“Claire…” he begins. “That’s not what I meant—”
“And I don’t care what you meant,” I say. “See? You were right.”
His jaw snaps shut, and a dark ruddy color floods his cheeks.
“Check with Nysus, make sure he’s working with Lourdes to track the signal.” A bullshit assignment because rabid dogs and the reincarnation of his personal hero, Berkeley Blue, couldn’t keep Nysus away from a mystery signal, but an assignment nonetheless.
I turn away from Kane and quicken my pace, trying to ignore him and the odd mix of pride and hurt welling up inside me. Pride that I’ve managed to at least partially fool him; hurt because I still somehow expected him to see through the act.
3
“We’re here,” Voller says over the intercom in my quarters ninety-four hours later. “Coming up on a whole lot of empty space, TL.” His announcement holds more than a tinge of glee.
The stab of disappointment in my gut is quick but not unexpected. We’ll clear the signal source, tag it as a ghost, and head to our rendezvous point with theGinsburg. We might even yet make it back to catch our ride with them, if they wait for us.
Back to nothing.
The open storage crate at the foot of my bed takes up all the floor space. I climb over the bed to reach the intercom switch on the wall and flick the channel open to respond. “Yeah. On my way.”
I’m nearly all packed. No sense waiting until we reach theGinsburgand then having to rush. I finish folding the scrap of blanket—its edges are filthy with red-stained dirt, no matter how many washings, and tattered beyond repair—and tuck it carefully into the open crate. The piece is, admittedly, a little disgusting in its age and condition. But it’s one of the few things I still have that’s mine, actually mine, given to me by someone who knew and loved me rather than a stranger with good intentions. My name and hab number are stitched in one corner in two perfectly even lines. My mother was a Verux-sponsored doctor—one of the only doctors at Ferris Outpost—and her stitching skills got a lot of practice.
The outpost, not even a fully-fledged colony yet, was a rough place, nothing more than a series of interconnected Verux hab modules and desperate people trying to make a go of it, with little or no help from their corporate sponsor. But if Ferris had survived past the ten-year mark, establishing their residency on Mars and sustainability of their efforts, then Verux would have swooped in and claimed another colony.
“You’ll have to be responsible for your own things,” she said to me, when we first moved to Ferris. I was five, and my father had died the year before. She’d taken the post—dangerous but highly paid—out of desperation. I didn’t handle my father’s death well, apparently. Plus, MedBots were already at that point cheaper and considered more reliable than the general practitioners they were replacing on Earth. They made fewer mistakes, according to some vaguely sourced statistics. (Although when they missed, they whiffed it completely, the robotic equivalent of a batter swinging at a ball so hard he spun in a circle when the bat failed to connect. They lacked the imaginative thinking and creative problem-solving skills of those same replaced humans.) “There’s not enough space in the hab for everyone to leave their possessions lying around. They have rules here.”
She’d tried to warn me, but I was not yet a colony kid, still a spoiled Earther, used to the luxury of breathable air everywhere and having someplace else to go, even if it was just to the crowded sidewalk outside.
My mother saved me, devoted her last living moments to my care. And she tried to save everyone else. Probably would have, if she’d had more time—Verux ended up developing a powerful (and pricey) new antiviral from her recovered research.
But I’d screwed that up for her.
Padding down the corridor barefoot, the grit of soil from the greenhouse still beneath my toes and between my fingers, I pause at the sight of the shiny blue-and-white caution tape across the airlock to the neighboring module flapping gently in the breeze from the air recycler. The wordQUARANTINEripples like it’s alive.
I shake my head, stuffing that memory down, way down, along with the lid on the storage crate holding the blanket. When search and rescue found me, they scooped me up where I was and took me away—no packing, no suitcases. I was holding on to that blanket, even though, at eleven, I was too old for the comfort it provided.So I hold on to it still. I’m not sure why when it more often reminds me of my mistakes than my mother.
Before I head to the bridge, I glance back at my quarters. The walls are barren, empty, echoing metal. My bunk holds only a pillow and bedding and enough official Verux jumpsuits to carry me over until we reach theGinsburg. It looks nothing like the home it has been. But it’s better to keep harsh reality right in front of me. It felt like a trick to keep pretending that this wasn’t going to happen sooner rather than later, that my home was not going away. At least this way—no matter how many days I have left here—I’m choosing to face it rather than clinging to a desperate illusion.
That’s how I see it anyway. Others may have a different view.
On my way out the door, I bump into Kane—my shoulder into his chest—as he steps out of his quarters, no doubt summoned by a triumphant Voller or by the feel of the ship slowing as it reached its coordinates.
“After you.” Kane steps back, gesturing for me to go ahead, while avoiding meeting my eyes. His curly hair is rumpled, and a fingerprint of grease decorates his left temple. His worn jumpsuit is open to the waist, the sleeves tied around his middle, revealing the cotton T-shirt beneath. It looks worn and soft to the touch, and the imagined sensation of my cheek pressed against his chest, against that fabric, stalls me out for a moment.
But only for a moment.
I move past him without a word. My shoulder, though, still feels warm and electric from the unanticipated contact.
Cut it out, Claire. Don’t do this.
Voller barely waits until I clear the threshold of the bridge. “See, I told you.” He throws his arm out toward the viewport at the front of the bridge that shows an empty expanse of space. “Nothing.”
“Distress signal?” I ask Lourdes.
She spins in her chair toward me. “It’s weaker out here. But the coordinates are right.” She frowns, her smooth forehead creasing. “I just don’t understand—”
“Because the commweb boosted the distress signal,” Nysusbreaks in on the intercom. “We’re closer to the source now, but that means we’re picking up the signal from the beacon directly. We’re outside the commweb now, too, so the signal doesn’t have the same juice.”
Outside the commweb.I’ve never been this far out. None of us have. Our job is literally the commweb. We live and work on it, like a spider spinning and respinning silk lines, checking and rechecking connection points.
