Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Ambrose watches digits count down. Clad in the gauzy blue fabric of a regulation Fédération suit, he pulls out a tray of water pouches and sifts through them while he’s waiting for his meal to heat. He holds two up to the ship’s fluorescent lights: identical sleeves marked water , though the word is printed in different fonts. He centers one in front of each seat of the dining chamber.

The light inside the device blinks off, and he removes a food packet from inside, setting it on a plate. He puts another in and resets the timer, then goes about preparing the rest of the table: straws for the water sleeves and a simple printed runner, playing cards centered in the middle. While he waits, Ambrose shuffles them and straightens the stack.

I know what comes next, because I’ve seen this recording many times before. A shadow from the doorway, then Kodiak is beside him. This younger space-borne version of Father is jacked up, networks of veins standing out on his arms, his back a thick triangle.

Ambrose says something I can’t hear—a side effect of the blind room they’d set up nearby is that there’s no audio on this reel, just moving images—and Kodiak smiles. He curves his larger body around Ambrose’s where he waits at the counter. Ambrose settles in, hangs his head back so Kodiak can kiss his neck. Kodiak presses himself tighter against him.

It’s romantic, but gross. These are the dads, after all.

I avert my eyes to the window—the screen—behind them to see what it’s showing. Revolving stars, among them the glowing clots of galaxies. I study the newness of the ship’s materials. Some relics of the Coordinated Endeavor still exist at our settlement—like the chair that Ambrose is currently settling into as the reel continues to play—but the ones we use are dingy and cracked.

The dads play cards, take drags of water (the label printed sans serif for Kodiak, serif for Ambrose), and converse easily, probably about the subtleties of their sleeves of roasted eggplant and tofu curry. It makes my heart pang with nostalgia, even if it’s for something I’ve never known. I’m jealous of them, even though I don’t think I want what they have. This life—one with a romance—is not in my future. I’m the only human alive with a womb, so I might end up carrying a child if the gestation device goes down, but it won’t be the result of sex.

Just when I get hopelessly moody and internal, Father interrupts. Real Father. He walks right through the projected reel, causing the images of his younger beefcake self to jump and stagger across his face. “You’re late,” he says. “Turn this off. I don’t see why you’d want to watch that, anyway.”

I tap my bracelet to stop the projection. “Really? You want to take this away? There’s basically nothing I’m allowed to watch already, since you won’t let us learn anything about Earth.”

Father passes through his own image, stalking toward the mucklands. I fall in line behind him. We pass along the inside of the settlement’s perimeter fence, until Father deactivates the gateway and we slip through to the outside. I’m relieved when the pneumatic guns resume their protective buzz at our backs. Once we’ve scanned the area for malevors, we start slopping out the reserve cistern.

We use polycarb paddles to scoop out clods of soil and glowing microorganisms. Each scoop makes a thwuck noise as it hits the ground. It’s the sound equivalent of my slurpy mood. Thwuck thwuck thwuck.

Father prefers to stay silent unless there’s something important to say. And normally that’s fine, I guess. But not today. I’m going for it. “So far it hasn’t happened, but what if this makes us sick at some point?” I ask. “I mean, look at this stuff that lives in our water. It’s gross, and it grows quick.” To emphasize my point, I hurl the next scoopful to the ground, so it makes an extra loud thwuck. It also sprays Father’s pant leg. Whoops.

He looks down at his stained pants, then at me. His face is perfectly controlled. “What do you propose we do instead, Owl? Your usual idea?”

“Well, yes, actually,” I say as I resume scooping, leaning deep into the cistern to scrape the seam where wall meets bottom. My words echo on the polycarbonate. “The usual. What if the rains go from occasional to never happening at all? What then? You need to let me go search for standing water. A sea or a lake.”

“Not likely,” Father grunts.

“Sure, okay, but if the rains did stop, it would be too late to go searching for water because we’d be lying around, all dried out,” I say. I drop my paddle and lean against the cistern, glaring out at the horizon. We’ve explored almost none of this planet. It’s ridiculous.

“If the water gets unhealthy, we can reprioritize how we use our metals,” Father says. “We can print some advanced filters.”

“You’re being obtuse!” I say. It just comes out of me. I’m not even sure if I used that word right. I read it for the first time yesterday, and I’ve been wanting to try it out. Judging from Father’s expression, it’s maybe a little harsh? I make a mental note to try out new words only on Dad, not Father.

Father stares at me, then goes back to scooping out the cistern. “We’re done here.”

I pretend I’m not scared of Father, so I can push further. “We’re not done!” I say. “Yarrow will be sixteen in a few days. I’ll be sixteen a while after. That would have been adult age in most any Earth frontier society. We can’t hide away in some tiny little safe corner of this planet forever.”

He pauses, the cords in his neck tight. Then he goes back to scooping.

“Listen to me for once! Send me out. You three can keep the settlement safe. I’ll be careful.”

“I know you think you’re capable of going on a solo expedition,” Father says, his words evenly spaced. “But you’re still my daughter, and I’m the one who will make the decision of when and if you go adventuring.”

“I don’t care how many kids died before and after me and Yarrow. That’s not our fault.”

All goes still. It’s like the planet itself is in shock. I’m hot with anger, and being mean is the only way I know to get rid of that sort of heat.

Father stands, looking down at the paddle in his hands. Then he hurls it to the ground, hard enough to spray his pants in muck all over again. “Don’t come back in until you’ve finished cleaning this cistern,” he says, his gaze somewhere over my head.

He stalks to the gate in the perimeter fence. Its defensive buzz pauses, then he’s inside, and I’m alone.

I look at the cistern, with its stupid, sloppy, boring mats of microorganisms that stubbornly spread inside. I won’t spend my life cleaning out algae. I fling my paddle down on top of Father’s, hard enough that I hear it crack.

Then I hurl myself to the ground, curl up, and hug my knees until they press against my eye sockets, so I’m almost a sphere like Rover.

Slowly, the heat drains, and takes with it my intense this-discussion-is-the-end-of-the-world feeling. I’m left with the fact that Father and Dad had a bunch of babies that filled them with love and hope, that those kids all died except two of us, and I just threw it in Father’s face because I want to go on an adventure.

I am a bad daughter.

I wish I would cry, so I could prove to this whole boring planet how upset I am.

“Owl.” I look up. My brother is holding out his arm. “Come on.”

Yarrow looks at me with his all-seeing expression and nods, meaning let’s walk barefoot along the packed dirt and have a sit with our backs against each other so together we can see in all directions and won’t we feel better then?

He and I go sit on one of the smooth, soft slopes, back-to-back. Our usual position. I sift the loose glowing grains of Minerva’s soil between my fingers and enjoy the sensation of my brother’s lungs rising and falling against my ribs. I can feel his bones and the muscles between them.

The wide-open flatness of Minerva spreads out before us. The microorganisms that abound in the soil—the only life we’ve found here, except of course for the malevors—glow in all directions, excited by our friction. Our footprints leave a glowing trail all the way back to the settlement, like Yarrow and I are ghosts. Father’s footsteps have already faded.

Yarrow let me chop off the sides of his black hair yesterday, and he scratches absently at his exposed scalp. There’s plenty of Father in his long-lashed eyes, his sturdy and thoughtful presence. That’s just a coincidence, though, since he’s genetically unrelated to any of us.

“Do you want to tell me about that fight just now?” Yarrow asks.

I shake my head.

“It helps to talk,” he says.

“Don’t even start with that sensitive brother nonsense,” I say, giving him a strong enough shove with my back that he has to reach a hand out to prevent himself from sprawling flat. “It’s the same fight Father and I always have. I don’t want to talk about it.” Playing it safe is one of the family decisions we make so wordlessly now that it’s not a decision anymore, it’s a law. I know that cautiousness can be our doom just as easily as recklessness, but no one else seems to see it.

Yarrow moves to face me, wipes his tunic free of glowing soil the best he can, and rubs his hands together. Slick organisms bioluminesce along the ridges of his fingerprints. Little Sister glows palely on him, the first rays of Big Sister appearing beneath her. “I hate to tell you, but you did just talk about it,” Yarrow says.

“You think you’re so clever.”

“Don’t worry,” he says, his wide eyes taking on luminous gray-red tints from the rising suns. “Someday you and Father will find something new to bicker about.”

“I’ll cherish the day.”

I do a mental countdown until Yarrow speaks again. Three, two, one. And there he goes.

“There’s good reason they’re terrified about losing us. You know that’s what this is about, right? Father’s not just being a hardnose. He doesn’t want us to have an accident out there and die. They’ve lost too many kids already.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I know.”

Before I’m even aware that I’m doing it, my eyes go to the unmarked spot outside the settlement walls where they buried the babies. Some days the dads will spend a few minutes there, kneeling and whispering, and that’s how we know it’s the birthday of one of our dead siblings. Some emerged from the gestation device gray and unbreathing, their zygotes gone inert during the thousands of years of travel, and some died in their first years of life. Sparrow and Purslane failed to draw enough of Minerva’s air; Thistle fell into a pit; Kestrel never adapted to the extra nitrogen in the atmosphere, her lips nothing but blue; Crane had a fever that left her body only once she was dead. Children one and two, four and six and seven. Every one except Yarrow and me.

Now I feel even worse about my fight with Father. My brother is excellent at making me feel bad. He doesn’t ever try to; he doesn’t need to, he’s that skilled at it. His constant reasonable goodness is enough.

I stand and reach out to him. He takes my hand, lets me pull him to his feet. “Big Sister is fully up in the sky,” I say. “The dads will be expecting us any moment. Which means you should go.”

“You mean ‘we should go,’ right?”

I hitch my sack over my shoulders, tighten the straps. My spear is lashed to the side as usual, waiting to finally be used. “I meant what I said. I’m going to find a river. Or something.”

“You’re just leaving? Now?”

I make myself look at him. “I’ll be back today. I’m not going too far yet.”

“Father is going to be furious,” Yarrow says. I notice that he hasn’t asked me not to go.

“What are they going to do, ground me?” That’s what the parents in Pink Lagoon call arresting their children. It was weird back on Earth.

Yarrow’s eyes dart around my face, searching for answers in my expression. I don’t think he’s finding any. “I don’t know how I’ll explain it to them.”

“You won’t have to. Let me deal with the consequences. Look, they’ll be so overjoyed by the fact that I’ve found a water source, and maybe a whale or a sea serpent or something, that they’ll forget that I’ve even broken the rules.”

Yarrow raises an eyebrow. “Really. That’s how this is going to go?”

“We’re happy enough here now, but our life could get bad. Hiding away isn’t the solution. It’s the problem. We have to find standing water we can use, more metals so we can build exploration drones. Maybe I’ll even find us some company. It’s going to take old-fashioned exploration. Me with a spear and my two feet, like some caveperson.”

My brother’s meaty body presses deeper into the soil than mine does, and the life-forms glow prettily around his bare feet. I think they like him more. “You’re crazy,” he says. “But I know better than to try to stop you.”

“Wise as ever,” I say.

“Go quickly,” he says. “I’ll try to keep the dads distracted so they don’t notice for a while. Also, I really don’t want Father to see me letting you go.”

“Thank you, Brothership,” I say, giving him a hug. “I really will be fine.”

He chuckles. “I think that’s probably true. If any one of us is going to survive whatever disaster you’re about to bring raining down on our heads, it’s the clone of Minerva Cusk.”

That’s who I am—my aunt. I’m the spitting likeness of the star spacefarer of twenty-fifth-century Earth, dead for over 30,000 years. Everyone avoids talking about it, but around when Yarrow’s face started breaking out in pimples he also got very touchy about the fact that I had a heroic spacefarer to compare myself to when he had no one. That I was related to Dad and he had no blood relations. Then he abruptly stopped talking about it.

I kiss Yarrow’s cheek and start off across the wide plains of Minerva, choosing a direction almost at random. When you’ve discovered as few landmarks as we have, every direction is basically the same—so long as I avoid malevor territory. “Think about what we can make the dads for their arrival anniversary while I’m gone!” I call behind me. “Maybe you can create a special reel? You’re so good at those.”

Here I go, assigning my brother to be the one to show our dads we care while I go satisfy my wanderlust. I dig my nails into my arm. Selfish Owl.

Yarrow gives one long wave in reply, then starts back toward the settlement, shoulders slumped. He’s the solid one who holds us all together, and he’s really good at it—but I’m asking a lot, even of him.