Her Three Orbits

Chapter Nine — Houston, We Have a Roommate

Artemis VI · Lunar South Pole · Day 4 of isolation · Natasha

I didn't answer him last night. Some questions don't disappear just because you don't answer them. They go quiet for a while, the way the rover goes quiet at 0300, every system still running underneath the silence.

Ethan didn't ask again. He ran the morning diagnostic, logged the consumables, drank his water without looking at it. I noticed the change. I didn't say anything about that either.

Thirty-five days. The number had recalculated at 0001, indifferent as always, and I had stopped expecting it to feel like anything new. It was just the next smaller version of the same fact.

I ran the ECLSS check while he reviewed the contact log. The humidity coil held steady. The water tank read clean. Everything in the cabin was doing exactly what it was built to do, which was the only thing I had asked of it since Day 1.

The contact window opened at 1300. Maya Chen's voice came through with the usual delay, but something in it was different today, and I caught it before Ethan because I had spent three days learning the specific shape of her caution.

"Good afternoon. Before we get to systems, I want to check in on you both. How are things going, in the cabin? Day to day."

Ethan answered first, the way he always did when Houston asked something operational. "Functioning. We've established a workable routine."

"Good. That's good to hear." A pause, longer than the delay accounted for. "And how would you two say you're getting along? Personally, I mean. Not the systems."

I looked at Ethan. He didn't look back at me. His jaw did the thing it did when a question landed somewhere he hadn't prepared for.

"We're managing," he said.

I leaned toward the comm panel before I'd decided to. "Is there a reason you're asking, Houston? Specifically."

Another pause. This one had weight to it, the kind that told me Maya Chen was choosing a sentence out of several she had available.

"Standard psychological monitoring for extended isolation scenarios," she said. "Two-person crews show particular stress patterns we want to track early. That's all this is."

That's all this is. I wrote it down in my shorthand.

She moved on to systems after that. Fuel cells, scrubber capacity, the route data Ethan had filed about sector seven. She confirmed they were reviewing it. She did not say when. She did not use the word intact anywhere in the call, not about the Orion, not about anything. I had stopped expecting her to. I kept noticing its absence anyway.

When the window closed, Ethan looked at the log he'd just filed and didn't say anything for a while.

"She's not asking about stress patterns," I said.

"No."

"She's asking because something changed on her end, and she wants to know if it's changed on ours."

He turned to look at me then, and for a second I thought he was going to ask the question again, the one from the night before, the one still sitting in the cabin like a third occupant. He didn't.

"What would you tell her," he said instead, "if she asked you directly. How we're getting along."

I held his gaze longer than the question required. "I'd tell her the truth is complicated and she only asked for a status."

"That's not an answer."

"No," I said. "It isn't."

Aboard the Orion, en route to the Moon · Six weeks earlier

The transit took three days, and on the second one, an equipment check sent Dmitri and Hayes forward and left the two of us alone in the docking module for what should have been ninety seconds.

I was running a pressure seal diagnostic on the hatch. Ethan was logging something on the tablet, standing close enough that I could hear the small click of the stylus against the screen every few seconds. Neither of us had arranged it. It had simply happened.

Ninety seconds became four minutes. Dmitri's voice came through the comm twice, checking on the seal status, and I answered both times without looking away from the panel, because it felt like it would cost me something.

"You always work like that," Ethan said. Not a question.

"Like what."

"Like the rest of the ship isn't there."

I finished the diagnostic before I answered. I had learned that answering too quickly gave a question more importance than it had earned.

"It's a closed system. I only need to think about what's inside the seal."

"That sounds lonely."

I looked at him then, because it was an unusual thing for him to say, more unusual than anything he'd said to me in the six months of training before this. He was watching me with an expression between assessment and a question he wasn't going to ask.

"It's efficient," I said.

"That's not what I said."

The hatch light went green. The seal held. I had every reason to leave the module immediately, and I noted, with the same precision I used for everything else, that I didn't.

We stood there for another forty seconds neither of us needed. He found a reason first. A checklist item on the far side of the module that did not require his physical presence to verify. He went to verify it anyway.

I told myself it had been ninety seconds, the way it was supposed to be, and counted the rest as a rounding error in my own head for exactly as long as it took to walk back to my bunk.

I have thought about those four minutes more than I have admitted to anyone, including myself, until just now.

I came back from the memory the way I always did, slow, the cabin reasserting itself around me one detail at a time. Ethan was at the forward console, running the same checklist he ran every evening, and the secondary display still read thirty-five days, and nothing about the present moment had changed in the time I'd spent somewhere else.

Except that I understood something now I hadn't let myself understand on the Orion. Whatever this was between us had not started in the observation module. It had started at least in a docking module three days into transit, over a pressure seal that took ninety seconds and somehow took four minutes instead.

He didn't know that I'd remembered it just now. He didn't know I'd been carrying it for six weeks either.

"Ethan."

He looked up.

I almost told him. The four minutes, the hatch, the reason I'd looked away from him on the comm so I wouldn't have to look at him instead. It was right there, ready, the kind of true thing that would have answered last night's question whether he'd asked it again or not.

"Nothing," I said. "Diagnostic's clean. I'm going to log off for the night."

I watched something in his face register the lie for exactly what it was, and watched him decide, for reasons of his own, not to call it one.