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“I am not sorry, Dr. Grace.”
It is well past sunset. Late dusk blues settle over the unfamiliar campus, pierced by the staring eyes of streetlamps—some of them the warm, modulated reds of Petrovalamps. Eva Stratt feels their gazes heavy on her shoulders.
She must be a strange sight to passersby, college students living in their envelopes of oblivion. She is not the only Petrova Taskforce alum to make the pilgrimage to Lost in Thought, one of 30 and counting statues of Ryland Grace that have gone up worldwide since the Hail Mary launched. Stratt has seen photos of many alumni sitting beside his immortal self—Lokken holding his hand, Dimitri sharing a drink with him, even the two remaining members of the backup crew holding the decommissioned Ringo, sharing in his triumph.
But not a lot of them are accompanied by armed escorts, Eva thinks. Her guards stand mere paces away, and they do not bother with the illusion of privacy; they watch her warily with their hands on their firearms. She does not mind. At this point, a swift death would be a kindness.
She is only here at all because after the Taumoeba bloom took hold, and Grace’s solution was proven, the governments of the world had evidently felt a certain amount of—grudging respect, possibly, or pity, and Eva was granted a pardon on the condition that she live out her days in humble anonymity.
Bah. After she did the work they needed her to do anyway. No one believed in the Hail Mary anymore—that dead zone after the hope of the initial launch rotted. Just Eva and what remained of her loyal team after the beetles’ signals were picked up past Saturn and ignored—taking over abandoned observatories and launch facilities, bribing governments in Eastern Europe where they could, calling in favors in Asia, running an operation to recover the splash-down and get a Venus probe together for launch. It only got done because her team had smuggled her off the continent and back onto the sea.
The world was ready to eat its own tail, only to deign to formalize her release once she’d saved them. Most nations keep her under close observation when she travels anyway—she is only left at peace now when at her cottage in exile in Russia.
Grace got all the credit, of course; Eva gets all the blame. There are no statues of her.
“I am not sorry,” she says, “because I was right, and you were wrong. I do not forgive you for not wanting to go, as I am sure you do not forgive me for what I did.”
She runs her hand along his bronze cheek. This is her first time seeing the statue she commissioned from her cell in France. He is half-smiling, his glasses perched at the tip of his nose. Someone has left a knitted scarf looped around his shoulders—winters are still colder than they should be. Someone must have thought he needed the warmth.
“You are a cowardly fool,” Eva tells him, and sighs. “And I am a wistful old woman. You ran away from Earth, I don’t care what you had to say about your new alien friends. You could have come home by now, but you cannot face what might await you.
“I am dying,” she adds. She says this matter-of-fact, but it is the first time she is saying it out loud. The sound of it in the air does not bother her as much as she once thought it might. “Did you expect that someone would try to kill me? It has been years, but they are getting their way. Fragments of the bullet they lodged in my shoulder have poisoned my blood.”
She looks at his shoulder, where the Hail Mary mission patch is rubbed shiny. A good luck symbol for students who have not studied adequately—their own personal long shot. What an insult.
“It is a long, slow, painful death alone for me, Dr. Grace.” She smiles wryly. “Some would say it is what I deserve. Would you agree?”
The statue does not answer.
She used to confide in him like this, from time to time, before a measuring mistake changed the course of world history. Perhaps it was for the better anyway: Grace would not have coped well with watching the world dissolve into nigh-endless war, and Eva would not have coped well with his face when they hauled her to prison.
But once, she told him—a moment of weakness best left forgotten—that she had not joined the Petrova Taskforce of her own volition. Much like the team she built, she had been an unwilling conscript in the fall of Earth. Her life had ended the moment the U.N. Sec-Gen’s name had appeared on her calendar. She told Grace that, and in the light of the stars over the deep ocean, his eyes had sparkled with tears she hated. She did not want him to pity her.
She is sure he does not now.
“Fuck it,” Eva says mildly. “I am ready to die, Dr. Grace. I have cheated it long enough, it is about time that death catches up to me.”
She lowers herself off the platform carefully. Brittle bones do not make easy landings. Grace stares silently at the spot she had occupied, waiting for more. She pauses, considering.
When she walks back to the waiting van, her hair falls around her shoulders, cutting the silhouette of a younger, softer woman that she has not been in decades. The warm hat she had worn is perched on the statue’s head.
Ah well. It used to belong to him, anyway.