Oxygen at seven percent, says the voice inside the hood.
Turn left out of the vestibule. Past Compartments 8, 9, 10, all the doors sealed. Does the contagion swirl even now through the air in the corridor, waking from its long sleep? Do bodies almost four-hundred-days-dead molder in the shadows? Or are crew members stirring all around her beneath the hiss of the extinguishers: friends, children, teachers, Mrs. Chen, Mrs. Flowers, Mother, Father?
Little nozzles in the corridor ceiling rain their mist down on her. Homemade book stuffed inside her worksuit, homemade axe in her left hand, she spirals outward from the center of the Argos, the booties over her feet sliding through the chemicals on the floor.
Scattered along the corridor are rumpled blankets, discarded masks, a pillow, the pieces of a shattered meal tray.
A sock.
A humped shape furred with gray mold.
Eyes up. Keep moving. Here the dark entrance to the classroom, then more closed compartment doors, past what looks like a glove from one of the biohazard suits that Dr. Cha and Engineer Goldberg wore. Ahead someone’s Perambulator rests upside down in the center of the hall.
Oxygen at six percent, says the hood.
On her right is the entrance to Farm 4. Konstance pauses on the threshold and paws chemicals off her face shield: on every level of the haphazard racks, the plants are dead. Her little Bosnian pine still stands, four feet tall: around its base lies a halo of desiccated needles.
Alarms sound. Her headlamp flickers as she hurries to the far wall: no time to think. She chooses the handle four from the left and pulls open a seed drawer. Cold vapor spills over her feet: inside wait hundreds of ice-cold foil envelopes in rows. She scoops up as many as she can with her mitts, spilling a number, and clasps them and the axe to her chest.
Somewhere nearby is the ghost of Father or the corpse of him or both. Keep going. You have no time.
Not much farther down the corridor, between Lavatories 2 and 3, is the titanium patch where Mother said Elliot Fischenbacher spent multiple nights attacking the wall. The patch has been secured with perhaps three hundred rivets, far more than she remembered. Her heart sinks.
Oxygen at five percent.
She drops her haul of seed packets and raises the hatchet with both hands. From her memory whisper the warnings she has been hearing since before she can remember. Cosmic radiation, zero gravity, 2.73 Kelvin.
She swings and the blade dents the patch but bounces off. She swings harder. This time the blade sticks through and she has to put all her weight into it to pry it free.
A third. A fourth. She’ll never get through in time. Sweat builds up inside the suit and fogs her hood. The alarms increase in volume; the extinguishers rain down around her. Twenty paces to her right is the entrance to the Commissary, full of tents.
All hands, says Sybil. The integrity of the ship is in jeopardy.
Oxygen at four percent, says the hood.
With each strike, the gash in the patch grows.
In three seconds outside the walls, your hands and feet will double in size. You’ll suffocate. You’ll freeze solid.
The gap widens, and through the vapor on her face shield Konstance can see into the interior, where Elliot has pushed aside conduits of wires wrapped in aluminum tape and cut through several layers of insulation. On the far side is another layer of metal: what she hopes is the exterior wall.
She pries the axe free, inhales, rears back, swings again.
Child, Sybil booms, and her voice is terrible. Stop what you are doing at once.
An atavistic fear flows through Konstance. She reaches back and with all the strength of months of anger, isolation, and grief, she swings and the blade severs wires and bites through the outer sheet. She wiggles the handle back and forth.
When she pulls it free, there is a puncture in the outer wall, a slice of darkness.
Konstance, Sybil booms. You are making a grave mistake.
She was wrong. It’s the nothingness, the vacuum of deep space—she is a hundred trillion kilometers from Earth; she will asphyxiate and that will be it. The hatchet falls from her grasp; space wrinkles around her; time folds up. Her father tears open an envelope and onto his palm slides a little seed clasped by a pale brown wing.
Hold your breath.
“Not yet.”
The seed trembles.
“Now.”
Beyond the breach in the outermost layer, the darkness stays put. She is not sucked out, her eyes don’t freeze solid: it is only night.
Oxygen at three percent.
Night! She picks up the axe, swings again and again; fragments of metal tumble into the dark. Out beyond the steadily enlarging hole, thousands upon thousands of tiny silver flecks, illuminated in the dying beam of the headlamp, are falling through the black. She pushes one arm through and her sleeve comes back wet.
Rain. It is raining out there.
Oxygen at two percent.
Konstance keeps swinging until her shoulders burn and the bones in her hands feel as if they have broken. The puncture gets more jagged as it grows; she can fit her head through, a shoulder. Her face shield is hopelessly fogged, and she’s tearing the bioplastic of her suit, but it’s worth the risk, and with another blow the hole is almost large enough to wriggle her torso through.
The smell of wild onions.
The dew, the lines of the hills.
Sweetness of light, moon overhead.
Oxygen at one percent.
The raindrops are falling much farther below the gap than she expected, but there is no time. She pitches armfuls of seed envelopes out into the dark, then the axe, and drives her body through the rift after them.
Miss Konstan—roars Sybil but Konstance’s head and shoulders are outside the Argos now. She wriggles, catches one thigh on a dagger of metal.
Oxygen depleted, says the hood.
Her legs still inside the structure of the wall, her waist stuck, Konstance takes one last breath, then rips off the hood, tearing away the sealing tape, and lets it go. It bounces, rolls, and comes to rest maybe fifteen feet below, among what look like wet stones and long blades of tundra grass, its headlamp shining straight up, into the rain.
The only way out is to drop. Still holding her breath, she braces her arms against the outside of the ship, pushes, and falls.
An ankle twists, her elbow strikes a rock, but she is able to sit up and breathe—she is not dead, not suffocated, not frozen solid.
The air! Rich wet salty alive: if viruses lurk inside this air, if they spill from the perforation she has made in the side of the Argos above her, if they are replicating inside her nostrils right now, if all the atmosphere of the Earth is poison, so be it. May she live five more minutes, breathing it, smelling it.
Rain pelts her sweat-soaked hair, her cheeks, her forehead. She kneels in the grasses and listens to it strike her suit, feels it land on her eyelids. It seems so incredibly, dangerously, promiscuously wasteful: water, given from the sky, in such quantities.
The headlamp dies, and only a glimmer emits from the gash she has chopped in the side of the Argos. But the darkness of this place is nothing like NoLight. The sky, webbed with cloud, appears to glow, and the wet grass blades catch the light and send it back, tens of thousands of droplets gleaming, and she peels Father’s suit down to her waist, and kneels in the tundra grass, and remembers what Aethon said: A bath, that’s as much magic as any foolish shepherd needs.
She finds her axe, strips off the rest of the bioplastic, gathers as many seed envelopes as she can find, and zips them into her worksuit alongside her homemade book. Then she limps her way through the grass and rocks to the perimeter fence. The Argos looms huge and pale behind her.
The fence is topped with razor wire and too high to climb but with the blade of her hatchet, working against one of the posts, she manages to chop through a dozen links, bend them back, and squirm through.
On the other side lie thousands more shining wet stones. On each grows lichen in crusts, lichen in scales—she could spend a year studying any one of them. Beyond the stones a roar rises, the roar of something perpetually in motion, seething, changing, moving—the sea.
Dawn takes an hour and she tries not to blink for any of it. First comes a slow spread of purples, then blues, a diversity of hues infinitely more complex and rich than any simulation inside the Library. She stands barefoot in the water, up to her ankles, the low, flat surf moving ceaselessly in a thousand different vectors, and for the first time in her life, the thrum of the Argos, of trickling pipes, of humming conduits, of the creeping tendrils of Sybil—the machine that has whirred all around her, all her life, since before she was conceived—is gone.
“Sybil?”
Nothing.
Far to her right she can just make out the gray outbuilding she uncovered on the Atlas, the boat shelter, a rocky pier. Over her shoulder, the Argos looks smaller: a white bolus beneath the sky.
In front of her, out on the horizon, the blue rim of dawn is turning pink, raising its fingers to push back the night.