Who would she have been, if she’d never gone? In the home clips I watched of her before she left Earth, Naomi was still quiet, but a smile often hovered at the edges of her lips, as if she held a secret she wished she could share. In one clip, taken the year before she left Earth, she’d opened her Christmas presents with the careful, considered way she did everything. A scientist through and through. Lifting the tape with a plum-purple nail, peeling back the shining paper to fold it up and set it aside. Opening the cardboard top, peeking in, the dark wave of her hair covering her face. The slight laugh as she took out the snow globe Valerie had given her, her mentor looking on with her own crooked half-smile. Valerie had bought one years ago at the Kennedy Space Center, and growing up, Naomi had always played with it. They had likely been out of production for years, but Valerie had found another just the same. Naomi shook it, the blue glitter murky and opaque before it settled to reveal the little space shuttle on its little launch pad.

She brought it with her when she left Earth. It still sits on her nightstand, even though the glass is cracked and the glimmer within leaked out long ago.

I never knew the first, early incarnation of Naomi. Sometimes, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her beneath that meteorite mask. Not really.

Every anniversary, journalists try again, begging for just one feature. Or a publisher will contact me on her behalf and offer me an eye-watering deal for her memoir as one of the Atalanta 5. No one understood why she kept saying no.

I do. Naomi has never craved fame or money.

Over the years, people have tried to fill in the blanks, or simply made up lies that further poisoned her legacy. She always claimed that her past was better left forgotten—what really mattered was what happened after. What we built from the remnants and rubble.

You’ll be wondering who I am to her, but I’m not the important part of this story. I never have been.

I’d only meant to stay with her for a week. One of my infrequent visits—always so difficult to get away and see her, and it’s so far to travel. It was easy to let too many months pass. At least I visited her, though. The rest of the family never does. She spends so much of her time alone.

I was meant to leave tomorrow, yet just half an hour ago, at two-thirty in the morning, she shook me awake. She leaned over me, greying brown hair tickling my face, her hands like claws on my shoulders.

Dark eyes wide, she said she’d tell me everything. Her face was red, splotchy with tears, her voice nothing more than a whisper, her sour breath hot on my cheek.