There’s a coyote pack waiting for Petra next to the dumpster. “Get, you mooches,” she tells them, and they disperse, slowly, with dignity, eyeing her sideways. There have been more of them, lately. Lock up your pets, the news warns her, too late; she has taken to carrying an airgun with her when she leaves the apartment. No people have been attacked, but you see them in alleyways, perched atop moldering pallets, or hear their cries echoing through the empty shell of the financial district at night.

They’re waiting for her again outside the bodega. She bites into the meatstick, growls at them, low in her throat, lets the bag loop around her elbow as she reaches up for the airgun. They watch, perfectly still, tapetum lucidum throwing the light back at her.

Long moment.

Hiss of door behind. “Holy shit,” murmurs a male voice. “I’ve never seen so many.”

Traffic noise fades away in the distance. They are gathered here, in an empty corner of the city, her hand upon her gun, frozen.

Corday draws the short straw, so up she goes, past windows and minarets, past comforting shroud of night’s rocky dome, out and into the terrifying light of space. She circles the globe in seven whirling hours, looking modo huc, modo illuc for cracks, chinks, weaknesses.

She tongues the radio on. “First pass, clear. Second pass, clear. Cove 1, clear, Cove 2, clear.” Aliens throng the slopes, their awful, aping eyes running in wonder after her arc’s fiery ascent.

“Any problems?” Control is laconic; she doesn’t have anything to worry about.

“They’ve seen me.”

“Suck it up, Lieutenant. They can’t even touch you.”

She tongues her mic off, swears, tongues it back on. “Yes, sir.”

Etna’s quiet and solid as ever, which isn’t very much of either. She retreats into the green room and passes through the plume. Outside her detectors go crazy, but the plants do what they’re supposed to and her personal reader stays mum. Everything’s on the green, but her nerves are scraped raw. Too bright, too noisy. She longs for the muted beauty of home, for her asphodel bed and Enyo’s soft voice.

“All right, that’s all we need.” Control’s voice is surpassing gently. “You did good, Lieutenant. Bring it on home.”

Petra’s waiting for her bus and there’s an old man across the street screaming at her.

“You damn people are ruining this country!” He’s all of 80, grizzled chest hair curling gray above his shirt collar, kind of stooped the way age does sometimes. “Cowards! Communists! Pedophiles!”

In her coat pocket she wraps her keys through her fingers. Tries to remember how it’s supposed to work. Instep, knee, groin… stomach? Or is it the other way round? She sees his face slashing open, his old nose splattered like a dropped beer bottle. She hunches her shoulders, checks her watch, looks for the bus.

“How many men have died so you can spit on their memory?” He steps off the corner, starts walking toward her, red hand be damned. “How many goddamned men–“

She can feel the adrenaline kicking in. Everything is suddenly so sharp; the old man, the keys digging into her knuckles, the car barreling around the corner. It crashes right into him, bam, and his head flies off and lands at her feet. The driver’s face through the windshield is a blank mask of horror. Someone across the street screams. The old man catches her eye, just his head, and glowers at her. “Kids today,” it says, then the lights go out.

There is a whole life ringing in the phone, a brighter life, maybe, certainly a more dangerous one, and on the other end a scared, desperate, pale face and a voice gone half an octave higher with fear saying “Oh, please, oh please, oh, please answer, please be home, pick up, pick up, pick up…” over and over again while the receiver buzzes gnomically in her ear, but that’s all at the other end, miles away along the curve of the earth or thousands of miles away if you count the leap from phone to tower to satellite to tower to the cell phone that Petra has left at home again. The phone rings and rings into an empty room and finally gives up and plays the voicemail message for the pale face waiting at the other end. “Hi,” Petra’s voice says, “I’m not answering my phone. Maybe I’m out of minutes, or maybe I’m at the library, or maybe I’ve forgotten the phone again. Leave a message.” Then the sexless female voice says to push 1 to leave a message or just wait for the tone, 2 to leave a numeric page.

It’s a nice day and Petra is wandering around, just enjoying the weather. She sees people she knows, old friends and new, ex-lovers and current ones, and smiles and waves at them all. She slides away from them when they try to talk to her, friendly, cheerful, laughing, gone. It’s too nice a day.

When she comes home, there’s a red light winking on the front of her phone. She checks her messages without turning on the lights, enjoying the day to much to want to extend it artificially.

There’s only one message, and halfway through it Petra turns on all the lights in her apartment and sits in the bathroom with her knees drawn up under her chin. Miles and hours away there was a life ringing in her phone; even in the bathroom the air is thick with the ghosts of what might have been.

Three days up from Lune.

Al comes swinging down into the lounge, legs long and graceful like a dancer’s.

“I’m tired of this,” Petra tells him. “I wish we were done already.”

Al gives her a funny look. “We’ve barely started and already you’re wanting to throw in the towel? What’s eating you?”

She waves her hands, vaguely meaning the lounge, the ship, the others… the whole mess. “It’s all so unreal. I can’t take any of it seriously. Nothing has any consequences out here.” Al tosses her a bulb by way of rebuttal and it takes her a minute or two to stop spinning. She sucks on the juice while she waits. “It’s all so mental.”

“You’d rather be back on Lune? Stuck in one spot? Tethered?”

“No,” she sighs, and looks out at the strange world beyond the window. Strange blobs with almost eyes go past, clinging to the surface of the ground. They open their faces at the window and make noises at the two of them. “I just can’t take any of this seriously.”