I decided I wanted to bring my children back together again. There would be destruction, on a scale you could not conceive. But that’s the way it is with family, sometimes. And you are no strangers to destruction: you seem, as a species, to crave it. I began to move the tectonic plates, urging them faster. They moved anyway, so slowly you never noticed, at about the rate of one of your fingernails growing. Africa curled, so slowly, up towards Europe. Australia reached out to Japan. They longed for each other. I have learned the names you gave my children, who have been Nuna and Rodinia, and a thousand others lost to time. I have names for them, too. Perhaps one day, if you return, you will learn them.

There will be scars. There always are. But they will be beautiful.

*     *     *
We sleep, we wake, we sleep again. Some of us chose, after the first or second cycle, to remain asleep until the end. Beneath us the planet convulses, the continents crashing into each other in slow motion. We should be used to it by now, the violence.

I watch smoke curl over a newly formed continent through the magnified viewer portal in the cafeteria. We can’t turn it off. Why the designers of the ship thought we’d want to watch the slow destruction of Earth while we consume protein paste and electrolyte fluid is a mystery I will never solve. It is oddly soothing, though, the way the smoke makes patterns, shifting in the wind. It reminds me of flocks of birds, wheeling over the sea at sunrise … I shut the memory down before it can form. I get enough of that when I'm asleep. No reason to ruin perfectly adequate protein paste. I instead let myself wonder if there will ever be birds on Earth again.

The clatter of a tray snaps me back to the cafeteria. It's rare that my waking cycle coincides with another passenger's. Most people synched their cycles with their family or friends. I purposefully programmed mine to be alone on the ship. I have nothing to say to another human being, not anymore.

She sits across from me, petite, with long dark hair. She sweeps it off her forehead with a grin.

"Morning. Beautiful, isn't it?" She nods at the display, ripping the top off the tube of protein paste with her teeth.

"If you forget that you're watching the destruction of a planet, sure." My voice sounds alarmingly hoarse. I can’t remember the last time I spoke out loud. I calculate it: a hundred years of cryo-sleep per cycle, five, or is it six cycles, with a week of wakefulness between … The stranger across from me laughs, a rich, musical sound. It rings through me like a bell.

"That was cool. I literally saw you go away into your mind while I was talking."

"Sorry."

She shrugs. "It’s hard to come back to life after a sleep cycle, right? All the memories. I'm sure they could have found a way to just give us amazing dreams. But no, let's let the last dregs of humanity relive their pathetic lost lives in their sleep. Over and over."

I laugh, and it surprises me. I’d forgotten what my own laugh sounds like. It’s possible I’d forgotten even before I boarded the ship.

"You think we’re the dregs?"

She narrows her eyes at me. "Three quarters of the ship bought their berth. They didn't have to take any cognitive or aptitude tests, they didn't have to provide proof of their skills or degrees. We're on a ship of rich kids. It’s Harvard in space."

"Rich kids can still breed. That might be more important than engineering or horticulture, in the end. If we ever go back."

She smiles and looks at the swirling smoke filling the screen.

"We'll go back. How can we not?"

"Do you think there will ever be birds down there again?"

"Of course. She wouldn’t be herself without birds."

Oh, God. The only other person awake on the ship and she's one of those neopagans. I gather my tray.

"I'm due back in my pod."

"Sleep well." Her eyes don’t leave the destruction below. A small smile lingers on her face.

I'm not due to resume my sleep cycle for another three days, but I override the timer and climb into my pod. A momentary pain as the tube connects to the valve surgically implanted at the base of my spine, followed by whole-body cold as the cryo-sleep cocktail floods my cells. Then, nothing at all.

*     *     *
We perched on the seawall, waiting for the sun to rise. The spray from the waves dusted your hair with tiny droplets. You passed me the thermos without looking at me. I could have brushed your fingers with mine when I took it, but I didn't. Something as simple as our hands touching had become fraught. I wanted to be touched, but maybe not by you, maybe by some other lover I'd convinced myself waited in my future. You wanted me to touch you, but only if it led to more. You felt neglected, I felt bullied, and when I said I loved you I didn’t know if I meant it anymore. But the thought of losing you made my chest clench in panic.

The sun glowed a golden trail across the water, turning the droplets in your hair into a net of light. A flock of birds lifted off from the sand, and my heart lifted with them. The melancholy I always felt in the presence of beauty washed over me: pleasure in its presence, pain it would not last. You once told me being in love with me was like living with a Samuel Beckett character: already mourning the happiness we had from some future point in which it would be a fading memory. When you were particularly annoyed with me you called me Sam, to remind me to lighten up.

The birds wheeled and turned in the growing light, moving as one. It was hypnotic, a dance of seven veils across the golden-rose glow of the rising sun. You reached over and clenched my hand, silent. I squeezed it once and released it, moving slightly away. I ignored the tightening of your mouth, the duck of your head.

I could fill a lifetime with the things I didn’t say to you.

Every time I sleep, I do.

*     *     *
It was hard, seeing you all panic and flee and die. You're my creatures, too. When the tectonic plates in the middle of the ocean shifted, they threw walls of water onto your coasts. Cities crumbled. It must have hurt, to realize in an instant how small you truly are. You fled inland, until long dormant volcanoes began erupting. Entire landscapes were erased as I drew my children closer, closer. Ash and smoke cloaked the sky, while below the land burned. Some of you survived. You're tenacious. You piqued my interest then, and I started watching you more closely. I saw you band together, and then war with other bands. I saw you kill each other. Astonishing, with so few of you surviving. I saw kindnesses, too, equally as baffling. Why feed a starving dog the last of your food, when both of you would surely die the next day? I saw you look in desperation to the stars, to the last hope for your survival. I watched when you left, the tiny flare of life struggling through the atmosphere. I thought you would search out a new planet, but you circle above me, watching. I can feel your longing to return.

*     *     *
Waking up from cryo-sleep is unpleasant. First the pinch as the tubes retract from my body, then the warming solution kicks in, burning. The past lingers: tastes, sounds. The feel of fingers slipping through mine. The lights in our pods are gradient, meant to simulate sunrise, but they are still disorienting. We're not so easily fooled, it turns out. We know on some deep instinctual level that everything here is artificial.

I'm still half in the past as I stand at the viewer portal. Things have quieted a bit down below. A blanket of pure white clouds shields the planet from view. The sun hits them, turning the planet into an opalescent orb.

"Morning." The neopagan again. I stifle a groan. I'd hoped her earlier appearance was a fluke. She takes a sip from her electrolyte tube and grimaces. "Ugh. Do you know what I wish, more than anything?"

Her raised eyebrow signals she expects an answer.

"No."

"I wish, with every fiber of my being, that I didn't remember what real coffee tastes like. You'd think after all this time I wouldn't, but I do, and every time I wake up, I'm disappointed."

She glances sideways at me, a smile quirking the side of her mouth.

"Sorry."

"You're very monosyllabic this morning. Are you always like this when you wake up? I'm Sarah, by the way."

"You're drowning me in words, Sarah." Sometimes things like this just pop out of my mouth.

She laughs. This time it sounds to me like water flowing over stones, a delighted trickle of silver. "Yeah. I do that."

I've been thinking of myself as in something like suspended animation, not really alive even when I'm awake. Just waiting. But Sarah is vibrant with life, and it makes me warm to her a bit, despite the neopagan thing.

"I'm Evie. Agricultural geneticist."

"Ooh, a scholarship kid. Me too. Biologist. I'm supposed to go back down there and figure out where we fit into the new biome. I guess you’re going to figure out what we can eat, huh?"

"You make it sound so easy. We'll probably all die as soon as we go back, you know. The atmosphere will be different. Accelerated evolution will mean new species will have popped up, most of them more well adapted to the planet, and …"

She places a gentle hand on my arm. I flinch. I can't remember the last time I was touched. Sarah sees it and drops her hand, although her warm eyes stay on my face.

"It's going to be okay, Evie. You'll see."

"What on Earth makes you think that?"

Again, that silvery laugh. "I love how we still say that. 'What on Earth?!' I think, I know, that everything will be all right because I believe in her. I believe in Earth, or Gaea or whatever you want to call her. Even after everything we did to her, I believe when we go back, there will be a place for us. And maybe we won't fuck it up so much this time."

I pull away. "I don't believe any of that. That neopagan stuff."

Sarah shrugs. "I'm not a neopagan. At least I don’t think I am. I never went to one of their meetings, so who knows. I'm just a believer in biology. We're not extinct yet. There must be a reason why."

"You call the planet 'she.'"

"What else would you call it? A big, beautiful force that took everything we did to her until she didn't anymore, then came and cleaned up our mess? Sounds pretty female to me."

"You're the weirdest scientist I've ever met."

"Well, that’s saying something." She stretches, luxuriously. "Come on. There's a chess set in the rec room, and I'm bored."

She pulls me along in her wake, and before I know it, I'm across the board from her, watching her mobile face telegraph every thought.

Over the next week Sarah beats me at chess fourteen times, teaches me Mah-Jongg, and lets me win at Parcheesi a few times. I find myself thawing, my defenses washed away in the tidal wave of her easy chatter.

"Why aren’t you on the Ark?" I ask one day. "I thought all the biologists ended up over there."

I sometimes like to imagine the Ark when I'm going to sleep. Regular sleep, not the immediate unconsciousness of cryo-sleep, which allows little time for thought. All the animals we could save, tucked into cryo-sleep pods just like ours. I wonder if the giraffes dream of their past lives like we do, long legs striding over savannah grass, neck reaching for succulent green leaves. I wonder if they have regrets.

Sarah looks uncomfortable, really the only time I've seen her hesitate before speaking.

"The psych eval. You know they worried we'd have trouble with the people we left behind. I was deemed important enough to save but damaged enough to need the cryo-sleep to deal with it. I guess that means all the biologists over there are heartless bastards who didn't care about who they lost. It doesn’t help though, the sleep. Does it help you?"

"No. I just relive every moment with my husband. Ex-husband, or almost. We were separated when it started. He was in Japan."

Sarah bows her head. No one survived Japan. "I'm sorry."

I shrug it off. "Ancient history, right?"

She puts a hand over mine, and I surprise myself by not immediately pulling away.

"Don't do that. It's okay to grieve."

Somehow over the week, I've stopped being annoyed when she says these things, pseudo-psychology sound bites I used to scoff at. From her it feels sincere. Still, I pull my hand away.

"Thank you."

When it's time to return to our pods she gives me a brief hug, laughing at my stiffness.

"See you next century."

It's only as the cold begins to flood my veins that I realize I never asked her who she lost. My last thought before unconsciousness is how selfish I still am.

*     *     *
I sat at the bar, thinking how fucking selfish I was being. I hated myself for not loving you enough, for my cliched middle-aged desire for freedom, a pathetic grab at my lost youth. I'd known you were working late tonight, and waited all week to go out, to sit here stroking the worn wood of the bar, inhaling stale cigarette smoke and feeling the beat of the overly loud music in my chest. I hated myself for wanting to be wanted by someone other than you. But I did.

I woke up in a stranger's bed. I didn't remember his name, just the way he laughed at my jokes, tapped my wrist with two fingers when he wanted to make a point, like he was gauging my racing pulse. I dressed in the dark, silently. I was pretty sure he was awake when I slipped out, but he didn’t say anything.

When I got home the sun was just rising. The thing we liked best about our new apartment was the way it was sun-drenched, such a change from our tiny dark studio that faced a brick wall. It felt like a new start, when we moved in. I had to shield my eyes when I finally negotiated the lock, still half-drunk. Then I saw you, sitting on the couch, still in your rumpled suit.

The awful thing, the thing that I never really admitted to anyone, not even myself, is that I wasn't sorry. It was all fake, the tears and apologies when we had our last screaming fight in the unforgiving morning light. I told us both how much of a mistake I made, how sorry I was, how I'd never do it again. You didn't believe me. You knew me better than I gave you credit for. Maybe you saw how I treasured the night I'd had, the feeling of being seen as not a wife, just a woman. I even treasured the shame, for the dirty sheets, the sex with a man whose name I couldn’t remember even when he was inside me.

The last time I saw your face it was contorted by anger. You left a bruise on my shoulder when you pushed me up against the wall of our bedroom when I tried to block the closet door, where our matching suitcases were stored.

"Don't touch me like that!" I screamed.

"I don't want to touch you at all," you said. Then you packed your bag, one half of a matching set, and left.

The next day you were on a plane to Japan, for the job we'd decided you wouldn’t take when we were trying to work things out. It was easy to tell myself we were both relieved, both free. It didn't ease the gaping hole in my chest, the feeling of being ripped apart. I also felt a strange vindication. The worst thing had happened, and all my melancholy when things were good between us was proved right. Nothing lasts, and the memory of happiness becomes pain.

Two weeks later the sirens went off. I was sitting on the windowsill in our apartment, numb, drinking coffee that was mostly whisky. The birds in the apple tree outside our bedroom lifted off in a flurry of panicked wings, scattering fragrant blossoms in their wake. I watched them wheel into the sky, white wings rising as the white petals fell, a hypnotic symmetry. It took a long time for me to process the blare of the sirens, to move from the windowsill watching the birds, thinking about another sunrise, wondering what would have happened if I’d just kept hold of your hand that morning on the seawall. It took a long time for me to realize I'd never see another expression on your face except that last one, anger and disgust.

*     *     *
The final joining, my children's homecoming. Long separated mountain ranges crash together again, forming new peaks that lift to the cooling sky. New oceans rage. The years of fire may have seemed unkind, from your vantage point above. I could feel your pain, your loss. But they gave birth to riotous life, which strives and fights for its place in the new world. You have a place here, too.

*     *     *
I lie in my pod for hours after I wake up. I wonder if the memories we relive in cryo-sleep are intentionally painful, a way to force us to confront our regrets so that when we return to Earth, we'll be free to focus on the task of survival and repopulation. Or maybe it’s just me; maybe the other sleepers dream of pleasant things.

Finally hunger drives me to the cafeteria. It's empty, and I'm surprised at the stab of disappointment. I'd resigned myself so thoroughly to being solitary for the rest of my artificially extended life that missing the sound of Sarah's laugh is a bit of a shock. But not an unwelcome one.

I avert my eyes as I pass the viewing portal; I'm not in the mood for more destruction.

I find Sarah curled up in the library. For some unfathomable reason the ship's designers modeled this room on someone's idea of a perfect English manor room: fake wooden beams and a simulated fire in the grate, comfortable armchairs in faded floral prints. Floor-to-ceiling books, although in the scramble to survive they didn't exactly curate our reading selection. They're mostly technical manuals bound in leather. Nothing like this room will ever exist on Earth again. I avoid it; it makes me too sad.

Sarah looks tired, which is no mean feat after a century of sleep. She gives me a small smile.

"Morning. Sleep well?"

I slump down into the chair next to her. "No. Just another greatest hits reel of my failures as a human being. You?"

"Same."

"Who is it, for you?"

"My daughter. And my wife. Lyra—that was her name, our daughter—died a year before things started on Earth. Leukemia. A blessing, I guess, that she missed everything that happened. We didn’t have the kind of money that would have let us bring a kid on board."

"Is that all it took?" I wondered sometimes about the presence of children on the ship. Practically speaking they wouldn't be much use when we went back to the planet, although this was a thought I kept to myself for obvious reasons. "So, you dream of her? I'm sorry."

"Not of her, so much. After she died, things between my wife and I weren't great. Marriages don’t survive that kind of thing often, you know?"

I nodded, although I was thinking of my own marriage, and how little it turned out it could endure.

"The day before things started going to hell, we had this huge fight. You know when the wheels come off and you say the most horrible things you can think of? She accused me of wishing she had died instead of Lyra. And I told her she was right. I told her I wished she was dead. Then the next day …"

"The world ended."

"It didn't end. It's just an extinction event."

"Just an extinction event?" I snort a small laugh despite myself, then feel horrible. I glance up at Sarah and see a hint of a smile.

"Yep. Just your run of the mill extinction event. Nothing to get worked up about."

I don't even try to smother my laugh, and to my relief Sarah joins in. We feed off each other, giggling uncontrollably.

Finally, she wipes a tear from her eye.

"So anyway. Yeah. The dreams suck. I bet the rich kids dream of ice cream and kittens."

"Probably. Come on. I've been itching to beat you at chess."

"Not going to happen, but I'm happy to see you try."

She lets me pull her up from her chair.





A few days later as we're bent over the Mah-Jongg board Sarah squints at me.

"Can I tell you something weird?"

"Sure."

"She talks to me. When I'm asleep."

I think of a voice, ringing in my ears. I don't want to touch you at all.

"Lyra?"

"No." She inclines her head to the viewing portal. "Her."

I try not to show my annoyance. I've tried to gamely ignore the slightly esoteric things she says sometimes for the sake of this unexpected, and maybe undeserved, friendship.

"What does she say?"

Sarah rolls her eyes. "I can hear it, Evie, when you condescend to me like that. I'm not an idiot. I know how it sounds. I'm a scientist too, you know."

"I'm not trying to condescend, but honestly. The planet talks to you in your sleep? Come on, Sarah."

She gets up, scattering Mah-Jongg tiles.

"Forget it. I'm due back in my pod."

"No, you’re not. We're on the same schedule, we've got two days left."

"Well, I'm tired. Fucking sue me."

She stomps out of the rec room. I hear her punch the door mechanism, childishly, I think, because the door will never slam, just gently hiss closed.

Then I'm alone in the room, looking at tiles scattered like runes, wondering why I always feel the need to fuck up anything good.

*     *     *
We sprawled on the grass in the park, my head on your chest, watching the wind in the trees above us. You reached over and turned the wine bottle over the glass balanced on the blanket.

"We drank all the wine, I think." I forced myself up to a sitting position and looked back over my shoulder at you. You gave me that slow smile that warmed me from the inside out, made me feel like I was the most beautiful woman in the world.

"You drank all the wine, you mean."

"I did not! You had a glass."

"Glutton." You pulled me back to you and I buried my face in your shirt, feeling the warmth of your skin, feeling safe and loved and happy.

"Don't go getting all Sam on me now." I could hear the smile in your voice.

"I'm not."

"Evie Daniels, as I live and breathe, are you enjoying a moment of happiness?"

I snuggled closer to you. "Maybe."

I closed my eyes and felt the wind on my cheek, listened to the birdsong above. I can do this, I thought. I can be happy. I can be normal.

*     *     *
I rest at last. We are as one, my children and me. One land mass. When you return, you'll be as one, too. No division, no countries. Just humanity, the most resilient and pernicious of my creatures. I wonder what names you'll give to the land, what you'll make of the new life that has sprung up. You've been sleeping for so long, floating above me, but it’s time to wake up. I will sleep now, too, and dream of your return. I'll dream of forgiveness and peace.

*     *     *
I wake with the sweetness of wine on my tongue and the caress of the breeze against my skin. The burn as my body warms to room temperature brings me back.

I stop at the door to the cafeteria. Sarah stands at the viewing portal. I smile as I catch her grimace when she takes a sip from her electrolyte tube.

"Still missing coffee?"

She turns, and her grin unties the knot I didn't know was sitting in my heart.

"Always. Come look."

I join her at the portal. Below: green and blue, with white wisps of cloud floating above. I'm embarrassed at the tears that fill my eyes.

"She's done. It's over."

I open my mouth, but Sarah takes my hand.

"I know you think I'm nuts. And maybe it was all in my head. But you know what? I don't care. I wasn't alone up here."

I turn my hand in hers to lace our fingers together.

"You're not, anyway. Not anymore."

Her smile outshines the sun.

"And look. For you. From her."

She bends to magnify the viewer, and far below, on the planet we refused to abandon, I see them. Wheeling, turning in the light. A flock of birds.