Page 143 of Stars

They were a flurry of movements, Sasha racing through the checklist and shoving Mark’s legs into the suit bottoms. Mark hollered out readings, snapping connections into place as Sasha dove into his own suit.

Swim up the torso, punch arms through the seals. Draw the pants up, fit the connector ring, lock everything down. Run the integrity check.

Skip the integrity check. They didn’t have those minutes to spare.

Gloves locked. Onboard computer booting up.

He slammed his helmet on. The world went muffled, static from the radio link scratching over his skull. His breaths were too loud in the fishbowl helmet, too loud and too fast. Was he hyperventilating? Black circles ringed his vision, narrowed his gaze to dark tunnels.

“What about Phillipa?” Mark asked over the space-to-space radio link.

Sasha shook his head.

“You need to open that airlock door!” Dan shouted. “You need to clear the station or you’ll be hit by the blast!”

“Moving to the airlock now!” Sasha grabbed station detritus from in front of the hatch and hurled it behind him. The airlock hadn’t been opened in almost a decade. “Mark, help me manually cycle the locks!”

They worked the levers together, slowly bleeding air out ofDestinyuntil the pressure differential was as low as they could get it. “Okay, okay, this is good,” Sasha called.

“Do it!” Dan yelled. “Go! Now!”

“Goodbye,Destiny.” Sasha grabbed Mark’s hand and slammed down the airlock release switch—

The hatch blew into space.

Infinity opened before them, a jewel-encrusted wonderland stretching through time. The Milky Way spread her arms behind the solar system, colors Sasha had never imagined swirling amid winking stars. Wonders of billion-year-old light danced beyond the galactic arms, solar systems and stars and universes filling the ocean of time, sights no human had ever seen before.

He and Mark, two bits of sand tumbling in the vast cosmic ocean, leaped out of the ISS.

They somersaulted, twisted, untethered from the ISS and floating free as the station accelerated away onIndependence’sback. They fell into her wake, spinning at 17,500 miles per hour in the shadow of her orbit.

Sasha held on to Mark with all his strength, bellowing when his shoulder separated from its socket as Earth spun around him like an ice skater, faster and faster until he thought he was going to black out. He clawed his way up Mark’s suit, fingers digging into the hard Kevlar and canvas until he felt his nails crack, felt his skin pop. Felt his knuckles give.

The ISS roared away on the silent burn ofIndependence'sengines. Trails of fire melted the solar trusses, and one giant array broke off the port side, tipping end over end down her orbital wake. Parts and pieces shook loose, a debris field spreading through the heavens.

“We’re out!” Sasha shouted. “Can you read? Moscow, we’re out of the station!”

Static filled his helmet.

Mark grabbed him and locked their arms together, wrapped a knee around Sasha’s leg. It was the best they could do, as close as they could get. Their helmets pressed against one another, tiny lights spilling down their gaunt faces.Independencepulled away, leaving them in the black on the dark side of Earth. All Sasha could see was Mark’s face beneath the flickering helmet light and the ruby stain of blood smearing his pale skin.

Emptiness, nothingness, surrounded them. The nearest satellite was five hundred miles away, and the next one even farther beyond that. Earth was a monolith, her black horizon bleeding into the darkness of space. He could trace the continents by their glow, by the wash of illumination spreading from city to city. In the wild reaches, the desolate places, campfires burned, flickers of light there and gone again.

He could pick out Greenland, edged in flame, and then Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom. Norway, Sweden, Finland.

Russia.

His breath hitched, and he followed trails of light from Saint Petersburg to Moscow, then northeast, a spiderweb of lines dividing the country all the way to the Arctic. Murmansk gleamed in scattered gold dust. Novaya Zemlya reflected the glow of Earth’s aurora, shimmering indigo and verdigris and splashes of rose and claret dancing on the glaciers.

And then Norilsk. His home, an ugly city marring an expanse of crystalline ice, a hammer of light at the edge of an Arctic delta. He’d hated it there, hated it so much. As a boy, he’d stared at the stars and begged to wake up somewhere else, anywhere else.

Now he floated in those stars, watching his home whisper by. From so high up, it seemed peaceful, the home he’d hated nothing more than a spark he could cover with his fingertip. If he could go back and turn that little boy’s face from the night sky—

If he hadn’t chased starlight, would he ever have met Sergey? Or Kilaqqi?

When was the moment he’d first stepped down the path that brought him to this second, this shaking breath?

Was his whole life leading to this?