by Hugh Howey
When the others woke, we performed our morning routine, taking turns with the solar shower hanging from the cab. The water barely warmed up in the filtered sunlight, and what heat it absorbed tended to leak out over the cool evenings. Once again, I resolved to take my showers at night, even though I knew I’d be too exhausted and too eager to spend time with my friends to follow through.
After the shower, my solitary change of clothes went back on, immediately undoing most of my hard-won freshness. The only alteration in our routine that morning was the lack of banter, each of us mulling over decisions that would be impossible to undo once decided upon. We were practicing the soft sciences, the fuzzy physics, each of us dreading a collapse into surety.
We walked to breakfast in more silence, took our meager helpings of fruitpaste and sat around peering down at our food and at the scratched and dented surface of our table. We rarely looked at each other during the half hour allotted for meals. As we split up—each of us heading to our duty stations—I heard some grumblings from another table about Mica and Peter not showing up for breakfast. I thought nothing of it at the time.
It was lunchtime before we found out they were missing. Myra came and delivered a message to our enforcer right before break. Whether because of my profession or some sliver of a bond we’d formed in our few tense encounters, she sought me out after delivering her message.
“We need to talk,” she said, standing at the end of my workstation.
I finished threading a cap on one of the fuel stages and stood up. “Of course. Are you okay?”
She waved me through the module without a word. Outside, I noticed a lot of people milling about. Either the clock in our module had run down or people were going on break early.
“What is it?” I asked Myra. “Is everything okay with you?”
“It’s not me. It’s Mica and Peter. They haven’t been seen since dinner.”
“Last night? And they aren’t out on the farm?” I looked off in that general direction, even though the plots of land were over a rise and out of sight.
“They haven’t been working out there for days. They were supposed to be helping support group on the canopy-clearing project.”
“The little rockets?”
“Yeah, they should’ve reported to the tool module for black powder refinement, but they weren’t even at breakfast.”
I looked past Myra at the activity around camp. The pattern of movement made more sense. People were spreading out. Searching.
Myra pushed her short bangs back on her head. “Have you had much contact with them? Seen anything unusual?”
I shook my head. “No, but we’re all exhausted. Maybe they’re just taking a day off.” I tried to make it sound reasonable, but I didn’t believe it myself. “Where did they normally sleep?” I asked.
“The communications module. But supply works in there during the day. They aren’t there.”
“Let’s head over there,” I said. I set off toward the communications module without waiting for her to agree.
“What are you thinking?” Myra asked, hurrying to catch up.
“I’m thinking we might find they aren’t the only things missing.”
There was only one person working in the module when we arrived. The place had a strong chemical odor as vials of bubbling fluids sent off wisps of dangerous-smelling smoke. Kayla, a girl I had spoken to several times, turned from a makeshift workstation, a crude plastic visor over her face.
“Find them?” she asked Myra. “Oh, hello, Porter.”
“Hey. Do you sleep here?”
Kayla shook her head. “I sleep in the power module. Remember? You dripped solder in my bedroll the other day. Found it in my hair during breakfast.” She smiled, but it faded quickly as she looked back and forth between us. “Has something bad happened to them?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I need to find out where they keep their stuff.”
“Oh.” Kayla stood up and took off her visor, laying it carefully on the workstation. “Mica is in here all the time. I know where she keeps her sack.”
We followed her to the end of the module where a wall of shelves had been built by someone in construction. Most of the cubbies were full of labeled golden canisters, but the top shelf was packed with bedrolls and duffels made out of stitched tarp. Kayla stretched up on her tiptoes and moved several of the bags aside.
“That’s weird,” she said. “She always comes to this corner.” She walked down the row of shelves, craning her neck to see up top, but I already knew the answer.
“It’s not here,” Kayla said.
I nodded, turning to Myra.
“You knew,” she said.
“I suspected.”
“What is it?” Kayla asked, but Myra was pulling me back to the door and out of the module. I thanked Kayla over my shoulder for her help.
Myra turned to me once we were outside. “You think they left, don’t you?”
“I do. I think—”
“Did you see this coming? Why didn’t you warn us? Isn’t this what your profession does?”
I felt a flush of anger at the accusation and pointed toward the power module. “I build satellites,” I said, my voice much louder than I was used to hearing it. “I solder plumbing and I make propulsion stages. I do shit I couldn’t have spelled two weeks ago.”
Myra ran her hands over her face and looked down at her feet. “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I—it’s been crazy the last week. But if you thought this was a possibility—”
“It never occurred to me until last night,” I said, which was the truth. “It was just a fleeting thought, really. I was wondering how long before people broke down, before they mutinied or ran.”
“Mutiny?” Myra cocked her head to one side. I watched as her hand came up and rested on her gun, then remembered who she slept with of late. “What have you heard? Is it Kelvin?”
“What? No! I haven’t heard anything.” I tried to convince her with my eyes, but hers were no longer on me—they were searching the dispersing crowd, which was searching for the missing couple. “I just worry we’re pushing people too hard,” I said. “It’s just a matter of time before some of us break down.”
Myra narrowed her eyes and focused on me again. “We’re colonists, Porter. We were trained for this.”
That’s bullshit, I wanted to say, but I managed to restrain myself. I was beginning to suspect Myra and I were not on the same side. Then they hit me—this series of sickening realizations: Had Mica and Peter not run, the base could be having these very conversations about me. About me and Kelvin and Tarsi. I was empathizing with Mica and Peter while Myra was probably thinking about stringing them up for treason.
“I need to go tell Hickson,” Myra said. “Go grab a quick lunch and come to the command module. We need to start searching the perimeter, see if they were able to get through the fence somehow.”
I nodded, glad to be done with the conversation and eager to see my friends.
••••
The perimeter fence had been built on top of a wide berm that ringed the entire base. Soil had been pushed up from both sides fifteen years ago, creating ditches on either side that made the ten-foot electrified fence all the more daunting to predators from without.
And prisoners within.
I stood in the inner ditch with Scott, a construction worker I’d been paired up with for the search. The two of us admired Mica’s handiwork. Five of the horizontal bars had been clipped—or more likely, as I examined them closely, they had been melted with acid or a cutting torch. Their edges drooped and the ends were bubbled and uneven. Five insulated wires had been attached to each bar; their coils drooped down into the ditch, leaving plenty of room for someone to crawl through.
It looked like Mica’s new electrical training had served her rather than the colony.
“Not bad,” Scott said.
“Yeah,” I said. I wondered if he was taking notes as well. “Then again, these thi
ngs weren’t built to keep out sentient life. Any of that on this planet and we would’ve been aborted fifteen years ago when it was a lot less messy.”
“Gross, Porter.” Scott frowned and slapped me on the back. “Let’s go tell the others.”
“Let’s save the walk,” I said. I reached out, grabbed one of the insulated wires and jerked it free. The buzzing from the electrified fence shifted in frequency, becoming agitated like a startled hive of bees. In the distance, a horn sounded, whirring up and down from scream to moan and back again. The noise gave me a chill, but I felt satisfied with the little test.
Scott punched me in the arm. I turned to defend my actions, but he just stood there, smiling at me.
“You scientists are fuckin’ awesome,” he said.
• 13 • Cover
Tarsi and I sat in the cab of our tractor, alone. Kelvin had to work late on the launch pad, as the first of the canopy-clearing missiles had been moved up the timetable and was scheduled to launch that night. We had asked to watch from the pad shelter, but there were concerns about how much bombfruit would fall after the explosion.
The food, of course, would be a welcome bonus, even if much of it would be wasted. After the tremors, we had learned bombfruit meat didn’t stay fresh, even with refrigeration. Hairy worms appeared in them after a while, and even though we knew a ton of fruit was rotting on the ground beyond the fence, nobody was allowed outside. With work on the farm halted, the hope around the colony was that the missile would do more than clear a hole for the rocket—it might see us through another week.
“What do you think Mica and Peter are doing right now?” Tarsi asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but I hope they’re able to find some cover.”
“Me too. And I hope they found something different to eat.”
“That would be nice.” I leaned forward and looked up through the glass at the absolute blackness above. “It must grow fast to have closed us in like this.”
“The canopy?”
“Yeah. Don’t you think the lander had to burn a hole through it?”
“It’s been fifteen years,” Tarsi said. “I personally think we should wait and clear the canopy when the rocket’s almost done.”
“Hickson’s pissed,” I said. “He needs to blow something up.”
“Speaking of pissed, please don’t be.”
I turned to Tarsi. “What is it?”
“I spoke to Kelvin after dinner. He’s dead set on getting out. Maybe tonight.”
“And you’re going with him?”
Tarsi shook her head. “No. I told him I was staying with you. I begged him to reconsider, and he said he wouldn’t go without coming by and seeing us and getting his stuff, but I think he was hoping we would both come.”
“And you’ve changed your mind? Are you sure?”
Tarsi reached out and took my hand with both of hers. She held it in her lap. “I want to be with you,” she said.
I nodded, thinking I knew what she meant.
She leaned forward and pressed her lips to mine—showing me I had absolutely no idea what she had meant.
We kissed. I’d seen a few other couples around base do it, and knew of it like I knew of earthquakes, guns, and beehives. But once again, conception gave me a mere glimpse of reality. Actual things kept proving louder and more dangerous than the idea of them.
Our lips moved together and it felt electric, but only for a moment. Then it felt wrong. Incestuous. I thought of Kelvin and pulled away. I held her back, my hands on her shoulders.
“Was I doing it wrong?” she asked, her face a mask of seriousness in the cab’s dim glow.
I laughed. “How should I know? I’ve never done it before.”
“But you didn’t like it,” she said.
“No. I loved it. And I love you.” I turned to the side and pulled her close, her head resting on my shoulder. “It’s Kelvin,” I said.
“There’s nothing between us,” she told me. “I prefer sleeping with him because I can trust myself with him.”
“He really likes you,” I said, realizing she had missed my point.
I wondered what my point had been.
“I know.” She reached up and stroked my arm, rubbing me from my shoulder to my elbow. It felt even better than the kiss. The comfort and intimacy. The newness and the familiarity. “But I get to decide for me,” she said. “And I choose you.”
I squeezed her tight, trying to picture the two of us together. As a couple. And it didn’t fit in my brain. There was no place to slot it. Familiar doubts surfaced, telling me why the thought of Kelvin made our being together impossible. It wasn’t because I was worried about taking Tarsi from him—it was because she wasn’t him.
“I don’t want to mess up what we have. The three of us,” I said.
“There is no three of us if he leaves tonight and you and I stay behind.”
“Do you want to go?”
“Yes, but I want to be with you even more.”
The words stabbed at my heart, slicing me with their sweetness and sincerity—crushing me with confusion. I saw no easy way to explain how much I loved her and how it wasn’t in the same way. How it probably couldn’t ever be.
“And if I wanted to go?” I asked.
“I would love that even more.”
“What would we do? Wander the wilderness?”
“We’d get away from base. We’d make a shelter, gather food and grow some Terran stuff. Be free.”
“Free,” I said. “Sounds like a lot of work being free.”
“Probably more work than we’re doing now, but it would all be for us.”
She was right, and I knew it. It went to the heart of my conversation with Colony, the talk that had given us guns instead of concessions for our well-being.
“Maybe we could find Mica and Peter,” I wondered aloud.
Tarsi shook my arm, practically vibrating in her seat. “So you’ll come!” she yelped.
“Yeah,” I said, speaking the decision and thereby making it, and wondering how I had reached it, if maybe my present emotional state qualified me as temporarily insane.
“We need to gather a few things,” I told her.
“Kelvin has a kit and I stashed some seeds away today. Plus a few other things.”
“Were you expecting me to agree to this?” I asked her.
“No, I promise. I had already planned to do it after we talked last night, just in case. I told Kelvin he could take them with him.”
I got down from the bench and went to the cab’s door; I peered across the floodlit base toward the power module. “There’s a few small things I should grab—”
A flash of orange light off to the side interrupted my thoughts. I watched as a streak of plasma lifted up, rising high above the base before exploding with a distant rumble. Tarsi stood and joined me by the glass, both of us peering up at the ball of fire overhead. A moment later, the whistling began, followed by the thudding impacts of bombfruit.
Not as many fell, however, as during the tremors. Not nearly as many. We stood together, our arms around each other as we listened to the odd impact here and there.
“So few,” Tarsi said.
“The trees are big,” I told her, “but how many of those can they produce? And how fast?”
She leaned her head against my shoulder as the canopy burned overhead. The flames from the incendiary missile spread out in a wide circle of destruction as golden embers rained down, fading to ash long before they reached us, very much how I imagined a meteor shower might look.
“We need to get out of here,” Tarsi said sadly.
I agreed. And from a more rational stance, this time.
• 14 • Clearing
Kelvin returned late, the hour technically qualifying it as early the next day. He smelled of cordite and smoke and seemed tired. When Tarsi broke the news that we were coming with him, his spirits buoyed immediately. He clasped me on the shoulder and tried to express his relie
f in a series of mumbling and manic half-starts.
Once he calmed down, we sat together on the bench seat and went through his stash of survival gear. He had stopped and picked up Tarsi’s seeds and a few other things as well. The only thing I had to offer was a battered flashlight I used to see around the power module during outages. I added it to a small pack of my own as Kelvin distributed the things between us—the act of sharing our things somehow sealing our resolve to stick together.
Overall, the gear we were meant to survive on was far less than any of us wished we could bring, but if we took any more, our guilt would get the better of us. We figured nobody we left behind could fault us for taking so little.
The plan was to leave as soon as the floodlights went off, but after an hour of nervous fidgeting, they remained brightly lit, even though they were usually doused after the day’s last shift.
“What are they doing?” Kelvin asked, looking out through a hole he’d swiped in the fogged glass.
“Maybe they’re worried about us,” I said.
“How would anybody suspect the three of us?” Tarsi asked.
“Not us specifically. I mean everybody. Hickson’s gotta know what’s going on, what everyone’s thinking after Mica and Peter bolted.”
Kelvin grunted. “Pretty soon they’ll need one enforcer for every worker. Love to see the timetables once that happens.”
“We should’ve left last night,” Tarsi said. “And why wouldn’t Pete have said something to me about him going? I mean, we were close enough that I’d expect a goodbye, or some kind of gesture—not that I think he should’ve asked us to join.”
“Same reason we haven’t told anybody,” I explained.
Tarsi bit her lip and raised her eyebrows. “I suppose you’re right,” she finally said.
“So what’s the plan?” Kelvin asked, turning from the window. “I say we go anyway. I don’t see anyone standing guard. Hell, who in the camp wouldn’t pass out if they were asked to take a shift tonight?”
I made my own hole in the misted glass, my hand squealing as it circled. I peered out, then turned to the others. “I say we sneak out of the cab and wait on the landing for a few minutes, see if we spot anybody. Nobody can get onto us just for being up at this hour.”