I have one of those faces that everyone looks right through. With the lights on in my sleeper, my window becomes a mirror and my face stares back at me, round and pale. The triple-paned glass blurs my reflection like a photocopy, but I know the expression written there: waiting.  

No sound ever arrives from outside. The gray sea-plain softly slopes to the dark horizon. Nothing moves except the light, the familiar pattern of shadows stretched across the dunes, until the darkness blankets everything. 

Every small vibration makes my heart race. I am listening for his return. I want the sound to be his knock. But I am also listening for another blast.  

I saw it coming. That’s something no one knows. See isn’t the right word. I noticed a glint in the sky, through the windows, beyond the sleepers. Sometimes a meteorite will catch the sunlight on a flat face, but this was a sustained beacon. Followed by a flash of blue light, blinding. 

When the blast hit, my first thought was that Inuk and I had somehow caused it.

I thought I was about to die. My body relaxed, involuntarily. It was the strangest thing.

In the seconds before the blast, all the hair on my body lifted and angled toward the sky. It started at the crown of my head and traveled down my jumpsuit to my toes. A warm gust of air through my insides. Then, the blue flash. My eyelids were useless, the light was so bright. An empty delay before the deafening boom, a rippling, rending noise, like shattering stars, entered my body, rose up in my throat, set my vocal cords buzzing. I remember seeing the boom, and hearing the light come slicing in, my brain inverted.

I didn’t know the house could move under me. I was knocked to the floor. I was certain the windows had been shattered. But of course, if they had been, we’d’ve all died instantly. 

I opened my eyes, but couldn’t see anything. I felt around for Inuk, he had been just beside me. I crawled in a circle. Finally, I found his body, motionless on the floor. I reached out to touch his face, certain he was dead. It was hot and my hand jerked away instinctively. He groaned. Alive. He reached out for me and I took his hand.
The emergency generator kicked in. The dim back-up lights made soft shapes of all the hard metal angles of the house. The dust dunes outside the windows were closer and more finely drawn. Oily sulfur from the generator filled my sinus cavity. 

The echoing reverberations of the blast chilled me. Inuk’s grip was comforting, wide and warm, but quickly released, as the other sleeper doors slid open. 

Just over his shoulder, I saw the view-slot on Salla’s sleeper door slide open. Her eyes, maskless, appeared in the dark square like two knuckle bones at the bottom of a box. 

Then the familiar hiss of the sleeper doors sliding open. She had her blanket wrapped around her skeletal frame, long white hair tucked underneath. From behind her mask, her eyes fixed me. She had been watching us when the blast hit. Guilt flooded me. I helped Inuk to his feet, his knees didn’t want to lock in place.  

We betrayed the cycle by sneaking around, and now everything had ground to a halt. Why had I allowed him in, night after night? 

I wanted to smooth his hair into place, straighten his jumpsuit. But I kept still. She didn’t ask why Inuk and I were already out of our sleepers. Perhaps the blast had erased what we had done.