Naomi sucked her lower lip. Held out her hand.

Valerie laughed but shook it in that firm, CEO grip. Then she whooped again, professional veneer dropped. “This calls for more whisky.”

“You knew what answer I’d give before you even arrived,” Naomi said.

“Still thought it’d be polite to ask. I taught you manners, didn’t I?”

No mention of their fight. Valerie seemed to want to pretend it’d never happened, and that worked well enough for Naomi.

There were a thousand ways the project could go wrong. A million obstacles before them. That night, as the moon blurred the clouds silver, and the whisky made them both warm, Naomi vowed she wouldn’t let anything stand in their way.

When the car dropped them off at the plasterboard spaceport employee apartments, Valerie walked Naomi to the door. She’d be heading down to London for meetings before heading back home to Los Angeles.

Valerie leaned her forehead against Naomi’s. “Happy birthday, Nomi,” she said, the closest she’d come to an apology, and then she was gone.

CHAPTER THREE

3 Hours After Launch

126 Days to Mars

249 Days to Cavendish

They should have had weeks to prepare for a spacewalk, not hours. They’d prepped, of course, through simulations and in EMUs underwater, but that was not the same. Every second they lingered in orbit, their window of escape grew smaller. The U.S. would be preparing to capture them like butterflies in a net, dragging them back down to Earth.

Valerie had lowered the atmospheric pressure in the Atalanta by thirty per cent so coming in and out of the airlock meant less chance of the bends. It was still risky, and everyone on board knew it.

Naomi adjusted the mask over her face, breathing in pure oxygen rather than the usual mix of oxygen and nitrogen. Lebedeva was across from her, her face likewise covered, tubes snaking into the spare canisters. Head and neck covered with absorbent cloth, the mic tracing the curve of her cheekbone. Her blue eyes were serious, blond brows drawn down as she stared, unblinking, at the hatch leading to space. Nine minutes. They were both lost in the spacesuits, so puffy that Naomi’s arms fell to her sides like a ballerina about to pirouette.

Naomi always thought calling it an Extravehicular Mobile Unit sounded too technical and uninspired. But scientists veered from naming things poetically—drawing from myth and legend—to incredibly factual, with letters and numbers or baldly stating the obvious. Naomi had burst out laughing when as a child she’d learned they were naming the new telescope in the Atacama Desert in Chile the Very Large Telescope. It was, at that.