By the time they’d gotten back to the Hotel Selene, the staff had already peaced-out in one of the shuttles that had been parked outside of the dome. Best that the crew could tell by scanning the hotel security footage, the asteroid had hit Earth while they’d been doing their trust falls. Everyone else in the research stations of Luna One had already evacuated. Radio silence from Earth, too, which hung in a dim crescent in the sky.

That was nearly a year ago. In the weeks of silence that had followed, the snow had started falling, and an Earth warped with dark clouds looked down on them. Some part of the hab’s weather system had malfunctioned. The pineapples and the hibiscus had withered. The infinity pool had frozen into a block of ice looking for a giant martini to cool. Goodbye tropical paradise. They’d abandoned the other floors of the hotel and had moved into the restaurant to conserve energy and wait for the rescue that wasn’t coming.

Logan had led them all here. He’d trapped them but also had saved them, in a way. The blame was murky—nothing as easy as it had been those days in the jungle—though they tried to wrestle some of that joy back. They were pack animals, now, and Logan would look out for all of them. They still had cases of beluga caviar and slabs of wagyu beef in the freezers of the kitchen. All they had to do now was drink and eat and fuck until they starved to death in the best five-star hotel this side of oblivion.

“You should see the footage from those four days, though,” Logan told me, outside on the deck by the iced-over pool. A single palm frond tried to struggle up from the snow. We had the same buzzed hair, the same slightly stooped shoulders. Honestly, we were way more alike than I was cool with—he was the gritty, sleazier reboot of me. He offered me a drag on his cigarette—oregano, he said, since they’d ran out of tobacco and weed a while back—but I waved him off. “Fucking beautiful stuff.”

He flicked the cigarette and the red spark died against the snow.

28

PACKED

We needed a plan but first I had to get Yusuf out of here.

Dinner was beef sliders that Logan cooked to order on a small griddle at the bar and served with ice-cold martinis. No one seemed especially interested in the details of how or why we were there. Happy hour had started around eleven that morning. I mean, I’d almost passed out after learning about the Envisioner, and here we were, two for two in the blasé reaction department.