Cover

Dedication

To the Mercury 13
and all the female astronauts since,
and those still to come.

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Epigraph

“Men could not part us with their worldly jars,

Nor the seas change us, nor the tempests bend;

Our hands would touch for all the mountain-bars:

And, heaven being rolled between us at the end,

We should but vow the faster for the stars.”

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

30 Years After

In thirty years, Dr. Naomi Lovelace has never given an interview.

Whenever I asked her to tell me what happened up there, Naomi would say no one who has been to space could ever describe it to someone who hasn’t.

They could use all the pretty language they liked. You might be able to come close, she told me once—she was always complimentary about my writing—but you’d never really know what it was like. Others will judge the choices she made, what she risked, how close she came to utter destruction. Let them, she always said. I’m used to their hatred by now.

Over the years, I’ve often imagined Naomi up there, floating alone, curled up like a white comma against a black sheet of paper. Her bulky spacesuit, the tethering cable an umbilical cord back to the ship. The silence but for her own breathing and the crackle of the comms. Twisting out to gaze at the stars, their reflections shimmering across the gold-lined visor of her helmet.

I don’t know what she thought about the expanse before her, if it changed her understanding of humanity and our place within it. If that led to the decisions she made.

I’ve watched the recording of the court testimony. Even there, she’d said as little as possible. The whole world had been desperate to hear her statement, to put her on trial as much as the others.

Naomi had stood surrounded by the polished wood of the courtroom, all warm browns compared to the white metal of the Atalanta. It must have all seemed so loud, so messy, after so long breathing recycled air, drinking recycled water, seeing nothing organic except for the plants she had grown in her greenhouse.

Naomi had lifted her chin, her posture ramrod-straight in her pressed, stiff suit, her short hair only beginning to grow out again. The scratches on her cheek were still fresh. Thirty years later, they were the barest seams, hidden among the faint wrinkles. Her face was drawn, not only from what she saw among the stars, but what she’d faced when she’d returned.

Dr. Naomi Lovelace has been many things over the years. Scientist. Criminal. Villain. Hero. Famous. Infamous.