The alarms on Kestrel Station started at 3:14 in the morning, and Mara Vey was already running before the first one finished.

HULL BREACH. SECTOR NINE. ALL CREW TO THE LIFT RING.

Sector Nine was the greenhouse. Sector Nine was where Jonah Reyes worked the night shift, humming to tomato vines that he swore grew faster when he sang to them. She'd laughed at him for that, once. Then she'd started stopping by on her breaks just to hear it.

Don't be there. Don't be there. Don't be there.

The corridor lights stuttered red. Somewhere behind the walls, the station groaned like an old ship turning in a storm. Mara grabbed the emergency rail, swung around the corner, and slammed her palm on the greenhouse door panel.

ACCESS DENIED — PRESSURE UNSTABLE.

“Jonah!” She pounded on the glass. Through the fog of escaping air she saw him: on one knee between the rows, wrestling a jammed vent shutter with a wrench, shoulders braced, stubborn as ever.

He looked up. Saw her. And of course — of course — he smiled.

“You’re supposed to be at the lift ring,” he mouthed.

“So are YOU,” she shouted back, though he couldn’t possibly hear it.

She pried the panel cover off with her fingernails, found the manual override, and yanked. The door shuddered open six inches. Air screamed past her. Mara turned sideways and pushed through, refusing to let a door tell her no.

Inside, the cold hit like a wall. Frost was spidering across the leaves. The tear in the dome above them was no bigger than a dinner plate, but it was growing.

“The shutter’s stuck,” Jonah said, his breath clouding. “If I can close it, the breach seals itself. If I can’t—”

“Then we close it together.” She grabbed the wrench beside his hands. “On three.”

He stared at her for half a second too long. Like he had something to say and no time to say it.

“One,” she said.

“Two,” he said.

THREE!

They threw their weight into it. Metal shrieked. The shutter moved an inch — two — then caught again. The dome cracked a little wider with a sound like ice on a lake.

“Again!” Mara gasped.

Again.

AGAIN!

The shutter slammed home with a CLANG that rang through the whole sector. Somewhere overhead, the emergency foam hissed into the gap. The wind stopped. The alarms dropped from a scream to a slow, tired chime, and then, finally, to silence.

They sat on the greenhouse floor, backs against the planter boxes, shaking and laughing and trying to remember how breathing worked.

“You came back for me,” Jonah said quietly.

“You were singing to tomatoes in a hull breach,” Mara said. “Somebody had to.”

“I wasn’t singing.” He paused. “Okay. I was humming a little. For morale.”

She laughed, and the laugh caught somewhere in her chest and turned into something softer. She had almost lost him. The thought sat between them, too big to step around.

Jonah reached over and brushed a little frost from her hair. His hand was cold. Hers, when she took it, wasn’t much warmer.

“Mara,” he said, “I’ve been trying to find the right moment to say something for about four months.”

“And you picked the morning the station tried to fall apart?”

“Seemed like the moment found me.” grin. “I like you. A lot. I like that you pretend you’re just passing through the greenhouse. I like that you never actually pass through.”

Her heart did the thing it always did around him, only now she didn't have to pretend it wasn't happening.

“I don’t pass through,” she admitted, “because you’re here.”

Outside the dome, the sun of Kestrel’s home world rose over the planet’s rim, gold and enormous, spilling light across the frost until every leaf in the greenhouse glittered.

Jonah squeezed her hand. “So. When this is over, and we’ve filed nine hundred incident reports—”

“Breakfast,” Mara said. “You’re buying.”

He was still smiling when the rescue crew found them, two silhouettes in the morning light, hands held tight, surrounded by tomatoes that — she would swear for the rest of her life — had grown just a little overnight.

The End.