Page 67 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH THE SHORT DURATION OF MY LIFE

Hours later, sirens. Mission control on the radio, static—voices blaring instructions through the dark.

The storm had knocked out our Life Support Buoy (LSB) with its air supply, as well as the hab’s depressurizing system.

The depressurizer was worse news than the LSB.

Without it we’d have to evacuate to the surface painfully slowly, nineteen meters over eighteen hours.

If not, we’d risk dizziness, pain, paralysis, and death.

I held tight to a rope. It was daytime, I thought, sometime daytime fourteen hours in.

Below me, Nadia gripped the same rope. There was a second one beside ours, with Aziz and then Tom.

They were many feet and many hours below us, having delayed their ascent to secure the hab.

I couldn’t see them and didn’t know when I would again.

Even Nadia’s presence was only an idea. We were locked within our bodies—masked eyes screened against a silty rush of water, lips spitting bubbles through scuba filters. The tubes that held us to our air supply, and the ropes that held us to the shadow of a boat—they rocked in the storm above.

We measured our progress in inches, in hours. We couldn’t sleep and couldn’t speak. We held on to our rope, the bones in our fingers burning in their joints, and let the ocean pull us forward and back.

I looked down. Nadia held my foot. She squeezed it three times, hard. With one hand, she held two curved fingers to her goggles. The diving hand signal for look . She repeated the gesture. I followed her gaze.