“Station, Moscow. Please provide update on power-down.”
Zhirov, still not taking his eyes from Beckwith, keyed open his mic. “Station is powered down. Commander and Flight Engineer One have ingressed spacecraft.”
“And Flight Engineer Two?” the ground asked.
“Flight Engineer Two has not ingressed.”
“Why?”
Zhirov almost—almost—smiled. “She would . . . prefer not to.”
“Say again, station.”
“Flight Engineer Two would prefer not to ingress.”
“What is her reason?” Moscow asked.
“She did not tell me.”
“Does she have a reason?”
Now Beckwith keyed open her own mic. “I do, Moscow.”
“What is the reason?”
“I will explain that later. But right now Flight Engineer One is injured and needs a hospital.”
“Lieutenant Commander Beckwith,” Moscow said, the mention of military rank an apparent attempt to invoke military obedience, “this is a violation of flight rules.”
“Yes, it is.”
“You will never fly again.”
“I suspect I won’t.”
There was a muttering at the end of the line, and another voice, an unmistakably American one, broke in. “Walli,” the voice said, “Flight Supervisor Copper speaking.”
Copper was Lance Copper, one of the NASA observers in Moscow’s Mission Control. He had always been addressed simply as Lance, but from the moment he arrived in Russia, he began going by his flight supervisor title. In a place where he had no actual authority, the label seemed his talisman. Beckwith had disliked the man from the moment she met him.
“Beckwith here,” Walli said.
“Please ingress the spacecraft, Walli.”
“No.”
“You are ordered to ingress the spacecraft, Walli.”
“I would prefer not to.”
“You will please do as you are told.”
“I should do so, but I will not.”
Another forty-five minutes elapsed—an excruciating forty-five minutes for the suffering Lebedev—as the station sailed into the half of its orbit that Mission Control in Houston oversaw. Flight directors came on the line, deputy administrators came on the line, the NASA administrator himself came on the line—beseeching, ordering, threatening in turn.
To each, Beckwith made her decision—her preference—clear. She spoke crisply, hurriedly, aware that every minute the Soyuz lingered in place was another minute of suffering for Lebedev. At last, Zhirov ended the argument.
“The conversation is over now,” he told Houston, aware that Moscow was listening in. “The spacecraft is leaving.”
Wordlessly, Beckwith nodded her thanks to him. She leaned inside the Soyuz, gripped Lebedev’s knee, and then shook Zhirov’s hand. Zhirov took Beckwith’s hand in both of his.
“Beregí sebyá, Vasily,” Beckwith said. Be safe.
“Bud’ úmnoy, Walli,” Zhirov answered. Be smart.
Beckwith slammed the hatch, and before long, the Soyuz had popped free, drifted off, and headed toward the atmosphere and home. After it was gone, she glanced at her watch. In less than four hours, the station would once again sail over the spot on the ground where the trouble lay. She would be at the window to watch when it did.
CHAPTER TWO
Three days earlier
It was a few hours past sundown when Sonia Peanut waded into the jungle and made her way to the clearing about three hundred yards from the camp she shared with more than forty other people from multiple other countries. Most of them knew the reason she was venturing out tonight—and that reason was to set a fire. Fires were hardly welcome in any part of this particular jungle, but hers would be small and controlled and, to her way of thinking, poignant and important. And she had all that she needed to light it readily at hand. There was paper in the clearing and kindling in the clearing, and she would light them first and then feed the blaze logs that would burn brightly and beautifully.
The logs would be mahogany, though Sonia would never cut it fresh from trees even if she were able, which she wasn’t. She did not know how to use an ax and was entirely unwilling to go anywhere near one of the ugly, roaring chain saws the loggers used. Had she ever been tempted to try, she would probably have been unable to wrestle one of them into her control. At five feet and exactly one-half inch tall—not a millimeter more, not a millimeter less—she had long looked sideways at big, heavy, dangerous machines. She suspected they regarded her the same way—eager for her to try to master them so they could wrestle her right back and throw her about. She wouldn’t give them the pleasure.
Still, there was a fair amount of mahogany to be had lying around, all of it from dead trees toppled slowly by nature or violently by the loggers. She and the others in her camp had brought the logs here and stacked them in the big, open space that had been cleared by hand centuries before and kept clean ever since—swept free of leaf debris and other flammables. Fires would be lit here, but they would never spread past here.
Sonia was looking forward to lighting her fire tonight, partly because of the person she was lighting it for and partly because she simply liked the way mahogany burned. She swore there was something about the color of the flame that she saw nowhere else—a faint shimmer of violet so different from ordinary violet that it seemed to be straining to become another color entirely. No one else in the group she lived with could see it, and at least a few of them doubted that she could either. She didn’t blame them. The color she saw looked as if it lived at the high, far, exiting edge of the visible spectrum, a final, discernible flicker of electromagnetism, just at the point of hurrying off into the X-ray and gamma ray frequencies where all energy vanished from view.
This was hardly the first night Sonia had visited the clearing. She came here every few nights, depending on the condition of the sky and the turning of the Earth. Two nights earlier, she had been here, but as soon as she arrived, a low gray-black bank of clouds appeared and then exploded into rain. She waited out the deluge under her poncho, protecting the firewood with a plastic tarp while alternating her gaze between the sky above and the smartphone in her hand, spinning and spinning a little globe on the screen a few tiny degrees of arc back and forth. But the screen degrees played out too fast and the clouds parted too slowly and she ran out of time and trudged off disappointed. Tonight, however, the air was clear and the stars were out and the sky was stunning. So she set out from camp for the clearing once more, and this time she did not come alone.
Wading through the brush with her was the boy she knew as Oli—which she pronounced with a long o, rhyming with “goalie.” His proper name was Kauan—or Hawk in his native Guarani, the language of one of the three hundred tribes indigenous to the Amazon. It was a perfectly fine name, but even Kauan’s own father called him Oli now because the boy took such extreme and giggly pleasure in it. He was just five years old, and the wind-chime laugh that sometimes came out of him when someone called him that was one his father said he’d been born with and then seemed to grow out of by the time he was four. The name brought it back.
It was Sonia who gave Kauan his Oli nickname, and it happened not long after she got her Peanut nickname. There were two Sonias in the group that arrived in the rain forest seven months ago. They were about the same age and they studied at the same medical college back home in Texas, but there was no mistaking who was who. The other Sonia was as elegantly tall as Sonia Peanut was kinetically short. One evening, back in the jungle lodge, after the day’s work was done and beers had been passed around, the other members of the team took to guessing the height difference between the two. Both a tape measure and then a laser measure settled the question, putting the tall, lithe Sonia at six feet, one-half inch, not a millimeter more, not a millimeter less—or a precise and perfect foot
more than the compact, kinetic Sonia. So little Sonia got the name Sonia Peanut—or Cacahuète in the French that was preferred by most of the others. Big Sonia became Sonia the Elder—though she was actually three months younger than Sonia Peanut. The French called her Sonia Aînée, which Sonia Peanut Americanized to Annie.
Kauan always addressed Sonia Peanut by her proper name, but never quite got the pronunciation right. The y sound that the i made in “Sonia” seemed to flummox him entirely, and he accorded it its own syllable, pronouncing the name “So-nee-ya.” All the same, he loved her Peanut and Cacahuète nicknames, and when he first heard about them, he collapsed so hard into his wind-chime laugh that he quite literally fell over, repeating the names over and over again until Sonia scooped him up and began tickling him in the ribs, calling him “Pignoli Nut”—an even smaller, tougher nut than a peanut and a name that seemed to suit him. That made him laugh so hard he had to squirm out of her arms, run a few yards away, and pee in the grass. Then he ran back, jumped into her arms again, and asked her to call him Pignoli Nut forevermore. She agreed, though she shortened it to Oli, which was fine with him since they both knew what it meant.
On the night Sonia planned to light the fire, Oli scampered and tumbled after her as she made her way to the clearing, refusing when she tried to pick him up and help him. He actually appeared to prefer his clumsy way of getting about. Even on clear ground, he tripped and rolled as much as he walked and ran; a road map of cuts and scratches always crisscrossed his skin and would likely be his lot through childhood. When the two of them made it to the clearing, Sonia turned to him and clucked her tongue in concern. He had badly scratched his arm on a low bougainvillea, and a trickle of blood was running down to his elbow. Breathing hard, obliviously happy, he did not notice.
“Oli!” Sonia said, affecting a sternness that both of them knew she did not mean, as she knelt and took him by the shoulders to look at his arm. He tried to wriggle free and she held him tighter. “Mitã!” she said this time, trying for a scolding “Boy!”
They communicated in a polyglot mess of English and Guarani, as well as French—because it was the language of Sonia’s group—and they included some Portuguese too, because it was the language of the surrounding nation. Oli managed all of them agilely, and in this case, it was Sonia who was left staggering and stumbling behind. Once more she snapped “Mitã!” and this time her concern caught his attention. He stood still—or relatively so—bouncing on the balls of his feet.
“Let me see that,” she said in their shared tangle of tongues, pointing at his wound.
He seemed to notice it for the first time and extended his arm. She swung her pack off her back and pulled out her first aid kit, then opened a sterile gauze pad and began dabbing at the cut.
“Does this hurt?” she asked.
“No,” he answered—lying. She dabbed again, harder, at a fragment of something in the wound. He winced, and before she could ask again, he said, “No, it does not hurt.”
She smiled. “OK,” she said. “But I think this will, so hold still for me.”
She removed an antiseptic alcohol wipe from the pack, and he began to pull away. She tugged him gently back and applied the wipe to the cut. He produced a small whimper, which he tried to cover. She bandaged the wound, then opened her arms and wiggled her fingers, signaling for a hug. He obliged.
“Brave boy,” she said, and kissed him on the head.
Sonia glanced at her watch, saw she still had a few minutes before she had to light her fire, and took advantage of the moment to give Oli a fast exam. She and the rest of the group had come here to help when twin epidemics—first of influenza and then of chicken pox—had torn through the tribes in the southern regions of the Brazilian rain forest. The viruses had been carried in by loggers, who had not cut this portion of the jungle yet but passed through on their way to raze bordering lands. That was all it took for them to shed the viruses to which they were immune but which the Guarani people had never encountered before.
Sonia had just finished her four years at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and was eyeing a specialty in pediatrics. She wanted to take a year before her internship to work for Health on Wings—properly Santé sur Ailes, or SSA—the largely volunteer French organization that sent doctors and nurses to developing nations and natural disaster sites around the world. She didn’t want the Amazon; she’d never much cared for the heat and bugs and humidity of Houston and knew that the rain forest would be an order of magnitude worse. She had in fact listed it last—putting Inuit communities struggling with emerging diseases at the top of her list. She briefly considered withdrawing her application altogether when she was nonetheless assigned to a hospital camp in the Guarani tribal regions, but Sonia Annie had talked her out of quitting, and now she was deeply glad she’d heeded that advice.
There were about fifty thousand surviving members of the Guarani people scattered across the jungle, all of them living in small tribes, scraping by on jigsaw bits of their remaining ancestral land, surrounded by ranches and sugar and soya plantations. Oli’s village was home to four hundred Guarani and was located just half a kilometer from the SSA hospital camp—an easy walk back and forth for the doctors and villagers, and an easy run for Oli, at least when he was healthy.
But only recently he hadn’t been. The boy had contracted chicken pox first and then the flu—one of the few children in the tribe to have had the poor luck to be hit by both. Toward the end, he’d developed pneumonia and nearly slipped away from respiratory arrest. Sonia had been assigned his case and wound up staying by his bedside for much of his illness, developing a connection to the boy—and he to her—that was all wrong for the dispassion she was supposed to feel as a practitioner, but she could not help herself.
Oli had lost his mother to a cholera outbreak just over two years ago, and while that was well before Sonia knew him, she could recognize the lost and envious look on his face when he saw other children his age picked up and cuddled by their mothers. He once was a boy who had been picked up and cuddled by a mother too, and now he wasn’t. That simple mortal arithmetic—going from one mama to no mama—seemed to weigh heavily on him. It weighed less so when he was with Sonia.
Then too there was Oli’s way, once he got to know her, of reading her almost eerily well. His father had told him of his belief in the idea of peteï korasõ, or one heart—the ability of two people to know each other’s moods and feelings and sometimes even thoughts, provided they cared for each other enough; it was a quality of near mind-reading he said he had shared with Oli’s mother. Sonia had never experienced such a thing herself, but no sooner had Oli recovered from his illness than he seemed to have developed something of a unidirectional peteï korasõ with her, able to climb inside her head, even if she could not climb inside his.
“Don’t be sad now,” he said to her once when she was privately feeling melancholy and missing home and he ran up to her in the doctors’ quarters and attempted to tug her outside to play. She was filling out patient reports on her computer at that moment, and there was nothing she could see that she was doing that signaled sadness, but he read it anyway.
“I feel fine!” he said to her another time when she picked him up for a hug but secretly planned to take the opportunity to check his temperature since she had been anxious that he looked flushed and might be coming down with the measles after an outbreak struck some of the other tribes.
Whether the peteï korasõ was real or not, a near mother-child bond had begun to form between Sonia and Oli, one that was all the stronger for one other reason: She very much looked the part. So many of the doctors and other outsiders were Europeans or Americans—pale, with light eyes and fair hair and sometimes dustings of freckles, which absolutely fascinated Oli. But they were clearly from somewhere else. Sonia could have been Brazilian—even Guarani. She was born of an American father and a Mexican mother, but the American part was hard to spot.
Sonia’s hair was black and thick, and she kept it long, though for fieldwork she braided it and then tied it up to the crown of her head in a businesslike bun. She had the kind of mocha skin that darkened a shade if someone so much as took a flash picture of her; in the jungle sun she was nearly the color of the tribespeople. Her eyes were a brown so dark that she sometimes had to squint in the mirror to make out the pupils. If there was any flicker of north-of-the-border appearance that survived, it was a faint spangling of green, her father’s eye color, in the brown of her own eyes. Oli loved the bit of color and called the bright flecks “hovyū mbyja,” green stars.
At the moment, though, the boy’s mind was on the real stars. He squinted up at the sky and then turned to Sonia. “Where is it?” he asked in his language scramble.
Sonia looked up at the curtain of stars across the sky. “It’s coming,” she said.
He reached toward her pocket for her phone, and she took it out. By now he knew how to spin the little globe on the screen and understood what it was telling him. He looked at the image and pointed to a tiny red dot that, if you focused long enough, you could tell was slowly moving.
“Soon, right?” he asked.
“Soon, yes,” she answered. “So let’s hurry.”
He scurried over to a pile of mahogany logs and selected a small one he could lift. She trailed after him and picked up two larger ones. They carried the logs into the clearing and dropped them there. Oli ran back and collected another small one, and Sonia hoisted another heavy one, and they tossed them on the pile they had made.
“That’s all for now,” she said. “It should be big enough for them to see us say hello.”
She crouched down and handed Oli some newspapers and kindling, and he began tucking them in under the logs as she’d taught him. They worked in silence for a few moments; then Sonia sat up, took a box of matches from her pack, struck one, and it lit and flared. The clearing flashed briefly in the white light of potassium and sulfur, then gave way to the softer yellow given off by the tiny flame. The smell of the powders and, more subtly, of the burning pine of the little matchstick hung in the air. Sonia bent forward to light the paper, and Oli leaned toward her to watch. Then, suddenly, his head snapped up. Caught by the movement, Sonia looked at him in alarm.
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