I pulled the soft helmet over my head, wincing at the feel of the thick, rubbery, almost slick material. The gloves were fat enough to make my fingers clumsy, but luckily the suit had been designed for people in a panic, for people losing air and losing blood and losing control. I clipped the seals into place at the neck and shoulders and powered the suit on.
For one frightful second, nothing happened, and I thought: wouldn’t that be bloody perfect, a dead suit, a useless piece of scrap—then the ventilation and pressurization kicked in. It felt odd, like a warm breeze in the small of my back and down my legs, an obscenely intimate caress that made me squirm. I told myself to get over it, and I reached for the airlock control panel. I hit Engage.
“Please fucking work,” I said.
My voice was dull and loud in the confines of my helmet.
The old airlock clanked and groaned around me. A loud hiss filtered through the shitty microphones in the suit’s helmet. My heart was thumping so hard it was a pain in my chest. My breath was rasping and metallic. I counted down the seconds.
The control panel told me depressurization was twenty percent complete. Thirty-five. Fifty percent complete. I could have sworn I heard the clatter of the spiders outside the interior hatch. It was impossible—not that they were there, of course they were there, but that I could hear them. The steel was twenty centimeters thick. The UEN hadn’t fucked around when they were building their wartime bases. Always so afraid the Martians would show up out of nowhere and bomb them to hell, never mind that the Martians had only ever started rebelling because they were starving, because they had no ships, because Earth-based companies had stolen their water and their moons, because they weren’t permitted weapons to defend themselves, because they were living like animals in their own habitat domes, in their own homes—or so the more radical of my parents’ friends had liked to say, during those otherwise dull academic dinner parties in their garden in London after the war ended, when the wine flowed like delicate summer brooks before the cognac flowed like the Thames in a storm surge. Nobody told me and my brother to hurry off to bed because nobody cared that we were awake and listening. Voices would rise and fall and laugh and argue while the summer sun set in brilliant streaks of red and orange over Hampstead Heath. I missed my parents, I missed Devon and his kids, I missed London and Oxford and sunshine and greenery and being able to move without pain. I missed all of it so much it hurt, like I had swallowed a knot of thorns and my entire body had hardened into scar tissue around the ragged, still-bleeding wound in the center. I should never have left Earth.
One hundred percent. The airlock depressurization was complete.
The doctors told me I had not been exposed to open space. They told me a lot of things I did not believe, but that one I couldn’t deny. I would not have survived if I had touched the vacuum. It had taken seven hours for help to arrive. That my nightmares took me from fire into ice, tumbling and tumbling, flames trailing behind me as charred bits of my own body fell away and froze and crumbled to dust, that was as much a mystery as the accident itself, one that nobody cared to solve.
There were infinite places I wanted to be that were not the barren surface of an asteroid with minimal gravity. My parents’ kitchen as my father made a pot of tea. Sunita’s garden in Oxford as the long summer sunset painted the sky red and purple. Aboard Symposium without knowing what was to come. Even my grim, lonely quarters on Hygiea, where I could lock the door, lower the lights, muffle the world outside. Anywhere. Anywhere. In that moment, every wonderful and terrible place I had been in my life was more appealing than the prospect of opening that door and stepping outside.
I opened the door anyway, and I stepped outside.
The wide, flat metal plating of the transport track stretched before me. My gecko soles wouldn’t keep me anchored on loose or sandy surfaces, but it seemed like I was in luck, if I used a very generous definition of luck—because asteroids don’t have atmospheres, so Nimue didn’t have wind, which meant there was no dust or grit drifted over the track. I closed the hatch behind me.
Stay centered. I took a breath. Move smoothly. Another. And walk. Lift one foot, set it down. Lift the other.
Just fucking walk.
Faster.
Don’t look up.
Once I had been the person who would have craned her head toward the darkness and the stars to see whatever she could see, to spot distant bodies familiar and strange, to stare and stare and stare until my eyes watered and my neck hurt and the view above was more precious and familiar to me than anything on the ground. I had been so certain I would not fear the dangers of space. I would embrace them. I was an explorer at heart, or so I had told myself. I had nothing to fear but failure. It had been so easy to believe in that courageous fairy-tale version of myself when I was earthbound and safe.
I did not look up.
The surface of Nimue was gray and gravelly and utterly dull. Any features larger than cobbles were few and far between. There was only dust, and gray rock, and two or three kilometers of track ribboning beneath me. I did not look up. I had no instinct for how long it would take. I didn’t know how fast I was walking. I didn’t even know if I’d estimated the distance correctly from the maps.
I did not look up, until I did.
It was less a conscious action than instinct, the impulse born of being a
