—She wakes up to flames. Calls out for her mother and breathes in smoke. Falls to her hands and knees. Can’t see. Feels her way across the room, hoping she crawls further from the flames instead of right to them. The heat has cracked the tiles of the kitchen. Blisters form on her hands and knees. She staggers out into the warm, dark night, furred with fire, rolling on the remnants of her front lawn to put out the searing heat licking up her legs, her arms—

The pressure dipped again, the readout doing another scan. Was that a glimmer of blue around the tear of her glove?

—Most of her hair has burned away, the scent acrid and chemical. The silver blanket the paramedics gave her crinkles. Burn gel is smeared over her face, her hands, her legs, her feet. Firefighters are like ants staring up at burning logs. Droplets of water from the hoses catch the light as they fight the flickering yellow and orange. The roof caves in, sending sparks into the sky. She feels the burst of heat on her raw, exposed skin. Her throat is a pulsing coal, red and hot. Her mother stumbles across the singed grass a few minutes later, almost untouched by fire.

Her father never came out—

Naomi wriggled her glove. The scan completed.

“It’s sealed,” Naomi said, even as Hixon gave a shout from the bridge as she spied the readouts.

“Finish the job, Lovelace,” Valerie said, as if she were any other member of the crew.

Lebedeva drifted over to her and the last connection to the hub. Wordlessly, the cosmonaut put her wrench to one of the bolts, and Naomi took a deep breath and tried to do the same. She twisted slower, keeping the ring and pinkie fingers of her left glove out of commission. Lebedeva did most of the work of the last bolts, but then finally—finally—the ship was free.

“Return to ship,” Valerie said.

Naomi secured the wrench in the toolbelt at her waist and pulled on the tether, gripping the handrails as hard as she dared with her damaged glove.

“You take the lead,” the cosmonaut instructed.

Naomi turned her back on the hub, kept her eyes on the white hull, focusing on where each hand should go. The Earth still swirled beneath them, night fully fallen. She could see the moon, a grey-white orb, waning gibbous, hovering over the curvature of the Earth. Still so far away, even from up here.

They took the same route back, and at the bridge, Hart floated to the window and pressed her palms to the quadruple-paned glass, a grin splitting her face. Naomi gave a salute, and Lebedeva touched her gloved hand to Hart’s bared one, separated by the tempered acrylic planes, in a high five before moving on.