Seventeen years in Space and there is nothing new. You know all the secrets the universe had to offer; your parents spoiled them, and their parents before. Humanity has always been desperate to crack open the golden-crusted promises of life and drink the time like water. God couldn’t have saved you even if he wanted to.

Lonely is the life floating amongst stars and planets. There is nowhere you can go. Nowhere but down the hall to Murphy’s room, and you try not to do that, because whenever you do, you fall in love a little deeper. Murphy seems to create his own secrets of the universe; his own promises of life and watery time. When the metal door shuts and his hands glide across your body, the wounds you bring to yourself because what’s one more death, the only thing that exists is your nerves.

Eyes watch you from all over the ship. The miniature village, the metal monster ensnaring three generations of people who were doomed to vacate the attempt on their lives. Earth is a woman who was dying and she did so for her children. Because of her children. Now, one hundred years later, they all sit along the bolted walls, whispering to themselves, because they know what you are: a boy who touches other boys. A man who hides away in the arms of another man, between his lips or inside his hands. You are the child of Earth determined to end the bloodline. Of course your brothers and sisters will hate you for it.

Murphy is all callused fingers and smooth palms as he brings you inside his room, shielding you from the judgmental eyes of other people who have no trouble at all loving themselves or the opposite gender. He is smiling at you, as if he has anything to smile about. His breaths are soft.

“You’re on edge,” he observes. “You haven’t been the same since you last spent the night in here. I won’t pretend I don’t know why.”