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Early morning on the deck came thin and metallic, the sea the color of dull steel under a pale sky.
Ryland Grace pushed the door halfway open with his shoulder, rubbing one eye. The sun was barely leaking over the horizon, and with how early it still was he almost expected to step outside and find the stars lingering stubbornly overhead, but even this weak daylight felt almost painful compared to the clinical artificial lighting inside.
Twelve overnight hours in the lab left the world feeling slightly hypothetical. The previous eighteen before that—spent flying to and from CERN with his terrifying kidnapper-turned-boss-turned-whatever-almost-kind-of-friend—had not helped, especially since she had apparently decided he needed what she called “enrichment time.”
Looking back, the whole trip felt suspiciously like taking a particularly anxious dog to a park so it wouldn’t chew through the furniture, which was a mildly rude analogy but not entirely inaccurate, although in fairness getting to walk through the world’s largest and most advanced particle physics laboratory had been genuinely incredible, like really awesome, and he had to give her credit for that. Still, it had been a long day, and the time zones had stretched it into something closer to geological time.
He had come up only for air, and perhaps the faint hope that caffeine might restart whatever part of his brain handled judgment, although judging by the sympathetic glances from almost every soldier he had passed on the way here, the damage was already fairly visible.
Thankfully the usual 6:30 morning meeting had mysteriously been rescheduled to the afternoon—an event so rare it bordered on supernatural—and he decided not to play ghostbuster in this particular case or investigate too closely whether the schedule change had anything to do with him. Presumably someone had realized it might look bad for the mission if the lead xenobiologist—apparently technically his title now—showed up with puffy eyes and the cognitive processing power of scrambled eggs.
Another soldier spared him a glance, as if calculating whether to let the doctor pass at all. Did he really look that terrible? Grace didn’t dwell on it; that line of thinking tended to spike his anxiety, and anxiety did not mix well with 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine, for him. Speaking of which—oh—he had forgotten to make the coffee he had walked all the way here intending to drink. That was just perfect.
Five chairs stood bolted to the deck near the rail. The unofficial smokers’ corner, a decent place to sit and pretend to be a normal human being for a while.
Three were empty.
One contained Eva Stratt.
Another contained her legs.
Grace stopped.
That explained the last side-eye, then—the one where the soldier was apparently running evaluation who was worthy of bothering the boss with their presence. Cute. They had let him through anyway. No biggie. Definitely nothing to read into.
Well... Here he was. And he was not entirely sure how to proceed without, in fact, bothering her.
“You don't bother me… You just—”
Stratt was not sitting the way he usually saw her, and that was a lot—from up close, there wasn’t a day where he would not sit by her side at least at one meeting, briefing, presentation, consultation, court hearing, consulate stuff—right, what he meant was that the image she usually presented and what was typical to her was: back straight, shoulders squared, posture like she was personally auditioning for the role of Atlas so future biographers would have good reference material.
Instead, here she was curled sideways into the chair, knees drawn up, bare feet—woah—hooked on the edge of the seat, sneakers tossed, not gently or carefully placed, on the deck floor.
The position looked cozy, comfortable, and absolutely catastrophic for her spine. On the other hand, she seemed to possess enough spine to distribute some of it to the rest of humanity, so perhaps she could spare a vertebra or two for a sec.
A tablet balanced against her legs. That part was not surprising. He had barely seen her not working in what felt like… ever.
A coffee cup rested precariously in the hollow of her lap. That, however, was unusual—or at least the fact that there was only a single cup was shocking. On that note, if he were to see her drink tea as well, that would be too much and his brain would simply explode.
But—most startling of all—she was smiling.
Not the thin professional approximation he was used to. Not the flat, judgmental, mildly annoyed, exasperated grimace he was really used to, the kind that scrunched up her nose just a bit. Not the try-to-arrest-me or you-and-what-army smirk. Not even the faintly melancholic grimace.
This was something softer, and oh so private, almost delighted, and somehow mournful at the same time.
Ryland Grace hesitated, suddenly beyond reluctant to intrude on whatever rare celestial alignment had produced that expression.
Eva Stratt looked up anyway. She always caught his eye the moment he entered her general vicinity, like some kind of professionally weaponized peripheral vision.
“Dr. Grace,” she said mildly. “If you are about to ask permission to come aboard the ship again, I remind you that you are already on it.”
He snorted and walked over.
“Yeah, yeah. That wasn’t my best icebreaker,” he admitted. “In my defense, I’m fully aware I have the charisma of a wet sponge.”
He dropped into the chair beside her and leaned back, breathing in the cold salt air. Again, he had to give it to her—living on a ship in the middle of an ocean—was an interesting habitation situation she had forced upon him, but it really did wonders for his asthma.
She made a small huffing sound and looked at him as if he might want to reconsider that statement. He certainly had no intention of doing so; if anything, it only made him want to double down.
“So, what’s up, captain?”
She rolled her eyes and leaned slightly toward him, not changing her laid-back position at all. He had expected her to snap back into form the moment she noticed she was being perceived, but she didn’t—she simply stayed as she was and tipped the tablet slightly so he could see.
Suddenly it occurred to him that he might be intruding on something deeply personal. Which was ridiculous, because he was not intruding—she had literally tilted the device toward him—but his brain did not care about procedural facts when it had decided to panic politely.
Maybe she was here to FaceTime her family. If she had family. Of course she had family—statistically everyone did—but Stratt did not exactly give off the frequent casual videocaller energy.
Still, maybe there were cats involved. She was kind of a cat-person type looking, no? He could not imagine her with a dog. Too much enthusiasm. She could have cats, though—cats she had not seen in far too long, with a sitter sending the occasional photo here and there.
Or perhaps she was planning a well-deserved vacation with a partner—husband, wife, long-term, long-distance, low-commitment, casual girlfriend or boyfriend, whoever—after the apocalypse had politely postponed itself and she was no longer contractually tied to carry humanity’s long-shot chance at survival on her shoulders.
Maybe she was looking at her kids’ messages, photos, drawings… If she had them. She might. She was what, mid-forties? He and she were not that far apart in age. She was a bit older, but she looked great, which was a thought he immediately chose not to examine too closely. She could have a preschooler at home, or a college student, or both, depending on how aggressively her personal timeline had refused to cooperate with work-life balance.
It wasn’t like she used the private jet for personal trips. Ever. And he would know—every time Eva Stratt set foot onto the STRATT JET™, he was there, tagging along. So perhaps there was no grand personal life of hers he would be intruding upon at all.
Hey, twinsies... possibly? He really wanted to know.
“Camaraderie helps them... doing their job....not so much me—”
Ryland Grace forcibly shut down that line of speculation and leaned closer in return, attempting to summon his remaining brain cells and have them do something more useful than this—like, for example, focusing.
Video footage flickered—crowds in a city, an old city by the river, lots of old buildings in an architectural style that Stratt could probably, one hundred percent, tell him the name of. People were waving flags—European Union ones, maybe? Yeah, he knew that one. Plus another flag showed up a lot, possibly Italian? Hard to tell for him.
They were singing loudly and somewhat off-key, together, celebrating.
Grace squinted.
“Uh… soccer?”
“It’s called football, Dr. Grace.”
She clicked her tongue softly and shook her head, clearly regretting even engaging him, in a silent I am not dealing with your Americanisms today, before she chose to explain what he was actually looking at. Nice. Everything was coming up Grace.
“Election night.”
“Ah.” He nodded with the grave seriousness of a man who had absolutely no idea what he was looking at. He was forty-five years old and still had not the faintest clue how the U.S. electoral college worked; this was not his forte. “Riiiight, of course. The—uh—”
He gestured vaguely at the screen, hoping she would take pity on him and elaborate just a bit more.
“—geopolitical implications.”
Eva Stratt took a sip of coffee, then said, after a brief breath, “Hungarian parliamentary elections.”
Grace blinked. “Okay. I knew that!” He definitely did not.
“Did you?”
Not a clue.
She looked up at him, blue eyes glinting through her lashes. The way she was sprawled—a word he would never have thought to use when it came to Eva Stratt—put her slightly lower than him, which somehow felt so fundamentally wrong, like gravity itself had briefly malfunctioned.
Nada.
“Well,” he admitted, “I knew Hungary existed.”
She watched the screen again, but didn’t remove it from his line of sight either.
The crowd had begun singing together again—hundreds of voices rising unevenly into the morning here on the ship and into the night in what he guessed was... Budapest? The melody sounded vaguely familiar, like an old Kanye song—ew—which raised the uncomfortable question of why anyone still listened to Kanye at this point in human history, in this day and age. Or maybe the rapper had sampled this, it was beautiful. The language, however, was completely incomprehensible to him, which probably meant it was Hungarian. Do people in Hungary speak Hungarian? That sounded about right.
Eva Stratt, judging by the look on her face, seemed to understand it perfectly. Or at least understand the situation.
Ryland Grace tilted his head. Lacking the comprehension skills she had, he still did not get it. “So what are you analyzing?” he asked. “Political stability? Coalition projections? Victory speeches? Something ESA might get out of this?”
Eva Stratt shook her head, her previous happiness seeming to mute and pale. For just a second, something bitter crossed her expression—as if he had offended her, though it was so fleeting it might have been imagination—before it disappeared behind another sip of coffee.
“No.”
“Then why—”
She scrunched her nose, the familiar I am trying to remain patient with you look appearing briefly, then handed him the tablet.
He took it. This was something that made her happy, and she was willing to share it with him; he could be too dumb to ruin that for her—and therefore for himself—but he really didn’t want to.
On the screen, flags moved along the crowd in uneven waves, some crisp and official, others improvised, hand-drawn, and half-wrapped around poles. People were laughing, hugging family members, friends, strangers without hesitation, climbing onto benches, railings, and low walls to see better, shouting into the open air.
Old and young stood together without order—sweatpants beside pressed suits, winter coats beside rolled-up sleeves and tank tops—faces flushed from the cold of the night and the warmth of the moment. Some were crying while laughing at the same time, others were filming everything on their phones with shaking hands, and a few simply stood still, smiling like they were trying to memorize the sound—like Eva Stratt was, oh.
Eva Stratt leaned back in the chair, a little further away from him, yet still offering an explanation with a small smile directed at him nonetheless.
“They’re singing,” she said, and it was really as simple as that.
For a moment the wind moved softly across the deck and slapped Ryland Grace across the face. Well deserved.
The sun finally cleared the horizon. It caught in her hair and along her lashes, scattering light like small shinning beads—pearls, almost. Her cheeks were faintly flushed, and her lips carried an unusual warmth of color, as if warmed both, from within, by her own blood, and the sunlight, too hot to a human touch. As if even the weather had decided to participate in the moment she was having.
Ryland Grace pretended to glance from the screen to her, and then back to the screen again. In reality, his eyes barely left her, watching how the sun’s beams mingled with the color of her hair in a kind of optical interference pattern—some part of his brain insisting there had to be a term for it—as it formed a halo out of those scattered pearls of light, a crown.
And then the sun rose higher, turned brighter, and took it away. Just as the Hail Mary, with all the luck in the universe, eventually would. Stratt would restore the Sun and be locked away in a cell, never to feel its warmth again. Wasn’t that what she had told him? Billions of lives are on the line. And to her, when the alternative is the death of your entire species, things are very simple.
Grace had always been a show-don’t-tell person, student, as a person he was a yapper for sure... and now he had been given a star-lit demonstration, as if the universe had finally decided to make the concept legible.
That didn’t mean he had to like it.
He let the moment pass, unsettled by it, because there was nothing he could do for her. Nothing in his skill set that could keep her from facing whatever consequences lay ahead. And yet now he could see what this had been about all along—her love for humanity, the joy, the singing. The singing. It didn’t matter to her how the world would see her and distance itself from her, but how she would see the world—separate from it, yet still witnessing it. And still, it gave her enough meaning, enough momentum, to continue willingly.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “They’re singing. Okay… that will do it.”
Then he smiled, aware that the expression felt slightly detached, as if it belonged somewhere far away from here. But that was just the sign of the times, apparently.
Oh!!! The karaoke?! For the love of Newton, Curie-Skłodowska, and the particle accelerator… Stratt was like annoyingly smart overthinker. What a song choice, huh?
He handed the tablet back, his fingers brushing hers. He didn’t let them linger, pulling away again before it could become too much.
And so Ryland Grace hoped, with his whole heart, that Eva Stratt would at least get to hear about the progress, the success, the restoration—that the melodies of celebration would somehow carry far enough through the air to reach her. Hell, he would take singing lessons if necessary, track down whichever hole they threw her into, and croak the news to her personally.
And maybe the sun too would reach her again someday, giving her back at least a few of those small specks of light—the pearls.
Right now, though, they could sit here together and listen to the singing.