“Extra bit of good news: Cochran died. The VP too. Both contracted the virus. Even if they hadn’t, they’d have been deposed by now, I reckon.” Hixon smirked in satisfaction. “Lots of people are blaming them for what happened. His policies loosened a lot of safety regulations for companies, so people currently think the virus was a result of that.”

“Feels a little wrong to be so happy to hear about someone’s death,” Hart said. “But eh. I’ll live.”

“So no one knows it was Valerie?” Naomi asked. The information hadn’t had anything in it to hint at Hawthorne’s involvement.

“The government, or what remains of it, does,” Hixon said. “But it doesn’t seem to have gone wide yet. So far, the public seems to think the leak was an inside job. Matter of time, though.”

“Things back home look… messy,” Lebedeva said. “Hard to know what we’ll be arriving at in a few months.”

“We’ll just have to wait and see.” Naomi paused and asked the question she feared. “Anything from Evan?”

Hixon chose her words. “Not through official channels. Have you checked your tablet?”

“No.” Naomi stood, flexing her fingers in agitation. “Excuse me.”

She turned her back on their sympathetic expressions.

The walk back to her room felt long. The ship was still pristine, clean. No more flashing lights or alarms. The same as it’d always been. Hixon and Lebedeva had been over all the systems, and everything was still working fine. If Lockwood had cut any more corners, it wasn’t obvious; nothing had broken yet. Hopefully it’d be solid enough to get them home.

Naomi entered her room and picked up the tablet. She sat on the bed cross-legged. Centred herself, fingertips tracing the shapes of the vines beside her bed. Her desk was empty. She’d put the snow globe in a cupboard, unable to look at it. Maybe she’d chuck it out of the airlock.

She gathered the courage to press the tablet screen and wake it up. She ran through the scenarios in her head. Evan could be dead, either from infection or the resulting chaos. Shot down trying to enter the dead zone. He could be desperately ill. If the virus had caused too much damage, the cure would only do so much. She tried not to imagine him too thin, his skin sallow beneath his tan, sheened with sweat, eyes glassy.

She tapped it.

New messages.

Her heart thudded, but she clamped down tight on any hope. It could be someone using his account to tell her bad news privately.

She pressed her lips together and opened the first message.

Evan Kan: Hello from Earth, Atalanta. I’m all right, Naomi. Well, mostly.