Every day in the workshop James and I sat close and worked and talked, and even laughed. He was more forthcoming than he’d ever been about lots of things. My uncle—what he was like as a teacher and a mentor. His training after Peter Reed. Even Theresa and what the Gateway was like when they first came here to work on the cell. One day we were easy with each other like this all afternoon, but as the sun went down and the workshop filled with a rosy glow, he turned quiet and taciturn. He finished what he was doing and got up from the table and moved at a slight tilt to the door.
I’m going to bed, he said, and waited in the doorway.
I put away what I was working on. Then I looped my arm through his. You don’t really want to be alone.
No, he said. I don’t.
Every minute I wasn’t working with James I spent in the station’s gym. My first morning the equipment was covered in dust and I started by wiping everything down, all the machines and weights and mats, and the chlorine smell of the cleaner filled the room. Simon came in, and Rachel too. Eventually Amelia showed up also, and we made a circuit, together, of all the machines.
We went on like this for a week, then two. Supplies arrived, and people. NSP officials took over and the station filled up with workers. In the control room a team of engineers upgraded all the equipment and ran launch sequences and communications models. In consultation with Simon and Amelia, a group of specialists from Earth worked to finish rehabbing Endurance and to outfit it for its mission.
Simon and I started working out twice a day, and most of the time Amelia and Rachel joined us. We upped the weight on the machines and added a predawn run in our suits up and down the rocky hills outside. I got stronger; I gained power in my legs and back. I watched my body change in the mirror, as I had at the agricultural outpost. My cheeks grew rounder; my stance was straighter and my shoulders wider.
But these changes made James’s condition all the more conspicuous. He was getting better, but slowly. Very slowly. He still limped. His eye was healing—the bandage was now just a single strip of gauze—but his eyesight was largely unchanged.
It was most striking when we were all together in the galley. It didn’t happen that often, but every few days the whole group would end up in the same room, eating or drinking coffee under the dusty yellow lights. One day I walked into the room and everyone was sitting at the table. James, Amelia, and Simon were talking and laughing about a drill they’d done in Candidate Group. They’d had to crawl in their suits through a pitch-black module full of obstacles to find and fix an unidentified gas leak, and they’d failed three times. When they finally completed the challenge successfully their drill supervisor had chewed them out for how long it took them. It was only later they’d found out that no team had ever completed the drill successfully, even with unlimited tries.
I made myself coffee and stood at the counter. I had my mission binder with me and I half read, half listened. After a few minutes James stood up. You should go through the launch sequences, he said.
I sat and led the group through the plans in my binder and he made more coffee. After a while he began to shift his weight on his feet and brought two fingers to his eye. Amelia was talking; she was going through the plan for capture when Endurance reached Inquiry. But James saw me watching him. He let his hand drop from his eye, and he nodded as if to say, I’m okay. I stood up so he could sit back down at the table but he stayed where he was.
At night he was restless in the bed next to me, and sometimes I got up—afraid I was disturbing his sleep—and made my way through the blue-tinted corridors to my own bunk.
One early morning when I slept alone in my bunk, I woke to see him sitting at the foot of the bed. I sat up. The room was still dark; silt pattered at the porthole. What’s wrong?
Everything’s going well, he said. Endurance will be ready sooner than we thought.
I wrapped my arms around him. You’ll be ready too.
He touched his head to mine and the wild scent of his skin and hair mixed with the antiseptic smell of his dressed eye. You know I can’t go, he said.
You can.
He took my face in his hands and looked at me. June.
I’m not leaving on a two-year mission without you, I said and my voice cracked.
His fingers were warm and firm against my cheeks. Let’s say things we already know. The silt tapped harder outside. I’m not going. But you are.