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me. Emotions I shouldn’t feel welled up inside me, threatening to break past my lips. I wanted to tell him how much he meant to me, how much I wanted us to be together, but Sirius saved me from confessing. “If anyone can save him, you can.”
    “I’ll try.”
    He pressed the panel for the upper decks, and the elevator took off in the opposite direction. I hoped Dad was safe in the engine room. Many lifers died in accidents caused by the combustion chambers.
    Dizziness overtook me, and an invisible force detached my feet from the floor. I clutched Sirius’s arm. “What’s happening?”
    “I bet the gravity rings are failing.”
    My stomach heaved and I swallowed a lump in my throat. An eternity passed before the elevator portal dematerialized and we stood before the hospital deck. The dim glow of the emergency lights lit our path as we ran to the medical bay, my feet bouncing high in the light gravity. Colonists guarded the portal, but they recognized me and let us through without questions. As Commander Barliss’s great-granddaughter, I was accustomed to getting my way.
    My grandpapa lay in a real bed, one of those platforms raised up from the floor with paper-thin sheets like in the pictures from Old Earth. If they were going to use real fabric to comfort him, then it had to be bad. The numerous wires running from his arms and input devices in his head didn’t faze me. Those were normal. The scurrying nurses made me nervous.
    “What’s wrong with him?” I walked over to his bed and took his veiny hand in my own. His bones were light as laser sticks and his skin felt so brittle and thin I feared it would flake off under my touch.
    “The funeral put too much stress on his heart.” The head nurse appeared to be about my mother’s age, with gray streaks of hair. “He’s lost consciousness and none of our stimulants have been effective.”
    I turned to Sirius, and he nodded as if I knew what to do. “Just talk to him, say something to cheer him up.” Around us, small glass vials floated in the air as the gravity rings cycled down. I gripped the metal bed handles to keep from floating away. At least they’d strapped my grandpapa down.
    “Can you hear me?” I tried to block out my surroundings, the shouting from the corridor, the emergency wail, the floating utensils, even Sirius’s proximity, and focused on my grandpapa. His skin sagged into sunken cheeks and his bones looked fragile compared to the sturdy metal wires connecting him to the mainframe.
    I don’t know where the idea came from, but I opened my mouth and began to sing a song Great-grandma Tiff taught me, a song she’d learned from her mom and her mom before her—a song from Old Earth. My voice felt weak in my throat, and I broke the melody to take a deeper breath and support my stomach muscles. My singing ability was nothing special, but at least the swell of the melody came through.
    I lost myself in the song, closing my eyes and picturing the words as places on Old Earth—city skyscrapers, radiant sun, tickling grass, and blue oceans—before overpopulation and wars over resources ruined everything. I reached back through time, borrowing images of the past. I wanted him to see something other than the inside of the ship. I wanted to give him hope.
    Glass crashed around me. Cringing, I stopped singing and opened my eyes. Gravity had pulled the vials to the floor. The lights flashed on, and the emergency wail trailed off into silence.
    “Tiff? Is that you?”
    I looked down, and my grandpapa peered up at me with watery eyes. “No, Grandpapa. It’s Andromeda.”
    He blinked twice and then seemed to focus and regain awareness of the room and the ship. “Oh, yes. I’m sorry. You resemble her, right down to the freckles on your nose. I seem to have lost it for a moment.”
    “Are you okay?” I leaned in. His skin was so pale I could see the thin blue veins underneath.
    “Yes, yes, I’m fine.” He sat up, and the tubes and wires pulled