The first three calls failed before they reached June.
Mara sent a short message through the acoustic relay to Sal: she was alive, she was at the refuge, she would call when the new cable carried data. Sal acknowledged it and said he would reach June himself. Mara left the phone beside her on the bunk.
The support package arrived ninety-seven minutes after launch.
By then Mara had slept for twenty minutes and woken in terror because she was not breathing. Kit had been awake on the opposite bunk. He said her name, waited until she looked at him and pointed at the return trace. Steady. She watched it until her body stopped demanding an explanation she could not give it.
Before the package reached them, Sal confirmed the capsule recovered on deck: Hester and Imani above water, their roughly ninety-minute ascent complete. Mara had him repeat the names. Then she waited with the others until he called the package approach.
Nessa took the receiving controls. Mara began to rise. Kit put a hand on her shoulder.
"She's got it."
Mara sat back down.
On the external camera the package descended into the Bell's light, a frame carrying cable, consumables and sealed equipment. Nothing grand enough to make the news picture Mara imagined above. A practical ugly bundle, exactly what they needed. Hester's voice came through from the tender, directing the approach with the strain of a person who had refused to sleep until one more job was finished.
"Receiving collar clear?"
"Clear," Nessa said.
"Don't compensate for my last movement. Hold the mark."
Nessa held. The package settled against the refuge's open delivery dock. A protected connector engaged. Hester called the seal checks while Imani read them from the tender's duplicate panel. The two ordinary people who had left were still working at the other end.
Power came on across the external link.
A light over the galley brightened. The battery display changed from discharge to supported load. The pumps kept going.
"Supported load," Nessa reported.
"Good," Hester said. "Two replacement pumps in the lower case. Spare seals on top. Food's the wrong flavor; complain to the ocean."
Benji was already opening the cupboard for the packets. His sleeve went to his face, came down wet. Jonah took the packets from him and read the labels while Benji stood with his back to the room.
Mara leaned toward the delivery microphone. "You got them up. Thank you."
"Yes." A fastener rattled on Hester's deck. "Your forehead?"
"Closed."
"I hate that."
"So do I."
"Your bag's on the next run. Dry clothes. Good boots. Don't argue, I'm still on a handling channel."
Mara laughed. "Okay."
"And I'm not saying you did the only possible thing. I don't know."
"I don't either."
Hester breathed out. "Nessa, give me the final collar reading."
Nessa read it. Hester took them through the last check, said she was going to sleep and left the delivery link open for Sal.
The new cable carried data beside the power feed. Nessa tested the surface connection, brought the refuge's message queue through and handed Mara her phone.
June answered on the fourth attempt.
The connection arrived as sound first, a scrape, a sleepy intake of breath. Mara's phone showed the small circle where her daughter's face ought to be. Then the picture resolved. June sat in bed with a blanket around her shoulders. One eye was puffy from sleep. Her room was dark except for the phone.
"Mom?"
"I'm here."
June blinked at the screen, looking past Mara at a white wall, a pipe, the edge of a man sitting at a table.
"Are you up?"
"No. I'm in the refuge."
"Sal said—he called. He said Hester was coming up and you weren't with her. He wouldn't tell me—" June stopped, swallowed. "He said you were alive."
"I am."
"Why didn't you go?"
Mara had moved the phone close enough that June could not see the cuff. She realized what she had done and lowered it. The branching thread under her forearm caught the light.
June stared.
"What is that?"
Mara told her. Not the whole day. The support, the people, the air she had given to the capsule, the local job that had taken longer. She said she had chosen the circuit after the old station fell clear. She said she was safe in the refuge, with the people she had helped move.
June did not interrupt. That was how Mara knew she was frightened.
"When can you come home?" she asked.
Mara looked at the little white circle of the speaker. Her own face reflected faintly in the phone's edge, still hers, a little gray, the dressing unnecessary above her eyebrow.
"I can't come up on this circuit. Not now. We don't know a way."
June's mouth opened.
"What does not now mean?"
"We don't know how to separate from the living source. The portable support failed. I saw it happen to Kit."
"How long?"
Mara could have said research, scientists, people working. All of those things would become real. They would not be an answer.
"I don't have a date."
June got out of bed. The phone swung, showed the floor, the wall, a pile of clothes beside the chair. Then she was standing in the kitchen, the refrigerator still in its ridiculous place. She set the phone against something and stepped back.
"You said three weeks."
"I know."
"You said they couldn't cancel it."
"They didn't."
June stared at her. "Don't do that."
Mara shut her mouth.
The refrigerator hummed. Above Mara's head a pump made its soft irregular tick. Two small ordinary machines, far enough apart that one had become a sound she might never hear in person again.
June crossed her arms. "Are you hurt?"
"I'm changed. The cut's closed. I don't feel the way I did. Leonie's checking—"
"Grandpa's Leonie?"
"Yes. She's our doctor here."
June looked at the line again. "Did she do that to you?"
"I chose it. To stay alive."
"After you gave away your air."
Mara looked down. "Yes."
"So you chose it after you chose everything before it."
Mara looked at her daughter in the kitchen she had promised to come home to.
"Yes," Mara said.
June wiped her nose with the heel of her hand. She looked furious with the gesture, with the camera seeing it, with Mara needing to see anything from her.
"I don't want to be proud right now," she said.
"You don't have to."
"Stop giving me permission."
Mara nodded. Behind her Kit rose from his bunk and went into the sanitation space, closing the door softly. Benji turned the galley tap on for a moment. Small sounds, giving her what privacy they could.
June looked at the kitchen wall. She was breathing hard. Mara waited.
At last June came back to the phone.
"Can I see where you are?"
Mara turned the camera.
The bunks. The table. The green pillow. Nessa at the control station, looking away to avoid intruding. Jonah raising one hand in greeting from his place beside the manifold. The broad window, with the living field opening beyond it.
June leaned toward the screen.
"That's outside?"
"Yes."
"What is it?"
"We don't know all of it. Part of what's keeping us alive."
June watched the fans open. A slow band of movement passed across the gradient. She looked at it for a long time, then asked to see Mara again.
"I'm glad you're alive," she said.
Mara's throat tightened. "Me too."
"I'm still mad."
"I know."
This time June let the words stand. She sat on the kitchen chair, drew the blanket tighter around her shoulders and asked if Mara had eaten. Mara almost laughed and could not quite make the gas come right for it.
"Not lately."
"Then eat. And call me tomorrow."
"I will."
"Tomorrow here. Tell me which time."
They chose a time. June entered it in her calendar and showed Mara the screen. Mara entered it too.
When the call ended she sat with the phone in her hands until Jonah put a cup beside her.
"Water," he said. "Not a solution."
She smiled faintly. "Thanks."
He went back to the table. He did not ask what June had said.
The first outside scientific request arrived the next day.
It came through Sal, with a list of observations and a proposal to send a pressure-retaining sampler. Mara read it at the table while Leonie examined her forearm. The request did not call them specimens. It asked for consent to collect a sample from the exterior source and separate samples from the return, to be studied at native conditions and compared without disconnecting anyone.
Kit read it after her.
"They've learned the good wording fast," he said.
"We can say no," Mara answered.
"Can we? If they're bringing food?"
Sal sent his answer to all six: support was not conditional on samples. The next food delivery was booked before they made a scientific decision.
They agreed to exterior sampling under Nessa's control and individual return-fluid samples by permission. Extraction experiments stayed off the list.
Imani sent the nine-day sensor record with the shelter log attached. Her note identified her own separate survival in precise terms. Four people had lived without oxygen. One had lived in an emergency breathing shelter. The distinction went into the first public account because she made sure it did.
On the second evening Nessa called Talia.
She had put the phone on the table three times and taken it away again. Mara was cleaning the pump guide with her good hand, learning which effort made the new tissue at her wrist heat unpleasantly. Nessa sat opposite her at last.
"Stay," she said.
Mara put the cloth down.
Talia answered with her camera off. Her voice shook before she said anything else.
"Tell me what is true."
Nessa closed her eyes. "I'm alive. I'm at a different habitat. I can't come up."
"Forever?"
"I don't know forever. I know not now. I don't want you to wait because somebody says they'll fix it."
Talia said nothing. Mara looked at her own hands, giving the conversation the little privacy Nessa had chosen not to have.
"I tried," Nessa said. "I tried something to get out. I hurt people. It didn't work."
"How badly?"
"A rescuer got caught. They got him out. He won't look at me."
The camera came on. A woman sat at a kitchen counter, wet hair tied back, eyes swollen. The woman from the photograph. Not laughing now.
"I don't know how to do this," Talia said.
Nessa shook her head.
"I wanted to yell at you for not calling."
"I should have called. I kept putting it off."
Talia rubbed at a wet patch on the counter. "I've had your bag by the door all week. I keep putting things in it."
"What things?"
"Your blue shirt. Those socks you hate. I don't know."
Nessa tried to smile. "I only hate the one pair."
They talked about the apartment. About a plant Talia had overwatered because she had needed something to do with her hands. About the bus which still went past every twelve minutes. Nessa asked whether Talia could hear it from where she sat. Talia opened a window. They waited together until the bus arrived, its brakes sighing through the phone's small speaker.
Nessa pressed both palms flat on the table.
Mara rose quietly and went to the window. Behind her Nessa asked Talia to leave the window open a little longer.
Jonah and Leonie had taken separate bunks.
They did not announce that either. On the first night she lay on the lower bunk nearest his, one hand tucked under her cheek, watching the line move beside his blanket. He asked her to turn off the lamp. She did. On the second day he moved his charger to the far side of the table. Leonie saw it and put the medical case somewhere else to leave him room.
Mara was there when Jonah asked Leonie to sit down.
Mara began to get up. Jonah shook his head.
"We don't have private rooms," he said. "If we wait for one, I'll be eighty."
Leonie sat across from him.
He put his repaired hand on the table. "I am glad you connected me."
Her eyes filled. He lifted the hand before she could speak.
"That's mine to say. It doesn't mean you can spend it on what you did to them."
She looked down. "I know."
Leonie reached for the water pitcher.
"Mine's full," he said.
She looked at his cup. He moved it away from her hand.
"I don't know what else to do," she said.
"Sit there. For a bit."
She sat. The pump ticked. Benji washed a spoon as quietly as he could. Kit lay with his forearm over his eyes. Mara looked through the broad window at a slow-moving line of pale fans.
After a long time Jonah reached across the table. Not to take Leonie's hand. He moved her cup closer to her, within reach, and left his hand beside his own.
She drank.
Mara kept the next day's appointment from her bunk. June was on the bus; they had seven minutes before her stop. On the third morning the refrigerator stood against its old wall.
"Who helped?" Mara asked.
"A person who lives within an hour."
Mara left the phone propped beside her bowl while June ate breakfast. They argued about the oven. When June had to go, Mara entered their next call before closing the connection.
They were learning meals and fatigue in bodies that no longer offered the old warnings. Leonie proposed a shared schedule and let them argue until it belonged to the room. Benji tested his salt on warm food. Nessa moved a guide so Kit could sit at the table without his line crossing her bag. Jonah took the balance handle apart for cleaning and waited for Leonie to hand him the cloth he had asked for.
Mara stood and helped make breakfast.