Mark shuffled closer to stand beside her. His jaw was tight even as he tried to smile.
He’s on the chopping block, too. April’s hack had confirmed the double elimination: one man and one woman. Mark, Lewis, and Govind were in danger of being sent out through the airlock into the Arizona night. For the women, Lori had a single impediment to expulsion: Chrissy.
Until April whispered those names to Lori in the bathroom, Lori hadn’t fathomed that April was sharing her inside information only with her—and now Mark, too. Here April stood at her side, gripping Lori’s hand and exhibiting as much anxiety as if her own name were on the short list.
“Tonight, two of you will be eliminated from the Mars Ho competition.” Gary’s eyes never quite lost their sparkle even as he kept his voice steady and cool. “This time, the decision is made by the People of Earth, with a record number of votes coming in from around the world to determine which candidates will stay, and which candidates will exit the airlock one final time.”
“Why is it always the freaking airlock?” Trent muttered. If Gary heard the comment, he didn’t react. “They’re making it like an execution. Like somebody’s about to get spaced.”
Lori felt Mark’s deep inhalation. She brushed her free hand against his and then clasped it tight. He squeezed her fingers and leaned closer.
“If one of us has to go, I just need to tell you . . .” Mark began.
“You’ll send a video message,” said April, her eyes glued to the screen as Gary rambled on about the significance of the Mars Colony Program in general and Mars Ho in particular, and how unprecedented it was for the “People of Earth” to take an active role in this first step toward seeding humanity throughout the stars.
“For now, grace under pressure,” April added.
Bolstered by Mark and April on either side, Lori lifted her chin and readied herself for whatever would come next.
“And so, without further delay, the time has come for two of you to exit the Mars Ho Candidate Habitat and leave behind your dreams of the Red Planet.”
“Jesus, who wrote this shit?” Leah complained, not bothering to keep her volume particularly low. “Just read the names and get it over with.”
Gary’s mouth twisted into an awkward smile as he registered the rebuke. But he didn’t miss a beat. He stared directly into the camera to deliver the candidates’ sentence. The picture zoomed in to frame his flawless face.
“The People of Earth have had their say,” Gary said. “Lewis Muldoon and Chrissy Smirch. Grab your bags. You’re going home.”
9
In the few hours since the airlock vote, Lori had wandered the biodome corridors for a couple of mindless laps. Then she ducked into the kitchen for the largest cup of hot tea should could manage—an 18-ounce insulated thermos. Finally, she secluded herself in the grow unit to gaze on the tender young plants in a kind of meditation.
She sipped her tea, inhaled the reassuring scent of fertilized soil, and listened to her breath rising and falling in rhythm with the irrigation she’d set up for her tomatoes. After a small adjustment to the lights over her bamboo, Lori moved over to April’s plot and was cheered to see that her friend’s plants were coming along nicely.
Two elimination events in a row had nearly sent her through the airlock. Sixteen candidates remained, to be whittled down to a final colony team of eight. Even ejecting two candidates at a time meant another five elimination rounds. Would she, and her nerves, survive that long?
Lori paced the narrow aisles between the garden plots. She imagined herself in the grow unit on Mars, in the reduced gravity, and tried to estimate the dimensions of that space. How much amended soil would it take? What rotation of crops would they experiment with, and what plants would produce first?
There weren’t any hard figures—or even speculative ones—provided to the candidates, and it made her wonder just how much planning had gone into Mars Ho. And worse, what gaps might exist in the colony preparations. Looking over Yoshiko’s tiny kale plants, Lori wondered how long the colonists would have to rely on freeze-dried stores and whatever slop they managed to squeeze out of the food printers.
But then she came to Mark’s plot, and she forgot all about supply ships and irrigation systems. This was the spot where Mark had pulled her close and kissed her so deeply she could still feel the tingle in her toes. Where he’d told her that though they might be competitors for seats on a Mars-bound spacecraft, he wasn’t playing any games.
And she believed him.
She drank her tea and kept walking.
Lori thought back over April’s inside information and realized that neither Cecilia nor her husband, Oskar, had yet been up for elimination. Was that just how the candidate rankings stacked up? Or maybe Cecilia was right about couples having an advantage.
Lori paused by a row of neatly spaced tomato and bush bean plants. Trevor Azam’s plot. Could the spark she felt with Mark be the beginning of real love? She didn’t know how to predict whether the attraction would survive beyond launch, much less endure the difficult start of a new colony. Maybe April had a compatibility calculator in her spreadsheet.
Life could only be understood backward, her father had told her, but it had to be lived forward.
Lori knocked back the dregs of her lukewarm tea, determined to seek out Mark Lauren.
Mark had hunted through nearly the entire biodome when he finally found her, curled up on one of the foam mats in the fitness room and tapping furiously on her tablet.
“You’re a difficult woman to locate”
April looked up and seemed surprised to see him. “You were looking for me?”
Mark walked to the edge of her mat and stopped. “You offered your counseling services earlier.”
“Right.” April glanced beyond him, her eyes scanning the room. She swiped her fingers across her tablet screen a few times, tapped out something on her virtual keyboard, then turned off her tablet and set it down. She patted the blue foam next to her. “How can I help?”
Mark sat beside her and rested back against the wall, his arms propped on his knees. “Did you just turn the cameras off?”
April folded herself into a complicated, cross-legged position that made her tiny body look even smaller. “That would have triggered somebody’s alarm bells.” Her smile contained a hint of mischief. “I just interfered with the mics in this corner. So you don’t have to worry about your words getting beamed all over the planet.”
“I don’t know how you’re getting away with it, but I respect that you’re upfront about it.”
“You wanted to talk?”
He took a deep breath. Outside of that brief respite with Lori, he couldn’t think of a time inside the biodome when he’d spoken freely. It was taking considerably longer than a few days to acclimate to the biodome’s surveillance state.
“That’s twice now I’ve nearly been expelled.”
“That’s got to have shaken you up,” she said.
“It’s not just that. I’m afraid my interest in Lori might hurt her chances.”
“How do you figure?”
“Before I came into medical isolation, there was . . . I didn’t think I would meet someone like Lori in here. Someone genuine and smart and attractive and driven.”
“You like her.”
Mark laughed. “You’ve a gift for understatement.”
“So how would that hurt Lori?”
“There’s the unspoken assumption that we’re supposed to pair off into happy little colonist couples before we jet off to Mars, right?”
April’s mouth hardened, and she nodded.
“Say Lori ends up associated with me, and I’m prickly and antisocial and always in danger of getting voted out.”
April patted her tablet. “You’re actually one of the stronger candidates in here. Maybe you could open up more, and let the rest of the world see the real you.”
“You think you know something about the real me?” Mark’s voice was sharper than
he intended. He nodded toward her tablet. “You’ve got all my data in your spreadsheet, my ranking against the other men, my odds of being a finalist, and which woman is most likely to be at my side?”
April shrugged off his anger. “Just playing the game and trying to make the final team myself. Like you said, I never made any secret of that.”
Mark shook his head and leaned away from her. “You doubtless possess some fine qualities and vital skills, April, but I’ll tell you in no uncertain terms that I’m not interested.”
April laughed instead of giving him the snark he expected. “Good. The feeling is mutual. I wouldn’t waste my time on a man who’s clearly smitten with someone else. Plus, you know I’d never do that to Lori, Mars or no Mars.”
“Okay then.” Mark felt his shoulders loosening up.
Govind sauntered into the fitness room, cast a curious glance toward Mark and April, then climbed on one of the exercise bikes on the far side of the room.
“Can I ask you something?” April slid closer. “If you had to choose between Mars and Lori?”
Mark looked up at the ceiling. He’d made nearly the same decision once already, before he entered isolation. He could argue that it had been more straightforward with Sarah, that the stakes hadn’t been as high. But that was little more than a convenient rationalization.
“My girlfriend and I applied together. I got in. She didn’t.”
April pursed her lips, thinking.
“We’d agreed . . .” Mark slouched against the wall. “If that happened, the one who was accepted would enter the program. We’d end the relationship. Then the other would reapply for the next shot.”
“But that’s not what happened.”
Mark grimaced. “We set a date for the break-up, wrote it on the calendar.” He looked at April and lifted his eyebrows at the ludicrous nature of the idea. “And how do you do that, really? ‘Oh, it’s okay, honey. We’ll call it quits in two weeks.’”
Mark looked back up at the ceiling, grateful for the disabled microphones.
“It was tense. Lots of bickering. She was pissed.” He shifted, trying to get comfortable against the wall. “Like it was my fault. She said she’d reapply, but I think being first really meant something to her. Those last weeks were mostly dinner parties, to say goodbye to everybody before I came to Arizona.”
Mark stopped and swallowed hard. He didn’t want to give voice to what had happened next. He coughed, knowing it was a delaying tactic. “Four nights before I was due to leave. Some of my friends wanted to go to one last hockey game. Something Sarah didn’t really care for. It was a good game, Canucks and Maple Leafs.”
“Hockey wasn’t the problem.”
Mark nodded at April’s tablet. “You’ve already got this story in there?”
“None of this is in your profile.”
“Well, there’s that at least.” He scooted back against the wall and sat up straight. “When I came home, after the game, I found Sarah with someone else. Another friend who hadn’t made the program. Four of us applied together.”
“And you’re the only one here.”
“Even if I get eliminated . . .” He spread his hands in front of him. “So that’s it. That’s my story.”
“That’s hardly the end of your story, Mark.”
“It’s as good a reason as any for why I’ve been the way I’ve been in here.” He tried to smile, but the muscles in his face didn’t want to cooperate. “I’m actually a really friendly guy.”
April laughed. “Did you love her?”
He was about to answer in the affirmative, the response that had become habit. But April noticed his pause, and he shrugged. “I thought so.”
“But not like Lori.”
Mark rubbed his hands together. He wasn’t ready to think about how he felt about Lori. Either of them could be voted out at any moment. If one of them got chosen for Mars and the other one didn’t, he might find himself slogging through another Mars Ho competition inside the dome while she was more than 50 million kilometers away at the closest Earth-Mars alignment.
April changed the subject. “So let me ask you this: Why Mars?”
“Why Mars?”
April shrugged. “It’s the same question we’ve all had thrown at us, over and over again before we even got to quarantine. You know, why sign up for something that would send you so far away from home and from everyone and everything you love, permanently? But what’s your real answer?”
Mark stared at her as he sorted through the responses he’d given over the months between his application and his Mars Ho acceptance. The heroic and selfless answers. The ones about adventure and exploration. The quiet, introspective responses about little boy dreams made real. The easy George Mallory quip: “Because it’s there.”
Mars had loomed so large for so long that longing for it had become a part of him, like a limb. He didn’t know how to justify it. It simply was.
“We’re all running from something, Mark.” April’s eyes misted over and she crossed her arms over her chest. Her tablet slipped off her lap. “No one signs up for a trip like this otherwise.”
“Come on, now.” Mark smiled, hoping that would be of comfort. “I can’t imagine someone as vivacious as you are would just abandon a planet brimming with possibilities. You’re not running away.”
“I have a secret, and it’s not my spreadsheet or my hacking into the Mars Ho servers.”
April glanced up at the cameras, then checked to make sure Govind wasn’t listening. Cycling steadily on the exercise bike, Govind had buds stuffed in his ears and bobbed his head in rhythm, probably to the Hindi rap he was always blasting from his bunk.
Still, April leaned close to Mark and lowered her voice. “I’m asexual.” She paused, waiting and watching him. “I lied on my application about having boyfriend. I’m actively trying to leave a world that’s obsessed with who’s sleeping with whom and where everybody falls on the Kinsey Scale. It’s not a comfortable place for someone who’s not on that continuum at all.”
Tears ran over the curves of April’s cheeks. Mark wished he had a tissue to offer, but handkerchiefs weren’t part of the Mars Ho uniform. “You could have fooled me.” He kept his voice gentle.
April wiped her eyes. “Yeah, I’ve got a good game face, don’t I? Years of practice.”
“So The Mars Ho is anything but?”
April laughed, and then turned suddenly serious. “I wasn’t molested or abused or anything like that. I’m healthy, body and mind, and I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. It’s simply who I am.” She laughed again. “And frankly, I’m still trying to understand all the effort the rest of you invest in mating.”
Mark’s brows knitted together. He thought about Paula and her disqualification, though the powers-that-be wouldn’t officially admit they were looking for only cis-sexual men and women to be the first human settlers on Mars. It was quaint at best, bigoted at worst, even with vague promises of greater inclusiveness in later colony teams.
But while Paula waited on the bench in hopes that her turn might eventually come around, April had faked her way in—probably altered her electronic records, covered any trail that might lead to her secret. It was disingenuous. She might have even stolen someone else’s spot.
Mark stared at her. She’d broken the rules, but now she was trusting him with her secret. She wasn’t letting anybody else tell her what she was allowed to strive for.
“But if you’re selected as a colonist?”
“Then I’ll have to find a mate?” April waved the thought away. “I can wing it, if I have to. They’ll probably use test tubes for most of it, anyway. Besides, the Blocks are always on about how the colony will be a prime laboratory for experimenting with polyamory. It’s possible my individual participation wouldn’t be missed.”
They laughed together, and then April’s tears started to flow more freely. Mark drew her into his arms, her tiny body fitting easily against his as he held her tight and
comforted his friend.
It took some time to find him, though hunting for Mark through the biodome did give Lori the opportunity to refill her thermos. She wondered what would happen once the initial stores of Highland Coffee & Tea ran out on Mars. Setting up a new Martian home and laying the groundwork for an enduring colony would not be easily done on caffeine-withdrawal headaches.
She followed the curving corridor and tried to ignore the unmistakable sounds of lovemaking drifting down from the dome’s ductwork. Was it the same couple every time? These intrusions had irritated her at first, but now she smiled a little. Maybe someone else had found real love inside the dome, too.
Lori spotted Govind as she stepped inside the fitness center. He was climbing down from one of the exercise bikes and mopping his sweat with a Bamboo You towel. He caught Lori’s eye and nodded toward the back of the room.
Following his gesture, Lori saw Mark sitting on the floor, hunched over in the shadows, and she started toward him. But she stopped short when she saw April pull out of his embrace. April smiled at him and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
The breath flooded out of Lori’s body. She wanted to turn and run away, quickly, before her presence was noted, but she couldn’t move. Her face burned cold scarlet as she remained frozen, staring at Mark and April huddled together, looking cozy.
No doubt April had turned off the cameras to give herself a little privacy while she canoodled with Mark, even if the fitness room was a curiously public site for intimacy.
Lori watched them murmur to each other, their faces close and expressive as they . . . What? Shared their most private thoughts and feelings? Worked out the details of their strategic romantic alliance? There was no time-out from the reality show. Every moment could be make or break when it came to securing a seat on the colony ship.
Mars Ho! (Mars Adventure Romance Series Book 1) Page 12