The fireplace stuck out from the lunar surface like a middle finger directed at my future.

From a distance, it looked just like the fireplace at my house in Pasadena, all limestone and granite, sparkling in the sun. The stone was covered in black ash, as if it had burned, like things could burn here on the fucking Moon. In the fireplace, dusted in lunar regolith kicked up by bootprints that we didn’t make, lay a kicked-over arrangement of charred wood—as if someone had decided that Mare Crisium was a great place to play Little House on the Prairie.

“Please say you’re seeing this,” I said.

Arjun smirked. “What, Kate? The fireplace? Or the dancing giraffes?”

I scowled. Arjun was our small survey team’s other geologist. He cracked extremely bad jokes when he was nervous, but right now I was in no mood for humor. It was after dinner and my oxygen tank was already barking at me for being irresponsible. We’d overstayed our welcome at the A5 survey site and taken the shortcut near Dorsa Tetyaev in our latest attempt to slake our employer’s unending thirst for rare-earth minerals. The long Moon’s night was coming, but two weeks of complete darkness didn’t exactly mean Lunatech was going to be lenient with our quotas.

It was amazing how a mission I thought I would love would end up as such a boring mess—just rocks, more rocks, sometimes scandium or yttrium or helium-3, but mostly more fucking rocks.

Arjun fished out his camera. “We didn’t bring an augmented reality set, right? We’re really seeing this?”

“We’re really seeing this.”

“How the hell are we really seeing this? Do we have time to stop here and figure it out?”

I checked my oxygen tank. Figure it out? All I wanted was to go back to Pasadena. Not that I could. “Three minutes before we eat into the buffer zone. We’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

“Should we tell Harper?”

“Tell her what, that we’ve been on the Moon so long we’re hallucinating?”

Arjun craned his neck, and the sunlight reflected off his helmet, bright enough to make me blink. “You know, this looks like something from my mom’s place,” he said.

“Doesn’t look very Indian,” I responded.

“As if you know what Indian looks like.” He snorted back a laugh.

I checked my footing and bounced off the rover. “I could, if we had AR out here.”

We edged around the site, two ungainly, overly careful lunar tumbleweeds halting and stumbling and leaving footprints that no wind would ever wash away, as clear as the craters and the dorsae and the mare and the Apollo site. Above us was a logy Earthrise, and if you squinted, you could almost catch the ash curling in the atmosphere over what was left of Los Angeles.

I had just convinced myself that we were looking at some sort of prank by the last survey team when I found the damning details in stone: the initials R&K carved into the lintel, chipped off with a pocketknife, as jagged as the day I made them.

In Pasadena.

Riley & Kate.

I didn’t tell Arjun about what the initials meant. I didn’t even mention it. He’d think I was finally going crazy. What other explanation could there be? That someone from Lunatech wandered into the radiation zone, packed up my dead girlfriend’s chimney, and recreated it here above the mare?

They already thought I was enough of a problem.

I stumbled into the airlock behind Arjun, samples from the formation shoved into my utility pocket. Our mission lead, Harper, was waiting with her face mashed against the airlock window. Arjun and I jostled each other like siblings in a mudroom for two minutes until the airlock filled with atmospheric mix and the door hissed open, revealing the cramped storage room—all muffled steel and white plastic, every single space taken up by drawers and cabinets and medical storage.

Harper’s mouth twisted downwards as we walked in, her Manchester accent deeper than normal. “You’re way over schedule. Both of you are better than this,” she said, tapping her watch.

I fought an angry, baffled knot in my throat the size of a walnut and tried to lighten up the atmosphere. “Sorry, Mom.”

It didn’t work. Harper went red-faced. “I’m not your mom. I’m your boss. And I don’t need to remind you that you could die out there, just like the members of the first Mare Crisium mission. What if you didn’t come back?”

Arjun mumbled an apology under his breath and bounced over to his suit cabinet. He toggled the release on his chestplate, then started to strip down to his underwear. Sweat had formed a salty, jagged crag on his black t-shirt.

I was less interested than he was in defusing the situation. I released my own chestplate and dragged off my gloves. “Look, Boss. You keep on saying that Lunatech wants results. We got you results. The A5 site looks promising. Fairly scandium-rich, with enough from the lanthanide series for three or four trips for Curtis and Tran.”

“Samples?” Harper said.

“In the bag.”

Harper rubbed her eyes. She looked exhausted. “Okay. Look, Kate. I know not being able to go back to Earth after the bomb was rough on you. I know I’ve been rough on you. I know we have to live without AR here, and that stinks, too.” She choked down something tough, something bitter. “But we all lost people. You can’t use the way you feel as a crutch to screw up out there.”

I pulled on my Lunatech sweater. The synthetic fabric felt like steel wool, but at least it was warm. “That’s not what’s going on,” I said.

Harper sighed. “All right. Dinner in five.”

“You go on. I’m going to put some hours in down the hall.”

Harper paused. “If you insist. Come on, Arjun. Curtis and Tran heated up nutraloaf for dinner.”

“Yay,” muttered Arjun, the ceiling lights catching the grey in his close-cropped black hair.

The tight ball in my throat yawned open, and sudden, shaking heat spread across my shoulders. I felt resentful and terrible and embarrassed, and ugh, why I was crying? Arjun opened his mouth to say something, but I slammed my locker and turned my back to the door. He swallowed whatever it was he was going to say, and when I turned around to apologize, he and Harper were already gone.

The lights blazed bright in the common room down the hall. It was the laughter that stopped me short: lazy, end-of-the-day, family-room laughter. It was Curtis complaining about the nutraloaf, Tran saying she’d deal the next round of rummy, like they didn’t feel the crush of Earth at war wailing above them, like they had been able to look away when California was nuked and Riley with it.

Like Lunatech had actually given them time off or cared that we’d watched it all happen from dead, dusty Mare Crisium.

The lab was dark and quiet and far more my speed. I flipped on the lights and laid out the samples we’d taken that afternoon. They looked ashen and dull, exactly like regolith—far different from the mica-bright, hard granite I thought I’d chipped off in the hot sunlight. I listened to the mass spectrometer whir and whine and wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my sweater.

Screw tears. Crying was wasting water.

Lunatech had offered me the survey post because of my research into rare-earth minerals, but it had been Riley that convinced me to take it—just after Christmas, standing in the moonlight in front of my parents’ house with her freezing white hands pressed against my cheeks, the snowflakes falling fat and beautiful on her lips and eyelashes. And there had been the save-the-world aspect to Lunatech’s offer, too, even if when I thought of the world I thought only of Riley.

But that had been Michigan and this was the Moon, and in between, terrorists had nuked California.

The spectrometer beeped.

Basalt, the monitor said. Anorthocite. Dunite.

I smacked it. “That’s not right, you stupid—”

“Hey!” Arjun, his voice hard-edged, appeared beside me with a memory card balled in his fist. He was already in his pajamas. “It’s not like we can just pop up to the store and replace that thing.”

I pointed to the results. “What we saw this afternoon was granite and sandstone and Portland cement, not more stupid moon rocks. I’m being gaslit by a mass spectrometer.”

Arjun peered at the machine, an unopened juice pouch clutched in his right hand like an afterthought. I shoved the samples back into the machine and started it up again, resisting the urge to tap out an impatient tattoo on the nearby table. Without augmented reality feeding real-time results at the top of my vision, I’d have to wait until the stupid thing was done. I’m sure plenty of science was done before AR, but I can’t imagine it was fun.

Arjun, too, had his eyes on the still-blank monitor. “It’s a weird formation, to be sure, and the moon’s a geologic vomitorium, but my mother’s hearth in Kumartuli was made of local stone.”

I cut him off. He was making no sense. “Did you look at the photos yet?”

He opened his left hand and dropped a memory card into my palm. It was warm and slightly wet. I winced. “I thought we could do that together. And I brought you some juice, since you skipped dinner.”

“Did Harper put you up to that?” The moment the words came out, I regretted them.

Arjun flinched, then put the cup on the table next to the spectrometer. “I get it, Kate. This is hard on all of us. And I understand that everybody mourns in different ways. But you don’t have to pull away like this, and you certainly can’t keep on treating us the way you are. It’s a small base, and there’s no AR to make things easier, and we all have to get along.” He sighed. “You know, we could even be friends, if you just tried.”

I felt my face flush. He saw it, too. “You can’t understand.”

“Try me,” he said.

“India wasn’t even involved.”

“We don’t have any choice in that,” he said. “Nature is nature.”

I nodded. He was right, of course, like he so often was. The wind was the wind, and it would carry the radiation that killed the West Coast into the stratosphere, across the ocean, into the bread and water and intercellular space of every human being alive. I bit my bottom lip to keep myself from sticking my foot in my mouth again. My shoulders felt tight. My chest burned.

Maybe I was being unfair.

“I just don’t know what to do,” I said. “I’m up here, and everything else . . . is down there.”

He sighed, then reached forward, tapping the memory card in my palm with one finger.

“Take a look, and then come to dinner. It’s really good nutraloaf and Tran’s having a bad night at rummy,” he said.

Tran always has a bad night at rummy, I wanted to say, but I plugged the memory card into the computer instead.

The pictures depicted nothing but the same damned thing we saw every day: rocks. Regolith. The empty, shattered surface. No mica-bright granite, no impossible initials. No fireplace, no room where Riley and I had spent hours reading books and sharing dreams and planning our life together. My heart clenched. I opened my mouth to yell at Arjun for screwing up, but the criticism died on my tongue.

Our footprints lay exactly where I thought they’d be, circling the place where the fireplace should have stood.

The camera had recorded no structure at all.

“We did see a fireplace, right?” I said.

He nodded. “Clear as day.”

“I was just making a joke about hallucinations.”

“I don’t know. We’ve been out here long enough.” He sighed, then plunked a straw next to the cup. “We’ll go by tomorrow. Get an explanation. Come on down the hall?”

I almost said yes. Instead, I looked away. “I can’t.”

He shrugged, then retreated down the hall, to the laughter and the light. I took the cup and stabbed the straw through the lid with entirely too much force, spraying myself. It was strawberry mango, my favorite flavor. The small kindness made me want to follow him—to seek warmth and company from my co-workers for my aching animal heart. When my feet moved, though, they deposited me right in the solitude of my cubby as they always did, and I drifted off to the sound of Curtis chuckling over his latest win.

I dreamed of Riley: brown-haired and smiling and surrounded by Christmas lights and flurries of snow. I dreamed the lights dimmed, the flurries turned to ashes, the skies went as black as the soil around her feet, that the Shackleton Crater swallowed her in the deep, black ice they’d discovered there, that her bones shattered into powder, scattering over the everdark stone. I dreamed of my work at Caltech, of bombs obliterating Pasadena, of ghosts in my throat, of being buried alive on Mare Crisium, regolith salty between my teeth.

At breakfast, I shoveled a protein bar into my mouth as Harper read the daily assignments. Tran sucked down black coffee, her eyes grey with fatigue, her mouth twisted into a sour curve. She always stayed up far too late, using her comm time to talk to family in the Vancouver refugee camps. Curtis had already finished his breakfast and was idly shuffling the worn deck of cards he kept next to a picture of his ex-wife. The only one looking at Harper was Arjun, who seemed bright-eyed and ready to go.

My mind wandered back to the photos he’d taken—their spectacular, peculiar emptiness, the bootprints that clearly weren’t ours, the endless grey sea beyond. Earth brushing the horizon, teasing horror and hope.

There was a very simple explanation to what we’d seen—we’d encountered an augmented reality program, just like the ones I used in my work at Caltech, like stores and restaurants used all over the world to personalize user experiences. But AR needed routers and receivers and was prohibited up here on the lunar frontier, ripped out of every suit and rover and system and brain sent outside Armstrong Haven, in case a member of the survey team might misjudge a navpoint, choose the wrong footing, fall straight off a dorsa and die screaming at the bottom of a thousand-foot crater.

In Lunatech’s central colonies, the rich twirled in their luxury apartments, AR braingear twisting their white walls and plastic chairs into Italianate mansions or mid-century penthouses or Miami beach condos. Out here, though, we had to make do with bad jokes and gin rummy simply because our monkey brains couldn’t judge the proper size of a rock when denied the right reference points.

Harper’s voice cut through my reverie. “Kate. You’re not even listening to me.”

“I was,” I lied through my last mouthful.

“The CEO has moved up the schedule on the AR installations in the Whitman wing, so our own schedule is changing. You and Arjun will head back to A5, extract at least 200 grams of scandium and get it on the rocket before nightfall. Be careful, and don’t stay out too long.”

The number burnt in my chest like a rubber band around my aorta. “I can’t do that. It’s not possible,” I said.

“Curtis can do it,” said Harper.

“He’s a miner,” I said. “I’m a geologist.”

Curtis stopped chewing. “We’ve already been scheduled for five hundred grams of lanthanides up near B2,” he said. “There’s no way we’d make it to A5 in time.”

I grabbed the table and leaned forward, staring at Harper. “And you shouldn’t have to. Boss, I said the vein was promising, not that I could load up a shipment without a full, proper survey of the area. Asking us to rush this is to sacrifice all thoughts of safety, and last time I checked, none of us had replaceable parts.”

Harper’s fingers tightened on her chair. “I know the schedule’s bruising, but there’s a new resident shuttle arriving at Aldrin the Tuesday after next, and you need to do your best.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t,” I said.

There was silence at the table.

“Shouldn’t build out Aldrin?” Harper said. “Or shouldn’t do our best? What are you going to do, Kate? Quit? Are you going to walk home?”

She pointed towards the airlock.

Tran sighed, rubbing her eyes. “There are tricks, Kate, we can show you how to preload the—”

I cleared my throat to cut her off. “Let the one-percenters play cards for a week or two. It’s not like they’re going anywhere.”

They were all staring at me now.

“And why are they doing any of it, anyway? Have you ever thought about what’s going to happen when we’ve built their augmented utopia, the war doesn’t end, and all the rich people rapture up here and leave the Earth to die?”

Tran looked away, clearly uncomfortable. I know I should have stopped, but the words burst out of my mouth like they’d been dammed up behind my tonsils ever since California fried. Maybe they had. “Have you thought about how the environment down there is collapsing and they haven’t changed one word of their business plan? We could be doing so much more. Lunatech could be saving people. On Earth. Where it matters. And you’re sending me out to get samples, so they can build AR routers for rich people that couldn’t give a shit.”

Harper licked her lips. When she spoke, her voice sounded like someone had worked it over with sandpaper.

“Even if we wanted to do something more,” she said, quietly, “even if we did, what do you think would happen? We’re all very small cogs, in a very large machine, with very big tires. We have to deliver results.”

“Yes. But—”

“I think it’s in all our best interests to clear every single milestone we’re given,” Harper said, almost as quiet as the Moon itself.

Tran swallowed the last of her nutraloaf and stood, her fingers spread on the table, turning her eyes on me, her cheeks suddenly flushed. “You think you’re the only one suffering here, Kate. That your lady balances out my aunt and my cousins. I’ve been nice to you because I know how much it hurts, but to have to sit here listening to you spin out your paranoid fantasies? I’m done. You know what we can do, Kate? Our jobs. You might get to go back to some fancy university when you’re done here, but some of us have to work for a living.” Her eyes closed. “First one in a suit gets first shift on the comm tonight.”

None of them looked at me as they rose from the table.

I went to work. I had to.

Didn’t mean I wasn’t burning like the redwoods. Like the montane forest. Like Los Angeles. Burning to a fucking cinder.

Arjun was quiet for most of the journey, which suited me just fine. He sat there shaking in his seat as the rover clattered over dusty grey stone, staring at dark California hanging above. He didn’t argue when I yanked the steering column away from the track that would lead us back to A5, taking the detour up Dorsa Tetyaev instead. We saw the fireplace coming for a very long time, standing craggy and wrong against the darkness of the stars, and I slowed the rover until it came to a gentle stop, thirty feet from the standing stones.

“Still see that?” I asked.

Arjun nodded. “It’s the fireplace at my mother’s house. The old house, the one in Kumartuli.”

“Well, I’m seeing the fireplace at my place in Pasadena. And unless someone packed it up and stuck it on a lander and carted it out here . . .”

Arjun pulled out the geological scanner. “Okay, so definitely AR, with differentiated effects. But how? There’s no power structure, no network. And even if there was, our suits don’t have receivers. How are we seeing different things? Are you sure your braingear is off?”

I looked around. Rocks. Rocks as far as the eye could see. Rocks and stars and death. “Surgically removed, yeah.”

“But there’s nothing here.”

“That we can see,” I said.

We looked at each other for a very long moment, and he went for the geological scanner on the back of the rover.

Geology. If I didn’t understand people, at least I could understand science. I let the familiar cadence of the work control my hands, trying to ignore the giant granite question standing right in front of me. When we were done setting up the scanner, Arjun turned it on and stepped back. We felt a slight frisson in our boots as the machine ran a search, sending sonar waves into the ground, registering obstacles and rare-earth minerals and the optimal place to have Curtis and Tran install their extractors and grinders. An itch fired up at the end of my nose, and I tried to scratch it by smashing my face against the speaker in my helmet. Just another one of the small indignities I had to put up with traipsing around in a suit all day.

I walked up next to the fireplace and ran my glove over the initials, like I could touch for one burning second the dreams Riley and I spoke about, sitting in the silvering morning light, burning our mouths on kisses and hot coffee: muddy boots by the door, the crayon scrawls posted on the refrigerator from our future kids, the way she’d go grey in fits and spurts, the laugh lines that would have eventually tucked in near her eyes. I expected my fingers to go right through the thing. Any good augmented reality matrix falls apart when you touch it, because AR is light and smoke and holotricks and empty calories.

Not this.

I pressed in, feeling the resistance of granite, the shudder of the layers of my suit compressing against my skin. No AR matrix I’d ever heard of had even come close to real haptic feedback, but here it was, happening right underneath my fingers. If Lunatech had this kind of technology, why hadn’t they already cornered the market with it? And why was it randomly out here on Mare Crisium?

“Holy crap,” I said. “Arjun, I can touch this.”

“Just a sec. Scanner says there’s something underneath where you’re standing,” Arjun said. He walked slowly, purposefully, in the careful half-shuffle of the moonbound. I heard his breathing, if not his footsteps. “Unknown composition. Three meters. Let’s dig it up and see what it is.”

“Okay,” I said.

It seemed like a good decision at the time.

I used to think nights in Pasadena were quiet.

I know what quiet means, now. These days, when I recall nights on Earth, I hear a clamor so loud I’m amazed I got any sleep at all: the crackling of insects outside, the sobbing of night birds, Riley’s skin, sticky and bright, slithering against the sheets. The muffled hiss of the air conditioner when we had enough money to pay for it. The laughter of my co-workers, the ticking of lab machinery, the planes above the college, all of that human noise wrapping around my ears, cracking open my skull.

And it’s quiet on Mare Crisium, absolutely bleeding silent, except for the noise you make yourself: dark breathing in the suit-comms, whispered swears when you think you’re talking to yourself. Every other sound, you touch. The screech of the rover’s engine comes only through vibrations felt in your feet and your fingers. Even the juddering impact of the trowel against the dusty moonscape is all you get, tough breaks of matter coming up against matter, the rush of black impact.

We dug, careful and sure, like archaeologists. Someone had disturbed this ground before. The way the regolith lay, the way it was packed loose and littered, the way it had been brushed by unknown bootprints—none of it was natural. A foot below the surface we caught sight of something bright and polished. I shone my flashlight in to find a cylinder of curved metal, worked by some sort of human machine, glistening in the sun of the lunar afternoon like a phoenix egg about to break. I spied a familiar white etching on the bottom.

“Look, the Lunatech logo,” I asked.

“An AR router,” Arjun said, after a moment. “And there’s no power source.”

“It’s too small to be a router. Unless it’s a prototype.” I paused. “Are we looking at a prototype?”

I caught a trickle of motion at the corner of my eye—a dark puddle of shadow, at first, then a person, made of arms and legs and my quiet fear. Arjun turned seconds before I did, and his mouth went wide.

“Mama,” he moaned.

The visitor wasn’t Arjun’s mother. It was Riley. She walked around us in a circle, barefoot on the moon’s surface in a white cotton dress, backlit by the encroaching cloak of night, bare sunlight streaming from her fingers and slipping through her hair like she wasn’t dead, like she hadn’t evaporated two hundred and forty thousand miles away.

Arjun scrambled, falling back, his eyes full of stars. “Mama, what are you doing here?” he said.

As Riley walked, the lunar regolith reformed underneath her, slithering out in echoing circles from her feet, becoming the dented laminate flooring of our home: the old, cat-scratched red couch, the dented coffee table where she’d left her copy of The Odyssey the night before I left for Canaveral. Walls rose around me—covered in the old, peeling wallpaper we’d planned on replacing with AR as soon as we could. The whole damned thing was so real, and so right, and so achingly familiar that I wanted to unhook my helmet right here, wanted to sit down with her, wanted to kiss her stupid face until she laughed and asked me to stop.

In fact, I felt like I should. The suit seemed more constrictive than ever. The itch had spread to my entire body. I had to get my helmet off to talk with her. I simply had to. The feeling was overwhelming. And why not? I was home. The black, eternal night disappeared under the white popcorn ceiling as sunlight dappled the carpet. In the window, beyond the gauzy drapes with their embroidered tulips, I saw the front yard with its stubby, browning grass, the orange tree with its twisting leaves and ripening fruit. I heard the sound of the coffee machine popping in the kitchen. I was home. With Riley.

But my hand stopped right before I flipped the latch on my helmet. Beyond the yard, the neighborhood blurred into house-shaped boxes, like a camera taking a picture with shallow depth of field. I squinted. I had never cared much about California; my world had been Caltech, the lab, Riley. I hadn’t paid attention to the neighborhood. I turned to tell her that something was wrong with the neighborhood, and I met her eyes—

—her missing eyes—

—she had no eyes—

Vomit rose in my throat and I stumbled back. I heard a clicking noise, retching, a gasping scream that seemed buried in muffled cotton.

I whirled. Arjun was on the ground, his legs kicking, his helmet cracked at the neck joint, as if he’d gone through with the notion I’d seriously entertained. Adrenaline kicked in and I called his name, clawing toward him over the jagged rocks. I slammed his helmet back into place and fixed the seal, then rolled him over to make sure his oxygen system was still working. How many minutes had he lost? How much air? He wasn’t conscious.

The spell broke. The living room was gone: the fireplace, the couch, the book, the window looking out on the half-forgotten desert. Only Riley remained. She perched on the rover, black-eyed, her hands crossed. At her feet shone the circular router, at rest against the dusted back wheel. It must have rolled over to the rover when Arjun dropped it.

I checked Arjun’s vitals. He was out, but alive. The event had lasted at least fifteen seconds. He hadn’t expelled his breath when the helmet came off, and petechiae dotted his face.

Repressurization, I thought. The suit’s med system would give him some of that, but I needed to get him inside, to the machines that could save his life. Choking panic helped me drag Arjun to the rover, and strap him in and careen back to base, juddering and jumping like a racecar driver—Riley’s ghost perched there the whole time, dust kicking up around her bare feet.

Yes, I brought the cylinder.

I’m a scientist. I needed to know what it was. What it could do. If it had done something to Arjun, to me, something irreversible.

Riley always said my curiosity was my most dangerous quality.

I radioed ahead to let Harper know to break out the medkit and charge the pressure chamber. At the base, I left the rover off the solar charger and shoved the router in my pack. I stuck my fingers in Arjun’s collar, then dragged him over the rainy grey ground towards the airlock.

“No,” came Harper’s voice through the comm. “No way.”

“Arjun’s hurt, Boss,” I said. “Open the door.”

I could see her face through the porthole. Her cheeks had gone white, and she was shaking.

“How do I know it’s you?”

I slammed my palm against the window, fingers splayed. “Harper!”

“You brought company,” Harper said, pointing. “A dead woman.”

I blinked. Turned around. Riley was standing there, silent, staring at me. Laminate spilled out under her feet, a rug, The Odyssey. I wanted to take my helmet off, to be with her. . . .

No. I tore away, focused on Harper, on the door, on the rocks stacked around me in piles of scandium and yttrium and regolith. “It’s all right. It’s just augmented reality. Whatever’s there, whoever you’re seeing, they’re not real. It’s just hijacking your optic nerve and whatever you dreamed about last night. Or something. We’ll figure it out. Let us in.”

Harper’s face had gone a corpselike grey. She pushed off her side of the airlock, stumbling back into the table full of medical devices she’d set up.

“If I’m seeing Allie, you found the router.”

I whacked the window again, this time with my fist. “Open the damn door.”

“Leave it outside.”

“What about Curtis and Tran?” I asked.

“They’re not due back until tonight. We’ll get Arjun hooked up, then you can drive it back out to where you found it.”

“It can’t hurt you—”

The words ripped from Harper’s throat with a harrowing anguish I didn’t think her capable of delivering. “But it did hurt me! Why do you think I left it out there? Why do you think Allie’s dead, with the rest of them? Why do you always have to be such a—”

“Okay, your orders are heard. Coming in.” My hands shook. The rest of them? Did she mean the first Mare Crisium mission?

I dropped the pack by the door. Harper peered at me, at my empty, open hands, like I was a criminal coming to a precinct to surrender. I started the airlock sequence. Cycle-in took two minutes, but felt like hours. When the inside door finally opened, I dragged Arjun towards the medicine cabinet, and we knelt over him, Harper shoving an oxygen tube up his nose, me undoing my helmet and putting it aside.

“This isn’t great,” Harper said. “How long was he exposed?”

“I don’t know. I was affected by the router. Fifteen seconds?”

I expected her to tear me down again, but her eyes flickered to the porthole, and she slapped on a pair of latex gloves. “Okay. He’ll be fine.”

“You going to tell me what happened?”

She hesitated, slipped the pressure sack over Arjun’s lolling body, and we breathed a mutual sigh as the machine clicked on and started to hack and hum. Harper peeled off her sweaty gloves, then looked at me. “They wanted us to be comfortable out here. And Allie, she—it’s complicated, she—”

She was going to tell me. Her mouth hung open. I could see the words bubbling in the tears behind her eyes.

But then the screaming began.

In the rush to save Arjun, we’d forgotten about the long night.

We’d forgotten Curtis and Tran would be home early.

Harper rushed to the porthole door, then pointed at me. “Suit,” she said, “now,” and rushed to her own locker. I grabbed my helmet and locked it tight, then went to the airlock. Riley stood there, just outside, smiling, her white teeth wide, her eyes missing, the area where they should sit as dark as midnight in irradiated Runyon Canyon. As welcoming as a black hole.

Tran staggered towards something unseen, her hands going for the lock on her helmet. “Auntie, no,” she said. “I know it hurts, I’m right here, just come closer, we’ll take you inside—”

“Tran!” I slammed the comm. “It’s not real!”

“It’s okay, Kate,” said Curtis. “Cassie’s here. She can help. She says she was wrong! She wants to come home.”

I did the math: how long they had to live, compared to how fast we could get out there. The math sucked, and left no room for my boss, so I threw myself in the airlock. Harper realized I wasn’t going to wait, and dragged on her boots, half-stumbling with the rest of her suit clutched in her hand, but I couldn’t wait, I couldn’t, and I slammed my hand against the toggle to feel the familiar shaky thrill of the airlock engaging.

Harper screamed at me as she brought down her chestplate, and I turned to watch through the porthole, counting the seconds—

—five, six—no, it’s been over that already—

Tran fell.

—eight, nine—

“Put on your helmets,” I screamed. “It’s not real!”

Eleven seconds.

I was going to be too late.

“Going now,” I said. I grabbed a tether, slapped it against my belt, and hit the toggle again to blow the door. I could see Harper scrambling to the environmental controls and felt the guilt twist in the bottom of my belly.

I’d always imagined being blown out of an airlock this way would feel like being sucked out into the void, but it was more like being slammed against a wall. I had no control. My ankle hit just inside of the door and I twirled, losing track of the ground, the stars careening in spirals above me, then a violent, bruising yank at my waist as I reached the end of my tether and fell towards the ground. I yanked my head back to keep my helmet from impaling itself on a jagged outcrop and waited for the impact.

The landing hurt like someone had punched me in the chest with a bag of boulders. I saw stars, sucked down oxy-mix, and crawled the last ten meters back to the too-still forms of my colleagues, my ankle screaming bloody murder. I grabbed both of them and hauled them back until we were all in the airlock, until there was enough air to rip the oxygen strip from my suit and shove it up Curtis’s nose, but they were both cold, so cold, and not enough oxygen for all three of us.

When the door opened, I was still trying to save them both. It was Tran’s turn, my warm lips mashed against her cold ones, breathing air into her body. Harper scrambled towards Curtis, and I could see from the way her shoulders dipped, the way they shook, that I hadn’t done a good enough job.

I felt dead myself. Ripped in half.

“We need to destroy it,” Harper said, eventually. “I should have destroyed it in the first place.”

“You did this?” I said.

Her voice cracked. “I did what my boss asked me to do.”

I grabbed her shoulders. Held them tight. Wanted to shake her. “Lunatech told you to bury it? Is this what they’re building on Aldrin?”

Harper nodded, wiping her nose. “They said they were giving us AR to make things comfortable during Moon’s night. They sent that—that thing, that router. Said it was new haptic tech that allowed you to touch your AR surroundings. That it gets right into your brain, figures out what you like, what you want. And I didn’t want to turn it on without testing it, so we brought it out to the mare. Turned it on.”

“The footsteps we found.”

She swallowed her own saliva, and nodded. “I was the only one who made it back. Who didn’t walk right out of their suit and freeze.”

I heard the rush of blood in my ears. “And when were you going to tell us the truth?”

She breathed quietly. She was fighting tears. “I couldn’t tell you.” Her voice climbed a register. “I was alone up here, Kate. Alone. I’ve been alone for a long time, before Allie. I couldn’t go home. There’s nothing for me left in Bolton. They made me sign a five-year contract with an NDA from hell. If they find out you know—”

I squeezed her shoulder. I didn’t want to. I took a breath, swallowing a nascent hate.

The others needed me now.

“You’re not alone now,” I said. “And I have a plan.”

She turned away to hide her tears.

I pushed to my feet, cast my helmet aside, and plucked the router from Curtis’s frozen hand. I tried not to gape at his dead face and his burned-out eyes. He looked surprised, honestly. Happy. Like he’d gone dark while gazing upon something beautiful, like everything he wanted had walked up to him and kissed him on the mouth to the sound of violins and fireworks.

I walked to the lab, looking over my shoulder, then searched for a syringe. Riley followed me, silent as the stars, settling in just inside the door like my own ghostly satellite, grey as the mare.

Riley felt real when I touched her. I looked everywhere but the cavern of her face. I ran my thumb up the dry skin of her arm, slipped the needle into her vein. The syringe filled with thick, ruby liquid, as if a ghost could have blood, as if any of this made sense.

I tossed the whole damned thing in the mass spectrometer. Science would tell me what was real.

“Baby,” Riley whispered. “How was work today?”

My head snapped back, and suddenly she was next to me, right there, smelling of toothpaste and curry, wearing the white dress she’d worn the night before I’d left for Canaveral, as cold and contrary as the moon. I wanted to say something, but she reached up and cupped my cheek, then leaned forward, and I could no longer look anywhere else but the abyss of her eyes. Her lips were ruby-red, grazed blood-scarlet, and felt diamond-cold against mine. I wanted this with every scratching thing under my skin: to push the strap of her dress to the side, to let my hands remember what I had loved.

Did it matter what had brought her back to me? Did it matter that she was as cold as Michigan, her fingers limned in ice, her lips cold from the wind, her hands on my cheeks, her encouragement to go, get on the rocket, when none of us knew what going would mean? That it would be rocks, more rocks, more damned rocks until we died?

That I would forget the color of her eyes?

That I would forget her?

The spectrometer beeped.

Basalt, the monitor said. Anorthocite. Dunite.

“You should go to the moon,” she said. Her touch was cold marble on my cheek. “And I’ll be here when you get home.”

I stared at Riley in the abyss of her blackshot eyes.

“Hell, no, I shouldn’t go,” I said.

I smashed the cylinder on the table, five times, six, sixteen, like a total fucking psycho, then closed my eyes for a very long time.

When I opened my eyes, Riley was gone. The floor of the lab was covered in grey rocks and powder-fine regolith, like I’d been talking to a pillar of stone and salt until a spell was broken. My tongue ran thick with gravel. The syringe was useless, now, clogged with dust. I was alone with the comfort of the hisses and the chimes, the soft breathing of the environmental system, and the hum of the mass spectrometer.

“Kate?”

Arjun stood at the door, hanging onto the lintel with whitened knuckles. He looked like hell. He sounded worse.

“You need to lie down,” I said.

“Harper’s using the pressure suit for Tran. I wanted to see if you were all right.”

“I’m fine.”

“Don’t lie to me,” he said. “Not after what we’ve been through.”

I wiped tears from my eyes. “Why did you do it? Why did Curtis do it?”

Arjun pushed off the door and came close to me, close enough so I could smell him: rank sweat, wet exhaustion, the acrid overtones of a body in stress. I felt the panic in my throat again but did not pull away.

“It was my mother. It was her. I knew it with every fiber of my being. She wore the sari I remembered from when I was little, the one she gave away when we moved to Delhi.” He coughed, and I heard the rattle of his damaged lungs. “I knew it was wrong. But I would have given up my life to see her again, the memory was so strong. And I nearly did.”

“But you remembered. I forgot,” I whispered. “I forgot the color of her eyes.”

“We all forget,” he said. “We have to. That’s the only way forward.”

“It’s not right.”

“You don’t think memory can be a curse?” he said.

I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to hurt him. “Memory is all we have.”

He paused, moving even closer to me. “And it nearly killed me, Kate. By forgetting, Harper thinks that you were able to poke a hole in the logic of the simulation. That your brain threw a fault, that it registered what was real and what was not. You forgot, and that’s the only reason I’m alive. I’m grateful. Tran’s grateful.”

My stomach churned. “It hasn’t even been a year. What kind of person am I, if I just forget her like this?”

“You have to,” Arjun whispered.

I felt a wild anger inside me at his words, a bright, searing sunburn against my sternum. Forget Riley? Move on? How? I suddenly understood the rich with their golden recall and their fancy tactile AR routers, slogging through their aluminum lives in the shuddering skins of the past, kissing dust and eating dirt while the rest of us dug holes in the Moon until we died. Why did I have to forget, when they could live in their dreams until they died? Wouldn’t I give anything to go back to Pasadena-that-was, every cent and bone and incandescent wish, even if my dreams were just lifeless stone and salt?

No. Arjun was right. Memory could be a curse. A weapon. I wanted their caviar brains to know what it was like to rot in the refugee camps. To drink down the pain I felt when I stared at the bones of dead California.

I would make them remember. It was Moon’s night. I had time. I was a scientist. I would find a way to reprogram the router system to make them see the truth. I would make them understand Los Angeles and Mare Crisium and everything in-between, to take it all screaming, to leave their lungs heaving up anguish, drinking down a pain that would settle forever under the truth of their skin, unable to forget a past that could never live again.

A past that was dead.

Like Riley.

I gasped for recycled air. For what was left.

“Tell me about her,” Arjun said.

“We were going to get married,” I whispered. “She always smelled like cinnamon. We argued about the paint in the bedroom. She wanted green. I wanted grey. Screw grey. This fucking moon.”

Arjun laughed, and I snorted down a sob.

“She—she made the worst coffee, but I’d drink it, see, because she made it for me, and she’d leave her boots by the door and I hated that, but she’d always be singing when she did it, so I’d forgive her every single time. She loved musicals, Arjun, and we were going to get married, and then—and then . . .”

I trailed off, unable to speak any longer.

“It’s okay to move on,” he whispered. “It’s okay to begin again. It’s okay to breathe. It’s hard, but that’s what we have to do. That’s how it works, if we want to be alive. It’s not a sin. It’s how you saved us, Kate. That’s how you saved us.”

He wavered with exhaustion. Arjun wrapped his fingers around mine. His palm ached there, warm and sure and utterly real, and we cried there, human and warm, for a long time.