The smell of the smoke in the grate was distracting Naomi, sticking in her throat. She needed to stay sharp. Naomi’s mouth went dry. She drank more whisky to wet it, but it tasted of fire, too. She wished for water instead.

Naomi tore open the white envelope. Slid out a card with a cartoony illustration of the Earth on the front, curling white clouds, the sea an even blue. She looked closer. No. Instead of larger continents, the world had smaller islands.

It wasn’t Earth.

She opened the card.

Happy birthday.
Let’s go.
V

Naomi glanced up at Valerie sharply. “Is this a joke?”

Since moving to Scotland, Naomi had often wondered what Valerie’s latest project was. More than once, she’d picked up the phone, their fight be damned, just to find out. She followed Valerie in the news, sifting through the sneering, patronising articles for clues of what she was truly up to.

“I’d never joke about that.” Valerie shifted closer, the firelight flickering along skin smoothed by good gene therapy, expensive creams and injections. No one would peg her for forty-nine. Her mouth curved. “I can promise you a world, Naomi.”

“Cavendish.” Her whole body felt alive, struck by an electric bolt.

The exosolar planet had been discovered the year Naomi turned sixteen. As soon as she’d seen it on the screen in Valerie’s living room, she’d blurted out how much she wanted to go. Valerie had laughed, said she’d come along too. Turned out she’d been dead serious. Hawthorne came upon harder times just after that and Valerie had to shut down some of her medical subcompanies, such as Haven, the one that beat the government to developing viable cloned organs. Growing embryos had already taken off with celebrities who could afford to pay the premium—Naomi remembered the selfies of smiling, glamorous celebrities in front of the tanks showing their growing child suspended in liquid, a hand on their flat and toned tummies. The next level of surrogate. Valerie planned to grow the foetuses in orbit in microgravity, where they wouldn’t need growing supports that could damage the tissue once removed.

It was all snuffed right before it could become relatively affordable. Couldn’t very well make it easier for women to stay in the workplace, could they? Valerie had to fire the head of Haven and throw him under the bus. She redoubled her investments in the robots and AI that had put Hawthorne on the map and focused on interstellar space enterprise instead.

Yet now Naomi was nearing thirty, her teen years long behind her, and they were no closer to that planet just over ten light years away. Probes had been there, and brought back samples, but even if they sent humans, Naomi would never have a chance. Not with how the world was changing.