Page 37 of Alien on the Moon

“Thank you,” he said softly. After his brother’s betrayal, he began to close himself off for a time. It took a while for him to openup to anyone outside of Carmen again. Even though she was upset, she knew he still needed some reassurance that she hadn’t rejected him over this.

Heading back to her room, she changed into a clean shirt and threw the dirty one into the basket for the laundry collection bots to pick up. Sitting on her bed, she let some tears escape for a few minutes before splashing cold water on her face and heading to the hangar to say goodbye to her family.

Carmen, Sofia, Arccoo, Zaraq, and Rylan were all waiting for her. Rylan hung back, his gaze pensive as she hugged the prince and Zaraq goodbye.

Stepping back from Arccoo’s hug, she flashed him a weak smile. “No hard feelings. I mean it.”

He returned her smile with an incline of his head.

Then Carmen and Sofia threw their arms around her. “We’re so sorry,” Carmen whispered. “We know how much this means to you.”

Elena straightened and gave them a smirk. Though a little hurt by their lack of faith, she didn’t want to end their visit on a bad note. “Hey, I’ve still got one more try. Don’t count me out just yet.”

Stepping back, Carmen smiled. “You? Never. We believe in you.”

Sofia patted Elena’s shoulder. “So, channel your inner mad scientist and figure this out. Thryal just isn’t the same without you.”

Elena’s world went a bit fuzzy as her eyes misted over. “I’ll miss you guys, too.”

She watched them climb the steps to the ship and take off with a pang of homesickness. They would be waiting on Thryal, but for now, she had work to do. She turned to Rylan and sighed.

“We need to talk,” she said.

He nodded. “My office.” They walked there together in silence, but it wasn’t the usual kind of quiet, comfortable companionship that filled their hours in the lab. This silence was made of that terrible anticipation that usually accompanied bad news.

Shutting the door, he sat at his desk and gestured for her to sit down across from him. “I take it that Prince Arccoo told you about ending this project,” he said, looking wan and exhausted.

She crossed her arms, her fingers again digging into her flesh and adding a new set of little crescents to complement the old. “Yeah, he said he was going to buy us some time to figure it out first.”

“Elena…” he began.

She shook her head. “No, don’t you ‘Elena’ me. We’ve come too far to give up now, especially with so many lives on the line.”

Didn’t he realize what giving up meant? She would go back to Thryal as a failure, and he would be shipped off to wherever the king and queen wanted. Long-distance relationships rarely ever worked out, especially one as new as theirs. They might never see each other again.

“I’m sure Earth also has a concept of the sunk-cost fallacy.” Sighing, he scrubbed his face. “I know you’re disappointed, but…”

“Disappointed? No, I’m confused and pissed.”

Too much energy buzzed beneath her skin. She had to move, had to get some of it out.

Standing, she paced the room. “This project is your baby. You’ve worked so hard at it and what? You’re just giving up now? We’ve had a setback, yeah, but we’ll figure it out.”

“Not just a setback,” he snapped. “This entire project has been setback after setback. Some things are just doomed to fail.”

Doomed to fail.Just liketheywere doomed to fail if they just rolled over and gave up. She thought he really liked her. Was this relationship just a diversion for him? Was he ready to cast her aside when she was no longer useful, just like all her peers on Earth?

Intellectually, she knew this was an illogical line of thought. His feelings for her and his feelings about the project were entirely separate entities. But he once told her that as long as he had his work, he would be content. Did that mean the work was more important? Would she always come in second to it?

It was completely illogical to feel like the fact that he wasn’t fighting for the project meant he wasn’t fighting for her, but feelings were rarely logical.

“I think you’re wrong,” she said. “I think we can’t just give up on this. We’re close to an answer. I can feel it. We just have to try.”We can’t just give up on us.

“And we’re going to. But Elena, you know that the odds of success—real success that we can show the royals—are vanishingly low. I also have to be realistic. You said yourself that half of all terraforming projects fail, and the other half only last a few years before it’s too expensive to maintain. How likely is it that we can make this one project a success when we have no real precedent for it?”

She straightened, meeting his gaze with a glare and a determined set of her jaw. “Well, sitting here with your thumb up your ass won’t make it any more likely to succeed.”

With that, she turned and slammed the door behind her. Elena had come here to prove herself as a scientist. She was here to save a terraforming project and stop a famine in its tracks.

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