With intent, I began to ask myself the question that had guided me into the deep slumbers of my childhood: Where do you want to go?

Mirabilis, I replied. I want to go back to Mirabilis.

I forcibly conjured memories of that lush world, but they had become bittersweet. I knew that those smiles would fade, those adventures would end. All days on Mirabilis led to Opera. To look at them was to look back on the path that had led to howling and skittering and sleepless nights. The ache to return to a time long gone was almost worse than fear.

If the sounds of the rats were chaos, the sounds of Elena were clockwork. I didn’t need to be on the same deck as her to know what she was doing.

She left her cabin around 06:00 every morning.

She’d run a full systems diagnostic.

She’d check the comms folders, even though no notifications had been received.

She’d check on the airlocks to see if the rats had given us an opening.

She’d go over that day’s weather data from the cubesats. She’d study it with meticulous focus, then update her forecasts accordingly.

She’d exercise for an hour. Weights, rowing machine, treadmill.

She’d shower, ten minutes.

She’d work on a project. Sometimes it was reviewing her old reports, rewriting sections she’d had better thoughts about, then rewriting them again. Sometimes she’d go through the cargo hold, rechecking the inventory. Sometimes I had no idea what she was working on, because she didn’t want to explain.

I awoke one morning to her knock on my cabin door. Jack’s knock is a melody, if he knocks at all, and he never waits for a response. Chikondi’s is a polite drumming, almost a little too quiet. Elena’s knock is three solid taps, loud and direct. I glanced at my clock after I heard it. 05:36. I’d managed about forty-three minutes of sleep from the last time I checked it. I sat up and rubbed my face. ‘Yeah,’ I called.

‘Hey,’ she said as she entered. There was a softness to her voice that I hadn’t heard in a while, and I warmed to it. ‘Sorry to wake you.’

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘What’s up?’

‘It can wait,’ she said.

‘I’m awake now.’

She stuck her hands in her pockets and leaned against the door frame. ‘I was thinking about doing a hardware inspection.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Of which system?’

‘All of them,’ she said.

I blinked. ‘All of them.’

‘I know, it’s a lot of work.’ An understatement. A full, proper, by-the-book hardware inspection took days. ‘But we’ve been sitting in water for three weeks, and those things—’ As if on cue, a chorus of shrieking erupted. We covered our ears and waited for it to end. ‘Those things outside are doing God knows what out there.’

None of that would impact the internal hardware, but I knew she knew that. ‘We’ve got green lights across the board,’ I said. ‘Have you noticed any malfunctions? Anything acting up?’

‘No. I just—’ She looked restless, on edge. ‘I just think it doesn’t hurt to check. Better safe than sorry.’

I rubbed my face again. My temples throbbed. My eyes twinged. I felt drunk, and not in the fun way. Flimsy thoughts strained for one another, evaporating before connection could be made. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Sure, we can do that.’ We stared at each other for a moment. ‘Did you mean right now?’

She put up her palms. ‘Whenever you’re up for it. I know it’s a pain,’ she said. Her face gave a different answer. Yes, it said. Right now.

I got dressed, and we got to work.

‘Okay, let’s give it a go,’ Jack said.

I lay in the cockpit, my control panel lit and ready. At Jack’s suggestion, I’d reworked the launch sequence to allow us to simply ‘rev up’ the engines without heading into full lift-off. They’d rumble a bit, enough to be loud, and without causing thrust. A rumble is all we were after. We were hoping to scare the rats off. The wind still prevented us from launch, but in lieu of that, we might be able to go outside. And if that wasn’t safe, then at least we would be rat-free, even if only temporarily. Uninterrupted sleep sounded like victory enough.

I got on the comms. ‘Engine test commencing,’ I said.

I hit the right buttons. Outside, the engines rumbled good and proper. Some Pavlovian part of me reflexively reacted to the sound with excitement; I reminded it we were going nowhere.

A second sound emerged. A split second after the engines kicked in, every rat on the hull began shrieking in alarm.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Jack said, slamming his hands over his ears.

The din made me shut my eyes, but I forced them open to look at the window. The rats, by their standards, were bellowing, the vocal holes in their sides straining as wide as they could. But I noticed something else, something that made my stomach sink. The viscosity of their mouths changed. They were clinging on tighter. In the face of danger, they held fast.

‘Give it another minute,’ Jack yelled.

‘It’s not working,’ I shouted back.

‘Just another minute.’

We sat in the noise for a few seconds more, the hellish harmony of straining metal and terrified animals clawing its way into my teeth, my torso. I looked at my readouts. I looked at the stubborn fuckers clinging to the window. I turned the engines off.

The rats took several minutes more to calm down.

‘Shit,’ Jack said, wiping his brow as they quieted.

I let my eyes fall shut, savouring the relative peace. The storm still bellowed, but that much I could manage. ‘It makes sense, with what we know of them,’ I said. ‘If they evolved alongside storms like this, and if their response to them is to find a rock and hang on, then maybe . . . maybe they interpret noise and rumbling as the weather getting worse.’

‘They double-down, is what you’re saying.’

‘Maybe.’

Jack shook his head. ‘It was a stupid idea,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have suggested it.’

‘It wasn’t,’ I said. ‘We had to do it to know that it wouldn’t work.’

He shook his head again. ‘Stupid,’ he repeated. He climbed down the ladder without another word.

Chikondi’s cabin door was closed, so I knocked.

‘Come in,’ he said. He was sitting cross-legged on the bed as I entered, watching the rats on the window. His tablet lay on the floor nearby, switched off.

‘Why are your lights out?’ I asked. It was mid-afternoon.

‘I was trying to get a feel for the sunlight,’ he said. ‘Such as it is, anyway.’ There wasn’t much of that to see. You could see a little, shining weakly through the rainwater that ran without pause through the gaps between silhouettes. The effect was like stained glass in reverse, in a grim sort of way.

I sat on the bed beside him, likewise pulling myself cross-legged. We sat in silence, watching the rats shuffle. I glanced at him, remembering when he’d been a baby-faced trainee with a million ideas. I wondered what that kid would think of the lean, serious man, pondering fragments in the dark. I wondered what he’d think of me.

I reached out and rubbed my knuckle over his cheek. ‘You could use a shave,’ I said.