The outer door opens, my suit stiffens as the airlock empties. I reach for the safety line, stop – I don’t need it, not this time. I face spinwards, push out into the blackness. Antennae and cabling blur beneath me, disappear, and with them the station. I am complete in myself, my own satellite in orbit, no longer Li Qiao of the Lingbao Tianzun.

​

Earth is void, blacker than space. The Philippines and Japan should burn bright, China’s patchwork of rods and smudges anchors me home, but not now, not ever. Only stars around me and darkness below tell me Earth is there.

​

Sunrise explodes. No gentle glow on the horizon, no warm, diffuse light heralds dawn; it’s off-on, night to day in a harsh, violent instant. Earth burns burnished gunmetal, a featureless, airless, barren world – no life, no hope, no future.

​

There’s no one to remember, envy, or respect me, nobody to understand what I achieved, no chance to fulfil my potential and realise the promise within. Thirty-four years is not enough: I’m cheated out of my life, time I deserve, the future owed to me.

​

‘What use more years when you wasted those you had?’ Fùqin asks.

​

‘Why me, why now?’

​

‘As always, this is your doing, your failure.’