Chapter Text
She gives him three hours, not to think, but to delay- she gives herself three hours to clear out staff and personnel. Yao, who point-blank says he will not accept a crewmate who is put on the ship unwilling, and Ilyukhina who is silent in a way so uncharacteristic of her, the core science staff, the engineering department. Dimitri, Lokken, Lamai, Hatch- Ryland Grace spends three hours sitting and thinking of how to explain that his life is more important to him than the entire world, while Eva Stratt spends three hours assigning busywork to everyone who cares about Grace so they won’t be witness to what will happen next.
When Grace runs, Eva stands at the window and watches. He disappears out of view quickly enough, but she waits anyway. They are at Baikonur Cosmodrome. There is nowhere for him to go.
Her phone rings in her hand, barely getting halfway through the first trill before she answers it. She raises it to her ear and opens her mouth to say Stratt, but there is a knot in her throat that strangles the noise, so she says nothing.
“He’s down,” Carl reports. He’s not even out of breath.
Eva clears her throat and her voice is almost normal when she asks, “How far did he get?”
“Almost touched the fence.”
“He was motivated,” Eva murmurs distantly. She is suddenly very tired.
“Past tense already?”
Eva flinches, feeling slapped in the face. No more coffees brought to her right as she starts to lag in the afternoon, no more bags of obnoxiously-colored candies hidden away in her pocket to slip to him, lest the vultures in the engineering department claim them all. No more staring at reports while he spins his chair around and talks about nothing, his voice soothing white noise to her after three years of hearing it practically nonstop. No more beers shared after a long day’s work, a brief respite before beginning another grueling day the next morning. It is all past tense now.
“Where are we putting him?” Carl asks.
Not the medical facility, Doctor Lamai will not be party to what she will see as a murder. Not Grace’s quarters, the small portable house the Russians had built a row of for the long-term Project members, people will look for him there. Baikonur has detainment facilities, but they have been out of use since the Project took over and it will be too obvious if they suddenly start using them now.
“Put him in my house,” Eva says. Quick, convenient, not odd for people to be coming and going at all hours, and yet no one dares set foot inside without her explicit permission. Even Grace stopped at the threshold and waited for her outside.
“Ma’am?” Carl says after a pause, startled and seeking clarity.
“The shuttle launches in three days, I can sleep on the couch for that long.” Not that she will be getting much sleep anyway, but that’s not something people want to hear from their leader.
Carl says something to someone nearby, his voice muffled as though he has pressed his phone to his chest. He returns quickly, and says to Eva, “We’re mobile. He’ll be out of sight in ten.”
“The story is,” Eva says, and stops and sighs. It takes her a moment to sort out the thoughts, to try to walk the fine line between what the story needs to be, and what people will believe of Grace. “I spoke to him privately, and he took time off and left Baikonur. I will arrange a videocall with a school in San Francisco, and tomorrow he will have made his choice, after speaking to his schoolchildren.”
“Did he have company when he left the base?” Carl asks, though he isn’t really asking. He knows her too well. Eva doesn’t answer, and he grunts. “I’ll find a bar to hole up in. Let me know when Doctor Grace is ready to return.”
He hangs up without saying goodbye- he’s not happy with her, either. This is not how he wanted things to end.
She needs to find someone who can spoof a videocall from a San Francisco school. She puts her phone away instead, and watches out the window as the sun descends and begins to set. Her hands shake and her chin trembles and her breath wavers, but her eyes are dry. She tells herself this, as she wipes at the tickling feeling of something slipping down her cheek.
She watches the sun set, alone.
There are still so many things to do. Three days to the launch and the three highest-ranking members of her science department are all out of commission in one way or another- Eva spends the evening putting out fires and issuing last-minute promotions. She had to get contact information for DuBois and Shapiro’s next of kin and decide when to let them know, she had to break the news to the UN, she had to arrange news coverage of the shuttle launch, she had to have someone raid Lamai’s notes and send Grace’s doctor the information he needs, she had to-
“Ms. Stratt!”
It is almost midnight and she could just ignore that voice. She has gotten some tea and is going to see what sleep she can get and not think about what is waiting for her in her little house. It is well past decent hours, she could easily just- not do this.
She can’t change her behavior. She can’t act as though anything more than the obvious is out of sorts, or it will raise suspicions. This is already going to be tricky enough to sell, she cannot start undermining herself.
“Commander,” she says, slowing her stride to allow Yao Li-Jie catch up to her without having to run after her like an undignified child.
“Have you heard from Doctor Grace yet?” he asks as soon as he is beside her. “No one has seen him since our meeting with him.”
She'd forgotten about this, in the middle of everything else that needed doing. Of course Yao, commander of the mission and soon to be Grace's immediate superior, would want to know how recruitment was going.
“I have,” Eva says. “He requested further time to think, and has taken time away.”
“He left?” Yao demands, and blows out a breath in a sharp sigh. “Well, who’s next on the list after him?”
There is no list after Grace. They were lucky to have even him. “Carl Boyce is with him. They found a bar.”
“He's off getting drunk? Is that a good sign?" Yao asks, trying to smile but mostly failing. He understands what is at stake, and the potential delay over something he can't control is clearly unsettling him. Eva takes pity on him.
“I’m setting up a videocall with his school in California later, so the kids can talk to him,” she says. One of the many things she had done today, contacting an old acquaintance who owed her too many favors to ask any questions. The time difference means she will have to get back up in three hours to take the call, but it doesn’t matter. Setting the pieces in place is more important. In three days, the Hail Mary will set off and Eva can sleep for a week straight if she wants. She only needs to be sharp for three more days.
Yao stops, and reaches out to catch lightly at Eva’s elbow when she does not stop with him. She turns to face him, granting him her full attention, something very few other people could claim to have these days.
“That sounds very close to coercion,” he says sternly.
“I have no intention of coercing Grace,” Eva says, completely honest. “I only want to remind him of what is at stake.”
Yao still looks concerned. A good man, their mission commander. People like Eva work very hard so people like Yao can be good people.
“And if he still doesn’t agree?”
“Then I move on to the next person on the list,” Eva says calmly. “But I don’t think that will be necessary. I know Doctor Grace, Commander. He can do what needs to be done. He only needs to get out of his own way first.”
“Ms. Stratt, there you are, I was hoping I could- ah.”
Yao looks over her shoulder and Eva glances back as well, and nods to the man behind her. Doctor Desai, the doctor monitoring Grace. He smiles awkwardly and lifts a hand in a halfhearted wave to Yao before wandering a few steps away, staring aimlessly into the distance and trying not to look like he is listening in.
Everyone needs Eva’s attention these days. Yao was lucky to have her for a whole three minutes, and he knows it. He catches her gaze once again and says with his serious expression still in place, “I’d like to see the list.”
“I’ll get it to you. But for now, I have a few hours to sleep before I have to call San Francisco, so if I may?” She phrases it as a question. It very much is not.
“Of course, ma’am. Apologies for bothering you.” Yao steps back, bowing his head in farewell as he retreats. Eva waits until she is sure he is out of earshot, then waits another fifty-count more, before she turns.
“How is he?”
“Sleeping like a babe,” Desai says as she walks up to him, and turns to follow alongside her. “Lamai’s notes were texted to me and I have him on the appropriate sedative now. The ones you used on him earlier will be flushed out of his system in plenty of time for.” He draws a hand up with a whistle, likely meaning the shuttle launch.
“Any issues?”
“No, ma’am, he’s all tucked in. I’m on bedpan duty since you denied my request for a nurse, but I just came from that, so he's good to go for now. He won’t be here long enough for bedsores to be an issue, correct? You said tomorrow, probably?”
Eva sends him a scathing look over the nurse comment, but relents when he carries on unbothered. There are more important things to focus on. “The logistics will be decided tomorrow, yes. I’ll let you know then how much longer he will be your patient. Does he need monitoring?”
“No. It’s a sedative, not an anaesthetic, it shouldn’t suppress his breathing that much. I have him on a pulse-ox monitor that will alert my phone if anything changes but-”
“Will he rouse at any point? Be aware of his surroundings?” Does he need to be restrained, she does not ask.
Desai blinks at her. He is a general physician Eva plucked from the medical staff based on personality and observed ability to keep a secret. He’s never had to deal with Eva directly before. “He’ll probably stir, yes. Again, it’s not an anaesthetic. We’re keeping him just this side of asleep, so his body will try to wake itself up sometimes. He won’t actually wake up unless the IV line fails somehow.”
“Such as being dislodged when his body tries to wake itself up?”
Desai flattens an irritated sigh into a long exhale. “It’s taped down.”
They have come up to the last portable house in the row. Eva’s house. The little house next to hers is dark and shuttered, its occupant never to return to it.
“How do I get those alerts on my phone?” she asks, and he ends up sending her a link with an authorized log on, and she downloads an app. It’s her personal phone, kept strictly separate from her work, and she has very few other apps on her phone, so it sits lonely and small on a screen by itself.
“Thank you, Doctor Desai. You’re dismissed,” she says, and he goes with a sigh, no doubt grateful to be away from her.
She used to be better at talking to people. It was a requirement for existing in the world, so she trained herself to be exactly as good at it as she needed to be, and let it rest there. Then she had gained a second shadow who often spoke faster than her, and smiled nicely, and she had allowed herself to grow used to someone else doing the talking. Her sharp edges were softened by the company she kept, no need to blunt her claws herself.
The first step groans under her weight, loud in the quiet night air, and Eva pauses. They have a tradition, and for a moment Eva waits, ingrained habit- but of course there will be no night Stratt! called through the clapboard walls of the house a few meters away. Past tense.
She braces herself, takes a deep breath, opens the door and goes inside.
There is the sound of breathing in the stillness. Soft, deep, slow. A machine beeps quietly to itself, green numbers glowing eerily in the dark. Eva’s eyes are adjusted enough to the night outside that she can see a silhouette.
She goes around making sure the curtains are pulled shut, first. Then she circles back around to the front door and flips on the light, and stares for a long while at Ryland Grace.
His glasses and knitted hat have been removed and placed on the bedside table, his clothes left in a sloppily-folded pile on the dresser. He is wearing a paper hospital gown and laying on a gurney shoved awkwardly into a space that does not quite have enough room for it. There is no oxygen mask on his face, as she had half-imagined, no nasal canula, no machinery and wires and tubes all over him. Only a single IV line running to his left elbow and the pulse-ox clip on his right middle finger.
Eva has seen Grace asleep before, plenty of times, as she has no doubt he has her. In his lab on the cruiser, on planes and trucks as they shuttled around running errands for the Project, here in Baikonur. She has a pillow in her office specifically for him, because it is easier to convince him to lie down properly on the couch in there than it is to get him up and moving to sleep in his actual bed. He trusts her- trusted her. Of course he did. What harm could she possibly wish to inflict upon him?
She looks at him, and forces herself to think of the look on his face as he said no. As he tried to tell her that his own life mattered more than the rest of the world. As he betrayed both of them, and everyone they had worked alongside for so long.
There is a bottle of scotch in the cabinet in the kitchenette corner. It’s not a particularly expensive bottle, but Grace had somehow smuggled it in among his luggage to Baikonur, and had presented it to Eva as a housewarming gift. He had been celebrating- first time in my adult life living in my own house! while Eva nodded and smiled awkwardly and tried not to think about apartments in Amsterdam and Berlin and Brussels- and had been drunk already on vodka and beer from the welcome back to dry land party that the senior Project staff threw. She had coaxed the bottle away from him and sent him staggering the short journey home, and they had both forgotten about it.
She remembers it now, and fetches the bottle from the cabinet. The portable house is small and cramped, one singular room with a small cubby of a bathroom, and the gurney takes up so much of what little space there is to move. She sits on her bed, the gurney blocking her from her couch and the table that serves as kitchen table and most convenient flat surface for paperwork to gather, and pours a glass of scotch. There is another glass balanced on her knee. She leaves that one empty.
“We could have done this properly,” she tells Grace, and holds out the full glass towards him in a mockery of a toast. “If you had only understood.”
Can she be angry at him? She certainly wants to be. How incredibly arrogant of him, to try to make that choice. To think he mattered so much, that any one person mattered that much. And now she must hide him and lie to her people and fabricate a story that will make him look like a hero instead of a coward who tried to run. They could be giving him a proper farewell instead of this. She could be sharing this scotch with him. His last memories of Earth could be something other than being held down and sedated.
She sees him again, sitting in that conference room with a look of stunned betrayal as she tells him that he is expendable, and she cannot find that spark of anger within her.
It’s not good scotch. It burns as it goes down, but doesn’t warm the blood or soothe the ache afterwards. Grace would probably think it’s fine, but Eva can only choke down half a glass before she has to set it aside in favor of her now lukewarm tea. She finishes it off, gets up and navigates past the gurney to turn the lights off, retraces her steps to collapse back onto her bed. She does not undress or climb under the blankets, only stares at the dark ceiling above her.
Grace’s breathing is loud, the monitor hooked up to him piercing. If she listens closely, she can hear the IV bag drip sedative into the line running to his arm. He is right next to her and yet so far away from her, carved out of her life and vanished from her. She so desperately wants to go next door and have him talk middle school science at her until sleep finally comes for her. She will never hear him speak again.
She stares at the ceiling until her tablet, left on Grace’s gurney at his feet, starts pinging an alert.
San Francisco is calling.