by Rob Boffard
He closes his eyes, and says, “We can’t go.”
“What did you say?”
Prakesh gets to his feet. He’s steadier this time, despite the pounding in his head. “If we split the group up, we die.”
“Yeah? Well, that’s fine by me, as long as I don’t have to be near them.” Carver jerks his finger back at the fire, and the figures around it, bathed in shadows.
“OK,” says Prakesh. “Go. Charge off into an environment we know nothing about, with no map and no supplies, at night, in the cold.”
“I’ll stick to the shore,” Carver says, but he sounds resigned now. The punch drained the last of the energy he had stored up. “Riley had to have come down close to here. If we—”
“We don’t know where she came down. We don’t even know if her pod launched.”
“Don’t—”
“You could hunt forever, and never find her.”
“So you’re just giving up? Is that it?”
“I won’t if you won’t. But if you head off by yourself, you’ll never make it.”
Prakesh twists the bottom of his shirt in his hands, wringing water out of the fabric, giving him time to articulate his thoughts. “We don’t know what’s out there, and we don’t know what the war did to the ecosystem. Most of the planet is a wasteland, and that has a knock-on effect.”
“I thought this part of the planet was supposed to be OK for humans now.”
“Maybe. But there could still be extreme weather patterns, localised microclimates.” Carver is about to interrupt, but Prakesh talks over him. “We could be caught in a flash flood, a snowstorm. Anything. That’s without talking about any wildlife we run into, or how we actually find food.”
Carver frowns. “Wildlife? You actually think anything survived long enough to get here?”
“Hard to say without data. The global population of certain species might have been decimated, but it’s possible that tiny clusters could survive, assuming they adapt. If they could migrate, hunt out food sources, they might be able to—”
“I get it, P-Man.”
“Right. Sorry.” Prakesh is secretly relieved at hearing Carver use that damn nickname. It means he’s calming down, thinking more like his old self.
He gestures to the lake. “But if we stay in a group, we can cover a wider area. We can find food, shelter, fuel for a fire. We can keep each other warm. And then I promise: we’ll look for Riley. We’ll find her together.”
Carver hugs himself, shivering. The thunderous look hasn’t left his face, but he gives Prakesh a tight nod.
“All right,” he says. “But if Okwembu so much as says one word to me, I’m going to do to her what I did to you.” He grimaces. “Sorry about that, by the way.”
Prakesh is about to answer when he hears a panicked shout from the fireside. He and Carver swing round. Okwembu and Mikhail are on all fours, leaning in close to the guttering flames. The smoke has grown thicker, swirling in huge curls around them.
“Oh shit,” Prakesh says.
He starts jogging back towards the group, Carver on his heels. He’s desperately hoping that he’s wrong, but even before he gets halfway back, he can see that the fire–their one source of heat–is going out.
14
Anna
The noise drags Anna Beck out of her sleep.
For a moment, she can’t separate reality from the nightmare. She was lost in space, drifting, alone, unable to move no matter how hard she tried. Slowly, she convinces herself that she’s awake.
The hab is dark. Her father is sitting up on the other cot, blinking in confusion. Her mother is curled up tight, still deeply asleep. There’s no alarm–they cut them off to save power days ago–but she can hear running feet, raised voices.
Then the voices resolve, and Anna hears the word “Fire.”
She stares into the darkness. A fire isn’t a reason to panic. The sector’s chemical suppression system should deal with it, stop it spreading. So why are people freaking out? Why the running feet and confused shouts?
Something’s wrong.
She kicks the covers off and runs, throwing open the hab door and rocketing into the corridor, sleep falling away like shed clothing. There’s a man in her way–she tries to dodge past, but she’s still not fully awake. It slows her reaction times: she smashes into him, and she goes flying, skidding on her ass down the corridor.
“Where’s the fire?” she shouts up at him.
The man is middle-aged, stubbled, naked from the waist up. He’s holding a blanket around his shoulders, open at the front. Anna can see his ribs, gaunt and bony.
She scrambles to her feet. “Did you hear what I said?”
He blinks at her, and she wants to scream at him. Then he says, “Down in the gallery.” He has the voice of a man who is not entirely sure that this isn’t a vivid dream. He probably thinks he’s going to wake up, and that Outer Earth will be good and whole again.
No point waiting to find out. She’s already running, going as fast as she can.
At least it isn’t far. She’s in Apex sector: home to the station’s main control room, the council chambers, the technicians who kept the place running. Outer Earth suffered an explosive decompression, a breach in the dock that rendered most of it uninhabitable. Everyone still alive–a thousand people or so–is crammed into this one sector, the smallest on the station. She can be at the gallery in five minutes.
Anna has no idea what she’s going to do. All she knows is that she has to be there. So she runs, barrelling through the white corridors of Apex.
The last time she ran this fast was when the dock’s airlock doors gave way, after the Earthers’ attack. She almost didn’t make it. The rush of air when the doors gave out almost took her off her feet. But she was in one of the side corridors then, a little further away from the dock. Someone–she still doesn’t know who–grabbed her, pulled her along, got her across the border. It sealed shut behind her, leaving her sprawled across the floor, gasping for air.
Just before she reaches the gallery, up in the Level 3 corridor, she runs into a group of people packing the passage. Two stompers are just beyond them, pushing the crowd back. Only one of the lights in the ceiling is working properly, but underneath it Anna can see lazy wisps of smoke curling through the air. She can smell it, too, hot and sharp.
She pushes herself onto her toes, craning her neck, trying to see what’s going on. She can just see into the gallery. There are no visible flames, but the catwalk is flickering with orange light. But why haven’t the suppression systems kicked in? Where’s the chemical foam?
A little way past the stompers holding the crowd back, a technician is down on his haunches, doing something to the wall. One of the panels has been removed, and the stomper is messing with the wiring, cursing and swearing. He grabs a hand-held plasma cutter, sparks it to life. That’s when Anna realises what’s happening: the suppression systems really have failed. If they can’t fix them, the fire will rage out of control.
“What’s happening?” she says to a man in the crowd.
“Electrical fire,” he answers, not looking at her. “Circuit in the gallery floor just blew up.”
And this is when Anna realises that there’s nothing she can do to help.
She can run, and she can shoot. In the past few days, after Outer Earth shrank down to this single, tiny sector, she’s discovered that she’s good with kids, looking after several of those who found their way into Apex, who lost their moms and dads. Right now? None of those things are worth spit. What was she thinking?
At that moment, Anna feels every single one of her sixteen years. Sure, she could fight through the crowd, use her tracer training to get all the way to the front, but what good would it do? At least it looks like the stompers got everybody out–there should be nothing in the gallery but the escape pods, which won’t do anyone much good anyway. No point escaping if you don’t have enough fuel to de-orbit. Even if you somehow managed it, your pod would incinerat
e the second it hit the atmosphere.
She leans against the corridor wall, her eyes closed, fists knotted in frustration.
Two stompers, clad in black and grey, are trying to push through the crowd. They’re a few feet away from Anna when she sees that one of them has a squat, orange gas canister in her hand. Supplies for the plasma cutters being used to weld the metal across the edge of the door.
But the crowd isn’t parting. They aren’t letting the stompers through.
Anna moves without thinking. She snatches the canister away. It’s ice-cold, the pressurised gas inside filming the metal surface with condensation.
The stomper who was holding it lashes out at her in surprised fury. Anna ignores her. She takes two steps towards the opposite corridor wall, and jumps. She leads with her right foot, planting it squarely halfway up the wall, then uses it to kick her body upwards and outwards. She twists in mid-air, and now she’s high enough to look over the heads of the crowd, all the way to the door.
Anna used to have a slingshot. She called it One Mile. It was nothing more than crudely welded metal with frayed rubber strips, but in her hand it became something else entirely. She could plant a shiny ball-bearing in a target from fifty yards away, knock grown men off their feet, shatter jaws and break fingers. She was that good.
One Mile is gone, lost when she and Riley and Aaron Carver were captured by the Earthers. But Anna can still shoot. She can still aim.
She throws the canister backhanded, sending it flying over the heads of the crowd. One of the technicians is quicker on the uptake than the others: he catches it, taking it in the stomach as he wraps his hands around it. Anna has just enough time to see him turn, handing it off to someone else, and then she crashes to the ground.
The stompers pick her up, slam her against the corridor wall. She even recognises one of them: Alana Jordan, a heavy-set woman with long black hair and a sour face.
That’s when she hears the click-hiss of the suppression chemicals. The smell of smoke vanishes, replaced by the iodine tang of the foam.
The crowd is cheering, high-fiving each other, hugging. One of the technicians–maybe even the one who caught the canister–is shouting over the noise. “We got it. It’s contained.”
Everyone visibly relaxes, shaking their heads and laughing, like all their problems have just been solved. Jordan lets Anna go. She dusts herself off, a small smile creeping across her face.
A man detaches himself from the crowd. He’s handsome, mid-twenties, with angular cheekbones. He’s dressed in the white jumpsuit of a council member, and he looks exhausted, his eyes bloodshot. Anna’s smile vanishes. Dax Schmidt is the last person she wants to talk to.
“Are you out of your mind?” he shouts at her.
No, Anna thinks. I’ve only got one foot out the door. She’s on the verge of spitting the comeback right in his face, but he looks as if he wants to reach over and strangle her. His anger is unbelievable, and it stops the words in her throat.
“That canister could have exploded,” he says. “You could have killed a lot of people.”
“Well, it didn’t,” Anna says, furious and embarrassed at the same time. People in the crowd are looking over at her, not even bothering to disguise their interest. “Besides,” Anna says, pointing to Jordan. “They weren’t going to get there in time.”
“What? The gas? They were doing fine. They didn’t need extra.” Dax looks back over to the technician–they can see him clearly now that the crowd is dispersing. He’s slotting the panel back on the wall, the plasma cutter by his side.
“But the stompers were—”
“I don’t know how much you know about plasma cutters,” Dax says. “They use them in space. They last for a really long time. You think the tech couldn’t use a single canister to cut through a couple of fused power boxes?
“But they—” Anna stops. Every word feels like it takes a year off her age. She wants to tell Dax that she’s killed people. That she had a long gun, during the siege in the dock. But she can’t figure out how to say it without sounding stupid.
“It’s called a back-up, Anna. I sent word to the protection officers to bring it over in case the first one failed.”
“Leave her be, Dax,” says Jordan, turning away. “She’s just a kid.”
Dax starts to follow, then looks back over his shoulder. “You shouldn’t be here. Go home.”
Anna watches him leave. The exhaustion hits her like a punch to the gut, and she slides down the wall, breathing hard. She reaches up, grabs the edge of her beanie, and pulls it down over her eyes. Her blonde hair splays across her cheeks.
She would do anything to have Riley here right now. Riley, and Carver, and Kev. She has to tell herself, not for the first time, that they’re gone.
It’s just her.
15
Riley
I’m breathing too fast. I try to slow it down, but it doesn’t help. Each breath sucks icy air into my lungs, slicing through me like a knife.
I don’t bother calling Syria’s name any more. I don’t even know if he’s able to respond. Chances are, he’s probably passed out from the pain.
The wonder I felt at being on Earth has left with the daylight. The sky above me is pitch-black now. I just walk, heading uphill, trying to ignore the fact that nothing around me looks familiar. I laugh, the sound bitter against the wind–it doesn’t matter. This landscape is the same for who knows how many miles in each direction. What were the Earthers thinking, coming down here?
My thoughts wander too far, and I lose control of my water container.
I’m already gripping the fabric so hard that my hands are aching and numb. I catch my right foot in a pile of rocks, or a plant root, or something, and the fingers on my right hand lose their grip.
There’s a panicky moment where I’m scrabbling in the dark, half hoping that I can catch the edges again. Then a deluge of icy water drenches my pants. The leaf-filled shirt flops against me, dripping the last of its load onto the frozen soil.
For a long moment I just stand there, staring out into the darkness. Then I grab the shirt and ball it up, furiously scrunching the fabric. I hurl it away, and it gives a wet thud as it slaps off a nearby rock.
I howl. That’s what it is: an uncontrolled, animal howl. It’s a hot anger, burning bright, as if trying to force back the cold air.
And as my voice trails off, as the howl dies in my throat, there’s an answering sound.
It comes from a long way away–a coughing bark, almost inaudible. I freeze, listening hard. The bark comes again. It’s deeper this time, more drawn out, but then it’s gone.
Seconds tick by. I let out a breath, the cloud dissipating into the night air. There’s not just anger now–there’s fear, too, flooding my mouth with a familiar metallic taste.
Whatever’s out there isn’t a picture in a tab screen or part of a story told by a teacher in some Outer Earth schoolroom. It’s alive.
And it knows I’m here.
I start walking again, reducing everything to the physical motion of putting one foot in front of the other. I don’t know if I’m going in the right direction, but if I don’t keep moving I know that I’ll just lie down and never get up again. I keep the slope ahead of me, keep climbing. Climb high enough, and you can get all the way to the top of the mountain.
I’m so deep in myself, so intent on movement, that I don’t realise I’ve found Syria until I almost trip over him.
He’s lying where I left him, prone in the depression. I get my footing, then drop to my knees next to him.
“Syria,” I say. He doesn’t respond.
My mind is already moving ahead of my words. I lost the water, but I can still hear the stream. I’ll have to take him there, over my shoulders if I have to, no matter how much pain he’s in.
He hasn’t moved. “Syria,” I say again, shaking his shoulder. The flesh beneath my fingers is a gummy crust. Even the lightest touch must cause him excruciating pain, so why isn’t he�
�
Then I’m shaking him, trying to roll him over, screaming his name.
The screams dissolve into sobs. I sit back, shoulders shaking, breath coming in hitching gasps. It’s almost completely dark now–I can’t see further than a few feet in any direction.
He shouldn’t have died here. He should have died on Outer Earth, in the Caves, the place he protected and watched over. He should have died years from now, surrounded by his friends. Instead, he died alone, in agony. Thousands of miles from home.
Okwembu.
Her name arrives in my mind from nowhere. It’s a strange thought, as if someone else is speaking the word. I react, hammering on the ground, once, twice, a third time, tiny rocks leaving impressions in my skin. I barely notice. All I can see is her face.
She made me kill my dad, she helped destroy our home, she took my friends away from me when she shoved me out of the first escape pod. She didn’t kill Syria, not directly, but she’s why he’s here. Without her, the Earthers’ plan would never have worked. And now she’s taken away the last link I had to Outer Earth.
It all comes back to her. All of it.
I’ve never felt such anger. The thought is so potent that, for a time, it’s all I can hold in my head. When I come back, I realise I’m shivering, shaking so hard that my teeth chatter. Everything below my waist feels like it’s made of ice.
I’ll never find the stream again in the dark. I barely found it in the light. I decide to stay where I am–I can survive a night without water. But I have to get warm. The last time I was this cold was in the Core, back when Oren Darnell had Outer Earth held hostage, and that was a cold that nearly gave me hypothermia. If I don’t find a way to get warm, I’m as good as dead.
I can’t make a fire–or at least I have no idea how to. It’s not the kind of thing they teach you on Outer Earth, where the general idea is to avoid fire of any kind. Besides, there’s nothing to burn.
Inspiration strikes, and I jump up, running on the spot. But it only makes my aching muscles hurt more, and doesn’t generate anywhere near the amount of heat I’d need.