Chapter 6

It didn't take long for Cleo to start going a little nuts.

It started in her chest: a flutter, a catch, a bit of tightness around her heart that made itself known any time she wasn't actively focusing her attention on a task or a TV show or a conversation. She could still ignore it, usually. She could still breathe around it, most of the time.

But then came the absolutely fist-clenching need to be around her friends, all the time. If she found herself alone in a room, just her and the walls and the vacuum of space outside, she couldn't breathe around the lump of tension in her chest anymore. Going to bed, which had once been in her Top Five Favorite Parts of the Day, became, well, a nightmare, her pulse racing and stuttering at the thought of waking up tomorrow to this same ship, these same walls, the same emptiness all around them. Cleo started bugging her friends whenever she could, asking Kaleisha to start a new show with her, Abe to work out in the gym with her, Ros to try a new dish from the replicator with her.

Billie she didn't have to bug, since exploring her powers and the Providence with her was the closest thing Cleo had to a schedule. They had started a training regimen, with Billie as a coach of sorts, guiding Cleo, Kaleisha, and Ros toward a slightly better understanding of their abilities. Practicing extra-dimensional feats of magic and mayhem worked up quite a sweat, it turned out, but that still didn't stop the twitchy malaise from setting in the minute Cleo stepped into the water-recycling shower.

It helped, she quickly learned, to think of the passing days aboard Providence I like a montage in an eighties movie—a training montage, a getting-the-team-together montage, a "dancing and sock-sliding through the empty rooms" montage. Quick shots of her and her friends learning how to use their nascent superpowers interspersed with shots of Kaleisha working in the greenhouse and Ros treating Abe's allergic reaction to an avocado from the replicator. Montages had no in-between time. Montages had no endless, fluorescent days. Montages had an end, the next plot point always just around the corner.

***

On Day 15, after hours of training that felt more like treading water than swimming, Cleo announced that she was going to go watch a dumb movie in the rec room.

"Ooh, I'm down," Abe said through his shirt, which he'd lifted up to wipe off his face. Despite his resolute lack of any supernatural abilities, he had found a way to be helpful: throwing small objects across the room so Kaleisha could fold them through the air.

"I'm sorry, what was that?" Kaleisha held a hand up to her ear mockingly. "Did you say ‘I'm going to take a shower immediately so I don't stink up the bed later'?"

Ros shook a few stray ice crystals off their Providence jacket disgustedly. They had just spent an hour struggling to conjure any ice at all—and when they did, it had been in a jagged, unwieldy burst, one icicle even ricocheting off the ceiling and forcing Cleo to dive out of its way. "I'll join you."

"Alright." Abe made pouty lips at Cleo. "Watch something extra stupid for me."

"Aye-aye, Captain." Cleo gave an exaggerated salute, but the other three were already walking out of the mess hall. She caught Billie's eye. "Sorry."

Billie puffed out an almost-laugh. "If you ever unironically called me ‘Captain,' McQueary, I think I'd die." She crossed her arms and looked at her feet. "What are you going to watch?"

"I don't know. Didn't think that far ahead. Something dumb." Cleo thought for a second. "Something happy."

Billie chewed on the inside of her cheek. "Have you ever seen While You Were Sleeping?"

"No, but that sounds like a rom-com, and rom-coms are garbage."

"It was my mother's favorite movie. And rom-coms are great."

Cleo blinked, trying to picture Billie swooning at some AI-generated straight couple falling in mind-numbingly predictable love while a pop song played too loud. "I'm sorry, I think my brain just broke a little."

Billie rolled her eyes. "We're watching it. Come on."

The rec room was surprisingly cozy, full of plush sofas and richly patterned carpets; one wall held a massive TV screen, and the others held bookshelves. Some of the coffee tables had holographic board games built in. Cleo was shocked that Erebus Industries had expected the crew to ever spend time anywhere else.

They started the movie in not quite companionable silence, Billie sitting in a not quite relaxed position on the floor and Cleo sprawled across the couch with her feet not quite touching Billie's shoulder.

Corny voice-over, love at first sight, a mushy-faced male love interest—it was a rom-com, all right. The only redeeming factor so far was the sight of a young Sandra Bullock in an oversized sweater. Cleo was practically vibrating from the effort of not sighing derisively when Billie announced, with absolutely no preamble, "My parents are dead."

Cleo jerked her head up from the armrest so fast she thought she might have twinged something. "Um," she said, rubbing her neck and thinking vaguely that she should pause the movie, "I know?"

Billie sighed in frustration, her eyes still locked on the movie. "Right, I know you know, because you had my Time magazine profile hanging in your locker or whatever. I wanted to bring it up the way a regular person might, however."

"With no warning, while I'm trying to understand what you see in this movie?"

Billie gestured at the screen like a lawyer revealing an incontrovertible piece of evidence. "It's my dead mom's favorite movie, asshole. And Sandra Bullock's parents are dead, aren't they? It felt like as good a segue as any."

Cleo sat up, tucking her legs under her butt. She peered at Billie, who was still determinedly watching Sandra trying to haul a Christmas tree through the window of her walk-up. "Do you want to, I don't know, talk about it?"

"No."

Cleo flung her arms in the air. "Then why did you bring it up?"

Billie finally turned to look at her, a small frown on her face. "It's something I want you to know about me."

Cleo blinked. "Oh. Why?"

Billie shrugged. "It's an important part of knowing me. You should know that my parents were killed by a drunk driver when I was nineteen and Elijah was fourteen. You should know that he had to move into my shitty college-student apartment with me, and I had to learn how to make gluten-free pancakes because he has—had, that is—celiac. And you should know that the most alone I'd ever felt is when I cracked open my mom's box of recipes for the first time and realized that she hadn't written detailed enough instructions on most of them for someone else to follow, because she thought she'd have so much more time to teach me how."

Cleo let out a breath. "I'm sorry."

Billie scoffed. "Don't be."

"No, for real." Cleo scooted a little closer. Billie tensed up, but didn't look away. "You've lost so many people. Your parents, your fiancé, now your brother and your crew. It's not fair."

Billie's eyebrows twitched, like she had never expected to hear those words in that order. "No, it's not."

Her hands were clenched so tightly in her lap that every blue-green vein stood out against her knuckles. Cleo wished she could reach down and gently untangle her fingers. "Thank you for telling me, Billie."

A tiny smile played at the corner of Billie's mouth. "No problem, McQueary."

Cleo smiled back, wide and toothy. Billie suddenly tensed up again and turned back to the movie. Cleo stared at the side of her face. Why had Billie pulled away again? How many times had she watched this movie, thinking of her mother? Why had she wanted Cleo, specifically, to watch it, and love it?

Finally, Cleo turned too, shifting into crisscross-applesauce right next to Billie's head. On-screen, some guy was hitting on Sandra Bullock and being pushy about it. "Uh. Who's this dipshit?" Cleo asked. "Why is he bothering Sandra?"

"That's the super's son. He's there to be creepily convinced that Sandra's in love with him, so that later he and Bill Pullman can have a big misunderstanding about it."

"Who's Bill Pullman?"

"The actual love interest. He's coming soon. He's hotter than the guy in the coma, don't worry."

"I'll be the judge of that."

"Aren't you a lesbian?"

"Yeah, and that makes me the perfect impartial evaluator. Obviously."

***

On Day 20, they got another message from Mr. Reid.

"Damn. When I tell you the science guys have no idea what's happening to you kids—I'm sorry. I wish we had more answers for you. I'm glad you have the, uh—hologram, was it? Of Captain Lucas to help you out. I remember always thinking she seemed like a real smart cookie."

In the following days, Cleo often caught Kaleisha replaying the recording over the greenhouse loudspeakers as she worked on reviving the garden. Billie had, to Kaleisha's ecstatic relief, pointed out the flash-frozen earthworm eggs in storage, and Kaleisha had wasted no time in thawing and hatching them as Mr. Reid's voiced echoed through the space.

"Remember, Kallie, soil wants to be alive. If you can print any greens out of the food-printer whatsit and chop them up for compost, that'll make a world of difference. Be sure to check the pH levels regularly. I'm so proud of you, baby. I'm glad you're growing life where you can."

***

There are a lot of things that can go wrong on a spaceship. Some of them, Cleo was learning, sounded like the pulse-pounding climax of an Oscar-nominated astronaut movie when you said them out loud, but turned out to be just minor annoyances once she'd hauled her tools into the maintenance shaft of the day. As a result, she was learning to respond to Billie's bored messages with less of a hyperbolic, sprinting-through-the-ship, I'm giving it all she's got, Captain energy.

"McQueary, there's an ammonia leak in cooling loop theta," Billie had grumbled at her over the intercom that morning while she was trying to make her Providence uniform look cute.

"Lame," Cleo replied, settling on tying the jacket around her waist so the tank top and baggy pants combo could really shine. "Think I've got time to grab a coffee to go?"

"Sure. And when you're puking your guts out from bringing an open Dixie cup into a vent full of ammonia gas, be sure to tell Wheeler that I was the one who let you poison yourself."

"You're no fun," Cleo said brightly, making sure to put a respirator mask in her toolbox on her way out of her quarters.

It was, of course, a tiny leak and an easy fix, but that didn't stop Billie from hovering in the open access panel—she couldn't come into the maintenance shaft because there were no hologram projectors inside—and backseat-repairing like her life depended on it.

"That's not—McQueary, I swear to God, if you don't pull out a torque wrench right now—"

"I've got it handled, Billie." Cleo scrubbed her dripping forehead with the back of her hand and pushed down harder with her trusty old combination wrench (which she had made sure to put in Abe's backpack for the Space Heist, thank God). "Where I come from, physicists know not to condescend to engineers about torque."

Billie smirked at her through the sweating coolant pipes. "They absolutely do not."

"Fine, maybe not. But I once built myself a car with nothing but this wrench and an entire pallet of green apple Hi-Chews, so you'll forgive me if I ignore your expert guidance." Billie was now staring at her straining biceps in what Cleo could only assume was a pointed manner. "Stop that."

Billie might have gone a little pink, but it was so hard to tell when she was silhouetted in the panel opening. "I didn't say anything."

"Your eyes speak volumes."

"Poetic."

"How dare you."

Billie narrowed her eyes, fixing Cleo with that curious stare of hers. "Who taught you how to build cars and hate poetry? I want to have a word with them."

"Cars? My dad. Hating poetry was all my dear mother."

"Hmm. Because she was a philistine and passed it on or because she was a poet and you hate her?"

Cleo blinked a drop of sweat out of her eyes and wished her mouth wasn't covered by the respirator, so she could send Billie her best stuck-out tongue of disapproval. "You're asking a lot of personal questions for someone who wants this leak patched as soon as possible."

"Fine, I get it. You're a closed book. A woman of mystery. No one may fathom the depths behind those hooded eyes—"

"Damn straight."

Billie fell quiet, her face deliberately, infuriatingly placid as she watched Cleo struggle with the pipes. Cleo glared at the bolt beneath her wrench and ground her teeth into the silence for one breath. Two. Three.

"My mother was an English professor. She left when I was seven."

If Billie was feeling satisfied with herself, it didn't show. Not that Cleo was looking at her. "I'm sorry to hear that."

"That was a fun year. The Providence disaster, the woman who birthed me deciding she never wanted to see me again, my dad forgetting how to talk to me like a fucking person."

Billie looked almost—sad, was it? concerned? pitying?—and Cleo couldn't stand it. "So he just taught you how to build cars."

"Yup, he was great at explaining how a shock tower worked. Not so great at treating me like I wasn't going to up and leave at any moment too."

"Sounds hard."

Cleo finally got that goddamn bolt secure and huffed out an angry, relieved breath. "Yeah, well. I spent a lot of time at Kaleisha's in high school."

Billie peered through the access panel at the coolant pipe, the golden glow from the room behind her lighting up her hair like a sunrise over water. "So you did up and leave."

The wrench nearly slipped out of Cleo's sweaty hands. "Excuse me?"

Billie just raised an eyebrow at her, infuriatingly. Cleo thought she deserved some credit for resisting the urge to toss the wrench through her.

"You're such a piece of work."

Billie smirked. "‘How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty.'"

"If that's a poem, I'm going to throw this wrench—"

"It's Hamlet. My God."

Cleo groaned explosively, swiping her damp hair out of her eyes. Yes, I left, she could have said, and I made a life for myself where I could mostly avoid looking at my father's face and only seeing how much we both missed her. And now I've completed the job and left the whole planet.

"You don't get to judge me," she said instead. "You of all people."

A tiny breath, sucked in through the nose. Billie probably thought Cleo wouldn't notice such a small gasp, but she did. "I know."

"Then don't look at me with those judgmental eyebrows," Cleo grumbled. She threw her wrench back in her toolbox and sat back on her hands. "Now can I go get coffee?"

The corner of Billie's mouth danced up again. "No one's stopping you."

"Come with me." Cleo had said it without thinking. But, despite how much she hated talking about her parents, something about saying all that to Billie had shifted something inside her. She felt lighter, in a heavy way. Tender, in a terrifying way.

"Sure," Billie said, and smiled for real. Maybe this was what making a new friend felt like, Cleo thought. It had been so long since the other three had become her family, she'd probably just forgotten. Surely it was always this uncomfortable, and incongruent, and electrifying.

***

On Day 35, Kaleisha became fixated on the climate of Proxima Centauri B.

"If the worst-case scenario goes down and we have to survive on the planet," she told Cleo as she bustled around the greenhouse, checking the height of every seedling and the moisture level of every pot of soil, "we need to know what we're facing."

The Starshot probes had gathered seemingly endless data on their missions to Proxima B in the decades leading up to the Providence missions, and Cleo was refreshing her memory by poring over a virtual stack of Abe's old documents that Kaleisha had seemingly already memorized. "Looks like it's going to be cold as balls."

"Half cold as balls," Kaleisha corrected her as she tenderly repotted a basil sprout. "Its orbit is tidally locked, so one side is actually boiling hot, the other is colder than balls, and there'll be an itty-bitty strip in the middle where we probably won't die."

"Lovely." Cleo swiped through the twenty-year-old Erebus-brand tablet and found a table of temperatures recorded by the long-suffering Starshot 5."At least if I'm hankering for a tan, I can walk right up to the edge of the Hot Zone and take a little sun bath."

"Have fun dying instantly."

"Yeah, yeah."

"Remind me how cold the terminator line is?"

"Minus thirty, on average." Cleo showed Kaleisha a photo, a panorama taken by Starshot 2 from the top of a mountain. There was nothing, as far as the camera lens captured, but snowy purple-gray mountains, blanketed in shadow from the perpetual sunset. "The star's a red dwarf, so not hot to begin with. And the atmosphere is thick enough to stand up to the solar flares."

"Nut me." Cleo reached into the bowl of chocolate-covered hazelnuts that Kaleisha had replicated, and popped one into her friend's mouth. Kaleisha crunched down on it as she frowned at the picture. "Does that mean we won't have to worry about dying by solar storm?"

The sky in the photo was a darkening red, shot through with fuzzy, iridescent streaks of color. "Those auroras," Cleo said, "mean that the planet's atmosphere will protect us." She let herself smile, thinking about it. She'd never seen the northern lights, back on Earth. Not that they would have been worth a trip to the disaster zone that was the Artic Circle, even if she'd had the funds. "Should be pretty."

"Gorgeous. We can be sure to enjoy the rainbow sky as we freeze to death, subsisting on lichen."

"Hey now." Cleo bumped their shoulders together. "We're never gonna see the surface of Proxima B."

Kaleisha rubbed one of the tiny basil leaves between her fingers and sighed. "I hope not."

"In other news, the dirt smells dirt-y again."

Cleo could hear the smile in Kaleisha's voice. "The baby earthworms are doing so good."

"And we didn't even have to shit in it."

"Hear, hear," Kaleisha said, and they went back to work.

***

"Billie!" Cleo called, struggling with the stack of books she was keeping in place with her chin.

Pop. "Oh my God. You couldn't make two trips?"

Cleo set the wobbling pile down on one of the coffee tables. "You asked me to bring up books from your lab when there are already, like, a billion books in here. You don't get to ask me to also take the elevator twice. Anyway, it worked out."

A few of the books tumbled from the less-stable top of the tower to the floor. Billie raised a perfect eyebrow. "Clearly."

"Listen, bucko, you should treat me nicer. I did all this for you."

Something like the beginning of a laugh twinkled across Billie's face as she watched Cleo sit on the floor to restack the books into smaller piles. "Thank you."

"Whoa, stop the presses, did the great Captain Dr. Wilhelmina Lucas just thank me for a favor?"

Billie raised an amused eyebrow at Cleo, then got distracted by the book in her hands. "That one."

Cleo looked down at the heavy white hardback. She turned it over, flipped through the pages. "Is this just poetry?"

"It's Mary Oliver." Billie sat down on the carpet next to Cleo. "She's just one of the greatest poets of all time."

"You dastardly bastard. You're trying to trick me into reading poems!"

Billie rolled her eyes so hard her entire upper body followed. "She was also queer."

"Let it never be said that I'm not easily tricked." Cleo flipped through aimlessly. "Is there any one in particular you want me to read?"

Billie leaned back on her arms, her long legs stretching in Cleo's direction. "Something about the world."

"Thanks for narrowing it down there, chief."

"That's what Oliver was a master of, McQueary. The gorgeous little mundanities of being a person in the world."

Cleo landed on a page titled "To Begin With, the Sweet Grass," which was so long that it was divided into little numbered chapters or something. Billie was probably into that, the freak. Cleo looked up at her for confirmation, but Billie was watching the stars fly past the little electronic window—a smaller version of the one in the mess hall—in the wall, so Cleo just started reading.

It was nice, she supposed, though she didn't really get it. There was something about larks singing, and bread being yummy, and nature being reliable.

"And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star both intimate and ultimate," she recited.

As Cleo read, Billie closed her eyes and didn't move except for the calm, slow rise and fall of her chest. Cleo had the impression that she was softer than usual, less prickly, less encased in armor, and if she reached out to touch her she would feel the difference.

"Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world."

Cleo stopped, her throat suddenly tight. She blinked at the words, trying to will the tears to stop gathering in her eyes. Billie crawled forward and put her hand over the top of the book, making Cleo put it down. Cleo avoided her eyes, but could still feel them boring into her.

"Let me read another one."

"No."

"This is how you're supposed to engage with poetry, right? Cry about it?"

Billie sighed out, hard, through her nose. "You've cracked it."

"Here, this one's called ‘The Dog Has Run Off Again'—"

"Do you miss Earth?"

Cleo glowered at Billie over the top of the book. "No."

"Your dad? The sky? Dogs, maybe?"

"Not really, not at all, and yes, but I'll live."

Billie leaned back again, her head tilting up so she could watch dust motes swirling around the lamp overhead. "I miss Earth."

"But you were prepared to live on Proxima B forever."

"Well, McQueary, a lot has changed since then, if you haven't noticed." The sound of Billie's slow, measured inhale reminded Cleo of the ocean in the distance. "And now I'll never stand on Proxima B or feel the sun on my skin again, so I think I'm entitled to a little wistfulness."

That thick feeling in Cleo's throat got thicker. "Fair."

Billie tilted her head to meet Cleo's eyes. "You'd be happy never going back to Earth?"

"I—" Cleo blinked hard. It didn't make the prickle at the corners of her eyes go away. She thought about While You Were Sleeping:how Sandra Bullock's character worked in the Chicago subway, how Chicago had closed down its subway system a decade ago thanks to all the flooding from the Great Lakes. "It's really hard to overstate how much Earth sucks, Billie."

"So much that you've spent your whole life wanting to escape it. I know the feeling."

"If you could drop just the tiniest hint about where you're going with this, I'd appreciate it."

Billie shrugged, her eyes flicking over Cleo's face. "The poem got you emotional, McQueary. Just trying to figure out if there's anything you and your emotions need from me."

Cleo's mind went buzzy. What did she need from Billie? Why would she need anything from Billie? Her needs were—had always been—concrete and therefore achievable: she needed to go to space, she needed to learn everything she could about the universe, she needed to figure out how it all worked so that yawning hole inside her would stop wanting everything—knowledge and freedom and a new world—so badly it threatened to swallow Cleo and everyone she touched whole.

What could she possibly need? She needed Billie to stop looking at her like that, like she was a connect-the-dots puzzle in the stars. She needed Billie to stop looking so real that Cleo was half convinced she could reach out right then and tuck that loose strand of hair back behind her ear. She needed her own fingers to stop itching to do that.

"I need," Cleo said slowly, "for us to stop reading sad poems and watch another stupid, happy movie."

Billie stared at her for another long moment, long enough that Cleo started worrying she was going to argue with her.

"Gladly," Billie said, and just like that, she was turning the TV on with a flick of her head. "Let's do Independence Day."

"Another Lucas family favorite?"

"My dad's. And it's also got Bill Pullman in it. He's the president who leads humanity through the alien invasion. And he's practically a poet, anyway. Wait till you hear his speech at the climax."

***

ARCHIVED: The New York Times, May 9, 2041, "Opinion: We Deserve to Know What the Providence Scientists Are up To," by Jeannie Davis, PhD

Nearly 80 years ago, during the original Space Race and the Cold War that precipitated it, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech at Rice University that is still quoted today. "We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people," he said. "We choose to go to the Moon... not because [it] is easy, but because [it] is hard."

But in private, JFK sang a very different tune: "I'm not that interested in space," he said in a meeting with NASA leaders in 1962. What he was interested in was war, and gaining the upper hand over the Soviet Union.

Science has long walked an uneasy line between the high-minded ideals it is supposed to support and the earth-bound evils it often ends up serving. Every scientist must grapple, in some way, with the fact that even their best-intentioned work may one day be used for harm. In the words of Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project researcher who later became a vocal opponent of the nuclear proliferation he had helped kick-start: "The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."

On its surface, the Providence Project seems as pure of intention as anything can be. Its mission is nothing more or less than to give the human race its salvation: to put a colony on an exoplanet, and in so doing prove that life and civilization are possible beyond this Earth that we've so rapidly turned uninhabitable. Providencecaptain Wilhelmina Lucas said as much in a speech last year, acknowledging the troubled history of space exploration in the same breath: "We take to the stars, this time, for ourselves. Not as some kind of a militaristic chest-puffing, or as a grab for unclaimed resources, or as an excuse to build bigger and better rockets with which to kill each other. This time, we're going to space so we can save each other. We're going to space so we can all go on, together."

As a physicist, however, I am interested in something else that Captain Lucas keeps saying: specifically, that the dark matter engine is proprietary, and this is why the public cannot be allowed to see it in action. Lucas and her team claim to have discovered a new type of reaction, one that does not follow previously established laws of physics; they claim to have circumvented the Rocket Equation problem; they claim that this is all entirely safe and reliable, with no negative side effects or possibility of catastrophic failure.

And the rest of us have, for many reasons, no choice but to believe them. What would we gain, anyway, from attempting to forestall our own salvation? But history shows us that it rarely ends well when science, human welfare, or the fate of the world are left in the hands of capitalists. Profit and growth will always, always come before truth or safety.

I ask again: Why haven't we seen the dark matter engine in action? Why hasn't Erebus Industries invited the scientific community to witness this unprecedented, energy-neutral phenomenon? Is it possible that we aren't getting the whole story, in the name of slick marketing and a corporation's stock prices?

Oppenheimer had something else to say about the bomb and the conditions that created it: "Our own political life is predicated on openness," he said in 1950. "We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism." Here is my criticism: I do not believe, absent concrete evidence, that Providence Ican travel to Proxima Centauri B without any fuel. A spaceship carrying 200 people cannot fly from one solar system to another without something burning, or being consumed.

I don't know what Providence I is running on. Neither do you. Maybe the Providenceteam doesn't, either. All I know is that, one day, we will find out. And if Erebus Industries continues to operate without scrutiny, continues to whisper sweet nothings to us about sailing new seas while privately caring less about salvation than about their bottom line, the results will not be revolutionary. They will be catastrophic.

***

ARCHIVED: Providence Intracrew Messaging Service conversation — Program WL2-Mk1.4 and Abraham Yang, August 17, 2061

Program WL2-Mk1.4

Yang

Hey, Yang

Abraham Yang

WHOOOOAAAA WHO IS THIS

Program WL2-Mk1.4

It's Billie. Obviously

Abraham Yang

Oh my god hi!! I didn't know you could pim!!

Program WL2-Mk1.4

Well, I can

[... ]

Abraham Yang

What's up, Billie?

Program WL2-Mk1.4

You're watching something in the rec room. What is it

Abraham Yang

Star Trek Voyager!

Program WL2-Mk1.4

Oh

I always liked that one

Even though my dad always said "everyone" "agreed" it was the "worst series"

Abraham Yang

YESSSSSSSS BILLIE I AGREE

Like, who cares if some of the storylines are silly! It's about the found family even out in the dark reaches of the unknown!!

Program WL2-Mk1.4

Plus, Captain Janeway is hot

Abraham Yang

EXACTLY

Okay Kaleisha wants to know if you consider yourself a Torres or a Seven of Nine

Program WL2-Mk1.4

I consider myself a Janeway, obviously. I'm offended

Abraham Yang

I'm so sorry

But Kaleisha says, and I'm quoting directly here, "Bullshit. Absolute nonsense. Tell her I know she's an Aries and she can't pretend she's not the most B'Elanna Torres–ass bitch to ever be born"

Sorry

Program WL2-Mk1.4

That's okay, Yang

I'll concede that I am MAYBE a Torres sun, Janeway rising

(That's how you use astrology words, right? Elijah was the one who knew about that stuff)

Abraham Yang

You're doing great!!

Program WL2-Mk1.4

[... ]

Abraham Yang

Do you want to come watch with us? We're about to start the episode where Janeway and Paris get turned into lizards

And I'd love to hear more about your brother, if you're up for it. I know he was so important to you

But no pressure

Program WL2-Mk1.4

[... ]

Yeah?

That sounds nice

Thanks, Yang

***

Day 38: Abe made Cleo and Ros stand back farther from Kaleisha than was probably strictly necessary, though none of them, Cleo thought as they all crowded against one wall of the mess hall, had any frame of reference for what was probable, strict, or necessary in this particular case.

Kaleisha turned back to look at them from her position at the center of the room. "Ready?"

"Ready!" Abe snapped his goggles on and gave a vigorous thumbs-up. Cleo and Ros, only rolling their eyes at each other a little, did the same.

Kaleisha faced the opposite wall again. Cleo saw her take a deep breath and raise her arms, palms out—

And there it was again, that uneasy too-tight sense that the universe itself was being stretched like a rubber band, and the mess hall was folding in half the way three-dimensional space wasn't supposed to and the far wall wasn't so far anymore. And Kaleisha stepped forward, and for a split second she was standing on the slanted ceiling, which was actually the floor—

And with an echoing, bone-shaking crack, space snapped back into place again, and Kaleisha was across the room, striking a showy pose. Cleo broke into applause along with Abe and Ros. She took her goggles off, saw Billie nodding approvingly, and smiled a little wider.

"You beat your best distance, babe!" Abe looked to Billie for confirmation. "That had to have been, what—"

"Seventeen meters of spatial distention," Billie said. "Not bad, Reid."

Kaleisha was trotting back across the room toward them, smiling harder than she had in a fair while. "Thanks, Billie. And everything still looks good with the ship?"

"All systems operational. You wouldn't think anything had changed." Billie pushed her glasses up her nose as her eyes started vibrating. "I still can't quite figure out the physics of it, but you really are folding space, not matter."

"And I think that's very sexy of me." Kaleisha raised a hopeful eyebrow at Ros. "You're up, Rozzy."

Ros's face immediately fell. "No thanks. Rather not waste everyone's time again."

"Hey, Ros, don't get discouraged," Abe said. "No one expects you to totally figure out your powers overnight."

"Cleo basically did." When they looked at her sidelong, Cleo realized that Ros's eyes were bloodshot, like they hadn't been sleeping. Or like they'd been crying. Or both.

"McQueary's abilities work when she passively allows extra-dimensional forces to flow through her." Billie was looking at Ros sternly, but not unkindly. "Your abilities, as far as I understand them, require you to be more active, deliberately siphoning energy into the other dimension. It makes sense that you require more practice, but your powers will probably be more precise once you master them."

The hard edges of Ros's face got even harder, their shoulders ratcheting up to their ears. "That's all speculation."

"Sometimes it's okay to start with speculation and work from there."

"Easy for you to say, when you don't have a body to be frozen to death if I cock it up."

Billie blinked in surprise, reeling back like Ros had tried to slap her. She opened her mouth angrily, but Kaleisha intervened before she could let her retort loose.

"Cleo," Kaleisha said in her fake-calm tone, "I think me and Abe can help Ros take it slow. Do you want to take Billie down to the engine bay and do that thing?"

Billie's gaze snapped to Kaleisha at lightning speed, her jaw still jutted out in frustration. "What thing?"

"I was telling Kal last night that I wanted to wimp the engine, to see if I can find out anything about the crew or why it started on its own when I touched it." It occurred to Cleo that it was panic turning Billie's cheeks pink, and she thought she knew the reason. "And if it energy blasts us again, it probably won't matter, right? So you don't have to worry."

Billie licked her lower lip absentmindedly, which made Cleo blink very hard several times, for some reason. "And you want me there for, what, my effervescent personality?"

"Because if I learn anything you might have supersecret memories about, I'll need to ask you."

"I told you, I went through everything. I've remembered everything I can."

"Then we'll just have a fun science adventure, damn."

A tiny smile twitched at the corner of Billie's mouth, but Cleo was distracted from how almost-cute it made her look by Ros making the gagging noise they usually reserved for Abe and Kaleisha when they were being gross.

"Go on, then," Kaleisha said, elbowing Ros in the ribs.

***

Let's do a thought experiment:

Is falling in love ever a bad thing?

Some people, like Sandra Bullock in While You Were Sleeping—the kind who have never been really, tragically in love—would say no. Love is great. Love is all one-liners and gently falling snow and proposals at the subway station. Love is always a net positive.

But anyone with half a brain—like, say, tiny lesbians with mommy issues and a fear of commitment, or starship captains who have lost everything—knows that love can hurt too. Your closest friend could betray you. The person you planned to spend the rest of your life with could die. You could fall for someone who's (literally, physically) incapable of loving you back.

And that's just people. There are other things to fall in love with, plenty of chances to be crushed from the inside out. Captain Lucas, to pick another totally random example, transferred most of her affections to her job after Neil died. And man oh man, did she romance that job. Late nights together. Fairy-tale vacations to the moons of Jupiter. You're the only one for me, baby, there will never be anyone else.

Which is why, when Lucas found out about the flaw in the dark matter engine on the eve of the launch, she reacted stupidly. Because love makes you stupid. She assumed that no one would take her seriously. She assumed that it wouldn't be as bad as she feared. Worst of all, she assumed that Halvorsen had been working to fix the engine, because that would be the reasonable, rational, right thing to do.

That was not what Halvorsen did.

You see, Halvorsen was also in love. He was in love with an idea, a plan, a dream: that the human race could one day understand more than we ever thought possible. That, through knowledge, we could avoid the consequences of the coming environmental collapse, and then focus on better things like exploring the cosmos, ending unnecessary suffering, even achieving enlightenment. That Halvorsen himself, through discovery, could make humanity a better version of itself.

That idea was the love of Halvorsen's life. He wanted nothing more and nothing less. And, at first, the Providence mission was everything he wanted—people traversing the galaxy, advancing science, working together to make the impossible possible. What's not to love?

But then he did want more, because he found something better. Because he fell too hard. Because sometimes love makes you stupid, and sometimes it makes you a monster.

***

The shadows in the engine bay had a gold tint to them, thanks to the endlessly spinning vortex of dark matter at the center of the engine. It was dead silent now that they were sliding frictionlessly through the vacuum of space, but Cleo's head was full of the other kind of sound, the whooshing roar of the dark matter, of the Other Place, as it slipstreamed around her.

Billie was a little hazier here, a little less opaque and a little more prone to flickering out, like she was running on an upstairs neighbor's Wi-Fi signal that didn't quite reach through the floor.

"You okay there?" Cleo asked. "Does that hurt, or—"

"No, McQueary. It's just annoying."

"If you say so." They stopped in front of the engine and Cleo craned her neck to look up at it. It was easier to look straight at the vortex now that she had dark matter in her blood or whatever, but it was still weird to be seeing something that people weren't supposed to see. "Hey, Billie?"

"Mm."

Cleo swallowed around the sudden clench in her throat. "If I find out what happened to the crew... do you want me to tell you?"

A muscle twitched in Billie's jaw. "Of course I do."

"Even if it's, like—"

"Even if it's bad. Even if it's terrible. Even if it's the worst thing you've ever seen, McQueary, you have to tell me."

Cleo chewed on the inside of her cheek and wished she could put a hand on Billie's shoulder. "So you'll know."

Billie's eyes dragged over Cleo's face like there were answers to be found there. "So I'll know."

"Okay." Cleo took a shaky breath. "I'm gonna touch it."

"Be my guest."

"Do the thing."

Billie's mouth softened. "You're so much better at this already," she said, though she was already stepping behind Cleo to speak in her ear. "You really don't need me."

Cleo shivered involuntarily. Probably because her fingertips were a centimeter away from the surface of the engine, and the energy coming off it was already pulsing into her skin like static electricity. "I think that's for me to decide," she said, trying to sound less breathless than she felt and failing miserably.

She heard Billie huff out a laugh. "Close your eyes, McQueary. Reach out with your feelings, so to speak."

Cleo did as she was told. She set her hand on the engine, spreading her fingers over the just-warm metal, feeling the frequencies of two dimensions vibrate through her.

"Listen for them," Billie whispered, her voice shimmering along the strands of the universe. "Where did they go?"

A flash of light, then a shimmering golden darkness—

Cleo opened her eyes. The engine was still in front of her, looming up toward the shadowy ceiling. But it was off, and when she turned, Billie was gone.

The engine bay was almost unrecognizable. It was well lit, for one thing, softly glowing lamps scattered among the cluttered aisles of desks and build stations that lined the floor between the server stacks. And at the front, standing behind a hulking control console, was Dr. Kristoff Halvorsen.

At last, he appeared not as an overbright kid or a pimply postgrad, but just as Cleo remembered him: blond but graying, strong-shouldered, friendly lines around the eyes. He fiddled with some dial as she watched, muttering to himself, and despite knowing that he'd lied to Billie and put their crew's lives in danger, Cleo swelled with fondness. This man had been the first to demonstrate to her what being an engineer meant. How big a girl with a wrench was allowed to dream.

"Test number 5.3, December first, 2040," he said, and Cleo realized that there was a small recorder clipped to his jacket pocket. "Flux fields set to 30 gigawebers. Acceleration stable at 55 MeV."

And Halvorsen twisted some toggle, flipped a few switches, and slammed down hard on a large button.

This time, of course, the massive wave of energy that came out of the engine didn't knock Cleo over. She was nonetheless surprised to see Halvorsen blasted into the air and slammed into the desk behind him, just as she had been on the vibrating Providence floor the night of the Space Heist. She almost ran over to help him, before she remembered she wasn't there. Instead, she could only wince as she heard Halvorsen groan.

"Jesus." He rolled over and slowly pulled himself up by the edge of the console. "What in the damn—"

HALVORSEN.

Cleo jumped in shock. Halvorsen did too.

The voice, or maybe it was a thousand voices, had come from everywhere and nowhere all at once. It rattled Cleo's bones and made the air shift in a way she sensed even through all the intervening layers of time, like every quark in every molecule was spinning the opposite way now. Halvorsen also seemed to be feeling it; suddenly he was trembling.

WE CANNOT ALLOW YOU TO CONTINUE.

Halvorsen dragged himself to his feet, elbows quivering. "Who are you?" he called, spinning to take in the whole engine bay. "Where are you?"

YOU MUST ABANDON YOUR MISSION.

Halvorsen's eyes landed on the center of the engine, where Cleo saw a tiny, pulsing spark that her eyes refused to focus on correctly. A small frown creased his forehead. "What? Why?"

YOU BELIEVE YOU HAVE DISCOVERED A SOURCE OF LIMITLESS ENERGY. THIS IS UNTRUE.

"Are you speaking from somewhere else?" Halvorsen stepped slowly toward the engine, his hands half raised like he was trying to settle a rhinoceros about to charge. "Does this mean my conterminous dimension hypothesis is correct?"

WE ARE ELSEWHERE.

"Brilliant," he breathed. Cleo recognized the gleam in Halvorsen's eyes. She had seen it in every one of her friends', and Billie's, and her own. He lived on discoveries, on the thrill of pulling back the curtains of the universe. They all did. "And let me guess. The energy comes from wherever you are. And our activity is depleting it."

The gold-dark point vibrated. WE WILL ONLY GROW WEAKER IF YOUR EXPERIMENTS CONTINUE.

"I see." Halvorsen approached the engine and extended one hand, palm out, toward it. He was very close to Cleo now; she could see the creases deepening around his mouth as he tried not to smile. "I didn't know. I would never wish to hurt you deliberately. But you must understand: this engine is crucial to the continued survival of my species. If you tell me how you work, I could try and remedy the issue."

THAT IS NOT POSSIBLE. YOU CANNOT COMPREHEND US.

Halvorsen's face fell. "I can't just stop. My planet is on the verge of irreversible disaster. I don't know if you can comprehend this, but there are billions of lives that will be at risk if I don't at least attempt to put this energy source to use. It sounds like we have more in common than not. We could work together. If you could just tell me how we might reach a compromise—"

YOU SEEM NOT TO BE LISTENING. WE TOLD YOU THAT YOU ARE KILLING US. IS THIS AN ACCEPTABLE CASUALTY IN YOUR QUEST FOR PROGRESS?

Halvorsen hesitated. It was too long a pause, too callous a deliberation, and Cleo would have silently yelled What are you doing, the answer is obviously no if a sickening sort of shock hadn't taken up residence in her throat.

"Of course not," Halvorsen finally said, and if Cleo was finding it hard to believe him, she knew the voices wouldn't either. "But I have to think of my own home, my own people—"

A deafening roar of bass and feedback ripped its way out of the engine. Cleo clapped her hands over her ears right as Halvorsen did the same. She felt the sound vibrating her bones, leaving an unshakable sense that this was a scream of frustration.

CEASE YOUR EXPERIMENTS, HALVORSEN, OR THE CONSEQUENCES WILL BE BEYOND YOUR UNDERSTANDING.

Halvorsen's hands fell to his sides. Cleo watched as the soft, hopeful Dr. Dark Matter face she recognized slipped into something grim and determined, the lines around his mouth made hard by the shadowy not-light.

"No."

Cleo stumbled back to reality like she'd been drop-kicked in the ass. Billie was right there, though, stooping to meet her eyes.

"McQueary." Billie's hand twitched toward Cleo's face, like she wanted to brush the hair out of her panicked eyes. "What did you—did you see—"

Cleo did it for her, tucking her curls back behind her ears as she tried to steady her breathing. "You didn't happen to know that the dark matter engine could talk, did you?"

"Could what?" Billie's eyes went wide. The glow from the engine made them a deeper, fluorescent green. "Absolutely not."

"Well, Halvorsen knew." Cleo ran her hand through her hair again and kept it there, clenching it between her fingers as she looked up at the engine. "The voice—voices, maybe—told him to stop the Providence mission."

"Why?"

"They kept talking about energy being depleted. I think the voices were from the Other Place."

The muscles in Billie's jaw seized. Cleo practically heard her teeth grind. "And he didn't tell anybody—"

"Billie, there's more." Billie clamped down on whatever creative insult she'd been about to call her old friend. Cleo chewed on her lip. "They said the engine was—I think it was hurting them, and Halvorsen—it almost seemed like he didn't care—"

And then Billie held up a hand and froze, staring right through Cleo at something only she could see.

"Tell me later," she growled. "Wheeler is about to break the goddamn ship."

***

When Cleo and Billie tumbled out of the elevator, they saw Abe doing his best to keep Kaleisha back from the edge of the spiraling ice storm that had almost engulfed the cafeteria.

"Ros!" Kaleisha screamed over the howling wind and the deafening rattle of hailstones bombarding the walls. "Come back to us!"

Cleo squinted through all the white and, sure enough, there was a figure at the center of the storm, knees curled against their chest and arms over their head, curly hair white with frost and whipping violently in the wind. Cleo ran to Abe and Kaleisha and grabbed them both by the arms.

"Oh, thank God," Kaleisha yelled, looking ready to cry with relief at the sight of Cleo and Billie. "Billie, can you counter their powers with the ship's climate control?"

"I'm trying!" Billie shouted back. "It's not enough, they're draining too much heat—"

"What happened?" Cleo asked.

"They were trying to freeze a pitcher of water," Abe replied, tears gathering in his eyes and being whipped away by the wind before they could fall, "and they couldn't, and they got frustrated, and just—they lost control, and the ice kept spreading—"

"We need to get to them." Cleo wrapped her arms around herself and took a step toward the maelstrom. Growing up in the over-warm, over-wet levee towns of the Florida islands, she had never even seen snow, let alone anything like this shredding whiteout of a storm. There was ice everywhere: clinging to the tables, forming drifts on the floors, clumping over the see-through wall and blocking the stars. "We could talk them down if we can get through."

"Reid." Billie filled the space between Abe and Kaleisha, and suddenly the starship captain was back. Kaleisha looked at Billie, eyebrow raised. "Can you fold your way past the ice?"

"I don't know. I tried earlier, but it's hard when I can't see where I'm going, and the wind keeps messing me up—"

There was an ear-splitting groan of shifting steel. Kaleisha and Abe flinched, and Billie's frown deepened.

"If it gets any colder in here, it'll threaten the structural integrity of the hull!" Cleo bellowed. She considered just walking into the ice storm. Her skin would heal. Probably.

"Reid, you need to bend yourself over to Wheeler, now."

"Me too." Abe gripped Kaleisha's arm so hard he was probably cutting off circulation.

"And me." Cleo took Abe's other hand and definitely didn't notice the stricken look on Billie's face. "You can do it, Kal."

Kaleisha squeezed her eyes shut and reached forward with her free arm. The space in front of the three of them wavered, rippling like lines of rising heat. Kaleisha twisted her fingers around the air, and for a moment the sideways hail was flowing in impossible, fractal directions—and then Kaleisha grimaced, and everything went straight again.

"Nuh-uh," she grumbled, clenching her fist toward where Ros was as the ceiling moaned again. "This is not how we go down."

"Feel for the dark matter web, Reid."

"What do you think I'm trying to do, Billie?"

"Here." Cleo moved to Kaleisha's side and guided her fisted fingers open, until her friend's hand was resting in hers. "Do it with me."

Cleo breathed in, and Kaleisha did too. And something happened, something like a static shock passing from Cleo's fingers into Kaleisha's, something like osmosis, something like power flowing from where it was to where it was needed most. Something entirely new.

And Kaleisha stretched out her fingers once again, snow and ice flecks pummeling her dark skin, and made a motion like she was ripping a massive hole in the curtain of ice between them and Ros—

And Abe was grabbing them both by the waist, and the wind and the floor and Ros's distant form were bending up and over and closer, and as they all stepped forward together, Cleo was struck with an overwhelming sense that she was being pressed into diamond and stretched like dough all at once—

And the three of them, with a deafening snap, were standing in front of Ros. The storm resumed like it had never stopped, but Kaleisha and Abe fell immediately to their knees, ignoring the needles of ice tearing into their exposed skin, and wrapped their arms around Ros. Cleo followed suit, and tried not to tense up at how cold Ros's skin was to the touch.

"You heard Kal," Abe murmured. "Come back to us."

Ros shivered, not lifting their head from their knees. Their frost-caked hair crunched against Cleo's cheek. "They're angry," they whispered.

"No, baby, never," Kaleisha cried, tears gathering in her eyes, "no one's angry at you—"

Ros raised their head and Cleo saw (thank God thank God) that their eyes were still blue. But Ros wasn't looking at Kaleisha; they were staring somewhere else, at something only they could see.

"They're angry," they said, more to the middle distance than to the other three. "And tired, and hurting."

Something nagged at Cleo, some vague sense of recognition at what was happening to Ros. She took their freezing face between her hands, blinked the snowflakes out of her eyes, and made Ros look at her. She tried to flow energy into them too, if that was in fact what she'd just done to Kaleisha, but it wasn't working; everything she gave to Ros seemed to slip away immediately.

"What you're seeing? It's not real, buddy," Cleo said instead. "I'm real, though. Feel that? I'm here."

Ros's pupils contracted, just a bit, like they were trying to shift their focus. Cleo almost thought that the roaring of the storm dropped in pitch.

"The others are safe," Ros breathed. "But they—they're still angry."

"Okay," Cleo whispered back, absolutely unable to think of anything else to say. "They are, though. They're safe."

A tear leaked out of Ros's eye. They blinked it away, and it traced a warm path through the ice on their cheek. "Cleo?"

"Yeah, Ros." Cleo laughed, and Abe and Kaleisha laughed in relief, tears streaming freely down both their faces. "Yeah."

***

Here's another thought experiment: Is going through something traumatic ever a good thing?

That's an easy one: no. But the aftermath, the way people deal with it, might not always entirely suck.

To give one totally random example: After they all make sure that Wheeler just needs sleep and some warm fluids, Yang and Reid shuffle them off to bed and McQueary goes down to the lab with the hologram. ("I need to warm up too, Billie, and I bet the captain's quarters has fancy blankets.")

And it does. McQueary immediately makes herself a cocoon on Lucas's bed and looks up expectantly, like she wants the hologram to sit next to her. And the hologram does.

"No harm in warming up in here for a few minutes," McQueary says. "I need to preheat the blankets with my flesh before I bring them to my bed."

"Whatever you want," the hologram says softly, "considering you stepped into an ice storm with no hesitation today."

McQueary shrugs, her cheeks going pink, her freckles standing out stronger as a smile crinkles her nose. With her round face poking out from under her blanket hood, she looks precious. Cute, almost disarmingly so. Happy, despite it all. "It's no big deal," she says, as if risking your life for your friends isn't the biggest deal in the universe.

"Stop that." The hologram glares at her, though anyone who knows Lucas would recognize that as her affectionate glare. McQueary probably knows, by now. "You were—" The hologram clears her throat. "You were incredible."

"Damn, Captain, what did I do to earn this commendation?" McQueary can't think she's fooling anyone with that sarcasm, not with her dark eyes shining, blinding and contagious and beautiful, from the praise.

"It's true. My only censure would be that you entirely failed to prioritize your own safety. But you're not going to listen to me, so."

"I don't know, Billie. I'm so cozy right now I might just do anything you say."

It's dark in there, so McQueary doesn't see the hologram blush. Stupid idea, programming a hologram to blush.

***

Wheeler has a different way of dealing with their trauma. Specifically by sneaking into the lab, long after McQueary and the hologram have talked themselves to sleep, and stealing Elijah's jacket. You know the one. With the anti–dark energy lining. That one.