No answer again, but as she drifted through the bell-shaped cabin, her boot caught on the survival kit between the seats.
“Really?” she said, addressing the kit itself as though it were the source of the voice.
She hadn’t touched the thing since she had last used it. She pulled it out now, opening the kit, the combination lock unclasped. (Had she left it that way?) She lifted out the TP-82, the long-barreled handgun. The machete was gone; she had tossed it out with Maigny. She raised the weapon to eye level, as though aiming it at the window … and then released it, watching it twist and float before her like a word or an idea hanging in the air.
She inventoried the rest of the kit. Twenty rifle rounds. Twenty flares. Ten shotgun shells.
“Tell me why,” she said, wiping away a rogue teardrop, watching the speck of moisture sail away. “After all this time—why now?”
She held still, her body barely rotating. She was certain an answer was going to come. A reason. An explanation.
Because it’s time …
The flaming light burst past her window with such silent alacrity that she choked on her own breath. She began to hyperventilate, grabbing the seat back and propelling herself to the window to watch the tail of the comet burn away into Earth’s atmosphere, snuffing itself out before reaching the tumorous lower atmosphere.
She whipped around, again feeling a presence. Something not human.
“Was that … ?” she started to ask, but could not complete the question.
Because obviously, it was.
A sign.
When she was a girl, a falling star streaking across the sky made her want to become an astronaut. That was the story she told whenever called upon to visit schools or do interviews in the months leading up to launch, and yet it was entirely true: her fate had been written across the sky in her youth.
Take it down.
Again, her breath got caught in her throat. The voice—at once she recognized it. Her dog at home in Connecticut, a Newfoundland named Ralphie. This was the voice she heard in her head whenever she would talk to him, when she would rough up his coat and engage him and he would nuzzle against her leg.
Want to go out?
Yes indeed I do I do.
Want a treat?
Do I! Do I!
Who’s a good boy?
I am I am I am.
I’ll miss you lots while I’m in space.
I’ll miss you back, dearie.
This was the voice with her now. The same one she had projected onto her Ralphie. Her and not her, the voice of companionship and trust and affection.
“Really?” she asked again.
Thalia thought about what it would be like, moving through the cabins, blowing out the thrusters until she breached the hull. This great scientific facility of conjoined capsules listing and plummeting from its orbit, catching fire as it entered the upper atmosphere, streaking downward like a flaming burr and penetrating the poisonous crust of the troposphere.
And then certainty filled her like an emotion. And even if she were merely insane, at least she could move without doubt now, without question. And—at the very, very least—she would not be going out like Maigny, hallucinating and foaming at the mouth.
The shotgun shells loaded in manually from the breach side.
She would scuttle the hull to let the airlessness in and then go down with the ship. In a way she had always suspected this was to be her destiny. This was a decision formed of beauty. Born of a falling star, Thalia Charles was about to become a falling star herself.
Camp Liberty