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She was mid email, muttering profanities in Dutch under her breath as she assured the pompous businessman that yes, she was very grateful for his help and fully aware he was giving it willingly and yes, she was properly humbled by how amazing he was. No matter that she could have taken all his assets and waited until he came to her, crawling on his hands and knees. Reasoning with people like him was, unfortunately, much more efficient. It didn’t require her to fill ten different forms and call authorities.
She checked the clock. 0312. She typed into her calculator. 3,5 hours of sleep.
She sighed. She could lose another half hour.
That was when the knock sounded on her door.
Eva Stratt didn’t get nighttime visitors. She didn’t have a husband or a child and had no wishes for either. If one of her people needed something, they would have emailed her or called her first. It was a barrier she’d set so she wouldn’t have to stare at any of their faces longer than necessary. That was a steadfast way to get attached, more so for them than for her, all things considered, but sometimes for her too. She couldn’t afford that. Not when Earth was on the line.
The knock sounded again. Fascinating. So she did not hallucinate it, that first time.
She stared at the door, one eyebrow quirked. Her bet was on Komorov or Ilyukhina. They were constantly drinking. She wouldn’t put stumbling into her room in an alcohol high above either of them.
…maybe above Komorov. He was trying to be, at the very least, somewhat dignified.
Oh, they were knocking again. Eva crossed her legs one over the other, settling into the office chair more comfortably, angled so that she could see the door. She was curious when they’d get bored. She was not about to invite them in. If they wanted to talk so badly, she had a phone. If they knew where her room was, they certainly had her phone number.
Another knock. Her lips twisted into a smile. They were not deterred easily, were they?
A few seconds passed. Eva heard footsteps. They were retreating.
She spun her chair back around and slumped over the email again. So much for that entertainment, she mused. It was good that it stopped, though. She had to focus.
She was already mulling over wording again when another noise sounded.
The handle creaked. Eva spun around again, the two rotations too close to one another to not make a soft ache flare in her head momentarily.
The handle was down. Nobody was coming in. She rolled her eyes; it wasn’t either of the Russians, then. They weren’t this hesitant about doing things. She liked that about them. They did not waste time.
The door began to slowly slide open, then faster when she still made no sound.
Dr. Ryland Grace fell into her room and slammed the door behind him.
“Stratt!” he said, more so exclaimed. A bit like he was surprised to see her, even though he’d come into her room. He looked a bit… crazed. Also, tipsy. She frowned.
“Dr. Grace, why are you drunk?”
He didn’t answer. He paced the length of her room once, twice, the third time, his hands clasped in front of him, fingers twirling.
He was such a time waster. Stratt sighed heavily.
Dr. Grace looked back to her like he’d seen a ghost. Again.
“Sit down,” she commanded, exasperated already. “If you want to pace then go elsewhere. Actually, do just go elsewhere. Why did you come here?”
He sat down on the edge of her bed. Typical.
“Grace,” she snapped. Oh, she needed to sleep. She had to get control of herself. “Out.”
He did not get up. Infuriating.
Eva took a deep breath and forced herself to look away. She placed her hands back on her keyboard, read the email again and clicked send. She scrolled through her inbox. Would you look at that—another court date!
She deleted the email with a sigh. She exited Outlook and pulled up Excel, to start inputting expenses into a spreadsheet.
“You can’t send them.”
To her credit, she didn’t immediately jump and look at Grace. Normally, she wouldn’t have been bothered by him speaking so suddenly, by him sitting there, quietly. Normally, he wouldn’t be there, because she would have made him leave. But she’d gotten a combined 4 hours of sleep the past 2, or maybe 3, days. The closer to launch day, the worse it would get, she suspected.
She had half a mind to ignore him. But damn her, she was curious.
She spun her chair to face him.
Dr. Grace looked more like a mess than usually. There were the typical messed up hair and fraying bracelets on his wrists, which he had to repeatedly put on, remove, put on and then remove again when he was going in and out of the lab. He had eyebags under his eyes, but the same could be said about everybody else on the carrier. But he was fidgeting terribly. A little ant trapped beneath a rock. His hands fiddled with one another, then with the edge of his shirt, and he kept adjusting his glasses with his shoulder or elbow, a habit typical of a man who spent more hours in a laboratory than in the real world.
Grace met her eyes.
“You can’t send them.” He repeated.
She sighed, loudly, again, and waved a hand so he would explain.
“Dr. Grace, either talk or leave.”
He swallowed. He raised a hand and ran it through his hair. It was shaking, badly.
“DuBois. Annie. You can’t send them.”
Eva blinked.
“I think you’re confused. I can. I am.”
Grace shook his head. His eyes were looking right into hers with an intensity she hadn’t seen in him before. She didn’t know he was capable of something like that.
“You can’t.”
She almost responded with yes, I can again but stopped herself. She was not about to have an “is not/is too” argument with one of the most important scientists on her team. She was above that. She hoped Dr. Grace was also above that.
“Then what do you propose I do instead?”
His chest stopped moving for a few seconds, as did his hands. He was still, all of a sudden. Motionless, his eyes still staring at her but the muscles around them contracting like he was fighting a deep instinct to squeeze them shut.
He began to breathe again, shallowly. Then, he opened his mouth.
“Send me.”
Eva was very glad to not have been holding anything. She would have dropped it.
“What!?” she couldn’t help but hiss out. Did he know he was the tertiary option? Was this some ploy to get her to admit to…
Grace swallowed, so loud she heard him. He did close his eyes for a second, then opened them again. His hands stopped shaking. He found some sort of strange resolve.
“You heard me,” he said. He smiled, joylessly. “Send me instead.”
“You’re not qualified.” She snapped back.
He smiled again, looked to the side and then back to her.
“Neither are they.”
He sounded certain.
Eva Stratt had seen Dr. Grace do many things. Most of them were either confusing or stupid, sometimes both. She had never seen him steady. She had never seen him this determined, not even when he pleaded for her to let him work on the project. She had never heard him sound certain.
Not like now.
“What are you talking about?” she furrowed her brows. “They’re the best people out there, best in their fields—”
“Stratt—Ms Stratt,” he corrected himself. She let it slide. “You’re not a scientist. You picked people because they sounded like they fit. They could, I suppose, if we gave up a lot of time to train them, and I know you intend for me to do that. But neither one of them is an astronaut, and beyond that, there really isn’t that much difference between us.”
He had to be drunk. That, or he’d finally managed to grow some balls during the night, and it had inflated his ego unbelievably.
She frowned at her own crude thought. God, she needed to sleep.
He kept talking. At least he was willing to explain himself properly, now.
“DuBois has doctorates in multiple fields, yes. But have you actually looked at his research? Applications of cryo-em in structural biochemistry for identification of plasma membrane proteins of Prothoteca sp.? Crystallographic design of potential anti-tuberculosis drugs with the use of AI? Roentgen microscopy with the use of polycapillary optics? Molecular background of the regulation of electron transfer between the ubiquinone membrane pool and extramembrane pool of cytochrome c?” he listed, as though those words were supposed to mean anything to her. When she didn’t respond, he raised his hands, adjusted his glasses again. “He’s basically a master of picking a niche and diving in! He finds something that interests him and buries himself in it. None of those things are useful in space, not to the level that he’s investigated them. Yes, he’s intelligent, insanely intelligent, but he can contribute much more to Earth here. He’s chaotic research is giving so many undergrads something to wonder about. If you put us two against each other in doing microbiology, I’m not sure he would do better than me. He’s a physicist who tacked “biochemistry” on top of the physics because it made them more interesting.”
She nodded. She could see his point; perhaps she was not as understanding of the scientific community as she thought.
“Okay. Then I send Dr. Shapiro. She’s a biologist.”
Dr. Grace shook his head again.
“She’s even more useful here. She’s already on track to finding a way to reduce risk of autoimmune conditions in patients with a family history. She’s going to be one of your greatest assets once Earth begins to freeze over. Once everyone is too desperate to scream and cry about how evil GMOs are. She’ll be at the forefront of pioneering cold resistance, of adding missing nutrients to foods that will remain when we inevitably lose most of our current crops,” he sighed again. “And tell me. Were you planning to send primers and starters and plasmids? Were you planning to set her up with an environment to work with CRISPR/Cas9? Did you even think which kind you wanted to give her, how much? What about the storage conditions, the fact that one problem with too much heat, which, lets be serious, is inevitable when you’re sending a spaceship to space for this long, and you don’t have anything to run PCR with; even Hot Start polymerase can be activated accidentally, if something bad enough happens. She’s, what, 26? She’s never worked in a lab that wasn’t designed to make everything easy. Her main advantage over me is that she understands bioinformatics better.”
Eva shrugged.
“So she has an advantage.”
“I have more.” he frowned. “Everyone keeps insisting on it, in fact. I’m World’s Leading Expert on Astrophage, am I not? I’m used to working in problematic conditions. I made you Venus out of boxes and duct tape. I’m used to explaining things in stupid terms to people who don’t know what a Van der Waals force is.”
“Why are you trying to convince me you want to die?”
He put his arms behind his neck, dragged them down slowly. His feet were back to tapping anxiously on the floor.
He stopped making eye contact.
“I don’t,” he said, voice so much lower than before. “But I need to.”
“Dr. Grace, I have two perfectly qualified science specialists. You’re a middle school teacher, and, yes, if they were gone, then maybe you’d be my contingency plan, but as it stands…”
Except his words were gnawing at her. She didn’t think he was competent, but he was right about one thing for certain—she had no idea about lab work. This time of her life was the first time she was surrounded by this many scientists.
“You can’t do this to them. DuBois, maybe, but I can tell you right now that you’ll regret it. Shapiro just doesn’t deserve this. She’s not even thirty! She needs a psych consultation, not to be sent off to space to die. This is no different than recruiting teenagers for war under the promise of laurel wreaths and universal admiration. And you’re not looking for their skill sets. You’re looking for someone who is used to making the best of what they’ve got, who has good knowledge in biology and microbiology and enough knowledge in physics. You don’t need a guy who can recite from memory how to synthesize caffeine.”
His hands went back to shaking. Still, Grace didn’t turn away. He kept looking at her, kept licking his lips and waiting. He’d thought about this a lot, clearly.
“I took two shots of vodka off Dimitri and came to you. I’ve been gearing up for a month,” it was like he read her mind. “I don’t want to do this. But I’m objectively the best option. Nobody is going to miss me, not except a few middle schoolers who are going to move on in a year or two, and Marissa who has enough of a support network to get by. Ilyukhina and Yáo already like me and I’ll be able to explain things to them if… if something happens to me in the meantime.”
“You’ll have to do astronaut training. You’re going to have to complete it in only a few months.” Since when was she agreeing to this?
Dr. Grace nodded.
“I know. I will.” He wiped a tear from his cheek—he was really serious about this. He didn’t want to die, and yet he gave it enough consideration to come to the conclusion that it was best for everyone if he did.
Eva felt her respect for him grow. He surprised her. She thought if it ever came to him being on the mission, she’d have to force him into it. Yet there he was, asking to be put on the Hail Mary because he was “her best option”.
What was the most insane was that he drove a hard bargain. He made too good a point.
“You’re right,” she said. She got up, walked to the bed and placed a hand on his shoulder, met his shimmering, wide eyes while standing above him. “You’re on the mission. Dr. Ryland Grace, Hail Mary Science Officer.”
More tears slipped out from his eyes. He nodded and tried to smile, but it didn’t quite work.
“Thank you,” he said. It sounded like he half wanted to take it back. “I have one more request.”
She nodded. He could have many requests, now. He was committing suicide for the Earth. He would have people lining up to aid him left and right.
“Don’t tell anyone else. I mean, tell Shapiro and DuBois, of course, and the crew. But don’t tell the press. Let them think it’s going to be DuBois until we launch.”
She frowned.
“Why?”
He smiled again, this time a little easier. His features softened slightly. It made her uncomfortable.
“I can’t do that to my kids. They can’t know, not until I’m far away. I’m too much of a coward for that.”
Eva used to consider him a coward, that was true. He wasn’t, though. If he were, he wouldn’t have come to her room, he wouldn’t have thought to suggest this. She’d misread him.
“Okay. Done.” She nodded.
He got up, unsteady on his feet. She offered her arm to steady him, and he gave her another wobbly smile before taking a deep breath and making for the door.
Eva watched it shut behind him. She kept standing, some part of her waiting for him to come back and retract his offer.
He didn’t. She would see this man every day for the next few months, and then never again.
It made her heart sink.
That was what she meant about not getting attached. She couldn’t afford to.
Fucking Ryland Grace.
“DuBois. Shapiro.” She gathered their attention in seconds. They were slumped over the beetle design plans, listening as Hatch explained the details of structure and use.
Dr. Grace already knew all about the beetles. As if she needed any more arguments to pick him.
“There has been a change of plans. You’re both demoted.”
Shapiro was still smiling, but it seemed to be steadily falling. DuBois only blinked. Hatch was too occupied with his plans to care; of course he was.
“Ms Stratt…” DuBois began to say. Impatient.
“Dr. Ryland Grace is taking your place as the primary science specialist. Dr. DuBois, you’re the secondary, Dr. Shapiro—tertiary.”
“Why?” Shapiro asked.
Eva hoped that the woman felt the way her gaze burned. She didn’t have to explain why. The decision was final anyway.
“He made a strong point about you being more valuable here on Earth. I agree with him. Neither one of you would contribute more in space than you do here. Him, on the other hand… he would be useless once the project was over.”
Shapiro looked like she wanted to argue, but DuBois placed a hand on hers and it made her pipe down.
“Thank you,” DuBois said. He looked close to tears.
Eva almost didn’t respond.
“Don’t thank me,” she settled on. “Thank Dr. Grace.”
“I have another request.”
Eva would need to put a bell on him. Where did he learn to sneak up on people like that, and for what reason? She’d slept enough to hopefully appear unbothered.
She mixed a sugar packet into her coffee with a wooden stick. She wasn’t going to turn around.
“Yes?”
“I want to go shopping.”
So much for that plan.
She turned around, eyebrow raised and the paper cup clutched in her hand.
“Excuse me?”
“I want a skirt.”
What?
“Why?”
He shrugged.
“I’ve always wanted to have one; they’re comfortable and have better patterns than pants. And, well, since I’m going to die and all…”
She sighed heavily. This man was going to be the death of her.
“Fine. Carl can go with you. Write down the expenses later, I’ll include them in the Excel.”
He smiled and gave her a thumbs up. It had been a week since their conversation and by some miracle, word around the carrier hadn’t spread. Yet. Stratt wasn’t delusional enough to think Shapiro and DuBois would keep their mouths shut. Hatch would, but mostly because if he spoke, it would be about the beetles and not much else. Even if they remained silent, it was inevitable that others would notice that Dr. Grace was acting different.
He was. He was shakier, she noted, but also more confident. The decision had rendered him more sure of himself; maybe he had decided that if he was only going to live for a fraction of the time he was meant to have, he couldn’t afford to have doubts.
It was good on him. Confidence. He was still awkward, still unbelievably strange and Eva would die before she denied that he was sometimes unbelievably stupid.
She waited for him to move away. He did not.
“Dr. Grace? Do you have anything else to say or can I leave?” she didn’t wait for him to respond, already making to walk around him and out of the room.
“Actually,” he began. She stopped. Great. “I have another request?”
Dear God, save us all.
“I want embroidery thread and beads. To make everyone bracelets. So they have something to remember me by.”
She took it back. He was just as insecure as ever.
She gave him a deadpan look over her shoulder.
“They’re going to erect a statue of you when you leave.”
He shook his head.
“Eh, that’s not the same.”
She wanted to argue. But he was objectively becoming insane, and she was already late for a call. She forced her mouth to shut and walked away.
She placed an order for copious amounts of embroidery thread and pony beads and nylon cord, once she had a moment to spare. Then she typed the numbers into the expense account, categorising it under ‘necessary mission equipment’. Nobody had to know.
Eva had only just began the meeting when Dr. Lamai raised her hand, shy as always.
“Yes?”
“Did you force Dr. Grace into it?”
Dr. Grace spat out the water he was drinking and stared at Lamai like she’d grown a second head. It was comforting to know he didn’t think Eva was capable of that. Stupid of him to think that, but nevertheless oddly encouraging.
“I did not.”
Lamai looked more convinced by Grace’s reaction than by Eva’s assertion. It made sense; she was too perceptive for her own good.
“What about your children?” Lokken asked. She didn’t even have the decency to raise her hand.
Dr. Grace sighed, his vision set on the table for a moment before he looked at the woman.
“They’ll be okay without me. I would like to see them one last time before launch, but it probably won’t be possible. It’s okay. I’ve made peace with it.”
Oh, no, Eva wasn’t going to facilitate that. No matter that he was still looking at the table like he was trying to hold back tears. She shouldn’t have dragged him to all those conferences; he was making her soft.
“And why is he the specialist, again?” maybe she should prepare a leaflet and start handing it out to people. She glared at Riedell. Sometimes she wished she could sew his mouth shut.
“Because that was the decision I made. He is the most qualified.”
Lokken laughed, high pitched and a little strained.
“You’re saying he’s more qualified than a Nobel prize candidate?”
“Yes,” she nodded. “You disagree?”
Lokken looked like she just might. Eva kept staring at her, making sure that her face remained impassive, something like a flat “just try me”.
Lokken did not try her.
Eva’s phone buzzed. She looked at the notification, then motioned for Grace to rise. He did so, hesitantly. His mouth formed around a silent ‘what?’.
“Your helicopter is here.”
“Oh,” he fiddled with a bracelet, smiling. “Okay. I take it I’m not needed for the meeting?”
“No,” Eva quickly ran down the list of people in the room in her head. “Dr. Riedell can give you his notes.”
Riedell looked like he’d swallowed something sour. Grace only nodded at the man, then at her, and then he was off.
He left his phone on the table.
“Dr. Grace, your—” he was too far away. She sighed again, looked up at the sky like God could help her at all, and then picked it up and stuffed it in her pocket.
“Alright, where were we?”
“You have to stop him.”
Eva had barely picked up the phone and already Carl was talking as though she had the faintest clue what he was going on about.
“What? Who?”
Carl sighed.
“Who do you think?”
He was right. These days, there was only ever one option.
“What did Dr. Grace do?”
“Nothing, yet,” Carl said. “But he’s about to—”
A knock sounded on the wall of the break room, which Eva still thought was not quite necessary and could have been done without, no matter the fact that she was currently sitting in it. In the entrance, which was currently a permanently open door, stood Grace, in a tiered A-line floral skirt, a formal shirt and his fox cardigan. The bracelets on his wrists seemed to have multiplied with the fervour of Astrophage. It was a wonder they didn’t weigh his hands down.
“Hi, Eva,” he said. Another request he’d made. Call her by her first name. She obviously relented. “So you know how you’re paying me all this money because of the Astrophage work and also because I’m going to space to die for Earth?”
She blinked slowly. It was too early for this.
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m not using it, right? So, I wanted to make it into a scholarship, something STEM related. And I want to call it The Carl Scholarship.”
There it was. The insanity.
“You’re not calling it that.”
He blew a raspberry at her.
“Seriously? I’m dying—”
“Carl said no.”
“How do you know that?”
She didn’t answer and instead only raised her arm with the cell phone and Carl’s contact still displayed, as the man remained on call.
“He shouldn’t be allowed to do that.”
She needed to get a handle on the fondness she felt for this man. She put the phone back to her ear.
“I said no.”
Carl didn’t sound relieved when he answered her.
“You’re going to relent.”
“I won’t.”
He laughed.
“You will. You like him too much.”
She pursed her lips.
“I do not.”
She hung up and looked to where Grace had been, but he was already gone.
The herd of middle school kids that she had organised in front of her was much bigger than she’d anticipated. Sure, she worked with hundreds of people, but she rarely had to see more than 10 of them at once. 30 was a lot of children. Too many children.
She raised a hand and closed it into a fist, clearing her throat at the same time, as she’d seen Grace do when he was trying to get the attention of his fellow scientists if they were talking too much. She needed their attention; this was not going to work as a surprise if they kept yelling.
The hand worked surprisingly well. Maybe Grace was onto something.
“Dr. Grace will arrive shortly, thinking we are to meet with a representative of the UN. You have to stay quiet and still before I turn the light on, so that he doesn’t know you’re in here.”
They all nodded enthusiastically. Eva could feel it in her bones that this wasn’t going to work. Why did she decide to waste time and resources on this?
They were in a conference room at a Hilton Hotel in San Francisco. Grace had, obviously, asked her why they were meeting someone from the UN in San Francisco, but her weak reasoning about common grounds and needing to get something done in the USA seemed to have worked. Grace was smart, but he was also stupid.
She got a notification on her phone. She put up a hand to quiet the children and put a finger to her lips for good measure, before she walked out of the door, shutting the lights off. She heard some snickering behind her and some anticipatory whispers, but nothing too bad.
Grace was waiting for her. He was wearing a skirt again; he seemed to have begun living in them. Them and atrociously patterned socks, and cardigans, even though it was too hot for Eva to be wearing a blazer. He at least had the decency to wear tights, that day, though the “professional” impression she’d wanted from him was thoroughly ruined by his worn sneakers.
“Why are we going to a big conference room to meet one guy?”
She waved a hand like that explained anything. Grace nodded like he agreed.
“Come on. They’re waiting.”
“They?”
She grabbed his sleeve and he followed behind her, chatting her ear off about some cloning technique that he was trying to make work on the Astrophage and about his last no-gravity simulator.
It was interesting, when she understood. When she didn’t, or tuned him out, it was still pleasant. White noise machine. The thought made her smile.
She pushed the door to the conference room open again and waited for him to enter before turning on the light.
“Surprise!” 30 children screamed. Eva winced. That’s too many children, definitely.
Grace looked at them, then at her, then at them again. He waved.
Then he walked back over to Eva.
“I have a request,” he said. She nodded, confused. “Can I hug you?”
She froze. Her eyes travelled to the children, who were all looking at them.
She looked at Grace, who was crying.
“Fine.”
He embraced her quickly and squeezed.
“Thank you.” He said. His tears made her shirt wet, but she forced herself not to think about it. She awkwardly wrapped her arms around his back.
And then he let go, turned back to the children with a brilliant smile.
“Who can tell me the speed of light?”
She slipped out, unnoticed, just as he was asking them about if they knew what a centrifuge was.
A piece of woven, colourful string in the shades of sunset, and another strange object, dangled before Eva’s eyes. She swatted at them absentmindedly, trying to work.
“Eva.”
“Later, Grace.”
He tapped his foot on the ground impatiently.
“I’m not going to be here in a week, and you’re telling me later. That’s how you are.”
“Yes. That is how I am.”
She typed a list into the laptop. Everything the crew would need, everything she still needed to acquire, by legal or illegal means.
“15 seconds.”
“We will have 15 seconds later. I’m sure Dimitri can entertain you.”
Grace flopped down on the breakroom couch with a heavy sigh.
“No, he can’t. He decided he wanted to get laid. And Ilyukhina also. And Yáo too. They went to the bar; except for Yáo who went to his room and called his wife. They’re all. Having. Sex. Why.”
“I don’t know, maybe you should try it, and then write a paper documenting your results. I’m sure Dr. Lokken would be thrilled to read it.”
He booed her. Eva tried to keep her focus. He nudged her with his foot, then again.
“I miss it when you thought I was kidnapping you.” She said, dryly.
“It’s called Stockholm Syndrome, and I think I have it.” He laughed at his own joke. Eva would not smile. She wouldn’t.
She put her laptop down on the table.
“15 seconds.”
He dropped two bracelets into her lap. One was woven out of embroidery floss and had a pattern of daisies on a sunset background, and the other was made of alternating pale yellow and blue beads with three square ones, which stated “E” “&” “G”.
“I’ve been giving everybody theirs. Yours are the last set.”
Something about that felt final. She breathed in deeply, finally looked at him.
He was colourful as always. His socks had crude impressions of planets over them, his skirt was mid-shin length and white, but he’d had the crew put their coloured handprints all over it at some point in the past two weeks. He had a T-shirt with a model of the atom on it and the words “protons have mass? I didn’t know they were catholic.”; there was no cardigan, for once, but his hair…
“Why are you pink?”
It wasn’t his whole head, just the ends, so not a lot as a whole with his short hair. He laughed.
“It’s my last chance to be pink, Eva. Let me live a little!”
She sighed. That was fair.
She reached for the bracelets and pulled them on her wrists. They fit perfectly. She decided not to investigate how he did that.
“I have a request.”
She didn’t even hum in acknowledgement, this time. He knew she was listening.
“I want sour skittles and gummy worms; and beer.”
“You’re not getting beer.”
“Olesya gets vodka!”
“Ilyukhina can handle vodka.”
“I can handle beer.”
He could, but it was more amusing to argue with him.
“I’ll consider it. Tell Carl what kind.”
Grace saluted her, then more rolled off than stood up from the couch. He was humming a song under his breath; Last Friday Night by Katy Perry, if she heard the few words he did sing correctly.
“I have another request,” he spun on his heel. “I want an aro-ace flag.”
“Do you want a pronouns badge too,” she muttered, unserious.
“Yeah. Have it say “any”.”
And then he left. Of course he did.
It was about time for take-off. About time that the world would find out it wasn’t Martin DuBois, but Ryland Grace, who was going to die for them. Eva considered the fact that most of them wouldn’t care; it would all be the same to them.
She did care.
She was mad at him. Not because he was doing this; there was always a chance he would have. She was angry because he was ready for it. He wasn’t screaming or crying or pleading for his life, so she couldn’t be settled by the fact that he knew it was unfair. That he didn’t want to do it.
She knew he didn’t want to. But he was singing again, Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl. They made him put pants on, which had made him very frustrated as he had all but denounced their institution months ago, so as a protest he insisted on having “any pronouns” sewn into his spacesuit. Because of course he did.
Eva agreed. Naturally.
This was the last time she was going to see him. Maybe, if they were lucky enough, she’d see his face, hear his voice, on a beetle, returning from space with the Astrophage solution. But she would never talk to him again.
She should have made peace with that months ago, really.
He caught her eyes and smiled bright. She tried to return the gesture.
Not enough time, she thought.
Before she could chicken out, she approached him.
“I have a request,” she said. Grace raised his eyebrows. “Hug me.”
And so he did.