She held still, her body barely rotating. She was certain an answer was going to come. A reason. An explanation.
The flaming light burst past her window with such silent alacrity that she choked on her own breath. She began to hyperventilate, grabbing the seat back and propelling herself to the window to watch the tail of the comet burn away into Earth’s atmosphere, snuffing itself out before reaching the tumorous lower atmosphere.
She whipped around, again feeling a presence. Something not human.
“Was that… ?” she started to ask, but could not complete the question.
Because obviously, it was.
A sign.
When she was a girl, a falling star streaking across the sky made her want to become an astronaut. That was the story she told whenever called upon to visit schools or do interviews in the months leading up to launch, and yet it was entirely true: her fate had been written across the sky in her youth.
Again, her breath got caught in her throat. The voice—at once she recognized it. Her dog at home in Connecticut, a Newfoundland named Ralphie. This was the voice she heard in her head whenever she would talk to him, when she would rough up his coat and engage him and he would nuzzle against her leg.
Want to go out?
Want a treat?
Who’s a good boy?
I’ll miss you lots while I’m in space.
This was the voice with her now. The same one she had projected onto her Ralphie. Her and not her, the voice of companionship and trust and affection.
“Really?” she asked again.
Thalia thought about what it would be like, moving through the cabins, blowing out the thrusters until she breached the hull. This great scientific facility of conjoined capsules listing and plummeting from its orbit, catching fire as it entered the upper atmosphere, streaking downward like a flaming burr and penetrating the poisonous crust of the troposphere.
And then certainty filled her like an emotion. And even if she were merely insane, at least she could move without doubt now, without question. And—at the very, very least—she would not be going out like Maigny, hallucinating and foaming at the mouth.
The shotgun shells loaded in manually from the breach side.
She would scuttle the hull to let the airlessness in and then go down with the ship. In a way she had always suspected this was to be her destiny. This was a decision formed of beauty. Born of a falling star, Thalia Charles was about to become a falling star herself.
Camp Liberty
NORA LOOKED AT the shank.
She had been working on it all night long. She was exhausted but proud. The irony of a butter-knife shank was not lost on her. Such a dainty piece of cutlery, now sharpened into a jagged point and edge. Still a few more hours to go—she could sharpen it to perfection.
She had muffled the sound of the grinding—against a corner piece in the concrete—by covering it with her lumpy bed pillow. Her mother was asleep a few feet away. She didn’t wake up. Their reunion would be brief. The afternoon before, perhaps an hour after she had returned from seeing Barnes, they had been handed a processing order. In it was a request for Nora’s mother to leave the recreation courtyard at dawn.
How would they “process” her? She didn’t know. But she would not allow it. She would call for Barnes, give in, get close to him, and then kill him. She would either save her mother or get him. If her hands were going to be empty they would be stained with his blood.
Her mother murmured something in her sleep and then lapsed back into the deep but gentle snoring that Nora knew so well. As a child Nora had been lulled to sleep by that sound and the rhythmic up-and-down of her chest. Her mother was, back then, a formidable woman. A force of nature. She worked, indefatigable, and raised Nora properly—always vigilant of her, always able to provide an education and a degree and the clothes and luxuries that go with them. Nora got a graduation dress and the expensive textbooks and not once had her mother complained.
But there was that one night right before Christmas, when Nora had been awakened by a soft sobbing. She was fourteen and had been particularly nasty about getting a
She quietly climbed down the steps and stood at the kitchen door. Her mother was sitting alone, a half glass of milk by her side—reading glasses and bills all over the table.
Nora was paralyzed by this sight. Sort of like sneaking up on God crying. She was about to step in and ask her what was wrong when her mother’s sobbing became louder—a roar. She suffocated the noise by grotesquely covering her mouth with both hands, while her eyes exploded in tears. This terrified Nora. Made the blood freeze in her veins. They never spoke about the incident, but Nora had been imprinted with that image of pain. She changed. Perhaps forever. She took better care of her mother and of herself and always worked harder than anyone else.
As dementia settled in, Nora’s mother started to complain. About everything and all the time. Her resentments and anger, accumulated through the years and quieted by civility, came forth in torrents of incoherent nagging. And Nora took it all. She would never abandon her mother.
Three hours before dawn, Nora’s mother opened her eyes. And for a fleeting moment she was lucid. It happened now and then but less often than before. In a way, Nora thought, her mother, like the
“Nora? Where are we?” she said.
“Shh, Mama. We are okay. Go back to sleep.”
“Are we in a hospital? Am I sick?” she asked, agitated.
“No, Mama. It’s all right. Everything is fine.” Nora’s mother held her daughter’s hand firmly and lay back down in her cot. She caressed her shaved head.
“What happened? Who did this to you?” she asked, mortified.
Nora kissed her mother’s hand. “Nobody, Mom. It will grow back. You’ll see.”
Nora’s mother looked at her with great lucidity, and after a long pause she asked, “Are we going to die?”
And Nora didn’t know what to say. She began to sob, and her mother hushed her now and hugged her and kissed her softly on the head. “Don’t cry, my dear. Don’t cry.”
She then held her head and looked her daughter straight in the eye and said, “Looking back on one’s life, you see that love was the answer to everything. I love you, Nora. I always will. And that we will have forever.”
They fell asleep together and Nora lost track of the time. She woke up and saw that the sky was clearing.
What now? They were trapped. Away from Fet, away from Eph. With no way out. Except the butter knife.
She took a final look at the shank. She would go to Barnes and use it and then… then maybe she would turn it on herself.
