He nodded to everyone else and pulled me aside. “So, what’s your prognosis?” he asked. “For the colonists, I mean.”
We stepped away from the scientists and stood in the small clearing that had formed between the three groups. I watched Tarsi speak with two other colonists, her head nodding. I wondered if by the end of the day, she would feel more connected with
“I’m not sure,” I said. I shook my head and tried to concentrate on the question. I looked Stevens in the eyes. “I’m not even sure how
“Yeah,” Stevens said, looking tired all of a sudden. He flapped back his poncho and pulled a knife out of a scabbard tied around his waist. He motioned for my tarp, and I relinquished it, trying to act comfortable with my nakedness.
“I figure people need to stay busy to keep their minds from wandering.” He inserted the blade in the middle of my tarp and made a quick gash. “Honestly, though, I wish the abort sequence went in the opposite order as the birth sequence.”
I nodded, having had the same morbid thought. The lowest-ranked colonists were wakened last, but that also meant we were the last to be aborted. That left the least qualified in charge of our half-wrecked colony.
Stevens held out the poncho he’d just made and I bowed slightly, letting him drape it over my head.
“I don’t think they ever planned on an abort sequence being terminated,” I said.
“Aborting the abortion?” he joked.
I smiled, more out of duty than any real sense of mirth. “Did Colony say what happened?” I asked.
Stevens shook his head but I saw something flash across his face. Something he was holding inside, a little twitch I had been trained to recognize.
“No,” he said, “but it must’ve happened fast. Colony changed its mind midstream.”
I looked toward the command module. “I didn’t think we’d really mastered the human brain like that.”
“I don’t know that we have,” Stevens said. “Maybe it made a discovery after the sequence had already begun, or a difficult calculation finally spat out some conflicting result. We may never know.”
He patted me on the shoulder, looking up and down my poncho. “I want you to keep me abreast of any problems you see. If you get any ideas on what to do about Hickson, I’d love to hear them.”
“You should find something for him to kill,” I said.
Stevens’s eyes widened. “Do what?”
“Some predators. Anything that threatens the group. The guy is programmed for security, and right now
Stevens nodded, his brow furrowing in thought.
“You’re right. Absolutely right. But I really hope we don’t find anything like that out there. Colony is being pretty mum on what we can expect. Very secretive.”
I clasped Stevens’s shoulder as he looked around at the other groups. “We’ll figure it out,” I told him. “On our own.”
“Yeah,” he said. He nodded, but the corners of his mouth went down instead of up. Another of those little signs I’d been schooled to note.
“All for the glory of the Colony,” he muttered.
I nodded, but felt no compulsion to answer.
• 4 •
Salvage
Just a few hours after my talk with Stevens, I found myself back in the place of my birth: the charred remains of the vat module. I was working there when he died, pulling wire from the conduits below the decking. At first, I had no idea anything had happened. The base had been a blur of activity all morning—people shouting over the roar of the tractors, excited scavengers running to and fro with special finds. When the accident occurred, it must have been more of the same noise, blending in with the rest.
Terri, another of the quasi-scientists, was working down the line of vats with me. She pulled up panels of deck plating while I followed behind, cutting open conduit and removing the intact wire. We rolled it up into coils before one of the others took it outside and arranged the scraps.
Beyond us—further down the aisle of vats—members of the support crew performed the nasty job of dealing with the remains of the dead, which consisted mostly of bone and ash. They swept and shoveled the piles onto tarps, then carried them by the corners out through several new holes that had been cut in the sides of the module.
Those holes let in a little light and the barest movement of fresh air. They also let both groups work simultaneously, giving us multiple exit points for taking out items useful or dead.
We found out about Stevens from Tarsi. I heard her yelling my name outside the module, and I half expected her to come in with some sort of lunch. Instead, she ran down the loose decking we’d already picked through, her poncho flapping, her face red and chapped. She was out of breath when she reached me—she grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the exit.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Stevens,” she gasped. “He—he’s dead.”
I shook my head and tried to pull my arm free, my body revolting. “No,” I said. “I was just with him, not three or four hours ago.” I looked back to Terri, hoping she would back me up, but she remained by the last grate she’d opened, her face slack, her eyes out of focus.
Tarsi pulled me past our old adjoining vats and through the door. I stumbled along, my brain reeling with the idea that someone I had just come to know might be gone forever.
I ran alongside Tarsi and noticed many others hurrying in the same direction. Several groups of colonists were walking the opposite way, their hands over their mouths or tangled up in their hair. We, the running, had a shared look of doubting shock on our faces. The others—the walking—had a similar, horrified expression, but with all the disbelief removed.
I followed Tarsi around a large brown puddle of yesterday’s rain and across the packed earth. We crested a rise and came to a broad clearing, the spot they’d chosen for the rocket pad. Several tractors and dozers idled there, puffing smoke into the sky like huffs of anxious energy. Near one of the tractors, a small cluster of colonists stood around a tarp. A tarp that covered something.
I shuffled down the slope and stopped one of the female colonists who was wandering back up. “What happened?” I asked.
“One of the tractors lurched,” she said. “He fell off and got caught under the treads—”
Tarsi dragged me away from the girl and toward the scene.
“We’re supposed to get back to work—” the girl called after us.
I stopped at the edge of a small group that had formed near the tarp. Myra sat on the other side of the covered hump, sobbing into her hands, her shoulders shaking. I could see a hand sticking out of the tarp, half opened. The fingers curling up from the ground were perfectly still.
“How?” I asked. It didn’t make sense. Someone so alive, so in control, and all so recently, was no more. He would never again move of his own volition. Never speak to us with his calm voice. Never lead us to all the hopeful futures he seemed intent on taking us. I found myself passing through the denial stage, and completely aware of it.
“It wasn’t an accident,” someone in the group said.
Several other people arrived at a run, while others shuffled off in a state of shock. I was dead-still, undergoing the transformation.
“It was a fluke,” another person said. “He fell. I saw it happen.”
“Hickson was on the platform with him,” the first boy said. “No way was this an accident.”
I turned to tell the two guys to leave it alone, then saw Oliver. Our eyes met, and he came over to me; he wrapped both hands around my elbow, the weight of his thin arms pulling down on mine.
