She was wrong. It’s the nothingness, the vacuum of deep space—she is a hundred trillion kilometers from Earth; she will asphyxiate and that will be it. The hatchet falls from her grasp; space wrinkles around her; time folds up. Her father tears open an envelope and onto his palm slides a little seed clasped by a pale brown wing.

Hold your breath.

“Not yet.”

The seed trembles.

“Now.”

Beyond the breach in the outermost layer, the darkness stays put. She is not sucked out, her eyes don’t freeze solid: it is only night.

Oxygen at three percent.

Night! She picks up the axe, swings again and again; fragments of metal tumble into the dark. Out beyond the steadily enlarging hole, thousands upon thousands of tiny silver flecks, illuminated in the dying beam of the headlamp, are falling through the black. She pushes one arm through and her sleeve comes back wet.

Rain. It is raining out there.

Oxygen at two percent.

Konstance keeps swinging until her shoulders burn and the bones in her hands feel as if they have broken. The puncture gets more jagged as it grows; she can fit her head through, a shoulder. Her face shield is hopelessly fogged, and she’s tearing the bioplastic of her suit, but it’s worth the risk, and with another blow the hole is almost large enough to wriggle her torso through.

The smell of wild onions.

The dew, the lines of the hills.

Sweetness of light, moon overhead.

Oxygen at one percent.

The raindrops are falling much farther below the gap than she expected, but there is no time. She pitches armfuls of seed envelopes out into the dark, then the axe, and drives her body through the rift after them.

Miss Konstan—roars Sybil but Konstance’s head and shoulders are outside the Argos now. She wriggles, catches one thigh on a dagger of metal.

Oxygen depleted, says the hood.

Her legs still inside the structure of the wall, her waist stuck, Konstance takes one last breath, then rips off the hood, tearing away the sealing tape, and lets it go. It bounces, rolls, and comes to rest maybe fifteen feet below, among what look like wet stones and long blades of tundra grass, its headlamp shining straight up, into the rain.

The only way out is to drop. Still holding her breath, she braces her arms against the outside of the ship, pushes, and falls.

An ankle twists, her elbow strikes a rock, but she is able to sit up and breathe—she is not dead, not suffocated, not frozen solid.

The air! Rich wet salty alive: if viruses lurk inside this air, if they spill from the perforation she has made in the side of the Argos above her, if they are replicating inside her nostrils right now, if all the atmosphere of the Earth is poison, so be it. May she live five more minutes, breathing it, smelling it.