He tipped Rosalyn’s head against his shoulder, wishing more than anything that he could’ve touched her once, just once, out of that suit.

Maybe her mind was on Misato, too, because she whispered between hiccups, “What do you call a sad canister of coffee?”

Edison smirked, realizing his face was wet, too. “I don’t know, Rosalyn, what?”

She gasped, squeezing him around the middle so hard he winced. The elevator dropped again, the voice announcing the floors warping from the terrifying speed of it. Then the voice resumed, normally, as if they hadn’t just free-fallen twenty feet. He watched the floors count down. Close. They were so close. He didn’t mind that she held him that tightly.

“Depresso.”

He snort-laughed, or sob-laughed, whatever it was, and tears splattered against the inside of his helmet. That made him laugh, too, and she joined in, glancing up at him, her big hazel eyes blurry behind the tears that just kept spilling out.

“That is the worst joke I’ve ever heard,” Edison said through his chuckles.

“I have more,” she warned.

“I can’t wait to hear them.”

They arrived. He almost dreaded the doors opening. The doors opening meant he had to stand up and take Rosalyn with him. It meant he had to take her to the evac pods, put her in one and watch her hurl into space away from him. Away from him. Selfishly, he considered the alternatives. He could go with her. He could master whatever was left of the Foxfire in his mind. There could be a cure, there had to be a cure, the mother of it all was dead, the first infected human, so didn’t that mean something? Didn’t that mean something?

Somehow he stood. Somehow he herded her into his arms and hug-walked her out of the elevators and down the platform. Somehow he followed the signage. Somehow he kept them upright as the station listed, threatening to catapult them against the gravity field. Somehow he put one foot in front of the other, guiding her to the bank of pods on the far left-hand side of the flat, where two dozen circular hatches in two orderly rows waited, green lights shining brightly on every little door.

Somehow he opened one of those pods and saw the crisp white cushions inside, and somehow he let her go.

45

“It’s so spacious,” she joked, turning around and sitting down on the lip of the pod hatch. “Just like being back in cold storage.”

Edison scrunched his eyes up but didn’t laugh. She hadn’t noticed how many shiny tracks had fallen down his cheeks, sparkles nesting in his beard. For some reason, he stood down at the bottom of the short ladder leading into the pod. At least her hiccups had stopped.

“What are you doing? Get in,” Rosalyn told him, tugging on the slack part of the suit over his chest.