She held out her hand; Stone dropped into her palm a small disk, like a coin, less than an inch across. It was the diamond marker. “I think it’s more appropriate for you to place it. For Ben. And the others.”

He reached out with two hands, and closed her fist over the marker. He was looking into her eyes.

He knows, she realized suddenly. About Ben and me. He knows. They all knew, all the time.

She dropped the marker into a sample pocket on her suit. Then, numbed, she pushed the red bands over her arms and legs, and dropped her gold visor down over her face.

Stone held the hatch aside. York got down, clumsily, to her knees, and backed up ass-first to the hatch. She started to crawl backwards, out onto the porch.

“Here we go. You’re lined up nicely, Natalie. Come toward me a little bit. Okay, down. Roll to the left. Put your left foot to the right — no, the other way. You’re doing fine.”

She could feel where her sides scraped against the hatchway. Coolant tubes dug into her knees.

Blood hammered in her ears.

“Okay, I’m on the porch.” She reached out and grabbed the handrails, to either side of the porch.

She looked up. The white paint of the outer hull was stained with landing dust, and tinged yellow by the quickening Martian morning. She had gotten so far out that could see the whole of the hatchway before her; it was a rectangle of brilliant fluorescent light, set within the skin of Challenger. Inside the rectangle Phil Stone had crouched down, peering out at her, nodding inside his helmet.

She continued to move backwards, still crawling over the porch, feeling out with her right leg; eventually, her toe hit the top rung of the ladder.

Holding on to the handrails, she straightened up.

She was emerging into the shadow of Challenger, the rising sun was hidden by the bulk of the craft, and the sky above her was still black, though the stars were washing out. She turned, stiffly. To left and right she could see a flat, sharp, close horizon, delimiting a plain of dust and rocks. Everything was stained rust brown, like dried blood, the shadows long and sharp.

The change of scale was startling. She’d spent months inside the confines of the Mission Module, where everything in the universe had been either a few feet away — enclosed by the tight, curving walls — or at infinity. The sense of height and depth, of scales opening out around her, was profound, disorienting; nothing in her training had prepared her for this. For a moment she felt as if she would fall backwards, and she hooked her hands around the handrails of the porch.

“Natalie?”

“I’m okay, Phil. It’s just—”

“I know,” Stone said. “A big moment, right?”

“Yeah.”

Gershon asked, “Natalie, have you gotten out the MESA yet?”