Whatever the case, all agree on this: she died and he did not. Some say he went mad from the loss, some say he only acquired the glacial clarity that comes on the other side of madness. In regards to this, there are a thousand truths, but none as lucid as the tensility of his attachment. He would not let go. No matter what was said to him, he would not tolerate the deletion of her existence, the slow disintegration of skeleton and skin. Before she could be interred in the cold of space, he ran, escaping with the pattern of her neurons, the chemical shape of her soul.

If death would take her from him, he would steal her back.

“What the fuck do you think you are doing? What the fuck? Turn the ship. Turn the fucking ship.”

“I can’t do this without you.”

“All these people. You’re going to kill the entire fucking ship.”

“I can’t! I can’t—”

“Allen, get out!”

“I can’t leave you.”

“You’re going to die! Turn around. Oh, god. We don’t have time. We don’t have time. We need to—you have to get out of here, you have to, you have to, youhavetoyouhaveto—”

They say he was a scientist, a captain, a liar with a honeyed tongue, a heartbroken trickster who brokered a hundred nations for the soul of his beloved. They say he killed himself, found respite at the end of the noose, the slant of a knife, that there was no redemption, only silence, the relief of an impartial dark.

They say he killed a ship of millions, that they screamed as they arrowed into the void, bodies decoalescing into protein and pain, bones dismantling into calcium extracts, stardust, and atoms of terrified memory.

They say he did nothing, that he lived on, that he found a new love and that that love soon materialized into children, fair-haired and dark, a wealth of new joys to subsume the death of the old.

They say many things about him.

And if anyone asked, he would have told them they were wrong.

“I had a dream.”

He startles at the hum of her voice, low, edged with the velvet roughness of sleep. Like a specter, Fatimah manifests beside him, silent, thoughtful, the heel of a palm pressed against a thick-lashed eye.

“Was it a dream about dying again?”

She yawns, stretches. In the halogen-limned penumbra, Fatimah is no more than thirteen, whole again, the lines of hard living scrubbed out, an image pilfered from their conjoined past, rebuilt into flesh and ragged cotton. “No. Not this time.”

“What was it, then?”

“I dreamt about what came after.”

Allen holds his breath. “And?”