The coffee on the space station tasted like recycled water and regret. Danny Cross had been drinking it for eleven years and still couldn't tell if it was coffee or not. It was brown. It was hot. That was enough. He floated in the observation cupola, one hand on the grab rail, one hand holding the coffee pouch, looking down at the earth. It was always the same: big, blue, quiet. People down there were walking and driving and arguing and making love, and he was four hundred kilometres above all of it, collecting garbage. His work was simple. Every morning at 0600 station time, he woke up, brushed his teeth, ate breakfast—oatmeal and energy bars most days—and checked the task list. Three to five items usually: collect debris from Sector A, check sensors in Sector B, de-ice solar panel array C. He piloted a small spacecraft called the Sweeper. He would exit the airlock, scan for debris with the onboard sensor, and use the manipulator arm to grab whatever was floating around—discarded satellite parts, paint chips, a lost glove, a nut from some bolt that had worked itself loose years ago. He stowed it all in the cargo hold. He didn't love space. He didn't hate it. What did space feel like? Danny had tried to describe it once to someone—Helen, before she left. He said it was grey. Not blue, not black. Grey. A colour between the two. Stars blinked in the grey like faulty lightbulbs. The earth hung below, enormous and blue and silent. His wife Helen had left him two years ago. Took the kids to Texas. Said she was tired of "always being alone." Danny didn't argue. He sent her sixty percent of his salary every month. The rest paid rent, beer, and birthday presents for his daughter. The debris field today was heavier than usual. A fragment of solar panel, spinning slowly. A piece of insulation foam, shaped like a cloud. Danny grabbed the foam with the manipulator arm and stowed it. Then he saw it. A small object, tumbling end over end. About shoebox size. Metallic casing, worn at the edges. Danny didn't recognize it. It wasn't any standard satellite component he'd seen in eleven years. He grabbed it and put it in the storage locker. He should have reported it. Standard procedure required reporting all unidentified objects. But reporting meant paperwork. It meant waiting. It meant people asking him questions. He didn't feel like being questioned. He continued his shift. Same orbit, same scan, same grab. The days blurred together. Mike, his colleague on station, a Canadian with a perpetual smile and a habit of humming show tunes, floated over during the evening meal. "What's that box you found?" Mike asked. "Don't know." "Report it?" "Not yet." Mike shrugged and went to check the solar panels. Danny put the box on a small table in the lower module. He didn't look at it often—just habit, the way you notice a piece of furniture in a room you spend a lot of time in. The box was there. That was all. A week later, Danny turned the box over and saw a mark on the bottom. Faint, laser-etched. A single letter: C. C. He thought of Helen. Helen liked C things—her name, the restaurant where they'd had their first date (Cafe France on St. Catherine Street), his daughter's middle name (Clara). He turned the box over again. Beneath the C, almost worn away, was a line of tiny text: Property of C. Kross Kross. Danny's last name was Kross—K-R-O-S-S, the same spelling as "cross." His father's name had been Robert Kross. But the box said C. Kross. Danny didn't know what it meant. Maybe it was his father's something—his father had died when Danny was ten, a truck driver who liked beer and baseball. Danny wasn't sure his father had anything marked with a C. He put the box back on the table. He continued his work. Same orbit, same scan, same grab. The box sat on the table. Like a piece of furniture. Months passed. Danny's shift was coming to its end. Twelve years, total. Then he would be back on earth, in a small apartment somewhere, watching the news and drinking bad coffee and trying to remember what the sky looked like from up here. On his last week, he was running a final inventory of the cargo hold when he noticed something about the box. The bottom panel was slightly misaligned. He pressed it, and it popped open. Inside was a small compartment. And inside the compartment was a photograph. A man holding a ten-year-old boy. The man had a thick neck and a wide smile and was wearing a trucker's cap. The boy was Danny, standing next to a faded blue truck. On the back of the photograph, in handwriting Danny recognized from old billheads and gas receipts: For Danny—your father's C. Kross. Danny held the photograph and floated in the silence of the station. Below him, the earth turned—blue, quiet, indifferent. He thought of his father, who had died when he was ten. A truck driver. A man who liked beer and baseball and whose last name was Kross. He thought of the box, tumbling through orbit for who knew how long, carrying a photograph and a letter and a C that stood for something Danny would never know. He put the photograph in his breast pocket, next to his heart. He closed the compartment. He closed the box. He continued his work. Same orbit, same scan, same grab. The box sat on the table. Like a piece of furniture. And Danny Cross, in the grey space between worlds, held a photograph of a man he barely remembered and tried to understand what a C meant. He didn't find out. Some things don't.