“Fought for me?”
“Well, the board was concerned. As you know, we generally like to recruit people who play well with others. Your records indicate you’re a bit of a loner. You’re the only recruit who hasn’t complained that disabling your devices has made it hard for you to communicate with friends and loved ones.”
“For me, your work ethic, your big brain, and your character won the day.” He closed the notebook. “And it still does. We’re not thrilled that you haven’t connected with the other recruits. The bonds you’re able to form with your teammates matter to us. But you’re respectful, you cooperate, you’re very disciplined. So as far as I’m concerned, we’re happy with you. Ready to sign you.”
Adri stared at the closed book, relieved and confused at the same time.
“That’s it?” she said.
“Well, not quite.”
“Not quite?”
“Well, it’s a two-way street. Are you happy with us? Do you still want to go?”
“Yes.”
Lamont studied her. Apparently, it wasn’t so simple as saying yes.
“Adri, it’s our business to know you a little better than you know yourself, in some ways. Our psychologists know this kind of stuff backward and forward. And to me . . . to us . . . you seem to be holding back.”
“Holding back how?” Adri asked, swallowing, disbelieving.
“I see most recruits come through here, they’re scared, they’re nervous, but they’re engaged. They want to get to know the people they’re going to be living with, potentially for the rest of their lives. Adri, I said it’s fine with me if you keep to yourself generally, but I wonder, is it fine with you? Are you truly excited about all of this? Are you ready to live and work with all these folks? Because you’ll need their support in the challenging times ahead, just as they’ll need yours.”
Adri searched for something to say but came up blank. “I can’t be who I’m not,” she finally said. She didn’t add that she had wanted to, and tried, and given up.
“Look,” Lamont went on. “I’m not trying to give you a hard time. But it costs us forty million dollars per person to send you to space. We don’t plan on ever bringing you back. So I want to know you’re in a good place . . .”
“I’m in a good place.”
“Because you don’t have to go. You really don’t.”
It was the first time the thought of not going . . . of her own free will . . . had occurred to her, even as a remote possibility. She thought what the future would look like if she could settle back into what she knew, back into life on Earth. What if she did stay with Lily, made a life in a dead town? It was seductive—the lack of fear that went with that possibility. Even the comfort of knowing Lily would have her. It sounded so easy.
“Tell you what,” Lamont said after studying her. “I’m not going to have you sign a contract today. As far as I’m concerned, you’re in. But if you want to back out, at any time before the launch, you come to me, okay?”
“I’m not backing out,” Adri said. “It’s not going to happen.”
“In the meantime,” Lamont went on, ignoring her, “whatever you need to wrap up to get closure on your life here, I recommend you do it. You need to call your long-lost friend and apologize for something, you do it. If it’s costly, like say, you really want to make Lily’s dreams of seeing the Taj Mahal a reality or whatever, you let me know. That’s no problem for us. You have great value to this mission, and we can do almost anything if it helps you firm up your commitment.”
“There’s nothing,” Adri said. “I don’t need anything.”
“Okay,” Lamont said, but he shuffled his papers and put them away. “We envision the next four weeks as ‘wrapping up’ time. Stay healthy, keep up with your Biphosphonates, wash and sanitize your hands constantly. Even a cold could jeopardize your spot on this particular launch.
“And I’m serious about the closure. The next four weeks are going to go faster than you can imagine. Get your affairs in order. Be good to yourself.”
Lily was on her second cup of hot chocolate when Adri found her in the lounge. “A robot named Jeeves gave it to me,” she said, delighted. “I love it here.” They got into the car.
“How’d it go?”
Adri looked at her. “He says to start wrapping things up.” She didn’t want to go into the rest.
“Like what?”
Adri thought for a long time. “Do you mind if we go to the archives?” Adri said.
“Why?”
“Apparently, people need closure,” she said. “It’s some kind of a thing.”
The Wichita Historical Archives were housed in an enormous, carved marble building that looked out on the river, brand new and elegant and beautiful. Its many quiet, cavernous rooms were divided into two sections: records and exhibits. The exhibits—full of life-size photos, historical artifacts, dioramas—specialized in portions of Kansas’s history, such as the Breadbasket boom, migrant workers, the recession and reboot of the 2020s, the shifting of the space program to Wichita. It didn’t take long to find the exhibit on the Dust Bowl.
Adri and Lily trailed through the room slowly, gazing at the enormous sepia-toned photos of prairie land covered in jackrabbits, herds of skeletal cattle, breathtaking shots of dust clouds dwarfing the tiny towns they were swooping in to envelop. It was eerie—after reading about it in Catherine’s words—to see it so starkly depicted, like a dark fairy tale coming to life. The whole thing was so scary, so beautiful, that it could easily have been make-believe.
“That’s only three decades before I was born,” Lily said, pointing to a photo of a ramshackle old hut, a stoic, embattled family standing on its porch, with June 1935 engraved along the bottom. “They should put me in this museum.”
“I saw a tiger once,” Adri replied. “At this traveling science exhibit in Miami. Even then, they seemed otherworldly. Like, how could they exist? Doesn’t it seem like . . . how could something so powerful and strange exist?”
Tigers didn’t live in the wild now. It seemed like nobody did. She wasn’t being logical, but Lily nodded.
“Isn’t it funny?” Lily finally said.
“What?”
“Well, you don’t like anybody. But you care so much about what happened to these people you’ve never met, that you read about in a pile of papers.”
“I’m just frustrated. I like to finish things.”
But Lily pushed on. “Why do you think that is, that you love these people you don’t know?”
Adri shook her head. “I don’t. I’m just curious.”
Lily shrugged. Offhandedly, as they were leaving the room, she said, “Maybe it’s because you’re invisible to them. Maybe that’s why you let them in.” She tapped on the wall on her way out, as if for good luck. “It’s less scary that way.”
“Ugh,” Adri said. “Did anyone ever tell you you’re not, like, an ancient oracle, you just look like one?”