Eight months on Mars and I never thought I'd miss the static in my helmet. But here I am, listening to my crew complain about coffee on a planet that killed everyone I knew.

"Remember when being an astronaut meant something?" Darren is leaning against the recycler. He has been leaning there for nine minutes. "Remember when people clapped?"

"Now we do maintenance with a helmet," Mae says, not looking up. "Now they put us on calendars between dental hygienists and the city council."

"I was a dental hygienist's calendar, once," Yuri says, very quietly, in the corner.

"Stop romanticizing Earth, Darren." Mae taps her screen. "Earth is just where the soil samples are. We are the soil samples."

I touch my ear. The right one. The silver hoop is still there.

I touch it every fifteen minutes. My grandmother kept this earring in a drawer for forty years and never put it on. When she died, she left me a note: Wear it the next time someone is brave enough to send you back. I do not know who she meant. I am wearing it on the planet she escaped.

"Tamura." Mae is looking at me. "You good?"

"I am cataloging."

She lets it go.

The corridor pings me as I walk. White panels. The recycler hum I have been hearing since I was three years old. The slit window at the secondary lab gives me a strip of sky the color of dust on old paper. I have been told all my life that Earth is not a place anyone visits. It is a museum. We are the curators. We do not touch.

I touch the earring. Routine.

Then the floor.

Not sound first. The kind of feeling you get in the soles of your feet when something has decided to be over. The recycler stops. The lights blink. The corridor goes silent the way a room goes silent when someone you cannot see has covered your mouth.

"Mae," I say into the comm. "Did your console just."

"My console just," she says. "Everyone, sealed-doors protocol, now."

The corridor flickers red.

Three seconds of nothing. Then the south corridor opens like a mouth and closes like a mouth.

"Yuri."

There is no answer.

"Yuri."

Nothing.

I am running. Three steps down the hall a piece of ceiling lets go and something hot punches the air past my shoulder. I keep moving. Copper on my tongue.

"Mae?"

"Stuck in the bunk corridor. Door won't release. Tamura, get to the surface. Now."

"I am not leaving you."

"You are leaving me. Protocol. Out."

My body is already running. My body and I are going to have a conversation about this. Later. The bone in my left side grinds with every stride, the cracked rib I will have time to name later moving against something it shouldn't move against.

The bulkhead at the next junction is closing. I get my hand on the frame. I get under. The door seals behind me with the soft, neat sound of an envelope being shut.

"Mae?"

Static.

"Mae."

Static.

I count my breathing because my breathing is the only thing left. One. Two. The blast door at the surface lock is hanging on one hinge. Three. I climb over. Four.

Sky.

I have not been outside without a dome over my head since I was three years old. I knew the sky would be bigger. I did not know it would be so loud. The wind has the cadence of an animal that has lost its young.

I cough. My ribs scream. I press my palm against my left side and laugh once, because that is the wrong reaction, and that is what comes out anyway.

"Okay," I say to nobody. "Okay, Earth."

Behind me, the vault collapses one floor at a time. Six floors. Each one a floor of Mae and Darren and Yuri sinking into California bedrock. The ground vibrates up through my boots, low and continuous.

I sit down. I did not mean to sit down.

The dust above the ground is the color of an old book left in the sun. There is no road, only the suggestion of one. I am alone on the planet that killed everyone I knew, and I have a cracked rib and a grandmother's earring and a hand pressed to my left side.

Then.

I do not see him arrive. He is, the way furniture is. Standing two meters from me, dressed in a black coat that is too big for him, no shoes. Dark hair over his eyes. Heat coming off him in a way I will think about later. A faint blue light moves under the surface of his eyes, brightens, settles.

He looks at me. His face does a thing that is almost surprise.

"Rei."

Like the word has been sitting in him for a long time.

"Rei. You came..."

The wind eats the rest of it. Or his voice does. The word stops halfway, and behind him, in the ruin past his shoulder, something I cannot see clearly moves through the dust and I am still trying to stand up when he lifts a hand toward me that I do not have time to read as