Echo Bloom

The escape pod was not built for two.

Garret Donaldson had known this for six hours now. Six hours of Lena Ortiz's elbow in his ribs. Six hours of recycled air that tasted like burnt coffee and regret.

He was twenty-eight. Too young to die in a tin can. Too old to blame anyone but himself.

"So," he said, "about the ration split."

Lena didn't look up from the life support panel. Her fingers moved over the cracked screen with the calm of a woman who had already done the math and hated the answer.

"No!"

"You haven't even heard my proposal."

"I've heard you talk for ten years, Garret. I can model your proposals in my sleep." She tapped the panel. "Oxygen recycler is at sixty-one percent. Water reclamation at forty. We are not negotiating calories while we're suffocating in shares."

The pod had launched from Station Kestrel six hours ago, right before the last of the station's power died. Something had gone wrong with the terraforming test. Something Garret had signed off on. Something Lena had warned him about in an email he still had not answered.

He opened his mouth anyway.

"Sixty-forty is arbitrary," he said. "You're bigger than me. You burn more just existing. I'm being generous here."

Lena finally turned. Her dark hair was escaping its tie in three places. There was a smear of hydraulic grease on her jaw. She looked, Garret thought with a sudden unwelcome jolt, exactly like she had at twenty-four, the night she'd beaten him out for the Donaldson Fellowship. His family's grant. She'd never let that go either.

"You're calling sixty percent oxygen draw *generous*," she said.

"I'm calling it fair."

"You're calling it fair because you're scared and math is the only thing you trust."

"That's not..." He stopped. Because it was true, and they both knew it, and saying so out loud would cost him something he didn't have left.

The pod creaked. Somewhere behind the wall paneling, a pump stuttered and restarted.

Lena went back to the panel. Garret went back to his sample case, which was wedged between his knees like a pet he refused to put down.

The case held the last spore sample from Kestrel's final experiment. The mycelium project. The thing that had, in his professional opinion, killed the station. Purple-gray threads in a suspension gel, faintly warm, faintly wrong. He'd grabbed it on the way out. He could not fully explain why. Scientists did dumb sentimental things and called it data preservation.

"What's in the case?" Lena asked without turning.

"Spores."

"From the mycelium rig. The one I told you was unstable."

"The one I *told* you was stable. In writing. With error bars."

"The one that vented half of Deck C into vacuum," Lena said, turning around fully now. "Yes. *That* spore sample. You brought the killer sample into a sealed pod with us."

"It's inert. Look." He unlatched the case before his brain caught up with his hands.

The spores were not inert.

They pulsed. A soft violet light, running through the gel like a heartbeat. Pulse, dim, pulse, dim. In time, Garret realized with a crawl up his spine, with the pump behind the wall.

Lena stared at it. For once in her entire life, she had nothing to say.

"Okay," she said finally. "Okay. That's new."

* * *

They argued about it for two hours. It was, in its way, the best conversation they'd ever had.

"We vent it," Lena said. "The outer hatch seal has a manual purge port. Small aperture, two seconds, done."

"You can't vent organic data into vacuum and call it *done*. This sample is the only record of what happened up there. If we dump it, the accident investigation has nothing."

"If we *keep* it, the accident investigation has two corpses and a glowing case."

"It's glowing *gently*."

"It's glowing in *rhythm with the air pump*, Garret!"

She had a point. He hated that she had a point. He hated, more deeply and for much longer, that he had spent a decade of his life orbiting that point, that mind, that specific way she had of being right with her whole body.

"That's not proof of anything," he said. "Coincidence."

"Run the interval."

He ran the interval. One point four seconds, pump to pulse. One point four seconds, pulse to pump. He ran it three times.

"Huh," he said.

"*Huh*," she agreed.

The pod lights flickered then. All of them, once, like a blink. The pump stuttered, held, resumed. And the spores pulsed bright, brighter than before, then settled.

Lena looked at the ceiling. Then at the case. Then at Garret.

"It's reading us," she said quietly. "The network bonded to the station's systems before we launched. It's in the pod firmware. It's in *here with us*."

"That's impossible. The pod was shielded."

"Nothing is shielded against roots, Garret. That's the entire point of roots."

He wanted to argue. He really did. But the spores pulsed again, and the temperature in the pod had gone up half a degree, and the recycled air smelled, for the first time in six hours, faintly of rain on soil. Warm soil. Growing things.

And under that, something floral. Something he couldn't name.

"Okay," he said. "New theory. It's not reading the pod. It's reading us."

Lena went very still.

"Define us."

"Touch. Skin. Bioelectric field. The network bonded to desire on Deck C. That was in the preliminary notes I never..." He stopped. "That was in the notes."

"Desire," Lena repeated. Her voice was flat, careful, a hand placed flat on a table.

"Botanical term. Insect pollination, chemical signaling, it's all..." He was talking too fast and he knew it. "It's jargon. It doesn't mean anything."

The lights flickered again. The spores pulsed. Lena's eyes cut to them, then to him, and something in her face did the math she was too good at doing.

"Garret."

"Yes!"

"Does it pulse when you lie?"

The sample glowed steady and bright and did not dim at all.

He looked away first. Ten years of rivalry, ten years of dinners after conferences and one shared hotel elevator in Zurich that he had thought about more than any sane botanist should, and he looked away first.

"It's responding to elevated cortisol," he said. "Stress. Fear. That's all."

"Sure," Lena said. "Fear."

* * *

The fight, when it came, was about the purge port. Of course it was.

She had the manual wrench. He had the case. They met at the hatch at the same moment, both moving without discussion, and it became a shoving match over a box of purple gel and, beneath that, over an unanswered email, a stolen grant, a decade of almosts.

"Give me the case, Garret."

"No."

"Give me the *case*."

"It's my data, it's my station test, it's my *name* on the wreck report, you don't get to..."

He grabbed her wrist. She grabbed the case. They were both stronger than the situation called for, and the pod was small, and then they were chest to chest, breathing hard, the wrench clattering somewhere on the floor.

The spores flared. The whole pod lit violet for half a second.

Neither of them moved.

"Let go," Lena said. It did not come out like an order. It came out like a question wearing an order's clothes.

"You first."

"Ortiz and Donaldson," she said, "in a broken pod, fighting over a love..." She stopped. He watched her stop. He watched her hear her own sentence. "...over a *sample*. Fighting over a sample."

The lights flickered. The spores pulsed.

"Do you want the case," Garret asked, quiet now, "or do you want to stop pretending?"

Lena's jaw worked. Her wrist was still in his hand. She did not pull it free.

"That's a stupid question," she said.

"It's the only question I've got."

She looked at his mouth. He watched her look at his mouth. Ten years, and it took a dying station and a sentient fungus to make it this simple.

"Yes," she said. "That one. The second one."

He let go of her wrist, so it would be a choice. She grabbed his collar instead, so it would be an answer, and pulled him in.

The kiss was angry and clumsy and six hours of recycled air and ten years of almosts all at once. The spores went off like a sunrise behind the pod walls, violet flooding every seam and vent, and the pump didn't stutter at all.

When they broke apart, gasping, the temperature display read two degrees warmer.

Lena laughed. Actually laughed, low and disbelieving, her forehead against his.

"We are never telling the investigation board about this."

"The spores already recorded it," Garret said. "Probably. In triplicate."

"Oh, God." She pulled back just enough to glare at the case, which pulsed, smug, he would have sworn, smug. "We're going to have to negotiate with a mushroom."

"Welcome to my entire career," said Garret.

The temperature kept climbing. Two degrees, then two and a half. Lena looked at the display, then at him, and made a decision with her whole face.

"Okay," she said. "Rules. Before anything else happens."

"Rules. Sure. I love rules."

"Shut up." She held up one finger. "One. We say yes out loud. Both of us. No spore-assumed consent, no vibes, nothing fungal. Human words."

"Yes," Garret said. "Yes to what, exactly?"

"Everything, hopefully. Ask me and find out. And a check first: this is me wanting you, not the spores, and I want you to say it's you too, because I will not do this if it's the mushroom talking."

"It's me," Garret said. "I have wanted this since a hotel elevator in Zurich. The mushroom just turned up the lights."

"Good. Same." Two fingers. "Two. Condom. I checked the medkit this morning, don't argue with me, I know you have one, we're not doing this raw in a biohazard pod with a psychic mushroom watching."

"The mushroom is watching?"

"The mushroom is *always* watching." Three fingers. "Three. If either of us says stop, we stop, and the mushroom can sulk about it."

"Agreed. All three. Can I..."

"Yes."

"You didn't let me finish."

"You were going to ask if you could kiss me again. Yes."

So he did. Slower this time, no anger left in it, just ten years finally landing somewhere. Her hands found the hem of his shirt and pushed it up and he helped, backing up just far enough to drag it over his head, and the air hit his skin and it felt warm in a way recycled air had no business feeling.

"Your turn," he said, and waited. That mattered to him, waiting. She pulled her own shirt off without ceremony, dropped it on the wrench, and stood there in the violet light like she'd been waiting ten years to be looked at and dared him to look.

He looked.

"See something you like, Donaldson?"

"See everything I like, Ortiz."

"God, you're smooth. That was terrible." She was smiling the whole time she said it. "Come here."