For a long time the message kept going, and she heard him breathing on the other end, loudly enough that he might have been right there next to her. Something had opened, a door she hadn’t expected to ever find unlocked. She opened her AR archive of messages, adding that one to the collection of notes from her mother, from Angela, from Saruti . . . Angela had reached out for months, even after her big move to the outer space campus, and then one day it just . . . stopped. Angela’s messages stopped just a month before their shared birthday, not that they could celebrate together this year. There wouldn’t be cocktails and cupcakes, but even a call would have been nice. Wiping at her mouth, Rosalyn sighed into her palm; she didn’t know if she regretted leaving Earth, but she mourned the bridges she had burned so recklessly in the depths of her pain.

Rosalyn sat in the damp towel, staring into that open door in her mind, letting the light pour out and wash over her. Her father was still in the wrong, but it was more complicated than she believed. Or maybe not. She didn’t know what to think, or what she would’ve done in his position. The urge to talk to him, to understand, almost soothed away the brief surge of relief. She felt shaky with the acidic burn of fear in her stomach. Coincidences were piling up, too many to ignore, and she had to wonder if the timing of her father’s company merging with Merchantia was key. Josh Girdy suspected a cover-up. Someone had tried hard to divert Rosalyn away from the infected Brigantine. Other ships coding. Piero, or Danny, whoever he was, murdering a crewmate, lying about his identity, holding on to a dated note that lined up with the launches of doomed expeditions . . . Was it just resentment bleeding in that now she knew, or felt, that her father and Belrose Industries were mixed up in it all? It didn’t seem possible, but then, none of it did. She had seen things nobody could expect to see, survived things nobody would expect to survive, and the pieces twining together in her head made an awful kind of sense.

Angela had left Earth with her own project, a dangerous one, one her father made sound like a suicide mission, but in every one of Angela’s unanswered messages, she made it sound like they were going to cure all the world’s ills. If only she could talk to Angela over lemon drop cocktails, she would know what to do, and that she was okay, alive, just working hard and video calling her kids, the same old Angela, mother as much to her test tubes as she was to her human children.