She was about to step into the suit when the door opened, and Tertio Polaris stepped into the chamber. He wore his teal uniform buttoned up to the throat, as usual, and his dark hair combed away from his face neatly. The only thing that had changed about him, as far as she could tell, was that he’d let her see he was human.

  “I don’t understand why you do this,” he said. “How you can call it ‘swimming,’ like it’s a fun activity. Especially now that I know . . .”

  He trailed off. She raised an eyebrow. The story she’d told Birdie had made its way from the ship’s surveillance systems—useless in the Arboretum, thanks to the trees, but fully functional on the Maintenance Deck—to the staff rumor mill, and now everyone knew it.

  “Especially now that you know it’s how my parents died?” she said. “You can say it, you know.”

  “I don’t know how near it is, for you.”

  “It’s a solar system away, Polaris.” Her lips quirked into a smile. “At first I did it to make myself hurt. To see what they saw, at the end.” She shrugged. “But then . . . I realized that what’s out there is oblivious to us. There’s no menace to it, because there’s no intent. We’re just fragile, and we break sometimes. And time keeps moving. I don’t know. I think it’s comforting—our smallness is comforting to me.”

  Tertio’s eyes were as dark as space. They held each other’s gaze for just a moment, and then she broke it, nudging at Georgina’s suit with her toe. “Help me get into this, will you?”

  So Tertio held the suit for her while she stepped into it, and he lifted it so it didn’t sag around her calves when she stepped into the boots. He even picked up the helmet to put on her head, but hesitated before he did it.

  “Birdie’s all right, you know,” Tertio said. “Detained, and ready to be taken into Earth custody when we arrive, but all right. Earth is a decent place to go to prison, these days. At least, it was last time I checked.”

  “And Mrs. Magnussen?”

  “Free, and everyone’s insisting they knew she was innocent all along.” Tertio rolled his eyes a little. “I can’t wait to drop these assholes off.”

  “Did you just . . . imply that our passengers are anything less than the very best customers a person could ask for?” Ace faked a gasp. “Why, Tertio! I never.”

  In response, Tertio put the helmet over her head and twisted it so it locked.

  “Come watch Frontier Justice with us tonight, okay?” she said, her voice muffled by the helmet.

  To her surprise, Tertio touched his forehead to her visor, so he was all she could see, and said, “All right.”

  Ace drifted in the void. She turned away from the ship and swallowed the horror of emptiness like a shot of whiskey that burned all the way down.

  It was strange how an ache that had persisted for years could just . . . subside. Just like that. Matter not disappearing, just . . . transforming.

  They would enter Sol System tomorrow. They would coast past Jupiter with its big swirling eye; land on Mars Station, adrift over the dusty red planet, to unload passengers; and then continue on to Earth, the big blue marble from which all humans originated.

  Sol System had been Ace’s home once, in the time before the void. Her parents took her all around the system, from job to job, so she adjusted to the pull of every gravity, every combination of elegant medications that kept her healthy, every configuration of stars and planets imaginable. When her parents died, they left her with no home but them to speak of, and they were gone. They left her with nothing.

  But the void was also nothing, and now it contained her entire world.

  And so all things passed, eventually. Even pain.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2019 Nelson Fitch

  Veronica Roth is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Divergent series, Arch-Conspirator, Poster Girl, Chosen Ones, the Carve the Mark duology, and the short story collection The End and Other Beginnings. Her stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including the Amazon Original Stories collection Forward, Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, Lightspeed magazine, and Catapult.

 

 

  Veronica Roth, Void (The Far Reaches collection)

 

 

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