I should save turning to Sabrina for when I run out of options. And for now, I should focus on the present moment – not spiral from plan to plan, from Hunter to Sabrina and back again. Easier said than done, though.
Hunter moves up to walk beside me, and I catch him an instant before he strolls into an intersection. I grab at his arm and yank him back, then edge forward to take a look around the cornercarefully.
Maybe Sabrinaisa better bet than this boy.
As I get a peek at the hallway we’re intersecting with, I freeze. Two new mercenaries are striding toward us. They don’t look wary – why would they be? – but they have guns at their hips.
I use my grip on Hunter to drag him backward, and at least he doesn’t resist. I look around wildly for somewhere to hide in the handful of seconds we’ve got before they turn the corner.
There’s a door two steps back, and I yank it open and step into a storage closet, pulling Hunter after me. He pulls the door closed after him, and we both stand perfectly still.
We’re nose to nose, bodies pressed together. He’s twisting his arm around to keep the door from flying open, which only pushes him closer to me. I can feel every tiny shift, feel his muscles contract as he keeps his grip on the edge of the door.
I try to keep my breathing shallow, so I don’t press against him any more than I have to, but the warmth of his skin bleeds through our thin shirts as his eyes meet mine.
His face is cut in half by the sliver of light that comes through the crack in the doorjamb, and I take in the hint of stubble at his jaw, the smooth lines of his cheekbones. I thought his eyes were all green, but now I can see they’re flecked with a golden brown.
Footsteps pass us by, and I catch a snatch of conversation. ‘Oh, it’ll be structural. A blast that big? Guaranteed.’
And then they’re receding. We both let out a soft breath, but that only presses us closer together. Hunter doesn’t move yet, but keeps listening, head tilted. Maybe a minute later, he eases the door open a touch and turns his head to press an eye to the gap.
We slip out silently, and we move a lot more carefully after that.
‘Only a few more blocks over,’ I whisper, barely audible, and he nods. We’re following the ring corridor, a long hallway that circles the base. The ceiling is a curved dome cut into the dirt and rock, and lights are fixed every ten meters or so, powered by the huge solar arrays above us. They can’t be doing much business in the middle of a dust storm, but the lights are bright enough for now.
I don’t breathe properly until I see the door markedGREENHOUSE.
Warm, damp air greets us as we make our way inside.
Around us, sunlamps hang from the ceiling, and plants burst from their shelves, filling every available centimeter of space. The air itself is practically green, and everything’s soalive, brushing my sleeves as I pass by, as if each and every leaf wants to say hi.
I haven’t been in here since I arrived – the gardening crew is always on hand – and unexpected tears prickle my eyes. Something in my body unclenches at the sight of the greenery.
This is the only place inside the settlement where chaos reigns. You can’t plan for exactly how plants will grow, after all. The greenhouse breaks the rules when nothing else can.
When I was maybe five or six, I found a little green shoot growing through a crack in the concrete by our front door. It was the first plant I’d ever seen outside the ones in glass cases in shopping malls, all carefully pruned and controlled.
This little guy was just pushing up a green stalk and three tiny leaves, and it seemed like magic. I got a plastic quickmeal pack and cut it up so I could build a little fort around it, and dripped water onto it each morning.
It lasted until it was stupid enough to try to grow a flower. Then someone pulled it out by the roots and took it for themself. I don’t really know what else I was expecting.
‘That’s the way the world goes,’ my mother told me.
When I got older, I got those green shoots and that purple flower tattooed up my arms, as a reminder that there’s alwaysa way to survive, even if you have to force yourself through a crack in what seems like concrete. I turned those little green shoots into a whole plant on my body, big and strong.
Here on Mars, this huge room bursting with rows of greenery feels more like another world than the red planet outside.
Originally, the plants here on Mars were for the food and O2recyc programs, but a lot of people come to the greenhouse just for the green. Turns out that’s important to humans, even on the red planet. Maybe more so here than anywhere.
I don’t know what Hunter makes of it – I can’t imagine what kinds of gardens they have at the GravesUP compound, or at his home on Earth, but I bet they’re spectacular. This is pretty nice too, though.
We make our way along the path until we find a table full of green shoots in little containers, and tools for digging and so on, abandoned mid-task. Someone was potting seedlings, and left them behind when the alarm went off, along with a jacket that tells me that person was about my size, and according to their name patch, calledASH HOUSE. I claim the jacket, tucking it under my arm, and check out the rest of their belongings.
‘Are those cookies?’ Hunter murmurs, breaking the silence that’s been strung between us since we left the closet.
He sounds so hopeful. Making him fit into the villainous shape I have pre-cut for him is harder than I’d have thought.
‘Put them in your bag,’ I say, passing them over. He’s still carrying the backpack he came down from the shuttle with. He stows them, and we move deeper into our sanctuary, crossing asmall footbridge over a pool of water. Silvery fish with trailing fanlike fins glide by soundlessly beneath us, with no idea they’re on another planet.
