“Some kind of emergency door has come down, but…” She describes the scene.

“Are you anchored?” asks Shell.

“Uh-huh.”

“Can you see the emergency fire extinguisher?”

“Uh-huh… yeah.”

“Next to that, you’ll see a panel labelled ‘control’.”

“I do.”

“Open it, you’ll see something that looks like a winch handle. Turn it clockwise until the gap closes. Joké, we all depend on you being able to close that shutter.”

“Go away now, Captain.”

Joké sips water. The panel is where Shell said it would be, but the EVA gauntlet is too cumbersome to manipulate the latches. She takes off the top part of her suit. The air tastes like burnt rubber, but it’s breathable as it rushes out into the cosmos.

The handle is cold.

Joké pushes clockwise. The gap doesn’t seem to change, and it’s hard. Fine. She pushes harder and this makes maybe an inch of difference.

“Fuck, this is not going to be unicorns and rose petals, is it?”

She pushes, sometimes with two hands, but the swirling droplets land on her; one or two to start with, then she glistens with it. At least it’s not foul smelling, but she loses her grip.

“Suboptimal.”

She knows what’s about to happen before it does, she sees it, and is calm. She loses her moorings, what anchors her in place, and is pulled towards the gap. Too late, she realises she has taken off the suit that would have stopped her from squeezing through and kept her alive.

Joké is sucked out, banging her head and torso, spinning, into the cold blackness of space.

She is in the Us, the nothingness and everything, the universe around her, all of spacetime open to her. Joyous.

“Ahh… this place. You guys…”

Others in the Us greet her in the Lamber way. Her mind is not nimble enough to take their form, but she can slip into and out of the Us at times. Her body can slip.

They want her to stay, her human biology attractive to them, sustaining in some undefined way. They bob around her, tentacles everywhere, entangled. She has, in the past, spent aeons with them before returning to her point in the time stream.

Her mother is in the Us somewhere, and it is likely that Joké has met her. But Lambers don’t do personhood in quite the same way as humans, and Joké’s flesh has always been a barrier to integration.

She opens spacetime and inserts herself back into the Ragtime.

This time she’s ready and gives it all her might. She wipes her hands on herself to keep the palms dry. Stubborn though it is, the winch submits to her determination. The gap closes. Pressurisation should start to build up again if life support isn’t damaged.

Body aching, Joké allows herself to drift, to float free. To rest.