The crawler stopped beside the pod and shone its light directly into Mara's eyes.
She raised a hand. A stupid little wave, the gesture she would have made to a workboat arriving beside a stranded barge. On the refuge feed Nessa saw it and moved the lamp away from the window.
"Sorry."
"I can see you," Mara said.
"I know."
Neither corrected the phrase. Nessa's face was on a screen; her working hands were three hundred meters away. The crawler belonged to her now in the only sense that mattered.
Its gripper found the pod's upper handling lug. The broad service coupling came into view above the window. Nessa aligned it beneath the lug and waited for Mara's local reading.
Mara read the mark. Her voice sounded wrong to her. She had to plan the little movement of gas for speech. She did it too forcefully, coughing at the end, and Leonie told her to rest between answers.
"I've been talking all my life," Mara said.
"Not this way."
Mara looked down at the line in her arm. The cuff had become part of a larger translucent patch. Its edge lay flat against her skin, warm and painless. She could not find a clean border between equipment and herself.
The crawler coupling engaged.
A hard little knock traveled through the roof. Mara flinched so violently her shoulder struck the seat. The pod remained dry. She looked at the pressure display anyway. It held. She had checked it a dozen times since the station fell and expected she would keep checking until somebody took her out of the room.
"Taking weight," Nessa said.
The pod rose from the service support. A scrape ran along its underside. Mara saw the remaining old frame drop away beneath the window. Water cleared beneath the little hull.
Her carrier branch traveled with the service bundle on the refuge side. Kit managed the slack from the Bell while Nessa recovered the pod. Benji called each change in flow. Jonah stayed with the balance. Leonie watched Mara's face and hands through the camera. Five people doing the work of getting one more person into the room.
Mara gripped the seat when the pod turned.
Black water filled the window. No station light now. A thick cloud hung downslope where the three drums had fallen out of sight. She could not see the little shelter. The table. The sink where she had washed Kit's blood off her gloves. The place existed only in the wreckage and the memories of the people it had kept alive.
She looked away before she could search for it.
The rail guided the crawler home. It moved more slowly carrying the pod. At the second support Nessa stopped before the old snag, checked both sides of the bundle and lifted the loop clear. Kit fed her the slack. Mara waited with her hands pressed flat on her knees, not permitted to help.
The helplessness was new. Not because she had never been a passenger, but because the work in front of her had become all the things she knew how to do and could no longer reach.
"You can ease the angle another fraction," she said.
Nessa did not answer immediately.
"I can see the trim," she said at last.
Mara shut her mouth. It took effort.
They passed the support. The refuge light appeared. She had seen it on three cameras, from drawings, through the approach feed. Now its light crossed her hands. Warm white through thick glass. A place below water, not an image somebody had sent her.
The crawler brought the pod against the Bell's service collar. Same coupling family, same pressure-tight mating face. Nessa aligned, took contact and let Jonah call the seal numbers while she held the mechanical position. The docking space drained. Green indicators. A dry path.
Mara could open the hatch.
She did not move.
In the window beyond the service collar she saw Benji waiting. No mask. No protective glass between his skin and the oxygenless habitat gas. He looked ordinary enough now that she almost believed he would ask whether she wanted coffee.
"Mara?" Leonie said.
She found the hatch wheel. Her fingers were clumsy, not weak exactly but delayed, each command reaching them through something she did not yet trust. She turned the wheel twice, missed a grip, tried again. The hatch opened.
Benji was on the other side with a local branch.
"One at a time," he said.
She nodded. He showed her each connection before changing it, letting her follow the path the way she had insisted Jonah be allowed to follow his. Supply live, return clear, the pod branch replaced by the refuge manifold. The liquid moved. Her body remained hers enough to stand.
She tried.
The floor moved under her although it was not moving. Her knees gave. Benji caught her with his good arm and called Kit, who came through the hatch already annoyed.
"Don't make us do a lift in this doorway. Sit."
She sat on the sill.
Kit crouched beside her. Up close the patch at his neck was less monstrous than it had seemed across the table. Fine tissue, a little sheen, the body he was living in. His face was still Kit's, tired and angry and now looking at hers as if he could not decide what he was allowed to feel.
"Did you get my message to Sal?" he asked.
Mara stared at him. Of all the things.
"Imani has it. The envelope."
He nodded. "Good."
He put his shoulder beneath her arm. Benji took the other side. Together they helped her over the sill into the refuge.
Six.
She counted them because she had spent the day counting and did not know how to stop. Leonie by the manifold. Jonah at the table. Nessa at the controls, finally taking her hands out of them. Benji under Mara's left arm. Kit under the right. Herself, no longer the person making the manifest from outside it.
They put her on the lower bunk nearest the service collar. Not Kit's far one. His blanket lay folded on it with the orange-sofa photograph open on the tablet beside it. Benji's green pillow had found its own bunk. Nessa's bag sat beneath the table. The whole place had acquired inhabitants in less than an hour.
Leonie knelt in front of Mara.
"I'd like to look at the cuff."
Mara held out her arm. The physician examined it, asked her to move her fingers and checked the tissue around her neck. Mara wanted to ask what else had changed, what remained of her old breathing, what she could expect tomorrow. The answers were not here yet. She could ask them one at a time when she could bear hearing I don't know.
"Pressure's good," Nessa said from the service collar. "Pod isolated. Bundle secured."
Mara nodded. She had no reason to supervise the words. Nessa had done the work.
Sal's voice came through the refuge's acoustic path, clearer now that the Bell had its own working relay. "I have the capsule on ascent track. Hester and Imani answering. Both alive."
Mara could not see the capsule climbing through the black water, could not hear Imani from here. She stayed on Sal's channel, listening for another update.
Kit sat down hard on his bunk. Benji bent over the galley sink. Jonah closed his eyes.
"Tell them," Mara began.
"They know you're alive," Sal said. "Lin made sure I knew over the ascent link. She's in a foul mood."
Mara laughed, a little expelled scrap of gas that became a cough. Leonie put a hand near her shoulder, asked, and touched her when she nodded.
Sal continued. "Support package launching. Your receiving dock clear?"
Nessa checked the service-collar position. Mara's pod occupied one mate, the main refuge delivery dock remained open. "Clear," she said.
"Keep it that way. Package ninety minutes once over. New power's coming to the stable side. We're not leaving."
Mara heard machinery behind his voice. Not a line meant to make them feel better. A winch beginning work.
She leaned back against the wall. The cut on her forehead had closed. She could feel the dry edge of the dressing and no pain beneath it. The absence made her touch it again, suspiciously.
Jonah brought water.
She drank. It tasted flat. She tried another sip, colder from the bottom of the cup. Still flat. She looked down and found him watching her.
"Temperature comes through," he said. "Most days."
Mara nodded. The cup was a cup. Water moved down her throat. A material need remained, humble and real, even while everything she had known about staying alive had shifted.
Benji turned on the lamp above the broad window.
Outside, the living field opened in the light. Its fans moved over the gradient, one band following another. Not applause. Not welcome. A world continuing with six small human lives now attached to its edge.
Mara looked until the shapes steadied.
Then she picked up her phone and opened June's number.