Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

ISS Expedition 78 | Flight Log | UTC 03:15 | MET +00.00 Dosimetry: 0.4 mGy/day (nominal)

Crew on station: 6

The growth plate on Sample 4 had clouded overnight.

Shane noticed it during his first pass through Destiny, the US lab, at 03:15 UTC, which was the middle of the crew’s scheduled sleep period and the only time the station’s American module belonged entirely to him.

Rose kept a strict schedule for the lab during waking hours—sample rotations, imaging sequences, centrifuge maintenance—and Shane respected the schedule because it was Rose’s lab and Rose’s science, and he was the Commander, not the principal investigator. They’d worked out how to share a workspace two years ago, during the eighteen months of pre-flight training at Johnson, back when they’d also been working out how to stop dating each other.

This wasn’t working. It would never work.

The drawer where he kept that confirmation was the same one where he kept everything else he didn’t look at directly; a drawer with no bottom, it turned out, because he kept filling it and it kept holding and he’d wondered whether the drawer was the point, whether he’d built his entire life around the architecture of a cabinet that existed only to stay shut.

He’d told Hayden about the breakup over a Sunday call, and Hayden had said “Dude, that sucks, I’m sorry” and then talked about his youngest’s ear infection for twenty minutes, and Shane had been so grateful for the pivot that he’d looked up pediatric ear infections afterward so he could ask follow-up questions the next week and have something pre-planned to talk about.

That was the friend he was. The kind who researched your kid’s ear infection so he’d never have to talk about his own feelings.

Nobody dated in microgravity. Nobody expected him to want anyone. Four hundred kilometers of vacuum was overkill, probably. A studio apartment in Gatineau would have accomplished the same thing. But the ISS had better views and nobody asked why you were single. The station gave him the one thing Earth never had: a legitimate reason to want no one, and for the wanting to be true.

It also meant he never slept well.

Shane had never been able to sleep a full eight hours in microgravity.

Ugh, ‘microgravity’. The CSA media training called it “microgravity.” Journalists called it “zero gravity.” Astronauts called it floating. The physics didn’t care what you called it—the station was in freefall, and so was everything inside it, and Shane’s body had adapted to the permanent plummet months ago, running on six and a half hours of sleep, and the remaining ninety minutes were his to spend in the one place on the station where nobody needed him to be anything other than a pair of hands and a functioning brain.

Chris Hadfield had talked about this, the stolen hours, the private communion with the lab, the ISS as a cathedral at night. Shane had read every interview Hadfield had ever given before his first flight, had watched the “Space Oddity” video more times than he’d admit, had traced the line from Hadfield’s command to his own and felt the weight of inheritance in it: two Canadians, twenty years apart, trusted with the same improbable job. Hadfield had made it look effortless. Shane was learning that the effortlessness was a performance, and the performance was exhausting, and the lab at 03:15 was the only place he could set it down in the rare moments of solitude.

He was aware of how this sounded. Commander of the International Space Station seeks alone time to look at crystals at three in the morning. If his flight psych could see the schedule he actually kept versus the one he reported, there would be a conversation.

Down here the stars were close enough to count. Shane never counted them, because discovering a thing, naming a thing or a star or a feeling, gave it mass, and mass had gravity, and gravity bent orbits, and he could not afford to bend.

So he distracted himself with work and being the best.

Overhead panels were dimmed to their nighttime setting, blue-white LEDs dialed down to a glow that turned the equipment racks into a canyon of soft-edged shadows. The hum of the Environmental Control and Life Support System—ECLSS, pronounced like the name, though Shane had never gotten used to how casual that sounded for the machine keeping six people breathing—was the loudest thing in the module. Below it, the whisper of ventilation fans. Below that, the faint, arrhythmic tick of the protein crystallization unit’s thermal cycling, a sound that had wormed its way into Shane’s sleep patterns so thoroughly that he sometimes heard it in his dreams.

He’d built a routine around these stolen hours. Float in. Check the growth plates. Log observations Rose would review in the morning. Adjust the gooseneck lamp. Let his hands do the work his mind wanted to do all day but couldn’t, because during the day the Commander’s job was meetings and status checks and making sure Cliff remembered to swap the CO2 scrubber filters and making sure Rozanov didn’t dismantle anything load-bearing out of boredom.

He pulled the crystallization cartridge from its housing and held it under the lamp.

His hands under the lamp were his mother’s hands. Shane had known this since he was fourteen, reaching for a centrifuge dial at a school science fair, and the recognition had arrived the way stars arrive at dusk: not sudden, but slow, the shape always there, waiting for the sky to darken enough to see it.

He had her narrow wrists, the same squared-off nail beds, the same ratio of finger to palm that looked wrong on hockey gloves and right on precision instruments. Yuna Hollander had been a chemist before she married his father, before she’d shelved the career for Ottawa and a bilingual household and a son who looked enough like both of them to confuse strangers in grocery stores.

What are you? a teammate’s mother had asked him once, at a tournament in Saskatoon, bending down to his nine-year-old face with a smile that expected a fun answer. He’d said Canadian and she’d laughed and said no, but what are you really and his mother’s hand had landed on his shoulder and steered him away and Shane had understood, with the clarity of a child who learns a rule by watching it get enforced, that the answer she’d wanted was the one he would spend the next twenty years not giving.

He photographed ambiguously enough to be everyone’s projection. Shane knew he was a parallax error in human form, his position shifting depending on where you stood to look at him, never resolving into a fixed point, because the observers couldn’t agree on the angle and he had long since stopped correcting them: not quite Asian, not quite white, a Rorschach test in a flight suit. Canada’s blankest canvas. The face they could project onto without having to see, the way you could stare at the night sky and find whatever constellation you’d already decided to look for.

He’d never asked whether the selection board saw that as an asset or simply didn’t see it at all. The question sat in the same locked drawer, the endless cabinet, floating in that black hole of all the things I do not want in the light.

Still, he suspected the answer was a third option: they saw exactly what they needed to see, which was a photogenic bilingual astronaut who could appear on the cover of both Maclean’s and L’actualité without either readership writing letters.

His French was the polished kind: completely fluent, interview-grade, suitable for government press conferences and pre-launch Q&As with Radio-Canada.

They would hate the French he’d grown up with, the rink French, the version that lived underneath: mange d’la marde, va chier, fils de pute.

Gutter Quebecois picked up from eighteen-year-olds in the QMJHL dressing room who thought it was hilarious to teach the prodigy how to tell a ref to go fuck himself. Shane had been fluent in filth by sixteen and silent by seventeen, the year the CSA recruiter first showed up at one of his games and the language went into the same locked drawer as everything else that didn’t fit the youngest Commander in ISS history.

The droplet inside rotated in its vapor diffusion chamber, suspended and slow, and even before Shane angled the cartridge into the light he could see the problem. Fourteen days of controlled nucleation, and the lattice boundaries had gone soft where they should have been sharp, hexagonal faces blurring into each other, the clean geometry dissolving into something nebulous and formless.

He frowned, pulling a stylus off the heavy strip of Velcro sewn directly into the thigh of his standard-issue USOS tactical cargo pants, and reached for the laptop Velcroed to the Destiny rack beside him.

Sample 4, Day 14, opacity at crystal-solution interface, possible secondary nucleation.

He was mid-keystroke when the hatch behind him banged open.

“Hollander.” Rozanov’s head appeared through the opening upside-down, because Rozanov had never in seven months oriented himself to match the module’s labeled ceiling. His light brown hair drifted around his face in a messy, weightless halo of unwashed curls, the waves freed from gravity to stick out at every angle. “You are awake.”

It wasn’t a question. Shane didn’t dignify it with an answer.

“Good.” Rozanov pulled himself through the hatch and into the lab, rotating lazily until his feet pointed more or less the same direction as Shane’s. He entered a room like a rogue comet entered a solar system: off-axis, too fast, dragging heat and debris, bending everything nearby toward the inconvenience of his trajectory, and he was wearing a grey Roscosmos sleep shirt unzipped halfway down his chest and a pair of athletic shorts that looked worlds away from the stiff, meticulously patched collars of Shane and Hayden’s CSA gear. A stray bungee cord hooked haphazardly through a belt loop in stark contrast to Shane’s meticulously organized Velcro patches. The green tennis ball was already in his right hand, the felt worn pale on one side where his thumb had rubbed it bald over seven months of orbit. He gave it an idle squeeze, and the foam compressed and held its dent.

“Sveta says the water recycler in Zvezda is making noise again,” Rozanov said, gesturing aft toward the Russian segment.

Shane suppressed a sigh. If the primary life support in the Russian service module went down, the maintenance schedule for the entire station was going to bottleneck.

“So fix it.”

“I fixed it last time. And time before.” Rozanov bounced the ball off the rack beside Shane’s head. It ricocheted into the far wall and he caught it without looking. “Is American water recycler hardware. Your hardware, your noise.”

“I am Canadian. It’s in the Russian segment. Your segment, your noise.” Shane kept his eyes on the laptop. The routine with Rozanov was simple: don’t engage, don’t react, don’t give him the satisfaction of looking up from whatever you were doing, because looking up was losing, and everything between them—from crew assignments to who got the last pouch of acceptable coffee—had calcified into a competition neither of them would name out loud. “Log a maintenance request and I’ll schedule it.”

“Schedule,” Rozanov repeated, tasting the word. He bounced the ball again—thock—this time off the ceiling, and it caromed past Shane’s ear close enough that he felt the breeze. “You will schedule it. Like is dentist appointment.”

“Like it’s a maintenance task that gets prioritized alongside every other maintenance task,” Shane said. “We don’t just tear into life support systems without Houston reviewing the procedure.”

“Ah, yes. The procedure.”

Shane believed in systems the way Canadians believed in snowplows: if you maintained them properly, the world remained navigable.

Rozanov looked at systems the way Russians looked at winter roads: obstacles that existed to be driven through.

Rozanov floated closer. His knee bumped the rack Shane was braced against, and he didn’t correct for it—stayed there, a half-arm’s length away, the tennis ball resting in his upturned palm. His face, in the lab’s blue-tinted nightlight, was all angles—the sharp line of his nose, the dark slashes of his eyebrows, the stubble was smattering over his chin. Shane caught the faint smell of the Russian segment’s air scrubbers clinging to his shirt, a slightly different chemical signature than the American side, sharper, less filtered. “Fifty pages of diagnostics to tell you a pump is broken. A Russian pump. Houston will spend three days forming a committee, and I could fix it in ten minutes with a wrench and some tape. Water recycler keeps your crew alive. I would not schedule this.”

Your crew. Not our crew. Seven months, and Rozanov still drew that line.

“It’s on the list, Rozanov.”

“Your list.” He grinned—the lopsided one, slow and crooked, assembled like he had to remember where all the parts went. “Many things on your list. Maybe I make own list. Fix it myself, put on my report, send to Moscow.” He tossed the ball up and caught it. “They like when I am proactive.”

“You mean insubordinate.”

“Is matter of perspective, no?”

Shane closed the laptop hard and the Velcro complained, its ripping sound was louder than he’d intended, and Rozanov’s grin widened by a fraction, which meant he’d won this round, which meant Shane had reacted, which meant—

“Shh. Careful Mr. Rulebook,” Rozanov said mildly. “You will frighten the paperwork.”

Shane had lost, and he knew he’d lost, and the worst part was the heat in his face that confirmed it. “Schedule it or don’t, Rozanov. When it breaks, I’ll fix it myself, and I’ll cc Moscow on the repair log so they know who let it get there.”

“Hey.” Hayden’s voice drifted through the open hatch from the direction of Node 2, the station’s forward connecting hub, followed by Hayden himself, pulling his way along the ceiling handrails in a Canadian Space Agency t-shirt and sweatpants. His hair was flattened on one side from the sleep restraint. “Svetlana’s blending things again and I can’t—why are you two awake. Is this a party? Are we having a party at three in the morning?”

“Hayden.” Shane exhaled. “Go to sleep.”

“I was asleep. The blender happened, and then you happened.” He anchored himself to a foot loop and rubbed one eye with the heel of his hand. “I could hear you from Node 2, man. Both of you.”

“We are having professional discussion,” Rozanov said.

“You’re having a fight about plumbing.”

“Professional plumbing discussion.”

“Shane’s right about the rotation, for what it’s worth.”

Rozanov looked at Hayden the way one might look at a dog that had wandered into a conference room. “Pike. You fly the capsule. You do not know shit about anything else. Why are you here.”

“Yeah, yeah, fuck you too Rozanov.” Hayden rolled his eyes and looked at Shane with long-suffering patience earned from being Shane’s crew partner through three training cycles and two backup assignments and knew, with the certainty of long friendship, that Shane was two exchanges from losing his temper.

Shane shook his head—barely, the smallest motion—and Hayden’s mouth twitched.

“Right. Well. Svetlana says if anyone wants tea, she’s making tea. Why that needs a blender I am not sure, but, like, whatever.” He pushed off and floated toward the hatch, then paused, gripping the frame. “Also, Cliff says the port-side radiator panel is reading six degrees over nominal and he wants to talk about it at the morning briefing.”

“Noted,” Shane said.

“Cool. Great. Love being awake.” Hayden disappeared through the hatch. His voice carried back from the corridor: “Svetlana, tell them to stop fighting—”

A response in accented English, too faint to make out the words but carrying the unmistakable cadence of Svetlana’s dry amusement, drifted back through the ventilation system.

Rozanov was still floating beside Shane’s rack, the tennis ball resting on his fingertips. He raised an eyebrow.

“You should sleep, Commander. You look tired.” He kicked off the hatch frame backward, one hand trailing the grab rail, his body rotating to clear the corridor without looking—the push-off and the turn and the course correction all one unbroken motion, a man who’d logged enough hours in freefall that the station moved around him. His shirt rode up on the push-off—a two-inch stripe of skin above his waistband, the flat plane of his lower abdomen, the dark trail of hair disappearing downward—

—and Shane’s eyes went there and came back in the same half-second, a reflex so practiced it had its own muscle memory: look, look away, swallow. The way an event horizon swallowed light. The way a telescope swallows starlight and converts it to data and files the data and never once asks whether the star wanted to be seen. Seven months of accretion, collecting what he refused to observe, and the archive was bloated, and the archive had teeth.

The ball left Rozanov’s hand—thock—caught it—thock—bounced it off the hatch frame on his way through. “I will fix water recycler myself. Don’t worry. Won’t put on your list.”

He was gone before Shane could answer. The green tennis ball’s distant percussion faded down the corridor toward the Russian segment, each impact a little softer, a little further away, until the ECLSS hum swallowed it.

Shane reopened the laptop. His fingers hovered over the keys.

Your crew.

He pulled the crystallization cartridge back under the gooseneck lamp and studied the clouded growth plate, which was an acceptable thing to study, unlike the afterimage still burning behind his eyes of Rozanov’s forearm braced in the hatch frame, the tendons flexing as he’d swung through, the careless strength of a man who didn’t know what his own body did to a room when he moved through it.

Or knew exactly, and didn’t care.

Or knew exactly, and cared very much, and aimed it like a weapon specifically at Shane.

Gritting his teeth, he glanced back at the growth plate. The lattice. He made himself look at the lattice.

The droplet rotated in its chamber. The lattice was still wrong. He logged the temperature, checked the thermal cycling sequence against Rose’s protocol notes, and was reaching for the pressure calibration log when—

From somewhere in Node 2, the sound of Hayden laughing at whatever Svetlana had said in the galley. And further away, from the direction of the Russian segment, another muffled thock.

Shane typed. The station hummed around him: fans, scrubbers, the tick of the crystallization unit, six people breathing the same recycled air in a tin can hurtling through the dark at seventeen thousand miles per hour. A normal night. The kind of night where the most pressing problem was a clouded growth plate and a Russian flight engineer who didn’t know how to stay in his own module.

Then the alarm hit.

Not the carbon dioxide alarm, which was two short bursts and a pause. Not the fire alarm either, which Shane could have identified in a dead sleep. This was the SPE klaxon: a shrill, continuous tone that drilled through the module and rattled inside his skull. Solar particle event. The dosimetry boards along the lab wall flipped from green to amber in sequence, left to right, and the numbers beside them were already climbing. Shane’s personal dosimeter on his waistband vibrated once, then again.

Forty milligrays per hour. Sixty. Then more.

ISS Expedition 78 | Emergency Log | UTC 03:18 | MET +00.02 Dosimetry: 84 mGy/hr (rising)

Crew on station: 6

The particles were here, each one carrying enough energy to shatter molecules, to strike and split and strike again in a chain reaction inside living tissue; invisible bullets passing through the station’s hull and through Shane’s body, and every second between now and the inside of a shielded spacecraft was a second that could not be taken back.

Shane pushed off the rack and was through the hatch into Harmony before his hands had finished sealing the cartridge. Muscle memory. Thousands of hours in simulators and hundreds more up here had written the choreography into his tendons: grab, twist, push, orient, grab again. He pulled himself hand-over-hand through Node 2, past the darkened Columbus module, and reached the comms station in twelve seconds.

The main panel was a mess. Half the status lights were cycling amber. The walls here weren’t solid; they were a grid of modular racks, every square inch covered in laptops, strapped-down cables, and soft-sided storage bags. It was a high-tech hallway where ‘up’ and ‘down’ were only defined by the orientation of the labels on the lockers, and the S-band link was dropping packets—Houston’s transmission came through in broken fragments, every third word swallowed by static.

“—Station, Houston, we are tracking a Class—” Dead air. “—proton flux already exceeding—current dose rate—second event behind, coronal mass ejection, CME arrival—” More static. “—significantly above forecast—full evac—repeat, recommend full immediate—”

Even through the static one thing had been clear: A coronal mass ejection. A wall of magnetized plasma thrown off the sun hard enough to flood near-Earth orbit with high-energy particles.

Shane pressed the talk button. “Houston, Expedition 78, Commander Hollander. You’re breaking up. Say again on the evac recommendation.”

Static. Then, faintly: “—Aurora storm shelter gives you substantially better shielding than Node 2—CME arrival imminent—repeat, take the Aurora—”

Full evac. Everyone off. Shane’s hand was already moving toward the all-call before the S-band dissolved into a noise floor. The TDRSS Ku-band relayed a wall of white noise, and the internal networks failed to handshake with any ground station through the interference. Houston vanished.

Ground control to Major Tom.

Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong.

In a song, it was fun. The difference was that Bowie’s Major Tom had drifted away from Earth on purpose, serene in his tin can, content to float. Shane was in a tin can too, but the tin can was taking a dose, and he was not serene, and he was not floating away—he was the one left holding the comm switch while the static ate the signal.

Major Tom’s circuit went dead and he didn’t seem to mind. Shane’s circuit went dead and four hundred kilometers of vacuum had never felt thinner.

He keyed the channel. “All crew, Commander Hollander. SPE in progress,” Shane’s voice was the one the CSA had spent two years polishing: level in any situation, bilingual, and scrubbed of any tremor. It was the voice of a man who followed the telemetry, and he already had the active emergency checklist pulled up on a tablet. “We are taking a dose now. Dosimetry amber and climbing… fast. Houston is calling full evacuation over standard shelter-in-place protocol for it and the following CME. The Aurora’s hull provides dedicated storm-shelter shielding our modules lack, and the vehicle remains in rapid-depart configuration from yesterday’s cargo transfer. All six crew on Aurora, forward port. Suit up, strap in. We are leaving. You have eight minutes.”

ISS Expedition 78 | Emergency Log | UTC 03:22 | MET +00.04 Dosimetry: 90 mGy/hr (rising)

Crew on station: 6

Hayden’s confirmation came first and immediately: Copy, Commander. Moving to Aurora. Get your ass moving Shane. Then Cliff, with a quick Aye, don’t need to tell me twice, already in motion by the sound of his breathing. Rose, clipped and professional: Copy. Lab secured, on my way. Svetlana, in the background of Rose’s transmission, a rapid affirmative in accented English.

Four voices. Shane waited for the fifth.

The S-band crackled. The ventilation fans hummed their indifferent hum. No fifth voice came.

Of course.

Shane checked the telemetry on the wall-mounted tablet, searching for his missing, silent, fifth.

The fifth crewmember, Flight Engineer Rozanov, wasn’t moving toward the lifeboat. The beacon in Zvezda was stationary, a stubborn gold dot on the station map—and Shane knew exactly what he was doing, because it was what Shane would have done. Rozanov would be at the manual valves already, triaging the cooling loops, running the same damage-loss calculus Shane was running but from the Russian side and probably faster, because Rozanov had been born with his hands inside a machine and had never needed a checklist to tell him what was broken. It was the correct call. It was the Commander’s call, and Rozanov had made it without consulting the Commander, because Rozanov had never fully accepted that the Commander was Shane.

Regardless, the crew snapped to action, and the station was alive with hatches squealing open, the whir of a ventilation fan kicking to high, the distant clang of someone grabbing a rail too hard. Shane pushed off the comms panel toward the forward port. The Aurora capsule—Canada’s first domestically built crew vehicle, six seats and a heat shield thick enough to matter—was docked fifteen meters from where he floated. Eight minutes. He could be suited and strapped in four.

He was passing through the Node 2 junction when the lights flickered.

The overheads cut to black. Shane’s hands found the grab rail before his vision adjusted—muscle memory again, his body running procedures his brain hadn’t authorized—and then the emergency strips kicked in along the floor, amber and low. From deep in the Russian segment, a sound he had not heard in any sim: a structural groan, metal flexing under a high-frequency vibration. A Single Event Upset must have tripped the ventilation controller in Zvezda; he could hear the fans screaming at an overspeed they weren’t rated for, hitting a resonant frequency that rattled the module’s very bones. Then, a bang that punched through fifty meters of aluminum hull and registered in Shane’s molars before his ears processed it. Not a hatch. Not equipment cycling. The mounting bolts on a secondary rack, likely already fatigued by years of vibration, had finally sheared.

It sounded like a rifle shot translated through fifty meters of aluminum pressure hull. Shane’s inner ear registered the vibration before his brain categorized it: something in the Russian segment had broken loose.

Three seconds later, the caution and warning panel lit up with a new alert. Hatch closure: automatic. Zvezda-Zarya inter-module hatch. The station’s safety protocols had registered an anomaly in the Russian segment and sealed the passage to isolate it.

Rozanov was in Zvezda.

On the wrong side of that hatch.

Because of course he was. Of the five people Shane could have lost behind a sealed bulkhead during a radiation emergency, the universe had selected the one who treated station protocols like a buffet—take what you like, ignore the rest. Shane had watched Rozanov bypass two separate maintenance checklists in the last week alone, and now here he was, stuck in an isolated module, and it was going to be Shane’s problem to solve.

Everything about Rozanov eventually became Shane’s problem.

Shane grabbed the Node 1 intercom panel—the hardline, wired directly through the hull, independent of the S-band. “Rozanov, Commander Hollander. Report.”

His own formality, stating his own rank, sounded absurd—Rozanov would never call him “Commander” back. Rozanov, who had finished second in the Commander selection eighteen months ago—second by a margin so narrow that three of the five board members had needed a second ballot—would hear the title and parse it the way he always did: not as rank but as a scoreline.

Shane 1, Rozanov 0.

Every time Shane gave an order, the number refreshed.

Two seconds. Three. Shane’s fingers pressed the panel hard enough that his knuckles ached. He kept his breathing even through his nose, the way he’d trained for vacuum-Loss of Pressure drills—slow inhale, slower exhale—while his heart hammered so hard he could feel the thudding beat in his wrists and behind his eyes. Rozanov was behind a sealed hatch in an isolated segment during a radiation event and Shane was standing on the wrong side of it holding a talk button.

Calm down. First problem. What’s the first problem?

His training had a procedure for this. His training had a procedure for everything.

Shane pressed the button again. In seven months, Rozanov had not once responded to an all-call within the expected window. Shane had started building a three-second Rozanov delay into his mental timelines the way you’d build in lag for a satellite relay. The man was not late. He was on Rozanov Standard Time, which observed no UTC and answered to no governing body.

“Rozanov, goddamn. Report.”

“I am here.” Rozanov’s voice came through tinny and compressed by the hardline speaker. “A rack mount sheared off the starboard wall—the secondary equipment bay, the big one. Is blocking the corridor. I am fine, I am not hurt, but the rack is wedged between the hull and the opposing mount and I cannot get past it. Also your station has closed the hatch on me, which is rude.”

Shane’s mind was running two tracks simultaneously. Track one: Rozanov was alive, not injured, sealed in Zvezda behind an auto-locked hatch with a dislodged equipment rack blocking the passage on his side. Track two: the clock. Six minutes and change until Hayden needed to begin startup sequencing. The Zvezda-Zarya hatch could be manually overridden from the Zarya side, but Shane would have to get there, access the override panel, cycle the hatch, and then help Rozanov clear the jammed rack and—

—and Rozanov still had to traverse the full length of the station to reach the Aurora.

That would take more than the minutes they had.

The dosimetry was at ninety milligrays per hour and still rising—he’d read the panel in the corridor without breaking stride, the number branded into his short-term memory. At this rate, every ten minutes cost them another measurable fraction of their annual limit. The four crew on the Aurora would be behind centimeters of PICA-X heat shield and Nomex insulation within minutes of hatch close. Shane and Rozanov would be behind aluminum hull paneling designed to stop micrometeorites, not solar protons. And the second event—whatever Houston had been trying to tell them about the CME—hadn’t arrived yet.

“Can you move the rack?” Shane asked.

“Is wedged. I am trying. The bolts sheared and the housing is jammed against the—” A grunt. The sound of metal scraping metal. “No. Not fast. Not alone. I need leverage, and there is not a good angle.”

Shane looked at the forward port. Twelve meters away. Four of his crew were already moving toward it; he could hear Rose and Cliff in the vestibule. Hayden would be at the controls. Svetlana was close. In five minutes, the Aurora could be sealed and separating.

He looked toward Zarya. Toward the sealed hatch, and Zvezda beyond it, and… Rozanov.

“Hollander.” Rozanov’s voice came through the hardline again, and the teasing had dropped out of it. “Go. Get on the Aurora. I will get the rack clear and take the Soyuz if I have to.”

“The Soyuz hasn’t been prepped for emergency departure and you know it.”

“So I prep it.”

“In how long? You’ve got a jammed rack and a sealed hatch between you and the docking module. That’s two hours minimum, and we’re at ninety milligrays per hour right now—before the main event hits. Houston said there’s a CME behind this. If that arrives while you’re still wrestling with the Soyuz umbilicals, you’re looking at acute exposure with no shielding and no medical officer, because Svetlana will be on the Aurora where I sent her.”

“Then is two hours at ninety milligrays. I took more than that during the Mir-tribute EVA last year when we clipped the edge of the South Atlantic Anomaly. I have had worse.”

“I don’t care what you’ve had worse before, it stacks.”

“Hollander, go.”

Shane was gripping the intercom panel with both hands. His feet had drifted free of the floor rail and he was floating at an angle, tethered to the wall by nothing but his own hands. Through the Node, he could see the vestibule lights: green, ready, the Aurora waiting.

Hayden’s voice cut through from the forward port. “Shane! I’ve got Cliff, Rose, and Svetlana—where’s Rozanov? I need you both in here. Two minutes to hatch close.”

“The Zvezda-Zarya hatch auto-locked and there’s a dislodged rack on Rozanov’s side. He’s stuck.”

“Fuck. Shit.”

Shane looked at the vestibule.

He looked at the Zarya hatch.

Four crew on Aurora. Two minutes to hatch close. Three milligrays of additional exposure for them, trivial, a rounding error on a medical chart nobody would ever flag.

Or: override the Zarya hatch, clear the rack, transit Rozanov back through four modules to the forward port. Fifteen minutes minimum. More likely twenty. Twenty minutes at ninety-plus milligrays per hour—call it thirty milligrays—for four people who didn’t need to absorb a single one, because their Commander was staring at a hatch instead of giving the order.

He could save four people right now, for certain. Or he could gamble all six on a rack that might not move and a clock he couldn’t see.

The math said go. The math had always been the loudest signal in him, louder than want, louder than the unnamed thing that had kept him awake in his sleep station staring at the ceiling while Rozanov’s breathing traveled through the thin wall between them.

The math was clear and the math was right. Numbers didn’t care who lived with the answer afterward. They simply described the universe as it was.

… And Shane had followed the math his entire life, had built a career and a closet and a continental reputation on the math, and the math said: save the four you can save and let the fifth take his chances.

Shane had never been a gambler.

But he had never been the kind of person to give up or leave someone behind, either, and one of those records was going to break in the next ten seconds.

ISS Expedition 78 | Emergency Log | UTC 03:26 | MET +00.08 Dosimetry: 99 mGy/hr (rising)

Crew on station: 6

He keyed the all-call. “Pike, you have command of the Aurora. Full evac minus two. Hollander and Rozanov are not boarding. Execute departure on my mark.”

Orders like that were why commanders existed. Not to be brave. To decide who left and who didn’t.

For half a second, the channel held. Then it broke open.

Hayden first: “Shane, what the fuck—”

And Rozanov, from Zvezda, his voice ripping through the all-call with a fury that made the speaker distort: “Nyet! Hollander, no. Get on the Aurora. Do not be stupid.”

Svetlana over both of them, already in Russian: “Ilya—Ilyusha, ty menya slyshish’? Pozhaluysta—”

Do you hear me? Shane caught fragments; pozhaluysta spelled out in his head as ‘пожалуйста’, and he thought it meant ‘please’, and Rozanov’s name, his first name, again and again, a hook she kept throwing into the static hoping it would catch.

“Sveta.” Rozanov’s voice changed on her name. The anger dropped out of it for exactly one second, replaced by the way he sounded when he thought no one important was listening. “Ya v poryadke. Uspokoysya.”

“Ty ne v poryadke!” She was shouting now. “Shane, I’m coming back out, I can help him with the rack, I am the smallest, I can fit—”

“Svetlana, no. Get on the Aurora.”

“Hollander.” Rozanov again, and the softness he’d given Svetlana was gone, stripped back to bare fury. “You have time. You have two minutes. Use them. Get on the fucking spacecraft.”

Cliff’s voice, underneath: “Holy fucking shit—” and Rose, cutting across him: “Shane, let me come back and help, we can get the rack clear if—”

“Everybody stop.” Shane’s hand was shaking on the comms panel. He could hear all of them at once—Svetlana’s Russian fragmenting into sobs she was swallowing, Hayden’s breathing gone fast and shallow, Rose mid-sentence, Cliff swearing, and underneath all of it, Rozanov, who had gone quiet and that was worse than shouting.

“I’m… staying. Just me. I’m going to get Rozanov out, and we’ll shelter until the storm passes. That is not a discussion. You need to go and do your job, Pike. Launch.”

“Then let me do my job and pilot all of us out of here. I’m not leaving you, man. Give me ten minutes, we get Rozanov out together, and all six of us leave.”

“You hold the hatch and that’s ten more minutes of radiation the crew—my crew—doesn’t need to take. And if the rack doesn’t move, you’ve burned your launch window for nothing. If there’s equipment failure you are all stuck. You’re flying four people to safety. That’s your job right now. Do your job, Hayden.”

“Hollander.” Rozanov again. “I don’t want you here. Do you understand? I do not want this.”

“You—Shane—son of a bitch,” Hayden cursed, and Shane could hear the Aurora’s startup sequence running: the fuel cell priming, the guidance alignment tone. His hands already doing what his mouth was protesting.“You get him out, you hear me? You get him out and you both shelter and I swear to God, Shane, Jackie and I are going to murder you.”

That was Hayden: loyal to the bone and smart enough to know when loyalty meant following an order he hated.

Also… strong. Hayden was strong. When they got home—if they got home—Hayden was going to hit him. Shane had seen Hayden hit a vending machine once at Johnson for eating his dollar, and the vending machine had surrendered.

Shane was going to get worse than the vending machine.

Four kids. Hayden had four kids and Shane was godfather to each one; the oldest was seven, and the youngest had been born three weeks before launch, and Shane had held her in the hospital and she’d wrapped her fist around his index finger with a grip that shocked him for its strength. Hayden had cried, which Hayden always did, loudly and without embarrassment, the way Shane had never learned to. Jackie had been laughing at both of them from the bed, and Shane had stood there with this brand-new person holding his finger and thought: I want this. I want this exact thing, except the version of it I want doesn’t exist I don’t think? I don’t know how?

The vestibule lights shifted from green to amber. Hatch closing.

But Hayden did know how, and he had it, and Shane loved him and them and all of it more than he could bear and Hayden had to go.

If he died here, Hayden would tell Jackie, and Jackie would tell the kids when they were old enough, and the story they’d tell would be about Commander Hollander staying behind for his crew. A hero. Clean and simple. Nobody would tell the part where Shane had stood in Node 2 and thought about a baby’s grip and a life he’d never let himself have and had almost—almost—climbed onto that capsule and saved himself.

Shane pushed off from the intercom panel and floated to the small, thick-paned porthole of Node 2. Most of the station’s walls were opaque, but here the blackness of the vacuum pressed right against the glass. He could see the long, metallic spine of the station—the truss—stretching out into the dark, capped by the massive, gold-foil wings of the solar arrays. Through the small round window, he watched the docking clamps release—four heavy bolts retracting in sequence—and then a push from the springs as the Aurora separated from Harmony’s forward port. The capsule drifted backward, white and blunt-nosed against the black. A small maple leaf decal near the docking ring was visible for a second before it rolled out of view, and then its thrusters fired in a brief flare of orange and it angled away, dropping below the station’s orbital plane.

ISS Expedition 78 | Emergency Log | UTC 03:34 | MET +00.16 Dosimetry: 105 mGy/hr (rising)

Crew on station: 2

Shane’s hand was still on the glass. The cold traveled through his palm and into the bones of his wrist and nested there, a small winter he would carry in that hand for hours. The capsule shrank to a point of light against the dark—indistinguishable, at this distance, from any star—and Shane watched it redshift into nothing, his crew becoming a constellation of one, then less than that, then a memory dressed as math, a trajectory he could plot but not follow.

Gone.

Then his mind reassembled itself. Be calm. Focus. What’s the first problem?

Radiation, obviously. The dosimetry was still climbing. The main event—the CME, whatever Houston had been trying to describe before the S-band died—was still incoming, arrival time unknown. What they were in now was the overture.

When it hit, if it hit, the numbers on those panels would make the current readings look like background.

He and Rozanov needed to identify the best-shielded location on the station. They needed to calculate the cumulative dose against time. They needed to inventory food, water, and medical supplies for a stay that could stretch as long as the storm wanted. They needed to establish whether the hardline comms could reach Houston through the interference, or whether they were truly cut off until the particle flux dropped.

Shane pulled his hand from the glass and pushed off toward Zarya.

Immediately, the station was different with four people missing. Shane’s skin registered it before his brain did—the hairs on his forearms lifting, his ears straining for sounds that had vanished. The fans and pumps that maintained atmosphere and temperature were constant, the same steady mechanical breath they’d always been. But the human layer underneath—laptop keys, a cough from the Japanese Kibo lab, Hayden’s podcast leaking through his headphones two modules away, the soft thump of someone pushing off a wall—that was gone. What remained was the station talking to itself: the CO₂ scrubbers already adjusting to four fewer pairs of lungs, the thermal regulators compensating for four fewer bodies’ worth of heat. Shane pulled himself through it hand over hand, and the air tasted thinner in his throat.

The Zarya module was dim, lit only by the emergency strips and the green and amber pinpoints of status LEDs on the equipment racks. Shane pulled himself to the Zvezda-side hatch and found the manual override panel. The hatch status indicator was red, Loss of Signal from the sensors on the Zvezda side, which had triggered the automatic isolation protocol. Not a pressure breach. The station’s software couldn’t read the sensor data through the SPE interference and had defaulted to caution.

He keyed the override sequence. The panel beeped twice, rejecting it with a flashing INHIBIT on the display.

He tried again. Same result. The system wanted confirmation from the Zvezda-side sensors before it would release the hatch, and the sensors weren’t talking.

“Rozanov.”

“Hollander, you are insane.” Rozanov’s voice on the hardline was slightly out of breath. He’d been working on the rack.

“The hatch override isn’t accepting my sequence. I need you to hard-reset the sensor relay on your side—panel ZV-4, behind the port-side equipment bay. That should clear the fault and let me cycle the hatch.”

“Hollander.” The accent thickened around the ‘r’, rumbling. “You stayed.”

“Panel ZV-4, Rozanov.”

“You stupid fuck. You could have gotten on the Aurora. You had time.”

The accusation in it was double-edged. Shane heard both blades: you’re an idiot for staying, and you made that decision without me. Rozanov had told him to go. Shane had overridden him. In any other context, that was chain of command functioning as designed—the Commander outranking the Flight Engineer, full stop. But Rozanov had never treated the chain of command as settled law. He treated it as an ongoing appeal, and Shane had just handed him new evidence for the brief.

“I did not have time.”

“You had time and you stayed because I am stuck, and now you are stuck also, and—”

“Panel ZV-4. Can you reach it?”

Another pause. The sound of movement—fabric against metal, a grunt, Rozanov’s breathing shifting as he contorted around whatever the dislodged rack was doing to the corridor.

“Da. Yes. I can reach it. Give me a moment. Blyat.”

The speed of it needled him. Shane had been reaching for the override manual in his memory—panel designation, relay reset sequence, steps one through six—and Rozanov had already been moving, navigating by touch in a blacked-out module, fingers finding the right panel behind a jammed equipment rack like the station’s layouts and schematics were written into his hands. Shane could run command. He could coordinate six crew across two segments, manage a mission timeline, interface with three space agencies in two languages. Rozanov could find a relay panel by feel in a module he hadn’t seen in hours, in the dark, with a dislocated rack pinning him to the wall—and he’d done it in the time it took Shane to remember step three.

In moments like this the gap between commanding a station and understanding one yawned wide enough for Shane to feel the draft.

Shane floated in front of the sealed hatch in the dim amber light of Zarya, listening to Rozanov work through six inches of aluminum. The station’s mechanical systems hummed around him. Through the small porthole in the hatch, he could see nothing; Zvezda’s lights were off on the other side.

A click. A buzz. The hatch status indicator flickered from red to amber to green.

Shane entered the override sequence a third time. The panel accepted it. The hatch locks disengaged with a heavy thunk that he felt through the grab rail in his hand, and he pulled the hatch open.

Zvezda’s emergency lighting was a deep amber-red, dimmer than Zarya’s, and it took Shane’s eyes a second to adjust. Unlike the sterile, white-plastic aesthetic of the US segment, the Russian modules felt utilitarian and cramped, the walls lined with olive-drab padding and exposed pipes, and smelled like a machine shop.

Shane hated coming over here. It always felt like stepping off a spotless laboratory floor directly into the belly of a diesel engine, like descending into a rugged, vintage submarine and the corridor ahead of him was half-blocked by the dislodged equipment rack—a big one, a secondary power distribution unit that had torn free from its starboard mounting bolts. It had drifted across the module’s narrow interior and jammed itself diagonally between the port-side hull and the opposing rack, creating a barrier of sheet metal and exposed cabling that filled most of the passable space.

On the other side of it, wedged between the jammed rack and the aft wall, Rozanov was braced with one foot against the hull and both hands on the edge of the displaced housing. His hair had gone feral; the messy waves that normally sat in some state of artful disorder were plastered dark with sweat to his temples and sticking up at the crown, and the grease streak on his forearm had been joined by a second one across his left cheekbone, following the line of the bone like war paint. The gold cross had drifted up on its chain and tangled in the collar of his T-shirt. His shoulder seam had torn, and through the gap Shane could see the curve of his deltoid, the skin flushed and damp from exertion.

Shane looked at the rack housing instead. Focused on the sheared bolt pattern along the mounting bracket. Structural failure, clean fracture, no thread deformation—good, that meant the housing could be repositioned without—

Rozanov’s head came up. His nostrils flared, his lips peeled back from those unnaturally white teeth, and his eyes—hazel, pale against the amber emergency lighting—locked onto Shane with a fury that would have been impressive if it weren’t so unearned.

“You are an idiot,” Rozanov said.

“Push on three.” Shane gripped the metal housing, his knuckles white against the grey paint. He didn’t have Rozanov’s instinctive grasp of the station’s guts, but he had the schedule, and he had the stripe on his flight suit. He was the one the world expected to bring everyone home, even the man who should have been in his chair.

“A complete idiot.”

“One.”

“The biggest—”

“Two.”

“—idiot I have ever—”

“Three.”

They shoved.

The rack groaned, caught again. Ilya wiped sweat from his forehead, leaving a streak of grease. “Do you know the joke about Soviet engineering, Hollander? What is as big as a house, burns twenty liters of fuel an hour, puts out a shitload of smoke, and cuts an apple into three pieces?” He kicked the base of the rack and it didn’t budge. “A Soviet machine made to cut apples into four pieces. And here we are, trapped by a rack that couldn’t even manage its one job of staying bolted to the fucking wall!”

“Save the jokes for later, I am begging you.”

Shane braced his feet against the hatch frame and pushed the rack from the Zarya side while Rozanov drove it from the Zvezda side. In gravity, the unit would have weighed close to two hundred kilograms. In microgravity, the mass was the same but the weight was nothing; the problem wasn’t heaviness but inertia and geometry. They had to break the housing free from where it had wedged itself and redirect its momentum without letting it jam somewhere else. Shane got his fingers under the edge of the mounting bracket and lifted while Rozanov kicked the base. The rack groaned, shifted six inches, caught again.

“Angle it,” Shane said. “Toward the floor—your floor.”

“There is no floor.”

“Toward Earth, then. Toward the ventilation grille.”

Rozanov repositioned, got his shoulder behind the housing, and heaved. The rack broke free with a shriek of metal on metal and drifted aft, rotating lazily in the red-amber light. Rozanov grabbed it before it could hit anything else and guided it against the aft wall, where he braced it with his body while Shane found a cargo strap to lash it down.

They were both breathing hard when it was done. Shane’s palms were scraped from the mounting bracket’s raw edge, and Rozanov’s T-shirt had ripped further at the shoulder seam. They floated two feet apart in Zvezda’s dim corridor, the lashed-down rack behind Rozanov, the open hatch behind Shane.

Rozanov’s hand went to the cross at his collar. Pressed it flat against his sternum and held it there, thumb white on the gold, and his eyes tracked over Shane’s face the way they tracked over a systems panel when a readout didn’t match his expectations—moving between data points, rechecking. His lips parted around the start of a word that didn’t come. Then his thumb dragged once across the cross and he let it drop.

“So, Commander.” Rozanov drew the rank out long, let it sag in the middle, and dropped it like a piece of equipment he’d been asked to carry but hadn’t agreed to. The grin arrived a beat after the words did—assembling itself mouth-first, the muscles around his eyes pulling in a different direction, the whole configuration seated slightly off-center. “Is just us.”

Shane wiped his palms on his shorts. His hands were shaking too—adrenaline and exertion—and he hated that Rozanov could probably see it.

“We need to get behind the WRS racks in Node 3.” Shane shoved the irritation down where it belonged—below the dosimetry numbers, below the missing crew, below the clock he couldn’t see, and into the next instruction. “Highest mass density on the station. Grab water, grab food—whatever you can carry in one pass. We’re not coming back out here until the flux drops.”

“Mm,” Rozanov said, which was particularly inelegant for someone that always knew the worst thing to say at the worst time. His hand dropped to his thigh and found the tennis ball—neon green, perpetually Velcroed there like some kind of cosmonaut security blanket—and closed on the fabric of his shorts an inch below it. He corrected, peeled it free, squeezed it hard enough that his knuckles blanched and the foam compressed into an oblong that held its dent for a full second after he loosened his grip. He didn’t look at Shane.

Shane had never seen Rozanov not have a retort. It was unsettling in a way the radiation alarm hadn’t been.

The ball. The goddamn ball. Every crew member got one personal item—one—and Shane had brought a framed photo of his parents’ lake at sunset because he was a normal human being, and Rozanov had brought a tennis ball that he bounced off walls, off equipment racks, off the back of Shane’s headrest during film night while Shane’s entire body vibrated with the effort of not turning around and shoving it down his throat. Seven months. Seven months of thock, thock, thock echoing through the modules at unpredictable intervals, and Rozanov’s lazy grin whenever Shane’s shoulders climbed toward his ears.

He wanted to shove it through the nearest waste port and never see it again.

Rozanov squeezed the ball again, turning it over in his fingers, not quite looking at Shane. “Hollander, you stayed.”

“We’ve established that.” Shane was already pulling himself back through the hatch toward Zarya. What Rozanov meant, and what Shane heard underneath every repetition, was: you chose wrong. A Commander’s first obligation was to the crew, and Shane had fulfilled that—four people on the Aurora, safe, Hayden at the controls. But a Commander’s second obligation was to the mission, and the mission did not benefit from two senior crew members trapped behind a water tank absorbing chromosomal damage. Rozanov would have sent Shane to the Aurora, taken the Soyuz, and handled the rest alone, because Rozanov had always believed he could handle anything alone, and the infuriating thing—the thing Shane’s pride snagged on like a hangnail—was that Rozanov might have been right.

“Move, Rozanov.”

“Could be on Aurora right now. Halfway home.” Rozanov pushed off the aft wall and followed him through, catching the hatch frame one-handed and swinging his legs through the opening. His shoulder brushed Shane’s in the narrow passage between modules. “Hollander why the fuck are you here?”

“I wasn’t going to leave anyone trapped in an isolated segment during a radiation event. Move.”

“My hero.”

They were in Zarya now, pulling themselves hand-over-hand toward Node 1. Shane grabbed two emergency water rations from the supply locker without slowing. Rozanov snagged a medical kit and tucked it under his arm. They moved through the station in tandem, module by module, the hum of the empty station filling every gap between words, and Rozanov was laughing, muttering something in Russian, and Shane could hear the grin without turning around.

This was the problem with Rozanov. Not the tennis ball, not the accent, not the way he left crumbs floating in the galley for Shane to clean up like some kind of zero-g janitor. It was this—the inability to register a situation at appropriate emotional volume. The station was irradiated, they were cut off from ground control, four of their crew were gone, and Rozanov was amused. Shane wanted to grab him by the front of his shirt and shake him until the grin fell off. He wanted to demand to know what the hell was wrong with him, how he could face mortal danger with the emotional register as if this was only an inconvenience like a cancelled flight.

He wanted, badly and against his will, to know what it felt like to be that free.

“Stupidest man alive, Hollander. My hero, the fool. Captain Canada, thick of ass and thin of brain.”

Heat crawled up the back of Shane’s neck. “Shut up. Can’t you take anything seriously? You would’ve done the same.”

“No. I would not have done same. I would not kill two men when only one needs to die. You are so bad at math, Hollander.”

Shane pulled himself through the Node 1 junction and banked left toward Node 3. The dosimetry panel he passed read one hundred and eighteen. Higher than Zvezda. The station’s shielding wasn’t uniform—some modules were better than others, and the ones they were passing through were among the worst.

“Faster,” Shane said.

Rozanov caught up to him in the connecting tunnel, close enough that Shane could hear his breathing

“Storm peaks in about six hours,” Rozanov said, “Maybe nine or ten based on the flux curve on the Zvezda dosimetry panel. I had time to read it while you were taking forever with my hatch.” He caught a grab rail and adjusted his drift. “Then we wait for it to pass, then we wait for your friends at NASA to pick up their phone.” A pause. “Try to be fun.”

“Please try to shut up.”

They hit the Node 3 junction at the same time.

Shane came through the hatch low, angling left toward the Water Recovery System racks. Rozanov came through high, pushing off the ceiling frame with both hands, and their trajectories intersected with the inevitability of bad orbital mechanics. Rozanov’s shoulder caught Shane across the chest and they spun—a slow, stupid rotation that sent the water rations drifting off Shane’s hip clip and the medical kit tumbling from under Rozanov’s arm.

Shane grabbed the front of Rozanov’s shirt with both fists and hauled them to a stop against the rack housing. The fabric bunched in his hands. Rozanov’s face was six inches from his—the grease streak on his cheekbone, the hazel eyes wide with adrenaline and locked on Shane’s.

“Blyat,” Rozanov said.

“Behind the WRS,” Shane said. “Now.”

“Bossy.”

He let go of the shirt. Rozanov caught the drifting medical kit out of the air without looking and kicked off the rack toward the gap behind the water recovery system.

ISS Expedition 78 | Emergency Log | UTC 03:40 | MET +00.22 Dosimetry: 118 mGy/hr (rising)

Crew on station: 2

The gap behind the WRS racks was not a shelter. It was a mistake in the station’s structure—a pocket of dead space between water storage and hull with a chaotic nest of power ribbons—and it had been designed to accommodate plumbing, not two men who between them represented a combined thirteen feet of limb and torso. Rozanov had wedged himself in first—back against the curved hull, knees drawn up, his longer frame filling the depth of the space—and what remained was a narrow channel between Rozanov’s thighs and the rack housing that Shane was supposed to fit into as if they were components designed for the same assembly.

“Come on, Hollander. Is not going to get bigger.”

Shane turned around, set his back against Rozanov’s chest, and lowered himself into the gap.

The aluminum hull of the station was useless against high-energy protons; they’d pass through the metal and secondary-scatter like buckshot. But the hydrogen-rich water in the WRS tanks would soak them up. It was the only wall on the station that actually meant anything right now, and the fit was immediate and total. Shane’s shoulder blades hit Rozanov’s sternum. His hips settled between Rozanov’s thighs. Rozanov’s knees came up on either side of Shane’s ribs—bracketing him, penning him in—and when Shane tried to extend his own legs, they hit the rack housing after eighteen inches, which meant his knees were up too, his feet braced against the back panel of the WRS, and every part of him that wasn’t touching metal was touching Rozanov.

The aluminum hull behind Rozanov’s back was useless—high-energy protons passed through it like light through a window and scattered off the heavier nuclei inside, producing secondary radiation that was almost worse than the primary. But hydrogen stopped them. Hydrogen had the highest stopping power per unit mass of any element—one proton per nucleus, maximum energy transfer per collision. Water was eleven percent hydrogen by mass. The WRS tanks held roughly four hundred liters. At the current geometry, that gave them maybe twenty centimeters of water-equivalent shielding on the sun-facing vector—enough to attenuate sixty percent of the primary proton flux at the energies they’d been seeing.

Sixty percent. It was the difference between a bad day and a career-ending one. It was not the difference between living and dying. Not if the CME was as bad as Houston’s fragmented warning had suggested.

But it was what they had.

“Blyat,” Rozanov said, behind his ear.

“For once I agree with you.”

The back of his head was against Rozanov’s collarbone. He could feel the ridge of it through his hair—hard, anatomical—and below that, the broad slab of Rozanov’s chest expanding against his shoulder blades on every inhale. Shane’s lungs kept trying to sync with the rhythm. He had to deliberately offset his breathing by a half-cycle just to maintain the fiction that his body was still his own.

Shane trained for cameras, for press conferences, for the CSA promotional footage where he floated through the cupola with his perfectly tucked polo, his forced rigid posture fighting the natural zero-g hunch, and Earth behind him, looking like the future of Canadian spaceflight.

His body cooperated with that project—photogenic, proportional, built along lines that photographed well in a flight suit and reproduced cleanly on magazine covers. Rozanov’s body had been built for a different kind of work. The chest behind Shane’s spine was thick through the sternum, deep through the ribcage—a mechanic’s chassis, broad where it needed to bear load and dense where it needed to absorb impact. His forearms were roped with tendon and vein in a way that Shane’s were not, built with the scaffolding of thousands of hours gripping wrenches and ratchets and the manual overrides of airlocks that hadn’t been redesigned since the Mir era.

Shane had hands that operated a robotic arm from a control panel.

Rozanov had hands that went inside the machine.

The dosimeter read one hundred and thirty-two milligrays per hour.

Hydrogen-rich water in the tanks reduced the incoming dose rate, absorbing the scattering protons, but the raw exposure already in Shane’s tissues manifested physically. Fatigue settled heavy into his marrow. The distinct taste of metal coated the back of his tongue, chased by a creeping wave of nausea. Rozanov’s knee dug into Shane’s floating rib. Shane shifted left to escape it and his elbow caught the rack housing with a dull clang that rang through the gap.

“Stop moving,” Rozanov said.

“Your knee is in my kidney.”

“Fuck your fucking kidney, you have two.”

Shane tried to wedge himself further into the gap and succeeded only in grinding his shoulder blade into the hard ridge of Rozanov’s sternum. Rozanov grunted—a sharp, irritated exhale through his nose—and his hand came up and shoved Shane’s shoulder forward without ceremony.

“You are—blyat—you are like a bag of elbows. How are you this shape? You are an astronaut, not a—a folding chair. Sit still.”

“Oh shut the fuck up,” Shane growled. He was perfectly normal and standard like most astronauts because they all had to use the same equipment, so his height, weight, visual acuity, and pointy elbows were all perfectly normal, it wasn’t his fault that no one had thought about compatible spooning geometry with hostile Russian cosmonaut, which in retrospect was an oversight. “I’m trying—”

“Try with less of your skeleton.”

Shane’s lower back was cramping where it pressed against Rozanov’s hip bone. He tried to arch away from it and his skull knocked Rozanov’s chin. The impact clicked Rozanov’s teeth together—Shane heard it, felt the flinch ripple through the chest behind him—and then Rozanov swore in a long, colorful streak of Russian that needed no translation and both hands closed around Shane’s upper arms and yanked him backward, rearranging him like cargo that had shifted during launch.

“Ow—”

“Be still or I will make you still, Hollander.”

“Believe it or not, I hate this as much as you do.”

“No. No you don’t because I am the one who is trapped under you because you did not get on the spacecraft when I told you to get on the spacecraft, so you do not get to complain. You lost comfort privileges when you decided to be a hero.” The last word came out serrated, the Russian r dragging through it. Rozanov’s hands were heavy on Shane’s arms, a physical manifestation of the way he’d been trying to crowd Shane out of his own command for seven months. “Now stop moving your—blyat, your hip, stop—”

Rozanov shifted—a rolling adjustment of his hips that changed the angle of his torso by maybe two degrees and ground the inside of his thigh against Shane’s hip in a way that sent a flare of sensation up Shane’s side so vivid he had to close his eyes.

When he opened them again, the arrangement was fractionally better—his head resting in the hollow below Rozanov’s collarbone instead of directly on the bone—and catastrophically worse, because the new angle meant Rozanov’s arms had nowhere to go except alongside Shane’s body, forearms settling on the outside of Shane’s thighs with a weight that didn’t feel accidental. Rozanov’s knees came up on either side of Shane’s ribs. His chest pressed the full length of Shane’s spine. His breath landed on the crown of Shane’s head in warm, even intervals that Shane could feel in his hair follicles.

Shane was sitting in Ilya Rozanov’s lap. There was no clinical or operational or euphemistic way around it. He was sitting between Rozanov’s thighs with Rozanov’s chest against his back and Rozanov’s heartbeat thumping into his shoulder blade and Rozanov’s breath stirring his hair, and he was the Commander of the International Space Station, and his ears were generating enough heat to register on infrared.

And the problem—one of the problems, perhaps the most immediately survivable of the problems—was that in literally any other circumstance, if it was literally any other person apart from Rozanov, this might’ve been an almost welcome predicament.

Seven months on the station. Seven months of sharing a module with five other crew members and a ventilation system that carried sound through the walls like they weren’t there. Seven months in a sleep station the size of a phone booth where the curtain didn’t lock, Cliff was six feet away on the other side of a panel, and jerking off required the strategic planning of a minor space operation: fan noise for cover, one hand braced against the wall to keep from drifting, the constant awareness that any sound above a controlled exhale would travel. Shane had managed it maybe four times in seven months. Each time he’d felt like a teenager sneaking around his parents’ house, which was pathetic at twenty-nine, and each time he’d finished too fast and floated there afterward with his heart hammering and the taste of his own silence in his mouth.

But he had also not been touched—really touched, with skin and intent and the understanding that the touch was wanted—in years that he’d stopped counting because counting them gave the number weight. And that drought was not the station’s contribution.

This drought was Shane’s, tended with the same discipline he brought to his protein crystallization experiments: controlled environment, no contaminants, perfect conditions for growing absolutely nothing.

It was all by his own hypocritical design.

He’d come close with Rose. Twenty-seven or twenty-eight, her apartment after a launch party, her fingers at his collar, and he’d wanted to want it so badly that he’d mistaken the wanting-to-want for the real thing. Her mouth on his and his hands in the right places and his body performing adequately and his mind a thousand miles above it all, watching, monitoring, checking the gauges.

He was different and he knew it and even after Rose he’d been so good. So exactly what they expected. He’d sat across from CSA flight psychologists and answered their questions about relationships and stress and support systems, and everything else: Do you have a partner? No. Are you interested in pursuing one? Not at this time.

The partner he didn’t have was never the girlfriend they were picturing, and he never corrected them.

And now he was behind a water recovery system with a dosimeter climbing and Ilya Rozanov’s body pressed against every inch of his back, and every system Shane had built to contain this was failing at once.

Because it was Rozanov.

Because Rozanov had a jaw that could cut glass and a mouth that never stopped moving and hands that Shane had watched for seven months—repairing relays, catching the fucking tennis ball, gesturing through arguments—long-fingered, blunt-nailed, a scar across the left knuckle that Shane had memorized the shape of before he’d realized he was doing it.

Because Rozanov’s eyes were hazel and Shane had spent months pretending he hadn’t mapped their color the way he’d map a planetary atmosphere, the green rim like methane haze at the edge of a gas giant, the gold near the pupil like refracted light through a hydrogen envelope, the whole shifting spectrum a world Shane could study from a distance and never, ever land on.

He’d also been looking at everything else, taking it in like data, because there was so much to see. Because Rozanov had shoulders that strained the seams of his T-shirts and a strip of golden skin at his hip where the shirt rode up when he reached for overhead panels, and a smattering of dark hair beneath his navel Shane had spent seven months training himself to look away from.

He could recite the serial number of every panel within eyeline of Rozanov’s hips. RS-TEK-4412. US-WRS-0097.

He looked away now the same way he did not stare at the sun, because the sun burned and Rozanov had a body that promised the same.

And all the while he knew it was there. He felt the pull of it the way the station felt the pull of the planet beneath it: constantly, inescapably, the tether that defined the shape of every orbit.

Shane had been falling toward Ilya Rozanov for months and calling it floating.

All of that was against him now. The collarbone behind his skull. The thighs along his hips. The breath on his neck. Rozanov’s heartbeat thumping through Shane’s shoulder blade at sixty-two beats per minute, and Shane’s own pulse was running almost double that, and the discrepancy was a crisis in itself, made worse that there was nothing but time now, to sit and think about it, and panic.

“You are an idiot,” Rozanov said, three inches behind Shane’s right ear, and his breath moved Shane’s hair.

Goddamn, sixty-two. Shane’s heart rate was sixty-two when he was asleep. On a good night. He added this to the growing list of reasons Rozanov was infuriating, filed it between bounces tennis ball during my briefings and looks like that on purpose, and then his vision tunneled and the list dissolved.

“You’ve said.” Honestly at this point he was grateful for the insults to distract from the radiation, the very real issue of proximity.

“I will say more. There is nowhere to go and you are here, so I will say everything I am thinking, and what I am thinking is this: you are the stupidest man on this station.”

“That’s up for debate. The one other man on this station is you after all.”

“I am not done,” Rozanov snarled, “You. There are satellites with more intelligence than you—old ones, Soviet ones, the ones that do not even work anymore. You are dumber than Sputnik and Sputnik was a metal ball with an antenna.”

The insult was delivered with genuine venom. Rozanov’s chest had gone rigid against Shane’s back, the muscles between his ribs locking down, and his hands had curled into fists on Shane’s thighs—Shane could feel each knuckle through the thin fabric of his shorts.

“You had time. You could have gotten on the Aurora. Pike was waiting, the hatch was open, and you stayed for—what? To sit behind a water tank?”

“I told you that I wasn’t going to leave you behind, I stayed so I could get you out.”

“I did not ask you to get me out. I told you to go.”

“Last I fucking checked,” Shane snarled, and seven months of swallowed rank-challenges climbed his throat at once, “you are not the one responsible for this expedition. I am. And I don’t follow orders from the runner-up.”

“Runner-up,” Rozanov spat. “I have logged more hours outside a spacecraft than you have spent awake on this station. You have simulator badges and a polite smile for the cameras, Commander. You are a kid playing with a multi-billion dollar toy, and now there is a good chance we both die because you could not bear to leave when you had the chance.”

“Probably,” Shane replied.

“So please explain how this is better. Explain the math to me, Hollander. You love math.”

Shane didn’t answer. The math, honestly, was not great. The math said that if the CME arrived within two hours, their cumulative dose behind the WRS racks would approach the threshold where long-term stochastic effects became statistically meaningful—a phrase that sounded clinical in a textbook and sounded like cancer when you were sitting in someone’s lap four hundred kilometers above the Earth.

He didn’t share this with Rozanov.

Rozanov’s complaining mutters dropped into Russian—a low, continuous and angry stream that Shane caught in fragments. Durák. Idiot. That one he knew.

Then more: Upryámyy. Stubborn, he thought.

Rozanov always did this when he wanted to strip Shane of his authority; he retreated behind a linguistic wall where English protocols couldn’t reach him, weaponizing Shane’s partial fluency to make him scramble. Hollander dropped into the Russian like a stone into a river, dragging unfamiliar syllables behind it, and from the cadence of the sentences Shane was fairly sure he was being insulted in ways the English language couldn’t fully accommodate.

Shane couldn’t see it from this angle—his head was below Rozanov’s chin—but he could feel the motion: the arm shifting, the shoulder rotating, Rozanov’s hand slipping into the narrow space near Shane’s shoulder to find the chain. And then the movement of Rozanov’s thumb closing around the metal cross, a repetitive back-and-forth that Shane felt pressing directly against his own skin.

Was he terrified too? Was he praying?

One hundred and forty on the dosimeter.

Going up. Still going up. Two hundred ninety.

Shane ran the math because the math was the only part of this he could control. Cumulative dose since the alarm: roughly thirty-five milligrays. Extrapolated over six hours at the current rate—but the rate wasn’t holding, the flux curve was parabolic, and without the external sensor array he had no model for the decay. The CME had hit the magnetosphere; the numbers weren’t just climbing, they were jumping now, taking massive leaps.

Three hundred and ten on the dosimeter.

Three hundred and fifty.

Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.

Shane’s brain was running the integration automatically: area under the curve, dose rate times duration. In the lab, physics was an invisible dance. Controlled nucleation, thermal cycling and it was beautiful, intricate choreography that powered reactors and grew crystals. It was gorgeous when things were normal. But the dance had broken. Now, it was just high-energy protons acting as bullets, splitting atoms in his own tissue, a chain reaction he couldn’t diagram his way out of, integrating under a curve he couldn’t see the shape of, and the curve was still climbing, and each increment represented damage to base pairs in his DNA that his body would either repair or not repair according to probabilities he could calculate but not influence.

There was nothing Shane could do. No system to override. No checklist to execute. He was running the odds like a flight controller, but the scenario playing out in his head wasn’t a Houston simulation; it was the final act of Alien, where the only remaining procedure was blowing the airlock and praying.

Ellen Ripley had a flamethrower and a cat.

Shane had a water recycler.

There was no procedure with numbered steps that would produce a predictable outcome if performed correctly and it was a horrible helpless, devouring feeling that was swallowing him head first.

And it wasn’t the first time he’d felt this way.

He’d been six years old the first time he’d sat through an earthquake—a small one, a 3.2, barely enough to rattle the dishes in the Ottawa kitchen. His mother had pulled him under the table and held him against her ribs and hummed, off-key, and the humming had drowned out the sound of the glasses shaking in the cabinet. He remembered the melody. He’d never figured out what song it was. He’d tried to find it once, at sixteen, scrolling through Japanese folk songs on his laptop with headphones in so his father wouldn’t ask what he was doing, and he’d never found it because his mother hummed everything slightly sharp and the version in his memory didn’t match any recorded version, and eventually he’d stopped looking because the search was replacing the memory, overwriting the original with near-misses, and he couldn’t afford to lose the original.

He could not afford to lose the original.

And now his body was absorbing radiation that would rewrite his DNA the way his search had tried to rewrite his mother’s song—close but wrong, near-miss after near-miss, until the original was corrupted beyond recognition—and there was no procedure for this. One step: wait.

Wait. Sit in another man’s lap and let invisible particles shred your chromosomes and wait. No sub-steps. No contingencies. No branch points. Shane could feel the failure propagating the way you feel a bridge fail—not all at once but in sequence, load-bearing members giving way one after another, each failure transferring stress to the next member, the whole structure heading toward a state he could model and predict and absolutely not prevent.

Shane’s breathing changed.

He noticed it the way he’d notice a caution light on a panel, nearly disembodied from the experience itself, registering data first, implication lagging. Inhales stacking too fast, not completing. His diaphragm pulling in sharp, shallow contractions that moved air without exchanging gas. Fingers tingling, then going numb—not radiation, wrong mechanism, wrong timeline—hyperventilation tanking his blood CO₂, pH rising, peripheral vasoconstriction propagating outward from his core. He could diagram the entire cascade on a whiteboard. He could label every ion channel, every receptor, every synapse in the chain. He could not make it stop.

Ignorance would have let him panic in peace. Instead he was having a panic attack and peer-reviewing it in real time, which was not the multitasking the CSA had in mind when they selected him for his ability to manage concurrent tasks under pressure.

Three hundred and fifty-seven.

On the rack beside them, the status display for the CO₂ scrubber flickered, a column of hex code scrolling uselessly across the screen as a stray particle flipped a bit in its memory. Shane’s vision was narrowing. The dosimetry display blurred, swam, split into two overlapping images that his brain could not reconcile. He blinked and it didn’t help, which meant his eyes were wet, and the wetness was not sweat.

“Hollander.”

Rozanov’s thumb had stopped on the cross. Shane felt it through the contact between their bodies—the suspension of a rhythm that had been running since the muttering stopped. Rozanov’s chest was rigid against Shane’s back again, the muscles between his ribs locking, and Shane registered distantly that his own breathing must have been transmitting through the same contact points—that Rozanov could feel every rapid, shallow, failing contraction of Shane’s diaphragm the same way Shane had felt the stroking of the cross.

“Hollander.” Rozanov’s chin lifted off Shane’s head. “Hollander, you are having a panic attack.”

And there it was—the thing Shane had almost dreaded more than the dosimetry, more than the CME, more than the slow arithmetic of irradiated DNA. Rozanov had seen him break. Not a stranger, not a flight surgeon behind a desk in Houston, but the one person on this station—on this planet, in this orbit—who had a competing claim to Shane’s chair and the talent to back it up. Every breath Shane failed to complete was a data point Rozanov could carry back to Earth. Proof that the board had picked wrong. Shane’s hands locked tighter around his kneecaps and his lungs refused to fill and the worst part, the very worst part, was that he needed Rozanov to fix this and Rozanov was already fixing it and that was its own kind of defeat.

A fucking panic attack. He knew what it was.

Sympathetic overdrive. Not lethal. Will resolve. I am not dying. Yet.

Knowing this helped exactly as much as knowing the name of the ocean you were drowning in.

ISS Expedition 78 | Emergency Log | UTC 04:00 | MET +00.42 Dosimetry: 361 mGy/hr (rising)

Crew on station: 2

The dosimetry display swam. Shane blinked and it kept swimming, which meant his eyes were wet, which—

“Shane,” Rozanov said, and the accent broke the word open—Sha-yne—two syllables where one had been, refracted, made foreign and familiar at once. Seven months on this station and Rozanov had never used it. Had called him Hollander, Commander, Captain Canada, had once called him the little astronaut with the freckles during a patch-in with Star City that Shane was not supposed to have overheard. Never this. Never the bare first name in a bare low register, stripped of every weapon Ilya Rozanov usually carried in his mouth.

Rozanov’s palm pressed flat against Shane’s sternum, the heel of his hand on the bone above Shane’s heart, fingers splayed wide enough to span from his clavicle to the top of his diaphragm, and he held it there with a weight that had nothing to do with force. The pressure reorganized Shane’s entire sensory field. Everything that wasn’t that hand went distant.

“Dýshi so mnoy,” Behind Shane’s ear, the consonants half-swallowed by the accent. “Breathe with me, Shane. I am going to breathe in, and you are going to feel it against your back, and you are going to match it. In.”

His chest expanded against Shane’s back. The hand on Shane’s sternum didn’t push—it held, gave his lungs a surface to press against on the inhale, a fixed point in a body that had lost all its fixed points. Shane’s diaphragm caught, hitched, tried.

The inhale was shallow. A quarter of what his lungs could hold. Rozanov didn’t comment on it.

“Out. Slow. I don’t care if it is not a full breath. Let it go.”

Shane let it go. The exhale was ragged and wet and his spine curved deeper into Rozanov’s chest on the release, and Rozanov absorbed the weight without shifting.

“Again. Slower. Listen to me. You are not dying. Your body thinks you are dying and it is wrong. Your body is stupid, like the rest of you, and it is getting this wrong.” The chest behind Shane expanded again, slow, exaggerated.

“Again. In.”

“Again. Hold. Two, three—out.”

Out. The shudder was smaller this time. Shane’s fingers loosened on his kneecaps by a fraction. The crescents his nails had cut were stinging as circulation returned.

He felt nauseous. Shane felt sick. Rozanov was better at this. At this. The animal part of being a person. The part where a human body failed and another human body caught it. Shane could run the station; Rozanov could run Shane, and his body had surrendered the chain of command in under ninety seconds without so much as a vote.

Fuck.

And he was so stupidly grateful for it anyway.

“Again.”

In. Hold. Out. The dosimetry display resolved into a single image on the third cycle.

“Khorosho, vot i vse. That’s it. You are doing this,” Rozanov said, behind his ear, and his register had dropped into a range that Shane’s ear snagged on—low, unperformed, the accent thicker than usual because whatever filter Rozanov ran his English through before it left his mouth had switched off. He sounded like a man talking to himself in a dark room, and Shane was the dark room. “Your body is having a bad reaction and you are overriding it. That is all this is. You are not losing control, you are regaining it, and you are doing it well, because you are annoyingly competent at everything, and this is no different. Again now. In. Hold. Out. Like you are a real astronaut and not a Canadian they sent to make the rest of us feel better about ourselves.”

“Fuck—” Shane’s voice cracked on the word. His eyes burned, and he blinked and the burning got worse.”—you.”

“Later, if you want, since lungs are working. Breathe in again.”

In. His lungs filled to half capacity. Rozanov’s chest pressed his shoulder blades and Rozanov’s hand pressed his sternum and he was suspended between the two, held in a space that was eighteen inches wide and contained the only other living person within four hundred kilometers, and his body was calming despite his brain, or perhaps because his brain had finally exhausted itself and ceded the negotiation to the palm on his chest.

Three hundred and sixty-one, then—three hundred and sixty.

The single-digit drop registered through Shane’s entire body. Not the breathing exercise. Not a decision. A release that ran through his obliques and his hip flexors and the long muscles bracketing his spine, all of them unlocking at once as if the dosimeter’s decline had cut a wire his whole nervous system had been hanging from.

“Going down,” Rozanov said. The hand on Shane’s sternum didn’t move. “You see?”

“I see.”

“Good.” A pause. Then: “ Because if you lose consciousness, I am required to perform rescue breathing, and I remember your VO2 max from training. Is only ‘average’.”

That wasn’t how rescue breathing worked. That wasn’t even right. “My VO2—max is—ninety-second percentile—”

“For a Canadian.” Rozanov’s thumb moved on Shane’s collarbone in a single pass, there and gone. “Which is, what, sixty-fifth percentile for Russians? Seventieth if we are generous?”

“That’s—not how percentiles—you don’t scale them by—”

“And your resting heart rate was sixty-one on your last physical. Mine was fifty-four. So when we are discussing which of us is more likely to have a cardiac event behind a water recovery system—”

The sheer statistical illiteracy of this was so offensive that it cut through the residual panic like a blade through—no, not a blade. Like a boot through wet snow. A brick through a window. Graceless and effective. Shane’s breathing was his own again, even almost functional, and what had driven it there was not the breathing exercise or the hand on his chest but the visceral need to correct Ilya Rozanov’s understanding of exercise physiology and shut him up.

“Resting heart rate is not predictive of acute cardiac events and you know that, any first-year physiology student—”

“Oh, also, while we are on the subject of your professional failures—your crystal experiment is ruined. Sample four. The lattice clouded. I saw it yesterday when I was adjusting the Ku-band relay and it was very obviously compromised.”

“You were looking at my samples?”

“I was passing through. The clouding was visible from the hatch. You did not need a microscope to see it, Hollander. Also, your rack labeling is wrong. You have the temperature logger on Bay 3 but the readout cable routes to Bay 5. Very sloppy, Commander. Perhaps if you spent less time with the manual and more time with the hardware, you would see.”

“The cable routing is intentional, it’s a cross-reference calibration for the—” Shane stopped. Drew a full breath through his nose. Let it out through his mouth. His hands had released his kneecaps entirely. His breathing was steady. His pulse had dropped below ninety—he could feel it in his wrists, no longer hammering but thumping, a rhythm he could live inside. “You’re… you…”

“Yes, Commander?”

Rozanov had identified the failure—Loss of composure, panic-loss-of-function, call it what you wanted—and instead of logging it, instead of banking it for the next time he wanted to challenge Shane’s authority, he’d burned it. Weaponized it in Shane’s favor. Turned it into anger because anger was functional and panic was not, and he’d done easily, effortlessly, because he (infuriatingly) understood exactly how Shane’s operating system worked and had chosen, this once, to be a technician instead of a saboteur.

“You’re doing this on purpose.”

“Doing what?”

Shane looked at him—sweaty, the gold cross hanging crooked outside his collar, hazel eyes unrepentant and every defense Shane had built with rank, the schedule—had collapsed toward a single point, and the single point was Ilya’s hand on his chest. A singularity. The place where all the known physics broke down and the only law that remained was proximity.

Because of course Rozanov understood how his brain worked. Of course Rozanov had mapped it. Shane had spent twenty years hiding himself from teammates and flight surgeons and CSA psychologists and every woman who’d ever tried to reach him, and this man—this Russian disaster with his tennis ball—had read him in seven months with the same offhanded competence he brought to fixing a toilet pump.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that the first person who’d ever really looked at Shane’s wiring was the one person Shane couldn’t afford to let see it.

And it was too late, because he’d already seen it, and he wasn’t looking away.

“Making me angry so I stop panicking.”

“Mm,” Rozanov said. “Is working, yes?”

Shane stared at the dosimeter. Three hundred and twenty. His breathing was steady. His hands had stopped shaking. His face was hot and he was pissed off and he was… more… pissed off than he was frightened.

“... My rack labeling is not sloppy.”

“Is sloppy. When we get out of here I will show you. I will draw diagram.”

“I don’t need a diagram from a man who spelled ‘maintenance’ wrong on three consecutive logbook entries.”

“English is a garbage language,” Rozanov said dismissively. “French is also garbage but at least it sounds nice. Why do you have two garbage languages when you could just speak Russian?”

“You misspelled it in your own logbook. In the Roscosmos system. In Cyrillic.”

“Oh you read Russian now?”

Shane wheezed. “I know what obsluzhivaniye, ‘maintenence’  looks like because I double check everyone’s logs, and I know what it looked like in your logbook, and those were not the same word.”

“The Cyrillic keyboard on the Zvezda terminal sticks on the second row. This is a known issue. I have filed four maintenance requests, which I spelled correctly in Russian, and your American partners have done nothing because they do not read Russian.”

“I hate you. That’s not how this works, that is—the maintenance requests route through the Russian segment ops desk in Korolev, not through—how did you even get let up here—”

“Shane.”

“—NASA, so the fact that Americans can’t read Russian is completely irrelevant to—”

“Shane.”

Two hundred and forty-two. The curve was bending. The peak—or at least this peak, the initial SPE before whatever the CME would bring—was behind them, and the numbers were retreating in grudging increments. Shane tracked each one with the part of his brain that had come back online: the flight-controller part, the part that could hold data and project trajectories and function.

The other part—the part still cataloguing the weight of Rozanov’s forearms along the outside of his thighs, and the heat of Rozanov’s palm through his shirt, and the way the thumb on his collarbone kept moving in absent, aimless arcs that Rozanov probably wasn’t even aware of—he left alone. It was running its own processes. It didn’t require input.

It needed to be ignored.

“If you are going to sit in my lap,” Rozanov said, “and grind your ass against my dick while you insult me, the least you can do—the absolute minimum, Hollander—is use my first name. This is common courtesy. I think even a Canadian would agree.”

Shane’s flush climbed from his collarbones to his hairline and he felt his face burning roentgen red—a full-body thermal event entirely unrelated to particle bombardment—and his hips locked rigid against the frantic, useless impulse to shift away from the specific physical reality he could now feel against his lower back, because shifting would require movement, and movement was what Rozanov had just accused him of, and any direction he shifted would grind him further into either the rack housing or Rozanov’s lap, and both options were equally unsurvivable.

“I am not grinding, I am sitting still in a space that is eighteen inches wide—”

“You are not sitting still. You have not been still for one second since you sat down. You are—how do you say—fidgeting. With your whole ass. Against my—”

“Rozanov—”

“Wrong name.” The hand on Shane’s sternum pressed once. “Try again.”

“—your equipment is what caused this, the rack was American-made but it was mounted to a Russian bulkhead with Russian hardware that your engineers specced at six-millimeter bolts when the shear load clearly required eights—”

“Still wrong name.”

“—so if we’re assigning blame for why I’m currently sitting in your lap behind a urine recycler—”

“Water recovery system,” Rozanov corrected. “You said this yourself, ten minutes ago. Multi-stage distillation process. Very sophisticated. Now say my name.”

Shane’s mouth worked. He could feel every inch of Ilya Rozanov’s thighs along the outside of his hips, and the specific anatomy of Ilya’s chest behind his shoulder blades, and the breath landing on his crown, and the thumb on his collarbone, and the other thing, the thing pressed against his lower back that he was going to aggressively not think about except that it was there and it was unambiguous and his body was responding to it in ways that were going to become their own crisis if this gap didn’t get wider in the next thirty seconds.

“Ilya,” Shane said, and got it wrong; the first vowel too short, the L too hard against the roof of his mouth, the second syllable lilting upward as if he were tasting it. He heard himself say it and wanted to be ejected into the vacuum. He compensated immediately: “Your bolt spec was wrong and your spelling is an embarrassment to the entire Roscosmos program.”

Ilya’s breath caught and released in a short burst against the crown of Shane’s head, maybe the precursor of a laugh, and Shane could feel the effort it took to kill the rest of it: the abdominal wall tightening behind his lower back, the ribcage locking, the whole body clamping down on whatever had tried to escape.

“You say it very wrong,” Ilya said, “but is better.” The thumb on Shane’s collarbone traced a single arc and lifted. “Pronunciation needs work. I will teach you. When we are not dying.”

“I’m not sure we’re dying right now.”

“When we are not maybe dying. Better?”

“Everything about this needs work.”

One hundred and eighty. One hundred and thirty-eight. The numbers dropped, and Shane tracked them the way he’d track a reentry corridor—each decrement a confirmation that the parabola was symmetrical, that what climbed would descend. Nineteen minutes. The spike had lasted nineteen minutes from peak to the moment the dosimeter dropped below one-forty and Shane’s hindbrain released its stranglehold on his adrenal glands.

Nineteen minutes in which two men had breathed between machines while particles passed through them at the speed of light, and Ilya Rozanov had put his hand on Shane Hollander’s chest and held it there, and Shane had let him, and neither of them had said a single true thing about why.

One hundred and thirty-five, and still dropping. One hundred. Ninety. And then… holding… at eighty-five. Shane shifted forward, and Ilya’s hand lifted from his sternum. The air that replaced it was station-temperature—twenty-two degrees Celsius, the same as every other cubic centimeter of atmosphere on this station—and it felt like a wound. Shane did not have a framework for air feeling like a wound.

He added it to the file and the file went into the drawer with everything else.

ISS Expedition 78 | Emergency Log | UTC 05:00 | MET +01.42 Dosimetry: 85 mGy/hr (holding)

Crew on station: 2

“We should run system checks,” Shane said. “That rack tore out of a power distribution mount—if it damaged the secondary bus on its way down, we could be losing thermal regulation in the Russian segment and not know it yet.”

“Da. Yes.” Ilya’s legs withdrew from around Shane’s hips, and the disassembly was no more elegant than the assembly had been—Ilya’s knee catching the inside of Shane’s thigh hard enough to make him hiss, Shane’s elbow cracking the rack housing, both of them grunting and shoving against each other in the gap until they separated with the gracelessness of two components pulled from a housing they’d been interference-fit into.

Shane drifted port. Ilya drifted starboard.

Two feet of recycled air opened between them.

Shane filled it with procedure before it could fill with anything else.

“I’ll take the US segment—Node 1 through the Lab. You take the Russian segment. Hardline check-in every fifteen minutes.” He was pulling himself out of the gap, hands finding rack edges, his body remembering how to be a single unit moving through a station instead of half a unit pressed against another half. The tremor in his fingers had settled to a hum he could manage if he kept his hands occupied. He was very good at keeping his hands occupied.

“And what are we looking for, Commander?” Ilya asked it lightly, the way he asked everything—as if the answer were a formality and he’d already decided what he was going to do regardless—but he hadn’t pushed off yet.

“Hull integrity first. If that rack sheared hard enough to trip the isolation protocols during the initial event, there could be secondary damage we haven’t seen. Pressure seals, thermal regulation, anything structural so we can avoid a blowout.” Shane ticked through the list each item a rung on a ladder that led him further from the gap behind the WRS and the shape of Ilya’s body against his back. “After that—we haven’t had comms with the ground since the S-band dropped during the SPE; Houston can’t help us if the station’s falling apart, so structure first, comms second.”

“And the Soyuz.”

Shane’s hands stilled on the rack.

The Soyuz was docked at Rassvet, the Earth-facing Russian cargo module on Ilya’s side. It was also their only ride home, now that the Aurora was four hundred kilometers below them with the rest of the crew. If the SPE had done to the Soyuz what it had done to the station’s electronics…

“Right. That too.”

“Okay, Hollander,” he said, snatching up that god forsaken tennis ball again, and the thock of it hitting a grab rail followed him through the module. One strike, two, three—diminishing with distance—and then the station swallowed the sound, and Shane was alone.

He pressed his palms flat against the WRS housing. The metal was cold against the crescents his nails had cut into his skin. His sternum still held the shape of a hand that was no longer there, and the cold wasn’t overwriting it.

Three seconds. He gave himself three seconds.

Then he pushed off toward Destiny, and his hands were reaching for the first diagnostic panel before his body had stopped moving. The work was waiting, and his body wanted it the way his lungs had wanted Ilya’s breathing cadence—greedily, without asking permission, already turning toward the nearest thing that offered forward momentum.

The system checks took two hours.

The S-band, and their communications, remained dead. Shane confirmed that first, cycling the communications rack and running the link diagnostics before moving on when the system returned the same inert error code. It was a problem for later.

The problems for now were all the other station diagnostics… which he ran twice. Power distribution, thermal control, atmospheric monitoring, the protein crystallization experiment that was almost certainly ruined but still warranted data collection—and by the time he’d logged the final entry, his hands had stopped shaking and his brain had re-established its normal operating hierarchy of task, next task, next task after that.

And the laboratory was always filled with tasks, even though it was different to be alone in it. Especially with Rose gone. Her handwriting was still on the whiteboard blocking out sample schedules in blue marker, her small, squared-off print, and her backup gloves were still clipped to the rack where she’d left them.

Shane pulled the gloves off the clip and held them. The station’s designers had given up on normal storage decades ago; every surface carried strips of Velcro so tools and gloves could be slapped down before they escaped into orbit.

Small, size six, the fingertips stained with silver nitrate from the microgravity fluid experiment she’d been running in Kibo. He turned them over in his hands. Rose had good hands. He’d noticed that first, before anything else—at a mixer during candidate selection in Houston, her fingers wrapped around a beer glass, short nails, no rings, and he’d thought I could hold that hand in public and it would look right and the thought had been so cynical and so precise and so sad that he’d walked across the room and introduced himself anyway, because sadness had never stopped Shane from doing the correct thing. Only from wanting it.

She deserved better than what he’d given her. He’d given her eighteen months as a man who showed up on time and said the right things and kissed her with his eyes open, checking, always checking—is this working? Am I performing this correctly?—and she’d been too kind or too proud to tell him that she could feel the inspection happening through his lips. When it ended, she’d said I think you’re looking for something I can’t give you and he’d said I’m not looking for anything and both of those sentences had been exactly half true.

He clipped the gloves back onto the rack. The lab was his now. The samples, the schedules, the whiteboard with her scribbles. All inherited. Shane was good at inheriting—at picking up what others set down, at tending their gardens with the discipline he couldn’t spend on his own.

Shane pulled up her last data log and picked up where she’d stopped, the way he’d picked up every responsibility she’d left behind when she boarded the Aurora and the mindless, thoughtless, task in the after.

He’d been in the lab for twenty minutes when Ilya drifted past the hatch. Shane caught the movement in his periphery—a dark shape decelerating in the corridor, slowing, almost stopping. He looked up. Ilya was already gone, the faint thock of the tennis ball resuming from somewhere in another unit.

The station’s ventilation fans carried sound farther than walls ever did; a dropped tool in Columbus could echo through half the US segment.

It had been like that for weeks before the storm, too. Ilya never came into the lab when Rose was running experiments. He’d linger in the corridor, or find a reason to be in the adjacent node, or send Svetlana to relay a maintenance question he could have asked himself. Shane had assumed it was a personality conflict—Rose was organized and direct and American, and Rozanov was none of those things.

The Soviets and the Americans had never exactly been friendly when it came to space, so Shane wasn’t particularly surprised they didn’t get along. While their crew functioned well, truly it seemed like only Cliff and Svetlana got along with Ilya, while the rest of them merely tolerated.

Hardline check-ins with Ilya—Rozanov, no, he was Rozanov to him still—came every fifteen minutes, as agreed. Rozanov’s reports were clipped and professional by his standards, which meant they contained only two insults per transmission instead of six. The secondary power bus in Zvezda was intact. The thermal regulators were compensating. The dislodged rack had not shifted against its cargo strap. The dosimetry across both segments was falling in a steady, shallow decline—one hundred and twelve, then ninety-eight, then eighty-five. The SPE was fading. The CME Houston had warned about was still a question mark, but the particle flux was dropping, and for now, dropping was enough.

And everything was, surprisingly, almost feeling like it might be okay, that they might be fine, until:

“Hollander.” Rozanov’s transmission came through the hardline with a flatness that Shane’s ear had learned, over seven months, to distinguish from his theatrical flatness, his bored flatness, his provoking flatness. This was the flatness of reading number he didn’t like. “Come to Zvezda. Houston uploaded an SPE forecast model to Destiny’s terminal before we lost S-band. I need it.”

Shane’s hand stalled on the data log. “How do you know that?”

“Because the particle decay curve on the Zvezda array is wrong. The slope flattened twenty minutes ago, and your dosimeters in the US segment should show the same if you stop looking at other systems long enough to check. Houston saw this coming. They would have sent updated models. Go to Destiny’s terminal, pull the forecast file, bring it here.”

Shane was already closing Rose’s data log before Rozanov finished the sentence. He found the file buried three layers deep in the uplink queue—timestamped eleven minutes before S-band died, flagged with a priority header that the station’s alert system had swallowed whole during the cascade of SPE warnings. He hadn’t known it was there. He should have looked.

He pulled it onto a portable drive and was through Node 1 in under a minute.

He found Rozanov floating in front of the Zvezda dosimetry array with both hands braced on the panel frame, his body angled forward, his nose six inches from the display. The amber emergency lighting carved shadows under his cheekbones and turned the grease streak into a dark slash. Even dimmed, the LEDs gave everything the same clinical brightness; the station never truly had night.

He didn’t look up when Shane entered.

“Tell me what you see.” Rozanov tapped the screen with one knuckle.

Shane hooked his foot through a restraint loop and leaned in. He slid his other foot under the handrail as well; astronauts learned quickly that one anchor point was never enough if you wanted both hands free.

The dosimetry array displayed two datasets: the local readings from the station’s particle detectors, and—when the S-band had still been functioning—the projected flux curve Houston had transmitted based on solar observatory data. The local readings showed the declining tail of the initial SPE, the numbers still dropping in their grudging retreat. Seventy-eight milligrays per hour. Manageable. Trending downward.

But Houston’s projected curve didn’t end there.

The model showed a second peak. Larger than the first. The coronal mass ejection, the wall of magnetized plasma that the sun had hurled into space behind the initial particle burst, was still in transit, and the projected arrival window was narrow: five to nine hours from now. The first SPE had been the shrapnel. The CME was the cannonball.

“This is a Carrington-class storm,” Rozanov said, dragging a knuckle across the projected peak.

The Carrington Event was back in 1859 but haunted the nightmares of today just the same; a solar superstorm so massive it set telegraph offices on fire and lit the night sky with aurora as far south as Cuba. Every astronaut learned it the way every sailor learned the word Titanic: the benchmark disaster, the worst-case scenario that training modules used to scare you into respecting the sun.

In 1859 there had been no satellites to fry, no power grids to collapse, no space station with two men inside it.

If a Carrington-class event happened now—was happening now—

“Astronauts outside strong shielding,” Rozanov continued, and tapped the glass, “receive lethal doses.”

Shane traced the curve with his finger.

The projected peak flux at CME arrival was three to five times the initial spike. Fourteen hundred milligrays per hour at the median estimate, and the upper bound—the ninety-fifth percentile scenario that Houston’s models assigned a non-trivial probability—the number climbed past two thousand.

Two thousand milligrays per hour. Shane didn’t need to run the full integration; the numbers at the projected peak, sustained over the duration Houston’s model forecasted, crossed every threshold that mattered. Acute radiation sickness, if they didn’t die outright, was assured. Lymphocytes crash within days. And behind that, the cascade: immune suppression, hemorrhage, organ failure; the body dismantling itself at the cellular level because the repair machinery couldn’t keep pace with the damage.

The WRS shielding wouldn’t be enough. Not for this.

“The water is not enough,” Rozanov said.

“No.”

‘No’ such a small word with such a large meaning, two letters and a single syllable that all meant this kills us. Slowly. Over days. But it kills us.

Shane stared at the curve. His brain was running the integration automatically—area under the curve, dose rate times duration, the merciless arithmetic of energy deposited in tissue. He could feel the answer forming before he’d finished the calculation, the way you feel a structure fail before you hear the sound.

“We can’t stay, so we’ll need to take the Soyuz,” Shane said.

Rozanov was already shaking his head, but Shane pushed past it. “What are you shaking your head for? The Soyuz has better shielding than any module on this station. The descent capsule is designed for reentry—the ablative heat shield, the structural mass of the capsule walls. If we seal ourselves inside and run the environmental systems on internal power, we’d cut the effective dose by another forty, fifty percent on top of the water. That might be enough to keep us below the acute threshold.”

“Come,” Rozanov said.

They traversed the length of the Russian segment, Zvezda through Zarya, past the Progress cargo vehicle docked at the nadir port, to the aft docking compartment where the Soyuz MS sat attached to the station like a lifeboat on the hull of a ship. Rozanov moved ahead of Shane through the passage, pulling himself through and navigating his own hallway in the dark, and Shane followed, cataloguing the route: how many hatches, how many meters, how long it would take to make this transit if they needed to do it at speed.

Rozanov reached the docking compartment first and stopped.

Shane pulled himself alongside and saw it immediately.

The compartment’s internal pressure was nominal—its hatches had held, the seals were intact—but the Soyuz’s orbital module, the spherical section that served as the airlock and living space above the descent capsule, had taken damage. A secondary equipment rack—smaller than the one that had blocked Zvezda’s corridor, but mounted on the adjacent bulkhead—had partially torn free during the SPE-induced vibration event. One of its mounting brackets had sheared and the corner of the rack had swung outward on the remaining bracket like a door on a single hinge, and the swinging edge had struck the Soyuz’s umbilical interface panel.

The panel was dented.

Two of the four fluid lines—the ones that connected the station’s coolant loop to the Soyuz’s thermal management system—had crimped at the connector. One had cracked.

A frozen bead of coolant hung in the air near the breach, caught between the vacuum of the damaged line and the station’s atmosphere, glinting under the lighting strips.

“Thermal control,” Rozanov said. He reached past Shane and ran his finger along the crimped lines, touching each connector. His hand moved with a sureness that didn’t need to think about where things were—muscle and metal in conversation, the station’s anatomy mapped into his fingertips. “Two of four lines compromised and one cracked. We cannot run the Soyuz thermal system on two lines; the descent capsule will overheat within ninety minutes of sealing the hatch.”

“Can… you repair it?”

Rozanov’s hand dropped from the panel. He floated back half a meter and looked at the damage the way Shane had seen him look at a failed component during a maintenance EVA six weeks ago, eyes tracking each fracture line, mouth flat, already sorting what could be salvaged from what couldn’t.

“The cracked line, no. Not without a replacement connector, and the spares are in the Progress cargo manifest, Bay 7, which is—” He pointed aft, toward the Progress vehicle docked beyond the Soyuz. “On the other side of the Soyuz docking interface. Inaccessible without depressurizing the compartment and doing an internal transfer, which takes four hours minimum and equipment we do not have staged.”

“The crimped lines?”

“Maybe. If the crimp hasn’t fractured the interior wall. I would need to pull the connectors, inspect, re-seat, pressure-test. Again, it would take hours. And if the interior wall is cracked, then I have the same problem as the first line and those hours wasted.”

Shane ran the timeline. The CME arrival window started… when? Anywhere from four to nine hours? Hours for a repair that might not work, leaving a small margin before the storm hit—maybe one hour to run up the Soyuz environmental systems, verify thermal stability, seal hatches, and strap in. And if the repair failed, they’d have burned all the time of declining-but-still-elevated radiation exposure in the docking compartment, which had the worst shielding on the station, for nothing.

“It’s not enough time,” Shane said.

“No.”

‘No’ again. Such a small word, but it filled the compartment entirely.

A frozen bead of coolant drifted near Rozanov’s shoulder. Shane watched it rotate, catching light. A tiny sphere of glycol solution, freed from its system, going nowhere.

They, too, were going nowhere.

“So.” Rozanov caught the bead between two fingers and wiped it on his shorts. “No Aurora. No Soyuz. No comms. The CME comes when it comes and we are not sure when that will be exactly, and the best shielding we have is a water recycling system that will cut the dose by sixty percent, which is not enough.” He ticked these off on his fingers without drama, the way he might inventory a supply locker. “Have I missed anything?”

Shane hadn’t. Rozanov hadn’t. The math hadn’t missed anything either; it had delivered its answer with the indifference math always had, and the answer was that two men on a station with aluminum walls and a broken lifeboat were going to absorb enough ionizing radiation to unravel them at the molecular level, and there was no checklist for that.

“No.”

Shane looked at the crippled Soyuz and its dented panel. The cracked line with its frozen bead of coolant already drifting toward the ventilation intake. He looked at the hatch behind him—the long corridor back through Zarya, through Node 1, through the empty station to Destiny where his ruined crystal experiment sat in its rack and his career, his entire life’s summation, was worth exactly as much as the shielding between him and the sun.

Rozanov was watching him, and he had the tennis ball in his hand, squeezing until his knuckles were white. “Then… it is already over.”

“Yes. It’s—yes. Okay,” Shane said. His own voice reached him from a distance, as if the word had to travel through the four hundred kilometers of vacuum below them before it arrived at his ears. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Rozanov repeated, and the repetition did not make it mean anything different.

ISS Expedition 78 | Emergency Log | UTC 07:00 | MET +03:42 Dosimetry: 78 mGy/hr (declining)

Crew on station: 2

Then Rozanov tucked the tennis ball against his thigh and pushed off the wall.

“Come on, Hollander.” He caught the hatch frame one-handed and swung through. “If I am going to die on this station, I am not doing it sober.”

“What?”

But Rozanov was already through the hatch and moving aft, back toward the Russian segment, and Shane was left floating in the docking compartment with the crippled Soyuz and the frozen coolant bead and the dosimetry numbers he’d already memorized and could not un-memorize. Fourteen hundred at the median. Two thousand at the upper bound.

The numbers would be waiting for him whether he followed Rozanov or not.