‘Mala!’ Pegeen bursts through the curtain, their face white beneath the sunburn. ‘It’s Gabi.’
Gilli’s bedroom is cramped, barely a cupboard. The General lies twisted on the bunk, convulsions shaking her skinny frame while Gilli watches from the corner, hands over her mouth. ‘Get Silas,’ I tell Peg, ‘tell him to bring whatever medical supplies he has on the ship.’
The General’s boots clack and thud against the boards of the bed, and I do my best to hold her steady, to make sure she’s not biting her tongue. She’s a terrible colour, like old ash, running with sweat. The wound in her side is burning hot, even through the bandage. Infected.
‘Don’t you dare,’ I hiss, as her breathing becomes more laboured, horrid wrenching gasps escaping her throat. ‘Don’t you dare do this now.’
Silas comes running. His eyes go wide when he sees what’s happening, before tumbling an armful of medicines onto the rag rug beside me. ‘What can I do?’
‘Hold her,’ I bark. ‘Tranquillisers?’
‘Ampules of Jix and a bottle of blockers.’
I hunt among the mess of drugs, much of it alley-grade, cut and watered. But I find the ampules of J-I10 he means, load up an injector gun and shoot one into the General’s arm.
It doesn’t help, and she’s getting worse; I can hear the breaths clack and stop, clack and stop in her throat. ‘Is there anything—’ I ask desperately, but Falco appears, holding out another object. The medkit from the abandoned mare.
I swear with relief when I see what’s inside. Silas’s drugs might be cheap, but Falco’s are proper army supplies, unwatered and pure.
‘She’s not breathing!’ Pegeen cries.
I grab up an adrenaline syringe and stab it into the General’s thigh, before snapping a defib coil against her chest. The jolt goes through her, hard, and after one terrible second, her eyes fly open.
I sag back on my knees as she heaves in a breath, then another, wheezing and coughing. From the corner of my eye, I see Silas slump with relief.
‘Fuck,’ the General gasps, blinking at me through reddened eyes. ‘Are you trying to kill me?’
Pegeen laughs, wiping away tears.
‘Welcome back,’ I say.
* * *
The next morning at dawn, I stand outside the trade post, beside the old, dead century tree where Boots is buried. Tied to the tree are offerings; a bouquet Falco made from dried agave stems and plastic wrappers, a scattering of bullets from Boots’s revolver, a plaited lock of Peg’s pale hair. Sand blows in small eddies across the ground, like the softest waves at the edge of a calm sea.
I let a handful of it trickle through my fingers. I don’t need to try to remember the words of the prayer; they were scored into my brain by eighteen years of repetition, as if into stone.
‘“Creator, maker of planets and moons, who dwells in the space between thoughts, the breath between words, the eternity between the beats of a heart, give us the grace to walk this world of matter, and to shape it in your name and to your will, until we may meet with you, beyond substance, beyond breath, as one, in the place beyond all reality.”’
The wind takes the grains, gathering them on the currents, bearing them away. I look to the west, the direction of our prayers. There, the sky still clings to night. Further out, beyond the edge of the terraform, beyond Factus, lies the Void, from which no exploration vessel has ever returned, in all the decades since humans had first crept into this corner of space. Back on the Congregations, my fathers believed that God the Creator dwelled in the space between atoms. What then, might live in that web of dark matter, of ultimate potential?
I open my hand. Where before there had been sand, now there’s a dice, old and yellowed, its pips rimed with blood.
Kneeling, I roll it in the dust.
One.
I roll again.
One.
Again.
One.
Six times, all the same. I give up, and place the dice in a hollow at the root of the tree.
‘So as we are, we shall not be.’
From the west, a breeze licks the salt from my eye. Another offering. I turn away, before it decides to take more.
In the saloon, I find the others breakfasting on coffee and protein grits and peaches. Falco has given any airtights she can spare to Gilli, as well as a promise to arrange regular water drops with one of her black-market contacts, saying that the Accord might have left At Least to rot, but she won’t, not while one of her own and best is buried there. Gilli cried, and asked Falco and Peg to stay, for all she knew they wouldn’t.
I stop in the doorway. Beside me, Gilli is arranging the tins of fish and beans and tomatoes proudly on the shelf. She catches my eye and smiles.
‘You walked a long way,’ she says.
I frown at her, when a bang makes me jump. The General is knocking the cactus syrup tin against the table, drowning her grits with the last of the stuff.
‘One thing is for damn sure,’ Falco says, in the middle of a conversation. ‘The Doc needs to get off this moon. You too, Gabi.’
‘Agreed,’ the General says, shovelling grits into her mouth. ‘But if you think I am going to travel with her—’
‘She saved your life again, you little rat.’ Peg snatches the syrup tin away. ‘Or have you forgotten already?’
‘That was her choice! Can I have that back?’
‘No, you may not,’ Falco says, taking the syrup. ‘You owe her. And if your money’s getting you off this moon, it’s getting her off too.’
The General huffs, slumping back in her chair.
‘That’s not going to be so easy,’ Silas says. ‘Every passenger port’s going to have eyes all over it.’
‘What about you?’ the General says sweetly. ‘Couldn’t you take us off-moon?’
He shakes his head, rubbing at his untidy beard. ‘Charis isn’t
