I BARELY NOTICE WHEN I STEP OUTSIDE: it's just as dark and cold as inside. The ship must be only a few hundred meters away, a cloaked pool of light in the distance, and my first instinct is to head toward it.
Then I remember: I can't.
A gust of wind steals my breath. I want to go back to the Nassau. Screw Sanne. Screw Mom. Screw Max, too. I just want to forget about them all, return to the ship oblivious and safe, and never go outside again.
I want to find Iris and then I want us to leave, so much that it startles me every time the thought creeps up. It's what I've wanted since the announcement in July. They mentioned ships in the same breath as they mentioned attempts to divert the comet. I think they wanted to cut off panic before it had a chance to spark. We have options, they swore. We don't want to abandon a single soul.
They'd been designing generation ships since long before the announcement, of course: NASA found habitable twin planets over a decade ago. Oxygen, temperature, gravity, pressure, water, magnetic field. Everything came back positive. They'd planned crewed missions on and off, alternately held back by lack of funding, and spurred on by more and more bad news about climate change and waning natural resources.
Then they saw the comet. Funding rolled in. Suddenly, climate change no longer mattered. Instead, there were predictions of the ozone layer going, of dust and debris blocking the sun, and disaster piling on top of disaster worldwide. Earth would take years or decades to be remotely habitable again, generations to recover fully. And how many people would survive to see that happen?
I don't want to be in a basement shelter the rest of my life, hiding from the surface; I want to be on that surface even less. I want a bed and three meals a day and to keep my life like it was. I want to go. I want a future. A ship seemed the only way out—just never a realistic one.
But now there's the Nassau, vines and shoddy bistro seats and all, and I'm paralyzed at the thought of standing atop this rubble to watch the ship escape into the stars. I've watched too many others leave already.
A breath shudders through me.
"Denise!"
My head snaps away from the hidden ship. A small pool of light bounces toward me not far to my right. Mom's flashlight. She comes at me in a half-jog. "There you are," she calls, relieved.
"I left a message."
"Oh! I didn't even think to check."
The beams of our flashlights meet in an almond shape on the ground. I click mine off.
"What were you doing?" she asks.
Even the thought of saying I'd been reading heats my cheeks with embarrassment. Mom wouldn't judge me like Sanne did. She'd say, Oh, that's nice, honey. I'm glad you got to take a break. That might be worse. I shouldn't get to take breaks while people on the ship work day and night to get it repaired, and while people outside of the ship—meaning us—are working simply to survive.
She runs her thumb over my cheek. It comes back black. "All that dirt out here can't be good, honey."
I'd barely noticed. A layer of fine dust coats my gloves and clothes, like the dirt that accumulated on our school's courtyard by the highway.
The sound of footsteps makes us turn. Max exits the building and kicks aside an abandoned chain that must've once locked the door. "Sanne doesn't know when—"
"Hello?" Mom steps forward, half shielding me.
"This is Max. He's Anke's son." I sound stilted. "And this is my mother."
"Heyyy," Max drawls. He sounds dazed, although that may just be his natural state. He turns to me. "If you need quiet spots on the ship to read, I can show you some. You don't have to freeze out here."
Mom responds with a wan smile before I can answer. "Thank you. We're no longer on the ship. And I think Denise needs to sleep. It's been a long day."
I'm not five.
"No longer on—?" Max's eyes grow massive. "That's why you're out here? You got kicked out?"
"Afraid so. If you want to put in a good word for us … ?" Mom says hopefully.
"Yeah! Yeah, I mean, I will. What happened? Where are you staying?"
"It was a misunderstanding. That's all. We're staying in our car." Mom gestures, although the world behind her is pitch-dark.
Max gives us a weird look but says, "There are hotels farther up—some rooms may be intact. Ish. If you want to stay nearby, I can take you to some offices with couches to sleep on. No windows, so no glass or wind. It'll be colder and dustier than the car, I guess, but you can at least stretch out."
"We do have thermal blankets." Mom looks at me—makes a big show of it, too, not just glancing over her shoulder, but stepping back, turning, making eye contact. "Denise, honey. What do you want?"
I grind out the words: "Yeah. I think—yeah." Distance from Mom's half snores would help in getting sleep.
A couple of minutes later we've grabbed our backpacks and we're following Max through the airport buildings. Sanne has already returned to the Nassau, thankfully.
It helps having the other two in front of me. Means I have to pay less attention to where I'm going. I only have to watch out for spikes of glass and slippery mud, tune out the giant shadows chaotically stretching and shifting across the wall, and listen to Mom and Max talk. Mom's come down by now, or close to it. She's still talking about him putting in a good word for us. She's not subtle, either. Max turns back occasionally to talk to me. I keep trying to find something to say, prepare the words, but when I look up they fall apart on my tongue.
After a while, Max hangs back, leaving enough space between us and Mom to talk at a hush. "Sorry about Sanne. She didn't know you spent the day helping. She'll back off. She's … struggling with some things."
"I'm not mad" is all I say. I look up briefly to show I mean it. A long crack runs through the wall behind him. Occasionally, we've had to go around rubble where the ceiling fell through. I don't know why he's been so nice when we only met today. He may just be flirting, like Sanne said. I'm familiar enough with flirting—boys like how I look, even if they don't much like the rest of me—but I hadn't realized he was doing it. He may flirt differently from boys at Iris's festivals. Or maybe he's simply bad at it.
"You sure?" Max says. "You're kinda quiet."
"It's nothing." My half glance at Mom betrays me.
"Ohhh," he whispers.
Soon Max announces, "Best couches in the house." The door creaks open, echoing through the dead quiet of the hall. The lock has been forced. Someone left a scribble on the frame with a thick marker. "The offices on this side of the hall have the same kind of couches. Do you need anything? Can I help?"
We thank him and say goodbye, and while Mom lingers to talk to him about God-knows-what, I step into the next office and click on my flashlight. Like Max said, the couch is long enough to stretch out on. There aren't any windows, so the air blast didn't push everything to one side of the room, either. I thump down, remove my gloves, and bend over my backpack. Mom packed it while I got cleaned up in a communal bathroom, and she did it all wrong, just as I expected. She didn't even fold my pillowcase correctly. The top, where my head goes, should be folded face in, not out, so it won't rub on anything and get all dirty.
I hold two corners of the pillowcase, flap it out in the cold office air, and drape it over the far end of the couch. There's no pillow to hold it in place. It looks wrong.
I braid my hair and wonder what to do with it from now on. It'll get dirty and tangled and damaged out here. I'll need to cut it short. Be practical. I'm just not sure I'll live long enough for it to matter.
I pull a vacuum-packed thermal blanket from my bag and keep my coat on. Even so, I'm shivering minutes after lying down, mashing my face into the comfort of my tainted pillowcase and staring at the wall with one eye. The flashlight lights the room from below. The books on one shelf are a chaotic mess. The desk drawers have been emptied out on the floor. I wonder what Max and the others might have found worth saving, and why they wouldn't leave it for those of us left behind, who need it more.
I hear footsteps. The barely-there shadow of Mom sways in my doorway.
As she pads inside to turn off my flashlight, I pretend to sleep, like I always do.
