Hold Your Fire

by Lisa Mangum

  “We got nothin’ to lose by goin’ on, Sheela. Even if we drive wide by a mile or two, we should get a good signal from the base, and Kellen kin guide us. I’ll lead and give you a break. We’ll go slow so we can see a channel before we drive into it. Then we can follow it back to the base.”

  “Aye. Slow it is, Doria.”

  With no better option, they carried on slowly. Doria sat on the edge of her seat, peering out through the smudged windshield, her hands tensed up like a cat’s paws on the controls. She could see only about twenty meters of featureless dirt, with lines of dust slithering over it like the very snakes Saint Patrick had driven from Ireland.

  They’d gone about another half-hour in silence when the front of Doria’s HVE lurched downward, and she was thrown back into her harness, bouncing her head off the backrest. She hit the brakes, and the HVE came to rest with its nose buried in a hole.

  “Doria! What’s goin’ on? Doria!”

  “I’m all right. Just a sinkhole.”

  There was a pause before her friend answered. “Can you back it out?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll give it a go.”

  “Let me give you room.”

  Sheela’s headlights receded a few meters. Doria shifted into reverse and eased on the power. The machine vibrated as the heavy tracks alternately spun and dug in the loose dirt. It didn’t move. She felt her seat falling out from under her, and then she was sliding down at a sharp pitch, the lights bouncing over rugged rock and sand.

  “Dor!”

  The HVE bumped hard, shoving her chest-first into the harness.

  She stopped breathing. The HVE didn’t move. Seconds passed.

  “Doria, talk to me.”

  “I’m all right, Sheela.”

  The HVE was tilted downward at a sixty-degree angle, and Doria was relieved it wasn’t pointing straight down. They would have at least a decent chance of pulling it out.

  “Don’t follow me,” she said. “I’ve just fallen into a cave. I bumped hard at the bottom on rock or something, so I don’t think she’s goin’ any deeper.”

  “Praise the Lord. Don’ move or even breathe. I’ll turn around and reel down the emergency grapples.”

  At that angle, the headlights shone forward to reveal a deeper opening just ahead. It was wider and taller than the HVE and dust-free. Doria tilted the lights upward remotely and revealed a deeper cave. The lights struck a far wall, exposing black lines and splashes of green, blue, yellow, and the defining color of Mars, red.

  “There’s something down ’ere, Sheela. I’m going to climb out and take a look.”

  “Leave it, Dor. Whatever it is, it can wait. I’ll pull you out.”

  “I think the HVE’s nose is resting on solid rock. She’s stable.”

  “Stay put. I’m going to set the grapples before you do anything.”

  Doria fought the urge to open the door immediately. Headlights flashed in her rear-facing camera. Sheela was turning her HVE around and backing up to the place where Doria’s machine had fallen. She set the brakes and dug stabilizer rods into the ground.

  There was a pause, then she saw Sheela staggering down the sandy incline.

  Doria grabbed a hand light, popped her driver’s door, and stepped out into a swirling wind. Most of the blowing dust was passing over the chasm. She could see Sheela’s squinted eyes through her faceplate.

  “You scared me to death,” Sheela said. “Praise God you found a hard bottom.”

  “Thanks. But I found something. Come on. Let’s take a look.”

  She waded down the slope of loose dirt to the front of her HVE and led the reluctant Sheela into the dark cave arch.

  Beyond it was a large room that was mostly free of sand, except for the spill that had flowed in when the HVE had breached the roof.

  The headlights lit up the bottom half of the opposite wall, and the hints of colors and lines she saw captured her attention. And what they revealed sent an electric shock through her.

  A drawing. No, a mural, a room-sized painting, the work of an intelligent mind.

  She played her hand light over the mural, her heart beating harder. She fought to catch her breath. The pressure suit’s tight faceplate seemed suddenly far too confining.

  “Dearest God …” said Sheela.

  The mural was scratched and faded, marred by thin cracks and one rock tumble. Thousands of years old? Perhaps tens of thousands? The lights revealed oblong shapes colored pink and gray in the lower half, pale blue and yellow in the upper half. The shapes were separated by thin ribbons of faded green, forming a seemingly random network.

  Doria stepped forward to examine the details, the subtle variations in the shapes and shades of green and yellow within the thin ribbons. Black scribbles—writing!—were scattered over the piece.

  Sheela joined her. She brought her gloved hands to her facemask.

  “Dor, it’s …” She swallowed loudly over the radio.

  Doria finished her thought. “It’s a map of our lands. There’s the large area where we set the camp. These lines …” She stepped forward to trace her finger along the ribbons of green. “These are Channels 5 and 6. And this large pool here—that’s where you buried your HVE in a sinkhole last week.”

  “Dor, this is … It’s historic. The greatest discovery ever.”

  “Yes.” Tears welled in her eyes. Was it luck that had brought them to this place, or providence?

  “A bit of Irish luck, this. We’d never have found this if we hadn’t gone to help the Domies. We don’t have to fight, tryin’ to trench through the hard rock. This map will tell us where to dig. The project’s saved.”

  “Yes. We can follow the lines. We can dig where it shows us to.”

  Tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks. Tears of joy … and of disappointment.

  “But now we have to stop digging,” Doria said.

  “Whatever for?”

  “Sheela, you said it. This is historic. We can’t even think of moving another foot of dirt. We have to cordon this off and preserve it.” She shook her head. “It belongs to everyone now, not just us.”

  Sheela stood silently, reflecting.

  But it would be all right.

  “We’re now the discoverers and curators of the first Martian historic site,” Doria said. “We’ll have all the funding we need to preserve it and to excavate it at our leisure. And we won’t have to ever worry about living in a dome. This can be our home to the end of our days.”

  But what pleased Doria most was that the ancient map proved her design was sound, that a place like this could endure on Mars, and could be built in other places.

  The Burren had lived on Mars once before, and Doria and her friends had brought it back to life.

  About the Author

  CJ Erick stumbled into Dallas in search of love, great sushi, and access to big-box stores. Having found all three, he now inhabits the city with his wife, Cee, and their sweet black-and-tan hound, Saber-girl. Mostly retired from the reckless adventure of engineering, he now designs and builds space fantasy, gothic horror, cozy mysteries, and even a little romance, among other unbalanced visions from caffeine-deranged nightmares.

  White Feather

  Shannon Fox

  Jae stared at the email on her screen and forced herself to keep her hands off the keyboard. She tried to focus on her breathing, counting out slow, even breaths, but her eyes kept reading and rereading the lines of the email.

  Hi, Jae,

  Thanks for sending back the logo revisions.

  After careful consideration, I don’t think your style and my vision are a match, and I don’t want to take up any more of your time or mine. You can keep the deposit for the time you’ve already put into this.

  Sorry it didn’t work out.

  —Kristina

  Jae swore under her breath and pushed her chair back from the computer. Each fresh pass through the email was only serving to further rile her up, and she knew if she continued to stare at it
, she might do something she’d regret.

  In the kitchen, Jae put the teakettle on the stove and leaned against the sink to wait. The bright sunlight streaming through the window behind her reflected off the stainless steel fridge. It hurt her eyes to look at it, so Jae stared at the floor instead, rubbing her temples. She’d woken up with a headache, and the email had only exacerbated it.

  Her doctor had warned her against consuming caffeine too soon after the accident, but Jae had shrugged it off. She needed to get back to work, and nothing focused her mind like a strong cup of black tea in the morning. Still, a small part of her wondered if the reason her headaches weren’t going away was due in part to her refusal to heed that particular order.

  As the kettle started to whistle, Jae took it off the heat and opened the cabinet next to the stove to grab a tea bag for her mug. But as her hand reached inside the cabinet, she froze.

  A single white feather lay on top of the boxes of tea on the shelf.

  Jae glanced around the kitchen in confusion, trying to work out how it had gotten there. She remembered her apartment complex’s repairman had come the day before to fix the slow leak in the kitchen faucet. Jae had been running errands when he’d come by. Maybe he’d rifled through her things. Gone through the cabinets and left her this dirty feather as a calling card.

  A fresh, hot wave of anger splashed through her. Jae snatched the feather from the shelf and dropped it in the trash. She turned the faucet as hot as it would go and scrubbed her hands with soap, the burning water eliciting an unconscious hiss of pain from her. But she didn’t turn the water down. Who knew what germs that feather contained?

  She thought about calling down to the front office to give them a piece of her mind. But as she dried her hands on a towel, she had a better idea.

  Reaching into the pocket of her bathrobe, Jae pulled out her phone and dialed her mother.

  Ever since Jae could remember, it’d just been the two of them. Jae and Leah. Her father had left when Jae was a baby, and though she was sure her mother must have had boyfriends over the years, none had made enough of an impression to make it as far as meeting her daughter.

  Which was fine with Jae. As far as she was concerned, her mother was a warrior. A middle school teacher during much of the year, in the summer she’d always pick up a second—or even third—job doing seasonal work. Yet no matter how long and hard her mother worked to provide for Jae, she was always there with a listening ear and ready advice for whatever trouble her daughter was facing. That had remained true even after Jae had gone to college and moved out on her own.

  Her mother picked up after two rings. After the exchange of pleasantries, Jae launched right into her story, explaining how she’d woken up to an email from her client firing her and then discovered someone had been rooting around in her personal belongings. She poured out all her anger and frustrations, holding nothing back. And when she was finally done, Jae paused, waiting for her mother to speak. She would know just what to say, how to fix it.

  But when the silence stretched out between them, uncomfortably long and void of her mother’s usually pat answers, Jae found herself speaking again. “Did you hear what I said?”

  “Yes,” her mother replied.

  “And?”

  “The client that fired you. Weren’t there a few others you lost this month?”

  Jae’s stomach twisted. “Four. Kristina was the fourth one.”

  There was another long silence on the other end of the phone, which Jae again felt compelled to fill. “But it’s fine, Mom. I have enough money to pay my bills if that’s what you’re worried about. I’ll find more work.”

  “Maybe you should talk to someone, Jae.”

  “Talk to someone?” she echoed. “Like a business coach?”

  “No. Like a grief counselor. About Felicity and the car accident.”

  Suddenly, Jae wasn’t standing in her kitchen anymore. She was back in the car on that dark, rain-slicked road. Seeing Felicity reach for the volume control out of the corner of her eye, saying how much she loved the song that had just come on the radio. Hearing the screech of tires, feeling the jarring impact that slammed Jae’s head against the side window. The sound of Felicity’s scream. The glass breaking.

  Jae was aware her mother was still speaking, though she hadn’t been listening at all.

  “I just think it would help, Jae,” her mother was saying. “I saw someone after your father left. There’s no weakness in asking for help.”

  “Just because I lost a few clients doesn’t mean I need to go to therapy,” Jae growled.

  “I know you,” her mother retorted. “You do good work. Fantastic work. People happily refer you all the time. So if you’re losing clients in droves, is it them? Or is it you?”

  Jae could feel her pulse pounding hotly in her ears. Her mouth opened, but she couldn’t force any words through. Couldn’t say the awful, terrible things slamming around in her head.

  As she breathed through her anger, Jae felt her blood turn to ice as her mother’s words fully registered in her brain.

  After the car accident, the doctor told her to take some time off from work. Both to let her brain heal from the concussion and to allow herself to grieve for the loss of Felicity, her best friend. But a week later, Jae was back to work. She had projects and deadlines and bills. So many bills, magnified by an ambulance trip and an emergency room visit. It didn’t matter what the doctor thought. He wasn’t living Jae’s life.

  But the cold truth she’d been hiding from, that she’d been avoiding ever since Felicity had died, was that she was stuck. The sweet rush of ideas that had once flowed easily from her, the burst of excitement she felt at tackling a new project, the happy exhaustion she felt at the end of a long day of creatively stretching herself—all of it had completely stalled.

  It now took every ounce of concentration and many, many cups of tea to drag even the most rudimentary designs from her fingertips. She found herself second-guessing font choices, wondering if those colors really looked good together, if her mind could actually be trusted to do this work anymore.

  Because the fear that burned brightest of all was this: What if, when her skull had connected with the car window on that awful night, it had rattled all that was good and special and creative about her right out of her brain?

  Jae swallowed. “Okay,” she said softly. “I’ll think about it, Mom.”

  The tiny old woman across the circle from Jae kept looking at her and smiling. It was beginning to creep Jae out, and she quickly looked toward the man who was speaking. He was older than Jae and, as she’d found out just a few minutes earlier, had lost his son after the boy had fallen in the pool and drowned at his ex-wife’s house.

  As she listened and tried to ignore the eyes of the old woman on her, Jae picked at her nails. It was an awful habit, she knew, but it was one of the ways in which her anxiety manifested itself. And if there was ever a time to be feeling anxious, it was sitting in this grief support group, listening to other people pour out their own feelings and tragedies.

  It had been a mistake to come. She could see that now. Jae could barely hold the space for her own feelings about Felicity’s death, let alone listen to and be supportive of these strangers she’d met just half an hour ago, whose names she couldn’t remember without a peek at their name tags.

  Though she had discovered that sharing the details of the accident, explaining who Felicity had been to her and why her death mattered so much, had actually felt kind of good. Instead of bearing the loss all by herself, it felt like she’d broken off a few pieces of it and given it to the six strangers in the room to hold. Jae felt lighter somehow from having shared her experience.

  She’d even explained what was happening with her work. How she felt creatively blocked. She’d shared what had happened last Saturday morning, when she’d woken up to Kristina’s email, discovered that disgusting feather in her kitchen cabinet, and called her mother. That was when the old lady had started
smiling at her, and whatever positive benefit Jae had gained from showing up tonight had abruptly cut and run.

  When the group leader concluded the meeting, Jae quickly got to her feet and started for the door. But she wasn’t fast enough to get around the guy in the wheelchair. Hoping her impatience wasn’t showing on her face as she watched him maneuver around the furniture, Jae waited awkwardly in the center of the room. She kept her gaze firmly focused on the back of the guy’s head to avoid making eye contact with anyone. The last thing she wanted to do was make small talk with one of these people. All she wanted was get home, take a hot shower, and go to bed. Her head was pounding something fierce.

  Jae felt a light touch on her elbow and stiffened. She looked to her right and saw the old woman had come up beside her. She smiled up at Jae, apparently oblivious to her discomfort.

  “It’s a gift, you know,” the old woman said.

  Jae blinked as her brain scrambled to figure out what the woman was talking about. “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch what you said.”

  “The feather. It’s a gift from your friend.”

  “My friend?”

  “What was her name, dear? The one who passed away. Felicia?”

  “Felicity,” Jae said, through clenched teeth.

  The old woman nodded. Jae noticed her hair was so thin on the crown of her head, she could see through the wiry white strands to the spotted skin underneath.

  “She’s speaking to you. Just like my Marv does. Only he communicates with pennies, not feathers.”

  Jae almost said something unkind but bit her tongue at the last moment. She glanced at the guy in the wheelchair. He was lingering in the doorway, talking to the group leader. Jae looked back at the old woman and forced herself to smile. “What do you mean he communicates with pennies?”