my face.
“A shard of rock,” he said, holding the bloody stone dart up for me to see. “Barely a scratch.”
I rolled over and worked my pants back into place. Kelvin helped me up, and it felt like a lot more than a scratch on the back of my leg. I limped over to the others, who shifted in place to include me.
“Doesn’t feel like a scratch,” I told Kelvin, enjoying the sensation of being half carried and half escorted by him.
“There might be a little bruising as well,” he admitted. “But trust me, your little legs will be fine.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Hello, Porter,” Vincent said as I joined them on the ground.
I smiled and greeted them both. “So, the disenfranchised among us make themselves known,” I said.
“Yeah, and I’m sure there’ll be more,” Britny said, frowning.
I looked to Kelvin. “Speaking of which, we need to find Mica and Peter. I can’t stand the thought of them out here alone.” I looked over my shoulder. “There’s what? Nearly ten of us?”
“Maybe this will be enough to change the way things are running around base,” Vincent said. “This many people gone—using another half dozen for enforcement—the timetables are gonna go to shit.”
“Chances are it’ll just make things at camp worse for the rest,” I said.
“How?” Britny asked.
“A dozen ways. They could tighten the perimeter now that the farms have been abandoned and the fuel depot has been picked apart. There’s enough fencing there for two smaller nested circuits if they wanted to do that. Or they could pack everyone into a few modules every night and lock them. And if I can think of these things, I’m sure Hickson can come up with even worse.”
“I don’t know it’s all Hickson,” Vincent said. “I think he’s just Colony’s muscle.”
Kelvin shook his head.
“No way,” he said. “Everything went south when Stevens died.”
“And I’m not convinced Hickson killed Stevens,” Vincent told him.
“We need to start worrying about ourselves,” Britny said. “The next few weeks are gonna make the last few seem like a night in the vats.”
“And Colony was predicting rain for tonight. I heard it from Myra.”
Someone squeezed my shoulder from behind. I turned as Tarsi sat down beside me. She leaned her head against my shoulder and I glanced up in time to see the pained expression on Kelvin’s face, which he quickly wiped away.
“How did you sleep?” I asked her.
“Bad dreams, but otherwise… okay. How are you?”
“He’s got a boo-boo on his girly little leg,” Kelvin said, pointing and smiling.
“Are you hurt?”
I shrugged. “It’s nothing.”
“That’s not what you just said,” said Kelvin.
I glared at him. His smile broadened, but he raised his hands in mock surrender.
Britny stood and rested her hands on her hips. “When you boys are done fooling around, we need to make some decisions. How far do we go before we start digging in? Everybody seems to have grabbed a thing or two before they left, so how are we dividing these things up? Or are we?”
Tarsi, Kelvin, and I looked at one another. We hadn’t planned on any of that. The three of us were family, so there was no question on what belonged to whom. As much as we needed and supported everyone else, the idea of submitting to another collective when the goal of that
“We
We sat silent for a moment.
Several of us nodded slightly, as we looked to one another. I turned at the sound of people moving behind me and saw some of the sleepers stirring and stretching, pointing up to the new patch of open sky overhead created by last night’s missile.
“This is going to get complicated awfully quick,” I grumbled.
“No, it’s not,” Jorge said behind us. “Let me make it real simple. I brought a gun.” I turned and saw him reaching behind his back. He pulled his hand out and pointed two fingers at us, then started laughing.
Eventually, the rest of us joined in.
Even though I never saw the humor in it.
An easy and temporary consensus formed once everyone was up and had their things together. We decided we would walk toward the nearest tree, just to make sure that’s what they were. Several of us were curious to see one up close after having lived within sight of them for weeks. They were so unlike the trees from our training programs that they seemed alien to us, even though we’d never truly known anything else.
From the colony, they had appeared continuous, a jagged cliff of rising bark that encircled us completely. The width of each trunk was easily as big around as the perimeter of our entire base. Between the closest trees you could see darker trunks looming in the shadowy distance. They overlapped in a way that blocked out all else, creating the appearance of something solid and impenetrable. As we neared them, they appeared even broader and flatter, their curvature removed by our proximity.
We set off toward the nearest one, figuring that would have been Mica and Peter’s plan. We could make shelter along the wall of wood, affixing our various scraps of tarp to stay out of the rain, and maybe use our machetes to remove building material from the trunk.
Even with the pain in my hamstring, the walk was a pleasant one. The previous night, we had discovered that the surface of our planet wasn’t all packed dirt and mud; that was all we’d ever seen inside our fenced-in colony. Everything Colony prepared for us, out to a hundred yards or more, had the beat-down look of constantly roaming tractors and dozers.
Moving past Colony’s reach, we saw what the ground of our home normally looked like. It was mostly moss. A half dozen varieties covered the ground beneath the canopy. Some were soft, others stiff, but all were better than the hard soil that had calloused our feet over the past weeks. We soon learned the brown mosses and the really dark green were the most abrasive, so our line swayed to and fro as we picked over the most luxuriant paths.
We also quickly discovered the bombfruit hadn’t evolved to explode on impact. Out beyond the perimeter, they studded the ground like stones—half-buried, the pointy ends embedded in the moss. They looked like seeds pushed partway into the ground by a giant’s thumb. None of them seemed to be sprouting anything, however, and the near dearth of natural sunlight didn’t seem to bode well for their chances of growing into more trees.
Kelvin, with his training as a farmer, was the nearest we had to a biologist in the group. He seemed fascinated by the seeds. The rest of us were just glad to know we would starve to death no more rapidly out here than we would have inside the camp.
The only other curiosity we came across on our way to the tree was an odd geological formation: a hole, almost perfectly round, that gaped in the middle of the moss. Our path nearly took us right into it, causing us to stop and peer inside. The shaft seemed to go straight down, far deeper than my flashlight could penetrate. Karl, an electrician who had been shuffled between construction and payload duty a few times, took a bombfruit and threw it into the center. We all stood quietly until we heard a distant clatter, then marveled at what the depth of the thing must be.
We left the strange hole behind and resolved to no longer run through the night like madmen. Just in case. Tarsi hammered the point home when she spotted another of the holes in the distance and off to one side. Nobody spoke of the chances that Mica and Peter wouldn’t be found, but I couldn’t have been the only one thinking it.
It took half the day before we reached the trunk, the thing seeming to slide away from us one step for every two we took. The base of it was even more massive than we had imagined. Kelvin had overheard the canopy crew adjusting their missile the other night for a height of two thousand feet. It was hard to believe a living thing could grow to such proportions, but the evidence loomed before us.
We stopped several hundred feet away and made lunch out of raw bombfruit with a pinch of spice someone had brought along. Objectively, it was less palatable than the paste we normally ate, but we all agreed the novelty
