Sully and Devi

Sully and Devi’s relationship is one of Aether’s most important forms of mutual care: Sully’s immediate affection for her crewmate deepens into persistent attention as Devi withdraws under the strain of isolation, and their intimacy gives Sully a way to face responsibility and grief when Devi dies during the second spacewalk. Their bond is expressed less through declarations than through practical acts—making room in a bunk, keeping company, attending to sleep and food, and finally preserving Devi’s name and place among the crew.

Meeting and Early Affection

Sully’s attachment began when she and Devi met in Houston. During underwater training, Sully noticed Devi looking up at an overhead crane while they waited for their turn in the pool. Tal and Thebes were completing an extravehicular-activity simulation below the surface; Devi watched the hoist, then turned back toward the pool with an amused response. The brief scene places the two women together before their life aboard Aether and introduces a quality that remains characteristic of Devi: quiet observation that can suddenly surface as wry humor.

Devi’s small stature and large, dark eyes could make her seem young or uncertain, but Sully recognized the analytical intelligence beneath that appearance. In the crew, Devi was exceptionally gifted and especially absorbed by machines. Her attention to mechanical systems was a strength, and one reason she excelled as an engineer; it also meant that her later withdrawal could be seen in the work itself. Sully’s early love for her thus belongs both to their personal affinity and to a respect for the mind that made Devi such a capable crewmate.

Care During the Silence from Earth

As the silence from Earth lengthened, Devi began to disengage not only from her colleagues but from the machines that had previously held her interest. She grew less responsive to both the crew and the ship, while Tal and Ivanov’s emotions became increasingly conspicuous. Thebes noticed that Devi’s repairs were lapsing: she missed obvious problems, failed to hear concerning sounds, and passed over malfunctioning components. He raised his concern with Sully while visiting her in the communications pod, and Sully acknowledged that she had noticed the changes. Their recognition did not make the problem easy to solve, but it made caring for Devi a shared responsibility rather than a private suspicion.

Thebes tried to draw her back through work and conversation. He worked alongside her, taking on additional labor, and told her about his recruitment into the South African space program when he was young. Sully took responsibility for the less technical rhythms of care: keeping Devi company during off-hours and trying to ensure that she exercised, ate, and slept regularly. She asked about Devi’s family and childhood. These efforts were limited by the same widening separation that afflicted the entire crew; as Aether drew farther from Earth, the silence felt more oppressive, and neither Sully nor Thebes could simply restore Devi’s former engagement.

Sully’s care became especially intimate in the dark, when there were no routine tasks to distract the crew from uncertainty and memory. Two weeks after Ivanov and Tal fought, Devi came to Sully’s bunk and spoke from behind the privacy curtain. Sully pulled it aside and made room for her. They lay side by side, allowing the closeness of their bodies to comfort them without pretending that Sully could promise everything would be all right. Devi was so quiet that Sully struggled to know how to reach her; a gentle touch of her foot against Devi’s was the small, wordless contact she could offer before Devi began to speak.

Devi described a recurring dream of her family’s kitchen in Kolkata. In it, her brothers sat at the table, her parents watched over the meal, and the familiar scene seemed to continue for hours. Then the dream gave way to the knowledge that her family was gone and that she was alone. The dream made her separation from home present as both consolation and loss: the family scene returned vividly, but waking brought her back to Aether and the knowledge that she would not see them again. Sully listened rather than trying to explain away that pain. When they fell asleep, they remained physically close; in the morning, Sully saw that Devi had been crying and, thinking of how Lucy had once sought comfort after nightmares, moved closer and wept with her.

Everyday Company and Mutual Understanding

Sully continued visiting Devi even when conversation was difficult. On one occasion, she found her curled around a pillow and asked about her day and whether she had eaten. Devi offered little detail, but asked Sully to tell her something. Sully responded with ordinary observations instead of speaking about Earth: a yellow tomato plant in the greenhouse corridor had begun to flower, and Tal thought the ship would pass through the asteroid belt in a few more weeks. The modesty of these details mattered. They offered Devi a point of contact with daily life aboard the ship without requiring her to discuss the future that was troubling her.

The exchange briefly brought Devi out of her withdrawal. She smiled and made a quiet joke about Ivanov’s attachment to his rock samples, and the two women laughed. The moment did not erase her exhaustion: her smile soon faded, and she said that anger could be easier than fear before asking to rest. Sully accepted the limit rather than pressing for a fuller disclosure. Their closeness included this restraint; care meant being available, but also recognizing when a visit could not repair what isolation had done.

Devi also understood aspects of Sully’s life that Sully had not put into words. Before the spacewalk, she told Sully that Harper was worried about her disconnection and that he was in love with Sully. Sully was startled by Devi’s directness. She trusted Devi’s ability to read what lay beneath appearances, a skill more often applied to mechanical systems than to human affairs, and found it meaningful that Devi named the possibility of a future with Harper as something real. Sully could not dwell on that possibility while preparing for the walk, and Devi did not insist that she do so. Before leaving, Devi squeezed Sully’s hand and reassured her in turn. The gesture briefly made their care reciprocal: Devi was not only the person Sully watched over, but someone attentive to Sully’s fears and feelings.

The Spacewalk and Its Aftermath

Before the second spacewalk, Devi’s distress appeared again in a nightmare. After dinner, Sully awoke to her whimpering and went into her compartment. Devi was frightened by a dream in which the communications dish drifted away and the two of them were carried toward the sun; in the dream, she blamed herself. Sully stroked her hair until she settled back to sleep. The episode sharpened Sully’s awareness of the responsibility she and Devi carried for the repair and for one another. The next day’s preparations made that responsibility concrete: Thebes checked the suits and tools, Ivanov examined Sully and Devi, and Harper and Tal prepared the replacement dish. The planned spacewalk could last at least eight hours, roughly twice as long as the previous outing.

During the walk, Devi became dazed and struggled to remain alert. She identified the failed lithium hydroxide cartridge in her suit’s scrubber and recognized that she had not noticed the problem. Harper ordered her back toward the airlock, but Devi believed there was not enough time. Sully could see that the emergency was worsening and remained fixed to the mast of the new communications dish. Thebes then confirmed over the comms that Devi had died. Sully’s shock made the voices from inside Aether difficult to understand, but the work was not finished, and she continued holding the dish in place.

At Harper’s instruction, Sully concentrated on installing the bolts one at a time. Once the work was complete, she detached Devi from her tether without asking permission. She believed it was what Devi, and any of the crew, would have wanted. As Devi drifted away and disappeared from view, Sully remained looking into the emptiness, unable to know where her friend would go. The practical task and the loss were inseparable: Sully completed the repair while watching the person she had tried to protect leave her reach.

The following day, the event returned to Sully repeatedly. She imagined alternate outcomes in which she had reached Devi in time or noticed the scrubber failure earlier, but could find no comfort in those imagined revisions. She had survived and Devi had not; the fact resisted explanation. Sully withdrew behind her curtain and could manage little beyond deferring her visitors until the next day. Even as grief narrowed her attention, she knew the crew still had work to do, including configuring the communications dish for which the spacewalk had been undertaken.

Shared Grief and Continuing Connection

When Sully returned to work, Thebes sat with her in the communications pod. They did not discuss the spacewalk, and Sully was grateful that their silence could be devoted to getting the new system online. She had feared that any gesture of sympathy would send her back to the image of Devi disappearing. Thebes’s presence allowed her to concentrate without making the work a denial of what had happened. When they later joined the others, Sully recognized that Devi’s death belonged to the entire crew: the other astronauts had watched it through helmet cameras, and the same moment was caught in their minds as well as hers.

At a meal, the crew passed around the last tin-foil dish of shepherd’s pie, which they had been saving for a special occasion. Ivanov took Tal’s and Harper’s hands, and the others followed; they bowed their heads together. Ivanov named Aether as having lost its youngest daughter and asked that she be protected. Thebes added that Devi had been loved. Sully understood that the crew had become her family, a recognition formed through the shared act of remembering Devi rather than through any single declaration of closeness.

The repaired communications system received its first signal since the main dish had broken away a week earlier: static telemetry from the probe on Europa. Sully and Thebes checked the equipment and calibrated the system as well as they could. The returning signal did not resolve Sully’s questions about Devi’s final moments; she wondered whether Devi had noticed the falling oxygen levels but had not said anything, and knew she would never find out. Yet the signal showed that the spacewalk had accomplished its purpose. Sully stayed after Thebes left, feeling less alone as she listened, though she did not mistake an open channel for an answer. Her bond with Devi remained in the work they had undertaken together, in the unanswered questions, and in the crew’s insistence that Devi’s life aboard Aether had been loved and shared.