The plastic grow-bag made a sound like wet paper tearing as Vera pulled it from Theo's hand.
He froze, crouched on his haunches beside the lower shelf of the nitrogen-sealed cabinets, one knee pressed into the hydrated clay floor. His fingers stayed splayed where they had been, curled around space. A bead of condensation rolled down the bag's remaining seam and splashed against his knuckle.
"Theo," Vera said.
He did not look up at first. He looked at the slug of bioluminescent culture in her grip, the pale blue glow already waking under her fingers, and then he lifted his gaze to hers. The light from the cabinet bars painted the underside of his jaw in thin blue lines.
"You are not supposed to be in here," she said.
"I know." His voice came out low, roughened at the edges, the way it always did when he had been silent for too long and then had to fill it. "I know that."
He stayed crouched. He did not try to stand, did not shift back, did not invent an exit. That was how she knew he had been caught and not interrupted. A man with a quick lie would already be on his feet. Theo on his heels meant he was tired of himself.
Vera walked the bag to her workbench and set it down under the broad-spectrum lamp. The mycelium threaded through the agar in pale rivers, and where her thumb had pressed the plastic, the cells had dimmed from her body heat. The cabinet from which he had pulled it was marked BP-09 GLIOCLADIUM VARIANS REV. 4 in her own blocky handwriting. She had written it last March, after three months of coaxing the strain to sporulate. She remembered the day because Jin-Soo had brought her a thermos of barley tea to celebrate, and she had laughed and said, "It is not a wedding, it is a fungus."
Now she turned around and folded her arms.
"Ventilation," Theo said. He gestured at the bag with one hand, a slow arc through the humid air. "The corridor scrubbers are throwing particulates. Helena asked me to grab a sample of something absorbent. Something that would not off-gas."
"Helena did not ask you." Vera kept her tone level. She knew because she had spoken to Helena that morning, after the anomaly report came in, and Helena had not mentioned her greenhouse. Helena had mentioned a length of mesh from the engineering stores. "You came in on your own."
"I came in on my own," he agreed.
The greenhouse was quiet except for the soft click of the humidistat cycling the misters. Somewhere behind her, in the row of flowering succulents, a pollinator drone adjusted its position by a quarter inch and resumed its hover. The air was thick, green-smelling, tasting of iron and wet loam. Vera could feel her hair beginning to lift at the roots from the static charge in the clay.
"It is a Gliocladium variant ," she said. "It eats jet fuel and excretes sugars. It has no business in your air duct."
"I will buy you a replacement."
"You cannot buy a replacement. You cannot buy this. It took me fourteen months to stabilize it. It is the only stable culture in the solar system that thrives on refined hydrocarbons." She paused, let the sentence settle. "And you reached through the seal with your bare hand."
She watched him look at his bare hand. A faint smear of agar clung to the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. He rubbed his thumb against his index finger as if trying to dislodge something he could not see.
"I used the sleeve," he said. The sentence was careful, deliberate, the kind of sentence he built when he was trying to look honest. She had heard him build sentences like this in interviews. She had watched his face across a briefing table and wondered how anyone ever believed him.
"You used the sleeve," she repeated.
"I used the sleeve."
"For eleven seconds."
"I did not count."
"I have the usage log." She tipped her head toward the small gray reader mounted at the cabinet's edge. A green pinprick blinked every two seconds. "It will say what you did with it. It will say whether you swabbed the inner seal. It will say whether you put the cap back on the port."
He stood up then. Slowly, as if his knees had earned the rest. He was taller than her by a head, and broader across the shoulders, and when he straightened he had to look down. He did not look down with authority. He looked down the way a man looks at a thing he has decided to be sorry for.
"Vera," he said. "I will fix it."
"You will not fix the culture."
"I will fix whatever you say to fix. I will fix the whole cabinet. I will fix the whole greenhouse. I will fix the whole air system if you want."
"You will fix the irrigation manifold. The primary header. Number four. You cracked it last week when you lost your balance on the ladder."
He blinked. "I did not lose my balance."
"You lost your balance," she said again, and heard the faint dry edge creep into her voice. "You came in here to use the long ladder to reach the upper canopy. You were hung over. You grabbed the manifold to steady yourself. The manifold is plastic and it cracked under your hand and you left."
"I patched it."
"You put a strip of nanofiber tape on a pressurized header."
"It held."
"It held for four hours. Then the leak started. The lower tomatoes are wilting. I have been hand-watering them at dawn every morning." She stepped closer. She did not step back. "You will fix it properly. You will replace the cracked segment with the spare from the storage locker. You will seat the clamps correctly. You will pressurize the line and hold the pressure for fifteen minutes while I watch. If it does not hold, you will do it again. And you will not come back into this greenhouse without asking me."
He looked at her. She saw the thought move across his face like a shadow across a wall, watched him weigh the truth against something else. She saw him decide.
"Understood," he said.
She unfolded her arms. She picked up the bag of culture and walked it back to the cabinet. She opened the inner seal with two fingers, replaced the bag exactly where he had pulled it from, eased the port closed. The cabinet exhaled a soft hiss and settled. She ran her knuckle along the seam to feel for drafts. There were none.
"Thank you," he said, behind her.
She did not turn around. "Go get the spare," she said. "From the lower locker. The gray one with the broken hinge. Bring the wrench with the red tape."
She heard his boots leave, the squeak of the pressure door, the deeper silence after. The misters ticked. A leaf curled slightly on the lower tomato row, its tip browning in a small, patient way. She pressed her thumb to the cabinet glass and felt the cold of it, the slow pulse of the temperature regulation. She was angry. She was also tired, in the way she only got when one of the crew did something careless in her domain. The tired had a particular taste, like the back of her throat after crying, except she had not cried and would not.
She took a slow breath. She straightened a row of vials that did not need straightening. She recalibrated the pH meter because the act of recalibrating calmed her hands.
When she heard his boots again, and the heavier sound of the spare segment knocking against his thigh through the door, she turned around with her arms at her sides. He set the wrench on the workbench with the red tape facing her, the way he had noticed she preferred. He had noticed a year ago. She had not told him she preferred it. He had simply watched her work one afternoon and figured it out, and from then on he had placed things with the red facing her.
She did not thank him for that either.
"Number four," she said. "Under the second walkway. Bring me the pressure gauge from the panel by the door."
He went. He came back. He knelt beneath the junction with the wrench and the gauge in his hands, and she stood two feet above him on the walkway grating and watched him work. She watched the back of his neck, the curl of damp hair there, the way his shoulders moved under his shirt when the joint resisted. He did not complain. He did not narrate. He did the work, and she let the work be enough for now.
The blue light from the cabinets behind him touched the edges of his hands, his forearms, the knuckle of his wrist where the pulse beat under the skin. Somewhere up the corridor, the rest of the station went about its small routines. She did not think about them. She watched Theo Marchetti's hands fix the thing he had broken, and she waited, and the misters clicked, and the greenhouse breathed.
The joint gave at last with a sound like a slow sigh, and the hiss of pressurized water steadied into the murmur she had been missing. The misters resumed their even tick along the walkway. Below her, Theo sat back on his heels and let the wrench rest across his knee, and she watched the way he closed his eyes for one breath, two, the way a man does when he has been holding something tense in his shoulders and finally permits them to fall.
"Number five?" he asked without looking up.
"Number five." She pointed down the corridor toward the far cabinets, where the seedlings in their little square pots kept their silent count under the blue lamps. "South wall, second row from the bottom. Check the seal at the base. I keep getting drift in the humidity log."
He rose, brushing rust from his palms onto the seat of his trousers. The motion left a pale streak on the dark fabric he did not notice. She noticed. She noticed most things about Theo Marchetti these days, which was the problem, and had been the problem since the first week of the rotation when he had arrived on the supply shuttle with his single duffel and his unfinished business and his habit of sitting in the common area after hours with a paperback open on his knee, not turning pages.
He walked the corridor the length of the greenhouse with his head tipped slightly forward, and she followed at a distance of six paces, which was the distance she had decided upon and enforced upon herself for reasons she did not examine. The blue light made his skin look like old parchment. The smell of the chamomile reached her before she had decided to suggest it, the faint green sweetness rising from the small planter near the humidifier where she kept the one indulgence she permitted herself in the working rows, four pots of Matricaria bred up from a university cultivar that had never in its ancestral memory been expected to perform in forty percent of Earth's sea-level pressure.
"Sit," she said, when he had finished the seal and was standing with his hands at his sides in the dimness between two cabinet banks. She pointed to the low stool by the humidifier.
He sat. The stool creaked under him, and he made a small apologetic sound at the stool, as though he had not intended to impose upon it. He was always making those small apologies to furniture, to objects, to the air. He had not made one to her yet. She did not know whether to be grateful or insulted.
She poured the chamomile from the thermos she kept behind the recalibration kit, because of course she kept a thermos behind the recalibration kit, because she was who she was, and there was no point pretending otherwise. The cup she gave him was the chipped white one, the only chipped cup among the matched set, and she gave it to him on purpose so that his fingers would have something to worry at while she watched him not drink.
"You don't like chamomile," he said.
"I like chamomile fine."
"You keep it in the greenhouse because you think the plants like the company."
"That is an absurd thing to say."
"It is also true." He turned the cup in his hands. The chip ran along the rim near his thumb. He did not look at her. He looked at the cup. "You told me that. First week. I remembered."
"You remember a great many things I have said."
"I have a lot of time to remember."
She sat down on the overturned crate across from him, and the distance between them was less than six paces and more than she wanted. The blue light touched the rims of their cups and the knuckles of their hands and did not reach their eyes. In the cabinets behind him, the Matricaria leaned toward the lamps in their patient way, and somewhere a drip fell into the drainage tray with a sound like a metronome set to largo.
"Drink," she said.
He drank. He made a face he tried to hide, and she saw it anyway, the small compression at the corners of his mouth, the way the bitterness of homegrown chamomile, the faint metallic undertone that came from the mineral profile of the regolith amendments, registered against his expectations of how comfort was supposed to taste.
"It is awful," he said.
"It is what we have."
"I know. I am not complaining."
"You are performing a complaint."
"I am performing nothing." He looked at her then, finally, and his eyes in the blue light were the color of the inside of a chestnut, dark and a little wounded. "I am sitting here drinking your awful chamomile because you told me to sit."
"Then finish it."
He drank again, slower this time, as though he had decided to commit to the experience. He held the cup in both hands. She watched the steam curl up past his jaw, and she waited, because Vera Okonkwo had learned long ago that the way to make Theo Marchetti say the true thing was to give him somewhere to put his hands and somewhere quiet to be while the true thing climbed up out of him.
"How is the shuttle?" she asked, lightly, as though she were asking after the weather. She kept her own cup in her lap, untouched. She did not want to drink. She wanted to see what his hands would do.
He did not flinch. That was how she knew.
He set the cup down on the floor between his boots, very precisely, with the chip facing away from her, which was the other kindness he did without being asked, and he said, "It is fine."
"The navigation array."
"It is fully operational."
"The cooling system."
"Within nominal parameters. Jin-Soo finished the diagnostic yesterday. I, ah. I saw the report."
"You saw the report." She nodded. She did not nod because she agreed. She nodded because her own face was doing something she did not want it to do, and the motion was a way of interrupting it. "And yet you are here. In my greenhouse. At twenty-three hundred. Drinking chamomile."
"I broke your irrigation."
"You broke my irrigation yesterday. The report you saw today says the shuttle is fit for departure."
He said nothing. He picked up the cup again and then put it down again, and the small dance of his hands around the porcelain was the most honest he had been all month. She watched the dance. She waited.
"Theo." She used his name the way she used calibrated instruments, with precision and a kind of care. "Tell me why you are still here."
He looked at the cup. He looked at the blue light along the rims of the cabinets. He looked at the small green breath of the chamomile in its pot. He did not look at her.
"I filed the manifest," he said, at last. "The one for the next outbound. I sat with the intake officer. I went over the manifest."
"And?"
"And I sat there for forty minutes, and then I came down here, because the intake officer said the courier window was not until Thursday, and I did not want to go back to my bunk and sit with my paperback and not turn the pages."
"That is not an answer."
"That is the answer." He raised his eyes then, and the look in them was the look of a man who had been cornered into a truth he had not planned to speak, and who was surprised to find that the truth did not, after all, kill him. "I am still here, Vera, because there is no good reason for me to go, and I am very tired of good reasons."
The humidifier ticked. The chamomile leaned. Somewhere up the corridor, the misters exhaled their even rain across the basil and the kale and the small, improbable wheat.
"The navigation array has been operational since Thursday," she said. Her voice came out flatter than she intended, and she heard the flatness and did not correct it, because the flatness was the truth of how she felt. "You have manufactured reasons to stay on base since Thursday."
"I broke your irrigation."
"You broke my irrigation yesterday. On Wednesday you recalibrated my spectrometer without permission. On Tuesday you rewired a relay in cabinet seven that did not need rewiring. On Monday you brought me a faulty O-ring and asked me to file a work order for it."
He opened his mouth. He closed it.
"Theo."
"I know," he said, quietly.
"You have been lying to me in small, repairable increments."
"I have not been lying. I have been. I have been." He stopped. He started again. "I have been delaying."
"You have been delaying in the specific shape of assistance I did not request, until I began to require it, and then you made yourself necessary, and that is a kind of lying, Theo, and you know it is."
He looked at his hands. He looked at the cup. He did not deny it. He had never, in the time she had known him, denied the shape of a thing once she had named it; it was one of the things about him she could not decide whether to admire or be afraid of.
"I do not know how to stay without a reason," he said. "I have never stayed anywhere without a reason. I left my family because I had a reason. I left my last posting because I had a reason. I came here because I had a reason. And the reason went home on the shuttle three weeks ago, and I am still here, and I do not know how to be a person who stays without a thing to fix."
The chamomile cooled between them. The blue light did not change. The misters did not pause. The greenhouse did its slow green work around them, indifferent to the small human confession occurring at its center.
"Then stay," she said.
He looked up.
"Stay," she said again, and her voice was not flat now, and she let it not be flat, because she had decided. "Not for the irrigation. Not for the spectrometer. Not for the O-ring. Stay because I am asking you to stay."
He sat very still. The cup cooled in his hands. Somewhere in his chest, she could see, something that had been clenched for a long time loosened by one degree.
"I do not know how to do that either," he said.
"Then we will learn." She picked up her own cup, the one she had not yet drunk from, and she raised it. "Drink your awful chamomile, Theo Marchetti. We will begin there."
He raised his chipped cup to meet hers, and the sound of porcelain against porcelain was very small in the humming blue room, and outside, somewhere above the regolith, a wind she could not hear moved across the dust, and the station turned, and the greenhouse held.
era found him at 0730, which meant she had been awake since 0600 and had spent an hour and ten minutes moving equipment by herself before deciding she could not move it by herself.
The lower cave system lay two levels beneath the greenhouse, accessible by a narrow maintenance shaft and then a sloping tube of ancient basalt that the original survey team had mapped in exhaustive, unreadable detail. Vera had been making the trip three times a week for four months. She knew every handhold. She knew the spot where the ceiling dipped low enough that she had to turn sideways. She knew the place where the regolith dust collected in a fine pale drift, like dirty snow, and ruined the knees of her coveralls.
She had told no one about the trip.
Theo found her anyway. He found her crouched beside a steel-frame soil coring rig at the edge of the shaft, one hand braced against its housing, the other gesturing at it with the kind of helpless frustration usually reserved for jammed printers and broken promises. The rig was not light. It weighed approximately ninety kilograms fully assembled, which was approximately forty kilograms more than Vera weighed, which was the precise problem.
"You are going to kill your back," he said from the corridor behind her.
She did not turn around. "Good morning to you too."
"It is a factual observation."
"Then make it to someone who asked."
He came closer. His boots made the soft grinding sound of regolith on deck plating. He stopped beside the rig and looked at it the way he looked at mechanical things, with a quiet, assessing attention that she had come to recognize as the closest Theo Marchetti ever got to tenderness.
"You cannot carry this down," he said.
"I was going to disassemble it."
"It has forty-seven bolts."
"I counted."
"You counted wrong. It has fifty-three."
She turned to look at him then. Her eyes were sharp with the particular irritation of a person who had been working alone for too long and had grown used to the efficiency of it. Her hair was pulled back under a worn gray cap. There was a smear of pale dust across one cheekbone.
"How do you know how many bolts it has?"
"I read the manual."
"Nobody reads the manual."
"I read the manual," he said again, in a tone that allowed for no argument, "and I am not letting you take this thing down the shaft in pieces and then try to reassemble it in a lava tube with magnetic dust interfering with your tools. You will lose three bolts. You will lose your temper. You will say something you will later claim you did not say."
"I never do that."
"This morning you called the spectrometer 'a vindictive little machine' and threatened to donate it to a museum."
"It is vindictive."
"It is inanimate."
"So is Marcus Webb and he is also vindictive."
The corner of his mouth moved. He did not smile, not quite, but something shifted in the architecture of his face. "Let me help you."
"I did not ask for help."
"You did not. I am offering anyway."
"I have a system."
"Your system involves you carrying ninety kilograms down a two-level shaft by yourself at seven in the morning after you drank chamomile until midnight."
She straightened. Her knees popped. She ignored this. "How do you know what time I went to sleep?"
"You left a cup on the bench. The dregs were cold. I estimated."
"You are a strange man, Theo Marchetti."
"Yes," he said. "Is that a yes to help?"
She looked at the rig. She looked at the shaft. She looked at him, and the look was long, and in it there was the particular negotiation of a person who had been the eldest of four siblings and had carried things alone since she was eleven years old and had not yet fully learned that sometimes the carrying could be shared.
"Fine," she said. "But you touch my samples and I will end you."
"I would not touch your fairy dust rocks."
"They are not fairy dust rocks."
"You called them that yourself. Last week. To Helena."
"I was being poetic."
"You said, and I quote, 'these rocks are like fairy dust from a planet that has never learned to lie.'"
"I was tired."
"You were being poetic," he agreed. He bent and found the release lever on the coring rig's frame. "Hand me the trolley."
She handed him the trolley. Their fingers brushed against the cold metal of the handle, and neither of them mentioned it, and neither of them needed to.
The descent took forty minutes. The shaft first, which required a small freight platform that Theo operated with the grim competence of a man who had once coaxed a broken rover across a frozen Syrian plain in 2014. Then the basalt tube, which was older than human language, the walls rippled and frozen from a time when the moon had still been warm enough to bleed. The dust here was finer than the dust in the greenhouse. It got into everything. It tasted like old teeth and old stone.
"You flew the resupply shuttle last Tuesday," Vera said, partway down the tube, when they had stopped to reposition the rig on a ledge.
"Yes."
"Helena told me."
"She would."
"She said you took the southern approach over the crater rim."
"It was the safer approach."
"It is the longer approach."
"It is the safer approach," he said again, in the tone that meant he knew what she was going to say next and was choosing not to defend himself.
"We lost twenty-three minutes on that approach."
"We gained a margin against solar flux."
"The forecast was nominal."
"The forecast was nominal until it was not. I have flown in places where forecasts were nominal, and then they were not, and people died. I do not die in those forecasts anymore if I can help it. Even here."
She was quiet for a moment. The only sound was the soft hiss of their breathing and the faint tick of cooling rock.
"That is fair," she said at last. "That is annoyingly fair."
"I try."
"You do not try. You are annoyingly fair by nature. It is one of your many flaws."
"What are the others?"
"Cataloging them would take all morning."
"Then perhaps later."
They reached the lower cave at 0820. The chamber opened around them like a held breath. The ceiling rose into darkness. The floor was a scumbled pattern of basalt and ancient dust. Vera had set up her field station against the far wall, a folding table and a sealed container of sample boxes and the spectrometer she had threatened to donate, which sat on its tripod looking, in the low blue work light, almost like a small and judgmental creature.
Theo set the rig down at the spot she indicated, which was a smooth patch of basalt marked with a single piece of pink tape. He straightened slowly. His shoulders were tight. His hands were grey with dust to the second knuckle.
"Where do you want it," he said.
"Here is fine."
"I meant angled."
"Angled how?"
"Slightly tilted. Toward the vent. If there is any seepage, it will pool on the downhill side of the housing, not inside it."
She looked at him.
"I read the manual," he said again, before she could speak.
"You read the manual," she repeated.
"I did."
She walked over and tilted the rig by herself, three degrees, no more, exactly as he had described. Then she came back and stood beside him and looked at the small neat field station, and at the dust, and at the chamber opening up around them into its long patient dark.
"Thank you," she said. The words came out stiff, as if she had to push them past something. "For the help."
"You are welcome."
"I am still annoyed at you about the shuttle."
"That is fine."
"I am also still annoyed at you about the O-ring."
"That is also fine."
"I am going to be annoyed at you about many things for a long time."
"Then I will stay for that too," he said.
She did not look at him when he said it. She was looking at the dust on her hands, at the fine grey powder caught in the lines of her palms, at the small evidence of work shared. But her shoulder, which had been set at an angle of stubborn independence since the moment he had found her at the shaft, eased by one degree.
"Good," she said. "Then bring the sample cases. I will show you where the fairy dust is."