Dale Rutherford floated in the void, tethered to a piece of debris the size of a refrigerator, trying to figure out how to bolt it to the collection net without losing his grip. The Earth rotated below him, beautiful and indifferent. He had been doing this job for fifteen years, and the work never got easier or more interesting.

His hands, cracked and cold, fumbled with bolts in gloves that made everything feel like he was wearing oven mitts. Orbital Salvage Inc. had given him the same pair of gloves for six months because replacing them cost twelve dollars each, and the company counted every penny.

The debris was a spent rocket stage from the early twenty-thirties, its surface pitted by micrometeorites, its fuel tanks empty. Dale's job was to attach it to the collection net, drag it back to the station, and watch it get cut into pieces that would be sold as raw materials. He had collected twelve thousand three hundred and forty-seven pieces of debris in fifteen years. He knew the weight of each one by heart.

He bolted the rocket stage to the net, checked the tether, and began the slow drag back to the station. The work was mechanical and repetitive, and his mind wandered the way it always did when he was alone in space. He thought about Mary. He thought about their daughter, who had not called in three months. He thought about the cheap beer he would drink when he got back to the dormitory, and the gambling slip he would fill out on his day off, even though he knew he would lose.

The satellite was sitting in a low orbit when his magnet gripper caught it. It was a Soviet-era communications satellite, decommissioned in the early nineteen-eighties, its hull pitted and scarred, its solar panels torn off decades ago. It should not have been there—Soviet satellites were supposed to have reentered the atmosphere and burned up thirty years ago—but orbital mechanics are unpredictable, and this one had survived.

Dale attached it to the net alongside the rocket stage and dragged both back to the station. The sorting crew cut it open on the other side, and inside, sealed in a waterproof compartment that had somehow survived three decades in the vacuum of space, they found a leather-bound notebook.

Dale recognized it immediately as something valuable. Not monetarily—the notebook was old and irrelevant—but personally. He requested it from the supervisor, who shrugged and handed it over because it had no scrap value.

He brought it home in his duffel bag, sat at his kitchen table in the company dormitory, and opened it.

The pages were filled with Cyrillic script. Dale could not read Russian—he had dropped out of high school in Ohio and the most foreign language he knew was the swear word his father had taught him—but one page had diagrams and equations that he recognized. Not the symbols, but the structure. The careful, precise lines of someone who understood the stars.

He took the notebook to Ohio State the next week and found a graduate student in the physics department who could read Cyrillic and wanted extra money. Her name was Priya, and she was twenty-four, bright, and skeptical when he told her what the notebook was.

"It's a cosmonaut's diary," Dale said. "He died in nineteen-eight-three. His satellite failed. But he wrote this before he died, and I think—it's important."

Priya translated it over three afternoons. Dale sat across from her in a small office that smelled of old paper and coffee, and she read aloud as she translated.

Sergei Volkov was an engineer's son from Omsk who had dreamed of space not as a frontier or a business opportunity but as a place where human beings might finally grow up. He wrote about looking out his spacecraft window and seeing the Earth as a blue marble suspended in black, and feeling not pride or ambition but a profound and aching love for a planet he was leaving behind.

"We will leave this warm earth," Sergei wrote in his final entry, "but the stars are our destination. We do not leave because we hate where we are. We leave because we love what we might become."

Dale read these words in a dimly lit bar in downtown Dayton, and for the first time in fifteen years, he looked up at the night sky and felt something he thought he had lost forever.

He cried without knowing why.

The next week, he returned to work. He bolted debris to nets. He drank beer. He argued with Ray Torres about a restaurant that would never be built. Nothing had changed on the surface.

But on his day off, he drove out to the edge of town, where the rusted remains of old factories stretched toward the horizon like the skeletons of great beasts. He parked the truck, got out, and looked up.

The stars were visible here, far from the city lights, and for a moment, he was twenty-two years old and believed that anything was possible. Then the cold set in, and he got back in the truck and drove home.

He sat at his kitchen table, the diary open in front of him, reading Sergei's final entry one more time. He closed the book. He did not know what to do with what he had read. He only knew that for the first time in a long time, the stars did not feel quite so far away.