Two days into the sprint, Ivo sat with his back against the landing strut and pressed two fingers to his own wrist, timing the ache in his molars against his pulse the way Judy had taught him without meaning to.
Both were slowing.
Around him the camp’s fires burned down to embers, and the kind of cold that made metal contract and creak crept in to take their place.
Eighteen families scattered across forty kilometers, all racing the clock toward a launch window that might hold or might collapse into math that didn’t close.
His hands weren’t shaking anymore.
That was progress.
The Dross had peaked around midday nausea, the tremor in his fingers, the taste like he’d been licking batteries and then Judy had found him behind the water processors and made him sit down and drink two liters of her carefully hoarded electrolyte mix while she timed his pulse against her watch.
She’d known what to look for now.
The signs he couldn’t hide.
The med tent’s flap opened and she stepped out, carrying a thermal blanket and two canteens.
She crossed the clearing and sat down beside him without asking, close enough that their shoulders touched.
“You’re supposed to be sleeping,” Ivo said.
“So are you.” She handed him one of the canteens.
“Drink. Slowly.”
He drank.
The water was cold and clean and tasted like nothing, which meant it was doing its job.
Judy watched him the way she watched vitals, counting something he couldn’t see.
“Better?” she asked after a minute.
“Better.”
She nodded and pulled the blanket around both their shoulders.
The camp was quiet except for the hiss of the wind across the plain and the distant crack of ice settling.
Somewhere to the south, Jupiter 11’s lights blinked twice a signal that their evening check-in was complete, systems holding, no emergencies tonight.
“You don’t have to stay up with me,” Ivo said.
“I know.”
But she didn’t move, and neither did he.
They sat in the dark for a long time, not talking, just breathing in sync.
The Dross ebbed another small degree, his body remembering how to process what he’d fed it.
The ache in his molars faded.
The taste receded.
Judy’s shoulder was warm against his.
“I froze once,” she said quietly.
“Under the ice. Back on the glacier world, before you were with us.”
“There was a girl trapped in her Jupiter. The lake had frozen over it, and we had maybe five minutes before the hull buckled and she drowned. I went down. Got her out. But for about ten seconds, I couldn’t move. I was under the ice, and I could see the surface, and I just… locked.”
Her voice was steady, clinical, the way it got when she was talking around the edges of something that still hurt.
“My mom had to pull me up. I got the girl out, but I froze, and if Maureen hadn’t been there I’d have died because my brain just stopped working.”
Ivo turned his head to look at her.
Her profile was sharp against the firelight, gaze fixed somewhere past the fires, on nothing he could see.
“You didn’t freeze tonight,” he said.
“Or yesterday. Or the day before that.”
“No. But I think about it. Every time something goes wrong, every time someone’s life is in my hands, I think: what if this is the time I lock up again? What if I can’t move, and someone dies because I’m standing there like an idiot, drowning on dry land?”
She pulled the blanket tighter.
Her hands were steady.
“I keep you alive because you’re worth it. But also because when everything’s on fire, you don’t panic. You go still. You get useful. And I need to be near that, because it’s the opposite of freezing, and maybe if I’m close enough to it I’ll remember how.”
The words landed on something in him that hadn’t expected to be touched.
He’d gone still because he was a stowaway who’d learned that panic got you thrown off the boat.
He’d learned to be useful because useful was the only currency he’d ever had.
And she thought it was courage.
He wanted to tell her.
He wanted to tell her everything that he went still because he was afraid all the time, that he’d bought his way onto the Resolute as cargo, that the calm she saw was just camouflage over a decade of hiding.
That he wasn’t brave.
That he was just practiced.
But if he started there, he’d have to tell her the rest.
The kinship.
The hunger.
The alien weight of the Line and the fact that it had chosen him for reasons he still couldn’t name.
And she’d already given him her core wound, and he couldn’t pay her back with the whole truth, not yet, not when it might end them.
So he gave her the piece he could.
“I’ve never had a place that was mine,” Ivo said.
“Not really. I’ve always been the one who had to earn it. Pay for it. Make myself worth the space I took up, or someone would notice I didn’t belong and I’d be gone.”
Judy turned to look at him.
“I go still because I learned a long time ago that if you’re loud, if you’re a problem, people remember you’re not supposed to be there. And then you lose the spot you fought for. So I got good at being useful and invisible at the same time. At fixing things quietly and leaving before anyone could say thank you, because thank you turns into questions, and questions turn into ‘who are you, really,’ and that’s the end.”
He looked down at his hands. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
They were clean.
Steady.
“You’re the first person I’ve ever wanted to stay loud around. To be seen by. And it’s terrifying, because I don’t know how to do that without paying for it.”
The silence stretched.
Then Judy reached over and laced her fingers through his.
Her hand was warm and sure and she didn’t let go.
“You’re not paying,” she said.
“You’re just here. That’s allowed.”
For a second Ivo couldn’t make his voice work.
“I don’t know if I believe that yet.”
“I know. But I’m going to keep saying it until you do.”
She leaned her head against his shoulder, and Ivo sat very still not the camouflage stillness, not the stowaway quiet, but the kind of stillness that came from not wanting to break something fragile and good.
The stars turned overhead.
The camp slept.
Somewhere to the north, a piece of hull plating groaned as the night cold made it contract, a sound like the world reminding them it was dying and they were running out of time.
Judy’s breathing evened out.
She was asleep, or close to it, her weight warm and trusting against his side.
Ivo looked at the sky and made himself a promise.
Later.
When it’s safe.
When the launch is done and the crisis is past and she’s not holding his life in her hands every time the Dross spikes.
He’d tell her everything.
The kinship.
The future he wasn’t supposed to know.
The fact that the thing under the ice wasn’t just her fear it was his, too, in a different shape.
The fear of being known and losing everything because of it.
But tonight, she’d given him her worst terror and he’d given her a true piece of himself, and the blanket was warm and her hand was still laced through his, and Ivo Lindholm stowaway, liar, the boy who’d learned to be invisible let himself be seen.
Just not all the way.
Not yet.
The fire burned down to ash, and he kept watch, and held the quiet like a promise he’d someday be allowed to keep.