Chapter 16: After the Feast, Hamlet Asks Whether He Has Become Something He Dislikes

The feast happens the way Mira said it would happen, and also not at all like that.

He knows this about plans: they are architectures built for the world as it was when the plan was made, and the world is never that world by the time the plan requires execution. He had understood this abstractly for years. He understands it now in his hands, which are shaking, and in the specific quality of silence on the catwalk when they return, which is the silence of three people who have just survived something and have not yet agreed on what to call it.

Mira goes to the western hatch. She does not say anything. She begins moving wire, checking the tension on the alarm lines she has strung across every approach, adjusting each with the methodical attention of someone who needs her hands occupied. He watches her do this for thirty seconds and recognizes it: the work of not having died, the specific labor of converting surviving into something that resembles ordinary.