She stood alone on a red hillside, staring at a sky that didn’t care about dying.

Comms go thin, then go to snow, then go to nothing. Far away, dust-devils write short, messy cursive and erase it again. Jothlin tried again, tilting her helmet toward the sky as if that might help the antenna find Earth, but there was only the hiss.

“Jothlin?”

They met halfway and faced each other, breath loud in their helmets, shoulders brushing with the awkwardness of bulky suits.

They knocked helmets, two dumb fishbowls in the wind. For a while they walked together, Karl lifted a gloved finger, then lowered it. Right.

Minutes passed before she noticed her thoughts beginning to scatter. His words came across the link, clear in tone, but her brain fumbled them. She answered slower, sometimes late, sometimes not at all. She caught herself staring at the horizon instead of the numbers on her HUD. It is ok. Karl is too hypothermic to call anyway.

By then, she was drifting. CO₂ pooled in her blood, making the edges of the world softer, stranger. Her body was still warm, almost too warm inside the suit, but her mind was going. The CO₂ made everything soft-edged. Karl’s face behind the visor seemed to blur and shift. Sometimes he was him, sometimes a stranger, sometimes interns died or lived 1 week more in office. His voice kept reaching for her, but she could not always tell what he was saying.

He squeezed her hand. Plastic on plastic, pressure suit to pressure suit, the world’s least useful comfort. He tilted his head toward the fall of the light.

“Look.”

She looked up, because the view was stupidly beautiful and they are stupidly human. They sat together on the ridge, their backs to the wind. Mars rolled out in front of them like rusted velvet, and the sun began to set. She felt a sense of peace wash over her, and for a moment, she forgot about their dire situation. The sun started to dip below the horizon, painting the sky in a fiery... blue? The blue deepened around the sinking disk while everything farther from it stayed dusty and brown.

It was wrong. Mars was red. Everyone knew Mars was red. Red planet. Red sky. Red sunset, right? like those cheap sci-fi magazines were telling. Yes. Then it transformed into a dreamscape of unimaginable hues blazed with shades of cotton candy pink, lavender, and hues so surreal they seemed to be just illusion. Much better. Sadly most of them are and are from a literal feverish dream. The sky faded into butterscotch and pale gold, while the sun itself sank through a halo of blue around the horizon.

Ugh.

Hey.

It was like nothing she had ever seen before, and she couldn't imagine a more suitable place to die.

Her head was light now.

She couldn’t feel her feet inside the boots.

The pressure of Karl’s glove in hers faded in and out, like a heartbeat skipping.

“Look.”

For a moment she thinks she is watching a sunset on Earth. There should be clouds somewhere. Telephone wires. A plane blinking high above them. Somebody taking groceries out of a car. The sun should be enormous and orange and familiar.

“I missed you.”

The words felt childish.

She wants to stop. She also wants a chair, a window, a bowl of soup, a planet that doesn’t feel like homework.

“Look.”

Jothlin thinks it was way cheaper to let them die than send a rescue.