“It’s Jay. He’s . . .” Chris shakes his head. “Come on.”
I follow Chris to the supply depot. We wind around racks of equipment and stacks of extra clothes and boots to a door in the back wall. Chris pushes it open and ushers me into a walk-in supply closet, like the one Beth and I have coopted in the greenhouse.
The shelves that line the walls are mostly empty. A low table in the center of the square room holds a tangle of beakers and metal tubing suspended above a pair of Bunsen burners. Clear liquid drips out of one of the tubes into a bag.
I knew the engineers had a still somewhere, but I didn’t know where they kept it. I’m the commander’s daughter and the admiral’s granddaughter. Nobody’s going to tell me where they keep the contraband.
“I told you to leave me alone.” Jay’s voice is sticky and slurred.
I look past the still, into the shadows at the back of the little room. He’s sitting on the floor, clutching a mostly empty bag of alcohol. A second bag is empty at his feet.
“You’re drinking,” I say, shocked. Jay never drinks. Alcohol messes with the nanobots in his nervous system that let him control his braces.
“I’m drunk,” he corrects, sucking the bag dry and dropping it on the floor.
I throw a look back at Chris. He shrugs. “That’s why I went to get you. I didn’t want to risk someone else finding him and reporting him.”
“Relax, squirt,” Jay says. “I can take care of myself.”
Chris’s eyes narrow. He hates it when people talk to him like he’s a little kid. Jay knows that. He’s being a jerk on purpose.
“You did the right thing, Chris,” I say. “Can you get him some coffee?”
“That is going to be counterproductive,” Jay grumbles. “To my goal. Of being drunk.”
“I think you’re mission accomplished on that one,” Chris mutters sourly. Then he shoves his way out of the storage room, leaving us alone.
I sit next to Jay and slip my hand into his. I almost expect him to push me away, but he doesn’t.
We sit there for a while. Finally, he says, “I killed seven Takers today, and it wasn’t enough.”
“You saved my life today,” I say. “And Leela’s. And maybe the lives of all the survivors on the Prairie, if the Sorrow had gotten away with the Trailblazer. Your mom. Your sister.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” he whispers. “I had to do it. I didn’t have a choice. But neither did they.”
“They attacked us, Jay,” I protest, but he cuts me off.
“They’re just trying to defend their home,” he says. “And I had to kill them for it. Seven beings. And it should have been eight. But I couldn’t . . .” He slams his head back against the shelves behind us. “Why couldn’t I pull the trigger?”
“The gray Sorrow was running away,” I point out again.
“And they didn’t hesitate to kill Hart, when he got in their way.” Tears start to roll down Jay’s cheeks. “Pulling the trigger was so easy, the first time. That Taker was swinging his hammer at you and I . . . it was like my hands just did it. All on their own. But once we were out of the heat of the moment, it was different. I knew I needed to shoot that gray Sorrow. I knew it. But I went to pull the trigger and . . .” He scrubs at his face. “Damn it. What’s wrong with me?”
“You couldn’t have known what would happen,” I insist.
“No. And I can’t know what will happen if I hesitate again. I need to be . . .” He trails off. Swallows hard. “I don’t know if I can be what I need to be.”
“You mean the kind of person who’d shoot another being in the back?”
“Hart had three younger brothers,” Jay whispers. “His adopted parents died last year, so he was raising them. Those kids are sleeping in the mess hall right now, with the Prairie families. One of them is only ten. And now they’re going to be orphaned all over again on an alien planet because I am not the kind of person who can shoot another being in the back.”
I want to tell him he’s wrong, but he isn’t.
I want to tell him that doesn’t matter, but it does.
I want to tell him that we need him to be exactly the kind of person he is. I want to tell him that I need him to be himself. But I don’t know if that will help him. I don’t know if this world is going to let him be the sweet, thoughtful man he is.
“What does it matter how I shoot a Sorrow, anyway?” Jay cries. “It’s not like anything about this is ever going to be fair. This is the Sorrow’s planet and we have to take it from them. Our people need it. My mom, my sister, they need this place. And it’s my job to make sure that they’re safe here. I want to do that. I really do. But doing that means that I’m going to have to kill more beings who are just trying to protect their home. Their families. Their way of life. How do I live with that?”
How can any of us live with that?
I have no idea.
I wrap my arms around Jay’s waist and pull him against me, like I can put myself between him and all the horrible thoughts. His arms close around me, hard enough to shoot fresh pain through my ribs. I ignore it and burrow closer.
We stay that way until Chris comes back with Beth instead of coffee.
“I thought Dr. Kao would ask a lot of questions if I took a thermos at this hour,” Chris says. “So I went to the greenhouse to use the coffee maker, and . . .”
“And I had a better idea,” my sister says, pulling a patch out of her pocket and holding it out to Jay. “This will help metabolize the alcohol. Much more effective than caffeine.”
“Thanks, B,” Jay mutters. But he doesn’t take the patch from her. I grab it and activate the adhesive, then press it against his neck. He doesn’t try to stop me.
It takes all three of us to get Jay to the greenhouse. Whatever the engineers are brewing in that still is strong. Even with the patch, he has a hard time staying awake on the walk. We help him onto my bed, and he’s snoring before I manage to get his braces all the way off.
When I come back into the greenhouse proper, Leela is there. She’s pale and her breath is ragged.
“Why aren’t you in medical, sucking nanobots?” I demand.
Leela shrugs. “Ask Beth. She texted. Said you needed me.”
“Overreaction,” I say. “Jay’s okay.”
“He’s not going to die of alcohol poisoning,” Beth says. “But that’s not the same as ‘okay.’”
“Don’t you think I know that?” I collapse at the lab table, fighting to hold back tears. “He’s not okay at all. And now . . . it’s just going to get worse.”
“You think the admiral’s going to go on the offensive?” Leela asks.
“Don’t you?”
She nods. “I’m going to enlist in the morning.”
“No!” The word jumps out of my mouth before I can stop it.
“Why not?” she demands. “Why should Jay and everyone else in the squads have to fight for us while I waste years of combat training sitting on the sidelines?”
“Lee-lu—” I start to say, but she cuts me off with a wheezing gasp.
“No, tell me, Jo. I’m begging you. Give me a reason not to pick up a gun.”
“If you’d seen Jay tonight—”
“Not good enough!” Leela cries. “I had three semesters of trauma-informed cognitive behavioral training at the Academy. Jay didn’t. I can take it.”
“No,” I say, more sure than I’ve been of anything in a long time. “You can’t. It’s not the violence. It’s . . . this isn’t self-defense. It’s survival. But that doesn’t change the fact that we’re taking their planet.” Jay’s words echo in my ears. “Killing beings who are protecting their home.”
Leela sucks in a ragged breath. “I can do that. I can do that to save our species. No. Screw that. To save our families. My cousins are up there. Ruti and Som and Bella and Harsh and . . .” She sucks in a shaky breath and swipes at the tears gathering in her eyes. “I can’t let them die because I don’t want to do what it takes t
o save them.”
I know that. But the pain in Jay’s eyes is painted over everything I see now. Every thought I have. I don’t want to see that look in Leela’s eyes. But I will. There’s no way to stop her. And I shouldn’t. We’re going to need her on the front lines, right next to Jay.
And what will I be doing? Delivering their bodies back to the Landing?
There has to be a better way.
I turn to Beth.
“This morning, up at the nest, you told me that you don’t trust Grandpa.”
She nods.
“I need you to tell me why.”
Beth stares at me. I meet her gaze and wait, trying hard not to hold my breath.
“Okay.” She shoves both hands through the ruff of hair that’s grown out from her usual buzz cut. “Okay.”
She takes a deep breath. My stomach clenches.
“You’ve always idolized Grandpa. And he has never given you reason to doubt him. But I know the lengths he’s willing to go to, in order to get what he wants. And I know . . .” She shakes her head. “No. I don’t know. I hypothesize that he often prioritizes his own needs over those of others. I don’t believe we can assume he has the best interests of our species at heart.”
“Nope.” Leela turns on her heel and marches to the exit. “Nope. I’m not doing this. If we start questioning each other. Fighting amongst ourselves—”
“We might find a better way to survive,” I say, cutting her off.
She stops, her hand on the door.
“You really think so?”
“There has to be a better way,” I say, trying to convince myself as much as Leela. I turn to my sister. “Tell me.”
“I was supposed to go to Stanford, remember?” Beth says. “I applied with a research proposal that the Earth Restoration Project had already committed to fund. I wanted to tailor bacteria to terraform soil on Earth to help repair the planet. Fix new nitrogen in the blight zones. Grow crops that would utilize the excess carbon in our atmosphere and stabilize the food supply. In success, it would have allowed the planet to find a new equilibrium. We would have been able to phase out artificial efforts that required maintenance.”
“Like nanofilters that might malfunction when you push an OS update, causing a cascade failure that eventually destroys the planet?” I say dully, realizing where she’s going with this.
Beth nods.
“My work would have made the filtration system obsolete, and the admiral killed it. He got the ERP to pull my funding and informed Stanford that he considered the research dangerously reckless.” She shrugs. “Given our experiences with my terraforming bacteria on Tau, he may have been right.”
“That was the ISA’s fault,” I protest. “If you’d known about the phytoraptors, things would have been different.”
Beth looks up at me, and just for a moment I see the grief burning in her eyes. The guilt. The longing. It’s easy to forget how deeply Beth feels things.
“Perhaps,” she says finally, “perhaps not. But it was a valid idea that might have saved Earth. It should have been explored.”
“But it would have made nanofilters a thing of the past. Which would have wiped out a big piece of the admiral’s legacy,” Leela says, realization wicking up the words.
Beth nods again.
“Mom tried to convince me that the atmospheric scrubbers had nothing to do with Grandpa’s decision,” she says. “Dad didn’t. He and Dr. Howard had to pull a lot of strings to get me into MIT and undo the damage Grandpa’s letter to Stanford did.”
I take the thought a step further. “The atmospheric scrubber system, his legacy, which destroyed Earth,” I say. “It killed most of humanity. That’s his legacy now. . . .”
“Unless he is the one who gives the human species a ‘new beginning,’” Beth says, quoting the words that Grandpa spoke that first night, minutes after he first stepped onto Tau soil. “Since he took command, we haven’t even stopped to debate his strategy. His way may be the right way. But it might not be.”
“I have to go to the Solace,” I say. “I have to go back and try to talk to Tarn.”
“What!” Leela cries. “Jo, the last time you saw him, he tried to kill you.”
“And Shelby tried to kill him,” I say. “Nobody did the right thing that night. Including me. And we never gave ourselves a chance to do better.”
Leela shakes her head. “Best-case scenario here is that we all get court-martialed.”
“No,” Chris says. He’s been quiet up till now. “Best-case scenario is we stop a war that should never have started in the first place. If I get court-martialed for that, I’m cool with it.”
“Agreed,” Beth says.
My hand drifts to the pips on my collar. These two little pins are literally the only thing about my life that turned out the way I expected it to. Better than I expected, really. Grandpa gave them to me himself. And he did it because he believes in me.
I don’t want to give that up.
I don’t want to let Grandpa down.
A wheezing snore sounds from the open door to Beth’s and my room, like a punch thrown wild against a harsh world.
Jay.
All I can see of him from here is one of his still-booted feet, hanging off the end of my cot. Even if he doesn’t die, he won’t survive a war with the Sorrow. Not as the boy I know. Not as the boy I love.
I love him, I realize, so abruptly and completely that my brain can’t even bother to be surprised. With that realization comes a certainty. The first one I’ve felt in a long time. Maybe since before we woke up in the Solace, almost a year ago.
It doesn’t matter if Tarn is my friend. It doesn’t matter if I can trust him. It doesn’t even really matter if he kills me. I have to go to the Solace, and I have to try to stop this war now, while I still can. Not just for the Sorrow’s sake, but for ours. For Leela and Jay and Mom and even Grandpa. He was just as crushed by the attack as the rest of us. And he said it himself. His caution might have cost us everything tonight. And if I don’t do this, it might still.
“I have to go to the Solace,” I repeat.
Leela huffs a sigh. “Don’t be stupid. We have to go to the Solace.”
“No,” I say. “Leela, I don’t want to risk—”
“Neither do I,” she snaps. “But I want to kill people who are just defending their home even less. Chris is right. At least this way, we die trying.”
“It probably won’t work,” I say quietly.
“So let’s be improbable,” Beth says. “Please.”
The words rebound through my brain, summoning another moment. Another certainty.
I knew for sure that I could save the Pioneer, even though Mom and everyone else thought the solar flare had doomed the ship. I was right, but Teddy died because of it.
I look from Beth to Leela to Chris, to the open door into the room where the boy I love lies heartbroken. Will one of them die for this? Can I live with that?
Does it matter?
If there is a better way, we’re it. Our people need us. This planet needs us.
We have to go back to the Solace.
Fifteen
The others are sleeping.
We agreed we won’t leave for the Solace until dawn, so resting is the smart thing to do. I can’t, so I’m packing. We’re not just going to run off with nothing but whatever happens to be stashed in our utility harnesses this time.
About 47 percent of me wants to go to Grandpa’s cabin and tell him what we’re planning. He’d stop us. Then my friends would be safe. I would be safe.
My stupid ensign tabs would be safe.
And everything and everyone I care about will be ruined.
But what if Grandpa is right? What if it is too late?
What if the Sorrow kill us all?
I shy away from the question and try to focus on my list. I’ve already packed beta flyer with dried rations, fresh water, three satellite phones, two tents, and a portable particle shield. It took some wor
k to fit it all in. I thought about removing the flyer’s emergency water-landing kit, which is bulky because it contains a self-inflating Zodiac and inflatable life jackets. If this goes according to plan, we won’t need them. We won’t be going anywhere near water. But nothing ever goes according to plan on Tau, so I found a way to fit it all in.
The next thing on my list is a fresh medical kit. The flyer’s kit is gone—someone must have grabbed it last night. I’ll have to sneak into the medical center for a new one. If I get caught, it’s going to be tough to explain why I’m restocking flyers in the middle of the night. We might not be able to get away.
I kind of hope I get caught.
I close the flyer’s ramp behind me and walk through the empty streets of the Landing to the medical center.
When I get there, the lights are turned low, so that the wounded can try to sleep. Doc has taken over for Dr. Kruppa, but they’re short staffed, so it’s just him and a medic. I wait until they’re both focused on a patient and then slip into Doc’s lab, where he keeps extra supplies.
The lab is the size of a single-family cabin. More than half of it is taken up by floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with diagnostic equipment and pharmaceutical supplies. There’s also a lab table, benches, and a small 3D printer used to print medical nanobots.
I grab a new medical kit from storage, then turn to leave and nearly collide with my mother.
“Mom!” I blurt out, startled.
“Joanna.” Her voice sounds calm, but it isn’t. There’s something tight inside it. Not anxious, exactly. There’s more anger in it than that.
She doesn’t ask me what I’m doing in Doc’s lab in the middle of the night. She doesn’t even slow down as she crosses to the morgue door and goes inside.
That room was supposed to be storage. We’ve been using it as a morgue since Ord called down a raptor attack on the Landing. We didn’t include one in the original plans for the medical center because it didn’t occur to anyone that we’d have a surplus of dead bodies anytime soon.
I follow her.
A big medical composter crouches at the back of the square room. Six insulated sleep crates are lined up on the floor in front of it. Inso crates are designed for deep sleep, but they work just as well to seal and preserve dead bodies so that their families can have a chance to say goodbye.
The Survivor Page 14