Grace had read enough of the etiquette handbook to know this was not a normal thing for a servant to say to a guest, so she only looked at the woman. She looked back at her with a knowing smile.

  "He needs the company of his own people."

  "His own people?"

  The woman smiled. "Indeed."

  Grace lowered her eyes, then looked over to Livingston’s little desk. She approached it, seeing what she hadn’t noticed before. He had books marked by ribbon, a small bird carved out of a pale wood. A drawing from a child, perhaps in thanks for some service. She touched a number he had written on a piece of paper. All the other numbers and letters had the characteristics of the time, but this one was modern, a blemish in his efforts to fit in.

  Without considering it deeply, she took up his strange pen and wrote down as best she could on a scrap of paper. "Signal A: complete in one hour. Signal B: complete in forty-three days and eleven hours."

  She left the home and stood out front, waiting there until Livingston returned with Mariah, who smiled at her kindly.

  "Good morning, Miss Wells."

  "Good morning. Might we take a brief walk?"

  "I would be delighted!"

  "Thank you, Dr. Livingston," Grace said with finality.

  He looked staggered.

  "When you have finished, allow me to escort you to your destination, Miss Wells?"

  "That’s quite all right, thank you. I know my way."

  He cast her one last look, intent and thorough, as if memorizing her. She took Mariah’s arm and walked away from him, but paused and looked back at him. "I hope to see you again."

  Grace didn’t wait for a reaction or reply. She and Mariah continued down and around the corner, out of his sight.

  "I only have a few moments to spare. I wanted to ask you… No. I wanted to tell you something that maybe you haven’t heard before."

  Mariah laughed uncomfortably, but Grace continued.

  "Mariah, you are a wonderful person. And you only have this one life, and you deserve happiness. You deserve companionship and respect and safety. And I do not think you will find it in that… Cowhaven? Van Brunt? What is his name, even? Never mind, I don’t care. You must follow your heart."

  "I wish very much to follow my heart, but⁠—"

  "No, no but!" Grace said, her voice drawing some attention from passersby. "You have to be happy. Life is so short. The wrong man ruins it, especially here, especially now. And you deserve happiness."

  "I find some happiness in service to my family."

  "Some. And you don’t even know if this man will be good for your family, or that Mr. Humphrey will be bad. He may become successful, or you may go out on your own and become successful."

  Mariah’s laugh was less carefree now. "That I can assure you will not happen. Women must be of a special strength to achieve independence. I do not possess the right disposition."

  Grace squeezed her arm. "Then at least marry a good man who has a future, who you love. I need to go now. Will you consider this? As my only friend here?"

  Mariah smiled at her. "I will consider it. Must you leave?"

  "I can’t stay." She swallowed. "I can’t."

  Mariah nodded then hugged her tightly, drawing some curious glances, but they didn’t care. "May God bless you, my friend."

  "Take care of yourself, Miss Lennox," Grace said, separating. "I’m rooting for you."

  "Rooting?" Mariah laughed after her.

  "I’m cheering for you? I celebrate you? Shit, I don’t know."

  Mariah laughed again, this time a small bawdy laugh. "Go if you must, you foul-mouthed sailor."

  Grace smiled and squeezed the young woman’s hand one last time before walking away.

  UNIVERSE D

  Danny couldn’t decide how to behave as he returned to work. The security guard hardly glanced at him when he explained he’d just gone for some air.

  Sweat pooled under his sweater as he walked through the halls back to the control room. He checked his watch. Fifteen minutes left. He was going to make it.

  He jogged the last stretch down the hall and opened the door. It was dark again. Stiles must have left. Drew V was still there, pacing between two desks at the front of the room. Danny walked towards his terminal beside Kevin, then paused. His terminal was in the test space. He didn’t know how to move back into production. Panic vibrated his bones. He needed to gain access to someone’s active terminal, soon, but all the available computers were either occupied or logged off.

  Kevin was glowering at his own screen, stabbing keys. Danny swallowed and sat down at his station. He looked around for something, anything, to help him.

  UNIVERSE B

  On her way back to the ship, Grace took a quick detour to grab the water pouch. It felt wrong to leave a modern thing behind, if the Skylark did take her home. The pouch would probably be treated as contamination of an archeological site and ruin some PhD student’s whole research expedition.

  At the turnoff from the trail, she walked up to the bush. There was no pouch. She’d noted the general geography of the area when she stashed it—this was the right bush. So where was the pouch? She checked again, and then nearby, without luck. Standing, she began to survey the woods for another bush that looked like the one in question when she heard a man quacking.

  She froze. Terror bloomed and radiated through her.

  Valkenberg appeared and leaned against a tree thirty feet away, holding the water pouch. In an instant, Grace imagined arguing with him, crying at him, using various fighting moves on him. None of it would work, or it would kill him. She flexed her knee under her dress. It was tender, but the walk had loosened it a bit.

  "Your prize is here, strange little duck."

  Grace let herself look scared, then frowned and looked at something intently over his shoulder. He turned to follow her gaze, and she took her chance. She grabbed her skirts and bolted towards the ship.

  He was either a very slow runner or a very slow thinker. She hurtled over fallen logs and dove through the tree branches and across the low foliage to her concealed ship well ahead of him. She opened the airlock door behind her wall of branches and waited. The sounds of an exhausted runner and clumsy footsteps continued past her. When Grace could hear the steps become distant, she shed the dress and boots and bulky underthings, then climbed through and sealed the airlock.

  "Time?" she whispered to Peggy, as if Valkenberg could hear her.

  "Five minutes."

  She slid into her launch suit, difficult on her own, no matter what Wright had pitched her. The even, mechanical stitching of the seams was disappointing. She smoothed a hand over the blended fabric, soft but sterile.

  It was then she noticed a smudge of ink from Livingston’s quill on her finger. She touched it and allowed herself a moment of an indistinct feeling. Not quite longing, but in that direction. She pushed it aside, then she set to work powering on the life support systems.

  "Time?" she asked.

  "Three minutes."

  "Are there any systems offline that will be required for launch?"

  "Systems are online. Ten minutes of power remaining."

  Doesn’t matter, Grace thought. If this is it, there’s only one way out. She had enough morphine to put herself into a coma and die, and she’d do it if this failed. No matter what happened, she couldn’t stay here. Hiding would suffocate her.

  There was a sudden, loud sound. Someone was outside the ship, hitting the hull.

  "Peggy, exterior camera."

  An angled camera used for checking the heat shield showed Valkenberg. He had a hunting knife. He was trying to cut his way inside the Skylark.

  UNIVERSE D

  Danny stood at the control room’s snack box, staring at the keypad. He didn’t have a plan, but he needed something to get him onto a terminal. He punched in a code for a soda, some kind of sugary thing that Naomi liked. He hated them because if they spilled, that surface was disgusting and sticky, and Naomi spilled drinks all the time.

  The idea had hardly settled into his mind before he acted on it. He turned, approached Kevin, still focused on his screen. With a quick gasp, Danny feigned a stumble and spilled the drink all over his trainer.

  "What the shit!" Kevin shouted, rising in alarm.

  "Oh my god, Kevin, I’m so sorry! I tripped! It’s so dark in here, why is it so dark in here! Here, uh, paper towels? What’s the code for tissues?" he stammered, running back to the bin.

  Kevin shouldered him out of the way, entered the code, shoved paper towels into his hand. "I want my desk and chair spotless when I get back," he growled.

  "What happened?" Drew V called.

  "This twit just spilled a kid’s drink all over me. God, this is never washing out."

  "Just get a new shirt and then get back to work," Drew V replied, turning back to the man he’d been speaking with.

  Kevin swore under his breath as he ordered a clean shirt from the bin, grabbed it aggressively, then stormed out of the office. Everyone else had watched the scene. Two women giggled behind their hands and gave Danny a sympathetic look as they returned to their computers.

  He cleaned Kevin’s desk while he was being watched, but once all eyes turned from him, he switched to the Active Connections screen on Kevin’s console.

  Two sequences were running, one nearly at the lowest point of the wave period. For the other, the TISE value was dropping at a slower rate. He did some mental math, went into a submenu he didn’t think anyone used, and entered an end time for that connection.

  "What are you doing?" Drew V called, staring right at him.

  When he didn’t respond, the manager began marching toward him. He didn’t look up. With a quick press of the hotkeys Kevin had taught him, Danny returned to the Active Connections panel and tabbed over to the most recent sequence. The one that was about to reach the lowest frequency value. He swallowed and hit END.

  UNIVERSE B

  Valkenberg wanted her dead. Grace couldn’t stop him, couldn’t do a single thing about him if he got in. If he clipped an oxygen line and live wires, he would kill her, and maybe himself, too.

  She buckled into her seat and closed her eyes. She could hear him screaming at her now, in a language she didn’t understand, but she knew the meaning. It wasn’t new to her. His intensity, and his freedom to follow through on his rage, those were new.

  There wasn’t time for him, she reminded herself. She imagined herself back at the launch pad, as if visualizing it would help.

  "One minute," Peggy said calmly, unbothered by the thuds and screaming of Valkenberg’s knife stabbing and scraping metal in the background.

  Grace kept her eyes closed. She wasn’t praying. Her mind was roaming, attempting to sense what it was that had brought her here. She was in a forest, in a past that was not her own, in a ship. A fuselage, from a French word that meant spindle like. Was she on a spindle now? She imagined a golden thread, twisting its way through universes and time.

  The gold thread had swerved, wrapped itself around another thread. If she followed the golden thread backwards, it would lead her where she belonged. It glowed in her mind, with small offshoots fading into nothingness, paths untaken. Beneath it, more tightly wound, she could see another thread leading from here to nearly the same origin, this one a shade of orange. And remoter still were other threads, faded and tangled, criss crossing time and space and universes bubbled against one another. She imagined it all, the intersections of lives apart from her but caught within a system not of their choosing.

  In her focus, she gained clarity. The ship was now damaged. If she made it back to her universe, she could still launch and see what happened, she could maybe make it out of the atmosphere, but she didn’t need this mission. She didn’t care about the moon or Mars, about proving to herself she could do things without Ethan, not if it meant losing her friends. She wanted to return home. She wanted to watch them try to fix a jukebox, to go to dance clubs in skimpy clothes she didn’t want to wear, to gossip outside budget hearings before making a case for spaceflight, and to play with Jadyn’s baby during a cookout. She wanted her car, she wanted to fly, she wanted to listen to her own advice. She wanted to find happiness.

  "Five seconds."

  Valkenberg’s fury faded, and Grace stayed in her mind, focused on the gold thread, her thread. This was her life. It sang her story, of her parents’ loss and her fight against the current their sorrows had made, and she could hear its song. She focused on it, believing in herself, forcing her will to push against whatever mistakes had brought her here.

  And then, a feeling shook her soul like a soundless concussive blast. It chattered her teeth and pushed the air from her lungs and rumbled through the Skylark.

  Her consciousness drifted from her grasp.

  It is night. She is loading her last bag into her beautiful Corvette, parked on the side of the road. Streetlamp glow shines on the recently polished paint. She looks back to the dark condo, the dark window where Ethan is sleeping.

  She gets into the Corvette and cranks down both windows. Then she starts the engine, puts the car into gear, and takes one last look before driving away.

  She takes the scenic route to the highway. She is listening to music, the cool night air moving across citrus orchards scented with blossoms, refreshing every part of her after the first hot day of the year. There are few cars on the road, the streetlights changing for her and her alone, as if the Earth is all hers.

  She is not going back to that place. She feels no regret. She has no love for him.

  There is pain, but not the loss of a needed thing. It is the sting of an unbearable weight finally lifted from her shoulders. Never again will she watch for signs of a truth she already knew—what love had ever existed between them died long ago. They continued together out of habit, not choice or desire.

  She knows he went elsewhere, often, and it never should have mattered to her. But it did. It hurt. Now she’s made her choice. Now what he does no longer matters.

  She is free.

  UNIVERSE A

  Grace opened her eyes. Her body was pressed backwards into the seat. She turned her gaze to the window and saw a clear sky and hints of support structures. She admired the perfect blue, the birds flying in the distance.

  A rattle moved through the fuselage. She blinked, then punched the abort button.

  UNIVERSE D

  Drew V froze, staring up at the giant screen.

  "Oh shit."

  He looked around, everyone in the room looked around, as if waiting for something terrible to happen. The woman at the desk marked Resources said from her screen, "Water pressure and radio receivers stable."

  Drew V swung around to Danny. "You are so fucking fired."

  An hour later, Danny parked in front of his parents’ house. The neighbor kids were playing soccer with a red kickball, which bounced into his mom’s sensible sedan.

  "Sorry!" one of the kids shouted.

  He jogged over, picked up the ball, and threw it back to the grateful kids, then proceeded up the steps to his home. It was quiet, everyone still at work or school. Not him, though. He had lost a job he hated. Danny hummed to himself as he grabbed an apple resting by itself on the kitchen counter, took a bite, and then climbed the stairs to his bedroom.

  He turned on the VPN, opened a private browser, and typed in the URL for his favorite message board one-handed, in case there was anything about what happened today. The song he’d been humming died on his lips. There was a message waiting for him.

  He had never posted on this message board, let alone received any direct messages. There was no public membership list, so there should be no way for any participants to know he existed. He sunk into his chair and clicked on the alert icon. It was a message from MissZumeena.

  Hey, I told you I’d message you. Guess Drew-boss doesn’t know why you got the job in the first place. They’ll have you back here tomorrow. Want to meet up again for lunch? And maybe destroy Occator?

  EPILOGUE A

  "I’m surprised you’re coming with me. You usually hate these things," Chloe said, her briefcase on her lap. It was a weekday morning and they were heading down the R line away from Manhattan, so the train was nearly empty. At each station, they saw people packed into the Manhattan-bound trains.

  Grace moved over one seat and turned to look at her friend. "I love doing school visits, what are you talking about."

  "No, I know. But this is an advertised one. With news cameras. Not your thing."

  With a shrug, Grace admitted defeat.

  The news cameras weren’t typical. Someone had leaked to the European Space Agency that Wright had manipulated file transfer data from their satellites. It was an international scandal. In response, Congress had vowed to keep NASA independent, approving a budget bill that funded the Mars mission without private contractors. But not for another year.

  Grace had returned to NASA and met with Chuck right away. He hadn’t even filed her resignation paperwork yet. Technically, she’d still been on leave. He didn’t apologize, nor did she expect him to. He slid over the mock-up of the first mission patch and told her to enjoy deep blue skies while she still could. It showed a curved blue line swooping to Mars and a golden line completing the circle, returning to Earth. The patch was in Grace’s pocket now, ready to show the kids.

  They got off at the Bay Ridge–95th Street station and walked north to the elementary school where the presentation was to take place. It was all brick and concrete here. Signs were in English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic. There was a pizzeria and an office supply store and nail salons and trendy coffee shops. Trees grew in tight square gaps of the concrete, cars honked, laughter from a distant window echoed down the street.

 

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