You were the second to set foot on the Viva Ship. The moment captured: a picture that would lay glossed across sprays of magazine covers in airports, waiting rooms, international newsstands. That hesitant but confident glance back over your shoulder, black hair aflow in the shifting breeze, eyes locked east. Almost a fashion campaign. And the caption: Harvest Engineer Micah Grantham Pictured, Embarking Ill-Fated Mission. 

As you rose to flight (your first flight), you couldn’t stop the images coming, pummel-fast, of the last pod that had lifted from this same platform. The explosion so bright you had shielded your eyes. An eruption of fireworks before a blazing return of metal, the pod spitting itself back to flat Earth. Your doubt burdened you, an ember glowing in your chest, pulsing out gray wafts of sulfur. You were proud, yes, but uncertain. Uncertain in a way that shifted and weaved and sat cold in the corners of your thoughts. That lift into orbit, then, nonetheless: the throttle, the boom, like the creation of planets. It had made your heart clench. It had made your chest burn bright.

#

His eyes are gentle, steady.

“We actually have several people here on staff with that picture framed at their desks. You’re a celebrity, you know.” His smile warm, dimple-heavy.

“Definitely not,” you murmur into your coat, turning to the window. The rain races rivers down the glass, beyond the sill and its soldier line of succulents.

“No, no,” the interviewer says. “You are.” He smiles. It’s warm and assuring.

#

A handful of days. The blue of oceans stretching back and away. Space trash floating by, a plum-streaked meteoroid; seeds packed, flipped through, and counted in a thick, metal tin. It wasn’t until Day 7 that you noticed something was wrong. You, out of all of them. Fingering the waffle weave on your collar, you saw that the operating system, Orca, was sending long strings of text, alerts to Base without any prompting, independent of Derek Tiguan, the one in charge of all communications. You looked closer and saw that in essence the Viva was sending out a Mayday, but a secret one. You found Derek in a narrow hallway at the back of Storage Locker 4. 

“No way, Grantham,” he’d said, but bumped into your shoulder with how fast he shoved past you, his jaw muscle a pulse.

And his face had changed by the time you circled back to Central. Not in the way you had hoped. He and Garret were standing with hands on hips just staring. The quiet, and the way their shoulders lurched up, turned your stomach to a ball of cement. The way the instrument panel lights shone up, hitting against a wall of building tears in Garret’s eyes. Derek’s fingers were gripping his belt loops, fingertips almost white. 

It had hit then: the knowledge. The others took longer to realize it, but you had known in that moment. 

You pictured the things you wouldn’t see again: white clouds, your cat Peppermint’s face, tree branches shifting in high wind. You thought about things you wouldn’t feel again. The way Garret had smoothed his hands down your back the night before—the last time you’d be touched like that—maybe the last time you’d be touched ever, unless you’d done what you’d felt like doing then and run hollow-eyed and moaning into the arms of your fellow crew. 

You swallowed the knowledge like the iron taste of a penny: you were all going to die, and it would be a cold, horrible death. You could already feel the vacuum of space sucking at the walls, ready to pull you in and drown you with sweet, beautiful gases. Stars licking your bones clean. 

Shelley Dern mumbled something over your shoulder about trying to stop it, trying to reverse it, but Orca confirmed to everyone in a low, silky tone that everything that could have gone wrong had. It was a never event, she chimed.

#

“Was it worth it? To be the first there and walk its surface, even if you were the only surviving crew member?” He shifts in his seat, awaiting your response, his thumb tempting the pen into a click that doesn’t come. 

You shake your head as you would to move hair out of your face, almost like a glitch. You breathe into your belly and out your nose. You do it again, just to feel it. That expanse.

#

Base let everyone know that forty-eight hours would pass before the explosion and confirmed that nothing could be done to change it. The signals had been sent out quietly because there was no way to fix what was wrong, no time for a rescue mission, and Orca was programmed to let Base break news like that. In theory, all that was left was to say goodbye, but both the monitors and the audio feed had shut down, so there would be none of that.

Instead, it would be like a magic trick: the top hat turned upside down to reveal you’re all gone. You left the room as Tiguan and Garrett and Marquette sat at the control board, typing in silence, messages that would never be sent. Graffiti lost in tunnels; meaningless, stupid words. It didn’t matter anymore. Everything left was just shapes and trembling forces and weak, dying movement, opening to a wide, black nothing.

#

An assistant brings you a coffee and a slice of coconut cake. You laugh at the size of it. The interviewer smiles and nods, taking down notes as you eat. Thunder rolls across the sky in great gray clouds that pass the narrow windows, parade floats lumbering past. It feels good in this room, to fill up your lungs with cool air. To not feel shaky, rattled with panic. But now you understand that after the cake, you’ll have to let them know that it’s time for you to leave, that you’re missing something that’s once in a lifetime.

#

You were all directed to read a manual with a description of Contingency Plan VI. It was a very simple choice, really. You watched everyone around you select Option B, and you helped them fill out the specifications in Orca. They chose their Visual as a group, some sort of bleak comfort in this last collective effort. 

The Visual they all chose was the Viva Ship’s re-entry to Earth, an imagined return that would never occur. 

You helped them get seated in front of the lunar bay window. The roving ship chairs would do the rest of the work—the medication, the sound effects, the virtual goggles, the last injection when the time came. 

They watched the descent with eyes melted into awe, emotions careening, mutating on their faces. Captain Elise Kadisban cried large tears that moved down her face like paint. TJ, First Officer Pfeiffer, throttled from the atmospheric entry, though nothing else moved in the room except his throne, the potted jade on the thin windowsill still as stone. Garret started whispering the color of that star as he stared at the inside of his black mask, his voice a little boy’s. You stroked his arms up and down, up and down. You stroked the new cold of his cheeks.

Outside, the rising of red light and red dust. The double moon that never sets.

The ship had started vibrating then and seemed to promise a crescendo to blare above and beyond the lifting chorus of your fellow almost-ghosts. The sky outside had changed. You knew it was just a dust storm kicking up, but it looked like a nebula forming just for you. Dust storms made you think of roads hot and black-wet, snakes that wind on their sides. 

You breathed in the cool filtered air, sat down, strapped in, and pressed one of Orca’s wide, orange buttons. 

#

You realize who the interviewer is toward the end, or at least how you know his face. It’s your grandmother’s brother, dead twenty-six years before you floated in the universe of your mother’s belly, smiling out from sepia photographs with scalloped edges, dates written on the back in cursive with a green felt tip pen.

You wonder if the others had this moment of clarity, this choice. A way to back out of the antiseptic scene. 

You’re not sure if it will work, or even why this has become your choice, but you close your eyes and listen to the interviewer (Uncle Duke from Nashua) first ask if you’re okay, then start to fade away (“Let’s wrap up here, folks. We lost her.”). You keep your eyes shut because you have a feeling if you pop them open too early, he’ll still be there, broad Italian face welcoming you back and hooking you in with more questions, more cake, another soft smile. 

You keep your eyes shut until the sounds of the traffic outside the high rise—honks of distant trucks, a siren, those deep canyons of thunder—become what they always were. 

You open your eyes again. 

It’s dark but oh so loud. The alarms are like screams and they push, push, push their way into your head. The only light comes through the window and it’s hot and it’s bright. The glass turns the color of caves. The walls warp and buzz and then a sound like when hand saws make music. 

The first explosion lifts you up, and the straps across your chest make you think of the time you rode your first roller coaster. Your mother pressed an arm across you like a knight wielding shield and sword, your great protector.

The second explosion is night itself. 

The galaxy comes inside.