ABEL STANDS OUTSIDE THE DOCKING BAY, WATCHING THE final stages of the air lock cycle. On the screen he watches as the artificial gravity releases the space. Noemi’s fighter bobs in its mooring wires; the Queen model hangs in midair, her arms spread wide as if welcoming the void.

Finally the silver plates of the door spiral open. The air rushes out faster than even Abel can see. In one instant the Queen is there, suspended. In the next she’s gone, lost forever in the dark. He looks at Noemi’s fighter, rattling in its wires, and wonders what it will be like to be inside it. For all his experiences and expertise, he’s never actually piloted a ship like this.

One more unique experience he’ll have before he dies.

The prospect of nonexistence can paralyze humans with dread. As courageously as Noemi faced the Masada Run, he saw the despair in her eyes. Abel, on the other hand, doesn’t feel the same disappointment he did at the beginning of their journey, when he first thought Noemi would space him.

It isn’t as hard to leave life behind, he thinks, once you’ve had a life worth living.

Maybe he should send a message to Mansfield, telling him that. It might help his creator face his own imminent death. Abel may not need to be with Mansfield any longer, but elements of his programming still feel that need—to try to help.

Noemi isn’t the first person Abel ever loved. That was Mansfield. He didn’t only possess Abel’s manufactured loyalty, but the real love of a would-be son. Yet he chose to throw that love away rather than die, even after a long life rich in creative and professional success. Now that Abel is making the opposite choice, he understands just how much luckier he is than his creator. How more alive he is, for all Burton Mansfield’s flesh and blood.

Sending a message to Earth is impossible anyway. Abel lets go of the thought more easily than he would’ve expected.

The air lock finishes its cycle as its door spirals shut again. Gravity returns, and he watches the fighter settle back onto the mesh floor. There’s no reason to delay further.

No objective reason, that is. Noemi asked him to give her time. Best if she’s the one to contact him.

She may not love him, but she cares. His death will matter to her. Surely it’s wrong to welcome that—to want Noemi to suffer any pain whatsoever—but even the most hopeless love must be a little selfish, because Abel finds he wants to be remembered. He wants to be missed. Not too badly, not forever. And yet.

Now he has time to kill. Abel smiles slightly at the dark pun. What should he do? The nameless ship can take Noemi back home, so there’s no need for repairs. He’d like to watch Casablanca again, but he suspects Noemi won’t need that long to pull herself together, and making her wait while he finishes the film would be cruel.

(Leaving in the middle is too appalling to consider.)

Abel decides to let his instincts guide him, since it turns out he has them. First he’s wandering aimlessly up the spiral corridor, looking at nothing in particular, and then he finds himself standing in front of the equipment pod bay doors.

His jail cell for thirty years. His home. Despite all the years he spent wishing to escape, he realizes he needs to tell this place good-bye.

After he steps through the door, Abel even works with the controls to release this area from the ship’s artificial gravity. When his feet drift off the floor, the familiarity of it makes him smile. Before he drifts too far upward, he turns off the lights, too, to make the re-creation almost complete.

He pushes off from the wall, propelling himself toward one of the small side windows. Through this one he watched that last battle near the Genesis Gate and saw Noemi’s fighter approaching for the first time. Even then he’d known she would set him free. He just hadn’t known in how many ways that would be true.

“Abel?”

Glancing down, he sees Noemi standing in the doorway, on the edge of the artificial gravity well. Her face is in shadow, but his sharp vision reveals that she’s regained her calm. Good. It hurt to see her looking so lost. He says, “I wanted to be here one last time. Is that strange?”

She shakes her head no.

Then Noemi steps through, and the lack of gravity buoys her up. Although her hair is held in place by the padded headband she wears in front, the strands in the back fan out behind her. She spreads her arms wide as she bobs into the center of the pod bay and looks up at him. “Will you show it to me?”

In the literal sense, Abel could show her nothing she can’t already see. But among the many gifts she’s given him is the ability to glimpse what lies beyond the literal.

So he propels himself down to her, not too fast. The newly applicable laws of physics mean that he bumps into her back anyway, but not too hard. He catches her around the midsection as they drift toward the far wall, where she braces them with her hand.

“There.” He points, leaning his head close to hers so she’ll see exactly what he’s seeing. “The dent in the wall? I made that when I tried to punch through to the inner corridor, about two weeks after I was marooned. The attempt was unsuccessful, obviously.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Yes.” That seems as irrelevant now as it did then. “Can you see the ceiling?” They’re fairly close, but it’s dark, and Noemi has to look through human eyes.

“I think so.” Her arm covers his, where he’s wrapped it around her waist. “There’s a pattern there—”

“Not a pattern. I made scratch marks. To count the days, using Earth measurement.” All those years ago, he’d spent a long time trying to decide whether to use Earth or Genesis days. He told himself then that calculating the Einsteinian variations for Earth dates would provide more of a mental challenge, but now he knows he wanted Burton Mansfield to understand the full measure of time he was alone. “I stopped after two thousand. It became depressing.”

“I can’t imagine being that lonely,” she murmurs.

Probably she can’t. Few beings could. Abel thinks this over, then says the only thing that still matters. “It helps, being here again but not alone.”

Noemi turns to look at him, her profile silhouetted against one of the starry windows. It strikes him that she is very close, so near their faces are almost touching.

But she knows that, so he keeps saying what he’d wanted to tell her before. “I’ve never been less lonely than I am now. With you.”

“Same here,” Noemi says.

She takes one of his hands as she pushes off against the wall. The momentum isn’t enough to carry them all the way across, so they slow down midway through. Noemi twists around to capture his other hand in hers, and just like that, he’s in her arms.

Abel watches, almost disbelieving, as she brings her face to his until their lips meet.

It’s his first kiss. Kissing turns out to be much more complicated than it looks; there are many variables to account for. So after that initial touch—exhilarating as it is—Abel ignores higher functions and once again gives in to instinct.

This appears to be the right way to proceed. At the beginning he and Noemi are tentative with each other, brushing their lips against each other quickly, lightly, but no more—and then the kiss really begins. Noemi pulls him closer, softly bites his lower lip, then opens his mouth with her own. As the kiss deepens, as they cling to each other suspended in the dark, Abel feels his response crackle throughout his body like electricity—sharp and warm at once. The better it is, the more he needs.

So this is desire. Why do humans describe it as torment? Abel has never known anything more exhilarating than this, the sudden discovery of how much more he can want, and do, and be. He cradles the back of her head in his hand as he kisses her even more intently, hoping to give her even a shadow of the pleasure and joy she’d given him.

He realizes this kiss is something Noemi’s doing for him. It could never happen except as good-bye. That tarnishes nothing; the knowledge only makes Abel love her more.

When they pull apart, she frames his face with her hand. He smiles at her before turning to kiss her palm. Without another word shared between them, he knows this is the end.

So Abel lifts one hand to the ceiling, which is close enough to touch, and propels them back to the floor, within easy reach of the gravity control. As soon as he presses it, their feet thump down harder, Noemi’s hair swings back to chin-level, and a few nuts and bolts clatter down beside them. They let go of each other at the same moment.

“Are you ready?” he asks her.

She lifts her chin. “Yes.”

Together they walk back down the corridor, and they’re almost to the door before Noemi stops. “Oh, Abel—I’m so sorry—I meant to ask you to do something for me before you—before, and then I saw you in the pod bay and I—I guess I lost track.”

He made her lose track. Maybe that means she enjoyed the kiss as much as he did. Abel’s pleased to think he did it well. “Tell me what you need.”

“I ran a couple of sims on how to land the ship by myself, but I’ve never actually done it. You always landed it, except on Earth, and Virginia did that. After this I think I’m going to be too—” Noemi’s voice trails off. He wonders what she might’ve said. “Could you lay in an automated landing? Just to be sure?”

Landing the ship is well within Noemi’s capabilities, but emotional upheaval can play havoc with both human skills and human confidence. So can exhaustion. Granting this small favor is more important than easing any insecurities she may have. “Of course.”

“I’ll wait for you here,” she says, as he begins walking toward the bridge.

This is vaguely disappointing. He’d have liked to remain with her as long as possible. But she may find the extended length of their farewell difficult; his scans of certain fictional dramas suggest that humans sometimes do.

Abel even runs to the bridge, to move things along. That it takes seconds away from his remaining life doesn’t register as a concern.

As the doors open for him, he walks directly to the helm—and stops. A light is blinking on one of the consoles, signaling ship operations in progress, but nothing should be taking place.

Then he sees it’s the light for the docking bay doors.

Noemi lied. She’s leaving with the device to sacrifice herself in the Masada Run—

—to save him.

He runs from the bridge so quickly the doors barely have time to open for him. Human speed is no use to him now; there’s no one to keep up with him, no one to fool. Abel pushes to his full speed, reaching the docking bay mid-cycle.

“Noemi!” he shouts. “Noemi, don’t!”

A small image appears on the screen in front of him—Noemi’s face. She must have tied her fighter’s communications into the ship’s. Her helmet is in her lap, and he knows without having to ask that she’s taken the thermomagnetic device, too. “Are you going to tell me I can’t do this, Abel? We both know I can.”

“Don’t. The Masada Run won’t end the war. You’ll die for no reason.” As terrible as it is to think of her dying, worse is thinking of her dying without purpose. She has lived every moment with intensity and feeling. To throw her life away—

“I’m not going on the Masada Run. I’m returning to Genesis to try to stop it.” She leans back in her pilot’s seat, smiling crookedly. “They don’t know how bad things have become for Earth. They don’t know that there’s a resistance rising up on the colonies. That changes things. If they understood we might have allies, that there’s really a chance—maybe it can change everything.”

“You can’t take that chance,” he says. “Not when you know I can save your world.”

“That’s the thing, Abel. You can’t.”

“But I—”

“Genesis isn’t just where we live. It’s what we believe. A victory that comes from the sacrifice of an innocent isn’t a victory. It’s the end of us.”

“I chose this. It’s my decision.”

“You’ve only been truly alive for a couple of weeks. You’ve only just won your freedom from Mansfield. You can’t give up a life that’s never been your own.” Noemi leans closer to the camera; he can imagine her face close to his again. “From now on, you decide where you’ll go, what you’ll do—who you’ll be. But today? You’re just Mansfield’s creation, or mine. You deserve to be yourself. You have to keep going. You have to claim your own life.”

He hears what she’s saying, but he can’t take it in. All he can think about is that she’s going away, putting herself in danger when he could save her. “Please, Noemi, let me.”

She shakes her head no and somehow manages to smile. “This is my moment of grace, Abel. All those years I prayed, and nothing—but now I don’t have to believe anymore. I know. You have a soul. That makes it my job to take care of you. To protect your life like it was my own.”

“But I—” It’s his job to take care of her. How can she owe him the same duty, the same debt? Abel doesn’t understand and he can’t yet force himself to try. All he knows is that nothing has ever devastated him this way.

Arguing with her is impossible. He’d pull open the bay door if he could, but from thirty years’ hard experience, he knows he can’t. This is it. Noemi is leaving him forever.

That leaves him nothing but the truth. “It hurts more to lose you than it did to give up my own life,” he says. “Does that mean what I feel isn’t only a copy? That I do love you?”

Tears well in her eyes. “I think maybe it does.”

The air lock cycle ends. Noemi presses her hand against the screen; Abel does the same, the closest he will ever come to touching her again.

When the image changes, he lets his hand fall. The wide view of the docking bay shows him Noemi’s ship, and within it he sees her slipping on her helmet just as the outer doors open. She releases her moorings and drifts into space until she’s cleared the ship. Then she fires her engines, a burst of brilliant orange and fire, and soars toward her home.

Abel’s vision is malfunctioning. When he touches his fingers to his cheek, they find warmth and wetness. These are his first tears.