Chapter 5

Cleo didn't sleep that first night.

(Not that there was such a thing as night, in deep space. But the ship's lights had gone from white to gold to a deep, gritty orange, to trigger the passengers' circadian rhythms. The Erebus people really had thought of nearly everything.)

Every time Cleo let herself drift off, she was plunged into half-waking dreams of a life that wasn't hers. The same person was in all of them, a blond-haired white boy, then teen, then man whose face grew more and more familiar as the night wore on. She saw him in grubby cargo shorts that didn't quite cover his scraped-up knees, in a graduation gown, in a welding suit. She watched as he meticulously arranged his Thomas the Tank Engine tracks; then as he wrote op-eds about the urgent need for a radical new approach to eliminating fossil fuels; then as he adjusted a rooftop telescope, the stars reflecting in his eyes as he looked, smiling, at Billie, who smiled back.

Cleo watched his hair get grayer, watched his wall fill up with degrees and awards, watched his arms stay sinewy and strong as he got his hands greasy in the guts of the Providence beside his colleagues. She felt his ambition, his curiosity, his shameless desperation for knowledge. It was so easy to lose herself in him. After all, she had always felt the same.

Every time she woke her headache deepened, and it was harder and stickier to come back to herself. So she held her eyes open until they felt dry and tacky, and she kept herself awake by pinching at the insides of her elbows and pulling at the sweaty tufts of her hair. And in the early hours of the morning, when the orange lights were just barely bleeding blue and Cleo could feel her heartbeat in the blood vessels of her eyes, his name vibrated through her head, no longer avoidable: Kristoff Halvorsen. Billie's partner, the head engineer, who had done this, who was gone.

***

ARCHIVED: Providence Intracrew Messaging System Conversation — Abraham Yang and Ros Wheeler, July 13, 2061

Abraham Yang

Aren't these communicators cool?? Glad we found them in the crew quarters

So we can still talk without waking up Kal

Ros Wheeler

For sure. Providence Intracrew Messaging System sure is a mouthful though

Abraham Yang

It shall henceforth be known as PIMS

Texting is now pimming

Pim me, baby

Ros Wheeler

[... ]

Abraham Yang

You feeling okay bud?

Ros Wheeler

Yeah

Might run another round of vitals checks on all of us

Abraham Yang

No!!

ILLEGAL

You should be resting, I shouldn't even be keeping you up

Ros Wheeler

Fine

It's fine

Abraham Yang

[... ]

Will you PLEASE tell me how you're doing I can't take it

Ros Wheeler

I just

[... ]

I didn't hurt anyone earlier, did I? With the ice?

Abraham Yang

No not at all!! You saw us we're all fine

Ros Wheeler

Are you sure though

Abraham Yang

Yes 100%

Ros Wheeler

Okay

I'm still gonna run another check

***

Neil Thorne had been a writer. Captain Lucas's Erebus Industries colleagues and grad school friends, knowing Lucas's penchant for Shakespeare and very serious poetry, often assumed that her fiancé wrote stuff like that, or groundbreaking reporting for TheNew Yorker at least.

But Neil wrote what many serious poets and staff writers for The New Yorker would call fluff. He wrote lightly comedic science fiction that once led a reviewer to call him "his generation's answer to Douglas Adams," about which Neil would never shut up. He wrote short stories about love and trees and talking gorillas that taught blowhards the meaning of life; and his publishing credits in The New Yorker were fourteen winning submissions to the cartoon caption contest, each of which was framed at the place of honor above his desk. He also wrote letters, which Captain Lucas would read and reread until they were coffee-stained and soft at the creases, and keep in her pockets until she inevitably forgot them and washed them with her pants.

(Later, when she was furious at everything, she would be especially furious with herself for ruining them. Particularly what turned out to be the last one.)

Once they got over their surprise that Neil wasn't the kind of writer who would ever even be longlisted for the National Book Award, people moved on to surprise that Lucas was marrying him at all. Most (not all) were polite enough not to make that face that Lucas knew to mean, Didn't you used to date women? I've forgotten that bisexuals exist. Some (not most) were polite enough not to stare pointedly at her crisp ponytail next to Neil's overgrown poof of curls, at her pressed slacks next to his perpetually ripped jeans. But very few (not even some) were polite enough not to ask some version of the question "How did you know you were going to marry him?" by which they meant, "Why are you marrying him?" by which they meant, "Why are you marrying him?"

At which Lucas would put a hand on Neil's chest, glare murderously at everyone else, and say, "He makes me laugh." And everyone who had only met her in the lifetime after her parents died would shut up at that, as they tried to remember if they had ever seen Captain Lucas laugh.

***

When Cleo came into the med bay the next morning balancing two coffees, a chai latte, and a green tea from the replicator in her arms, the buzzing in her chest decelerated, just a bit. Kaleisha and Ros were passed out in adjacent cots, and Abe was nodding sleepily in a chair between them. Battered, all of them, but alive. Cleo too.

Abe twitched all the way awake when Cleo thrust his coffee at him. He took Kaleisha's chai and Ros's green tea too, and put them carefully on the bedside table. "Did you sleep okay?" he asked, lifting the mug to his face like it was the Holy Grail. "You look—"

"Slept fine," Cleo muttered, turning away before Abe could read any more into her bleary, bloodshot eyes. "The bunks are comfy enough, so if we all wanna pick a room once we—"

"—stop being genetically modified abominations?" Cleo hadn't realized Ros was awake. Their voice was rough and bitter in a way Cleo had never heard before, though they still emerged from their blanket cocoon with a tiny smile to accept their tea from Abe. "I don't think that's gonna happen, Cleo."

"That's not what..." Cleo blinked back the prickly feeling behind her eyes. "I was going to say, once we're all feeling better. Whatever that ends up looking like."

Ros just looked at her for a long moment before closing their eyes to breathe in the tea smell. Their fingers, wrapped around the mug, were a little pink and flaky, but not frostbitten or otherwise damaged. Their eyes were still blue too—another relief. Cleo wondered how long she would have to wait for them to turn that terrible, glowing gold again.

A loud groan made her turn around. Kaleisha was stirring on her cot, stretching her arms over her head before wincing and putting them back down.

"All the money they spent on this ship and they couldn't pay up for comfier hospital beds?"

Abe put his coffee down so fast it spilled a little, and ran a soothing hand over Kaleisha's face. "Hey, baby. How are you feeling?"

Kaleisha smiled up at him, like she'd forgotten all the soreness and confusion the second he'd touched her. "Best guess? Like my molecules can't decide whether they want to be here or somewhere else. And also like I just decided that bench-pressing would be a cool hobby to try."

"Well, not that I have any frame of reference, but it makes sense that teleporting or whatever it was you did last night would have taken an unprecedented toll on your body," said Ros. A muscle clenched in their jaw. "But I checked your lactic acid levels last night, and they're not too far out of the ordinary. You should heal up just fine."

Kaleisha leaned around Abe to smile at Ros. "Thanks for checking. How are you, though?"

Ros still looked pale, a bit green even, and the tendons in their hands were straining as they gripped their mug like they wanted to break it.

"Totally fine," they said unconvincingly.

Kaleisha squeezed Abe's hand. "What about you? Any changes?"

"Nope, nothing." Abe shrugged, though it looked more like a wince to Cleo. "Sorry if any of you were hoping for Fantastic Four vibes."

"Better no powers at all than the ability to accidentally drop the air temperature in a pressure-controlled ship traveling through the vacuum of space, is what I always say," Ros muttered.

Abe smiled at them sympathetically. "Yeah, not to be insensitive or anything, but I'm happy not to be adding to the dark matter weirdness."

"This must be why Billie took Dr. Halvorsen's jacket," Cleo said, gnawing on the inside of her cheek. "To stop her brother from getting freaky powers."

A shadow crossed over Ros's face again. "Has to be."

Kaleisha pursed her lips. "Why don't we ask her? I really want to hear her explain herself."

"No." Cleo didn't realize she'd shouted until she saw Kaleisha frowning at her. She took a deep breath. What she wanted was to shout at Billie—for dooming the Providence and the world and Cleo's dreams—which was exactly why she desperately wanted not to see her. "I mean, I don't think we should. You were right, Ros, we really don't know if we can trust Billie."

"Oh, I've changed my mind." Ros sipped their tea delicately. "I don't think she's lying to us. In fact, she was actually very honest with us as soon as she was able to be. I'm still extremely curious, though, about why she thought protecting her brother and no one else was in her crew's best interest."

Abe nodded energetically. "She's probably the only one who can answer all our questions, Cleo. I'm gonna call her."

"Abe, don't—"

"Hey, Billie?"

Pop.Billie appeared at the foot of Kaleisha's bed, apparently halfway through cleaning her glasses on the hem of her sweater. She looked up at all of them in surprise. Cleo wondered whether her hologram glasses actually got hologram smudges on them or the wiping was just a nervous tic. Then she remembered that she was furious at Billie, and didn't care.

"Hey," Billie said, having enough sense to sound sheepish, at least. "You're all, um. Conscious."

Cleo slurped her coffee loudly. "No thanks to you."

Billie's mouth opened soundlessly, then closed again. Her eyes were sunken, like she hadn't slept, or recharged, or whatever it was she did. The tangible air of remorse around her made Cleo want to grind her teeth down to nubs.

Billie frowned, chewing on the inside of her cheek. "You look tired."

Cleo's headache flared. "You're not exactly the picture of effortless beauty yourself."

Billie's mouth twisted, and she turned pointedly to Abe. "Did you need something?"

"I, uh." Abe blinked back and forth between Billie and Cleo. "It's not that important. But we were all kind of wondering what you knew about these powers that have, uh, manifested?"

Kaleisha stretched an arm across her shoulder and grimaced at the bone-cracking pop. "Yeah, I'd appreciate knowing what's going on with, you know, our bodies."

"And brains," Ros grumbled.

"And I would still love to dig a little deeper into how you got to be a captain when your decision-making process sucks so many balls," Cleo said through her gritted teeth. At least she wasn't yelling. She counted that as a success.

Billie placed her glasses carefully back on her nose and sighed. "Anything else?" she asked flatly, as if Cleo was an annoying waste of time, and not the only person who saw Billie for who she was.

Cleo's throat tightened. "You're such a dick."

"I'm just checking," Billie snapped, "whether there's anything else you want to interrogate me about, McQueary."

"Oh no, I wouldn't want to impose any further. Especially since looking at my hideous, bedraggled face is obviously such a struggle for you—"

Kaleisha cleared her throat, but when Cleo looked at her she just blinked back pointedly.

"Fine," Billie said, shooting one last glare at Cleo before directing her attention to the other three. "I'll go in order, then. Yang, I spent all night sorting through my memories, my files, and the ship's archives, and it looks like I don't know anything I haven't already told you. Reid, Wheeler, I've also been running simulations, and I still haven't figured out exactly how your powers work, but I'm making progress. And McQueary, I agree that my actions represented a horrific lapse in judgment, and if there were still a space agency with any jurisdiction over me, I would obviously accept my dismissal without contest."

Cleo tried not to visibly vibrate with fury. "Ha. As if they wouldn't have given you an award for your generous sacrifice in the name of their profit margins."

Billie sucked in a breath and held it. "I'm sorry. I fucked up. I understand if you're not inclined to forgive me."

Abe dropped his head onto Kaleisha's shoulder. "I forgive you, Billie."

"Whatever." Ros rolled their eyes and downed the last of their tea.

"What do you mean by ‘progress'?" Kaleisha asked. "What have you learned about our powers?"

Cleo felt like she was going crazy. "I'm sorry, did I miss something? Or are you all actually ignoring the fact that Billie's apology would barely fly if she'd left dishes in the sink and now we have ants?"

Kaleisha closed her eyes like Cleo was giving her a headache too. "Clo, I swear to God, just drop it."

"Drop what, the teeny-weeny mistake that's defined our entire lives?"

Abe shifted nervously in the bed. "Look, Cleo, I know it's hard to accept, but there's nothing we can do about the past, so. Like. Maybe we can stop fighting about it and just figure out where we go from here?"

Cleo dug her fingernails into her biceps, bracing against the stabbing pain behind her eyes. She needed to either keep fighting or never see Billie's face again, but neither seemed like an available option. "Be my guest, Abe. I'm going to go lie down."

"Wait," Billie said, her voice pulling Cleo's eyes away from the gut-churning look of concern on Abe's face. Cleo barely had time to formulate a properly rude deflection before Billie was turning and stomping soundlessly past her toward the elevator. "There's something else I need to teach you about the ship. It's the, uh. Thrusters."

Cleo kept her feet planted where they were. "It can't wait? I thought we were on autopilot—"

"Now, McQueary. It's urgent."

Cleo turned to the other three, ready for them to defend her. But Abe still looked worried, and Kaleisha was murmuring something sweet to him, and Ros was rolling over in bed, pulling the sheets up to their ears.

Cleo, feeling very ignored, threw her hands up and trudged after Billie.

***

ARCHIVED: Halvorsen, Kristoff Lucas, Wilhelmina, International Journal of Theoretical Physics, Mar/Apr 2039, "A Conterminous Dimension Hypothesis for the Reconciliation of the Lambda-CDM Model with the Sangupta-Romanov Paradox"

ABSTRACT: It has long been theorized that dark matter, as it exists in our universe, is made up of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), the nature of which is still largely unknown but which are understood not to interact with matter except in certain cases involving weak nuclear force and gravity (Kamionkowski, 1997). It has separately been put forth that WIMP theory is fundamentally incompatible with special relativity and quantum field theory, as spacetime and anything occupying it must interact with the electromagnetic force, and dark matter does not (Sangupta Romanov, 2029). We will attempt to reconcile this paradox, incorporating observations made by the Providence Exploratory Team in their attempts to create an engine for interstellar space travel, by hypothesizing that dark matter and its constituent WIMPs exist not in our own spacetime but in an alternate dimension. This alternate dimension would not be "parallel" to our own, as is the common verbiage in the popular imagination, but conterminous—that is, occupying the same four-dimensional manifold but differentiated by a border of unknown nature—allowing dark matter to pass into and through our spacetime without resistance from electromagnetic forces.

***

Specifically, Neil was the first person since the death of her parents who had proved capable of making Captain Lucas laugh so hard that she forgot to pay attention to whether or not she was snorting. She, against all odds, made him laugh too, and Neil's laugh ranked somewhere just above Jupiter's Great Red Spot on Lucas's list of Wonders of the Universe. She had always been drawn to sunshine people—to the people who managed to light up the dark corners of her frantic crank of a mind—and Neil was all light. With him, for the first time, Lucas could almost see beyond her ten-year plan, to a life of laughter and love letters and folding laundry side by side as their favorite podcast played.

When the end came, she couldn't imagine a future that encompassed the next day, let alone the rest of her life. There was just that hospital bed, and endless papers to sign, and Neil's once-strong hand slowly losing its grip on hers. She tried to be his sunshine for once, but all she could come up with was "It's going to be okay," and "I'm not going anywhere," spoken over and over, back and forth, like the most useless spell in the world. The last time she said it, she made Neil laugh, because they both knew by then that it was a lie.

When Neil was gone, everything contracted again. And Captain Lucas, furious that she had so willingly been tricked into wanting—into trusting the universe, given everything it had already taken from her—knew that she would never fall in love again.

"Love makes you stupid" became her mantra, and by "stupid" she meant "sad," and by "sad" she meant "weak," and by "weak" she meant "daring to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the universe has anything to offer but darkness."

***

Billie could make the elevator run with her stupid computer brain, which was good. It meant Cleo didn't have to push any buttons, which might have put her in danger of accidentally making eye contact. It meant she could keep her arms crossed and her gaze fixed on the doors.

"Alright," she grumbled, "what's so important with the thrusters that it couldn't even wait until the caffeine absorbed into my nervous system?"

"There's nothing important with the thrusters. We're on autopilot."

"Then what, pray tell, the fuck?"

The elevator door dinged open. Billie had taken them not to the flight deck, but to her lab. She stomped out, leaving Cleo with no choice but to follow.

"You have something to say to me, McQueary. I suggest you get it out of your system now, instead of continuing to snipe at me and push your friends away."

"I'm not pushing anybody away."

"The look on Yang's face just now would beg to differ."

"You're just kind of a garbage person and I know that now. Happy?"

Billie loomed closer. Cleo had the same disorienting sense as before that Billie was an empty space where something should be, that everything else around her was suddenly twice as solid and Billie was just a quietly buzzing void. Listening for the emptiness made her head hurt worse, though, so she tried not to.

"Listen, I guess you're still hung up on how I was your childhood hero or whatever, and you can't deal with the fact that I'm just a person who's made mistakes, but—"

"Oh my God." Cleo dragged her hands through her hair. "You need to get over yourself."

"I need to get over myself?"

"Do you think I care about your boring fame complex right now?" Billie's eyes went round. Cleo felt a few hairs pull free of her scalp and reluctantly loosened her grip. "Try to keep up, Captain. You ruined countless lives because you were scared, and you don't even seem to care. That's what I'm hung up on."

Billie was holding her breath. Cleo tried not to notice the red that was creeping up her face from the neck of her sweater. "So that's what you think of me," she whispered. "That I don't care? About my crew, about my brother?"

"And the entire human race, dude. You have no idea what the last twenty years have been like."

"Even worse than the previous twenty, I'd assume."

"After the Providence mission failed, Erebus Industries pretty much shut down. No one will even talk about the possibility of space travel anymore." Cleo felt the buzzing in her chest again, the prickle behind her eyes, but she couldn't stop talking. "Everything gets worse every day. We don't even know how much longer any of us can live on Earth. And still no one wants to do anything about it now that it's not profitable anymore. It's like the whole world is just willingly going quiet into that good night."

"Dylan Thomas."

"I don't know who the fuck that is."

A tiny smile twitched at Billie's lips, and she looked away. "Those bastards on the board always were useless."

"You're the original bastard here." Cleo wished she could shove Billie in the chest. "That's my entire goddamn point. All subsequent bastardly behavior is because of you, the first bastard domino."

"I would argue that Halvorsen seems to have been the first bastard domino."

"Yeah, but he's dead, so I don't get to yell at him."

"I'm dead too."

"Don't say that." It was out of her mouth before she could overthink it, but Cleo knew that regardless of what had happened to Billie's physical body, she was undeniably, vividly alive in front of Cleo's eyes.

Billie blinked. She took a tentative step closer. "If I'm not dead, can I at least be sorry?"

Cleo should have stepped away. Instead, she found herself laser-focusing on the pink in Billie's cheeks. "You tell me."

"I'm sorry, McQueary. God, I'm so fucking sorry it feels like I'm drowning." Billie looked away, like Cleo was the sun burning her eyes. "I'd say I can't believe I did something like that, but that would be a lie. It's true that we were under unbelievable pressure, that the entire human race was counting on us, but—but I was also just selfish. I cared too much about my work because I felt like I didn't have anything else. Anything except Elijah, that is. So when I found out on the eve of the launch that Halvorsen was playing with dark matter and the lives of our crew, I panicked and I was selfish and I tried to save my work and Elijah and I ended up"—she swallowed, then sucked in the smallest, softest gasp—"I ended up losing both."

Cleo was holding her own breath now. She couldn't say what she was waiting for.

"So," Billie continued, dragging her eyes back to Cleo and looking, for a second, almost like the starship captain Cleo remembered, "I will do everything in my power to fix this mess I helped create. I promise you that."

Cleo exhaled. The buzzing was still there in her chest, but it had changed tenor. It was warmer, Cleo thought, almost like anticipation. "That's—thank you," she said.

Billie narrowed her eyes, but in that way that was closer to a smile, Cleo was quickly learning, than a scowl. "For what?"

"For revealing that you're not just an asshole but an asshole with a heart of gold, which is way cuter." What? What are you saying, Cleo? "I mean—you know what I mean. You can hang. Opening up is Abe and Kaleisha's whole thing."

Billie looked dangerously close to laughing again. "Of course. Speaking of, are you going to tell them whatever it is you're hiding?"

"You're changing the subject. Also, what?"

"Answer the question."

Cleo was going to pull the rest of her hair out if she kept spending time with this woman. "I don't know what would make you think I'm hiding anything."

Billie circled Cleo slowly, looking her up and down. "You were irritable with them. Defensive. And, as I previously noted, you're tired. You didn't sleep last night."

"Brilliant, Holmes."

"If I had to guess," Billie said, coming to a halt and looking very self-satisfied, "you had another vision last night."

Cleo was officially too tired to keep pretending. "So what if I did?"

"So, if you saw the future again, that would probably be helpful to know."

"Wasn't the future."

"What?"

Cleo internally kicked herself. "It was the past, okay? I saw Halvorsen."

Billie blinked, her glasses sliding down a bit in surprise. "Kris? You mean you saw his, what, his past—"

"Yeah. He doesn't have a future to see, obviously." Cleo felt tears threatening again, and looked around for something to distract herself. "I saw his childhood. Grad school. You two stargazing together at Erebus."

"Yeah, we did that a lot."

"Were you actually friends? Or was that just for the cameras too?"

Billie's fingers clenched around her biceps. "He was a friend. He was a genius. He was the only person on the crew I could have a real conversation with, because he didn't just see me as the child genius astronaut hero or whatever. I had so much respect for him. Until the end, I guess."

"We still don't know exactly what he hoped to do with the engine," Cleo said, pressing on the tip of her own nose in thought. "Is there any world where he had good intentions?"

Billie seemed lost in thought too, her gaze fixed on Cleo's finger on her nose. "God, I want to believe that, but—good intentions, gambling with the lives of everyone on our crew? He was so—" And then Billie frowned. "Now you're changing the subject."

"And you're still flinging wild accusations around."

"You had more visions!" Billie reached her arms out like she wanted to grab Cleo by the shoulders. "And they kept you up all night, by the looks of it. Why didn't you tell anybody?"

Cleo mumbled something about "more important things," and Billie scoffed so loudly that Cleo stood up straighter. "Everyone has a lot on their minds, okay? I wasn't about to bother them with Baby Halvorsen and his trains when Ros, for example, is trying to figure out how not to uncontrollably shoot ice out of their hands."

"And you don't think that your powers are equally worth figuring out? Visions so aggressive that they kept you up all night aren't worth your friends' time?"

"I didn't—"

"Come with me." Billie turned on her heel and marched deeper into the lab. "We're going to figure this out."

Cleo heaved a sigh and followed. "How are we going to do that, exactly?"

"Same way Wheeler is going to have to learn to control the ice. I'd bet anything that, if you learn to summon your visions deliberately, they won't keep seizing you involuntarily. Here." Billie stopped in front of a bookshelf and pointed at an ancient copy of My Side of the Mountain. "Pick that up."

"Um. Why."

"Last night, your visions of Kris were loose and undefined. But yesterday, you saw Wheeler's future when you touched them, and that vision was contained and specific. If I'm right, which I probably am, touching something allows you to focus your powers on the past or future of that person or object."

Cleo pulled the book out and flipped through the yellowed pages. "So what am I going to see?"

"Me, in theory. I've had that book since I was five."

"Adorable." Cleo's hands clenched around the book. "I don't feel anything."

Billie rolled her eyes. "Try harder."

Cleo closed her eyes and tried to listen. It made her headache even worse, hearing that infinitesimal buzzing of every molecule around her. But as she pushed deeper, strained her awareness past the surface, she could hear more: the golden-dark thrum of something else, something flowing through her like a thundering river, something streaming through and under and around everything. It was fundamentally different from the world around her—but it was also inside her, shimmering strangely in her bones. And Cleo knew, without knowing, that if she could just trace the flow of it, if she could just focus, like Billie said, she might be able to grasp it, ride it, take control of it, even.

"Billie," Cleo said through gritted teeth. "Say something. Anything, to block out everything else."

"Okay." And even though Cleo was sure that Billie had no idea what she was talking about, she stepped closer, her voice suddenly right in Cleo's ear. "Focus, McQueary. Focus on the book, and everything it's connected to. Let it all move through you."

The book. The bonds of all its atoms. "Keep talking."

Billie chuckled. Cleo should have felt a puff of breath across her cheek, but of course there was nothing. "Remember how it felt, seeing Wheeler's future. Let the feeling take you again. But this time, it's yours."

Mine—

Black, then blacker than black—

And Cleo's eyes flew open, and the lab was gone.

A different room, smaller, but just as cluttered with bookcases and tools. A window for sunlight to stream through and a regular, wooden door. A gauzy, off-white curtain and a twin bed. Everything was golden and slow again, but Cleo could tell that the real room would have been bright and cozy. A homey room. A room where someone—

Cleo turned, and there was Billie. Not hologram Billie: flesh-and-blood Billie, only about eight or nine years old but still looking exactly like herself, glasses and blond ponytail and all. She was lying on top of a child-sized work desk stacked with abandoned precalculus and physics workbooks, head and hair dangling upside down off the edge of it, and she was reading a book with the same scowl of concentration that Cleo had already come to know. The book was My Side of the Mountain, the same edition, but less yellowed and less dog-eared.

There was a sound outside the door, a child's giggle followed by a crash. Billie's head popped up. She dropped the book, leapt down from the desk, and ran right through Cleo—

And then Cleo gasped back into her body. Everything was spinning; the book, now old and tattered once again, fell to the floor. She reached for Billie instinctually, for something to ground herself, but her hands found nothing.

"McQueary. Hey, McQueary. Breathe."

Cleo froze, gulping air as her head slowly settled back securely on her neck. She blinked and managed to focus on Billie, who was still staticky from having Cleo's arm swiped through her.

"Sorry about that," Cleo panted.

Billie waved her apology away like it was a dragonfly buzzing around her nose. "Never mind, McQueary. What did you see?"

"Well." Cleo swallowed, trying to get her sand-dry throat back to normal. "I saw what I would have to assume was your childhood bedroom. Which was only marginally less cluttered than this lab."

"Did you only absorb enough to insult me, or did you see anything else?"

Cleo stuck her tongue out at Billie. "I also saw you as a kid, maybe eight years old, reading that book. And then it sounded like your, uh, brother hurt himself out in the hallway and you went after him. Did your parents leave you home alone or something?"

"Probably. They both always had to work. Eli would have been three. Always throwing himself into walls and tables full of fragile things, especially when it was just me watching him." A smile began to crinkle around Billie's eyes. "You saw an event twenty-one—I mean, forty-one years ago and a million miles away. Impressive."

Some of the exhaustion drained out of Cleo's chest at that, and she stretched her neck to crackle out some of the tension. "It was a team effort."

Billie eyed her over the tops of her glasses. "Speaking of, what did you mean when you said you needed me to block out everything else?"

"Just that, like, I can kind of hear molecules vibrating now? And also something underneath it all? It's like a river. Outside of everything else. I just needed to listen to it."

Billie smacked herself in the forehead. "You didn't think the fact that you can hear dark matter was worth mentioning before now?"

"I don't—I didn't fully realize that's what it was, Billie. It's not like they taught us about this in undergrad astrophysics—"

"Jesus. Come on." Billie reached out a hand like she wanted Cleo to take it, and Cleo almost did. "I think I know how all your powers work."

***

McQueary is brave. I'll give her that. She has to be, not to crumble in the face of all these changes, all these unknowns. All that power.

There's also the fact that she seems, despite everything, to actually like the hologram. And the hologram is, for all intents and purposes, Captain Lucas, and I could count on one hand the number of people who have ever been brave enough to care about her.

***

"A visual aid is going to be useful," Billie said.

She waved her arm, and suddenly the hospital bay was filled with oversized, bright blue holographic atoms, their misty electron clouds overlapping. Cleo heard herself gasp, heard Kaleisha's murmured "whoa" and Abe's excited laugh. She drew closer to the nearest nucleus, which was the size of a basketball, and brushed a finger through it. It was carbon, connected to a few relatively tiny hydrogen atoms. An organic molecule of some kind—Cleo had slept through most of undergraduate chemistry. It flickered when she touched it, just like Billie.

"Holy hell, Billie," Cleo said. "What happened to making me draw on the whiteboard for you?"

Billie smirked. "I told you, I learned a lot about myself last night."

Ros sat up a little straighter in their bed. "Cute trick. Now, will you please tell us what's going on with our bodies?"

"Right," Billie said. "So, the thing about dark matter is that it's slippery." She waved her hand again, and tiny, dark gold particles flowed into view, passing easily through and between the atoms. "It acts like it's part of our universe, but only sometimes, and only in certain situations, and other times it's like it's not here at all." The image zoomed out, making Cleo dizzy, until they were watching the solar system spin around the sun, golden tendrils connecting the planets to the sun like spokes of a wheel. "Kris and I had a hypothesis that might have explained it all: that dark matter exists somewhere else. A conterminous dimension that occupies the same fourth-dimensional manifold as our own."

Kaleisha paced between the planets, rubbing at the frown lines in her forehead. "Can we assume that the botanists in the audience need working definitions of gonzo theoretical physics words like conterminous and manifold?"

Billie smiled. "Of course." She swiped away the holographic universe and replaced it with just a circle, filled in blue. "This circle is a two-dimensional object, but it exists in a three-dimensional manifold, our universe."

"Okay."

"Now, say you draw a square that intersects the circle." As Billie said it, she did it, tracing a solid purple square with her finger so it sat inside the circle, perpendicular to it. "These two-dimensional objects now occupy the same three-dimensional manifold."

Kaleisha was nodding now, frown lines loosening. "Got it."

"Now, here's the thing. Imagine both shapes are a universe. Imagine there are two-dimensional beings living in the circle and in the square."

"Sure, why not."

Billie moved to indicate the line where the square and the circle intersected. "The inhabitants of the circle would have no way to see the square, because they can't think in three dimensions. The only evidence they would have of the square's existence is this inexplicable line running through their universe."

"Oh!" Kaleisha's hand flew back up to her forehead. "Dark matter is the line!"

"Exactly." Billie rubbed her hands together excitedly, shooting a look at Kaleisha that was almost proud. "If our universe and this conterminous dimension exist in the same four-dimensional manifold, then they intersect each other in ways our three-dimensional minds can't truly comprehend. All we can see are the points of intersection: dark matter."

Cleo realized she had been gaping at Billie the whole time she'd been talking, and clamped her mouth shut. "So this, um, other place—"

"Conterminous dimension."

"Just for that, I'm officially naming it the Other Place. Capital O, capital P."

Billie raised an amused eyebrow. "Fine. Go on."

"The Other Place is maybe where the energy from the dark matter engine is coming from."

"Correct."

"And maybe where our powers came from."

Billie nodded, squishing and un-squishing the circle-square into the outlines of three human bodies, coursing with and connected by those golden tendrils. "I believe, based on the simulations I've been running, that when the engine went off you were all blasted with something—dark matter, or dark energy, or radiation of some kind we have yet to comprehend—that altered you. I believe your abilities are rooted in this newly forged connection to the dark matter dimension."

"Damn." Kaleisha's eyes were wide. "How can we be connected when the, uh, shapes—the universes—are barely connected themselves?"

"I'm not completely sure," Billie admitted. "But it was McQueary who gave me the idea. Tell them what you told me."

"Oh, uh." Cleo swallowed. "I felt this, like, river? Of energy or particles or maybe both? Running under and through everything else. Focusing on it helped me focus my visions."

"Felt it how?" Kaleisha asked.

Cleo's face got hot. "I just focused really hard. I can show you how, since we are all connected to it."

"Not all."

Cleo realized guiltily that it was the first thing Ros had said since Billie had begun her speech. They were sitting up straighter in their bed now, looking accusingly between Billie and Cleo.

"I don't feel anything," they continued. "And I don't want to."

"Maybe that's why you don't feel anything," Billie said blandly.

"Ros, your eyes were, like, gold last night," Abe said. "I think you felt the connection to the Other Place before Kal or Cleo did."

Ros crossed their arms, bunching up the blanket around them. "Then maybe you guys should stop trying to commune with it or whatever, because if you didn't notice, it kind of messed me up."

"Listen," Billie said, with the air of someone trying to herd cats, "there's got to be some kind of scientific explanation for all of your powers. And once we learn how it works, you'll all be able to control them better."

Cleo's fingers started to twitch. "What do you think the explanation is?"

"I only have hypotheses, but: Reid." Billie pointed at Kaleisha, who raised an eyebrow. "I think you're folding spacetime itself along the intersection lines."

Kaleisha's mouth fell open. "Dope."

"McQueary." Billie's gaze fell on Cleo, and Cleo could feel herself practically vibrating from the attention. "I believe your consciousness, like a WIMP, is now only weakly interacting with our universe. Like dark matter, your mind can now exist outside of space and time, allowing you to see the past and the future, matter and dark matter."

Cleo thought of the distant, golden river, of the vibrating under-energy of the Other Place. Of how her head had felt like an untethered particle, bouncing helplessly around in time, until she had figured out how to ride that wave. "Feels right. I can even call my visions ‘wimping,' since everything needs a cute name now, I've decided."

Billie's mouth twitched into an almost-smile, but then she dragged her gaze away from Cleo. "Wheeler."

Ros slid further down into their sheets, like they were trying to dissolve away into the pillows. "What."

"Your powers are, possibly, the most interesting."

"Gee, thanks."

"To freeze the air around you, you have to remove energy from it. But, since energy can't just disappear, and nothing else was getting correspondingly warmer—"

"I must be diverting the thermal energy out of this dimension and into the Other Place." The revelation didn't seem to do anything to improve Ros's mood, and they reached for their mug to slurp at the last dregs of tea. Cleo wanted to give them a hug. Or she would have, if she wasn't so afraid of getting thrown into another terrifying vision of their future.

"Exactly," Billie continued, oblivious. "What's interesting is that your powers are the only ones that seem to involve the Other Place directly. I'm fascinated by what the purpose of all that diverted energy might be."

Ros glared daggers at Billie over the rim of their mug. "Well, good to know you're fascinated."

"Damn it, Ros," Kaleisha said sharply, making Cleo jump. "Can you chill, please? You're not the only one going through it right now."

"Right, sorry. I forgot that the fact that we're all miserable is actually great news. I'm all cheered up now."

"Come on, babe, that's not what I—"

Ros slammed their empty mug down on the bedside table. "Whatever! Whatever. It's fine. Forget it."

Kaleisha frowned, blinking hard. Ros threw up their hands.

"Oh my God, ignore me. I'm such an asshole. I'll stop talking now."

"Get the fuck over yourself," Kaleisha seethed, her voice suddenly quiet, halting. "Because you're right, we're all screwed straight to hell. We just don't all have the luxury of dissolving into prickly puddles of self-pity at this particular moment."

"Dissolve away, Kaleisha," Ros said through gritted teeth. "It's not myself I'm gonna fucking pity when I lose control and crush the Providence like a tin can."

Kaleisha sucked in a breath and held it, her chin jutting out.

"Babe," Abe said softly, "are you—"

"Jesus, get me off of this goddamn ship!"

And Kaleisha turned and ran to the elevator, swatting away one of Billie's holographic atoms as she went.

Billie raised her eyebrows at Cleo, but Cleo focused on Abe. Abe mouthed You go at her, inclining his own head toward Ros. Cleo went.

***

Cleo found Kaleisha in the greenhouse, of course. It was the one level of the ship that, if the launch had gone as planned and the crew remained alive to work and water the plants, might have smelled like Earth. Like the botany lab at the university. Like Mr. Reid's house. Now it was just rows upon rows of planters filled with twenty-year-old dirt, dry as dust.

"Hey."

"Do you think there are any microbes left in the soil? From the air, maybe?" Kaleisha asked, her back still to Cleo. "Or are we going to have to, like, shit in it?"

Cleo snorted before she could stop herself. "We could do a sign-up sheet. A shit schedule. I'll take Wednesdays."

She drew even with Kaleisha and saw that she hadn't cracked so much as a smile. In fact, she was staring at the large pot in front of her with tears in her eyes. It held the remnants of a sapling that might have almost been a tree by now, its slender trunk and sparse branches twisted and desiccated.

Cleo could count on one hand the number of times she'd seen Kaleisha looking so lost. No, one finger—winter break, sophomore year of undergrad, when she'd told Cleo under their Christmas Eve blanket fort that she'd hooked up with Abe and it was perfect and she was terrified to blow up the friend group. Cleo had an easy answer to her worries then: Finally. Please just go for it. You've been painfully in love with each other since we were fourteen and I'm exhausted. Now, with her best friend staring down over a decade without smelling a flower or hugging her dad, what could Cleo possibly say? What was the thing to say that would make it all make sense? What was she supposed to do if she couldn't fix it?

"We can test the soil for a microbiome," Cleo said, desperate to at least get that look off Kaleisha's face. "And there must be something on board to help the soil out. Can chemical plant food do that? I bet some of the seeds are still good, and the botanists' notes are probably in the—"

"God, just—just stop." Kaleisha sniffed wetly and rubbed her nose on the sheer black sleeve of her dress. "It's not gonna make this okay."

Cleo shoved her hands in the pockets of her coveralls, which now smelled noticeably of nightmare sweat. What were they going to wear for the next seven years? Dead people's Providence uniforms? "I know."

Kaleisha blinked hard, tears streaming down her face. "It's not gonna make Ros's Virgo ass process their feelings."

"Oh, trust me, I know."

"They're lashing out at everyone because they're scared." Kaleisha scrubbed her hands over her face, the last remnants of her blush and foundation coming off on her fingers. "Can't blame them for that. I mean—"

She closed a hand around the air in front of her and pulled like she was tugging on a rope. The room folded, creasing like a piece of paper, until the pot and the sapling were perpendicular to them. Now that it was directly in front of them, Kaleisha plucked the sapling out of the dry soil. The room snapped back with a shuddering crack, the little trunk still in her hands and the pot now empty.

Kaleisha drew a shaking breath. "It's so weird. Why—why is it so—"

And she broke down crying, the sapling falling forgotten to the floor and full-on sobs racking her body. Cleo carefully folded all the soft curves of her friend's body into her arms.

"Fuck this. Fuck our fucking drunk idea. Fuck everything."

"I know. I'm so sorry this is happening. And I'm sorry I was being such a dipshit last night."

Kaleisha made a strangled little sound into Cleo's T-shirt. "Thanks."

"And I'm sorry about Ros. And the dark matter powers. And the incomprehensible mysteries of the universe we're now forced to contend with."

"Okay, you don't have to be sorry for all that." Kaleisha let out a gurgle that might have also been a laugh, which Cleo took as a win.

"Well, I am."

"I don't actually need you to be sorry. I need you to help me find out what the hell is going on."

"Oh my God, of course. Of course." Cleo rubbed Kaleisha's back, up and down, up and down. The fabric of her dress was silky, and her hand slid over it so easy. "We'll figure it out, babe."

"How?"

"Oof, you're the one with the plans. I'm just the muscle."

Kaleisha reached a hand up and thumped Cleo on the forehead. "You're too tiny to be the muscle. You still gotta contribute with your brain."

"Okay, we start with the basics, right? How much HRT does the med bay have?"

"Ros says, like, decades' worth."

"Thank God." Cleo hooked her chin over Kaleisha's shoulder. She still smelled like her moisturizer from home, just a little. "Do you think they've got coconut oil for you on this ship?"

"There were Black people on the crew, dummy. Next question."

"The Star Trek back catalog?"

"Natch."

"Then our most pressing order of business is listening up for the response to your radio message."

Kaleisha pulled away, looking snotty but hopeful. "You think we'll get one?"

"Heck yeah. We've only been moving at near-lightspeed for, what, eighteen hours? So a radio message will take even less than that to get back to Earth. The farther away we get, the longer it'll take, but—"

Kaleisha shook her head, wiping her eyes. "Good enough for now. Now we just have to figure out the next fourteen years."

Cleo smiled and brushed the last tear off her friend's cheek. "I really am sorry. For getting us into this. For being so starry-eyed."

Kaleisha rolled her eyes, and she was almost herself again. "Nuh-uh, don't go changing that now. We're gonna need you to be extra obsessed with space if we're ever gonna get through this."

Obsessed. "Oh man! That reminds me! I had more visions."

"Cleo!"

"I'm sorry! They were last night. I saw the chief engineer—Halvorsen."

"Oh man." Kaleisha raised an eyebrow, and for the first time since takeoff she looked the way she did when she was writing: like the past was an origami crane that just needed a few more folds to take shape. "Then you gotta have more visions. See if you can find out what Halvorsen was up to."

Cleo bit her lip. "I guess I could work on it. With Billie's help. She was really good at helping me focus my powers."

Kaleisha smirked. "Of course she was."

"What does that mean?"

"Nothing." She grabbed Cleo's hand and pulled her toward the elevator. "Let's go replicate some wine and start planning, babe."

***

Later, they all stood huddled around the console on the flight deck as a recording of a very familiar voice crackled out of the speaker.

"Christ, baby. It's like you're trying to give me a heart attack." Mr. Reid chuckled, half in relief and half in barely disguised terror. Cleo pictured him pacing around the disused Erebus control center, rubbing his bald head the way he always did when he was agitated. "I love you. You and the other kids too. But I do have to say that this is the last thing on Earth I ever expected. Or—or off Earth, I suppose."

Kaleisha rolled her eyes. It didn't hide how close she was to crying.

"Listen up. The NASA folks are on the job, and they told me to say"—he cleared his throat, shifting into a tone that sounded like he was peering through his reading glasses at a notecard someone had scribbled on for him—"that you're going to have to reprogram the ship's planned orbital pattern. If you do it right, instead of falling into orbit around Proxima B, you should be able to swing around the planet, then Proxima C, and then you'll be angled back toward Earth. There's a lot of math involved. They said the ship's computer should be able to figure it out."

They all looked at Billie, who was staring at the speaker and chewing on her bottom lip. She met Cleo's gaze, her eyes flickering briefly, and nodded.

"That's—that's all they really have, baby." Mr. Reid's voice was thick, his words coming in a choked-out staccato. "I know it's going to take years, but there's nothing else they can do. There's no way to come after you."

"Yeah, Dad," Kaleisha whispered. "I know."

"You're going to have to be strong, like I know you are."

"I know." Abe and Cleo wrapped Kaleisha up in their arms as she wiped her eyes. "I know."

***

That night, Cleo changed into some very soft Erebus-issue pajamas, wrapped her dad's NASA jacket around herself, and slept in the med bay with the others. She still had visions, this time of Mr. Reid and another man she couldn't quite make out, but those dreams slipped away easily. A few times, she was gripped by scenes of Halvorsen staying up late into the night writing, making adjustments to the dark matter engine, and pulling out his hair. But when these visions woke her, Cleo had Kaleisha's rumbling snores to listen to until she drifted off again.