“I have no idea. Something about the fuel and feedback from the probes. But why are they making us keep all the freezing on schedule?”

The cyro liquid was rising fast. I turned my head, so my right ear could catch their conversation.

“Who cares?” Ed asked. “Not them — they’ll just sleep through it all. They say the ship’ll take three hundred years just to get to that other planet — what’s the difference in one more year?”

I tried to sit up. My muscles were hard, slow, but I struggled. I tried to talk again, make a sound, any sound, but the cryo liquid was spilling over my face.

“Just. Relax,” Ed said very loudly near my face.

I shook my head. God, didn’t they know? A year made the world of difference! This was one more year I could be with Jason, one more year I could live! I signed up for three hundred years… not three hundred and one!

Gentle hands — Hassan’s? — pushed me under the cryo liquid. I held my breath. I tried to rise up. I wanted my year! My last year — one more year!

“Breathe in the liquid!” Ed’s voice sounded muffled, almost indecipherable under the cryo liquid. I tried to shake my head, but as my neck muscles tensed, my lungs rebelled, and the cold, cold cryo liquid rushed down my nose, past the tubes, and into my body.

I felt the finality of the lid trapping me inside my Snow White coffin.

As one of them pushed at my feet, sliding me into my morgue, I imagined that my Prince Charming was just beyond my little door, that he really could come and kiss me awake and that we could have a whole year more together.

There was a click, click, grrr of gears, and I knew the flash freezing would start in mere moments, and then my life would be nothing but a puff of white steam leaking through the cracks of my morgue door.

And I thought: At least I’ll sleep. I will forget, for three hundred and one years, everything else.