Maureen called the meeting two hours after dawn.
Ivo stood at the back of the main tent with Don and a dozen others, close enough to hear, far enough to fade.
John and Judy sat near the front.
Will was beside the Robot the machine hadn’t left the camp’s edge since it had pointed at Ivo and said the word that still rang in his skull like a bent bell.
She didn’t waste time on comfort.
“The star is collapsing faster than we thought,” she said.
The holoprojector on the table showed a dying sun, its surface convulsing in slow ribbons of light.
“We have six days. Maybe seven. After that the radiation spike will cook the atmosphere and everything in it.”
Silence.
Someone in the second row made a sound that might have been a laugh or a sob.
“Six,” John said.
Flat.
The voice of a man measuring a fuse he couldn’t cut.
“The Resolute can’t land,” she continued.
“Too damaged. They’ll orbit and we launch to meet them but launch means we need the Jupiter flyable, fueled, and clear of the gravity well before the star goes critical.”
“The Jupiter’s half-crushed,” Don said.
“We’ve been patching it with spit and optimism for a week.”
“Then we patch faster.” Her eyes swept the tent.
“I’m reorganizing everything around the countdown. Every hand, every resource, every hour we have left goes into one goal: getting off this rock alive.”
He knew what came next.
Not the details the shape.
A frantic sprint, an impossible launch, something that went wrong mid-flight and stranded them somewhere worse.
He ground it flat behind his molars where it had lived for weeks, next to everything else he wasn’t allowed to say.
None of it was speakable.
Not one syllable.
“What about the other families?” someone asked.
A woman near the front.
“The Dhars, the Watanabe-Fosters are they launching with us?”
Maureen hesitated.
Just a beat.
“We’re coordinating.”
The lie landed badly.
Ivo saw it in the way John’s jaw shifted.
“Coordinating,” Don muttered beside him.
“Politician for ‘every Jupiter for itself.'”
“Victor Dhar contacted us an hour ago,” Maureen said.
Her voice stayed level but something cold crept into it.
“He’s proposing a resource-share fuel, parts, labor pooled across all three operational Jupiters.”
“That’s good,” the woman said.
“Right?”
“It would be,” John said, “if the terms weren’t designed to leave us last in line.”
Maureen pulled up a second screen. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
Contract language, dense and bloodless.
Ivo couldn’t read it from the back but he didn’t need to the plan that looked like cooperation and functioned like theft.
“Dhar wants priority launch for the Jupiter carrying the most colonists,” Maureen said.
“Ours carries five. His carries nine. The Watanabe-Fosters, eleven. Under his terms we’d hand over our fuel reserves, our salvaged parts, and launch last if we launch at all.”
“He’s pricing us out,” Judy said.
Quiet.
Angry.
“He’s doing what he thinks will save the most lives,” Maureen said.
Her voice said otherwise.
“And if we don’t agree, he’ll lock us out of the fuel depot we’ve been sharing and we won’t have enough to break orbit.”
The tent erupted.
Voices overlapping, someone shouting about fairness, someone else about survival math, Don swearing in two languages.
Ivo stayed still.
His molars ached.
Not the hunger something else, older.
The taste of a choice being made in a room full of bodies that would be sorted into kilograms and seconds, the living ranked by mass.
She raised a hand.
The noise died by degrees.
“We’re not handing over our fuel,” she said.
“And we’re not launching last. But that means we solve our own problems. No shared depot. No borrowed parts. Everything we need, we make or we fix.”
“With what?” Don said.
“Half our tools are scrap and the fabricator’s been out of graphene for three days.”
Her gaze moved.
It found him and stayed there a beat too long to be an accident.
“We have a fabricator,” she said.
“We don’t have the materials. But if someone could work with what we do have if they could make substandard stock hold under stress longer than it should we could close the gap.”
The tent went quiet.
Ivo’s heart kicked once, hard.
Not a question.
She was naming him without naming him, in a room full of people who’d just watched a machine point at him and say danger.
Stay silent.
Let someone else volunteer.
Let her ask outright and buy himself time to think.
His mouth opened anyway.
“I can do that,” Ivo said.
Every head turned.
Her expression held.
“You’re sure.” Find the original chapter at g.com.
“I’m sure.”
“It’ll mean working full-time on the Jupiter’s frame reinforcements. Stretching materials past their ratings. If something fails in flight”
“It won’t fail,” Ivo said.
The lie tasted like iron.
“I’ll make it hold.”
Maureen held his eyes for three long seconds.
Then nodded.
“Good,” she said.
“John, you’re on fuel acquisition find me fifty kilos of hydrazine we don’t have. Judy, I need the medical supplies packed and rated for high-G. Don, you’re with me on engine repair.”
She kept talking.
Ivo stopped listening.
His hands were steady.
The pulse underneath them wasn’t.
He’d just volunteered to save them with the power they didn’t know he had, under a countdown that would force him to use it over and over, in plain sight, with Maureen’s suspicion already half-hardened into theory and Will’s question hanging in the air like a sentencing.
The meeting broke.
People scattered to their tasks, voices tight and fast the paced escape reborn as a sprint with a death-date stapled to it.
Ivo stayed at the back of the tent, hands loose at his sides.
Maureen walked past him.
Stopped.
Turned half around.
“The metal work you did on the shelter beams,” she said.
Quiet.
Just the two of them.
“The joins were too clean. I checked them twice.”
Ivo said nothing.
“I haven’t figured out what you are,” Maureen said.
“But you’re not just lucky. And in six days none of it will matter if we’re dead.”
She walked away.
Ivo stood alone in the tent.
The hunger was a low hum, patient and waiting.
The collapse-clock ticked in his head like a second pulse.
He’d just bought himself a seat at the dead center of the sprint the load-bearing seam, the place where his hands would be watched and his work tested and every impossible thing he did would be witnessed by the woman who never stopped collecting data.
He’d chosen essential over safe, and there was no undoing that particular arithmetic now.
Which one killed him first being needed, or being seen was a bet he’d just made without being asked to call it.
Outside, the star was dying, six days from taking the atmosphere with it.
Six days to hold a ship together with a power he couldn’t explain, for a family that didn’t trust him yet, toward a launch that a life he’d never admit to living had already told him would go wrong.
Six days, each one costing him a little more of the only thing he had left to spend: the not-being-seen.
Ivo walked out into the cold.
The Robot stood at the tree line, watching.
He didn’t look back.