Malenfant tried calling again, but there was no reply from either Cornelius or Emma. He felt his own body rock to and fro in reaction to the tether’s swinging mass. The tether was swinging closer to Cornelius now, close enough surely for him to see it. But Cornelius, drifting, spinning, slowly receding, showed no awareness of what Malenfant was doing; he just kept repeating his circle gesture, over and over.

At last the tether snagged on Cornelius.

Cornelius reacted to the touch of the tether with a start. He twisted and reached out to his side with jerky, panicky gestures. And, to Malenfant’s immense relief, he grabbed the line, wrapped it around his waist a couple of times, and tied it off. Then he pulled on it gingerly and started to haul himself along it.

Huge waves oscillated up and down the line. Malenfant felt his own motion change: gentle, complex tugs this way and that.

Meanwhile the glow continued to dim, noticeably, the yellow increasingly tinged with orange rather than white. It was like being inside a giant iron sphere, heated to white hot, now cooling fast.

The tether to Cornelius provided an anchor, of sorts, and Malenfant was able to pull himself around it. Like a damn trapeze artist, he thought. He twisted, trying to search all of this cooling three-dimensional space, looking for Emma.

And there she was: in fact closer than Cornelius, no more than ten or fifteen feet away. She was directly above him, drifting, inert, her limbs starfished, her gold sun visor down. The blood was still leaking from her shattered leg, little droplets of it pumping out. She was slowly turning, as if her wound were a rocket, a miniature attitude thruster fueled by Emma’s blood.

Malenfant got hold of another tether, checked that its piton was secure, and started swinging it around his head.

He managed to get the tether to brush over Emma’s chest, but unlike Cornelius, she made no attempt to grab at it. He was going to have to hook her without her cooperation. He aimed for her good leg, playing out more line. If he could get the tether to hit her leg, the momentum of the piton might make it wrap around her ankle a couple of times.

He tried once, missed. Tried again, missed.

It was getting increasingly difficult to aim, as Cornelius clambered closer. In fact, Malenfant realized belatedly, Cornelius was actually dragging Malenfant away from Emma, toward their joint center of gravity. Malenfant glared down, across the twenty feet or so that still separated him from the doggedly working Cornelius. “Cornelius, hold it a minute. Can’t you see what I’m doing here? Cut me a little slack.” Cornelius didn’t respond. Malenfant tried waving at him, miming that he should back off. But Cornelius didn’t seem aware of that either.

Swearing under his breath, Malenfant continued to work.

It took a couple more swings, a couple more agonizing near misses, before Malenfant at last managed to hook his line around Emma’s foot. The tether immediately started to unravel, so Malenfant risked everything and gave the tether a hard yank.

The tether came loose.

But it had been enough, he saw with an immense relief; still starfished, passive, spinning, she was drifting toward him. He rolled up the tether hastily and slung it over his arm.

She came sliding past him like a figure in a dream, not two feet away. He reached up and grabbed her good leg. He pulled her down to him until he had her in his arms once more. Under his gloved hand something crumbled away from Emma’s suit. It was a fine layer of white soot.

Clumsily he pushed up her gold visor. There was her face, lit by the still-brilliant orange glow of the sky. Her eyes were closed, the fringe of hair that poked out of her comms hat plastered against her forehead by big, unearthly beads of sweat. It was hard to judge her color, but it looked to him as if her face was pink, burned, even blistered in a few places, on her cheekbones and chin. He reached out without thinking, meaning to touch her face, but of course his gloved hand just bumped against the glass of her faceplate.

Enough. He was still in the business of survival, here. He got a tether rope and knotted it around his waist and Emma’s, making sure they couldn’t drift apart again.

What next?

Emma’s leg. It was still bleeding, pumping blood. A tourniquet, then. He grabbed a loop of tether rope.

But now somebody was clambering over his back. It was Cornelius, of course, pulling himself along with big clumsy grabs. Malenfant felt a thump at the back of his helmet and heard a muffled shouting that carried through the fabric of Cornelius’ helmet and his own.

“… that you? Malenfant? Is that…”

Malenfant yelled back, as loudly as he could. “Yes, it’s me.”

“… portal. Have you tethered us to the portal?” The words were very muffled, like somebody shouting through a wall. “The portal. Can you see it? Malenfant…”

The portal. That’s what Cornelius had been signaling, even as he drifted away into space, with his circle gestures. The portal. The most important object in the world right now, because it was their only way out of this place.

And it hadn’t even occurred to Malenfant to think about it.

“Malenfant, I’m blind. All this light. I can’t see… The portal, Malenfant. Get us back to the portal.”

So, adrift in this featureless universe, he had another tough call. The portal, or Emma’s tourniquet.

He shouted back to Cornelius. “I have Emma. I’ll find the portal. But she needs a tourniquet. Do you understand? A tourniquet.”

“…tourniquet. The trooper. I remember…”

Malenfant reached down and guided Cornelius’ hands to Emma’s damaged leg. As he touched Cornelius’ suit he kicked up another cloud of ash particles. He showed Cornelius by touch where the wound was, gave him a length of tether.

Tentatively at first, then with more confidence, Cornelius began to work, pulling the rope around the damaged leg. Malenfant watched until he was sure Cornelius was, at least, going to do no more harm.

Then Malenfant clambered over Cornelius’ back, turning this way and that, looking for the portal.

There. It was an electric-blue circle, containing its disc of inky darkness, its color a painful contrast with the dimming, orange-red background of the sky. But it was drifting away fast. And when the portal was out of reach, it would be gone forever, and this little island of humanity would be stuck here for good.

Hastily Malenfant prepared his tether, weighted with a piton to which asteroid dust still clung. Anchoring himself against Cornelius’ back, he whipped the tether around his head and flung it toward the portal. The tether was drifting well wide of the portal. Malenfant dragged it back, tried again, paying out the tether hastily. He tried again, and again.

If he had been blinded, Cornelius had had it so much worse. But even so he had been thinking; he knew immediately how important it was to grab hold of the portal, and alone, blinded, overheating, he had even tried to signal the fact to whoever might be watching.

Cornelius was one smart man.

On the fifth or sixth time, the piton sailed neatly through the black mouth of the portal, dragging the uncoiling tether after it. He let it drift on. It was, in fact, a little eerie. He could see that the piton had just disappeared when it hit the portal surface, and now the tether, too, was vanishing as it snaked into the darkness.

He began to pull the tether back, cautiously, hardly daring to breathe.

My God, he thought. Here I am fishing for a spacetime worm-hole. On any other day this would seem unusual.

The tether grew taut.

He pulled, hand over hand, gently. He felt the combined inertia of the three of them, a stiff resistance to movement. But he was patient; he kept the pressure on the tether light and even.