5

No star burns forever. Gaspery scratched the words on a wall in prison some years later, so delicately that from any distance at all it looked like a flaw in the paint. You had to get close to see it, and you had to have lived in the twenty-second century or later to know what it meant. You had to have seen that twenty-second-century press conference, the president of China on a podium with a half-dozen of her favorite world leaders arrayed behind her, flags snapping against a brilliant blue sky.

There was time in prison, infinite time, so Gaspery spent a lot of it thinking about the past, no, the future, the point in time in which he’d walked into Zoey’s office on her birthday with cupcakes and flowers, and everything that had followed. What had happened now was terrible, he was in prison in the wrong century and he was going to die here, but as months slipped into years, he found his regrets were very few. Warning Olive Llewellyn of the approaching pandemic was not, no matter how he turned the moment over in his mind, the wrong thing to do. If someone’s about to drown, you have a duty to pull them from the water. His conscience was clear.

“What’s that you wrote there, Roberts?” Hazelton asked. Hazelton was his cellmate, a much younger man who paced and talked incessantly. Gaspery didn’t mind him.

“No star burns forever,” Gaspery said.

Hazelton nodded. “I like that,” he said. “Power of positive thinking, right? You’re in prison, but that’s not forever, because nothing is forever, right? Me, every time I start feeling a little down about my life, I—” He kept talking, but Gaspery stopped listening. He was calm these days, in a way he wouldn’t have expected. In the early evenings Gaspery liked to sit on the farthest possible edge of his bunk, almost falling off the end, because from that angle there was a sliver of sky visible through the window, and through it he could see the moon.