For six months, Reyes lived on a space station circling the Earth, and although the work was important, it was also relentlessly repetitive. As the weeks went by, the silence between tasks grew heavier, and she began to feel more alone than she had expected to feel.
One Friday night her radio picked up a faint signal on an amateur frequency. At first she suspected that she was imagining it, but then she made out a child's voice, reading a picture book aloud, slowly and with great care. The girl's name was Lila. She was nine, and she belonged to the radio club at her school in a small town far below.
From then on they spoke every Friday. Lila wanted to know what space smelled like, and Reyes, after a moment's thought, told her that it smelled of hot metal. Lila asked whether the stars were loud, and Reyes explained that space is perfectly silent, though the stars look as if they ought to be shouting. On her last Friday in orbit she read Lila the ending of the book. And when she finally landed, the first place she visited, before she had so much as unpacked, was the radio club at Lila's school.