It’s been fourteen years since the Event, and everyone except Laura has accepted that communication is gone. Yet the radio tower has become her chapel, her service each day a ritual of ablutions, pilgrimage and praying into the void.

Something woke me this morning with a sense of dread, and so I beg her to neglect a day, once, just today, just this once, but she barely hears me and just laughs in that light-hearted way that fanatics do, buoyed by faith.

I follow her around our cramped quarters, clinging to her shadow as she dresses, whispering warnings and pleading and promising all the things we can do if we just stayed – stay – inside today.

I mention the studio, where she could see Judith’s most recent sculpture, and the galley where Aiden was cooking. Fettuccini alfredo, I try to tempt, but she doesn’t hear a thing I say and instead heads to the airlock.

Vents hiss and things are sprayed – in year 2, when the silence became truly ominous, we decided we needed to protect the outside world as much as the inside, and so she baptizes herself each day in antiseptic and departs.

But I cannot follow.

I am tethered to my post.

—)—-

The radio tower is twenty seven of Laura’s steps away. I’ve watched enough to know the count in my dreams, the ones where I’m whole and perfect and strong and stalwart and there for her.

Once, it was right down a hallway, but after the Event we couldn’t repair the collapsed corridor, and so the only route became external.

There had been a vote, of course, but survival eclipsed communication and so our resources went towards internal things.

“But what about the other colonies?” Laura, my dear Laura, wonderful Laura had asked.

But, fuck em, we need to live, came the paraphrased answer, heavy with a how-dare-you-even-question-right-now.

—)—

I had tried to explain it to her, later, alone, just us, but she hated me for it.

“How can you condemn others if there’s a chance for everyone?”

I see this moment over and over, the first thought when I awake, and the constant knowledge of its replay driving me as each day ends.

I had explained things. Tried to.

“We don’t know what’s happened,” I would say, and this became our bedtime ritual. Instead of love or lovemaking, we debated the ethics of shutting ourselves off from the world.

“You don’t know they are are gone,” she would hiss and I would see her and melt in her passion before, eventually, reluctantly, asserting authority.

“I need to tend to the living,” would be the only thing I could ever say to remind her – of her place, of my place, of our place, trapped here without anything.

“What is my role without that tower?” she would cry.

“What is mine if you are all dead?” I would softly whisper in reply.

Neither of us had answers.

—)—

She’s heading to the door again. The one outside. The one to her tower.

I need to stop her, but I can’t. I’m too late, today, as always – I got caught up in a rotation, checking on everyone throughout the hab. Judith is sculpting, endlessly working on her next big creation. I fear it will never be finished.

Aiden is cooking – fettuccine alfredo again. He knows how to stick with a good thing.

And outside it’s the familiar roar, the one that haunts me, the one which wakes me, the shrill banshee call I hear at night.

A storm is coming.

—)—

She won’t survive, I remember, calculations whirring.

This is the worst part, the part I always hate, the part that comes after our fight – I suit up myself.

Maybe I shouldn’t have spared those minutes – maybe I could have been back in time. Maybe I should have risked everything for her, but protocol was protocol and so I had shrugged – am shrugging, yet again – into that suit. The one Aiden designed, no matter what it took, even if he had to use half the kitchen. We had needed the metal.

I’m fogged with the antibacterial spray Judith sculpts about to forget how it broke her, a vaporous result of sleepless sessions and creative burnout. As the world mists around me, I’m forced, again, to think about sacrifice and what it did to us and what we had sworn.

As the makeshift airlock opens, I’m made to remember about what we promised. I always am.

—)—

Before all this, months before the Event, we had tested and trained and I remembered – always have to remember – that day when Laura held me captive, a moment of glorious afternoon sunlit love.

“We’re going to Antarctica, babe,” she had murmured. We were celebrating, had booked a hotel up in Christchurch after we got the news. The airdocks of Invercargill had awaited.

“We’ll save the world,” she had said, and I had rolled my eyes and said something flippant and bold and brave in reply, pulling her close. Mine. We were kids – everyone said things like that when ideals were quick and easy to develop, unchallenged.

She had giggled and pulled her body tight to mine, but when we eventually drifted to sleep, her whisper was in my ear.

“We will,” she insisted and I hugged her tight, knowing that somehow this oath meant more, meant everything.

I had agreed.

—)—

My suit is clumsy and I stumble in the icy winds, but I can’t stop.

The tower doesn’t have supplies.

The storm will kill her if she goes back tomorrow – but she will go back tomorrow – and so as she sleeps, as the auroras crackle into moonrise, I have loaded the sledge to set out to protect her.

I was an idiot.

—)—

I make it to the tower, half frozen, but supplies intact – someone could survive a month here between the food and the snap heat blankets and the autobrew water.

But I didn’t, I always realize.

I went back.

Why?

—)—

For once, that one single once, that stormlit day, she wasn’t there.

She had listened to me and instead gone to visit Judith and Aiden and spent her day happy instead of consumed – she had lived instead of trying to preserve life.

And so I had tried to stumble back to her, when I realized she wasn’t coming.

I had thought I could outrace the storm.

It was only twenty seven steps, after all.

—)—-

There’s another blizzard brewing, I try to tell her, cloaking her movements as she dons the suit, again, today. Stay inside, but my words are merely a breeze lost in the gust of the airlock.

A storm is coming, I try to warn her, but wraiths like me have no voice.

She’s already gone before I realize I’ve been haunting her absence.

—)—

Everything goes dark.

—)—

The storm is here and she’s stuck at the tower, sending her call out to nobody, while I’m trapped in the hab, wallowing in my routine. For some reason, it’s shifted – I’m reliving the what-if instead of the what-was.

My endless cycle repeats again and again and again and again, even if the station is dark and dead. I start to loathe fettuccine alfredo. I begin to want to murder Judith.

All the other colonies are gone; we voted in year 4 to accept that as fact, but Laura still refuses and so she’s out there, alone, trying to reach them.

How will she survive, I had once thought.

Maybe she will, I now think, remembering what I did, a life ago.

—)—

Days and weeks go by, and all I can do is walk where she walked, follow her routine, visit Judith and Aiden and see their eternally unfinished, perpetual, aborted creations.

—)—

And then, all at once, everything becomes alight.

—)—

I find them near the generator, Laura and whoever this new person is. They’re attractive, I suppose, in a weather-beaten way, nose chapped and cheeks ruddy. Their cold weather gear is from almost a generation before we even left – an early colony.

Grateful, there, capable, present, warm. I try not to be jealous. They followed Laura’s call, and now the station is alive once more. The labs, the samples, my Laura: everything will be rescued.

She had always prayed someone would hear her screaming into the void, and finally someone did.

—)—-

And maybe I always knew that keeping her safe would save us, and everything we had made.

We had voted to survive, but I had chosen the timeline.

I hope they love her, as I once did.

I want her to be happy.