Vanessa takes in a full deep breath and looks around the ship. An entire crew unconscious or dead.

She is a mission specialist. But she has been begging to be given a chance to pilot this thing for years. And now, ironically, she will finally get what she’s asked for.

She can do this. She has never landed a space shuttle before—not even in a simulation—but she will do it today.

And so, as Mission Control comes up with the plan, Vanessa grabs the deorbit procedure checklist and reads it.

She has to stabilize everything in the orbiter—nothing can be free-floating, all must be strapped down. This usually refers to things like microphones and sleeping bags and binders, the items the crew needs. She had never, until this moment, realized it would ever refer to the crew themselves. She has to strap them in.

She considers the seats in the flight deck. After all, there are four of them. But she needs full use of the flight deck to land.

And so, for Steve and Hank, she settles on the airlock.

She nods, swallowing. A droplet of blood floats past her, and she pulls away. She grabs a Huggies wipe from the stash that has been ripped off the wall. She takes the wipe, opens it fully, and touches the corner of it to the blood droplet as it passes through the cabin. It absorbs into the sheet, gone from the air.

She begins with Steve. She tucks the wipe into the front pocket of his shirt and then grabs his hand. She can’t imagine not talking to him every day. Not calling him when she’s afraid she’s screwed something up. She has always understood that Steve being ten years older than her has allowed her to put more faith in him than he probably ever asked for.

But now, looking at his face, she regrets so sharply that she never told him how much his guidance meant to her. She had just left it for him to glean from her high fives and thank-yous.

“Steve,” she whispers to him. “I have to put you in the airlock, okay?”

Her throat catches as she sees his expressionless face. But there is no time for that. She pulls his body toward hers and swims slowly through the mid-deck.

She pushes him inside the airlock and knows that she will need to shut the inner hatch to keep him from floating back into the mid-deck. Before she does, she wants to tell him that he’s the best commander she ever had. But she knows what he would say to that: I’m the only commander you’ve ever had.

Anyway, it would feel awfully final. It doesn’t need to be like that. She closes the door.