3. Counting Pencils

Cookie read the printout and snarled. “I am not, repeat, not counting pencils.”

“Just agree with what they put there.” Li leaned over her as they read down the roll of inventory that curled onto the floor and was still chattering out of the fax. “This is just the offices and living quarters. Nothing from the physical plant.”

He knew Cookie well enough to read the snarl correctly. Twelve years on station—longer than him, longer than most of the remaining crew—and she’d developed a finely calibrated nose for Mizmo nonsense. She’d come up at seventeen, or so the story went, signed whatever they put in front of her and never looked back. The Moon had suited her from the start in a way it didn’t suit everyone, and she’d built herself into the place the way the Station Rats had, minus the childhood and the shared history. She just decided to belong, and then she did. That was, in Li’s experience, either very simple or very complicated, and he’d never quite worked out which.

What he did know was that Cookie had been through the Clavius water reclamation shutdown and the Big Stop of ‘52, same as he had, and both times the inventory came first. She knew the tell as well as he did. Her nail file had gone still the moment the fax started printing, and she hadn’t picked it up again. He doubted she knew she’d stopped.

“They plan on leaving it to come back to. The only question anyone is asking is: what can stay, what can leave?” Angie paced the office.

“You mean, who.” Cookie handed the readout to Li and sat back down at her desk with a thump.

“No one is being left behind, Cookie,” said Li, giving her a long, slow smile. She purred back at him, their flirting ritual of four years uninterrupted even by catastrophe. Li had a shorter history in the offices than anyone else, but Cookie never seemed to care about that. She was one of the ones who had spaced up as soon as they were seventeen and old enough to sign the sterilization consent form. “No babies born on the Moon” was the rule, and from everything Li had observed, it had suited her perfectly.

Angie and Peter were a different story. They were among the few raised station side. Of the hundred or so office workers, only twelve had grown up there, and they were a tight group. Even in their current divided state, the Station Rats kept in contact, if only to argue.

It was one of the things Li had never quite gotten used to, even after shifting over to the administrative side. The Station Rats had a shorthand built from shared childhood that ran underneath everything they said to each other. He’d watched Angie and Peter fight from a distance and seen how it operated. Their arguments had the structure of very old grievances, rehearsed and refined over decades until they ran like grooves worn into rock. They weren’t fighting about filtration systems or evacuation plans. They were fighting about everything that had ever happened to them on this station, with the current crisis as the occasion.

Cookie had put it better, after the ping pong table incident, dusting chalk off her hands: “Station Rats don’t fight about the thing. They fight about the family.”

She’d been exactly right.

“Sam.” Angie waggled her ringing phone at Li, who nodded but did not bother to reply. Sam was Angie’s closest contact to Peter, the boy who was Peter’s best friend and Angie’s first crush. Li did not envy Sam’s current status of envoy between them.

Angie grimaced before answering, thumbing it to speaker because she could be a real asshole sometimes. Li rolled his eyes and she gave him a feral grin.

“What, you’ve taken the fax hostage?”

“Sam, it’s just an inventory from Mizmo. Big deal. Tell Peter he’ll get to see it, too.”

“Peter doesn’t care, told me to piss off. Sue and the others, though, are hot, and I mean it.”

“Okay…and what? They going to storm the main office? Welcome on! They can have it, and the inventory too.”

“Damnit, I’m just sayin—”

“What? Saying what? I’m doing my job, Sam. That’s all. As Assistant Executive Captain, inventory is part of my job description. They can look it up online, so tell them to bite my ass.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“I’m not.”

“While you and Peter duke it out, have either of you stopped to think that everyone’s lives are at stake here? The station’s failing, Angie.”

“Like I don’t know that? Fuck off!” She hung up on him.

The room held its breath. Cookie opened her mouth, read Li’s expression, and closed it again.

Angie had her back to them, both hands flat on her desk, head down. Her shoulders rose and fell once, slowly, and then she straightened and turned around.

Li had seen her like this before. Not the anger, which was was common enough, practically her management style, but the thing underneath it. He’d seen it in the mines, in the lead men who were responsible for keeping a crew alive in a tunnel everyone in the room knew was becoming less stable by the shift. They got loud. They got decisive. They filled the available space with motion and noise because the alternative was to stand still and let the fear catch up.

Peter went quiet when he was frightened. Angie went loud. Li had worked for both types and knew that neither was better or worse; they were just different shapes of the same weight. One hundred and fourteen people. That was what both of them were carrying, every hour of every day, in whatever way their natures allowed. Peter carried it like something fragile he was afraid to set down wrong. Angie carried it like a dare.

Neither of them slept. Li was fairly sure of that.

“You know how Sam hates cursing.” Cookie looked straight at her.

“Not the time to pick a fight, Cookie. Back off.”

“Just saying!”

Li put down the long roll of paper and went over to the fax, which was still going. He wasn’t sure why he did, but something about the grain of the text didn’t look right. She he scanned the latest paragraph, still clicking out of the feed, he felt tremors of shock down his spine. He raised his hand to silence Cookie and Angie, who were still bickering. “This isn’t just inventory.”

They scrambled over to look.

“Holy mother—evac instructions? This is what couldn’t wait until the regular transmission? My god, are we on countdown?” Cookie’s eyes scrolled over the text as she talked.

“And why stick it at the end of inventory?” Li looked over at Angie, puzzled.

“Good way for us to miss it,” she said.

Li read it again. Then a third time, because the first two times he kept expecting the words to rearrange themselves into something less final. They didn’t.

He knew evac protocols. Every miner did—you learned them before you went underground the first time, and you learned them again every week until they became the kind of knowledge you kept in the back of your head in a drawer you hoped never to open. He knew what the language meant, the careful Mizmo phrasing designed to convey urgency without triggering panic. Stripped of the corporate softening, it said: we are done here. It said: this ends now.

Cookie had gone quiet, her nail file nowhere in evidence. She stood with one hand pressed flat against the top of the fax machine as if she were taking its temperature.Halfway through the evacuation instructions, the paper roll ran out.