. He grabbed the console wall just in time to avoid pitching forward. You emerged from the ladder opening. Your hair was loose and sleep-tangled around your face. Your eyes, still heavy with the blur of waking, were already scanning the room. One hand gripped the ladder. The other pressed flat to the floor as you pulled yourself up.

“What’s happening?” you asked, already more alert than him.

Ryland pointed at the ceiling, the screens, the chair, and possibly his own breakdown.

“What? I—uh—I don’t know.”

Your eyes snapped to him.

“You don’t know?”

“Nine.”

“I woke up by the beach!” he said. “I came as fast as I could!”

You pushed yourself upright, immediately swaying. He stepped toward you on instinct, then stopped himself when you lifted one finger at him.

“I wasn’t—”

“You were going to hover.”

“I was going to—”

You turned to look at him, and your expression spoke a thousand words. 

Yeah, better to stay silent. 

“Eight.”

You looked past him at the buttons. Your face changed very slightly. Most people would have missed it. 

You were scared.

He saw it, and the sight of it did something awful to his chest. It made his own panic multiply, which felt deeply unfair. He had enough panic. He did not need borrowed panic. He had not signed for any additional panic.

“What does it want?” you asked.

“I think the engines are cutting off.”

Your head turned slowly toward him.

“You think?”

“Seven.”

“Yes,” he said. “Mary told me earlier.”

“Mary?”

“Six.”

“The ship.”

“You named the ship?”

“Not the time.”

“You named the ship Mary?”

“It’s short for Hail Mary,” he said, defensive.

Your face went blank.

You didn’t like the name, clearly. 

“Five.”

You stepped fully into the room and grabbed the back of the pilot chair, placing yourself beside him. “What are you doing?”

“I don’t know!”

“Four.”

He grabbed the chair because you had grabbed the chair and imitation seemed like the safest available strategy.

“What happens at zero?” he demanded.

“How should I know?” you snapped.

“You’re the one who always sounds like you know things!”

“That does not mean I know countdown etiquette!”

“Three.”

The ship hummed louder beneath you both. Ryland stared at you. You stared back. The red light kept flickering over your face. He wished, absurdly, that he had not noticed the stray piece of hair stuck to your cheek. 

“Two.”

You tightened your hand on the chair. He tightened his hand on the chair.

“One.”

Ryland braced for death, though death did not arrive.

Nothing exploded. The ship did not snap in half, fall out of space. The alarm stopped and silence dropped into the room. The two of you just stood there, hunched over the pilot chair, knuckles pale against the material, sharing the deeply intimate experience of having not died by countdown.

“Well,” you said, voice low with relief, “that was a lot of stress for—”

Your hair lifted. The loose strands around your face rose slowly, curling upward as though underwater.

“You are now entering zero gravity,” Mary announced.

Ryland yelped, ripped from somewhere ancient inside him. His shoes lifted. His stomach lifted. His soul lifted. He clutched the chair with both hands and you grabbed it too, one arm locking around the side as your body rose slightly beside his. To your credit, you did not yelp. Your eyes went huge, but your mouth pressed into a hard line.

“Grace,” you said sharply. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine!”

“Well, it’s going to have to be! Get a grip.”

“I have a grip!” He lifted one hand half an inch from the chair to show you, immediately regretted the loss of contact, and slammed it back down. 

“You’re panicking.”

“Yes! Good observation!”

“Stop.”

“Oh, great! Thank you. I hadn’t considered stopping.”

You angled yourself against the chair, trying to hook one foot beneath its base. It did not work. Your foot floated up in betrayal, and your expression darkened.

His body began drifting upward despite his hold on the chair. He adjusted, too forcefully. That was a mistake. His shoulder rose, his hips rotated, and suddenly he was not standing so much as slowly tipping backward through the air.

“What the—”

You grabbed the front of his shirt and yanked him back down. He collided softly against the side of the chair, one elbow clipping the armrest.

“Ow!”

“Are you alright?”

“No!” he shouted.

You stared at him, hair floating around your head in a ridiculous halo that would have been beautiful under literally any other circumstance. “You’re alive, Grace." You remind him, eyes pleading with his own as you beg him silently to help.

He recognised that expression, but from where, he did not know. It was familiar, and jarring, and something that he was certain he never wished to see.

You hardly ever looked like that, especially at him. In fact, the only time you looked at him like that was—

Damn it. Slipped away again.

Your grip was still fisted in his shirt. Neither of you seemed to notice for a moment. Then you did. Your eyes flicked down to your hand, then up to his face. Slowly, you loosened your hold but did not quite let go. He saw the tightness in your jaw and the slight tremor you were suppressing through your fingers.

You were scared, and you were still functioning anyway. 

God, you were good at that.

“Petrova scope operational,” Mary said and both of you looked up.

“Do you know what this means?” he asked.

You turned your head very slowly toward him.

“I have a basic understanding of space travel and chunks of my memories missing,” you said. “So yes, Grace, of course I know what all of this means.”

That was sarcasm.

There was no time to question it, but he logged it away as a promising sign. Sarcasm meant your higher faculties were operating. Sarcasm meant you were probably not about to fully unravel. Sarcasm meant he was the nearest available target, which was unfortunate but familiar.

He could deal with that for you.

“Okay,” he said, twisting his body awkwardly around the chair. “There’s a telescope.”

“So?”

“So maybe we look through it?”

Your eyes went back to the screen. “Why?”

“Because Mary just said it was operational.”

“You are making scientific decisions based on the ship talking at you?”

“I am making scientific decisions based on the only thing on this ship that seems to know what’s going on.”

“The thing that won’t answer questions?”

“It answers some questions.”

For a second, your mouth twitched. Finally, some tension eased within you. He pushed off the chair very gently, attempting to glide toward the scope station. He moved roughly three times faster than intended.

“Grace.”

“I know.”

“Grace.”

“I know!”

He stretched one arm out and caught a handhold built into the wall just before he could smack into the side console. His body swung around, legs floating stupidly behind him. A lesser man might have screamed again. Ryland only made a strangled sound this itme. You pushed off after him with far more control.

You reached the wall beside him, your shoulder brushing his. He managed to lie down on a platform and angled himself toward the eyepiece. He looked through the scope, adjusted the focus, and the universe sharpened into view. Tau Ceti sat there, bright and indifferent.

“That’s Tau Ceti,” he said.

“Yep,” you replied. “We got that.”

He ignored you, mostly because you were right and that was annoying. He flicked one switch, then another, moving through visible light filters until the screen beside the scope shifted into infrared.

The display changed as the line appeared. Faint, red, and unmistakable.

“It has a Petrova line.”

You leaned closer, eyes narrowing. “Yeah, I got that too.”

“It’s not dimming.”

“Yes,” you said, as if he was already stating the obvious. 

The Petrova line stretched across the display. Around Earth’s sun, it had meant astrophage. But here, at Tau Ceti, the line did not behave the same way. The star was not dimming. The system was not dying. 

He frowned and adjusted the orientation.

“Careful,” you said.

“I am being careful.”

Trying to be. 

He adjusted another control as he squinted, finding a small mark. He leaned closer.

“What is that?”

“What is what?” you asked, instantly moving nearer.

“That.” He pointed at the screen. “There’s something in the line.”

The little mark sat inside the Petrova signature like a smudge on glass. He switched off infrared, the display shifted back into visible.

“Blip-A detected.”

Mary, excuse me?

Ryland shifted too fast, his body began floating away from the scope. Your hand caught his shoulder and pressed him gently back toward the console.

“What’s a Blip-A?” he asked the room.

Mary did not answer.

“Blip-A detected,” she repeated.

“Yes,” Ryland said, voice thin. “I heard you.”

“Blip-A detected.”

You and Ryland looked at each other. A strange, shared understanding passed between you.

“Yeah,” you said slowly. “No, I now get what you mean.”

Finally, you could understand his love-hate relationship with the damn contraption. 

He nodded, oddly pleased. “Thank you.”

“Blip-A detected.”

"Thank you, Mary," Ryland said through gritted teeth.

He focused his attention back on the screens and buttons in front of him, wanting more than anything to figure this out for you. That was until he heard you shift behind him, letting out a small sound that made his heart lurch.

The ship stilled ever so slightly. A small shadow travelling over the far window.  Ryland felt it before he fully understood it. A dimming. A blotting out of stars. Something large enough and close enough to interrupt the endless black beyond the glass.

Your hand found his sleeve. Your eyes were fixed on the window, all humour gone as your fingers searched for something more.

“Grace,” you whispered.

“I see it.” He said as his eyes followed your own.

The shadow continued to pass beyond the window, something structured and completely foreign to you both.

Ryland realised the worst part was not that he didn’t know what it was; it was that he had no idea how to protect you from it.

a/n: idk if im happy how this turned out but writing it made me feel bittersweet in a way

i hope you enjoyed the next segment. things are still unfolding, but trust me there are some twists i have been hinting at, if anyone can guess them i will be impressed ;))

ive got some work to do on a potential job for the next few days, but i am aiming to get something else out within a week if time allows

as always let me know what you think <3