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The need to be strong has woven itself into habit. Etched into the very skin. To set herself aside, to sacrifice everything for the greater good. What are the souls and feelings of two people in love when the survival of humanity hangs in the balance? Amelia learns how to live with her head held high. How to be calm, unflinching. To conceal the pain, a clot of cold darkness beneath her ribs, to speak of Edmunds without her voice betraying even a hint of a tear. It was their choice, one they made together, and now there’s no use in tears or self-reproach. Even now, when vows and promises have faded into meaninglessness, Amelia cannot allow her emotions to break free. She locks them tightly in her chest.
She studies the data readings, checks them once, twice, three times, before raising a hand to the collar of her suit and unfastening the helmet’s seals. Her fingers, steady even during the harrowing maneuver at Gargantua, tremble as she lifts the helmet away and draws her first ragged breath. The air carries a faint metallic tang, but it doesn’t sting her throat. Amelia smiles. A faint, uncertain smile. The first in ten days since that damned morning when she found Edmunds’ cryopod. A cruel, senseless accident—an earthquake on a plateau of near-zero seismic activity.
Stepping outside the module, Amelia pauses a few paces away. Without the helmet she’s grown so used to, she feels strangely vulnerable. A cool breeze tousles her hair, grazes the nape of her neck, and sends a shiver through her. Her eyes water—from the light of the setting star, nothing more. She wipes the tears with a quick, almost defiant motion.
A new world. A planet so distant from Earth, yet hauntingly familiar. Or is that just her mind’s illusion, shaped by the cold void of interstellar space and the suffocating facilities of the Endurance, where the walls sometimes seemed to close in, stealing her breath? A new world. A home for those who will follow, but not for her. To Amelia, this planet will forever be the place where the man she loved drew his final breath.
She returns to the technical module and hunches over a paper, listing everything that must be relayed to Earth. She pares it down, again and again, until it’s reduced to a sparse string of numbers—just enough for the transmitter’s limited power. Not a word about herself, not a flicker of emotion. All of that stays here.
Exhausted, she closes her eyes and presses her palms to her face. Tears slip down her cheeks, defying her will. She’s never felt so alone, not even during the sleepless nights after Edmunds left. Back then, hope sustained her—fragile as a signal thread passing through the wormhole, streaking across an alien galaxy, yet stubbornly unyielding. That invisible tether bound them across the light years. The certainty that Wolf Edmunds was alive—just alive—gave her strength. Now, she must draw it from her own weary, battered heart.
Amelia pulls her hands from her face and clenches them, fingers laced so tightly it hurts. Here, at the edge of an alien universe, she has no one, nothing. The temptation to surrender, to retreat, looms large. To climb into a cryopod. A bitter thought lingers at the edge of her mind: another earthquake would end all of this. Giving up would be so easy, so welcoming, especially when there’s no one left to judge her. No one to hold her accountable.
She sends the signal mindlessly, fingers moving over the controls without thought. It must be done, and that necessity outweighs her despair, her confusion. The display dims, then goes black. The message is sent, and there is nothing else she could’ve done. It is soaring through the void toward a planet where the last of humanity might be choking in dust storms. Their only hope.
Hope. The same force that carried her through all those years.
Amelia turns inward, searching blindly for answers. She’s suppressed her emotions for so long that they’ve knotted into something indistinguishable—real feelings tangled with those she’s forced herself to endure. She squeezes her eyes shut, pressing her forehead against her clasped hands.
“There’s one thing I’ll always believe in,” Edmunds’ quiet voice echoes in her mind. Words from their final day together. “Us. You and me.”
What remains now, beyond those memories?
A vivid image flares beneath eyelids stinging with unshed tears: Earth’s blue sphere, laced with delicate threads of clouds. Amelia thought her heart held only emptiness, but something stirs within her soul, faint and fleeting. Earth. The home that was, and always will be, despite everything.
Love for that home, buried in a tangle of raw, painful emotions, emerges as her only anchor. No warmth of affection, perhaps, but unshakable. That same invisible thread that once tied her to Edmunds across light years weaves itself anew. Thinner, more fragile, but no less real.
Amelia forces herself to straighten, switching off the transmitter. She steps outside into the open air, letting the cold night wind graze her face. Above, unfamiliar stars blaze, their light shimmering through the tears in her eyes. She closes eyes tightly, picturing Earth’s globe with aching clarity, just as she once envisioned Edmunds’ face. And makes a vow, silently.
To live on. No matter what.