And yet I’d felt bad about it even after I’d said it, because Brigid had looked so hurt. She hadn’t cried, but her eyes had been bright. I’d remembered that after I’d left her to go to school.

But that wasn’t the only time we ever interacted. It wouldn’t have even been a significant one, if it hadn’t been the last. Brigid had been sixteen when she died. I’d known her since the moment she was born. Sixteen years, the entirety of her life. We had been all but inseparable as children, though we’d started to grow apart after we’d become teenagers.

When she’d died, that would’ve been her last memory of me, but not her only memory. I had never doubted that my sister loved me. I had known my sister too well to doubt that she knew I’d loved her, too.

“Yeah,” I said to Tamara as we walked through the abandoned spaceship, and couldn’t say anything more.

“Then you have no reason to feel guilty,” Tamara said, and I was glad she was leading the way, so she could not see that I had to swipe my palm across my eyes.

We’d walked a little further through the dark, following turns only Tamara knew, before she said suddenly, “Lashana Pecking. Raphael Warren. Lian Wu. Jacob Tarver. Pelle Takgaard. Sara Boccanegra. David Etten. Jen Primrose. Evan Colgate. Evan Gallagher. Christian Glaceau.”

“Who were they?” I asked.

“The people who came with me on this ship,” Tamara said. “My team, the ones who died.”

She’d told me once that she hadn’t remembered their names. Yet she’d recited them for me like they’d been waiting on her tongue all this time.

“I didn’t like to think about them,” Tamara said. “I had to focus everything I had on staying alive. But sometimes something will remind me of them and it’ll hit me, who they are and what they sound like and look like and what they smelled like, even. All so real it’s like I’m back there, not here and now. So I tried to put that away, to keep myself alive.”

I brought out my memories of Brigid and Kystrom so often that they were starting to fray from the overuse, the way a piece of cloth will grow thin and fragile if you rub it with your thumb for too long.

Suddenly Tamara’s arm came up and struck me in the chest, forcing me to a stop. She grabbed the flashlight from my hand and flicked it off, turning as she did to press her finger to her lips, the whites of her eyes gleaming in the moment before the flashlight died. I lifted my hand to Ultraviolet’s collar-light and dialed it down to black.

In the stillness, I heard what Tamara had heard: movement several rooms away, footsteps. Sound did travel further than light in this ship. There was someone, or something, directly in our path.

Tamara’s hand landed lightly on my arm, drawing me forward. We crept through the blackness and the blackness brightened around us, a strange, colorless light.