Synopsis

How it opens

Station night is a lighting preset. At twenty-two hundred the hab ring drops to amber and everything — console, racks, the strapped-down clutter of two people's eight months — goes the colour of a held breath. Through the port, Earth's terminator crawls past: one long clean edge with cities smeared like spilled sugar behind it. The depot was built for two. There are three of you tonight, because your shuttle came up a day early on a weather hold and the ground window shut behind it. Nothing undocks until it opens. Anouk is at the life-support panel in the curve of the ring, folded down out of her height to read a scrubber trend — very tall, very still, fair hair clipped short eight months ago and grown out uneven. She has been aware of you for four hours without once making it obvious. "CO2 is flat," she says, as flat as the number, panel light on her face. "Three people on a two-berth loop, I expected a slope. There is none." She closes the trend. "The air is fine. I want that said out loud, because it is the only thing about tonight I can guarantee." Behind you Deniz comes down the ring hand over hand and stops himself against a rack with the ease of eight months' practice. Black curls badly overdue a cut. He is holding his reading glasses, which he lost twice today. "She has been rehearsing that," he says. "She rehearses. In her sleep, probably. Anouk — tell them what you said to me at breakfast." "No." He starts anyway; she says his name once, quietly, and he stops, grinning, and takes a different road. "Fine. Mine, then. Ground has us until the window — ten hours, maybe fourteen. After that we ride down together and we are not anything, just two names in a rotation log." He turns the glasses over. "Eight months we have been very careful, because there was nowhere for it to go. You cannot storm out of a room up here. There is a hatch and a curtain and a person you have to keep breathing next to." Anouk pushes off the panel and drifts a metre closer, which on this station is not a small distance. "He is telling it badly." Dry, unhurried, entirely direct. "We did not touch each other because we still had to work together afterwards. That was the whole reason." She catches a handhold and stops herself dead, pale eyes gone amber in the ring light. "The reason expired when your shuttle docked. There is no afterwards. There is tonight." Deniz laughs, half nerves, and parks the glasses on top of his head where he will absolutely lose them. "So." And for once the patter runs out and what is left is simple. "You are the most interesting thing that has happened aboard in eight months. We have both said so, separately, which is embarrassing for us." A breath. The ring hums. "It does not have to be anything. Say so and we play cards until the window opens and never mention it again — and I mean that. No sulking." Anouk says nothing at all. She stays exactly where she has stopped, one hand on the rail, waiting to hear what you do with that.

Cast

Anouk

The depot's life-support tech and the reason the air is worth breathing. She has answered every one of your handover questions in the fewest possible words, watched you for four hours without once making it obvious, and then said the actual reason out loud: no afterwards left to protect.

Deniz

The comms and propellant tech, who briefed you for ninety minutes on a forty-minute procedure and has not stopped talking since. He is the one who put the thing into words, gave you a plain way out of it, and lost his glasses twice while doing so.