of the mixture made it somehow more enjoyable. Or perhaps it was just that the food and the time spent consuming it were
Several people wondered aloud what the rest of the camp was doing right then, besides hating our guts. Those with intimate knowledge of the timetables told us precisely what each group would be doing and even what some of us were supposed to be up to. I sat facing the distant camp, the tops of the modules barely visible above the rise of the berm. A spot of raw sunlight beamed down from the new hole overhead and glimmering off the things we could no longer use. It all looked so small. So impossible. How was such a speck of humanity expected to tame an entire planet? And what did that make our little group? A mote ejected from the speck?
Halfway through the meal, rapid popping noises sounded in the direction of Colony. Even if the berm and fence weren’t there, we were too far away to see individual people moving around camp, leaving us to speculate.
“The propellant?”
“Sabotage,” Jorge said, almost with a hint of wishing.
“It’s a warning.”
A twinge in the back of my leg—a sudden jolt of pain—gave me the answer:
“Target practice,” I said.
We fell silent and the popping sounds did as well. We looked around at each other as the noise started back up a minute later. Those who had obsessed with timetables for three weeks murmured their disgust at the labor hours needed to replenish all those rounds of ammo.
Overall, the meal could not have been more bizarre. It was, in many ways, even stranger than the first one we’d had the morning after our birth. That one had been so consumed with depression and despair that no other emotion could gain purchase. This one had a tinge of accidental camaraderie, as fully three separate groups had made our break on the same night—all following in Mica’s and Peter’s footsteps. While we ate, Kelvin admitted that the three of us had dreamed of escaping a day earlier. Four of the others, including Vincent and Britny, had even discussed the idea before the enforcers formed up.
As a half-trained psychologist, I was fascinated by how quickly the group gelled. Many of my fears concerning shared resources faded as I spoke and joked with each person. Names and faces I knew in passing were now a part of my tribe, and over the course of a single morning I went from feeling wary of their presence to being willing to risk myself for them. And not just like the night before, where my primary concern had been for Kelvin and Tarsi, but really put myself in danger for any one of them. Whatever the cause of this magical transformation, I had not yet come to it in my studies of human behavior.
After we ate as much of the foul tasting fruit as we could and passed around our several rations of water, we rose as a group and approached the tree. The organism seemed to offer a hello—or possibly a warning—as a single bombfruit whistled out of the canopy and buried itself with a thud inside a nearby patch of light-green moss. We laughed at the timing and stepped around the embedded fruit as if it still contained some animating force. We spread out to explore the mountainous plant.
“It’s soft,” Samson said.
He was one of the two boys that had brought machetes. I saw him rubbing the blade against a jagged edge of bark, peeling a piece back with ease.
The skin may have been soft, but the shape of the tree was rough, far more than it had appeared from a distance. The bark was so jagged and the spacing of the outcrops so regular, you could step inside the wide crevasses and find yourself surrounded on three sides by cool, brown walls of tree. It reminded me of a mechanical gear if seen top-down, like evenly spaced cogs standing out from a round, recessed base.
Several of us stepped between the cogs into what felt like roofless caves. I went all the way inside one of the creases and looked up, mesmerized by the way the bark wiggled its way up into the canopy. It no longer looked like a cave but more like a square, vertical ditch running all the way up the surface of the tree, the edges seeming to converge in the distance.
I put my back against one of the walls jutting out from the center and tried to place my hands against the opposite side, wondering if a taller person could shimmy their way up to the branches and leaves overhead. It would take monumental endurance.
“Give me fruuuiiiiit,” someone howled, and we all laughed at the way the vertical canyon toyed with their voice. I popped out of my indention and imagined us carving a little village right out of the trunk, all of our individual caves interconnected. We could dig up some mosses and plant our Terran seeds in the soil, see if they would grow in the filtered sunlight. The tarps we could save for gathering and storing water. I stepped back and looked up the tree, imagining how we could make it work.
Tarsi came up behind me and wrapped her arms around my stomach. I turned into her embrace and gave her a joyous squeeze. To our side, I saw Kelvin step away from the tree and glance over at us, that expression from earlier on his face. I waved him over and he grudgingly joined in our little group hug.
“I’m gonna miss our tractor,” he said.
“Even on floor night?” Tarsi asked.
“Even then.”
“I wish Oliver was here,” I told the others, breaking out of the hug and looking back in the direction of base.
“Yeah,” Kelvin said. “I wonder what he—”
“Hey! Check this out!” Vincent backed away from the tree and pointed. He had wandered fifty feet or so further down the trunk. We all ran over to see what he’d found.
“Did you carve that?” Samson asked, pointing his machete at one of the outcroppings of bark.
“With what?” Vincent said, shrugging his shoulders and lifting his empty hands.
I pushed past the people up front to see. Leila stood right next to the tree, rubbing her hands over it.
It was an arrow. Carved into the trunk.
Pointing up.
• 17 •
Inclinations
“None of you carved this?” Leila asked.
“How are we supposed to go up?” someone said.
“Why should we?” Kelvin asked. “I don’t want to be up there. If it was Mica or Peter that made this, let them come down here and join us.”
“I don’t like being on this side of the tree,” Vincent said. “If we’re really looking to survive for the long term, setting up camp next to the people we abandoned might not be the best plan.”
“I agree,” Britny said. “We should make our way around one of these guys and set up camp on the other side. Maybe move even further as we explore. For all we know, there’s open fields on the other side of this thing.”
“No way,” Jorge said. “Colony wouldn’t have cut its way through the canopy and set up here if there was open space like that nearby. I’d be surprised if there was a clearing this big anywhere else in the temperate zone. It would’ve picked the best spot. That’s like its primary job.”
“What were you trained for?” I asked Jorge.
“I’m a miner, but that doesn’t make me any less smart than you.”
“Whoa,” I said, holding up my hands. “Just curious.”
He shook his head and looked away, and I resolved to step lightly around him from then on.
“Guys, I found the way up.”
We turned and looked further down the trunk where Mindy stood, her hand on an outcropping of bark several paces away. The crowd shifted again, curiosity driving us along.
“Holy shit,” one of the guys said, looking up the trunk of the tree.
It was a spiral tunnel, rising up and off to the side, further around the base. The angle wasn’t too steep, and the carved indention ran behind the gear-like outcroppings, exposing the inclined plane to air before weaving behind the next outcropping, and so on. Kelvin stepped between two of the juts and ran his hand along the exposed core of
