Script quote running down the spine

The water recyclers failed again on Tuesday, so forgive the smudges. Mum's old kettle is bubbling on the galley hob and I have the last of the cocoa, which I am rationing like a miser. Hab Four has gone quiet since the board shortened the outer-ring shifts. Nobody says it out loud, but everyone is counting days again, and the counting makes the corridors feel narrower.

Yesterday I finally took down the card above my bunk, the one Mum copied out by hand when we left Earth: To live would be an awfully big adventure. I held it up against the porthole and let the stars sit behind the letters. Ruth from hydroponics caught me doing it and asked if I was stalling. I was. I had carried that card through three transfers and never once asked why she thought it belonged on a wall full of rivets.

Then I turned it over. Under the printed credits Dad had pencilled the date, and beneath it a second line he never finished, just the words 'and the ones who stay' and a dash where the rest should go. I sat on the edge of the bunk for a long time with that dash in my lap. He wasn't a man for half-finished sentences, so I suspect he left it open on purpose, for whoever came after and needed room.

So I've decided the rest of it is mine to write. I'm putting the card back up, face out, taped to the porthole frame where the light catches it at shift change. Tell Nadia her godmother is coming to the reunion ceremony whatever the rota says. And tell her the dash is still there, if she wants to fill it in too.

Love, Hanna