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here.”
     
    “We’ll never move these cars—” Several vehicles had been jammed together by the shock wave, fused into a giant flat mass of battered automobile.
     
    “Let’s just move ourselves.”
     
    They had managed to cross a hundred meters, beyond the parking lot to a park that was now a collection of windblown debris and shattered trees, when the light around them changed.
     
    Neither of them could help turning. They saw the bubble expanding toward them, scooping them up.
     
    During the next several hours in the bubble, perhaps a day, they never clung to each other. Dale would park her in some new spot along the wall, then go swimming off. “Nayar is here,” he said during one of his departures.
    Valya didn’t care. She barely knew the man. And, like most Indian men of his generation, Vikram Nayar, the
Brahma
mission director, was unused to working with women in a professional capacity. He showed it by ignoring her.
     
    After Dale’s fifth or eighth return from errands, Valya finally said, “Why don’t you stay put? What can you possibly be trying to accomplish?”
     
    “Actually, some of us are trying to organize these people, find out what they’re carrying.”
     
    “You haven’t asked me.”
     
    He smiled that crooked smile. “I know what you’re carrying.”
     
    Valya immediately sensed something different. Granted, their circumstances had changed radically. And their relationship was only weeks old. But that voice, that posture, meant a kiss, a touch, a pat on her behind.
     
    But now, here? Nothing. Valya touched his arm. “You’re through with me.”
     
    She knew him well enough to see that her blind shot had struck home. “What the hell are you talking about?”
     
    “You won’t touch me. You won’t spend time with me. If it weren’t a little crazy, I’d think that you’d found someone else—”
     
    Naturally he seized on that. “Given the circumstances, that is indeed a little crazy—”
     
    “Don’t deny it.”
     
    He didn’t. He floated for a moment, then shook his head. “I’m married.”
     
    It took Valya a moment to register this information. Then, to deal with her own irrational surprise. She had never considered it! She knew he’d been married before—her one moment of due diligence had been to access Dale’s official NASA biography, which called him “married.” But that was years out of date, untouched since Dale’s unceremonious exit from the American agency.
     
    Then there were the snickering glances from co-workers about Dale’s other, younger, prior women. Somehow it had all lulled her into…well, not asking the question.
     
    She started laughing.
     
    “Oh, for Christ’s sake…it’s not as though—” He wisely left that sentence unfinished. “Why is this funny?”
     
    “
Now
you tell me?
Here?
”
     
    He couldn’t resist joking. “Well, there’s never a good time—”
     
    “Shut up! Leave me alone!” Her anger was as shocking as her surprise at the revelation. Clearly she was hungry, exhausted, frightened…at the edge of sanity, most likely. Or over it, because it was very unlikely that Dale Scott’s being married made any difference. None of them would be seeing Earth again.
     
    She swam away, taking up a perch a few meters away, beyond the cluster of life support machines. After a few moments, Dale launched himself clear across the forty-meter-wide bubble to the opposite side.
     
    Sometime during the second day, Valya returned from an unquiet doze to note a change in the background noise of the bubble. She clutched at her purse as she realized that the clicking and thumping had ramped up.
     
    Dale, apparently feeling that her anger had subsided, was swimming toward her. “Don’t freak out,” he said, making her feel a lot like freaking out.
     
    Through the milky walls, one thing became clear:
     
    Keanu was closer! She and Dale and a hundred others…they were all falling toward it!
     

ARRIVAL DAY: