Yet it still felt unfinished. Or unfair. Cole Palmer had been the Man of Mars, the Martian, the Red Man. Cole’s story was meant to end on a grand finale—making it to over one hundred, dying on a bed somewhere on Cavendish, his reddish hair pure white, surrounded by generations of his family. He was meant to leave the universe as a patriarch who had left his mark. He had always wanted a family. A giant brood of children so his progeny would carry on. Once, Naomi had thought she wanted that. Eventually.

“Five years ago, neither of us could have imagined where we’d be,” she said aloud, face pointed up towards the ceiling, eyes closed. It felt good to speak to him. Like they were both still back in their old apartment, after dinner, when they held those thick-bottomed blue-green tumblers she’d bought from a thrift store one day on a whim. She would have gin and he had whisky. The news would be on, but muted, flashing lights against the living room. Their conversation had meandered, or they’d lapsed into silence, waiting for the day to end.

“You were a good father to your son. I’m sure of it,” she said, opening her eyes. She reached her arms out, as if she floated in a pool rather than her small bed.

“If I’d stayed. If you’d stayed. You would have been a good father to our child.”

She let her gaze fall to her belly. She was still so tired, all the time—she let herself drift into that liminal space between sleep and awake.

Even in her tiny, empty room, she couldn’t bring herself to say the next words aloud. So she stated them in her head, each word clear and loud as a bell.

But this child was never yours.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

6 Years Before Launch

Houston, Texas

Naomi knew as soon as her phone rang that she’d made it into NASA.

She’d flown back out to Houston and aced both her interviews. She gave them a presentation on the Cavendish biome, watching the panel’s eyes grow increasingly round. Most of the details of what she’d grown in her larger biome hadn’t leaked to the press, and Naomi hadn’t yet written many papers on it.

One of them had asked why Naomi wanted to come to NASA and leave behind a corporate sector that gave her such opportunities. Naomi said she knew that for NASA to travel to Cavendish, they’d need to partner with companies like Hawthorne, and they’d need three main things:

1. Better fuel efficiency through ion drives for relatively short distances.

2. To crack the Alcubierre equation now that they’d discovered negative energy for longer distances.

3. The ability to grow food and keep the crew fed, both on the way and once they arrived.