Ark

Samantha’s hands were still red from the cold, the skin over her knuckles taut and dry. She had gone that morning to bring supplies to the Naomi, a small fishing vessel off the coast that she had bought with the last of her money, before money lost all meaning.

She had learned the knot to moor the boat months before she got it. A bowline knot, which started with a loop in the rope, the end snaking up and down and through. The world’s most useful knot, the website had said. The internet had disappeared a few weeks later, just before the evacuation.

In the Bible story, Noah had built a boat to survive the flood, to endure. The Naomi would not survive anything. That was not her purpose.

Samantha sat down at her station and breathed warm air on her knuckles.

“I,” Dan said, sitting back from the computer screen, “would really like a smoke.”

Samantha was in the middle of a tissue ID. She stared through the magnifier at the tiny leaves of what seemed to be a clump of peat moss in an attempt to match it to the grid of images on the screen in front of her. Ambuchanania or Sphagnum were the two genera options confronting her. The Sphagnum’s leaves, the screen told her, would have large dead cells alternating with the living ones. She needed to take a sample for the microscope.

“You don’t smoke,” she said as she got up to fetch a slide.

“I don’t smoke anymore,” Dan said. “I quit when I was twenty.”

Clean slide in hand, Samantha sat again and reached for the iodine. “And now that you work in a confined space with other people, you suddenly want to do it again?”

“Well, consider this,” Dan said. “Not only is it against the rules to smoke on either Ark ship, there’s also not gonna be tobacco. Not the fresh stuff, anyway. So isn’t it our obligation to experience everything Earth’s plants have to offer for as long as we can?”

She used a scalpel to scrape a sample from one of the tiny leaves. Her hands trembled when she had to do delicate work like this, but she was used to it now after taking an incalculable number of samples from an endless supply of plants. She put the sample down in the iodine, dabbing a few times to get it loose, and covered it with a slip. The iodine-stained sample spread wide beneath the glass.

She put the slide on the microscope stage and secured it with the clips. Her hand went automatically to the coarse-focus wheel to bring the stage closer to the lens. She realized, as she brought her eye to the eyepiece, that Dan was waiting for an answer.

“I’ve never smoked,” she said.

“Well,” he said, “there’s no better time to try.”

Dan had shaved that morning, and there was still a tiny square of red-spotted toilet paper on his neck from where the razor had nicked him. He had broad shoulders and round, perpetually pink cheeks. He’d been eating nonstop since Earth was evacuated of most of its inhabitants. There would be plenty of time to get trim again on a spaceship hurtling toward Earth the Sequel, as he liked to call it, eating bland rations.

“Sure,” Samantha found herself saying. “Why not?”

When she was seven years old, there was a windstorm that knocked all the leaves off the maple tree in the backyard. She woke up to bare branches and a lawn blanketed in orange, yellow, and red. Her father had spent all Saturday raking them into a giant pile at the far end of the yard, and then, as the sun set, he had set them on fire.

She had avoided him all day—it wasn’t smart to interrupt her dad in the middle of a chore, or in the middle of anything, really—but when she saw that he was just standing there next to the leaf pile, she had put on one of his old coats and joined him. The sleeves fell over her fingers, keeping them warm, and the elastic hem brushed her kneecaps.

“Don’t get too close,” he said when he saw her.

She stuck her hands out of the sleeves to feel the heat from the fire against her palms. The patch of woods behind the house was bare of leaves, too, except the pines, heavy with needles. Her father had told her, the year before, that every winter she saw would be one of Earth’s last winters. He had fallen asleep a little while later with a glass of scotch balanced on his lap.

She looked up at the silhouettes of the branches against the color-rich sky. The wind shifted, and flakes of ash blew toward her face, pricking at her eyes. One landed on her lip, and she tasted it with her tongue. It tasted like burned leaves curling up at the edges in the flames, like musty old coats, like breaths you could see unfurling.

That, Samantha thought, standing bundled up near the back door with Dan, was how cigarettes tasted too.

The eyepiece was cold against her eye socket. Everything was cold in Svalbard, an archipelago north of the Arctic Circle that was technically part of Norway. In the last several years, as the tenants of Earth prepared to evacuate, Svalbard had seen an influx of scientists from all over the world, thanks to its existing store of genetic material in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which had already housed more than one million samples when the apocalyptic news came.

Borders had stopped mattering after the asteroid Finis was discovered twenty years ago. Everyone was just an Earthling now.

The global scientific community had begun their work right after Finis’s discovery: preserve as much genetic material from Earth as possible before the catastrophic collision occurred. They had sent researchers out into the world with new technology for preserving live plants and animals, and they had collected hundreds of thousands of samples in facilities all around the world. At the same time, they had constructed two massive storage ships, one in Australia and one in Svalbard—Ark Flora and Ark Fauna, they were called—and began cataloging all the data they had received, and would still receive, until the very end. There had been talk, in the beginning, of simply loading all the samples onto the ships and analyzing them later. But the space on the ships had been limited, and there were too many repeat samples. Better to get one hundred unique specimens, the leader of the Ark Project had said, than three hundred duplicates.

Ark Flora and Ark Fauna would depart in two months’ time, with a narrow window of escape before the asteroid hit. They would join the other Earth evacuees en route to Earth the Sequel (formally known as Terra). None of the people on board would see the new planet in their lifetimes, though their children would.

Samantha hadn’t been involved in the Ark Project from the beginning, or even the middle, really. She had joined the effort when the call for End Days workers came. The qualifications had been a master’s-level degree in a related field, no criminal record, no history of mental illness, and no living family. No one to lose if Finis showed up early, or if the ship failed to launch.

“Orphans, gather round!” The shout came from the doorway of the laboratory at the same time every day: 11:45 a.m. The young woman to whom it belonged, Averill, was small, slim through the torso, and thick through the hips and thighs. She had learned as a girl to speak only in her chest voice, so she could be heard over her two brothers, and the habit had stuck.

Her brothers, as well as her parents, had died in a car accident when she was eighteen years old. Everyone here knew everyone else’s tragedies. They were as commonplace as talking about the weather.

In front of Averill was a cart with two rows of bagged lunches on it. They were for the higher-level scientists to take to their private laboratories, where they performed more sophisticated work than identifying plant samples using pictures on a screen: monitoring and maintaining the environments of the storage facilities to maximize species survival.

“It’s everyone’s favorite time,” Averill said with a grin. “Lunch-delivery time. Today’s contestants are Brendan, Alice, and Sam.”

Samantha pulled away from the eyepiece of the microscope and crossed the room to the cart. Brendan, boyish and sturdy, and Alice, her shiny black hair pushed behind her ears, were already standing there. Averill stuck out her fist, which had three straws in it. Brendan picked first, then Alice, and then Samantha.

Samantha’s was the shortest. She sighed. Almost all the higher-ups were in the same building, their offices in a long row, but there was one that required trudging in full arctic regalia out to the remote greenhouse belonging to Dr. Nils Hagen. The man himself was inoffensive, but the walk was brutal, and the trip took over an hour.

Averill handed her the only insulated bag, the one with “Hagen” written on it in blocky letters, and Samantha lifted it up in a toast to the laboratory peons. They hooted in response, and she went out to retrieve her coat.

The first breath of wind made her aware of all the places she hadn’t covered—a line of skin above her cheeks and below the goggles, a narrow channel on one side of her hood that wasn’t drawn as tightly. She tugged her coat sleeve down to cover a patch of wrist skin not shielded by her glove and started the hike.

Hagen spent his mornings in the greenhouse with his orchids. Everyone from the peons to the head of the entire Ark Project had tried to convince him to move into the facility with the rest of the scientists, but he had refused. And because scientists who qualified for his position had been scarce—and were gone now, since everyone except them had evacuated Earth—he had to be catered to. He got all his work done anyway, so there wasn’t much to complain about except the inconvenience.

All around her was white. Even the sharp-edged hills in the distance showed only the faintest brown of earth through the snow and ice. Samantha had first arrived in Svalbard by helicopter, in the evening, so the settlement had shown itself in orange ropes of light, the paths that connected the low buildings. The land had glowed blue—beautiful in the way that a Rothko painting was beautiful, because it was empty enough to shrink a person and then swallow them.

There wasn’t a soul in sight. It wasn’t difficult to believe, in Svalbard, that the world was about to end.

She made it to the greenhouse, the glass reflecting white back to her, simultaneously glaring and invisible. Hagen’s little cabin was right next to the structure, a brown smudge set at the base of one of the hills that hugged their little settlement close. She pulled the first door open with a crunch and searched the steamy greenhouse for a sign of Hagen. Most of the time he came out to retrieve his lunch, so she didn’t even have to take off her goggles. She doubted he knew her face, though she had been there once a week for the last several months. But today there was no sign of him.

Samantha took off her gloves, her goggles, her hood. She tugged her scarf down, tasting wet wool, and unzipped her coat. She left everything on the ground in the entryway and opened the door to the greenhouse.

Humidity clung to her cheeks and eyelashes. There were three rows of plants, with two aisles between them. Everywhere she looked, there were leaves and stems and flowers of almost every color. A bloodred Cymbidium with half a dozen flowers was on one of the low shelves, the lips between the lower sepals touched with white. Beside it was some kind of pink Oncidium with delicate branches that unfolded into tiny flowers, no larger than her fingernails. And beyond them both were increasingly stranger and more colorful orchids that looked almost monstrous, their labella bulging, their petals thinning to needles.

“They grow in every color except blue and black.” Through the leaves and flowers she saw the slope of a shoulder and Nils Hagen’s pale hand cupping one of the flowers near him.

“But…” Samantha stepped into the greenhouse, forgetting the sack in her hand, to point to one of the nearest flowers, another Cymbidium with a fuchsia central column. The petals looked black to her.

“Just a very deep purple-red,” Hagen said, shaking his head. He tilted one of the flowers up toward the light, and she saw that it was dark burgundy, the color of a glass of Barolo. “It’s the same with the so-called black Paphiopedilum.”

“And the glistening sun orchid,” Samantha added with a smile of triumph when Hagen looked taken aback. “My mom loved them, always had them in the house. I guess she primed me to study horticulture.”

“And your mother is now…”

“Dead,” Samantha supplied. “Everybody’s family is dead around here, you know.”

“Yes.” Hagen’s brow furrowed. “I keep forgetting.”

Samantha held up the bag that held Hagen’s lunch. “Your tuna sandwich.”

“I don’t suppose you would help me with something first.” Hagen looked her over, and she returned the favor. He was older but not quite elderly, his hair threaded with silver and his face deeply lined. He was tall, with rounded shoulders, and trim, though there was a bubble of a belly reined in by his leather belt. “You look strong enough for the task. It requires more than one set of hands.”

“Sure,” Samantha said. “Beats clicking a bunch of pictures on a screen all afternoon.”

“Ah, so you work in species identification,” Hagen said. “You must have good color vision, then, or they would have shoved you into the Ark Flora’s storage area to play a highly sophisticated game of Tetris with all the identified samples.”

Samantha laughed. “All the better, since I was never any good at puzzles. But I’m good at detail, generally. And tedium. Highly tolerant of tedium.”

“Bodes well for a scientist.”

“I’m not a scientist,” she said, smiling. “I’m a horticulturist.”

“You have a master’s of science, like everyone else left on Earth right now,” Hagen said. “And you’re working on the very last scientific endeavor ever to take place on this planet. You are indeed a scientist. Now, come and help me with this shelf.”

An old wooden desk stood at the back of the greenhouse, wedged against the wall. There were two shelves just above it, one full of books and the other empty, sagging on one side where the bracket had broken. The small pots that had once been on the shelf, evidently, were now stacked on the desk itself, on top of notebooks and papers and books. A mug with vines painted on it stood right near the back. It was lopsided—clearly handmade, with the indents of fingers baked into its surface.

“Now, if you could hold the wood up—it’s solid wood, heavier than it looks,” Hagen said. “I will put up a new bracket. I’d rather not have to detach the shelf entirely, as it was quite difficult to get straight in the first place.”

He spoke with only a faint accent, but in the slower, halting way that Samantha was used to from non-native English speakers.

She leaned over the desk and braced herself against the shelf, pushing it into the wall and lifting it from beneath at the same time. Hagen took a screwdriver to the bracket, and once it was free, she realized the shelf was, indeed, heavier than she had expected. She gave a surprised grunt, and pushed closer to the wall, her arms shaking.

“You know,” she said, her voice strained from the effort, “it may not be worth fixing a shelf you’re just going to abandon in two months.”

Hagen’s smile softened. “I will not be abandoning it,” he said.

She had heard rumors that Hagen intended to stay on Earth when the rest of them left, but it was different hearing him confirm it himself. There was nothing melancholy about the way he said it; in fact, he sounded almost fond of the idea, like it was an old stray cat that he put out food for.

She thought of the Naomi, held fast by her bowline knot, bobbing on the waves.

“Well,” she said, “I guess it’s good we’re fixing it, then.”

Early estimates suggested that the asteroid, calculated to be at least five miles in diameter, would flatten an area the size of the United States when it struck. The resulting debris and dust in the atmosphere would block out the sun, and that would be what wiped out all life on the rest of the planet. So, Samantha figured, a person would be able to live for some time, depending on their existing food stores, if the asteroid didn’t strike anywhere near them.

“Everybody’s family is dead around here, you know.”

He put the new bracket in place and began screwing it in. As the bracket took hold, less of her strength was required, until she was able to release the shelf and start arranging the pots on top of it.

“Would you mind if I asked why?” she said.

“You wouldn’t be the first,” Hagen said, dusting off his hands. He took off his glasses and set them on his desk. His eyes creased at the corners, she noticed, like he was always smiling, even when he wasn’t.

“I don’t mind being unoriginal,” she replied.

The answer seemed to charm him. He chuckled a little.

“There are many reasons,” he said, “but there is also just one: I can’t bear to leave my home.”

Samantha nodded. She picked up the bag that said “Hagen” on it and set it on his desk, next to the homemade mug.

“Have a good lunch,” she said.

“If you want to learn more about orchids,” he said, “you might consider bringing lunch for yourself next time you come.” He tilted his head. “If you love them as your mother did, I mean.”

She gave a wave and went into the entryway to put her gloves back on.

The “orchid hospital,” as Samantha’s mother had called it, was in her bedroom, along the back window. After the shriveled blooms dropped, her mother took the plant up to the windowsill and left it in the indirect light until it bloomed again. She put ice cubes in the pots once a week, so water would melt into the soil.

Why, she had once asked her mother, do you bother to keep anything alive when it’ll all be wiped out by Finis?

Her mother had shrugged. Why take a shower when you’re just going to get dirty? Why eat when you’re just going to get hungry? Every flower dies eventually, Sam. But not yet.

Samantha had gone to the orchid hospital every day as a child, standing in the bathroom doorway as her mother did her makeup and leaving before the roar of the hair dryer could make her heart race. If she was lucky, Naomi would dust Samantha’s cheeks with blush or let her blink her eyelashes into the mascara wand after she was finished. Once she had even tied one of her scarves—the silky one with the violets on it—around Samantha’s head like a headband.

When she grew older—old enough to put on Barbie-pink lip gloss and to smear glitter on her eyelids—she didn’t watch the morning ritual any longer, but she still went to the bedroom to feel the orchid soil to make sure it was moist, to open the scarf drawer and breathe in the scent of her mother’s perfume, to try on her shoes as her feet grew bigger, inch by inch, big enough to fill them. And later, when she was home from college, to run her hands over the oxygen tank, to try on the mask her mother wore to breathe as her body broke down.

Her first dance was in eighth grade, when she was thirteen, and her mother took her shopping for a dress. She was self-conscious about the sharp points of her breasts without a bra to give them shape, so they moved away from the halters and toward something with thick straps. A black shift that fell to the middle of her calves was the most promising option, though she had clutched her hands tight around the rise of fat around her middle when she first put it on, only for her mother to smack them away and tell her not to be silly—it was no crime to have a body. And standing in the dressing room, looking at her reflection, she had thought that a body rippled like desert sand, swelling up into hills, dipping into valleys, the sand blowing around curves and over sharp edges.

But better than the dress had been the earrings. They had, her mother said, belonged to her grandmother, who had passed away when her mother was only twenty, from an undiagnosed heart condition. The earrings were pearl posts set into small metal leaves, and her mother had cautioned her to take care of them before sending her off with her friend Kara’s mother to the school gymnasium.

It took an hour for her terror of the dance floor to wear away, and even then she kept her movements small, hips shifting and feet shuffling. Mostly she and the other girls sang the lyrics they knew into the center of a circle, their heads bobbing, the little crystals they had pressed into their hair dropping unseen to the gymnasium floor. She had one slow dance, with Davud Shah from her choir class, who smelled like sweat but had a shy smile and a nice clear tenor.

When she got home later, the dress scratchy against her shoulders, she felt her earlobes to take out the earrings and the right one was missing.

She searched along the path she had taken down the upstairs hallway and up the stairs and into the kitchen and along the hall to the front door, but she knew that the earring was more likely lost on the gymnasium floor. She ran to her mother with tears in her eyes, holding out the single earring and confessing.

Her mother was quiet for a few seconds, plucking the earring from her daughter’s hand. Finally she offered a smile, touching Samantha’s head, and told her not to worry.

That night, Samantha got up for a glass of water, and saw her mother on her hands and knees in the hallway, wearing her white bathrobe, searching the carpet for what her daughter had lost.

On her way back to the compound in Svalbard to begin her work again, Samantha walked across a rare shaft of sunlight. It made the snow glimmer like fallen hair crystals and glitter eye shadow and pearls cradled in metal leaves.

When there was a flower in the lab, everyone gathered around.

The sample had come across Samantha’s station. It was a whole plant: flower, stem, leaves, and roots, held suspended in the clear solution that preserved all the full plant samples. Most of them came to Svalbard already labeled by the scientists in the field who had collected them years before, but sometimes the labels were lost, or the higher-ups didn’t think they were correct. There were still thousands of samples in the basement beneath them, rows upon rows of plants they would soon forget when they were coasting through space. But Samantha and her coworkers were doing their best to log as many as possible.

This particular flower was yellow and round, with dozens of frilly petals around a central point. The stem was fuzzy and light green, the leaves at the base of the plant oblong and smooth. No one said anything for a while as Samantha typed in the initial parameters of her search: yellow, height: 28.2cm, leaves: five, origin: United Kingdom.

“It looks like a dandelion,” Dan said as Samantha leaned closer to the images the database had presented to her.

“So?” Averill said. “Even dandelions need to be logged.”

“Listen, we’re not going to get through all the samples before liftoff,” Dan said, “and personally, I’d rather preserve the genetic material of a rare African violet than a dandelion. Is that such a crime?”

“You can’t go picking and choosing,” Averill argued. “One man’s dandelion is another man’s African violet.”

“I don’t accept the argument that there are no objective standards of beauty or value.”

“It’s not a dandelion,” Samantha said. She pointed at the leaves at the base of the plant. “Dandelion leaves are… poky. This one’s leaves are smooth. See?”

“That an official horticultural term?” Josh asked from her right shoulder. “Poky?”

“Shut up,” she said. “I think I’ve found the match.”

She went through the checklist of terms associated with the species she thought she had identified. Wales, check. Shaggy stem, check. Whorl of leaves around stem, check. By the time she had reached the end, she was smiling.

“It’s a Snowdonia hawkweed,” she said. “Categorized as ‘rare.’”

“Ooh, I know about those,” Alice said from somewhere behind her, her Irish accent distinct. “Almost went extinct because of overgrazing, and then some foot-and-mouth disease killed off a bunch of sheep and wham—the flowers were back.”

“See?” Averill sounded smug. “It’s more African violet than dandelion. Told you.”

“That is not what you told me,” Dan retorted.

Samantha carried the sample over to the cart for it to be stored, her fingerprints smudging the glass.

Samantha could mark her childhood years by her favorite colors. When she was five, it had been purple; at seven, it had been green; and at ten years old, she had liked navy blue. The color of the night sky just after sunset, she had told her mother, and together they had painted Samantha’s bedroom again. Her mother had looked up a constellation chart to arrange glow-in-the-dark stars on the walls in the right positions, held in place by sticky tack.

She had been wearing a navy-blue shirt when her father took her out to Warren Field one July night. Warren Field was in the middle of the preserve, so they parked in the lot at one end and hiked together down the winding paths, slapping at mosquitos. She still remembered the sweet, medicinal smell of the repellant he had sprayed all over her before they left, telling her to close her eyes and hold her breath first.

They didn’t talk. Her father didn’t tell her why they were going into the preserve late at night, when there was no moon, to look at the stars. She had known since she was young that the more she spoke to her father, the more likely he was to take things away from her. Dessert, sometimes, or if she wasn’t so lucky, special trips he had promised her—the ice-cream parlor, the zoo, her grandfather’s house. But silence often brought a reward.

Her skin was sticky with sweat by the time they reached the field, and her father trudged through the tall grass to the middle of it, so just a fringe of trees was visible on either side of them. Then he started setting up the telescope, screwing the pieces together with his hands, stowing the cap for the lens in his back pocket. He took out his phone to get the right coordinates, and she saw his face lit up blue from beneath as he scowled at the screen. The deep lines in his forehead and the pale whiskers in his beard.

“I want you to look through the eyepiece there, and pay attention, because this thing is only gonna pass for a second,” he said. “I’ll tell you when.”

She leaned over the eyepiece and waited, careful not to lean forward and knock the telescope out of position or to lean back and miss the moment. Her back was stiff and her legs ached by the time her father said, “Five, four, three, two, one—now.”

She saw it, a streak of light, a white glow between the stars.

“See it?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “What was it?”

“Finis,” he said. “That was the asteroid that’s going to collide with Earth one day. Asteroids always make a couple swoops in their orbits, like a criminal scoping out a jewelry store before he steals its diamonds. I thought you should see it, because hopefully the next time it comes that close, you’ll already be living someplace else.”

Samantha felt a little pocket of warmth in her chest at the thought. This rare thing, Finis passing Earth, and he had given the moment to her instead of taking it himself.

He crouched down next to her. It was too dark to see all the details of his face, but she could make out the rise of his cheekbones and the hollows beneath them.

“I’m sorry,” he said to her.

He looked down at her shoes. One of her shoelaces had come untied, so he started to tie it, his thick fingers fumbling a little with the short, muddy laces.

“It’s okay,” she said, even though she wasn’t sure what he was sorry for. The dread of Finis was the only thing she knew. It was the first segment on the nightly news, the top category of every news website, and the easiest reach for every comedian.

Now that she was older, she understood that there had been other possible lives to live before Finis. Lives without evacuation plans taped to the refrigerator or emergency go-bags stashed in the hall closet. Lives full of plans, for college and houses, children and golden retrievers, retirement and last rites. Those lives had not been lived in the shadow of Finis. And he had known when he made her that they wouldn’t be possible for her.

So maybe he had been apologizing for giving her life in the first place, when he knew it would be full of dread.

She wished she could have told him that life was already full of dread, no matter who you were. That there was nothing you could have that you couldn’t one day lose. That autumn always gave way to winter, but it was her favorite time of year—those fleeting bursts of beauty before the branches went bare.

In the lab, the next time she was called up to draw straws, she swapped her long straw for Josh’s short one, and for the fourth time that month went to see Hagen’s orchids.

“Which one is your favorite?”

Hagen gave her a blank look.

They were potting some of the tissue samples he had brought over from the laboratory, spare ones that wouldn’t be necessary for the Ark. Samantha spread the gravel evenly at the bottom of the pot, to keep the roots from rotting if the plant were overwatered. It wasn’t until she was already finished that she realized it was probably unnecessary. There were only four weeks until the launch of the Ark, and a few days after that for the asteroid to collide with Earth, and then, if he managed to survive the collision, Hagen wouldn’t have long before he ran out of food. The plant would die from lack of sunlight before its roots rotted.

She frowned down at the pot.

“I don’t have a favorite,” Hagen said.

“You know,” she said, leaning in conspiratorially, “they can’t hear you.”

Hagen laughed. “I’m serious! I see value in all of them, and therefore I am impartial.”

Samantha rolled her eyes.

Hagen’s eyes wrinkled at the corners as he laughed again. They were very bright, Samantha thought. They would have been cold, like a pale winter’s morning, if he hadn’t smiled so often.

“You think I’m full of shit,” he said.

“No, it’s not that.” She picked up the little plant in the tray between them, and held it by the sturdiest part of its stem as she scooped soil in around it, centering it in the pot. “Okay, yes, a little.” She grinned. “But also, I just don’t think impartiality is so great—that’s all.”

Hagen returned to his own plant. “No?”

“Well, you can’t love everything equally,” she said. “You just can’t—and if you did, then it’s the same as loving nothing at all. So you have to hold just a few things dear, because that’s what love is. Particular. Specific.” She paused, testing out her next thought on her tongue before she spoke it aloud. “The way you loved your wife.”

It was a dangerous thing to say. They had spoken of his wife, once or twice, in the last visit. She had died of the same disease that had claimed Samantha’s mother’s life, cancer of the pancreas. There was a photograph of her on Hagen’s desk. She had her head turned to the side, and she was laughing at a joke someone else was telling, her crooked teeth showing. She had been plain, but her face held the eye nonetheless—the high arch of her nose, the permanent crease in her full lower lip, the deep creases in her forehead, the constellation of age spots on her cheek.

“Ah.” Hagen’s smile was gentle—good, she hadn’t overstepped. “Yes, I suppose I see what you mean.”

She finished piling the soil around the small plant, pressing lightly around the roots so they would settle into their new home. The thick green leaves at the base of the stem hung over the edge of the clay pot, stiff but still flexible. She had tied a stick to the stem to keep it straight. There were no buds for flowers yet, and maybe they would come before the plant died or maybe not.

“My favorite,” Hagen said, “is her favorite, I suppose. Ophrys speculum. The mirror orchid. Would you like to see it?”

He led her to the second row of flowers, to a plant on the waist-high table he had set up against the wall there. The one in question was in bloom. The flowers were almost alien in appearance, the lip three lobed and glazed, with a fringe of red hair around the edges. The center of the lip looked almost blue.

“It is cunning,” Hagen said, touching his finger to the center of the lip. “It has evolved to look this way in order to lure in one particular pollinator, a wasp, Dasyscolia ciliata. The male wasp lands, hoping to mate, and picks up the flower’s pollen in the process. Even the scent is similar to the female wasp’s pheromones.” He smirked. “Alicia loved this, the improbability of such a specific, perfect cooperation between species. In evolution, she saw the mechanics of a god. Her faith was rarely at odds with her scientific mind—a point on which we disagreed, of course, as I have long been an atheist.”

“You have to hold just a few things dear, because that’s what love is. Particular. Specific.”

He touched the flower gently for another moment, smiling still.

“An orchid is not self-reliant,” he said. “It doesn’t carry endosperm in its seeds, so it requires a symbiotic relationship with a fungus in order to survive. But it finds those relationships everywhere. On almost every continent, in almost every climate. On trees, on rocks, even underground. A temperamental plant, but somehow, in contradiction to that, a resilient one.” He shrugged. “I suppose when I say that I am impartial, what I really mean is that I am partial—but to all orchids. They were not high on the priority list for gene storage, of course. They don’t provide sustenance, after all, and thus were deemed unnecessary for the initial launch. Which is fair, I suppose. But still…”

He looked at Samantha.

“What is necessary?” he said. “I’m no longer sure. I think that she was necessary, for me.”

“You feel like you’ve been dying all this time, too, then,” Samantha said. “It’s just that your body hasn’t caught on yet.”

“Indeed.” He gave her a strange look.

Samantha leaned close to the mirror orchid to see the line of hair that outlined the labellum. It was less like a flower and more like a beetle or a cockroach, she thought. Or it would be, if not for the swell of blue in its center, more reflection than pigment.

“I’m not going to leave with the Ark,” she said, not looking at him. She had kept the secret of the Naomi all this time, from Dan and Averill and all the other lab orphans, from the director of the Ark Project every time she checked in about Samantha’s medication and feminine-product needs for the trip aboard the Ark Flora after its launch, from the application she had submitted to get this job in the first place, though she had known what she would do then too. She had known, perhaps, since she first saw Finis through the telescope in that field, next to her father, with the smell of insect repellant clinging to them both.

“I’m going to steer a boat out,” she said. “I know how to drive one; I have since I was a kid. I’ll keep to calm waters, see as much of the peninsula as I can. And put down my anchor to watch the world end.”

Hagen’s face was inscrutable.

“I’ve spent my free days getting the boat ready. She’s capable enough for the task, I think. I call her Naomi—my mom’s name.”

She made herself stop. If she went on, she would find herself talking about how she wasn’t suicidal, never had been, not even in the throes of grief. Instead, it was simply that her entire life had been lived in anticipation of loss, such that neither her mother’s death nor her father’s had surprised her in the least, but had rather seemed like the fulfillment of a promise.

Hagen’s morning-pale eyes were steady on hers. A lock of silver-black hair had fallen over his forehead in a distinct curl.

“You’re sure?” he said.

She nodded.

“You’re young,” he said. “You could still have a family, a whole lifetime.” He frowned.

She wanted to tell him that she no longer saw anything down that avenue. Couldn’t imagine herself loving someone as dearly as Hagen had loved Alicia, or touching hand to belly in anticipation of a flutter kick from a growing fetus, or even silver haired and lined, spraying orchids to keep their leaves moist in some distant greenhouse.

“A lifetime on a ship,” she said finally. “Sounds like a pale version of life to me.”

Hagen scratched the back of his neck with one hand. “Is that why? You don’t want to live on a ship?”

She shook her head and reached for another flower, one of the common white Phalaenopsis that she had once bought at the grocery store. The top of the labellum was touched with pink.

“When the asteroid hits, it will shred our atmosphere,” she said. “Finis is too large for it to be much of an encumbrance. The only thing that will slow it down will be Earth’s crust. It’ll likely hit water, though we can’t be absolutely certain. Its current path will take it away from Svalbard, regardless—somewhere on the Southern Hemisphere, so we won’t see the impact zone even at a distance. But it will send a catastrophic dust cloud into the air that will obscure the sun. It might rain fire. Everything will burn and shrivel and darken and break apart.”

She tilted her head.

“It’s the story of this planet in reverse,” she said. “We were born out of—coalescing matter, chaos, here, all lava and earthquakes and thunder.” She smiled a little. “It will be like… seeing the birth of the world. Can you imagine anything more beautiful, more worth witnessing, than that?”

Hagen’s hand reached over the white flower with its thick petals. His fingers hooked around hers.

Samantha lay on the floor of Dan’s room, bobbing her head to the music. Dan was sitting on the narrow bed next to Josh, who was rolling a joint in his lap. Averill, cradling a glass of wine against her chest, was crouched next to Dan’s record collection in a stack on the floor. There were only four of them, but they filled the room, the warmth of their bodies staving off the cold from the drafty window.

Samantha felt like she was in college again. The skunk smell of weed, the rough carpet under her head. The sight of an old sock lying forgotten under Dan’s bed. Their rooms at the little compound were like single dormitories, too, some of the beds lofted so cheap dressers could fit beneath them, the group bathrooms all beige tile and unfamiliar hair curled in the shower drains. It was like time running backward.

“The older ones belonged to my grandmother,” Dan said. “She took good care of them.”

“How many can you bring?” Josh said, his voice sounding thick from the smoke. He passed the joint to Dan, who traded it for a box of crackers and stuck it between his lips.

“I can’t believe you’re even bringing the record player,” Averill said absently as she pulled a Radiohead album from the stack and flipped it over to look at the track listing.

“We all get the same amount of square footage,” Dan said. “The rest of you have photo albums and knickknacks and erotic paperbacks…”

“Why”—Josh ate a cracker, then passed the box to Samantha—“did you look at me when you said that?”

“Why did you look bashful when I said that?”

Dan offered her the joint, which she took, because there were two weeks left on Earth and there seemed no reason not to.

She drew a tentative breath of smoke. It tasted like dirt. She coughed and stuck her hand in the cracker box after passing the joint to Averill.

“Anyway, because I have neither photo albums nor knickknacks,” Dan said, “I am bringing albums. I’ve already picked the ones I want most, but I also want you guys to have your favorites, if we’re all going to be listening together for, oh, the rest of our lives. So everybody pick one.”

It was generous, Samantha thought. Unspeakably generous, in fact, to give away their most precious commodity—space—to friends he had made only a few months before. She ignored the prickling behind her eyes as she turned her attention to the records spread over the floor.

“The question is,” Averill said, “do you pick the album with the song you love most, or do you want a band with a more consistent oeuvre to represent yourself?”

“Ugh,” Dan said. “Don’t say the word ‘oeuvre’ in my room.”

The cracker was bland but salty, and it made Samantha’s mouth feel dry. The weed was settling in now, making her head feel like it was being squeezed between two giant palms.

“Don’t be that guy,” Samantha said. She closed her eyes. “You know, the one who says he’ll bring Ulysses as one of his desert-island books.”

“I like Ulysses,” Josh said.

“Nobody likes Ulysses,” Dan said, wrinkling his nose. “She’s right, just pick an album you love. Even if it’s not the best one by some objective standard.”

They all went quiet for a few seconds. Smoke curled around the lamp in the corner. Samantha craned her neck to see the records spread out around Averill, who sat cross-legged now, surrounded by old album covers with worn corners.

“Fine,” Josh said. He rolled over on the bed and flopped to the floor next to Averill. He sorted through the stacks until he found what he was looking for, an album with a photograph of a woman smiling on it with red lipstick, her arm flung over her forehead. “Hotels. My wife and I—”

“May she rest in peace.” Averill held up her wineglass in acknowledgment. Josh’s wife had died in a car accident five years before.

“May she rest in peace,” Josh said solemnly. “My wife and I met at a dance in college, and ‘Into the Hudson’ was the first song we danced to.”

Dan sang the first few bars in a surprisingly high falsetto, making everyone laugh. Samantha closed her eyes and felt the room turn around and around.

“By that logic, I choose the Argument’s ‘You’re in a Cult.’” Averill retrieved the album, with its illustrated white peaks that looked oddly like the Svalbard horizon, from where it rested at the foot of the bed. “My brother Oliver made me listen to it when he drove me to school. I hated it. But after he died it was all I could listen to.”

Samantha sorted through the music around her. Most of it was older, the records from Josh’s grandmother: stacks of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones. Averill had started stacking the records by band name, so she flipped through the Pink Floyds, the red writing on a white wall, the light passing through a prism and scattering into a rainbow. She found the man shaking hands with his twin self, the latter self on fire, and held it up as her selection.

“Wish You Were Here,” she said. “Pink Floyd. It was my dad’s favorite, because it was his mom’s favorite. He used to play the title song over and over.” She twirled a finger in the air. “Made him cry, sometimes.”

Tears prickled at the corners of her eyes, but she smiled.

“How’d your dad die again?” Averill asked.

“Suicide,” Samantha said. “Couple years after my mom. I think he was just… done.”

She thought of what she had told Hagen earlier, that he had been dying since his wife passed away, and his body hadn’t caught on yet. When she was younger, she had been angry at her dad, thinking she wasn’t enough to keep him around. But now she felt like he had known too well that he was in a piece of weaving that was unraveling, that the world was unmaking itself, and he just didn’t want to witness it.

Not like her, she thought. She wanted to see it all come apart.

Averill stopped the record that was playing, a neo-folk song called “Spite, Thirst, Money,” by NICU. She eased the needle away from the grooves of it, slid it back into its jacket, replacing it with Metallica.

Samantha wondered if, after the Ark launched, they would spend all their time looking backward—at Earth, at the life they had built there. If the Ark itself was all the time capsule they needed, its inhabitants living in their memories as they coasted toward a distant planet, and then dying with them.

“So many samples,” Dan moaned. “And no one will ever see them again.”

They were sitting in the lab, on the stools. The equipment they needed for the Ark had been packed away and taken to the ship, which was perched on a massive aircraft carrier just beyond the bay—former military, from God knew what country; it didn’t matter anymore. Samantha’s bag was packed, sitting at the end of her bed. Dan had brought the record player into the laboratory because he played music constantly now, like he didn’t want to hear his own grief.

Reality was setting in, Samantha thought. She had heard Averill sobbing in the shower that morning. Josh kept stopping in the middle of sentences, in the middle of steps, in the middle of thoughts. Now that she didn’t have any pressing work to do, Samantha went every day to see Hagen, who was steady as ever, tending to his plants.

He told her about them as she helped him. About the Rhizanthella gardneri, which grew underground in Western Australia. And the Caleana major, which looked like a white bird in flight, its petals frayed at the edges, featherlike. Anguloa uniflora, which curved around its center column like cupped hands keeping a match from going out. There was no end to the flowers’ variety, and he listed them with increasing frequency, every day, showing pictures when he had no living example to present to her. She didn’t know why, of all the last words he could have chosen, he chose these, and he chose her to say them to. But she listened.

“Let’s each do one more,” Samantha said.

“What?” Averill said. “Why? It’s not like any more samples can be stored.”

“So?” Samantha shrugged.

“All right,” Josh said. “I mean, the computers are still hooked up.”

They each claimed a cart of living samples, stored in their little glass containers, afloat in life-sustaining fluid. Samantha peered into each one, searching for flowers. There was no point in pretending she wasn’t partial to them now, and no value in it either.

She saw a hint of blue and slid her fingers between the containers to pull up the right one. She grinned when she saw the little flowers—tiny, really, not even the size of her fingernails, and light sky blue. Or likely, she thought, considering what Hagen had told her, just a very specific shade of purple.

She carried the container to her lab station, flipped on the work light, and jiggled the mouse to wake up the computer screen. The plant was simple: waxy, thick leaves at the base, with a somewhat fragile center column, like a vine. The flowers branched off at the top, in clusters of blue and white. Each one had three petals that came to teardrop points and three sepals, blue and white spotted. At the bottom was a small labellum with furry edges, also blue, though darker than the petals and sepals that framed it. In the center of each flower was a dusting of yellow pollen.

It looked like an orchid, but she would have to verify that with the microscope. She opened the container and used a pair of long scissors to clip one of the flowers from its stem. This would be delicate work—orchid seeds were already tiny, and these orchids were the smallest she had ever seen, if indeed they were orchids. She picked up the delicate metal tools at her station that reminded her of the dentist’s office—the one that scraped between your teeth in particular.

The others were already talking about their discoveries, Averill bending over something that resembled a cherry blossom, Dan squinting at a vine with veiny leaves, and Josh poking at some variation of a protea that had not yet been logged. Samantha set about preparing a slide, then dragged the heavy microscope over and plugged it in.

She had seen enough seeds in Hagen’s greenhouse to identify an orchid seed’s telltale lack of endosperm, the starchy tissue in most seeds that provided nutrition after fertilization. An orchid likely didn’t have it, meaning most of their seeds would come to nothing, failing to find the right fungus to aid in their growth.

Samantha let out a little yelp.

“What?” Dan asked from across the room.

“It’s an orchid,” she said.

“Cool,” Josh said. “What kind?”

“No idea,” she said. She slid over to the computer and selected Orchidacae, logging all the plant’s details: height, number of petals, number of sepals, appearance of leaves and central column, color. The screen then presented her with a row of photographs, close-ups of flowers with relative sizes noted beneath.

“Huh,” she said.

“What?” Averill, seated at the next station, frowned at her.

“I’m not sure, but… I don’t think I have a match,” she said. “Second opinion?”

Averill abandoned her station and went through the same steps Samantha had: looking at the tissue sample on the microscope, measuring the plant with a ruler, tapping the container with the tip of her pencil as she counted petals and sepals, noting symmetry, labellum, pollen, column, country of origin (Brazil).

She, too, sat back from the computer screen at the end and frowned. By then, Dan and Josh had left their own samples and were staring at the container from either side, the work light casting odd shadows on their faces.

“It’s new,” Averill said finally, saying out loud what Samantha had been thinking but couldn’t dare say herself.

“It can’t be new,” she said. “That’s just. I mean.”

“Think about it. We had only discovered, like, ten percent of all plant species at the start of this project. And orchids are one of the most diverse groups, so…” Averill gestured at the container. “It’s new.”

Samantha sat down on an empty lab stool.

“It’s new,” she said.

For some reason, she felt heavier now.

That evening, when the others were at dinner, Samantha took the container from the laboratory and put it in an insulated bag, the kind they used to transport hot food. She put on her boots and her coat, her gloves and her scarf, her hat and her goggles. She zipped herself up and fastened all the straps and buttons and walked out into the snow.

It was dark, and her way was lit by floodlights casting wide circles of yellow onto the packed snow. The path to Hagen’s greenhouse was well trod now from her frequent visits, but she had still taken her snowshoes with her, just in case she needed to wade back. The wind whistled around her, but otherwise all she could hear was the scuffle of her own feet over the ice.

She hugged the container tight to her chest as she walked, breathing heavily, though the walk wasn’t taxing. There was a lump in her throat that she couldn’t explain. She pushed through the outer door of the greenhouse and set down the container, gingerly, before removing her outerwear and tossing it in a pile in the corner.

Hagen had heard her come in, evidently, because he was standing in the greenhouse when she carried the container in. He wore a lumpy gray sweater, and his salt-and-pepper hair was more rumpled than usual, its curls sticking up in the back.

“Hi,” she said. “I need you to verify something for me.”

“Okay,” he said, looking confused. She unzipped the insulated bag and took out the plant in its glass sleeve.

“I thought the identification had stopped, since we can’t transport anything new to the Ark,” he said.

“Officially, it has,” she said. “But you know us horticulturists—we love a good last hurrah.”

“It seems to me,” he said, “that you need some less boring hobbies.”

“Hilarious,” she said. “Have a look, would you?”

Hagen took the container from her and carried it back to his worktable, which was littered with plant cuttings. He had taken to making little bouquets and putting them all around his small cabin. She had seen them the day before when she used his bathroom and drank a small tumbler of whiskey in his living room as he talked to her about plants, plants, always plants, never the people and things they had both lost, or would soon lose.

She forced herself to sit at his desk while he looked the plant over under his own work light, clipped to the shelf above the worktable. He was silent as he evaluated the plant and then disappeared into his cabin, returning a few minutes later with a book. He searched it for a while and then disappeared again. This time he was gone for so long that she lost her patience and peeked into the cabin, attached by a heavy door to the greenhouse. He was sitting at the computer in his office, searching.

The lump in her throat was swelling like she had swallowed a distended seed pod. The longer he was gone, the more certain it became that she had found something new, and the more twisted and strange she felt. She thought of the Naomi, stocked with cans of food and bottles of water and spare fuel for the journey. The map next to the steering wheel of the boat, marked with the spot in the middle of the nothingness that she had chosen to put down the anchor and watch the apocalypse.

Hagen finally came back, his glasses dangling from pinched fingers. He was smiling, but then, Hagen was always smiling a little, his cheek creased with it, eyes crinkled with it. She had gotten used to that smile.

“What shall we call it?” he said. “The Samantha orchid?”

She scowled at him.

“So it’s true,” she said. “It is new.”

“It appears to be,” he said.

“You’re sure?”

“Well, I could never claim absolute certainty about anything in science, really, but—” He frowned at her then. “Why do you seem angry? You’ve just found a new species, in the last forty-eight hours of human occupancy of Earth. That is—”

“Amazing, I know.” She pushed her hands into her hair. The seed pod in her throat swelled yet again, and she was a flower, blooming—

Bursting into tears.

“Oh dear.” Hagen’s lumpy sweater was against her face, her head nestled beneath his chin, and he held her tightly.

“There is so much left for you to see.” His hand moved in a slow circle between her shoulder blades. “Don’t you know that?”

They stood close, tasting each other’s air, their arms circled around each other. The tears dried on her cheeks, pulling her skin taut.

Over his shoulder she saw the orchids bending toward the windows, seeking light.

Samantha kept her eyes closed. Just for a little while, before she was really awake and had to put her outerwear back on and trudge through the snow to the facility. She had fallen asleep on Hagen’s couch, in full view of his bedroom.

She had dreamed in scattered images, with no story to connect them. But one of them was clinging to her still, the feeling of grainy concrete under her knees as she knelt on the floor of her father’s garage, an old cardboard box in front of her.

Her father had died a few weeks before. She had just broken things off with her live-in boyfriend, Greg, and gone to stay in her father’s empty house while Greg packed up his things. The cereal in the cupboard wasn’t stale yet, and there was still a glass in the drying rack.

There had been no point in going through his things or packing anything away. There was no selling the house; no one was buying. There was no consigning of old jackets, no reclaiming of valuable possessions, no hollowing out of spaces to get rid of the ghost of him. The world was ending, and the house would be consumed in the flames along with everything else.

Still, she found herself in the garage, kneeling in front of the box marked “Naomi.” The flaps were open, as if he had recently gone through it himself. Sitting on top was a stack of letters. Her mother had liked sending letters, though Samantha had teased her, when she was young, for being the only person left on the planet who did. She assumed they were from her parents’ courtship, the glowing years of their romance, before it all went sour and they turned away from each other.

But when she skimmed them, she realized they were more recent. From after the divorce. Sammy quit orchestra, I think it’s for the best… the rosebush out front finally bloomed, remember how we used to say it was broken?… Mom’s had a bad cough all winter, I’m worried it’s something serious…

She hadn’t known that her parents were still in touch. That her mother had updated him about the state of the rosebush, about the daughter he spoke to so gruffly, about her dreams, her parents, her work. All written out in her mother’s familiar scrawl, close and narrow, with scribbles every other sentence as she second-guessed herself.

Samantha’s chest ached.

He had saved every word.

She picked up an envelope, wedged in the stack of paper, and opened it. Inside was a flower, pressed flat. It had been white but had turned the color of old parchment. She tipped it into her palm.

The concrete was cold under her knees. The air smelled of mildew and firewood. The flower was an orchid.

“There is so much left for you to see.”

She opened her eyes and looked at Hagen, asleep on his stomach with one arm reaching for the empty pillow on the other side of his bed. She wondered if he had learned as much about his wife in her absence as he had in her presence, just as Samantha had with her father. His heart, still open, despite having appeared closed for so long. The letters reminding her of all that she did not know.

Dread pooled inside her like poison, and it was nothing new.

At the harbor in the bay nearest to the Ark’s facilities bobbed an old fishing vessel, the Naomi. The white paint was peeling away from its hull, revealing the matte metal beneath, but it looked sturdy enough, with a long bow and a cabin large enough to fit a twin-size mattress, a gas-powered space heater, two jugs of drinking water, and a few days’ worth of food.

Samantha saw it as a white speck in the distance as the helicopter lifted off from the landing pad behind the facility. She leaned forward, across Dan’s sturdy lap, to see Hagen’s greenhouse glinting in the daylight. Perched on his desk, still suspended in the life-preserving fluid developed by the Ark scientists, was the Oncidium Samantha. Hagen had confirmed, before she left it with him, that it was in fact purple, not blue.

Hagen had told her about so many flowers in their final days together. They were all he had spoken of. Vanilla planifolia, which most people knew as simply vanilla. Bulbophyllum nocturnum, which only bloomed at night. Platystele jungermannioides, with flowers only two millimeters wide. One of the two largest flowering plant families in the world, he had told her, as if begging her to listen, as if it would save her life.

Twenty-five thousand species of orchid, and counting. The world would never run out of them. And the universe would never run out of discoveries.

She had spent the last year with her head buried in the tiny things of Earth, the roots that gripped the soil, the fine hair that covered stems, the veins of color through the center of a petal. Plant cells you couldn’t see without a microscope. But pulling away from the ground in the helicopter had a way of simplifying things. Flakes of snow disappeared into white masses of frozen land dotted with floodlights and abandoned buildings. Fierce waves dissolved into a stretch of flat navy-blue ocean.

Soon it would break apart, break free of its orbit, scorch and burn. Soon the crisp blue sky would turn dusty with debris, and all the things of this world that made it beautiful—the fish with their multicolored scales, the flies with their iridescent wings, the churring squirrels and the deep sighs of whales, the new leaves, still curled and pale, the earth rich with red clay—they would all be gone.

But not yet. And Samantha had always loved autumn.