You keep going because stopping would mean the yellow lied, and you wanted yellow to be a story.

The tick becomes a hiss. The hiss becomes a wind that does not sound like Earth wind. It sounds like a bottle emptying. An interlock does what interlocks are for: a door thumps, a light goes red, GROVE says “Porch isolated. Leaf Hall pressure hold: unknown” in the same polite voice it uses for the date.

You are on the hab side of the thump, ears popping, a stripe of frost writing itself on the inner port. Lina is a shape through the window, already dogging a second hatch, already counting. Imani is a voice: “Nobody outside. Good. Plants are not good.”

Mars did not take you. Mars took the loop you opened and drank it like a sip. The sip was your bubble. In the greenhouse, leaves blacken at the edges with cold and thin and the kind of dry that is not a desert story, it is a vacuum story. Nobody is a rumor. The crop is.

Hearth stays a bubble because people who are not you wrote labels. You wait in a blanket that smells like tomato because Imani left her wrap, and you learn the shape of a day that will be told as a warning.

You write three lines in your log because Imani makes you: I treated Mars air like a snack. Percent is not amount. Stop is a skill I used too late.

THE END

What you learned: Mars is almost all carbon dioxide and almost no pie. Opening a greenhouse to the outside is a depressurization, not a plant feeding. Labeled locks are not puzzles. Tiny vents still empty a bubble.