On the sixth morning, Mara accepted the apartment with the large front room.
She did it sitting on her berth, knees against the opposite wall. The message wanted a few ordinary decisions: arrival arrangement, a deposit, whether she needed the furniture that was already there. Nobody asked whether she was sufficiently sure of her life.
She kept the little kitchen table and declined the sofa. She had seen a picture of it. It looked like an argument a previous tenant had won.
Then she confirmed the Earth work she'd been offered: a new decommissioning contract, local enough to come home most nights. She would still solve problems. She liked the work. She wanted to leave the equipment at the end of a shift, instead of lying awake listening to machinery that kept her neighbors alive.
For a minute she sat with the reply open.
The front room would be hers. It might be lonely. It was also what she wanted.
She secured her screen, pulled on her work clothes, and went to Kestrel.
Suri had put the other three through the morning checks before Mara arrived. She stood outside the service cupboard, hands tucked into her belt, looking theatrically unnecessary.
“I've been asked no questions,” she said.
“Congratulations.”
“They may be dying politely.”
Ivo looked out from the cupboard. “We're not.”
“You'd say that.”
Mara watched him finish the check. He wasn't elegant. He set a tool down and had to fetch it back when it drifted. He used the instruction card instead of acting as if learning it once meant possessing it. When he finished, he showed Suri the result without asking for praise.
Suri nodded. “Good.”
They rehearsed the responses they would need if a routine went wrong. Who noticed, who called, who isolated which part, how another person knew it had been done. Alma caught a drifting item before anyone could trip over it, though trip was the wrong word here. Dev ran the communications checks and made everybody else send and receive. Ivo took Suri's part while she kept her mouth shut so fiercely Mara thought she might injure it.
“Finished,” he said.
Suri went over it. She found a thing he should have checked earlier, made him do it again, then nodded.
“You'll all get worse when you're tired,” she said. “Practice when you're tired.”
“We are,” Alma said.
Outside Kestrel, Mara and Suri confirmed the repaired loop through another full operating cycle. It held. The isolated shell, the independent power, the stocks and reserve conditions all belonged to a real little habitation now. Not a word anybody had to take on trust.
They rehearsed the release cues once more, with the old survey tug's separate propellant reserve checked for the move away from the ring. Alma asked for one step again.
Back inside Kestrel, Mara fixed the stock sheet to the cupboard door.
“Four people. Roughly a year of food and replacement supplies if nothing goes wrong. What happens before that year ends?”
Dev set down his earphone. “I've asked for prices for cargo and passenger space. I haven't got a booking. The work might pay toward one. It won't buy a ship.”
“Then leave the income out of the calculation.”
He drew a line through the estimated earnings. “All right.”
Suri turned the card over. “A count every week. We use the lower figure when the counts disagree. In three months we decide whether there's a funded way to extend this. Without one, we stop buying anything except a way out. At six months we need a confirmed passage within the remaining stocks. Earlier if the reserve falls faster.”
“Need isn't have,” Mara said. “What do you do if nobody will take you?”
Nobody reached for the card.
“We keep asking,” Ivo said at last.
“And if the answer stays no?”
He looked at her. “Then we could die here. Even with food left, if something fails that we can't mend.”
Mara held the edge of the cupboard until it hurt her palm. “You can leave tomorrow. All four of you. Those places are real.”
“I know.”
“That six-month date doesn't make the next ship real. I won't sign a sheet that says it does.”
“It won't say that,” Suri said. She wrote the dates beside the counting rule. “It tells us when to act while we still have supplies to wait on. It can't make anybody come.”
For a while nobody spoke. Dev's earphone had begun to drift; he caught it and held it against his leg.
Alma asked to see the sheet. “If the count changes, tell me that day. Not after you've spared me a bad night.” She read the dates, lips moving. “I don't want to go tomorrow. Even if tomorrow's the last chance I get.”
Dev nodded. Beside the transport inquiries he wrote, “Copy everyone.” Suri put a hand on Alma's shoulder.
“I'm staying,” Ivo said. Mara made herself release the cupboard.
“I think you're taking too much risk,” she told him.
“I hear you.”
She wanted him frightened enough to come. He was frightened; he still hadn't changed his answer. She couldn't turn that into a safe choice by understanding it.
“Send me the counts too,” she said. “I'll want to know. I can't be the passage you haven't booked.”
“You won't be,” he said.
Suri signed the habitation results. Mara added her name beneath the readings she had verified. Then Alma took the pen and signed the stock sheet against the cupboard door. Dev, Suri and Ivo followed.
Mara put the pen away. She stayed beside the cupboard until Alma asked her to move so she could reach the straps.
Keon came over from Traverse after lunch. He listened to the final results, asked two practical questions and checked with each of the four. Their evacuation places would remain until final boarding closed. If anyone changed their mind, they would come aboard. The commander didn't dress that in generosity; it was the arrangement he had made, and he was keeping it.
Alma asked whether the chair was bothering the crew.
“No,” Keon said. “Two children are reading in it.”
“Then tell the crew not to improve it.”
He agreed.
Mara took her shutdown kit to the hub and checked the last work access. The damaged sector remained closed. The route to the isolated commons had been inspected and cleared for limited work; nobody was going back to live there. She checked the notice, spoke with the person controlling access, and put Ivo's net dismantling on the day's work list.
He found her packing the tools.
“Can I get down there?”
“With me. The safe route only. We bring the material out and finish the sorting here.”
He nodded, glancing toward the transfer. “I'd better get a cutter.”
He left without asking what her support meant. She realized they had both become afraid of meanings, and both a little better at doing the thing itself.
Before following him she went back to her cabin. The Earth reply had arrived. Apartment secured. Work confirmed. A key would be waiting when she returned.
She pictured leaving her shoes beside a door that opened onto weather. Ivo's shoes would not be there to trip her. For once she let herself want both the empty floor and the foot that wouldn't stand on it.
Then she closed the message and went to help him take his home apart.