Epilogue
Earth is below him, and the sight of it fills him with awe, bringing him nearly to tears.
It’s everything he ever dreamed of; it’s everything he trained for.
He remembers the first time he ever went up in an airplane, when he was just a little boy grieving his parents, desperately searching for something to ground him, something to hold on to in this terrifying and chaotic world.
He remembers the first time he ever went up in an airplane, and then he looks back at Earth once more, and even that moment of first taking flight doesn’t compare to the awesomeness before him.
Around him, Paul and Michael seem to be having similar reactions.
They’d all heard from the astronauts who had gone before them, had thought they were prepared for what they were about to experience—something between an awakening, a deeper understanding of their place in the vast universe, and, simply, the coolest thing any of them has ever done.
It doesn’t disappoint.
He can’t wait to tell Viv about it. Can’t wait to share this moment with his wife.
Because even up here, even when they’ve been fighting for weeks, months, even as they’re grieving a loss he’s not sure he’ll ever recover from, there’s an invisible string connecting them, and he’s filled with peace as he looks at Earth knowing that she’s down there waiting for him to come home.
And in that moment, a certainty fills him.
They will be alright.
Everything will be alright.
Until it isn’t.
It starts as a tingle at the base of his spine. Then he sees it playing out in the navigation systems of the spacecraft going haywire, space around him shifting, changing.
They never ran tests for this, never practiced the scenario before him.
And then the tingle explodes into a full-body panic, except he doesn’t panic.
He shuts down the fear and the worry the way he’d shut down a failing engine when he was a pilot, and the training takes over, the routine he’s done in the simulators thousands of times coming back to him, muscle memory guiding his actions, his mind calm as the three men work in tandem to deal with the situation unfolding before them, to recover the spacecraft, the Moon no longer the goal, survival superseding all else.
They must get home.
Time slips through his fingers, as they race against what feels like an invisible clock to make things right, as they try to understand what has gone wrong, as the darkness sucks them in.
His life flashes before him.
Moments in time.
Moments he remembers.
Moments that haven’t happened yet.
He is young.
He is old.
He is a cocky pilot with the world at his fingertips.
He is sitting on a couch, a pair of glasses perched on his face, his hair gone gray, his grandchildren opening Christmas presents at his feet.
And there she is.
Viv.
His wife. His love.
He is falling, and the universe feels infinite in all its possibilities, in all the paths that lie before him.
He reaches out, grasping through space, through the timeline of his life, through what was and what could be, and he grabs hold of the only thing that is solid, the only thread that feels tangible and real in his hands.
The tether that grounds him.
Viv.
Relief fills him.
Peace.
He yanks on it, tugging it toward him until he pulls it closer, holding on to the thread as though his life depends on it, this slip of magic between time and space that takes him back to her.