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than—
    A door opens behind me. “Ren, is the grandson at Mack’s place?”
    Mack?
    I’ve given you access. Keep up with the meeting, in case I need some info, OK?
    I pick up the health kit as the v-keyboard disappears and hurry over to Mack’s place, pretending I can’t hear ten different people calling my name. I shut down my stream and my in-box. I just can’t handle being connected right now.
    I press my palm to the side of the door and the house “tastes” me. I can hear footsteps as the door opens but I don’t turn around. “It’s being discussed at the meeting,” I call over my shoulder and let the door close behind me.
    Ignoring the knocking, I put the health kit down on a nearbytable and look at Sung-Soo. Mack has taken his shoes off, eased his legs up onto a footstool grown out of the moss and covered him with a blanket.
    The moss looks inviting, so I take off my shoes too and let my feet sink into its cool green softness. The knocking eventually stops and I make sure the windows are still set to privacy before making my way to sit near him.
    The only sound is our breathing. I watch him sleep, feeling . . . everything. No, not everything. I don’t feel relaxed and I don’t feel hopeful. Watching someone sleep can be the hardest thing in the world.
    I’m back at the hospital in Paris, watching Suh sleep. There are monitors and wires and beeps that serve to remind me that her rest is anything but normal. I cried a lot. I talked a lot too, hoping she could hear me, clinging to some romantic notion that the sound of my voice would somehow call her back into my world.
    We were just flatmates then. I already loved her, of course, but no one else knew back then. Not even her.
    Watching someone in a coma is a special kind of prison made of love and hope and despair. Sometimes other people come and sit in the prison with you, but you can’t have a real conversation. You can talk about coffee or what the sleeper did or didn’t do and what that might mean and what the doctors have said, but nothing else. People who don’t know the rules learn fast. For those who have no words left for one another there are magazines more than thirty years old, relics of a paper age kept for this kind of prison where no one is allowed to get online and talk about their vigil.
    And you’re always alone there, even if other people are sitting around the bed and watching the comatose with you. There’s nothing to say after the daily update and so you’re leftthere in your private little hells, unable to leave in case they wake up when you weren’t there.
    So you talk to the sleeper when there aren’t any other visitors and you pray and you cry and you sit there, numbed, for hours until one day they either slip away completely or open their eyes and give you the only key out of the prison.
    I sat with her for two months. I lost my placement and I nearly lost our flat, before Dad intervened when he realized what was going on. That was back when he wasn’t angry with me. That was before the cancer too.
    I blink and look around Mack’s living room to remind myself I’m not back in that prison again.

5
    I’VE BEEN INSIDE every house in the colony—I helped to build most of them—but Mack’s is my favorite. It has just the right balance of space and coziness. Not too big, not too small. Room to breathe but still with the feeling of being held.
    I walk away from Sung-Soo toward the bedroom, thinking that his pack must still be in there. I want to look inside. I want to see what he’s been using to survive and if there’s any food or clues to explain how he could have traveled so far alone. It doesn’t occur to me that it’s a breach of privacy until the pack is in my hands.
    I sit on Mack’s bed. It’s an expanse of crisp white cotton with a patch of dust on it left by the pack. I bounce up and