“Nora?”
She felt in her bones a vibration, up through the floor, in her hand as she felt around his face. She made her choice.
“It’s all right.”
Her fingers closed around the bolt that locked her helmet into place. The door was open, several people shouting behind her as they scrambled, encumbered in their suits, to stop her.
“It’s all right.”
She lifted the bulky ironwork off. She looked at him, smiled. For two, three seconds she stood bathed in light that swarmed, pulsing the air, a moment longer, then shrank to nothing, plunging the room into blackness. An attending doctor was the first to reach her: turned slowly on the spot toward their voices, the trace of a curl on her lips.
Saul Morrow, pacing around the kitchen, turned the corner and found David in the doorway, hands out as though feeling through space by touch. They looked at each other, unnatural as it was for both to be awake so early in the morning. Saul opened his mouth to offer breakfast—chopped bacon and fried eggs together in a pan, his son’s favorite—and when his eyes caught the light, a seeping blue under the boy’s skin that darkened around his eyes and under his fingernails, he thought for a moment of his luck: the godsend to fathers able to look on their sons as if for the first time.
David thought he knew what he wanted. More asylum seekers were pouring into the Spanish commune every day. A photograph had been taken from the International Space Station, a nickel-sized flare of white light on Earth’s surface, now the brightest spot on the planet.
“I’m a danger here. What if I burn the house down? They said the Korean girl’s mother only lived because of the suit she had on. There’s real treatment in Spain. They’re taking bigger risks there.”
He almost stopped himself saying it, as if forbidden: “What if they can cure me?”
He grew hot, the way boys did when they could tell their fathers weren’t listening.
“Why can’t you see this is what I want?” David filled his lungs, and his father could swear his skin brightened several degrees as he did so. How long had it been? Days? Weeks? He had failed to notice.
“Dad.”
“You’re not going.”
“Dad—”
Saul took two steps to where he stood. Any day now David would realize his own body had eclipsed his father’s. When that happened he would, for the first time, picture Saul’s death, the wilting of joints and papering of the skin. It would make him gentler, kinder. It had been the same with Jack, a week shy of his high school graduation when he died. Saul remembered their last words: the trash had been left in the garage and had missed the trucks that morning. Jack had apologized, placing his hands, folded earnestly into each other, at his waist, and his sincerity had so shaken both Saul and Priya that their annoyance had crumbled instantly. There it was, there he was, at the end of their line—
David blinked his eyes, dragging his arm across his face with impatience. He was so young and trying not to be.
“If—If I’m going to—”
Out of pride, or some other stupid, boyish determination, he did not reach out for his father.
“You’d be able to visit me,” he tried, feebly, lowering his head.
Saul held his breath, afraid for a moment that he’d be left there in the kitchen for the rest of the day. He raised his hands, had to wait only a moment before David relented, leaning forward to rest his head in the crook of his father’s neck, and his light threw a ghost’s shapes on the walls.