Zero Hour, Nine A.M.

One

I swear that I can see the smoke even from here, thick and black and curling like a clawed hand around the tiny blue planet I used to call home.

It's impossible, of course; the raging fires that are rapidly destroying the last remaining bits of Earth aren't visible from space. But I stare through the tiny porthole window in the cargo hold anyway, watching the entire planet grow smaller and dimmer. It's the size of a dinner plate, then a softball, then a golf ball, then a pencil eraser. Diminishing at an unbelievably fast rate until it disappears from my sight completely and I'm just watching the patch of space where I saw it last.

It hurts to lose it all, to think about my old swing set still standing in the backyard or the smooth granite of my parents' joint headstone in the cemetery, waiting for my weekly flower delivery that will never come again. It feels like someone has removed a large and vital organ, like my liver was carved out and left lying inside my school locker.

But it's still easier to look back than it would be to focus on the future.

Because none of us have any clue about where that will be.

We should have been more prepared - the news had been growing more dire for months. Broadcasters on the evening live stream looking gray and haggard, their cheekbones becoming more prominent, their eyes haunted over dark circles like purple bruises. So my best friend Brandon's parents, the family that took me in when I became an orphan, made the basic preparations available to people with our financial resources. They bought the ship and stocked it, kept it parked in the large field behind the farmhouse. Brandon's family spent a week and a small fortune carefully decorating their chosen bedrooms.

I couldn't help thinking that if my family were still alive, they would have been too poor to make it off the planet alive. So the ship felt like a hulking shadow over me, a constant reminder of death and wealth and pain; I pointedly avoided looking in its direction.

The truth is that there was nothing anyone could really prepare for. Nothing that any sane person can prepare themselves for, anyway. Because the truth is that we were readying ourselves for a life sentence, the ship our prison and eventual tomb.

We can't reach any habitable planet in our lifetimes. So, outside some amazing stroke of luck or outreach from an alien civilization (of which we have no proof that they even exist), there's very little chance any of us will set foot outside this ship again.

From his position sprawled on the cold, smooth metal of the ship's floor beside me, Brandon snores and twitches, fitful enough to wake himself up.

"It's gone," I say, my voice echoing and hollow, unrecognizable to my ears. "You fell asleep and missed the last view of home."

He sits up, his faded jeans slipping a bit lower on his narrow hips. As usual, he's wearing a t-shirt with some obscure comic book character on the front - I don't even bother to ask what it is anymore.

There's a sudden, sharp slice to my chest when I realize that there's no one who will understand his geeky references now.

But he just adjusts his glasses and rubs at the stubble that's grown in on his chin; it shakes me like it always does, the dissonance between my memory of Brandon as a knobby-kneed kid that chased me around the playground and the seventeen year-old, nearly-man that he's become.

"I didn't miss seeing home disappear, Gretchen." His voice is deep and thick from sleep but his blue eyes are clear and sharp as they scan over my furrowed eyebrows, hunched shoulders, and curled-up legs. He doesn't need any of this to know how I'm feeling, though; he somehow always seems to see straight through to my bones. "I didn't miss home because it isn't there. I've got everything that makes a home right here with me."

This is what he told me yesterday, when the news stopped broadcasting and the power turned off, when there stopped being any hope that we could stay on Earth for even another day. Brandon kept repeating, while I cried and hiccuped and nearly hyperventilated, that as long as we were together - his parents, his sister, and me - we would always be home.

But it just showed that this was the one part of me that he could never understand.

I came to be part of his family through addition - his parents added me when I had nowhere else to go. But for me, it was subtraction. Division. The loss of my entire family in one stupid accident. One moment.

And now, two years later, I've lost my entire planet. Every place that reminded me of them, of myself, abandoned to the fires and soot and scorching heat.

"Come on," Brandon says, standing and reaching one slender hand down to me. It's stained with charcoal and paint flecks - he's been working, and recently. Sometime right before we left the planet.

He sees me notice and flexes his fingers. "I wanted to get as much of it on the canvas as possible. The last day on Earth. Not pictures, nothing even remotely realistic - just the way it made me feel."

I swallow and nod. Brandon is an incredible artist...and now the only way anyone else will ever see his work is through pixelated images, beamed between spaceships.

If anyone else's ship stays close enough that we can communicate. If anyone out there even cares about things like art.

I tuck my hand into his, his long fingers wrapping around mine as familiar as my own reflection. "I'd like to see your painting sometime, if that's okay."

"Yeah," he says, trying and failing to smile. "Sometime."

And for the first time, I begin to wonder how much of his quiet strength through the last day has been an act for my benefit. Maybe this isn't as easy for him as he has pretended.

I stand and squeeze his hand and, somehow, manage to offer him a smile.

And I don't look back through the porthole at the dark spot.

I don't.