Sunset ^beta

“Seals are good...stats are steady.”

Angie tries to control her breathing as she watches the launch techs buzz around the outside of her transport pod. The curve of the transparent lid distorts their figures so much they look like giant wasps in their yellow hazmat suits and black respirators. Droning voices swap technical readings across the comms as gloved hands tap mobile touchscreens and blinking panels—a flurry of activity to prep the capsule for spaceflight that looks chaotic from where Angie is lying but she knows is as ordered as the beehive in her allotment.

“T-minus ten minutes to launch.”

If someone had asked Angie a year ago if she'd ever considered strapping herself to a miniature rocket and launching herself into the vacuum of space, she'd have laughed in their face. When someone asked her six months ago, she only hesitated for a moment before committing to the clandestine colonization project. It was no secret that something big was going on behind closed doors between every major government in the world, but nobody could have guessed what it was. The late-night talk shows and exposés theorizing war and climate action and aliens were all so far off base they'd be laughable if the reality wasn't so dire.

“T-minus eight minutes to launch.”

Angie never imagined anything like this when she opened the door to a composed Colonel in dress blues; a secret launch pad, hundreds of international military personnel, thousands of individual space capsules already prepped and waiting to sling the chosen few to a secret lunar outpost, hidden on the dark side of the moon and in construction for over a decade.

“T-minus six minutes to launch.”

And how few the chosen truly are. Barely a thousand people out of everyone on Earth. Nine billion people will be left behind to face the inevitable. Who is she to get a free pass? What has she done to warrant her survival over another more qualified scientist, a nurse, or a child?

“T-minus five minutes to launch.”

Who would pick a botanist over a surgeon? She’s the wrong person for the job. She didn’t earn this. She doesn’t deserve it.

“T-minus four minutes to launch.”

“Wait!” yells Angie, knocking on the inside of her pod. “I’ve changed my mind!”

The techs stop moving as one and look over at the far wall. For a moment Angie thinks they’re reacting to her pleas, until a strong vibration, abrupt and powerful, reverberates through the capsule with enough force she can feel it in her teeth. When she opens her eyes, she’s cocooned in a blanket of silence and darkness. She can’t hear anything, can barely see outside the pod save for the faint glow of emergency lights, too weak to puncture the swirling dust.

Angie pulls the emergency escape lever, just like she’s been drilled for weeks on end, but nothing happens. She tries again, yanking it fast and hard to trigger the release, but the lid doesn’t open. Heart in her throat, she pulls it again, and again, and again...

“Shit.”

She tries to remember what to do in the event of a fault, but all her training abandons her in the face of the unknown. None of the launch drills covered this.

She shoves against the lid with both hands, and runs her fingers rapidly over the seals, trying to find a weak point, but comes up empty. She raps her knuckles against the inside of the capsule, a frantic SOS, clumsy with the adrenaline surging through her veins, hoping, praying, pleading for someone to answer, but no one comes, no one—

“HELP!”

Angie bangs on the lid with clenched fists, begging to be let out, but no one answers over the crackling of the dormant comms. She yells, her hot breath misting on the glass, punching and kicking to escape the confinement that’s pressing in around her body, until a sudden movement outside the pod startles her; a yellow arm reaching out of the darkness and grabbing a hold of the frame cradling the pod. A tech hauls their body up the side of the pod and slumps against it. For a moment she’s relieved as she recognizes a familiar face, but then she notices his enviro-suit is punctured with a dozen holes, the yellow rubber streaked with red.

Angie watches horrified and helpless as the tech struggles to manoeuver himself, leaving behind a red smear on the glass. He taps his comms unit with a bloody glove.

“Good luck,” he rasps as he steadies himself and reaches over the pod.

“Wait!” yells Angie, pressing her palms against the lid. “Wait, no—”

The last thing she sees is a stubborn, steady hand slamming the launch button next to her capsule.

“Wake up.”

Angie turns her face away from the voice. Her head throbs and her pulse pounds in her heavy limbs. She feels like she’s been punched in the face, and every cell in her body is screaming to go back to sleep.

“Hey! Time to get up!”

“Tired.”

“I know, but I need you to open your eyes for me, darlin’.”

The voice is persistent, so Angie complies. She immediately recoils from the bright, white light surrounding her, compounding her headache and leaving lightning flashes on the inside of her eyelids.

“Oh, sorry. Let me just...”

Angie opens her eyes again and blinks away the ache. The hazy, floating orb in her line of sight slowly sharpens into a halo of curls around a freckled face, a woman she doesn’t recognize.

Angie swallows against the dryness in her mouth. “Time’zit?” she croaks.

“Uh, about thirteen hundred hours UTC.”

UTC? Angie tries to sit up, but something pulls tight across her chest, keeping her in place. She looks down to find a strap across her shoulders, her stark white clothing spattered with a dark red stain. When she lifts a hand to touch her aching nose, her fingers come away tacky. The sight of it bothers her more than a nosebleed should, and it leaves her feeling disjointed.

"Take it easy," says the woman, pulling her arm gently down and unclipping the strap. "You had a rough landing. You've been out of it for a while."

“I have?” Angie doesn’t know how she got here, and that troubles her as much as the nosebleed.

“What do you remember?”

She remembers breakfast, eggs, bacon and orange juice. Remembers a vid-call with her brother, and missing her dog. Arguing for the hundredth time over the contents of her personal effects. ECGs and checklists and countdowns and— oh god, oh no.

“Yeah. Okay. So. Here’s the thing.”

Angie does her best not to freak out when the woman tells her that hers is the only capsule that launched from Cape Breton. She hauls herself up until she’s sitting upright, and all the information starts to click into place as she surveys the room. She’d recognize those ascetic angles anywhere; she’s been living in a replica hab for months. She’s arrived. She’s on the lunar outpost.

“What happened?” she asks, gripping the rim of the pod for stability.

“I don’t know. It’s been radio silence for hours. Not just with Munich and Houston and Bangalore; comms went out across the board in the middle of the countdown. I can’t connect with anyone at all back on earth. I had no idea someone was en route until your orbit pinged the sensors.”

“There’s been no one else?”

“No one. I’ve been searching manually since you docked, but as far as I can tell you were the only person to launch before everything went dark.”

Her memories are fragmented, but the image of the bullet-ridden tech is burned into Angie’s brain in between giant voids. She knows she should have a thousand questions, but they slip away like sand through her fingers. She needs to get her bearings. She tries to stand, but a wave of nausea pushes her back down.

The woman looms over her, brow furrowed and hands hovering awkwardly. Angie closes her eyes against the spinning room, expecting admonishment or instruction, but it doesn’t come. She waits out the wave of discomfort until it starts to ease. When she looks up again, she finds the woman scowling at a heavy binder in her hands. She flips a page, then another, and then looks back at Angie.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she says, showing Angie the green cross of the emergency medical binder. “I’m an engineer, not a medic.”

“Okay.” Angie reaches out a hand. “Help me up?”

“Sure thing, Hon.”

The woman eases her out of the pod, then helps her out of her bloodstained flight suit and into some baggy, grey sweats that were obviously made for someone else. Angie tries not to think too hard about that as the woman rolls up her sleeve. She should be feeling...something, guilty or devastated, but mostly she’s relieved she’s not dead.

The moon. It’s a miracle she wasn’t lost to the dark depths of space. The thought of waking up in her pod, drifting through the void, makes her feel like the ground is falling out from under her. It doesn’t help that when she tries to take a step, her knees buckle under her weight. The woman pulls her close and holds her steady while she regains her footing. When Angie nods, she helps her through narrow corridors to a gallery, where a mug of hot coffee and a couple of pills are pressed into her unsteady hands.

“Dani,” says the woman as she sits opposite, and Angie’s brain stutters as she tries to parse the meaning of the word. “My name, Danielle,” the woman continues, not unkindly, and Angie is grateful.

“Angela,” she replies, and sips her coffee to give herself a moment to look around. She takes in Dani’s red-rimmed eyes and tangled mess of copper hair. “You said you’re an engineer?”

“Mmmhmmm.” Dani drains her coffee cup in one go and reaches for an open pack of washcloths on the counter behind her. “I lead the team that designed the oxygen extractors.”

“You’ve been here a while?”

Dani shrugs, folding a damp cloth in her hands. “Couple of months. I’ve been monitoring the equipment.”

“Alone?”

Dani’s lips are pressed tight when she nods. The colonists were supposed to be sent in waves. Angie was part of the first, what was to be a dozen or so people to get settled in and everything up and running before the second and third, each wave larger than the last, and with every new set of colonists, more of the dormant outpost awoken for habitation. She can’t imagine what it must have been like to inhabit the outpost alone on the dark side of the moon, counting down the days until other people would arrive, only to have all communication with Earth cut off out of nowhere.

When Dani holds out a wet washcloth and asks “May I?”, Angie leans forward, closes her eyes, and lets her clean the dried blood from her face.

Angie’s no engineer, but nor is she one to sit around and do nothing when there’s work to be done. After a rest and a brief tour of the few modules of the outpost that are already habitable, Dani assigns her to a couple of small, simple tasks and talks her through the procedures. She has the kind of calm, patient disposition that works wonders on children, animals, and overwhelmed botanists who are in way over their head despite weeks of SOPs being drilled into her; never getting frustrated or ornery when Angie asks her to repeat the instructions the next day.

She lets Angie help—or at least lets her feel helpful—when she tests the comms systems every few hours, pinging the wide net of satellites orbiting the planet and then the dozen or so launch stations on the ground. Each time they don't get a reply, Angie feels like a piece of her soul is turned to ice and chipped off. She knows the radio silence is a huge deal, knows that what happened before she was launched was no accident, but there's nothing but white noise where her anxiety usually sits. Instead of fretting, she spends her days on maintenance and her nights in a bunk two doors down from Dani, listening to the rush of the air vents and the faint melody from Dani's music player. No matter how many times they fail to contact Earth, Dani's resolve doesn't waver. Angie's not surprised to learn that she has spent a lot of time in space, even before a mass exodus in the face of an extinction-level event became more than a movie plot. She wonders how she'd feel to be sent into orbit if the stakes weren't so high.

No one could conclusively predict if anyone will survive on Earth. The lunar outpost isn’t the only plan in place, but it had the best chance out of all the fail-safes to wait out the fallout. And now? Now Angie and Dani haunt a lunar habitat too big for two, and only a week in, starting to feel like a cage.

“Hit.”

Angie deals another card to Dani, gently placing a ten next to her three of hearts and five of diamonds. In the low grav, it's hard to keep from knocking them off the table, but Dani insisted that they cut power from various systems to try to increase the sensitivity and range of their comms. Angie thought the hardest part about losing the artificial gravity was not being able to shower, but she didn't anticipate that a career astronaut would carry a genuine pack of cards, nor that they'd share their first laugh when she sent one careening on course for the ceiling vent.

"You don't know just how bored you can get until you find yourself alone in a shuttle during a solar storm. Besides, I don't trust an app not to cheat. Deal me in."

Dani peers at the cards for a moment, before staying. Angie counts out a four, an ace, and a ten. The next card wipes her out.

“You win.”

“A lucky streak, Hon. You’ll get me next time.”

Hon. Dani's been calling Angie 'Hon' and 'Darlin' and everything under the sun except her name. It's been a long time since anyone called her anything other than Doctor Wolff, even before she joined the colonization project. It makes her feel warm every time, despite knowing it's just a Canadian affect. Still, it's not lost on her that she had to travel nearly four hundred thousand kilometres to meet someone who breaks through the wall of apathy that's been shielding her from everyone on Earth these past few years, nor that she starts to reconnect with her humanity when she's been irrevocably removed from it.

“Sun’ll be up soon,” says Dani as she collects the cards and slips the pack back into the floral storage tin.

Angie looks up to the skylight, layers of some supposedly indestructible composite that could be mistaken for the same glass that lets the sun warm her cabin in the afternoon. “For how long?” she asks, searching for a sign of dawn, knowing that no matter how bright it shines, the rays won’t freckle her skin ever again.

“A little under two weeks,” says Dani. She gestures at the skylight. “The windows are polarized, but you might wanna hang a curtain or two in your room. The light can make it hard to sleep regardless.”

“I’ve spent most of my career in the polar regions. Two weeks will be fine.”

They still haven't heard a thing from Earth. Two weeks of continuous daylight is the least of their problems. The view from her bunk is a blanket of stars unlike anything visible from Earth. This week of lunar night has given her the most incredible view of the Milky Way she has ever seen, like someone swept a paintbrush across the heavens and left an entire galaxy in its wake. Sometimes she dreams she's freefalling through it, but she doesn't dream of Earth, and she doesn't dream of any of the people she left behind.

“I should have known.”

The words slip out of Angie’s mouth over dinner, as the two of them split a utilitarian pouch of something labelled cassoulet, but which has been so thoroughly heat treated there’s no way to be sure what it’s made of. Dani seems indifferent to the space food, spooning it into her mouth almost thoughtlessly, but Angie’s used to texture and colour and, most importantly, flavour.

“I’m gonna need you to narrow that down,” says Dani, waving her spork in the air. “Animal, vegetable, mineral?”

"Situational," replies Angie. "I should have known about this. That something was going on, at least."

“Best kept secret for the whole of human history, and you think you should have figured it out?”

Angie prods her food with her spoon. “Didn’t anyone else think it strange when so many countries suddenly found the budget to fund a space program? Cause I started getting suspicious around about the time Japan funded a launch pad in Luxembourg.”

“You and every other smart cookie on the planet.”

“Did no one connect the dots?”

“Sure, but anyone that got too nosey either got sworn in or diverted with info on some other clandestine project.”

“Like who?”

“No idea. Not my department.” Dani gestures at Angie’s bowl. “You gonna eat that?”

Angie slides it across the table, not nearly hungry enough to keep eating. There isn’t enough hot sauce on the whole of the moon to make the lumpy beige slop taste any more appetizing than swamp algae, but she knows that in time she’ll get over it.

It's a pleasant surprise when Dani throws her the crackers and cheese paste. Another entry in a long list of things she hasn't expected lately. Not just the obvious, the way her whole life has been turned upside down, but the small things too. The outpost is like the training habs on Earth in many ways, but nothing could have prepared her for some of the more mundane things. The taste of the recycled air, the stark and sterile rooms, the constant checking and rechecking for malfunctions...her waking day is a lot different than it looked on paper, not least because as a member of the agricultural team, she had no reason to learn more than the most basic maintenance routines.

Unexpected too is the noise; the air vents and the equipment, the soft thwump of the fusion generators and the groaning of solar panels as they tilt to the sun. Oftentimes Angie can hear the faint sounds of Dani’s activities, even from several habs away. This place was built for hundreds, even in the small sector already in operation there should be dozens of people. There should be enough natural noise that she couldn’t make out a single person, especially not one as quiet as Dani, who is so acclimatized to the outpost that she doesn’t bump into things or knock things over or even drop her tablet.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

Angie looks up, surprised to find Dani leaning forward over the table the bowl empty by her elbow and her spork sitting neatly on the rim. The cracker pouch is still in Angie’s hand, and she fumbles with it for a moment until she manages to tear it open.

“I just, uh...” she begins, floundering for something to say. “I guess I’m just thinking that you're...kind of a natural?”

“Is that right?”

“With the space thing, I mean,” Angie adds quickly, squeezing the cheese onto the crackers. “I’m not sure I’m going to get the hang of...all this.”

“I was recruited for the space program in my early twenties,” says Dani. “There are people with more days in orbit, but...well, you know how it is.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“I guess I just found my place.” Dani shrugs. “To be honest, there’s never been much on Earth that interested me.”

It's not unthinkable to Angie, but she's always been a child of the earth, in the literal sense. Grew up on a farm, aced the natural sciences all the way through school, majored in botany, and then took the natural leap in a changing climate to eco-agriculture. She wonders what Dani would think if she saw her elbow deep in soil. It's hard to imagine someone so put together in muddy overalls.

“I see.”

Dani tilts her head and looks Angie up and down, her gaze almost palpable on Angie's bare forearms. She leans back in her chair and says, "Could be that I was mistaken".

It makes Angie feel warm, and a little giddy, and then a little foolish. She's being an idiot. There's no way that Dani's putting down what she's picking up.

“You ever get scared?” Angie asks, to stop herself from saying something that’ll give away how strongly her pulse is pounding in her ears.

“Sure.”

“I mean, really scared. Like, you thought you were going to die?”

Dani’s quiet for a moment, then she crosses her arms and nods, eyes fixed on the table between them.

“Once,” she says, quietly. “The boredom? That came after.”

Angie starts to regret her question, thrown so carelessly but landing so hard.

“You don’t have to—”

"No," Dani interrupts, one hand raised. "It's okay. I was on a mission to look for good locations for the outpost. Long story short, a solar flare knocked out all my systems, I got caught up in lunar gravity with no comms, no manoeuvrability, no air filtration, no heating."

“What did you do?”

"Nothing. I tried everything I could think of, but when none of it worked, I got out my playing cards and I waited."

“For what?”

“I’d like to say that I waited for my ground team to figure out how to fix the problem, but honestly, I thought that was it. I figured I had a good run. So, I shuffled my cards and I waited for whatever non-functioning system was going to get me first.”

“I don’t think I could wait for my end with that kind of dignity.”

"Oh no, I wasn't dignified. I cursed, and I cried, and I screamed, and when I got tired of despairing, I played solitaire on the console. Turns out that waiting for the end to come is mind-numbingly dull. There are only so many card games you can make up, and I ran out of snacks real quick. And then someone back in Houston tricked the shuttle's computer core to reset and set me back on track."

“What, you finished the mission after all that?”

“Multi-million-dollar craft, once in a lifetime mission, humanity's future on the line? You bet I did.”

“I can’t imagine being able to just pick up and carry on like that.”

"You're doing just fine, darlin', don't overthink it."

Dani calls Angie to the control room in the middle of the night, or at least what would be the middle of the night if you were in bed anywhere in Western Europe. Angie's circadian rhythm isn't adapting to the outpost's local time, but nor does it resemble anything on Earth. She finds herself roaming the habs when she should be asleep, and suddenly bone-shatteringly exhausted when she's in the middle of something important. She's awake in her bunk and staring at the ceiling when Dani's voice sounds through a speaker on her wall, already out the door before she stops talking. She bounce-steps as fast as she can, her bare feet tapping against the hard floor every time she lands. She's getting better every day at navigating the corridors in low gravity but still has to course correct when she gets too close to the walls.

When she arrives, Angie isn't by an active comms station as she had hoped; instead, she's standing in front of the massive flat screen that dominates the outer wall, a conceptualized view of the solar system that displays data in real-time. Her heart sinks at the red dot that's appeared on the screen, blinking as it moves out of the asteroid belt. It wasn't there yesterday, and for a time, Angie had been able to fool herself that all the scientists on the planet might have been suffering some kind of mass delusion.

Angie tries to find the words, but what could she possibly say to make either of them feel any better?

“How long?” she asks instead, stepping up next to Dani and dropping a hand on the table to keep from overshooting her landing.

“To impact?” Dani checks some data on the pad in her hand. “If the telemetry from Voyager 1 was correct, about ninety days. But remember, it’s old—”

“Old tech, yeah, I got that from the vids. So it could be wrong?”

Dani's face is impassive when she looks at Angie. "It could be. But it's a solid probe, it's lasted decades past its lifespan. And..."

“And?”

“The asteroid’s emerged almost exactly where and when we calculated it would.”

“Almost?”

“The margin of error is practically zero, but not quite. Too small to change the odds of collision.”

The greatest minds on Earth have been working the problem for nearly as long as Angie's been alive. Of course they got it right. Angie thought she understood the gravity of the situation, could look past the cold, hard math that led to her being chosen for the ultimate expedition, the smallest hope of humanity's survival a balm to any reservations, but she can't deny the irrevocable truth blinking danger red on the screen. Most of the people on Earth have less than three months to live.

It’s a miracle they kept it quiet so many years, but as reality comes crashing down on Angie and her brain connects the dots she’s been denying, it’s suddenly obvious that word did get out; that whatever happened at the launch facility was a calculated, targeted attack and not a random act of violence. The realization is a sucker punch, and though she knows Dani’s saying something, she’s struggling to parse her words into anything useful over the ringing in her ears. Her horror must show on her face, because Dani’s mouth stops moving, and she reaches out to touch Angie on the shoulder.

Angie can’t bear the kindness, can’t accept comfort when everyone, everything she’s ever known is weeks away from oblivion, and she’s up here, slowly dying in a glorified coffin on the moon with a woman who is far too understanding to deserve the vitriol in Angie’s voice when she hisses “fuck off” and rushes from the control room as fast as lunar gravity will allow.

Dani presses a drink into Angie’s hands and sits beside her on the bunk, one leg bent under the other. Angie spins the tumbler in her hand and feels Dani’s eyes on her. She can’t bring herself to meet her gaze. Now that the moment has passed, she feels like an idiot, and it only further serves her bone-deep belief that she should not have been chosen for the colony. Humanity needed the best of the best out here to survive, not an overly sentimental gardener with an over-reactive adrenal system and the interpersonal skills of a European mole.

It needs people like Dani, someone who manages to keep her shit together no matter what. People with the kind of scientific expertise that will keep an outpost up and running. Leadership skills. Crisis management training. Previous exposure to the dangers of space.

The quiet knock at the door wasn’t unexpected, but Angie had half a mind to ignore it. If she opened it, she’d have to apologize. If she didn’t...well. She did, but now here she is with the perfect opportunity to say something meaningful and competent handed to her in an unbreakable, thermal tumbler, and she’s still messing it up.

She looks at Dani, willing her tongue to get a grip, but something in Dani’s relaxed, comfortable posture eases the storm in her stomach. Dani smiles and holds out her own drink.

“To uncomfortable silences.”

Angie can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of Dani’s toast. She taps Dani’s tumbler with hers, and they both take a sip of the wine; a dry white from a bottle with a well-worn label. She doesn’t know that much about wine, but she does know that something that costs more than her car shouldn’t taste like it came out of a box.

Dani scowls at her tumbler, and then takes Angie's and puts them both on the bedside table with a clunk.

“That...did not go to plan,” she says.

“You had a plan?”

“Sure, I did. A little wine, a little music, maybe a little dancin’,”—Dani shimmies her shoulders—“shake some of those cobwebs loose. Shame that even a vintage Marsanne tastes like crap up here.”

"I'm sorry you wasted the wine.”

“Nah, it wouldn’t have tasted any better in five years time.” Dani pauses, and glances at the bottle, her expression unreadable. “It was a gift, not like I bought it.”

“Someone special?” asks Angie.

“Hell no!” replies Dani, leaning back on her elbows. “A billionaire asshole I had to keep sweet to keep the program funded. It’s kinda typical since everything else he got his hands on turned sour. Why not the celebratory wine?”

“Huh.”

“Probably a fake anyway.”

It hits Angie how much there was on Earth that they won't have here. There are the obvious things that she'll miss—the library, her favourite coffee shop, seasonal fruit and veg—but so much more that she had that she wouldn't consider a loss. Fast fashion, flavoured beer, and all the mass-produced junk that's going to linger on the planet for a long time after the bones of the people who won't survive. Of the all things she's glad to leave behind, money is at the top.

“What will you miss?”

Dani looks surprised at the question, like she hadn’t considered it before.

“To be honest, I’ve been preparing for this a lot longer than you have,” she says after a beat. “I’ve already said my goodbyes.”

“How long have you been involved in the project?”

“Since the beginning, when an ambitious overachiever assigned to sift through endless gigs of extrasolar data found an anomaly in the noise.”

“Wait, that was you?” asks Angie. “You discovered the asteroid?”

“I was young and naïve and I thought I’d stumbled on something incredible. It turned out to be the find of the century but without any of the accolades I hoped for.”

The disappointment in Dani’s voice resonates with Angie. “I'm sorry,” she says, looking down at her hands.

Dani leans forward and drops a hand on Angie’s arm.

“Me too,” she says, squeezing gently. “But I came here to wipe that look off your face, Hon, not make you feel worse.”

"I don't know how I feel. So many people...I should feel worse, I just feel helpless. Useless."

“Useless?”

Angie shrugs. “I just—what the hell do I know about...about comms systems and solar radiation and—”

“Well, what the hell do I know about plant growth in extreme environments?” asks Dani.

Angie looks at her, incredulous. “I specialize in arctic farming systems, not Astrobotany. There must have been better choices than me."

“You specialize in making plant life cultivable in inhospitable climes," argues Dani. "I've read your file; you’re the foremost expert at making the ungrowable thrive in places they shouldn’t even survive.”

“In tundra, not regolith!”

Dani shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter. It’s about transferrable skills, not established methods. Of all the plant people on Earth, you have the wherewithal to take what we’ve got and create what we need. And what we’ve got is a vast supply of seeds and an endless amount of time.”

Angie closes her eyes and swallows. She chooses her next words with care, because she wants Dani to understand, but doesn’t want to hurt her.

“It doesn’t matter, though, does it? Because even with all the time in the world, it’s just the two of us, and—”

“Hey.”

“—it doesn't even matter.”

“No, none of that.”

Once the tears start, Angie can’t get them to stop. Dani puts her arms around her and pulls her in tight. It’s a comfort she doesn’t deserve, but Angie tucks her head into Dani’s neck and lets someone hold her for the first time since her wife died.

"Sometimes..." whispers Dani, and Angie can hear the crack in her voice as she squeezes her, "...sometimes you think it’s game over, but even when you feel like there’s no hope, that all is well and truly lost, sometimes the universe throws you a hail mary. All you need to do is be ready to catch it.”

Angie pulls back and tries to wipe her eyes with the back of her hand. She nods, needing to believe, because even the smallest amount of hope is the lifeline they both need to keep going. When Dani pulls a rag out of her pocket and raises a brow, Angie nods. Dani’s touch is gentle as she dries her tears, and when she cups Angie's face with both hands, it feels like the comfort of home. It’s been so long since she felt anything like that on Earth.

Dani smiles at Angie, her gaze both mesmerizing and calming. Angie finds herself leaning in, a question that Dani answers with the soft touch of her lips. It’s the smallest kiss, barely a press, but it makes Angie's heart pound like she’s a teen again, and she has to put a little space between them to catch her breath.

“Sorry,” she says, resting their foreheads together, eyes closed.

“No need, darlin’,” says Dani. “It’s fine. It’s good. It would still be good if everyone else had made it.”

“Do you think anyone else is doing this?”

“What, kissing?”

“Yeah.”

“I hope so.”

They're probably figuring things out on earth. There are backup plans, Angie knows this, and Dani will know better than her. There's still time, still hope, and when both of those run out, she won't have to face it alone.