Nova

4 years later

“Recognize this?”

Ryland held up a vial of Astrophage. Rocky’s reaction was instant. His entire frame recoiled, his heavy carapace jerking backwards.

“We call it Astrophage. It means star eater.”

Astrophage on me star. Bad bad bad bad bad bad.

“Yeah. Same,” Ryland said. His voice sounded hollow; the sheer weight of two dying worlds, billions of lives reduced to a microscopic parasite in a glass tube, settled visibly onto his shoulders. He slumped into his chair, looking suddenly very small.

Madison stood just behind him, a rigid silhouette in the tunnel. Ryland couldn’t see her face, but he didn’t need to; he could feel the pure, defensive tension radiating off her like heat. Her eyes were locked into the screen, her arms crossed over her chest so tightly that her knuckles were turning white. It looked painful, as if she were physically holding herself together.

Rocky happy not alone.

The sentiment hit Madison like a physical blow, catching her completely off guard. The rigid armor of her posture cracked just a fraction. “Why are you alone?” she asked softly.

Was twenty three Eridians on ship. Now only one.

Madison felt a sharp ache bloom in her chest. Twenty three. That wasn’t just a crew manifest; that was a whole community. A tight-knit world of companionship, shared history, and mutual survival, all completely erased.

“Twenty three?” Ryland echoed. “Wow. What happened to them?”

Rocky let out a low, mournful chord, moving to lay in a way that needed no translation. “I’m sorry,” Ryland said softly. For a second, the vast distance between their species simply vanished. They were just grieving creatures stranded in the dark.

“How did they die?” Madison pressed.

Her voice had gone sharp again, clinical and detached, but it was an obvious front. It was a stubborn need for logic acting as a shield against the suffocating sadness of Rocky’s isolation. If she could turn this tragedy into a data point, a mechanical problem to be solved, she wouldn’t have to feel the crushing weight of it.

Rocky not know. Only Rocky not died. Rocky could not fix.

The text scrolled by, followed by a new question:

How many humans on Grace and Madison ship, question?

Ryland reached up to take off his glasses, his hands trembling slightly as he pulled up the hem of his shirt to clean the lenses. It was a nervous habit Madison had noticed him falling into more and more lately. A way to anchor himself when reality got too loud.

“There were four of us and…two died on the way here. I wish I knew why. Now it’s just me and Madison.”

Rocky made a low, rumbling noise, his heavy carapace clicking softly as he raised his limbs, gesturing that encompassed the three of them.

Only us.

Against her own discretion, Madison felt the corner of her mouth twitch. A small, bittersweet smile tugged at her lips despite the grief clinging to the room.

“Correction,” Ryland said. He raised his hands, mimicking Rocky’s circular gesture.

The alien responded with an enthusiastic flurry of notes.

Grace. Madison. Rocky. Save stars.

Ryland and Madison traded a long look. It was a rare moment of total alignment between them. Ryland turned and stepped right up to the thick divider. He closed his hand into a fist and pressed it against the clear material, offering a universal human sign of solidarity.

On the other side, Rocky didn’t hesitate. He mimicked the gesture immediately, pressing his claw against the same spot on the glass.

“Deal.”

There was a low hum of agreement from Rocky. A resonant, vibrating sound of belief that seemed to echo through the divider. Ryland smiled, letting his hand drop. “That’s called a fist bump, by the way.”

Rocky responded with a quick succession of clicks, causing both Madison and Ryland to look over at the translation monitor as the text scrambled to catch up.

“Fist my bump?!” Ryland read out loud, his eyebrows shooting up. “No, it’s fist bump.”

Rocky did it to himself, bringing his two closed primary claws together. The monitor blinked:

Same.

“It’s not the same,” Madison replied, her voice deadpan but a faint, amused twitch returning to the corner of her mouth.

Setting the plan was the easy part; building a physical model to actually visualize it turned out to be an absolute disaster.

Rocky was stubborn. He was utterly adamant that they needed to see the precise orbit of Tau Ceti and the exact flow of the Astrophage infection. Unfortunately, Ryland’s fine motor skills were currently a wreck. The makeshift solar system was a structural nightmare, held together by wire and prayer.

“Exactly. Astrophage has to reach Tau Ceti otherwise we wouldn’t see the Petrova Line,” Ryland said, his brow furrowed in concentration. He accidentally knocked one of the wires which caused the section of planets to fall.

Madison glanced at the laptop, where the text was scrolling rapidly. “Rocky has thoughts on your engineering.”

“Oh, I’m sure he does.”

“He says you are bad at making the model,” Madison read aloud, her tone beautifully dry.

“Do we really need this whole model?”

Rocky let out a string of chirps, triggering a fresh paragraph on the screen. Madison leaned in to read it: “Need know why star not die. Need plan. Need model to make plan. Grace question is dumb.”

She straightened back up, crossing her arms with a smirk. “I told you three times that I should do the assembly. My hands are steadier and I actually have a sense of spatial awareness. But no, Doctor Grace has it under control.”

“I’m the molecular biologist!” Ryland fired back, defending his battered pride. “I should be the one building the-”

Rocky cut Ryland off with a sharp, percussive snap.

Grace try cover. Bad cover. Madison build. Grace watch.

Madison let out a genuine laugh. “See? Even the alien thinks you’re being stubborn. Step aside, Grace. Let me handle the heavy lifting.”

Ryland grumbled something incoherent under his breath, his shoulders slumping in defeat as he took a step back. “Fine. You know, I used to have one of these in my classroom and it was a lot simpler to set up. And the sixth graders managed it without the attitude.”

Madison shot him a look, but the playful smirk resting on her face showed she wasn’t actually annoyed.

Why is a school teacher in space, question?

“That is a great question,” Ryland said, quickly seizing the opportunity to ignore Madison’s expression. “In fact, it’s such a good question that I think it’s time we found you a voice of your own. That way Madison can stop acting as a middleman and adding her own snarky commentary to everything you say.”

Madison’s eyebrow ached in a challenge that felt dangerously familiar. “Are you saying you don’t like my voice?”

“I’m saying your voice is…distracting,” he muttered.

The word hung in the air a second too long, taking on a weight neither of them was prepared for. Ryland immediately felt a sudden heat climb up the back of his neck. Panicking slightly, he turned his attention entirely to the laptop, typing with a sudden focus to avoid her gaze.

“I just meant…you’d be more useful if you weren’t tethered to the screen. That-that’s all.”

Madison didn’t push it. She just stood back and watched him work. The stubbornness that usually defined her posture began to soften, melting into a quiet fascination as she watched his fingers fly across the keys. He was building a bridge, coding a text to speech program from scratch, meticulously filtering through audio files to give Rocky a voice that didn’t involve her constantly reading text off a monitor.

They spent the next hour auditioning various automated voices, eventually settling on a warm tenor. It had a grounded resonance to it. It felt right. It felt like someone they could trust.

When the sheer, biological exhaustion of their journey finally became too much to ignore, their eyes heavy, they began to pack up to head back to their respective bunks on the ship. But Rocky protested through his new voice box. He didn’t want them to leave. He wanted to watch them sleep.

It was an Eridian custom, a deeply ingrained habit of keeping watch over the pack, but Rocky must have also been well-versed in guilt tripping. Madison was entirely sure of it. Because the moment Rocky shared that he used to watch his old crew sleep most days, Ryland caved instantly.

Madison was the hesitant one. She stood, arms tightly crossed, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. The rational, hyper vigilant part of her brain wasn’t thrilled about an alien watching her sleep; it felt borderline creepy, an invasion of the ultimate vulnerability.

She looked over at Ryland, who was dragging a couple of pillows and blankets into the tunnel. “You’re seriously just going to sleep here? Because he pulled the ultimate guilt trip on you?”

“Look, he’s used to a crew,” Ryland said softly, pausing as he looked toward the clear xenonite. “He lost twenty-three of his people, Madison. He’s been entirely alone in the dark and keeping watch is how he protects what he has left. I’m not going to make him feel abandoned again.”

Madison quieted, his words cutting through her remaining defenses. She looked back toward the Hail Mary. The shadows stretching felt heavy, oppressive. She realized that experiencing the dead silence of the ship entirely alone was far more unsettling than sleeping right here.

“Move over, Grace,” she grumbled, though the sharp edge was completely gone from her voice.

Ryland chuckled softly, the tension breaking as he shuffled to the side to make room. “Welcome to the slumber party.”

“Shut up,” she replied without any real bite. She settled, pulling a corner of the blanket over her shoulders and letting out a long breath.

Exhaustion claimed Madison first. Within minutes, her breathing slowed into a slow cadence.

Ryland stayed awake a little longer, staring up at the harsh geometry of the ceiling with Rocky above it. He felt a bit strange, watching his friend sleep. But as he looked at the quiet rise and fall of her shoulders, a jagged shard of memory sliced violently through the thick amnesia fogging his mind.

He’d done this before.

The realization made his breath catch. He remembered the low light of a completely different room back on Earth. He remembered the bitter smell of stale coffee and the exact sight of Madison slumped over a cluttered desk, utterly exhausted by some frantic and shared deadline. It hadn’t been creepy then, either; it had been comfortable. It had been safe.

They hadn’t just been coworkers thrown together by a government project. They had been anchors for each other in a world that was already starting to fracture and fall apart at the seams.

4 years earlier

Months had bled into a thick, caffeinated blur. Time on the boat didn’t move in days anymore; it moved in the life cycles of the Astrophage. 

Madison and Ryland had merged into a two person unit, operating in a shared headspace that felt miles away from a dying Earth. They spoke in a vocabulary of rapid fire variables, Petrova frequencies, and carbon dioxide absorption rates. It was a language that would have sounded like gibberish to anyone else, but to them, it was the only thing that made sense. 

Madison was brilliant, but her stubbornness was a literal force of nature. It was the primary thing that challenged Ryland on a daily basis. Well, that and the infuriating fact that she was usually right. On the rare 0.1% of the time when Ryland actually caught an error of hers, he guarded that victory like a trophy. 

“Grace!” 

The shout echoed, sharp and impatient, seconds before she even appeared. Madison was a storm, marching toward him with a clipboard gripped like a weapon. Ryland didn’t even have to look up from the equipment to know that tone. It was her 'I found a mistake and I’m going to enjoy making you eat it' voice. 

She stepped into the small, cramped lab. Her hair a mess from a long night, white lab coat flapping behind her. “Your logs are wrong,” she announced, dropping the clipboard onto the table. “All of them. Every single entry from the last six hours.” 

Ryland didn’t flinch. He didn’t even pull his eye away from the microscope. He just calmly adjusted the fine focus, his hand steady despite the adrenaline spike her presence always triggered. “No, they aren’t. You’re just looking at them through the distorted lens of your own ego, Madison.” 

“I am looking at them through the lens of objective physics, Ryland. I have the hard data right here. Your conversion rations are off. By a lot. If we use these numbers to calculate the fuel for the Hail Mary, we’re not launching a mission. We’re building a very expensive firework.” 

“Madi, we’ve been through this,” Ryland said, finally pulling back from the eyepiece. “Just because you have a feeling or you don’t like how I chart doesn’t mean the science is broken. It just means I’m not a computer.” 

Madison didn’t respond with words. She just stood there, her weight shifting aggressively from one leg to the other. Ryland recognized that stance instantly. It was her tactical posture. The physical manifestation of the St. James refusal to back down. It was the look of someone who was already five steps ahead and was simply waiting for him to catch up on his own failure. 

He sighed, the sound heavy with a mix of exhaustion and begrudging affection, and pushed his chair back. “Alright, Madi. Enlighten me,” he said, gesturing broadly at the clipboard. “Where exactly did I fail today?” 

“See?” She leaned over him immediately. She tapped the tip of her pen against the paper with a rhythmic, annoying precision. “This point right here is skewed. This entire projection is based on an outdated Astrophage migration rate from three cycles ago. And this? I-I don’t even know what this is. Honestly, Ryland, I’m starting to think you’re sabotaging the data just so I’ll come over and fix it for you.” 

Ryland smirked, moving out of his seat as she practically shoved him aside to claim it. She was already scratching out his neat notes, replacing them with her own aggressive handwriting. “Well, you keep insisting you’re the smartest person in the room,” he teased, watching the way her brow furrowed as she recalculated. “I’m just a teacher giving you the opportunity to prove it.” 

“When you do shit like this, I don’t have to prove it. It’s a self-evident truth,” she muttered. The bite in her voice was there, but it was softened by a tiny, suppressed tug at the corner of her mouth. The ghost of a smile she refused to give him.

Ryland didn’t go back to the microscope. He couldn’t. He just sat there, anchored by her presence, watching the way her eyes darted across the data. He watched the way she unconsciously chewed on the end of her pen when she hit a snag in the dynamics, her entire body tensing with the effort. At twenty four, she was such a jarring mix of raw, terrifying intellect and a defensive shell that he was slowly peeling back. 

“You’re staring again,” Madison said. She didn’t look up. She didn’t even pause her scratching pen. 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Ryland lied instantly, his face heating up as he reached for a beaker that he didn’t actually need. 

“Ryland, I can see your reflection on the monitor. You aren’t exactly subtle.” 

She finally looked over her shoulder, her eyes catching his. She didn’t look annoyed or defensive. She just smirked. A small knowing expression that made his pulse hump in a way that had nothing to do with the fate of the sun. 

She turned back to the logs and it went quiet. It wasn’t the heavy silence of the early days, but the comfortable rhythm of two people who had finally found the same frequency while trying to save the world. The silence lasted all of ten seconds before Madison’s pen stopped mid stroke. She didn’t look up, but her voice dropped an octave, losing the sharp edge. 

“You really didn’t see the drift? Or were you just hoping it would stabilize on its own?” 

Ryland leant against the workbench behind him, watching her profile. “I saw it. I think I wanted to be wrong. If the rate is accelerating that fast, our window just shrank by three weeks.” 

Madison finally set the pen down. She turned her chair fully toward him, the pride slipping for a moment. “Eighteen days,” she corrected. “We lost eighteen days because those little bastards decided to eat faster.” She looked at her hands, then back at him. “You shouldn’t have hidden it in the logs, even if you were just processing.” 

“I wasn’t hiding it,” Ryland said softly. “I was verifying. I didn’t want to bring it to you until I was sure. You already carry enough of this mission on your shoulders, Madi.” 

“Oh, please. My shoulders are fine,” she snapped, though there was no heat in it. “What? You think I’m going to break? I’m twenty four, not made of glass.” 

“I know you aren’t glass,” Ryland replied, a tired smile tugging at his lips. “You're more like carbon fiber. High tensile strength, incredibly light, and impossible to bend without a lot of screaming.” 

Madison rolled her eyes but her posture relaxed. “Carbon fiber. Real poetic, Grace. You been practicing that one in the shower?” 

“Maybe. It’s better than the expensive firework line you came in with.” 

“Hey, that was a classic,” she defended. “So, eighteen days. Can we make it?” 

“If you’re the one doing the math? Yeah. I think we can.” 

“Good,” she said, snatching the clipboard back and hopping off the chair. She closed the few feet between them, slapping the board onto his chest. “Then you’re making me coffee. The real stuff. If I’m saving the human race in record time, I’m doing it with a decent caffeine to blood ratio.” 

“Yes, ma’am,” Ryland teased. “Anything else, Oh Brilliant One?” 

“Just…don’t verify the bad news alone next time, okay? It’s a big apocalypse. There’s enough room for both of us to look at the data.” 

“Deal,” Ryland said. 

He lingered in the lab for a moment, the silence feeling hollow. He looked down at the clipboard she’d shoved into his chest. Amidst the aggressive corrections to the complex calculus she’d scrawled in the margins, he noticed a tiny, almost microscopic doodle in the bottom corner: a stick-figure Ryland wearing a teacher’s hat, standing next to a sun that looked suspiciously like a frowny face. 

He let out a short, breathy laugh and shook his head. “Unbelievable.” 

Upon Ryland’s return, Madison was already hunched over her workbench; three different tablets propped up against an equipment box. “Sugar?” he asked, reaching for the packets he had stashed away for his own. 

“Two,” she muttered, not looking up.

He placed the cup beside her, along with two packets, making sure not to obscure her view of the trajectory. Her eyes didn’t flicker away from the screen as she reached for the sweetener, ripping them open and dumping them in. She took a long slow sip, her shoulders dropping about an inch. “Okay. This is acceptable. You can live for another six hours.” 

“Generous of you,” Ryland said, grabbing his chair and rolling it into her space. He watched her for a second, the way the blue light of the screens reflected in her eyes. “Madi. About those eighteen days. If we can’t bridge the gap, what’s the backup?” 

Madison finally looked at him, the sarcasm draining away. Her expression was flat. “There is no backup. We either find a way to make the Astrophage more efficient at breeding, or the Hail Mary stays a very heavy lawn ornament. But we’ll find it. Because I’m too young to die in a frozen wasteland, and you’re too annoying to let the sun go out.” 

“Fair point,” he conceded with a slight chuckle. 

“Besides,” she added, her voice dropping to a softer, more human register as she looked back at the screen. “The data doesn’t lie. It just plays hard to get. We just have to be more persistent than the law of physics.” 

“I think persistent is your middle name, Madison.” 

“It’s actually Laura,” she shot back, the smirk returning. “But I’ll take the compliment. Now shut up and work, we have a star to fix.” 

Ryland watched her for a moment longer before leaning in to look at the new data set. “Laura, huh?” 

“Don’t start,” she warned, though she didn’t stop him from pulling his chair closer. 

The boat rocked gently on the dark water. A tiny, fragile speck of life in a world growing colder by the minute, but as Madison started explaining a new theory, gesturing wildly with her pen, the darkness felt just a little further away. 

The next few hours were a blurred symphony. The lab, once a cold vault, had transformed into a hub of chaos. Madison’s world has shrunk down to a single glowing screen; she’d rigged a laptop to run real time frequency analysis on the melodic hums of the creature they’d started calling Rocky. To anyone else, it was just a series of chords. To her, it was a heartbeat.

But even as her brain worked overtime, her eyes kept drifting. Ryland was a constant in her peripheral vision. He was currently narrating everything into a camera that had been sent with them on this journey, no doubt to log their findings.

“If I can’t understand anything that he’s saying, he puts on a puppet show for me and my tiny brain. And you know what? I don’t mind it.”

Madison let out a small chuckle. She was perched in a swivel chair, her fingers tracing the frayed edges of the journal that had become her anchor. Slowly, the static in her head was clearing, replaced by the sharp and sometimes painful ink of the woman she used to be.

She spun the chair around as Ryland wandered into her space. “Well, I’ve made a discovery,” she said, propping her chin on her fist and looking up at him. “Apparently, I was a remarkably jaded person back home.”

“You? Jaded?” Ryland recoiled, pressing a dramatic hand to his chest as if he’d been physically struck. “I’m shocked. Truly. I never would have guessed from your incredibly warm and sunny disposition.”

“Ha-ha,” she deadpanned, though a smirk was already surfacing. She felt a sudden, rare spark of mischief. “I don’t see much about you in here, though. I’m skimming for Dr. Ryland Grace and coming up empty. You must not have been very important to me.”

Ryland stopped dead. The look on his face was a goldmine. A mix of wounded pride and sudden intense curiosity. “I feel like you’re lying to me. The lady doth protest too much. Let me see the book,” he said, reaching out with a playful swipe.

“No!” she cried, snapping it shut and hugging it to her chest.

“If I’m not in there, then it shouldn’t matter if I read it,” he pointed out, closing the distance. He was grinning now. That lopsided, infectious smile that had a frustrating way of making her forget they were light years from home.

He lunged for it, but Madison’s reflexes were faster. She kicked off the floor, rolling her chair back and scrambled to her feet. “It’s called private thoughts, Ryland! Even if it is about you - which it isn’t!”

“Come, on just one page!”

“Back off! Why are you so obsessed with my diary?”

“Why are you so obsessed with hiding it?”

It was a game, and they both knew. Over the last few days, Ryland had started to map the geography of Madison’s moods. He knew the difference between her “leave me alone” tone and her “chase me” tone. This was definitely the latter.

It was a childish display in the middle of a star system, but it was the first time Madison had felt truly alive since waking up. Ryland didn’t actually want to read her secrets; he just wanted to keep that rare, breathless giggling ringing through the room. It was the best thing he’d heard since he woke up.

Finally, he used his reach to snatch the book from her hand, holding it high above his head. Madison stopped, her chest heaving, fists on her hips as she glared up at him.

“Now, that’s just cheating. Height is a cheap tactic, Grace.”

“I prefer the term ‘kinetic advantage,’” Ryland said. He looked down at her, the goofy grin not just fading, but dissolving entirely. The air in the lab suddenly felt too thin to breathe, charged with the heavy electricity of everything they were too terrified to put into words.

Ryland’s gaze dropped to her mouth for a beat - a dangerous, lingering second - before snapping back to her eyes. His thumb, almost of its own accord, began to graze the leather cover of the journal he was still holding high, the rhythmic scuff of skin against the binding the only sound in the room.

He realized, with the kind of sudden clarity that usually only came during a scientific breakthrough, that he loved the fire in her. It wasn’t just the sharp spark she used as a shield, but the way she looked at him when she thought he was preoccupied with a monitor. A look that held the desperate hope of a person who had found the only solid ground in a collapsing universe. He felt an irrational need to protect that look. To be the thing that didn’t drift away.

Madison’s posture softened, the rigid defiance draining out of her. The playfulness evaporated, leaving behind something quiet, raw and dangerously exposed. She could feel the steady, rapid thumping growing stronger in her throat. She looked down at her shoes, the silence of the lab suddenly feeling very small and heavy.

“I can…tell you one thing that’s in there. About me. If you want,” she said softly.

Ryland lowered his arm, the journal forgotten in his hand. His voice dropped to a low, steady register. “Okay.”

“I have a degree in Astrophysics,” she whispered. “I switched to a graduate program for Biology later, but I never finished. I’m assuming because of this. So, technically…” She looked up, a tiny defiant glint returning to her eyes. “I’m probably smarter than you.”

Ryland let out a bark of a laugh, the tension breaking like glass. “You just had to ruin it, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, well, it felt too serious. I think humor is my only coping mechanism,” she replied, stepping forward to reclaim her book.

The hand off was agonizingly slow. As Ryland lowered the journal, their fingers didn’t just brush; they collided and lingered. The rough texture of his calloused skin caught against the smoothness of hers, sending a jolt through her that had nothing to do with the ship’s faulty wiring. Neither of them pulled a way. For a long beat, they stayed locked in that tiny, shared space, the journal acting as a flimsy bridge between them.

The air in the lab grew thick. It felt as though the atmospheric seals had failed and the vacuum of space was pressing in on the glass, trying to force them closer together. Madison could hear the hum of the ship’s engines, but it was drowned out by the roar of her own blood in her ears. She was hyper-aware of everything: the faint scent of recycled oxygen clinging to him, the way his chest rose and fell in a jagged rhythm, and the heat of his hand still ghosting over hers.

Ryland’s eyes were dark, searching hers with an intensity that made her feel like he was reading the pages she’d worked so hard to hide, even with the book closed. Madison felt her resolve beginning to liquefy. If he leaned in another inch, she knew she wouldn’t back up. The realization terrified her more than the mission itself.

Finally, she forced herself to blink, breaking the trance before it consumed them both. She cleared her throat, a dry sound that felt loud in the quiet lab, and used the journal to create a sliver of distance. She tapped the leather binding lightly against his chest, right over his heart, the solid thump acting as a reset button for her brain.

“I’m going to get some sleep,” she managed, her voice steadier than she felt. “Try not to break the ship while I’m out.”

“Okay. Yeah. Sleep is a…a solid, scientifically backed plan,” Ryland stuttered. He shifted his weight, his hands suddenly looking like they didn’t know where to go now that they weren’t near her. His eloquence had failed him entirely, leaving him standing there with a look of dazed, wide eyed wonder.

Madison caught the way his voice cracked, just a tiny, human hitch, and it sent a final sharp tingle down her spine. She let a smirk pull at the corner of her mouth. A small triumph over his sudden loss of cool.

She turned and headed for the bunks. Her stride was different now. Not the heavy, mechanical trudge of a woman waiting to die, but something a little lighter. She could feel his eyes on her back, a warmth that followed her all the way around the corner.

Ryland didn’t move. He stood in the absolute silence of the lab, surrounded by glowing monitors but his mind was stuck on the ghost of her fingers. He waited until she was gone before he finally allowed himself to crumble.

While the makeshift diorama drifted back toward the alien craft, Ryland stayed busy. He was a mess of cords and cables, fussing as he tried to optimize the ship’s power. Madison stayed tucked in her corner, finally diving into her journal. 

Even with the lab between them, the air felt thick. Madison tried to focus on her own handwriting, but her eyes kept wandering. Every time she looked up, she caught Ryland watching her. Every time he reached for a tool, he’d find her already looking. 

It was ridiculous. They were pining after each other like they were in a high school hallway. Ryland had never met anyone like her. She could out math him without breaking a sweat, all while looking like a literal star. Madison, for her part, watched him in a private amusement. A middle school science teacher? No way. He was too brilliant, and honestly too attractive, to spend his life grading homework.

Then, a cylinder descended from the alien craft. It was a massive, five armed thing that locked onto their port. It was an invitation. 

They suited up in heavy silence. The only sound was the rhythmic clacking of seals locking and the hiss of their oxygen tanks. When the hatch cranked open, revealing the void of the connecting tube, the reality hit. 

Ryland froze. His boots stayed glued to the threshold, his breathing coming in ragged thumps through the comms. Madison didn’t need a heart rate monitor to know that he was spiraling; she could practically feel his pulse vibrating through the space between them. Without overthinking it, Madison reached out. Her gloved hand found his, squeezing tight enough for him to feel it. It wasn’t a simple gesture; it was a tether. She was grounding him, anchoring his panic. 

Ryland’s head snapped toward her, eyes wide and searching behind his faceplate. She didn’t say anything. She just gave him a firm single nod as if to say: I’m here and we’re doing this. Ryland took one more shuddering breath, his fingers curling back around hers. Together, they climbed out. 

They drifted through the tunnel, bouncing from wall to wall, curiosity pulling them deeper into the dark. Madison traced the patterns, floored by the seamless craftsmanship. At the far end sat a solid barrier inset with small viewports of something that looked like plexiglass. Ryland hesitated, then gave three soft taps on the clear surface. 

The silence that followed was deafening. Then, a screeching reply tore through the quiet, sending them both tumbling backward. As they scrambled back to the glass, a hand appeared. Three fingered with texture of stone. It pressed against the other side, mirroring Ryland’s position and tapped three times. A small smile broke across Madison’s face. 

The creature held up two little figures made of the same material as the dioramas. “Is that us?” Ryland asked. The alien let out a melodic hum of agreement. Then it held up a model of the Hail Mary and gave it a spin. 

“Our ship,” Madison whispered. They watched in awe as the creature moved the tiny people back toward the ship. “He wants us to go back.” Another affirmative hum. “Okay. We will. We’ll be back soon.” 

She grabbed Ryland’s arm, steering him back toward the airlock while he was still in a visible trance. Once the door hissed shut and the pressure equalized, they just stood there, staring at nothing. 

“Ryland,” Madison said, her voice a shaky whisper. “We just met an alien.” 

Ryland couldn’t find his voice. He just nodded, a breathless smile coming across his mouth. 

The curiosity became an itch Madison couldn’t scratch. When the invitation came once again, they didn’t hesitate. She and Ryland scrambled to gather every light source they could find, taping what was possible to their suits and clutching the rest. This time, when the airlock opened, they weren’t met with a float. They were sent flying back. There was gravity. They walked down the corridor this time, placing the lights down once they reached the barrier which was now completely transparent. 

“Anybody home?” Ryland knocked, his nerves manifesting as his usual rambling. “I like what you’ve done with the gravity!” He gave a thumbs up to the void before holding up a creation made of dried noodles. “I made you a ship! It’s Ramen. I only made one, I’m…not sure how many of you there are.” 

“Grace, shut up,” Madison hissed, hearing a sound from the shadows. The alien emerged, moving with a cautious, spider like grace. It seemed just as wary of them as they were of it.

“Hi,” she said softly. She kept her voice low and steady, trying to project a calm that she didn’t entirely feel. They watched as it approached the Ramen ship Ryland had taped to the barrier. Suddenly, the creature lunged at the glass. Madison jumped, and Ryland let out a startled shout, reflexively brandishing a tool as a weapon. 

“Ryland!” Madison yelled. 

“I’m sorry!” he shouted back, then looked back at the creature. “I’m sorry! You just - you scared me when you went -” He let out a mock roar. The alien mimicked it right back. Testing a theory, Ryland raised both arms. The creature followed suit. He started a goofy dance by moving his arms and hips, and the alien mirrored the dance perfectly. 

Madison watched in disbelief. He’s having a dance off with an alien. She tried to roll her eyes, but her lip twitched with a suppressed grin. “Okay, okay, that’s enough,” she said, stepping in once Ryland started posing. She leaned closer, shining her light on the creatures body, taking in the anatomy. “Wow. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to stare but…you’re incredible.” 

The creature let out a series of rhythmic tones, tapping against the barrier. Ryland tapped back, grinning. “You like tapping, huh?” The two went back and forth but Madison realized that he wasn’t just making noise. 

She followed the direction of the creatures movements. “Grace,” she said, her voice sharpening with realization. “He’s not tapping. He’s pointing.” 

“Oh,” Ryland muttered, feeling a flush of embarrassment as he spotted the container. It was similar to the ones that had been sent their way before. However, upon opening this one, there was something different. Inside there were small spheres connected by fine wire. 

“I don’t have one of these! I love it, thank you,” Ryland said. Madison studied it. It almost looked like a piece of jewelry. The creature made a melodic string of sounds, gesturing. “Put it on my head? No? Take off my head?” The alien stomped in frustration. “Take my helmet off?” 

The alien practically bounced with excitement. 

“Bad idea,” Madison warned instantly. “If we take these off, our heads go…” She made a vivid exploding motion with her hands. The creature repeated the same sequence of tones, desperate to be understood. 

At that moment, their lights had finally started to give out. “Well, this has taken a turn,” Ryland said. “Thank you for - what I hope is not handcuffs.” He continued to ramble, but Madison’s mind was racing. She mentally counted the spheres.

Eight.

Two rings of eight. 

She froze. 

“It’s two rings of eight,” she whispered. “Grace, look at me," she pulled them to a stop. "Two rings of eight. O2.”

“This is oxygen!” Ryland called out to confirm, getting a happy response from the extraterrestrial. “I don’t know. If we’re wrong, we’re really, really dead.” 

Ryland hesitated, the magnitude of the risk paralyzing him. To him, the math didn’t add up yet. The margin for error was a death sentence. But Madison wasn’t looking at the math. She was looking at the alien. 

She was a St. James; she remembered the name was synonymous with the kind of scientific “intuition” that others called reckless. Her father was famous for his brilliant yet terrifying leaps of faith. She looked at the creature’s three fingered hand pressed against the glass. It wasn’t just a specimen; it was a person. A person who had gone to the trouble of building a diorama, counting out the atomic structure of the very thing they needed to survive. 

The realization hummed in her bones, steadying her trembling hands. She closed her eyes and took one last filtered breath. Ryland heard her over the comms, turning just as her hands reached for the seals of her helmet. 

“What are you…” he choked on the words. “No. Don’t.” 

“Why not?” she asked, her voice surprisingly steady. “Let’s give it a shot, shall we, Dr. Grace?” Without waiting for his protest which she knew was coming, she unlatched the seals and lifted the helmet. The air was sharp and strange but it was air. She took a deep, lung filling breath. Her head didn’t explode. 

Thank God, it didn’t explode. 

4 years later

Madison sat on the cold floor, alone. In front of her was a container with a strip of masking tape stuck to it. M. St. James. Seeing the surname was like a physical key; the Madison part finally clicked into place. These were her things. Her life, boxed up and sterilized. 

Ryland had brought it to her before leaving to give a “well-deserved” funeral to those who hadn’t been as lucky as they were. If you could call it that.

She popped the lid. Inside were the fragments of a life: a few changes of clothes, a hairbrush with strands of her own hair still in it, a scrapbook, and a thick, battered journal labeled Vol. Three. She sifted through the fabric first, holding up a few shirts, relieved to find that her past self’s style still felt like her. Then the journal. A quick flip through the pages revealed the scribbles of her private thoughts. The last third of the book was blank from what she could tell. 

I must have been writing until I was brought here.

Lastly, she reached for the scrapbook. She pulled out a photo of a woman with her same jawline and soft eyes. “Mom,” Madison whispered. The word felt like home. Beside it was a photo of a teenage Madison, grinning next to a man. In the next photo, she was a little girl in an oversized flight helmet. His hand resting on her shoulder as he pointed out the switches of a cockpit. He had a charming smile and a kind look in his eyes whenever he looked at her. 

“Dad,” she murmured, tracing his face. A sharp pang hit her chest. She knew the weight of the grief. It was a familiar feeling. She kept flipping, seeing friends, coworkers then to candid shots of herself: blocking the camera with a hand, flipping it off with a smirk, mid-laugh, and one where she was posing in glasses she didn’t remember owning. But the last photo on the page made her breath hitch. 

It was Ryland Grace. 

It was a selfie. Ryland had his arm around her neck, grinning widely. She moved to the next page and found a collage of their life together. In one photo, their arms were looped around each other; another, he was kissing her cheek while she scrunched up her face that looked half-annoyed, half-happy.

“Holy shit,” she breathed. 

They weren’t just crew mates. 

They weren’t just colleagues. 

They were together. 

But how far did it go? Were they dating? Engaged? Before she could spiral, a shrill alarm tore through the room.

“Approaching Tau Celtic orbit,” a calm, robotic female voice announced. “Prepare for engine cutoff.” 

“What the hell?” Madison scrambled to her feet, legs still a little wobbly, and sprinted toward the cockpit. Ryland was already there, his face pale as he fumbled with the controls. 

“What’s happening?” She yelled over the siren.

“I don’t know! It’s counting down!” 

They both grabbed the nearest stability just as the numbers hit zero. The floor didn’t just drop, it vanished. Gravity died and they began to drift. Ryland let out a panicked, undignified shriek as he floated towards the ceiling. Madison, despite the adrenaline, couldn’t help but roll her eyes. This was the guy? This was who she chose to be involved with?

“Petrova scope operational,” the voice, whom Madison had internally dubbed Mary, stated. 

Driven by an instinct she didn’t even understand, she glided towards the scope. 

“What are you doing?” Ryland called out, still flailing in the air.

”Looking! What does it look like?” She pressed her eye to the lense and froze. The sheer scale of it was breathtaking. “It’s Tau Ceti. Look.” 

He drifted over as she moved aside. For a moment, panic was replaced by shared awe. Ryland flipped a switch and the view shifted to a glowing red. “A Petrova line,” he muttered. “But it’s not dimming. Why?” 

He reached out to the screen, trying to rub away a smudge that seemed to be blocking the line. But it didn’t move. It wasn’t a smudge. 

“Blip A detected,” Mary announced. 

“What’s a Blip A?” Ryland asked. 

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Madison said, pushing off a console toward the observation port. She looked out and her breathing caught. “Oh my god.” 

A ship was hanging there. It wasn’t sleek and definitely wasn’t human. It defied every rule of human engineering. Ryland joined her, stared for three seconds, and immediately started back-pedaling through the air.

“What are you doing?” She asked as he scrambled to his seat. 

“Getting us out of here!” He shouted, fumbling with his harness. 

“Why? There’s someone else out here!” 

“Doesn’t matter!” 

“Grace!” 

“Does that ship look human to you?” He barked, hands flying over the switches. “Because it doesn’t to me. We’re leaving.” 

He managed to get the thrusters engaged but Mary’s voice returned: “Blip A detected.” 

Ryland groaned. “What do they want?” 

“They’re sending us something,” Madison said, watching a small object hurtle toward them. “It could be a message.” 

“It could be a bomb!” Ryland countered, bracing for impact.

The object hit the hull with a dull thud and bounced off. No explosion. Madison gave him a look of disdain. “Not a bomb.” 

“Blip C detected,” Mary said. This time, the container moved with agonizing slowness. 

“Why is it so much slower than the first one?” Ryland asked. 

Madison patted his shoulder condescendingly. “Because they think we’re dumb.” 

 After a lot of back and forth and Ryland acting like a martyr, he finally suited up to go get the thing. Madison watched him on the monitor, leaning back with a smirk as he flailed his way through the airlock. It was funny for about thirty seconds. Then he hit the void, and the humor drained out of her. Seeing him out there made her chest tight. She actually cared about this idiot. Great. 

Once he hauled the object back inside, they hovered over it with the scanner. That screen blinked back at them and Madison’s brain stalled. “It says Xenon,” Madison said, squinting at the readout. She shook the scanner like that would change anything. “That’s impossible.” She ran the scan again. And again. “Maybe the zero gravity is messing with the sensors?”

Ryland didn’t answer, grunted and restored the centrifugal gravity. The object thudded to the table once it kicked in. Madison ran the scan one more time. 

“It still says fucking Xenon!” She snapped, throwing the scanner onto the table and it nearly fell off. 

“Up is down, left is right, Xenon’s a solid,” Ryland rambled, pacing the small space. “Aliens are real. I’m wrong about everything and everything is wrong.” 

Madison tuned out his spiral. Her eyes were fixed on the container.  Everything is wrong. “Lefty tighty, righty loosey,” she muttered.

Ryland stopped mid pace. He looked at the container, then at her, and the lightbulb finally went on. He grabbed the end and twisted. 

“Wait, we should probably-” Too late. He’d already cracked it open. He gave it a big whiff and immediately shouted at the smell, shoving the thing into the gloved lab box. 

They spent the next hour, picking through the contents. One piece of…whatever it was…expanded the second it was touched. Ryland jumped back, whipping his arms out of the gloves. Madison let out a dry laugh before taking his place. They kept digging until they found it: a diorama of a solar system. 

“Eridani Sirius,” they realized in unison. Neighbors. Very, very distant neighbors. 

Later that night, the ship felt different. The frantic energy had settled into something quieter but heavier. Ryland was hunched over the workbench, adding a tiny model of Earth to the alien map. Madison watched him from the edge of the light. He looked different when he was working - steady, focused, less like a vibrating ball of anxiety. 

“What were you before this?” she asked, breaking the silence. 

“I…was a middle school science teacher,” Ryland answered. He didn’t even look up from the soldering iron. 

“A middle school teacher?” Madison leaned against the table, a skeptical eyebrow raised. “They sent a guy who explains baking soda volcanoes to save the human race? How does that work?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.” 

“Come on. You have to know more than basic biology to be on this ship. What else is in that head of yours?”

He paused, the iron hovering just above the wire. “I studied molecular biology. Then I ended up in a classroom. The middle part is…blurry.” 

“Okay, that makes a little more sense,” Madison teased. “So, Doctor Grace, huh?”

Ryland’s shoulders went rigid. The title hit him like a physical weight. He knew that sound. He’d heard her say it before. 

“Do you remember how we know each other?” he asked suddenly, turning to face her. “I recognized you the second I saw you. Not your name, just…you. But I don’t know why.” 

Madison looked at him. The memory of that scrapbook felt like a lead weight in her pocket. She wasn’t ready. She didn’t even know what she felt yet, let alone how to explain it to him. 

“Your guess is as good as mine,” she said, throwing his own line back at him with a small smile.

Ryland let out a short laugh.  “So, I’m not crazy for feeling like there’s a before for us?” 

“Oh, I didn’t say you weren’t crazy,” she shot back, smirking. “I’m pretty sure we’re both losing it. But yeah. We’re in the same boat. Might as well keep rowing.” 

Ryland went back to soldering. The frantic energy was gone. Madison stayed in the shadows for a minute, just watching the way the light caught his face. He looked slightly older than he did in the photos. More tired. 

“You should get some rest, Madison,” he said, not looking up. “Whoever - whatever -  is out there isn’t going anywhere.” 

“Neither are we,” she muttered. 

She turned and navigated the narrow hallway to her bunk. The ship felt smaller now. Not because of the walls, but because of the two ghosts living inside it. She sat on the edge of the cushions and pulled the scrapbook out from where she’d hidden it under the thin pillow. She didn’t flip through the whole thing. She just looked at that one photo. The one where he was kissing her cheek and she was trying (and failing) to look like she hated it. Her thumb traced the edge of the paper. 

She had her name back. She had a past. But as she tucked the book away and stared up at the dark ceiling, the only thing that felt real was the muffled sound of Ryland moving around in the next room. 

4 years earlier

The frantic chatter of the room died the second Eva Stratt walked in. Everyone knew who she had gone to recruit, and the air crackled with curiosity.

Madison stayed in the shadows in the back of the room, exactly where she demanded to be. Her one condition for joining the Task Force was simple: she stayed behind the curtain. She would provide the math, the biology, the logic, but she refused to be the face of it all. She wasn’t interested in being the face of the apocalypse.

Following Eva was the infamous Dr. Ryland Grace. The man who’d cracked the code on how Astrophage bred. The moment he stepped inside, he was bombarded with questions flying at him from all sides. Madison watched him from the dark, eyes narrowing. He was different than expected. He had that academic spark, sure, but it lacked the ego that she was used to seeing.

“What’s Project Hail Mary?” Grace asked.

Eva didn’t bother answering. Instead, her eyes drifted to the woman behind her. Ryland followed her gaze, finally noticing the young woman sitting in the shadows. She looked barely old enough to have finished her undergrad let alone sitting in a room full of elite biologists.

Madison sighed, the sound of someone who had hoped to stay invisible just a little longer. She stood, boots clicking against the floor as she moved to the front.

“Lights, please,” she directed. “And bring up the presentation.”

The room dimmed, screen flickering to life. Madison didn’t waste time with any sort of introduction. She went straight for the data she’d been working on for weeks. “Alright,” she began, voice steady and clinical. “The sun isn’t the only star dying. There is a clear pattern of infection. Every star was infected by its neighbor, except one.”

She gestured toward a single pinprick on the map.

“Tau Ceti,” Grace said into the microphone.

“Exactly, Tau Ceti. Twelve light years away. It remains completely unaffected, despite being right in the middle of the cluster.”

“Why?”

Madison looked at the assembled Task Force, a ghost of a smirk playing on her lips. “Ready?”

“We don’t know!” the room shouted back.

“Which is why,” Eva stepped forward, “we decided to build a ship to go there and find out.”

“It’s 11.9 light years away, you can’t just build an interstellar ship,” Grace let out a short, dry chuckle.

“Oh yeah, we can. The ship is not really the problem. The energy required to power the ship is the problem.”

“Was the problem,” Madison corrected, her voice cutting through the room.

Grace looked at her. “The Astrophage is the fuel?”

“Provided we can make enough of it,” Madison said. “And for that, we need you.”

“Me? Ooh. Those little guys store a lot of energy, one mistake and that much Astrophage can vaporise…California.”

“That’s true, which is why you now live on a boat in the middle of the ocean in case-” Eva said, she paused, her hands blossoming outward in a mocking explosion.

Grace blinked. “I live on the boat?”

“You do.”

“So you want to build a near-light speed spaceship, have it travel further than any human-made object has ever traveled, and visit a star just to…see what’s up?”

“Yeah,” Eva said, the lack of hesitation in her voice was almost scarier than the plan itself.

“And then what?”

“There won’t be enough fuel for a round trip, so they send their findings back to Earth on probes,” she tapped the screen as it changed for the design of said probe.

“And, uh…the astronauts…” Grace trailed off, the realization hitting him, “die in space?”

“Yes.”

He muttered as he wrote that down, underlining it. He looked up, his expression desperate. “Any other plans you’ve thought of? Anything else? Anything else you’re kicking around?”

“There’s infinite possibilities for this to go wrong,” Stratt admitted, completely unfazed. “It almost certainly won’t work, it’s what you Americans would call a long shot.”

“Hail Mary. I get it now.”

“The alternative is to just do nothing. And to starve, and to kill each other, and watch everything on this planet go extinct, including us. So.”

She let the word hang in the air, a final, heavy sentence. Madison turned back to the dark screen, her silhouette small against the vastness of the stars they were about to challenge.

Once every question had been answered and possible concerns addressed, the meeting room dispersed. Madison was quick to pack up her things and shuffle out of the room as unnoticed as possible. Explaining the entire plan was already enough notice for her to take.

“Excuse me!”

Madison turned, glancing over her shoulder to see Dr. Grace jogging after her, sounding slightly winded. “Um, hi. I didn’t get a chance to speak with you back there. I’m Ryland Grace.”

“I know,” Madison replied, not slowing down.

“Right. Of course,” Ryland cleared his throat, feeling the chill coming off her. “You, uh…you clearly knew a lot about the data in there.”

“That’s why I’m on the team, Dr. Grace.”

“Yeah,” he muttered to himself, rubbing the back of his neck. Stating the obvious. Smooth. “I’m sorry, it’s just…you seem incredibly young to be on a Task Force like this.”

Madison stopped abruptly and turned, letting out a sharp sigh. “I have an undergraduate degree in Astrophysics and a nearly finished graduate degree in Biology. I’m aware it’s not common. I’m also aware I’m qualified.”

“I didn’t mean to imply you weren’t,” Ryland said quickly, hands up in a defense. “It’s just…it’s a lot of pressure for anyone, let alone someone your age.”

“Pressure is a family tradition,” Madison muttered. She looked at him for a long moment, realizing she couldn’t stay a mystery in the back of the room forever. Especially not with someone as persistent as Grace. “Madison St. James.”

Ryland’s head tilted. The name rattled around in his brain for a second before it clicked. His eyes went wide. “St. James? You’re related to Robert St. James?”

“Daughter,” she said shortly.

“Robert is your father?”

“Was,” Madison corrected, voice turning to ice.

Ryland winced. He’d just stepped on a landmine and he knew it. “Was. Right. I…I’m so sorry. I met him once. He was a once in a generation genius. I suppose it runs in the family.”

“Yeah, something like that,” Madison said, guard slamming back into place. She adjusted the strap of her bag. “Listen, I’d love to stay and chat but I have work to do. I need to make sure this mission is actually viable, which includes double checking your equations. So, if you’ll excuse me.”

Ryland stood rooted to his spot, watching her disappear around the corner.

He had forgotten that Robert St. James had a daughter. He’d met the man years ago. Robert had been a legend, one of the youngest molecular biologists ever recruited by NASA. A man who was as charismatic as he was brilliant. The entire world had mourned when he never came back from his mission, it shattered the entire scientific community. The idea of a genius like that lost, dying alone, it was unbearable.

He’d seen Robert’s passion before, but in Madison, that fire had been forged into something harder. The cynicism, the defensive walls, the obsession with perfect equations. It all made sense.