It is not dramatic. It is a small sound, a soft hiss, and then he is coughing, and we get him inside fast, and it is not enough. The Ashfall particulates are not immediately lethal but they are cumulative, and Zaid has already had four years of surface exposure, and his lungs are not what they were. He knows this. We all know this. He sits in the depot’s interior with his back against the wall and watches us finish the work through the small porthole window, and his expression is the same expression he always has: careful, contained, not saying what he’s actually thinking.
We finish.
The dispersal system releases its payload into the upper atmosphere during the forty-minute window that Selin calculated thirty-one years ago in a kitchen with yellow curtains and the smell of cardamom.
We will not see the results. Not for months, maybe years. The clearing will happen slowly, the way all real things happen: without fanfare, without a clear moment you can point to and say, there, that was when it changed.
On the way back, I walk beside Zaid. He is breathing carefully, each breath a small deliberate act. He does not complain. He looks up at the grey sky with an expression I can’t fully read, and after a long time he says, “She was a good engineer.”
“She was,” I say.
“I’m glad you went back in.”
I think about Selin’s hands pressing dough against a wooden board. The warmth of that kitchen, which I have never been inside and which no longer exists. The thirty years of work compressed into a memory that found its way to me across the ruin of the world.
I carry it carefully, the way you carry something that belongs to someone else.
I think I always will.
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