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Every morning before work, I measure the Queen of the Andes. I’ve nicknamed her Nova because her trunk is a ball of spikes that reminds me of a supernova in slow motion, an explosion of leaves pointing in two hundred and three directions from the core of the bromeliad (the largest of her species—and the last). For almost thirty years, Nova has been growing, her presence in the garden expanding, like a true queen’s. Her ball of spikes now measures a full meter wide and just shy of five meters high—more than enough to dwarf me, especially once you add in the height of her regalia, her inflorescence, standing almost seven meters tall. I look like a child next to her, an infant toddling around her in awe, with no sense of what it costs to sustain a life that vast or even one as small and insignificant as mine. Next to her measurements, I include my own. Height: just below 1.7 meters. Bust: 117 centimeters. Waist: 99 centimeters. Hips: 127 centimeters. Shoe size varies by shoe brand and type, but generally an eight seems to fit me. I have no idea what my weight is because no one bothered to bring a scale to the climate shelter. Why would you? It’s the end of the world—we can eat bread if we want to. We can have popcorn every night for dinner and read until three in the morning and grow impractical flowers taller than we will ever be.

No one told us the apocalypse would end up being so freeing.

When we first arrived at the shelter, the disaster coordinators told us it would be a year or more before spots opened up on a ship. “Settle in,” they advised, handing us the keys to assigned housing units and seed packets to kickstart our garden. “Most people use this time to pick up new hobbies. Gardening, brewing, running; whatever passes the time.” Twenty-nine years later, we’re still here and still doing whatever we want while we wait for the settlements in Alpha Centauri to dispatch a refugee ship and relocate us to one of the habitable exoplanets. I work part-time on the maintenance crew responsible for the shelter’s outer hull and sensor arrays, but Abuela is retired, and she spends most of her time puttering around, fussing over the plants. In the before-time, she worked at a nursery in Bolivia’s Altiplano, preserving rare species creeping higher and higher up the mountains due to climate change. During the evacuation, she managed to save only one seed: the Queen of the Andes. For a full decade, it was so small and slow-growing no one fought us for space or questioned the wisdom of growing such a towering plant in such a small plot. Only after Nova’s spikes grew did someone balk, “What a waste! You know how many zucchini you could grow in that soil?”

Abuela’s only response was, “¿Y qué? I’m an old woman. I grow what I want.” I have no doubt Abuela would grow weed if she had the seeds; that would certainly ease her pain. For now, at least, the physicians at the clinic can confirm that she is cancer-free, but without the equipment necessary to synthesize a full course of adjuvant chemotherapy, all she can do is go on living and hope the cancer never returns or metastasizes. When the doctor first explained the limitations and told her her life expectancy had dropped twenty years and she might not live past eighty-five, Abuela chuckled. “Most of my ancestors didn’t dare dream of seventy, let alone eighty-five. I’ll be fine.” For a long time, she was spry, mischievous as a sprite. Only recently has she started to slow.

When I return with Nova’s measurements, Abuelita is pushing herself up off the bed with the walking stick I carved for her. She holds her reading glasses over her nose to study my notes, then nods with satisfaction. “Bueno. Ya está lista. We should get seeds soon.”

“Really? I thought it would take her like eighty years or more to flower.”

“Sí, in the mountains, yes, pero we did not account for this controlled climate.”

“I’ve always thought they kept it unnecessarily humid here,” I say, sitting on her bed.

“My bones love it,” she says, gathering speed on the way to the kitchen. “¿Has comido?”

“I had some oats.” I place the notebook on her side table so she can study the notes later.

“Entonces, ¿por qué estás esperando? Go to work.” She shoos me away with a spatula.

Outside, my gaze drifts back toward the Queen of the Andes, just visible over the top of a squat school building where I failed to learn calculus fifteen years ago. Math only makes sense to me in its most discrete, practical forms—heights instead of hypotheticals, word problems instead of differential equations. If a plant typically grows at the rate of one-sixth of a meter a year for its first thirty years, how worried should you be if it reaches five meters in height in a fraction of the time? In retrospect, the data was right in front of me: from trunk to rosette to inflorescence, Nova has grown at three times the normal rate, meaning that a life span of almost eighty years has been cut to around thirty. All my life, I assumed my Abuela would be gone by the time Nova flowered and I would have to sustain her legacy by bringing the seeds with me into space and planting part of the Andes millions of lightyears away. Now, we will have to make a calculation together: wait and risk keeping all the seeds on ice until a ship comes or start some in pots and hope we make it to the Alpha settlements while the inflorescence is still short enough for the ship.

Imagine: all the space in the universe and nowhere to house a single plant.

• • • •

My co-workers have already made the decision to stay on Earth until our shelter collapses or the disaster coordinators force them to leave. Their calculations were no less complicated than mine will be. For instance, Martín refuses to go anywhere until he locates his wife and daughters, from whom he was separated during the forcible evacuation of Santiago, Chile. Josefa’s only son had an untreated heart condition (an atrial septal defect) that caused a rupture in the wall between two chambers of his heart. Although he has been buried nine years now in a corner of the shelter, she will not leave his bones behind simply for the promise of a new planet humanity will destroy. Adelgonda, meanwhile, prefers the quiet of Earth. Its dwindling population. Its crèche system for queer families and children. Its relative lack of catcalls and fat-shaming. When I arrive at work, I find her standing outside the maintenance shack, staring up at the sky—or, the screened dome we programmed to mimic the real sky, I should say. Today, it’s displaying an EF5 tornado picked up by the sensors. Adelgonda tilts her head back, staring up into the tornado’s funnel.

“I can toggle the settings if you want. Turn off the sensors, throw up a blue sky.”

Slack-jawed, she responds in almost rapturous fear. “And miss this?”

With a shrug, I admit, “It’s not often we get a tornado here in Bolivia.”

“What oldschool stormchasers wouldn’t give for this view,” she croons.

“If not for that ceiling,” I say, “they’d be halfway up the funnel by now.”

This plucks a string of fear. She asks, “You think it will break through?”

“Unlikely. We’re too far down, and the walls are too thick and reinforced.”

“You’re right,” she says, equal parts reassured and disappointed. After a few stutter steps, each one punctuated with a sudden glance upward at the behemoth overhead, she follows me into the maintenance shack, where Martín is on the fiberline again, hounding the logistical authorities in one of a dozen shelters dotting the foothills of the Andes. He calls them every day (sometimes, multiple times a day) to ask after his wife and kids, begging the poor folks on the other end of the fiberline to search their databases for his wife’s name, her middle name, their kids’ names, nicknames, dog names—anything they could feasibly have given to a uniform during evacuation. He blanches, shamefaced, when he sees us see him in this state of desperation. His voice drops to a whisper as he murmurs in Portuguese, “Eu tenho que ir. Te ligo amanhã.” He hangs up with his back to us, his fingers lingering over the call button.

Adelgonda takes a chair and props her feet up on the desk. “I don’t know why you bother switching to Portuguese around us. It’s not like we don’t all speak five languages here. How hard is to get I have to go from that if you know even a little Spanish?”

He takes a steadying breath, then insists, “A man has a right to some privacy.”

“Oh? And what about a woman? Or is it only men who deserve privacy?”

“That’s not what I meant.” Beleaguered, he retreats to a tool bench, picks up a wrench the way certain people pick at their fingernails. He listens as we shrug and change the subject, asking each other half a dozen simple, everyday questions that have become a kind of litmus test for our moods, a personal shorthand built on decades of shared experience. In our lexicon, “I didn’t sleep last night” means “I don’t intend to do any work today and will leave by two” for Adelgonda, and for me “I’m worried about Abuelita” means “she hasn’t guilt tripped me once today; something’s wrong.” Martín expected us to keep talking about him and has been waiting to insert himself into the conversation ever since we changed the subject, so when I mention Abuelita, he asks, “Is she worried about pollinating the Queen?”

“Probably. But how did you know Nova’s about to flower?”

His hands twist into a question mark, as if to say, Isn’t it obvious? “I mean, look at her.” I trace his sightline through the window and across the dirt path, only to be met with the flat, blank faces of buildings and the trunks of Brazil nut trees. He scratches his head self-consciously when he realizes his mistake. “Anyway, I figured it was about time. What’s your plan?”

“Honestly? Not sure yet. I don’t think we have enough bugs for all those flowers.”

“Oh—not even close,” Adelgonda says, with almost obscene respect for Nova’s abundant inflorescence. “She must have thousands of…what are they called?”

I squint at her for a moment, unsure what she’s asking. “Pistils?”

“Yes, how could I forget? Como pistolas,” she says, miming finger-guns.

Martín shakes his head over a screwdriver. “A queen would never bother with a gun.”

“No, she would get someone else to fire it for her,” Adelgonda blurts with vicious glee.

“Well, yeah, that’s probably what’s going to end up happening. Manual pollination.”

“You mean…?” Her eyes widen, then pinch, confused. “How? With a ladder?”

Martín points vaguely across the room. “We have a fifteen-meter ladder in storage.”

Just the thought of it beside Nova fills me with dread. “I’ll have to keep Abuelita away.”

“Oh yeah—this is a job for a professional,” Adelgonda says, her tone half-irony and half-dejection as she turns toward our maintenance interface, responding to the ding we all heard; that dreaded ding signaling that something has malfunctioned or broken or been torn clear off the tiny enclosures installed on the surface to ensure access to sensors and communication satellite relays in orbit. In all my time here, I have been dispatched to the surface only four times, each job more harrowing than the last, with weather intent on peeling your face off and temperatures like to boil your brain inside your skull. When Adelgonda says, “Looks like a turbine’s down in Section I,” a part of me relaxes.

I pick up a tool belt, an oil can. “Where’s Josefa?”

Martín hangs his head as he says, “You were late, so she went to the corner.”

Meaning: her son’s grave. This is one of those months where she visits it every day. If we peer through one of the hatches in Section I, we might be able to see her on the way up the dome. Her kneeling frame. Her messy braid. Those paper flowers she shapes because she cannot bear to watch something so near to her son die. Inside the dome, every grief reverberates. Every moment of joy bounces off the walls like a pinball, its trajectory erratic, its future eventually consumed by the gutter. When Adelgonda and I wave Martín away and claim this job for ourselves, I know we will stretch it out far longer than necessary. I know we will find each other in the service tunnels. Let our hands slip inside our uniforms. Tuck this pleasure away for safekeeping so that someday, when we need it, we can come back to this spot and remember: we survived.

Against all odds, we thrived.

• • • •

Space travel is so ridiculous when you think about it. Imagine building the equivalent of a giant flying city, relocating thousands of people onto it, telling them to hold onto their butts, then hurling them out of the solar system at speeds that could break their necks—and for what? A vast majority of space is just empty. It looks nothing like the digital composite photographs we know. All those brilliant reds and violets at the far ends of the spectrum? Invisible to us. Impossibly far, too. Here, at the beginning of the interstellar epoch, everything sucks in space. No one has hyper-sleep chambers, food replicators, or holographic entertainment—no one except the very rich, that is. Only fifty or so years ago, people were still shitting into suction tubes. Maybe one day we will be able to zip around fast enough to collapse our perception of the universe and turn these distant worlds into neighbors, but at the moment it still takes a full decade to travel to Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to Earth, and I’m not sure Abuelita has that long. If we leave now, she may die en route, her remains then jettisoned into space—that uninhabited stretch known as the Alpha-Earth Corridor, lined, as it must be, with the detritus of humanity’s journeys back and forth.

This is what concerns me when Josefa shares the news: a ship is coming.

“It will be here in six weeks,” she says, her voice thick with mucus and tears.

Still shocked, I move toward the transmitter. “Why wasn’t the message broadcast?”

“It just arrived,” Martín says, rubbing Josefa’s back in anxious circles. “It’s text only.”

With a tap, I wake the transmitter’s interface and read the message aloud to Adelgonda:

ARRIVING NOVEMBER 17, 2233. DEPARTING NOVEMBER 19. ROOM FOR 500,000.

“That’s it?” Her nose wrinkles in disgust and disbelief. “A hello would be nice.”

“I expect an explanation at the bare minimum,” I snap, not at her but at the note. “I for one would like to know if this ship will remain in orbit or come down to the surface; how we will be transported from the climate shelters to the ship; what provisions we should bring; who gets to go this time; is it first-come, first-serve—you know, the basics!”

From her chair, Josefa sniffles miserably. “You’ve decided to go, then?”

I watch as she folds and unfolds her embroidered handkerchief. “I’m not sure yet.”

“Well, I’m not going,” Adelgonda says, parking in a chair by Josefa. “Fuck colonizers.”

“Proxima Centauri b was uninhabited,” Martín says. He cowers under her sharp glance.

“Uninhabited by humanoids. What about the flora and fauna? Their ecosystems are being destroyed so those bumblefucks can make high fructose corn syrup.”

He shakes his oily head. “You have no way of knowing how they’re using the corn.”

“And that’s what scares me,” Adelgonda says, crossing her arms, first in defiance, then in panic, as she flashes back to what her life was like, before. “It could be a mess up there. Fascism. Indentured servitude to billionaires. Forcible attempts to rebuild the human population. I feel like I’ve seen this movie, and it doesn’t end well for people like me.” Her gaze darts to me, imploring and accusing. You’re going to leave me, aren’t you? Please don’t. Don’t you dare choose them.

Oblivious, Martín glances between us, one hand open. “. . . or it could be good?”

“You’re so naïve!” She bursts out of the chair, snapping, “You call those poor people and ask them the same questions every day when you and I and everyone here already know what the answers are. You know, Martín! You just can’t admit it.”

Martín steels his wobbly chin. “Only a coward tries to crush other people’s hope.”

“Well, at least I’m not weaponizing my misery to force strangers to be my friends.”

His face crumples briefly, then smooths, like a lake struck by stone. “Do I do that?”

“Yes!” we say in unison, then Josefa pats his back and adds, “It’s pretty exhausting.”

“Oh no,” he breathes, like someone simultaneously found out and revealed to himself. He wraps his fingers around the back of a chair, as if to launch himself toward the door, then decides against it and sags back into the conversation. “What do we do now?”

“Good question,” I murmur, raking my unwashed fingers through my hair.

He hangs his head. “I suppose we each make the decision that’s right for our families.”

“You’re my family,” Josefa says, her bright tears gleaming at us in turn, as if asking us to acknowledge a truth she believed to be understood all this time. Our careful silence confuses her. Her thumb worries the handkerchief as she considers this. “I don’t want to lose you. Any of you. Even you,” she says, plucking at Martín’s sleeves with her free hand. He perks up with gratitude, and they share a wan smile I find alarming and flirtatious, though I refrain from saying so.

Adelgonda apologizes even as she says, “Coworkers aren’t family. Not in my view.”

“That’s probably healthier,” Josefa admits. “But it still doesn’t change how I feel.”

Another maintenance alert chimes, this one overflow from the interior maintenance crew, who sometimes needed help working through the stream of requests from residents with a broken box fan or clogged drainpipe. Before anybody can claim the job, I say, “We’re not going to solve anything now—that ship isn’t going to arrive for a month and a half. Everything could change by then.” What I mean is, We could all be dead by then; just look at that tornado—do you know how rare that is? but what they all seem to hear is, Our feelings could change; we might not love each other anymore, and that seed of fear lodges in their minds, the most fertile soil left on this planet. Over the weeks, I watch it germinate, its tendrils creeping behind their eyes, under their soft pink tongues, monitoring every word, every movement. At night, under the pale light of the simulated moon, I press myself into Adelgonda and wonder, Is tonight the night it finally flowers?

I would hate to miss it.

• • • •

A second message from the transport ship arrives five weeks after the first. Abuelita and I are simmering broad beans, lentils, and purple potatoes and toasting rice in what was once a non-stick skillet, so when the transmitter chimes I activate the read-aloud function and a voice springs out of the interface on the wall:

SELECT LANGUAGE FROM FIFTY-SEVEN AVAILABLE OPTIONS

Abuelita and I exchange a glance. “I’m guessing they’ll have Spanish, not Quechua.”

A ding indicates that my selection was valid. The voice begins to read the message:

FROM THE DESK OF STARSHIP CAPTAIN FEN SHÀO

(Translated from the original Terran Taiwanese)

To the Humans of Earth:

Our starship remains on course to rendezvous with citizens of your planet on the 17^th of November. We will maintain a geostationary orbit over the equator. Due to unforeseeable, regrettable, and ultimately costly systems malfunctions, we must now revise our previous capacity estimate to 250,000 persons (half the original quoted number). As such, I have been forced to institute Emergency Prioritization Protocol Alpha-2, which will utilize a tiered lottery system to select passengers from the remaining viable population. Details of the selection process and complete instructions for entering the lottery are, thus, enclosed. I look forward to welcoming all those selected to my starship in one week’s time.

As that deceitful legalese bores through our skulls like the dullest possible drill, I imagine Adelgonda alone in her apartment, shouting, What is this fuckery?!? Josefa shrugging at the thick wall of text and dismissing it. Martín poring over every word, calling all the logistical authorities on the continent and asking if this or that phrase might constitute a loophole should he win a spot for himself and then happen to locate his wife and children alive and require three more; or in the unlikely scenario that his wife won two spots, not three, and then had to make a choice, could the rule dictating that, in the event of a passenger limitation requiring family separation, priority will be awarded families who can prove those left behind will be “cared for appropriately” be applied as a mandate for social support systems, such as the reunification of lost relatives? That language gives me pause, too. I ask Abuelita, “Do you think it could be a euphemism?”

“Por supuesto. Appropriately is so vague, it could be a license for anything.”

“And that’s on top of this horrifying tier system. Listen to this: A maximum of 1% of total tickets will be allotted to persons age seventy-five years and above—and that’s only after they’ve weeded out people that don’t meet their strict health requirements!”

“¿Qué esperabas? Elders are expendable.” She stirs the pot with a wooden spoon. Mashes beans on the roof of her grumpy mouth. “I suppose it’s a good thing I’m not going, then.”

“I thought you were undecided. You said just this morning you needed time to think.”

She swats the air by her hip. “Ay, niña, don’t quote me to me. I know what I said!”

“So, then, is this your final-final decision or just your final decision for today?”

“A smart woman weighs all her options before she makes a decision.”

“If it’s options you want, enter the lottery. Win and you don’t have to make up your mind until the ship leaves. Lose and at least you’ll have a few more days of uncertainty.”

“Wow, you make it sound so appealing.” She rolls her eyes and hips as she stirs.

“I’m not doing PR for the settlements. I’m just trying to figure out where you stand.”

“I stand aquí. On Earth. I’ve been here all my life and I’ll be here until the day I die.”

I dodge the wooden spoon she brandishes with pride. “Even if I’m not here with you?”

“¿Qué?” She plops the spoon in the pot and studies me hard. “You’re leaving me here?”

“I haven’t made up my mind.” I sit down, smirking. “I’m your granddaughter, after all.”

She clucks in disbelief. “You’re not leaving. You’re going to stay here with that maldita.”

“Her name is Adelgonda. And you only dislike her because she’s like you but younger.”

“Like me?” Indignant, she wags one finger at me. “No. Everything is a fight with her.”

“My point exactly,” I say, though she is already wiping her hands on her apron, preparing a point by point rebuttal of what she expects my argument to be. Over dinner, in between bites of rice and stewed beans, she attempts to counter all my evidence—to say she’s not this or that way, I’m just misinterpreting her—and, in so doing, she just proves that I’m right and that every major relationship in my life has been built on strife and guilt. This push and pull of opinion and desire propels me out of our apartment and into the gardens, where the oblong orange skins of ají amarillo chilis gleam in pale moonlight. I know, even before I hear her footsteps, that Adelgonda will find me in the dark, that she will pluck Nova’s leaves where they hang down beside her head like the tassels of a pompom and ask not if I am entering the lottery but what I plan to do if I win. “What would you do? What would anyone do? Winning the lottery always ruins your life.”

“You could stay. We could be the ones who stay and fight.”

I tilt my head back to the sky and wonder how many of the stars simulated in it have died. How many families tried to survive on the surface and paid dearly for this mistake? Decades ago, leading climate scientists estimated it would be millennia before Earth was habitable again. What if that was a conservative assessment? I shake my head. “There’s no one left to fight, Adelgonda. All our enemies moved on. Took the battle to space. We’re the ones who were left behind.”

“We can still build something here,” she says, taking my hands. “Look what we’ve done, what you’ve helped bring to life.” Her gaze drifts up to the Queen of the Andes. Nova. My Nova. Her entire species would be extinct if not for our efforts. In a way, the species we once cultivated may have already slipped through our fingers, its lifespan and reproductive cycle perhaps forever altered by the unique climate of the shelter. How will it evolve when introduced to the arid desert of a distant world? I imagine the spines of the inflorescence sharpening and lengthening. Imagine the proboscis of a xenomorph navigating the closely packed fronds. None of my ancestors would have imagined this future. This shelter we dared bury under the mountain. This woman who risks rejection by wrapping her arms around me from behind as I start to cry. We were never supposed to live under these conditions. People need to know: we were here. We’re still here.

Sometimes, I forget: this was never meant to be our home. My parents married in El Alto, once the highest city in the world, a miniature metropolis nestled 4,150 meters high in the Andes, little more than a stone’s throw from the dry bed once known as Lake Titicaca. A fading photo of their modest wedding shows five people in attendance, not counting the bride, the groom, and the priest who married them. In this photo, a man Abuelita claims not to remember rains a handful of purple confetti over my father’s head, obscuring his smiling round face. Digital composites and a handful of photos downloaded off social media have helped fill in the mental image of my father, whose bad teeth and bushy eyebrows Abuelita remembers specifically. El Feo, she still calls him, her voice as acrid and bitter as the sad cigarettes hand-rolled by the downstairs neighbors. “If not for him, my daughter would never have left home.”

What she means is: if not for him, she would still be alive. Climate change killed both my parents when I was six months old—too young, Abuelita argued, for a trip down to the valley my paternal ancestors once called home. A flash flood trapped them in a church, the wall of water so tall it smacked loose the belltower and rained through the ceiling. I often wonder what it felt like, drowning, swimming toward their deaths. If my father was grateful, at least, that his bones would rest somewhere familiar. My mother never had the privilege. Abuelita called the local authorities for months, but DNA tests were required to separate the skeletons of all those who drowned, and the newly hired disaster coordinators were overwhelmed, understaffed. They let the earth reclaim her and started ignoring Abuelita’s call. “But I had to try. I couldn’t just give up.”

This is how Martín explains himself to Josefa when she finds out he entered the lottery.

She aims two fingers at her heart. “You promised me we would stay here together.”

“I know. I’m sorry, but you have to understand: I did it for my family.”

“What family? They’re dead, Martín. Your wife and kids are gone.”

“You don’t know that,” he says, rolling a pen fitfully across the desk.

“Yes, I do. There are only so many explanations: they’re either dead or offworld.”

“Or,” Adelgonda adds, lifting one finger, “they could be avoiding him because they don’t want to be reunited, because your wife fell in love with one of the logistical authorities at another climate shelter and now every day the guy dreads getting your call and having to lie to you.”

This theory pains Martín so much his neck seems to retract like a turtle’s into its battered, weather-beaten shell. “Lara would never do that to me,” he says, even though twenty-seven years have passed since their last kiss, and even a fraction of that time is enough to change one forever. He waves his hand, as if to dispel this thought. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. I didn’t win, so I guess I’ll be staying here with you, after all.”

“Don’t sound so excited,” Josefa mocks him, but does not break up on the spot. Resigned to each other’s choices, they list in their rolling chairs, avoiding meaningful eye contact until one last spark of indignation ignites and Josefa fixes her fury on him. “When did you find out?”

“This morning.” Long-faced, he adds, “While I was eating breakfast.”

“Really? I didn’t get a message.” I reach for the nearest interface to check.

A gasp escapes Josefa as if a ghost has rushed out of her mouth. “Not you too?”

“What? It’s not just my decision. I have other factors to consider. Abuelita. And Nova.”

“You and that fucking plant,” Josefa says, one hand clasping her forehead both in wonder and the shock of betrayal. “Do you mean to tell me you’re leaving for a flower?”

“It’s not just a flower; it’s an entire species. It’s part of our culture.”

“Our culture,” Adelgonda says, “cannot be transplanted to another world. It’s rooted here. In these mountains, with these peoples. One plant isn’t going to change that. You can’t just place the Queen of the Andes in the Alps and expect everyone around her to bend the knee—that’s just not how this works.” Her hand loops through the air—dramatic, dismissive, disappointed, for she has already identified the gap in her logic. “Not unless you’re a colonizer, anyway.”

“We wouldn’t be colonizers,” I say, glancing at the interface long enough to see the word Congratulations unadorned with the expected exclamation points, emojis, or animated confetti to the point where I feel it might be a trick. A ticket would not necessarily be a win and could never guarantee safe passage to a world prepared to embrace the ticketholder. At best, it offers the hope of continuity, a chance to carry on traditions and recreate some of the contexts that define the self in a new place. At worst, it promises assimilation, destruction. Survival on someone else’s terms, never your own. My eyes squeezed shut, I explain, “We would be refugees.”

Across the room, Josefa breathes, “You say that as if you know you’re leaving.”

“She is.” Martín points to the interface. “Isn’t that what that message says? You win?”

His viciousness makes my eyes snap open. I confirm: I did win a ticket—just the one. My mind immediately turns toward Abuelita. “I have to go,” I say, despite their protests of You can’t just leave us like this and It’s the middle of the workday and We could report you, you know. This threat comes from Martín, who grips his chair’s armrests and attempts not to shrink as I round on him with a hand on my toolbelt. I bend slightly, as if talking to a child. “You don’t really want an inspection, do you? A bunch of officious disaster coordinators poking their noses in your records and asking questions about the long calls, the years of falsified timesheets, the wasted electricity. You wouldn’t want to risk your job, would you? Not now, when you know you’re stuck here.”

His shoulders pinch as I speak, and his gaze drifts toward my shoes.

I make a sincere effort not to snicker as I say, “I didn’t think so.”

Adelgonda catches my sleeve as I turn to leave. “Talk later?”

“Maybe.” Her cautious eyes blink up at me, plaintive and bare, angled so that I can watch love begin to drain from her expression and attempt in my own haphazard way to salvage what’s left of us. “Tomorrow? Not sure how things will go with Abuelita,” I explain. I fully expect to be exhausted by a night of arguing with Abuelita, debating the pros and cons of abandoning Earth—our ancestral home, this land that made us and has every right to undo us—and preparing for any obstacle, no matter how improbable, that could prevent us from bringing a little part of our planet to a mountaintop millions of lightyears away; but, when I return home, Abuelita has already read the message, and she only has one question. “What will hurt more: staying or leaving?”

“That depends,” I say, as I take a chair at the table. “Whose hurt are we considering?”

“Everyone’s.” She glances out the window, and I know this category includes Nova.

If her seeds don’t reach Proxima Centauri, the last thirty years will have been in vain.

On the day the ship arrives, we wake early and collect the seeds Nova dropped overnight. Flowering has been swift and delicate. Each white bud opening in its own time, on its own terms. For weeks, I have been climbing this ladder in the mornings, parting the petals of Nova’s creamy white flowers, and manually transferring pollen from the fiery torches of her stamen to the sticky green dot balanced atop her pistil. For me, Nova is both mother and father, pollen and pollinated, a queen in need of nothing but a lover to follow her from room to room, ensuring all of her needs remain met until the end. All her life, Nova has enjoyed the benefits of two lovers—Abuelita and me—but, soon enough, she will only have one. At age eighty-three, Abuelita sits on a stool at the center of the garden, and she counts. Flowers, minutes, number of times I mention Adelgonda. “I estimate Nova has three, maybe four thousand more blooms,” she says.

From high up on the ladder, I call down, “And then what?”

“You know what.” She snaps her fingers and makes a parched sound like a hiker dying of thirst high on a mountain. Semelparous by nature, Queens of the Andes withers after first flower, reproducing just once in a lifetime, making it an event: the passing of the throne, rare even in the wild, and so much more so in botanical gardens that all recorded instances can be counted on one hand. “As a young botanist,” Abuelita says, “I assumed the flowering I had witnessed would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, the last gasp of a mass extinction. And now here we are.” She says this last part to Nova, not to me, as if together they had climbed to the top of the world. Her hand drifts through the puddles of seeds collecting in the tarps we strung up all around Nova.

I shake my arm, massaging the muscles. “Do you think we have enough?”

“For today, yes.” She pops one of the seeds into her mouth. “Tastes like dirt.”

I climb down the ladder to study the seeds. “They look like tiny dehydrated avocados.”

Her laugh glitters with delight. “How I wish we had avocado trees,” she says.

“I can’t remember what one tastes like. The texture, yes, but not the flavor.”

“You were so young.” Her free hand cups my cheek. “You’re still so young.”

“Maybe we can ask them to send some pits back with the next transport ship.”

“It will be too late.” She shakes her head and seeds fall from her hand like sand. Only one of the hundreds of seeds nestled in the dips of these tarps today will come with me into space. Of what remains, a portion will be preserved, kept on ice in the event of another catastrophe, and the rest will be planted. Most will die before they germinate, minute variations in their genetic make-up resulting in some being more or less adapted to these conditions—this humidity, this less than perfectly draining soil. What I bring with me to the settlements will be a longshot, a wish. One of Abuelita’s prayers. May the seeds germinate before I pass Jupiter. May the adolescent Queens of the Andes never be forced to bend their heads to fit into the hull of a starship. May they live long and proud on their new mountain thrones. If I could send a picture to Abuelita, I would.

I know now why Martín calls people every day: to avoid saying goodbye.

He refused to look me in the eye yesterday—my last day at work. Same with Josefa.

Only Adelgonda acknowledged this strangeness. “So much for being a family.”

Outside the maintenance shack, I asked, “Will you come say goodbye tomorrow?”

“Oh yeah,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes, trying to be tough. “By the garden?”

Suitcase in hand, I wait for her underneath the Queen of the Andes. Begrudgingly, but not by my request, Abuelita sits with me, both hands folded over the knob of the walking stick as she nods at the other refugees passing by on their way to line up for the shuttle—some of them alone, some with friends, some families, plus a trusted few holding pots with Nova’s germinating seeds, which Abuelita selected and distributed without telling me. When I spot the first one, I raise both eyebrows and cross my arms, but Abuelita shrugs. “It’s a precaution,” she says, waving one open palm in the air. “In case your pots fail.”

“I’m already bringing twenty.”

“It never hurts to have a backup. In life and in love.” Her eyes roll with her shoulders, her lips press resolutely shut, but I know what she wants to say: Adelgonda isn’t coming. La maldita. You can do better. Before I can respond, she spots a friend of hers, a ninety-four-year-old tía in a lime-green sweater pushing a walker while her middle-aged niece hauls a heavy pack and cradles a terracotta pot in her hands. Behind them, another set of refugees, then another, their long hellos and goodbyes punctuating the line like commas in a sentence. Every time someone asks Abuelita why she is staying, she gives a different answer. “So I can die in a different tin can? No thanks. It would be too risky a journey, anyway. You know how many things can kill you in space? Totally out of the blue, your ship crash lands or a virus turns you into goo. I’ll take my chances here.”

After each party passes, though, she falls silent, unsure what to say: Stay. Go on. Take me with you. I love you. Don’t let the plant die. Every minute, I think, “This is it. I’ve already waited too long,” though the line only appears to grow longer, not shorter, as people start transporting to the orbiting ship one by one. Finally, I spot Adelgonda standing under a tree in the distance. Hair curled around her cheeks, fists stuffed deep in her pockets. She will never say goodbye. I can see the life she wants for us unfold, like flower buds at dawn: deciding to stay here on Earth, moving into her apartment, having Abuelita over for dinner most nights, taking care of her in her old age, taking care of everyone, really, by building a community, opening our home to the queer orphans of the apocalypse, and never having to compromise ourselves again for capitalism. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? I want to live to see that universe.