Half-illuminated, half-dark, the Earth was framed by the square mouth of the docking bay. It looked so small. Small enough that I could pinch it between my fingers, snag it on the tip of my glove, fling it away to be lost among the stars.

“Zahra!” Dag’s voice was muffled, as though carrying over a great distance.

Look, I would say, when this was all over, when I was holding Anwar on one side and Nadra on the other, both of them warm and relaxed and happy. We would have a room of our own, clean and bright with soft blankets and plentiful food, and I would pull them closer to me even as they rolled their eyes and tried to squirm away, and I would say: Look how far away it is. We can’t see the desert from here. The tessellated soil above our mother’s grave, the windowless punishment shed at the edge of the homestead, the wire fences snagging tumbleweed in the wind, all of it so far beyond reach it was not even a blemish on the face of the planet.

“Zahra! What the hell are you doing?”

Dag was not angry—he was never angry, I did not think him capable of it. He showed no temper even when he spoke of how he had been stripped of his citizenship for a minor crime, how he had been escorted to the border, how the Councils security forces had laughed as they set him loose in a spring snowstorm. If that did not anger him, then I did not believe anything could. The harshness in his voice now was impatience. We were crossing the space between Pilgrim 3 and House of Wisdom, climbing ten meters along the docking ladder from the shuttle to an airlock hatch. I had not meant to stop.

I had let go of the ladder with one hand, and both of my feet were floating free.

“Put your hand back on the ladder. Zahra. Are you listening to me?”

I knew about space vertigo. I knew about perspective distortion. I knew about the vacuum madness that made people giddy and irrational the first time they stepped into unconfined space. As a child I had sat rapt at my father’s side while he told me how excited he was to go into space, how honored he was to have been chosen to work aboard House of Wisdom, but also admitting, sheepishly, that he was frightened. What would it be like, he had wondered, to live so long in a place where even the bathrooms were different, where water came in globes rather than glasses, where you could not set your spectacles on your bedside table because they would float away during the night? I had giggled at that, happy to focus on something silly rather than the dwindling days until he departed. I had loved the sound of his voice as much as I hated that he was leaving us.