Chapter 1

Chapter 1

The moment she appears on the horizon, I can tell Owl didn’t find the mystery beacon. It’s not like she’s dragging her feet or sobbing or anything, but I know my sister’s movements better than my own. She twirls her spear in the air, experimenting with the heft of it. Trying to convince herself that she’s unbothered.

I open the gate and stand in the broad plain outside the settlement, pitching my shovel into the soil so I can rest my chin on the handle. The polycarb bends under the weight of my head.

“No luck, huh?” I ask once she’s near enough.

Owl blows past, giving her head one furious shake.

I know not to push when she’s feeling hassled. Instead I tail after her, letting the shovel drag behind me.

I keep myself within view of Owl as I return to my day’s task, which is the same task I had yesterday and will have tomorrow: shoveling. We need to process many tons of hydrocarbons to make our bunker, in addition to the chromite Father and Rover (and sometimes Owl) have been towing back and forth to the settlement. Dad and OS are making refinements to the blueprints to turn the Aurora into a refuge. All of that is more exciting than my task, but I’m the one who requested shovel duty. I don’t trust myself to do anything else. So I spend my days in a quiet pit, with the feel of tools under my hands and the cool breeze on my skin. Alone with my thoughts.

Here, away from them all, where it’s safe. Where they’re safe.

Everything is better when I’m alone. When I’m in the flow state of shoveling, I don’t imagine them dead as often.

Neither Father nor Owl is towing metal at the moment, which means I get Rover’s help. We’re running two different tarps back and forth. I work on filling one, while Rover shuttles the other to the processor, returning with an empty tarp that I then begin to fill. I count the shovelfuls, to keep my focus on work. Twenty-three is my standard before Rover returns. Sometimes I get as many as twenty-six in before Rover starts hauling them away.

This latest one is just nine. I let my thoughts distract me. If Rover notices, it makes no sign.

One. Two. Three. The soil makes a pleasant rasp against the tarp as it scatters on the surface.

Four. Five. Six. Thwisp, thwisp, thwisp.

Seven. Eight. Nine. Heads, caved and cratered. A rasping cry. Hair and blood.

Ten. Eleven. Twelve. I let out a long breath, control the speed of my shovelfuls. Bring air back in slowly. Try to make each shovelful contain the exact same amount of soil.

Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. Minerva, open-sky beauty. Our home.

Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. My calluses creak and shriek. Good.

Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one. The tarp stretches over Father’s face. He clutches at it, trying frantically to free his airway before he suffocates.

Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Twenty-four. It’s Dad who’s dead now, his corpse dangling from a fence post.

When the visions started, they were just bodies laid out, death without murder. Now sometimes I’m standing over my family, my muscles aching with the effort of strangling them all. After I’ve pushed the vision from my mind, the feeling of exertion in my muscles is as vivid as if I really have just done it.

Every time I banish one thought, another arrives. But when I’m alone I don’t feel like I need to hide them as much. The violent visions aren’t intruding then. They’re just visiting.

Because I know now that these visions can come true. Like removing part of the perimeter fence. I saw that a day before I did it.

It’s not like my family is too suspicious of me, even now—or if they are, they’re not at the point where they’re going to restrain me. But I have noticed that Father always directs me toward dig sites within monitoring range of OS. It’s a smart move. I’d have done the same if faced with the awful prospect of me.

I also noticed they didn’t mind that I requested doing this meditative, simple labor. What could I sabotage here? Nothing. I’d have to be really clever to figure out how to ruin soil.

Twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven. This vision is of Owl. It looks like she’s fallen from a great height. Her eyes are unseeing, her mouth in a scream, blood coming out of her ears.

“Hello,” Rover says, laying the empty tarp out beside me, whisking it in one efficient motion so it lies flat.

“Hi, OS,” I say, managing—I think—to keep the tension out of my voice.

“Is everything okay, Yarrow?” it asks. I guess I haven’t kept the tension out after all.

“Yep,” I say. “Just starting to feel this work in my muscles.”

“Please tell me if anything is not okay,” OS says.

“Yes. Don’t worry,” I reply.

Rover drags the tarp to the processor.

One. Two. Three.

Owl must have pushed herself hard on this latest attempt to find the beacon. On my break, I find her sprawled out on her bed, left arm and leg dangling so far off the side that they’re touching the ground. If she even breathes the wrong way, she’ll fall off entirely.

Gently, trying not to wake her, I nudge her more squarely onto the mattress.

Her eyes blink open. She stretches and smiles when she sees me. “Oh, hi,” she says. She opens and closes her mouth. “I think I was very sleepy.”

“I bet you were,” I say. “That was the longest excursion yet. Hey, move over.”

I get in the bed, lie alongside her.

“You are a very sweaty brother,” she says.

It’s cold enough today that I don’t think I have any sweat still on my body. But if she means that I smell sweaty, then yes. That’s definitely true. I am quite fragrant. “I take it you couldn’t find any sign of the beacon,” I say.

She shakes her head. “This was my fifth try. It’s so frustrating.”

“OS keeps scanning frequencies. I’m sure the beacon is transmitting its location somehow, but it’s just not transmitting in a language we’re listening with. We’ll catch it eventually.”

“I don’t know,” Owl says. “I’ve had a lot of time to think on my treks. If that beacon was Earth tech, which is fair to assume, then it had to be incredibly light to be shot out at interstellar speeds without its own power source. Even the most basic transmitter would add a lot of weight. It’s probably got a detectable signature instead, and isn’t beaming a powered signal. We just have to be close enough for Rover or a handheld to pick up on it.”

I nod. This makes sense.

“Did you have any new thoughts about our theories?” Owl asks. I don’t think she’s actually interested in our theories. I think she just wants me to say something so she’ll know I’m not currently in a weird spell.

“I just spent ten days doing nothing but shoveling soil. I had plenty of time to think about our theories, yes.” Suddenly I imagine snuggling Owl so tight to me that it crushes her. Her ribs snap. I shudder and turn on my side so I’m facing away from her. “I didn’t have any insights, though.”

She rests her hand on my shoulder. I sigh in relief that I’m worth touching.

“And how are you feeling?” she asks. She paused long enough that she probably debated a while about whether I’d be mad she asked.

I’m really tired of that question. But it’s also nice to know my family cares. “I’m still liking our old-clone hypothesis,” I say. “That the beacon was sent from the Coordinated Endeavor sometime earlier in its journey.”

“But what would they have wanted to tell us so much that they went to that effort?” Owl says. “That’s what I don’t get. Why not, you know, just leave a message inside the ship?”

“I don’t know,” I say, hands pinioned between my knees. I count Owl’s breaths against my neck. “They want to say something they were worried OS would censor, maybe?”

“Not knowing is killing me,” Owl said.

“Yeah,” I say, feeling a surge of excitement at that word. Killing. “Me too.”

I wake up from our nap before Owl does, and go stand by the edge of the perimeter fence, looking out at the distant malevors, those terrestrial herbivores who decided to attack us on sight. I wonder what they know of us, how they came to their decision. I know it’s probably not a conscious thing on their part, that it’s nothing specific we did; the baby yaks born here without parents didn’t have anyone to teach them how to be, and that’s not their fault.

I’m tempted to deactivate the gate, to see what would happen if I went out into the midst of them. Maybe we could come to understand one another. Or maybe they’d end my existence with one strike of those sharp horns.

Why would I imagine my life ending? Am I starting to have another fugue episode? Or are thoughts like these part of what it means to be a normal human? Is everyone tempted to step into a pit, just to test if it will really be the end? Maybe the humanness comes in the resisting.

I turn to face inward. Our settlement looks fragile and hopeful under the setting Sisters. This frontier house, so underpowered in the face of a vast undiscovered world. Cuckoo is bright in the sky, nearly in Sky Cat’s teeth. Below it huddle our inflated structures, trembling in the Minervan wind. At the far edge of the fence is the nearly submerged wreck of the Endeavor , including the room with the gray portal that contains the thousands of Earth zygotes inside it. Where I emerged just over sixteen years ago.

I’ve done this walk many times. Paced the boundaries of our home and prison, soil lighting up under my feet. Still, I begin the walk yet again. My feet bring me to the portal that produced me. I lean my ear against the hull of the old ship, feel the slight whoomp every 1.3 seconds that gives the gestating fetus the experience of Earth’s gravity. Who will you be? It’s already predetermined. By a machine. I hope this sibling survives.

In a few minutes the dinner bell will ring, and we’ll sit down to our evening meal, will answer the same prompts and repeat the same stories and wonderings. Everyone will talk to and around and over me, will avoid the Thing, will reward every normal thing that I do and bristle at every weird thing that I do. They don’t want any part of the new me. They want this new Yarrow, the one that they have to worry about, to go away.

But he will not go away.

I don’t want to pretend anymore. I just want to be , and feel like that’s okay. Maybe if I could be alone with Owl for a few days, or even alone with Dad, I could warm up enough to just let it all out, tell them how many times I’ve imagined them all dead, and then I’d feel better. But Father... I can feel the heat of his gaze on me, the worry and the disappointment, the need to have everyone be normal and focus on the productive future and not worry about the past or even the present. Just be strong, Yarrow , he’d say . You can fight this off.

I can try that. I have been trying that. I have been failing. But I can keep trying. I should not burden them.

Even before this change came up within me, Father wished he could erase the part of me that wanted to know about the past. If he could remake me without the morbid tendency to wonder about the lost, fateful Earth, he would do it.

But I’m not my sister. I am not the copy of someone whose history we all know. All of Earth is my heritage. I can’t give that up.

My footsteps have brought me to the Museum of Earth Civ. Owl’s and my playground, before she moved on and stopped building with me. Here are the mock-ups we made from scrap polycarb, vehicles and buildings and monuments from Earth’s history. Tanks and horses and an Eiffel Tower and Cristo Redentor. All crude and ugly. They’re sprinkled with actual artifacts: the felty scraps that remain of the playing cards from the Coordinated Endeavor , Dad’s broken and time-softened violin in its dinged-up case.

Now, too, the duck skeleton. I’ve kept it hidden under a rag, because I know how alarming it would look to the rest of my family. I’ve glued the bones together with molten polycarb, dropped dirt onto the hot printings so it would have the color of plumage. The head is still just a skull on a lumpen body with broken bones sticking out of it. I wanted to see what a duck would look like. To know a new animal. But I made a monster.

Dry-eyed, I stamp the skeleton into the dirt. Stupid broken Yarrow.

Breathing heavily from the exertion, I feel what little scraps of excitement I got from ruining the skeleton drain away. The feeling that’s left behind when the buzz fades is loneliness. I feel alone . It is the biggest emotion of them all, huge and elemental and utterly dominating. There used to be an “us” in my world, and it got taken away by my own mind.

What was it that Dad once said? Intimacy is the only shield against insanity. Okay. But how can I be close to my family if they don’t want me to be who I truly am? Since I don’t want to witness their disappointment all day every day, my darkness must be a secret. And that makes me feel ashamed. It’s the dearest friend of loneliness, shame.

I’m tempted to wreck the rest of the Museum of Earth Civ, but if I did Owl would notice and we’d have to talk about it. No one knew about the reconstructed duck, so I can avoid all that painful talking about feelings and actions if I just stop here.

I walk back by the gestation unit and rap my knuckles against its siding. I do hope you survive, little one. I hope your lungs are strong enough to breathe this air, and that frontier life doesn’t claim you. I hope that you live until you’re sixteen and that when you do, you don’t find a new and sudden darkness blooming inside you.

The bell for the evening meal goes. Rover glides over to the table, tray hovering above its spherical body. It’s the same meal as yesterday and the day before. I imagine one of the lavish dinner sequences from Pink Lagoon and find myself wondering if one of those characters would be able to understand me. There were billions of people on Earth. Surely there were some who would relate to the surprises happening inside my brain. Maybe my loneliness isn’t from the fact that something is wrong with me. Maybe it’s from having too few other humans around.

I stalk across the settlement, planning my path so I’ll cross Father’s as he walks toward dinner, mopping his brow. Back in the before, we were the closest pair of all of us. We’d work together for long hours in quiet, the only communication from him a squeeze on my shoulder as we headed back in for the day. Now he often avoids looking at me. He probably thinks I don’t notice.

He looks up when I cross in front of his path, and unexpectedly tries to chat. “Yarrow. What’s going on? Want to walk over to dinner?”

These are strange words for him. He’s probably been practicing them. “Sure,” I say. “Sounds good.”

I start walking and then stop again. This walk won’t be long enough to give me time to say what I’m yearning to say.

“Yarrow?” Father prompts.

“I need to talk to you about something,” I say.

He surprises me by coming to a stop, facing me directly, giving me his full attention. “Of course. What is it?”

I hadn’t imagined he’d take the direct route. I’m grateful, even as I struggle to find words. “I... thanks. Um. I know you know that life has been strange for me lately, that I’m having these thoughts... that intrude?” I see pain enter Father’s eyes, his pain at the thought of my pain. It makes me want to eat my words back up until I choke on them. “I think it’s getting better, I really do, I think I’ve got it under control.” No, I don’t. Coward. “But I also think, now that I’m sixteen, and an adult, at least sort of, I want to access it all. To know all of Earth’s history. I want to make that choice. To know as much of my origins as I can. Like the Museum of Earth Civ, only for real.”

He looks at me. Deeper than anyone else in my life does, even Owl. When Father sees, he sees. All is still for a long moment.

I continue. “Owl is connected to Dad, because she’s his sister. She knows where she came from. You knew the Celius provincial orphanage, even though your parents left you there before you knew them. I’m the only one of us who doesn’t have a background. Like any at all. It’s sort of killing me, not knowing the past.”

He shrugs.

I cock my head. Did he really just shrug ?

“You’re right,” he says, “you’re an adult now. If it will make you feel better, you can learn whatever you want to learn. I’ll tell OS to give you the same full access to its systems that your dad and I have.”

“You think Dad will be okay with that?” I ask.

Father smiles, just from thinking of him. “You and I both know that I’m the one who’s been the roadblock on this front, not him.”

I just stand there, flabbergasted. Father nods toward the table, where Owl and Dad are peering at us nervously. He whispers, “Okay if we continue on our way to dinner?”

“Yeah, sure.”

We walk side by side, Father holding my hand like he used to do when I was a child. Owl raises an eyebrow at me as we approach. I give a shrug. What, just bonding with Father. No big deal.

“So,” Dad says, giving me and Father a long look, “how are we all doing today?”

“Very good,” I say, tucking my chair close to my portion of algae. “And this looks delicious.”

Dad’s eyebrows rise. Father notices. “Yarrow would really like full access to Earth history,” he explains. “He’s sixteen now, so I said he could.”

Dad goes still. “You allowed him, just like that?”

Owl whistles.

Father shrugs. “I knew you would be fine with it. You’ve said as much before.”

“Maybe,” Dad says slowly. “But I think we should have discussed this first.”

“We’re discussing it now.”

“But you’ve already given him permission,” Dad says, his voice steadily flat. He’s got his combustible the kids need us to be a unified front tone.

“So when do I —” Owl starts to say.

“You’ve already gotten permission to go exploring for long periods, and you’re only fifteen. Don’t push it,” I say sharply. I don’t need Owl bringing this back to herself like usual and wrecking my plans.

I take Dad’s hand in mine. “I really, really think this will calm my mind. I think I just wanted to know what was being kept from me. It started to occupy all my thoughts, because I didn’t know. I got paranoid.”

This is sort of true. I do hope this will calm my mind. I also want to have agency over my life, over the settlement, to not feel shut out anymore.

“Can he tell me what he finds out about Earth?” Owl asks.

Dad looks at Father. Well? Did you consider this?

Father sighs. “No. Not until you’re sixteen.”

“So wait, I’m going to be the only human in the universe, in all of existence, who doesn’t know how Earth worked? And the rest of you are just going to tiptoe around it, or send me away whenever you want to have a private conversation about all these Earth facts you’re keeping secret?”

Father sighs. He clearly had not thought this far.

“Don’t jump ahead of the game. I haven’t found anything out yet,” I say, slurping up my algae stew. Sooner I’m done, sooner I get to go sift through the partial internet image that was on the Coordinated Endeavor . “OS, are you catching all this?”

“I am,” OS replies through Rover.

“Start warming up your memory.”

“I have already prepared a forty-seven-minute summary of Earth history for you.”

“Ugh, I hate you!” Owl says. She’s almost smiling, though. She knows I’ll be telling her anything I find out.

And the dads know it, too. But we’ll live in this truce state, pretending there are rules, pretending that they aren’t being broken. My spoon scratches the bottom of my bowl. “So, can I go ‘explore’?” I ask.

Dad sighs. “What have we done?”

Father pats me on the shoulder. “Go, go. Have a good time.”

I shove back from my seat, heart thumping. “Thank you, thank you! Coming, Rover?”

Rover whirs into motion, turning a neat somersault beside the table. “Rover needs to help with dinner at the moment,” OS says. “But I will come find you in a few minutes to start the projections.”

“See you soon!” I say, whooping with glee as I skip across the settlement.

Owl and the dads laugh. It must be a relief to see me excited about something.

I’m relieved, too. I haven’t thought about them dead for at least an hour.

My favorite place to watch projections is on the far side of the infirmary. I can lean against the inflatable wall while OS displays reels in front of me, or just listen to audio while I stare out at the Minervan sky. It’s where Owl and I have watched a lot of Pink Lagoon.

I settle in against the wall. A few minutes later, Rover arrives, whirring to a stop in front of me. “Okay, I’m ready,” I tell OS.

OS jumps right in. “After years of short outbreaks of violence, the countries of Earth resorted to treaties that tied more and more of them together in mutual defense, resulting in the remaining two geographically patchworked countries, Dimokratía and Fédération. I start here because I believe this is the most important piece of information, though you already know it. We will delve into the reasons for this twenty-fifth-century state, including the shift of warfare from human-labor-based to principally aerospace, cybernetic, and economic mechanisms.”

“OS,” I interrupt. “I don’t want to know all this. I mean, I do, but not now. There’s something else I want to know now.”

“If it’s about the beacon, I don’t have any additional information, no classified partitions that will help us understand it.”

“Not that,” I say, craning my neck to check that the dads and Owl are still at the table, out of earshot. “I want to see the messages the original Dad and Father left for their future selves.”

“I see,” OS says. “I’m not sure they would want me to show you those.”

“Isn’t it part of the information you store? And didn’t they grant me access to all that?”

“They did.”

“Let’s see, then.”

It doesn’t take OS any time to deliberate. The reel starts playing.

It’s hard even to recognize this as Dad at first. He’s wearing a cloth that shimmers; decorations on his skin glitter like chromium. He looks shiftily at the camera. His voice is just like Dad’s, though he intones his words strangely. The way he speaks has clearly drifted over the last eighteen years. “I’m Ambrose Cusk,” he says. “You know that. Because you’re Ambrose Cusk, too.” He whistles awkwardly. “I’m the original. We split after I had that medical screening. They recorded my, our, brain there. A couple of months ago. Now I know the truth. That Minerva’s distress beacon never triggered, that mission control lied to me. You needed to believe that, though, to have the will to survive each time you were woken up, so that’s why they mapped my neurons while I still believed, too.”

This Dad continues to tell a story I know, a story so extreme that it would be unbelievable if I didn’t already know it to be true. Of someone sold a lie so that his copies would think that lie to be the truth. Horrors. The reel finishes, leaving me with the view of Big Sister as she sets. “Okay, now show me Father’s,” I say.

“Even Kodiak didn’t want to see Kodiak’s,” OS says.

“I know. Show me anyway.”

The projection comes up of a hulking, even broodier Father, before a wall of dark tiles. He’s in his cosmology academy reds, seated on a chair and staring into the camera. He looks shell-shocked. There’s some scrap of fabric in his hands. Wool, maybe? “I am Kodiak Celius,” he says, his voice low and barely controlled. “I am relaying to you, clone, information I have just discovered for myself. That I am not going into space as I planned. That there is no rescue mission to be launched. But you, clone, are going to space. You are going to another planet. I hope you will be strong.”

He pauses, to steady himself. Unlike Ambrose’s recording, Kodiak’s doesn’t have high production values. There’s no special costume. There’s no soft lighting. Just a man in shadow, facing a camera, barely keeping it together.

Until he isn’t.

Father goes from collected to sobbing. There is no moment of transition. Racking, body-shaking sobs. His big hands cover his face, but I can see the force of his convulsions, hear the cracking of his chair as his body wrenches against it.

“Stop the reel!” he screams.

“Stop playing the reel,” I tell OS, my voice overlapping with Father’s.

It’s just the quiet of the Minerva evening now. Big Sister glows.

I can barely process what I just saw from Father. This loss of control from someone who usually has so much of it. He wasn’t angry, he was grieving. Losing his mission was a pure and intense sorrow. It feels sacredly private, and I feel like I’ve betrayed him by seeing what I just saw.

“I’m sorry, Father,” I mumble. I sit back, numb.

“What would you like to see next?” OS asks.

I don’t say anything. I just look at the stars. Looking for the prick of light that means the end is coming.

“Would you like me to continue with the history of the Earth?” OS prompts.

“No,” I say. I let out a long breath. “That’s enough history for tonight.”