Half Way Home (8 page)

So we worked in a silence punctuated by the occasional grunt of frustration from someone in our group. Every now and then, a bombfruit whistled outside and all of us cringed in fear. Even though there was a roof overhead to protect us.

It’s amazing how quickly you get used to things. My head was full of an education on how to help brains on the verge of breaking, but all I’d seen around me was them bending more and more under a growing strain and somehow remaining whole. For all the studying I’d done on the fragility of a thing, here I was a witness and example of its incredible perseverance.

Another thing I noticed was how quickly the human brain paired causal events. “A” leads to “B.” We love to make that link, however tenuous. Like how Tarsi hits people when she’s joking. As soon as she slaps someone, you can expect her odd little laugh to follow. The one event follows the other like clockwork. Kelvin and I make fun of the habit, telling her we aren’t going to laugh on command anymore. That’s why we think she does it, like a little threat of violence if we don’t find the last thing she said humorous.

Still, the harder we try not to laugh, the more we end up doing it. Harder and more often of late, it seemed, despite the longer days and the less time we spent together. More evidence of our bending without breaking.

The whistle of the bombfruit was another of those causal pairs. After the whistle, there was usually a bang. Often, it was the softer thud of the rind exploding as it hit the mud, the dirt mixing with our next meal. But sometimes, it was the booming report of a large bombfruit hitting something metal. The next day, a dining group might find a new dent in their gold table and breakfast already spread out, dutifully tended to by a variety of little worms.

Whistle followed by explosion. Like clockwork. There was always the warning of the first before the bang of the latter. The in-between time was spent tensed up, waiting.

My nerves, then, were not prepared when the sounds reversed themselves. It was late at night, and my group was struggling along to meet its quota. Several of us worked outside joining pipes—not just to keep the fumes of our welding irons away from the others, but because of the ironic state of our lighting. The bulbs outside burned brighter than the dim flickering
within
the power module, which struggled to keep up with demand.

The explosion came without warning. A loud boom. My entire body twitched, and I dropped my iron. We all looked at each other, wondering what had happened. Then the high-pitched screaming started. The two noises had come in the wrong order.

I left my iron in the dirt and ran toward the source, trying to keep up with Muriel, who had taken off immediately.

The wail emanated from the direction of the launch pad. Other colonists converged on it as well, despite the shouts from enforcers to return to our stations. One of them raised his gun and fired a shot straight up.

I cringed, then I realized the sound from the gun was the same as the one we’d heard earlier. The whistling noise was distant shrieks, which grew louder as we stumbled down the slope toward the rocket site.

Several enforcers stood together, their gleaming guns drawn. Hickson came running up to join them, shouting questions. Stephany, one of the girls I knew through Kelvin, sat in the dirt, screaming. She held someone in her lap—an eerie recreation of what I’d come upon the day Stevens died. The boy was large and unmoving, and for a second I thought it was Kelvin, but then I saw him drop down from the scaffolding.

“What did you
do
?” Stephany shrieked, rocking back and forth. I ran to her, joining Julie—a nurse who had become, by default, the base’s doctor.

The boy had both hands pressed to his stomach, vainly attempting to staunch the flow of blood. His chest heaved in and out rapidly; the only other thing moving was his eyes, which darted back and forth between us.

“Let me see,” Julie said, pulling his hands away and pushing the thin fabric of his top up to his chest. Blood welled out, thick and dark; she immediately placed her hands over the wound and started barking out commands: water, clean towels, coagulant. I didn’t hear what else. Someone pulled me back forcefully.

“Give them room,” Hickson said.

I stumbled backward, feeling a fury rise up inside. One of the enforcers came to me, holding the gun out between us, but he wasn’t threatening me with it. He held it limp and on its side, looking at it like he wasn’t sure how it got there.

“I didn’t mean to—” he said. He looked at me, water coating his eyes. “He was trying to take an extra break,” he told me. “I didn’t mean to—”

I pushed the gun down, getting the barrel away from me, and looked around for Kelvin. He stood beside the scaffolding, his fists clenched in front of him, his eyes glaring daggers at Hickson.

I stepped away from the enforcer, making him cope with his guilt alone, and ran to my friend to save him from making a huge mistake.

Later that night, the three of us sat together in the cab of our tractor, the overhead light turned up just enough so we wouldn’t bump into each other. It felt hot and muggy inside, but none of us felt safe out on the hood. Partly out of fear of being overheard, and partly out of fear of the bombs overhead.

“We need to get out of here,” Kelvin said, looking back and forth between Tarsi and I.

“And go where?” Tarsi asked. “Just wander out into the wilderness of a planet we haven’t been properly oriented for? Colony won’t even show anyone the satellite maps. We have no idea what’s out there.”

“We know what’s in here,” Kelvin said.

“Tarsi’s right,” I told Kelvin. “Besides, we would just be abandoning everyone else.”

“Anyone that wants to come, can come,” he said. “The more the merrier. The place gets enough rain, right? And there must be tons of bombfruit out there, especially since the tremors. It’ll last us until we get started—”

“Started on what?” I asked. “Rubbing sticks together? Do you have any idea how long it would take us to rebuild a fraction of this?”

Kelvin squared his shoulders at me and raised his voice. “Do you have any idea how long we’ll last here if we keep killing one another?”

“Settle down,” Tarsi said. “Both of you.”

“I’m sorry,” Kelvin said. “I’m just angry at what happened today. I knew that enforcer was going to do something. We’ve been whispering about it all across the scaffolding today. Hell, I should’ve done something earlier.”

“Then
you’d
be the one getting a blood transfusion,” Tarsi said, holding his arm with both her hands.

Kelvin sniffed, his mouth tilting up at an angle. He looked to each of us in turn. “You guys can stay here if you want,” he said, “but I’m leaving. I’m gonna take a piece of magnesium from the supply store and a machete, so I can start a fire. Maybe a few strips of tarp for carrying water or to make a shelter. Not much. I don’t care if I only last a week, I’m not gonna sit here and watch us tear each other apart.”

Before I could complain, Tarsi floored me with her reaction.

“I’ll come with you,” she said. “I can grab a few seed packets from support in the morning. But I think we should spread the word, give others the chance to join us.”

I shook my head at this, arguing tactics when what I should’ve been doing was dismissing their entire plan. “Tell anyone and you’ll be stopped. By force.”

“So you’re staying,” Kelvin said.

“I don’t think I can leave,” I told them. I immediately recognized the hurt on Tarsi’s face. “I’m sorry, it just feels suicidal to me. And I think you guys should sleep on it and reconsider. Give it a day, at least. Once you go, Hickson will know what happened. I don’t think you’ll be able to come back—”

Saying it cemented the seriousness of what they were considering. I pictured myself sleeping in the tractor at night. Alone. I turned away and pretended to peer through the cab’s glass, but it was fogged with a billion droplets of our condensed worry.

“I don’t want you guys to go,” I whispered. “There’s no telling what’s beyond our perimeter.”

“We’ll give it a day,” Tarsi said. I felt her turn away from me to face Kelvin. “Is that okay with you? We could use it to gather a few things. Another day like today, and I don’t think we’ll be alone in going.”

“Another day like today, and I won’t have any of my sanity left,” Kelvin said. “In which case, the shrink here will
have
to come.”

Tarsi slapped him in my defense—which automatically got us laughing. It felt nice, even if we weren’t sure why we were doing it.

And I don’t know that we would’ve been laughing, had we known it would be the last time the three of us enjoyed a moment like that in our small home. Because, even though Tarsi and Kelvin had agreed to wait a day, we would soon discover that the day would not wait for us.

For the second straight night, I hardly slept a wink. And when I did, more nightmares chased me, nightmares of waking and finding myself alone. Several times, I snuck out and sat on the hood, trying to catch the glimpse of a star through the dense canopy overhead and listening to the occasional whistle of breakfast falling, cringing in anticipation of getting whacked the way Kelvin had.

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—”