Page 132 of Stars
“Do you hear that?”
Roaring stabbed at Sasha’s eardrums. Phillipa’s screams mixed with theclangand rattle of her furious beating against the airlock. She’d been at it for hours, nonstop rage against the metal that kept them apart. She’d beaten the airlock so hard and so long her fist was nothing but a bloody pulp, ghost-white bones sticking out of flayed skin.
He froze and closed his eyes. Listened.
Phillipa’s racket was giving him a headache, a throb behind his eyes. He shook his head, trying to push it away. Maybe it was hypothermia. His breath fogged in front of his face and turned to snow. A crust of ice had formed over his upper lip and at the corners of his eyes.
Mark’s flashlight had died two hours ago. They floated in the black, clinging together, trying to preserve Sasha’s flashlight as they breathed in tiny, shallow gasps.
Oxygen deprivation led to headaches. Mark was worse off than he was, though. Sasha heard him occasionally whimper, felt him tremble in pain.
Sasha frowned. “What do you hear?”
“Sounds like… static?” Mark pulled away from Sasha and reached for the communications controls. “This is completely dead, though.” The comms system was destroyed, broken parts and pieces floating inDestinybeside them. Occasionally debris brushed past Sasha’s cheek.
Mark moved in the darkness. Sasha followed his progress from bulkhead to bulkhead by sound. Without Mark in his arms, his meager warmth had disappeared, and Sasha’s shivers began again. His teeth chattered, and he bit his tongue hard enough to bleed. Copper filled his mouth. He swallowed.
“Sasha!” Mark’s voice broke through the module, coming from a shuttered airlock collar, a hatch that had been closed and the space converted to storage. “Sasha, get down here!”
He pulled himself hand over hand, feeling his way toward Mark. Phillipa’s rage continued behind him, the bang, rattle, and clang. It was hard to hear anything over her bellows, her hollow shrieks and blood-soaked wrath.
A light winked on and nearly blinded him. Sasha closed his eyes, throwing his arm up. They’d been in the darkness for hours, the station a tomb shrouded in ice that blocked the sun. Squinting, he peered at Mark.
Mark had an EMU helmet on and was smiling, nodding, and talking to empty air.
Blyad, he’s fucking lost it. O2deprivation.
How little oxygen did they have left?
Sasha closed his eyes and exhaled. He grasped Sergey’s ring, still on a chain around his neck under his shirt. The sound of waves came back to him, the feel of sand between his toes. Salt on his lips, ocean spray. Sergey’s voice, so soft, so hesitant, describing his dream of dropping to one knee before Sasha on the happiest day of Sasha’s life.
Sergey had it all wrong. The happiest day of his life wasn’t the day he launched into space.
It was the morning he woke in Sergey’s arms. And the afternoon they spent laughing together, and the evenings over dinner, the nights they lay in bed, sometimes making love, sometimes just holding each other close. And then it was the next day, and the day after that, a lifetime of perfect days in an imperfect world—their universe, their world orbiting a joy that was theirs alone.
Happiness had a shape: a gangly, slender man, hips and skinny chest and angular jaw. It had color, an ocean of azure and turquoise and steel gray, all the shades of blue he could and couldn’t name shifting and colliding inside Sergey’s eyes. It had a sound, the sigh on Sergey’s lips and the purr in Sergey’s voice when he said Sasha’s name. The way Sergey’s laugh rolled over him, tickling up his bones until he couldn’t help but smile. It tasted like Sergey, like his kisses, the salt of his body, the curve of his hip and thigh, the sheen of sweat across his chest and back.
His happiness lived inside Sergey, in the same place Sergey kept Sasha’s heart and part of his soul.
“Sasha!” Mark’s voice was muffled inside the helmet. “Grab a helmet and put it on!” He thrust one into Sasha’s chest.
Mute, he pulled it over his head, staring at Mark, at his smile, so fucking wide it broke Sasha’s heart—
“Sashunya? Are you there?” A voice from the static, tinny and so faint he wasn’t sure if he’d imagined it or not, if he hadn’t just hoped and wished it into existence.
“Sergey?”
“Sashunya!” Sergey cried, a roar following his words, relief coursing over the weak signal. “Blyad,you are alive. You are alive.”
“I am, I am.” He grasped the helmet and tried to push his ear against the speaker, as if he could crawl through the signal and ride the radio waves back home. “How are you contacting us?”
Dan Hillerman spoke. “We’re bouncing a Russian signal off a GLONASS satellite. It will be in range for the next ten minutes.”
“Where are you?” Mark frowned. “What’s going on down there?”
Roxanne’s voice. “We escaped NASA and the government’s martial law. Sergey flew us to Russia, and we’re working out of Roscosmos now. We’re trying to get you home.”
“The president said—”
