Half Way Home

“I’ll take a turn,” Oliver said, digging into his paste and watching Tarsi out of the corner of his eye.

Tarsi glared at me, her eyes angry slits.

“What?” I asked. “I swear, he’s just getting you back for calling him dumb just now.”

“We’ll talk about this later,” she said, turning back to her bowl.

“Yeah.” I looked across at Kelvin and held up my closed fist, the cool cylinder of gold wrapped up inside it. “We’ll talk about this later,” I whispered.

••••

That night, the three of us lounged on the hood of our tractor, recuperating from another day of impossible deadlines. For the first time, the metal surface was as cool as the night, as nothing had been done on the farms all day. It was also our first night without Oliver.

His absence made it feel like a wheel had been removed from our home, our little family now unbalanced and incomplete. He had come by earlier to get a few of his things and to explain his desire to sleep closer to the command module. It had been an awkward moment, none of us knowing what to say. It almost felt as if we would never see each other again, even though the lone window of the command module could be seen from our hood and he had promised to join us at every meal.

So the three of us lay in an unusual, cool, silence. Kelvin and Tarsi continued pretending to be mad at each other; a series of jabs and jokes earlier in the day had somehow turned into a spat of sorts. It designated me the third wheel, even as Tarsi forced me to scoot over and lie in the middle. She snuggled up to me, but I couldn’t help but sense it was an assault on Kelvin more than a true gesture of affection.

For a brief moment, I imagined Kelvin sidling up against my other side to return the blow, and the visual imagery excited me. Sexually. Then it filled me with shame. I concentrated on my arousal going away, which just made it throb all the stronger. Looking down my body, I could see the swelling in my pants illuminated from the glow of the tractor’s cab. I felt like my two friends could see it as well but I worried that covering it would just draw more attention. The more I thought about it, the more my erection grew, until I felt like I was going to die from the humiliation.

“Is there something you want to talk about?” Kelvin asked me.

“What?” I felt my cheeks flush. “I—what would I want to talk about?”

“You know,” he said, elbowing me.

“No.” I could feel myself turning bright red, but at least the rush of blood put an end to the source of my embarrassment. “I have no idea what you’re referring to,” I said.

“The bullet,” he whispered.

Oh. I exhaled. “Yeah,” I said.

“What bullet?” Tarsi asked loudly. She rolled on her side and draped one of her knees across my legs, resting her chin on my chest.

“Shhh,” Kelvin hissed. “Voices carry out here.”

He wasn’t kidding. A few nights earlier we’d spent our entire time on the hood giggling, the four of us wrapped together in fits of hysteria while two other colonists sat on top of the power module and told each other how madly in love they were.

In at least a thousand different ways.

And not all of them verbal.

Tarsi scooted up my body, her knee pressing into my thigh, her lips hovering just a few inches from my cheek.

“What bullet?” she breathed, the air from her lungs tickling the tiny hairs deep inside my ear.

I pushed her away, giggling and digging a finger in after her question, trying to stop it from itching. “Tell her,” I told Kelvin.

He quietly related his day’s activities, telling us both what the rest of his group had been up to. I sat up, crossed my legs, and turned to face him. By the time he was done, we were all three sitting close together, our heads bent down over our laps. Tarsi looked back and forth between us, her eyebrows low in worry.

“Aren’t you two being a little paranoid?” she whispered.

“Paranoid?” Kelvin asked. “They’re making guns,” he hissed.

“Maybe to go hunting. Or for defense,” Tarsi said.

“Then why make them in secret?” I asked her.

“They aren’t. We’re the ones making them.”

Kelvin shook his head. “I don’t know. You had to see how it was being done. Everyone was kept apart, and nobody is talking about it.”

“We’re talking about it,” Tarsi said. “And everything is being done that way. Building the rocket, waking us up, preparing for the future. I think you guys are reading too much into this.” She pointed to Kelvin. “You, I understand,” she said with a smile. She jabbed a finger at me. “When did you get bonked on the head?”

“I think he’s right,” I told her. “And I think maybe it’s all my fault.”

“Your fault? How is that?” Tarsi asked.

Kelvin looked to me as well. I tried to sort out how to put it, but the theory had just begun to form while listening to Tarsi’s doubts.

“I think it might have something to do with the conversation I had with Colony this morning.”

Kelvin frowned. “I thought you said that went well.”

“Yeah,” Tarsi said. “According to Oliver it was a ‘miracle.’”

I frowned at her. “Colony said it was going to change some things. I thought it meant we would get back to planning for the future and chill out on the rocket schedule, maybe give morale a boost.”

“How does making guns help that?” Tarsi asked.

“It doesn’t,” I said. I glanced back and forth between them. “Unless you decide you don’t give a fuck about morale.”

We stared at each other in silence, unbroken until the whistle of a bombfruit descended from the canopy, causing us to tense up, fearful of the impact. It had become our normal reaction to the sound ever since the tremors. A sign, perhaps, of our growing learned sense of helplessness.

• 10 • Order

I had more nightmares that night—the worst ones yet. In one, it wasn’t bombfruit falling from the trees, but the heads of the four-hundred-plus colonists who hadn’t made it out of the vat module. They rained down on us, streaming fire, and landed charred and black but still screaming. We gathered them up from the ground and ate them raw, lapping at the stuff spilling from the cracked skulls, caring more about our survival than the foul taste. And in the dream, I knew it wouldn’t be long before we ran out of heads and those of us left alive would turn on each other.

A few days later, shadows of these dreams leaked out into the real world as a new group formed. The first person I saw with a gun on his side wasn’t Hickson, as I expected it to be—it was Oliver. Not that he got his weapon first, I just wasn’t actively avoiding him the way I was Hickson and some others.

I passed him on my way to the power module, where I was helping build the mission package. The bright golden object gleamed from his hip and captured my attention. He greeted me, but I couldn’t hear what he said, so distracted was I by the sight of him carrying something I knew, even if only from training modules, to be very dangerous.

“I said good afternoon,” Oliver repeated.

I nodded, looked up, and tried my best to return his smile. “Missed you at lunch,” I said. “And the floor of the tractor gets pretty cold without you there.”

Oliver frowned. “Yeah, weird how I miss sleeping like that. But I’ve moved into the command module full- time. Hickson made me an enforcer. No more bombfruit duty for me, scraping up all that green mess.”

“An enforcer?” I asked. “What’s that?”