I heard them breathing. I smelled toothpaste and dirty socks. I wanted to close my eyes, but they felt huge. My body hummed. The backs of my calves ached. My scalp itched where my helmet had pressed against my head, and when I reached to touch my face it was full of fluid and squishy under my fingers. I shifted left and then right in my sleeping bag. My thoughts roamed through the empty station, into all its modules and compartments and holds. Images shuttled through my mind—of water droplets spinning through the air, of massive crates creaking against their restraints.
Sleep didn’t come. And didn’t come. The thought that it might never come again entered my mind and my throat tightened. I felt a twist of panic low in my stomach. I shifted to my side, my back. I thought of my first night at Peter Reed, how impossible it felt to sleep in that big room full of other girls. How it seemed like I’d stay awake forever under my icy sheets listening to everyone around me breathe and cough and sneeze.
Amelia came into the module and I watched her through half-closed eyes. I heard the rrrrp of her sleeping bag, a cough, and then silence. I closed my eyes. I would be all right; I wouldn’t be awake forever. Sleep would come.
And then—a low, guttural snore. And another. And another.
I pulled my sleeping bag to my chin, and then over my ears; I pressed my face to its slippery fabric and squeezed my eyes shut. Amelia’s snores seemed to lengthen and amplify, to fill every inch of the small room.
I unzipped my bag and swam out of the sleeping module and the twist in my stomach loosened. I pulled myself into the next module and the sound of the snores faded and the twist disappeared.
I floated to Storage and Systems and checked the water reclaimer. It was running fine. On the intercom was the empty SM, its panel of monitors blank. I pressed a button and the image changed to the sleeping module I’d just left. Simon was still turned toward the wall. His long legs were tucked into his body making him appear small. Amelia and Rachel faced each other, and one of Rachel’s arms was loose. It reached toward Amelia, as if they’d been holding hands and had just let go. I pressed the button again and looked into each empty module, into each of the three holds, including Cargo 2, the one we’d just loaded, which was full of dark and irregular shapes.
I pressed some more buttons and an exterior image of the station appeared: the dark shine of a solar array turned away from the sun, the long pole of a robotic arm tethered tightly to the starboard of the station. A series of vents on the station’s underside, and below them, a dark expanse broken only by the tiny pinpricks of stars.
It seemed impossible that such a sprawling jumble of modules and airlocks and equipment and arrays could be so silent and still. But it was.
I kept clicking and was surprised to find I could access satellite feeds from other stations in orbit, as well as the outposts on the moon, Mars, and the Pink Planet. I skipped past all of them but the last, and a hazy pink grid filled the screen—a view of the solar fields on the Pink Planet. The visibility was poor, and the image seemed to change in waves. I pulled myself closer to the screen and remembered my uncle’s soft, precise voice telling me about the power grid he helped develop and the challenge of generating solar power on a moon where frequent windstorms clouded the air with silt.
I watched the undulating image for several minutes, and finally began to feel sleepy. I quit the satellite feeds and returned to the interior view of the Sundew. The Service Module was still empty. Simon and Amelia and Rachel were exactly as they were except now Amelia was turned toward the wall.
I paused at Cargo 2. My eyes were heavier now. They began to close. Then a flicker of movement came from deep in the hold, a shadow that flitted past the runner lights. I kept watching and it came again.
I grabbed a flashlight and floated to Cargo 2, opened the airlock.
The hold was dark and dense with cargo and colder than it had been. I hovered just inside and moved my beam across boxes and crates and bags, and shadows sprang up and shifted. I floated through the rows and pointed my light into the spaces between the tethered shapes, catching the scents of glue and motor oil and pepper (a sack of spices had split when we were unloading). I saw nothing.
Then there was a sound, a scrabbling, living sound. I rose above a sack of linens bigger than me, twisted my body around a crate marked no crowbar in three languages, swam deeper into the hold. Bits of reflective tape flashed when my light hit them; containers and bundles shifted and creaked as I swam past. I listened hard, heard a scrabble and a squeak, and turned my flashlight in time to catch a glimpse of a rat as it floated between two crates, its tail hovering and its hair standing on end.
I shivered; there was a strange feeling at the base of my neck. A tingling ache. The shadow of a wide crate seemed to loom, to move toward me of its own volition, and I pedaled my feet. I didn’t feel right. Something wasn’t right. The tingling ache began to crawl up the back of my skull. I turned back to the airlock and something flashed from behind a large sack. I swam toward it. It was the loss-of-pressure alarm, but it wasn’t sounding. Why wasn’t it sounding? I rolled my body in the air and the pain in my head roared. I felt along the wall for the emergency pull. It wasn’t there—
My fingers found it and I tugged and the air filled with sound. A bleating alarm, a staticky voice warning me of something; I couldn’t make out what. I rolled again and pushed off a crate toward the open airlock, the flashing light beating time out of the corner of my eye. The lock was two meters away. One. It slid shut with a swift thnnk.
I hung suspended in the air and stared at it dumbly.
I pressed the button to open the lock and nothing happened. I pressed it again. The lock didn’t budge. Through the porthole the corridor was empty. The alarm wailed on and on but no one was coming. The shadows around me changed; they distorted and bent. They doubled and joined. They became large and rose up like spirits.
They weren’t coming. Why weren’t they coming?
Amelia’s oval face appeared in the porthole in the airlock door. June. What the hell.
I blinked. The air was colder. Pain gripped my head and squeezed and squeezed. My rapid breath made clouds in the air.
Amelia’s face was replaced by Simon’s. Behind him Rachel was talking. We’ve got a seal leak but no alarm—
June. Simon talked to me through the porthole. His voice was loud and deliberate over the alarm. I need you to do something for me. I want you to take low, slow breaths. Just like in the dive pool, remember? Low and slow.
I nodded but my lungs kept pumping.
June. Low and slow.
I swallowed. I forced my throat to release its grip on my breath, forced my chest to relax. I remembered my first dive at Peter Reed, the feeling of my teeth against my rubbery mouthpiece. It had felt impossible to ignore the impulse to blow air out fast and draw it in even faster. To ignore the quick beat of my pulse in my throat. But I did it. I did it then and I could do it now. I made my breaths low, and the clouds they made slowed. I focused on the clouds; I counted them and let each one dissipate before I made the next.
Simon’s face was gone but I heard Rachel’s voice. She was talking about a manual override. Amelia said, We need two suits.
I counted breaths. Counted clouds. Low and slow.