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because she didn't want to slow down and she didn't want to hit them and she certainly didn't want to be here with the station about to blow.
    At the last second, the doors slammed open (or, at least, she thought they slammed—they shook the wall as they hit it, which had to sound like slamming, although she couldn't hear it), and then she was free of the place.
    The Dane zoomed away from the station as fast as the ship could safely go without hitting FTL. She turned the screens onto the station itself, imagined that snarky automated voice continuing its countdown to the now-empty station:
    The station will shut down entirely in…five…four…three…two…one ….
    She raised her head, expecting to see the station blow into a million pieces. Instead it remained intact, and she wondered if she had gotten her count wrong. She hadn't really been paying attention to the clock. She'd been running, not counting minutes.
    Her heart was pounding and she was breathing hard. Her palm had left a damp print on the controls.
    She stared at the screens and wondered, for the very first time, if she had gotten it all wrong.

NINETEEN AND A HALF YEARS EARLIER
    T he woman sitting at the edge of the bar wasn't pretty. She was too thin, her head too small, her features not clearly defined. She wasn't even a woman—not quite, anyway. She was probably eighteen if she was a day, but she pretended to be older, and that had caught Rosealma's attention.
    That, and the woman's brownish-blond hair. The hair was choppy, clearly cut by the woman herself. The woman's long fingers were wrapped around a mug of some kind of ale, and she looked lonely.
    Maybe it was the loneliness that caught Rosealma. Or maybe it was the woman's sideways glances. Rosealma tried not to watch her, but there was something, something interesting, the first interesting thing Rosealma had seen since she left Vallevu.
    The bar was old and seedy, the space station not much better. Rosealma had used the last of her hazard pay to get here, and really didn't want to leave. She had placed six months' rent on a berth that wasn't much more than a bed, an entertainment wall, and an unlimited supply of reading material from the station's rather eclectic (and ancient) library.
    The woman glanced at her again, and Rosealma lifted her own mug of ale in a kind of toast. The woman smiled. She tilted her head sideways as she did so, as if she couldn't quite believe she had caught another person's attention. She might even have been blushing.
    The bar owner, who was also the bartender, shouted at someone near the entrance, something about nonpayment of a bill. Rosealma didn't listen. Out here, everyone was short of money, and everyone wanted something for nothing.
    She found it was easier to remain quiet about everything, to be ignored rather than draw attention to herself. She had come as close to disappearing as a human being could without actually losing her identity and starting all over.
    The woman at the end of the bar glanced at Rosealma again, then looked at the seat next to her.
    Rosealma's breath caught. She wasn't sure if she should walk over. If she had a flirtation with the woman, then she would be noticed, and everything would change.
    Still, she hadn't had a real conversation in six months, and surprisingly, she missed talking. Not about trivial things like the quality of the ale or the best place to eat for the fewest credits, but about ideas and politics and science and the things that people talked about when they were laughing and relaxing with each other.
    She missed interaction, and she had never thought she would.
    She sighed, stood, and grabbed her mug of ale.
    Then the lights flickered out, and her stomach fluttered. She recognized the moment as it happened: the gravity had changed. The lights came back on just as she floated upward, her ale floating with her, the glass emptying and beads of liquid dotting everything around her.
    No one screamed like they would have had