Chapter 2

Chapter 2

The way I figure it, if advanced life here were land- or air-based, it would have wandered past us by now. But maybe there’s an aquatic civilization somewhere on Minerva. If I can discover a lake or even a sea, then it’s a double win, because I’ll have located a natural source of water if the rains stop—and we also might find out we’re not alone.

I imagine dinosaur-like creatures paddling their massive fins in a tropical sea, Yarrow and me riding on the back of one and whooping up into the salty sunshine. How could I not go search that out? The dads are crazy not to have prioritized exploration.

Already, just an hour’s walk from the settlement, I make a discovery. A minor one, but still: the soft, moist yellow green of the land rolls far in either direction, but there, in the lee of two hills, the old ethylamine pond has disappeared. The same one the dads mistakenly logged as methane when they first arrived. See? Something has happened. This expedition is already paying off.

Big Sister has shrunken almost to the size of Little Sister, which means I’m well into the day’s long twilight. I have time to investigate this dried-up pond bed before I need to get back. Maybe. During the twilight, time stretches long and then snaps into night. It can surprise you.

The dads’ voices play in my mind: Father saying I’ll get no algal sugar for a week for sneaking away even as Dad quietly protests that I’m basically an adult now, that fifteen is plenty old enough to manage my own risks on a frontier exoplanet, Father replying that even at fifteen I need rules and consequences, even if I claim that I don’t. It makes me smile: they’ll fight bitterly, not because they’re upset but because it’s far more interesting to fight than to find something to say about another identical day tilling the soils of Minerva for hydrocarbons.

I’ve read books. I know people can die from boredom. I know versions of the dads did, back on the Coordinated Endeavor. They’re lucky I’m here to do interesting things.

I tie my straps tight over my shoes, cinch my belt over my long tunic. All my gear has been printed from elements we’ve extracted from Minerva’s soil. This newest tunic is OS’s best work yet, a fabric that’s slippery-smooth across my shoulders.

The ground turns loose as I approach the pond bed. I’ve been going at a fast walk, but now I slow. I don’t want to twist my ankle and make someone come rescue me.

The soil pitches downward, steep and crumbly. As soon as I’m heading down the slope, it becomes clear what happened here. No big tentacled alien monster attacked from below and drained the fluid, unfortunately. The ethylamine boiled off. Minerva was cold when I was born, according to the dads, and its temperature has been rising ever since. It’s not exactly hot now, except for the daily Scorch, but who knows when this warming will end.

It all makes perfect scientific sense. No big story here. I should head back. I might already be too late to make it before dark.

But!

In the tumbled soil, something gleams. Something white. A few white things, actually, poking up out of the litter. Not a color we find in the wilds of Minerva.

I pretend to debate whether to investigate, I guess so I can tell the dads later that I did, but it’s not even a question in my mind. I use my spear like a staff, testing out the loose soil as I make my way down.

You’re doing fine, Owl. They’ll be grateful for what you’re discovering.

I tumble on the last stretch, rolling down the slope, microscopic spores puffing into the air around me. Up close, it becomes clear what I’m seeing. Bones.

I’ve seen bones in my learning reels, and in real life from dead malevors and that one time when Dad fell from a habitat roof and sheared off half his pinkie finger. I’ve broken bones, too, but they never punctured the skin, so generally I have to imagine what they look like, like teeth but encased in muscle and blood and skin.

Here’s a complete rib cage, almost intact. Could it be Crane, whose body my parents buried far from the settlement after she got sick? But this skeleton is not human, and it’s not malevor. Horror prickles the back of my neck as I push away the loose soil to expose more. A spinal column branches out into... arms? No, or at least they’re not like any arms I’ve ever seen. These are broader and finer, and they don’t end with hands. The skeleton has feet, too... but no legs. I shiver. Long-boned feet, fragile toes ending in narrow points. The skull is long, light, broad-planed, ending in a sort of spade where a mouth should be. The whole thing is small, the size of Rover.

If it’s not human, and it’s not malevor, then it’s some sort of alien we haven’t seen before. My breathing turns shallow. This might be the most important thing I’ve ever found. New alien life. That lived in a pond .

Proof that this scouting isn’t unnecessary. That reckless, impulsive Owl is useful to the family after all.

I gingerly tap one of my fingers against the creature’s dreadful spade-mouth, then snap back, ready for, I don’t know, for it to infect and devour me, spring into motion and... I guess I don’t really know what. But the skeleton remains a skeleton. Inanimate like skeletons should be. I work my hands under it and shake, so the dry flakes of soil tumble away. My sack is far too small to carry it—I was figuring I’d find water today, not proof of new alien life—but I wrap the skeleton in the hem of my tunic and roll it up and over so it’s bunched at my waist, where I can tuck the bundle in my arm as I run. It means exposing my whole bottom half to the microfauna of Minerva—and my family, once I’m home—but it’s not like there’s anything down there that all of them haven’t seen many times before.

The skeleton is light, so light that I can barely feel any weight. I can keep the bundled fabric of my tunic together with just a pinch of two fingers, which is the only reason I’m able to get out of the pond bed as easily as I do. Then I’m speeding back toward home, spear in one hand and bundle awkwardly pinched in the other while I check the sky for signs that twilight is ending.

Little Sister is already halfway down the horizon, flushing the sky’s edge to the color of my inner lip. If I return via the same route, it will be hours until I make it home, long after Big Sister has set. The dads will be beside themselves with worry. That’s if I don’t fall into a pit and fail to get there at all; even the glowing creatures in the soil aren’t enough to light my way once the long night arrives. Thistle died in a pit in the dark.

Without losing speed, I consider my options. The way I figure it, I have three: I can continue the way I am, and arrive at night; I can camp out alone away from home for the first time in my life, here in this place where aliens once lived (currently live?), and finish the trip at first light; or I can take the most direct path, which would get me home before the twilight is over... but only by bringing me through malevor territory in the process.

My hand gripping the spear turns slick as I make my decision. Malevor territory it is.

The malevors roam the felty hills to the south of the settlement, where the liquid water from Minerva’s occasional rains puddles on the slopes and microorganisms cluster in edible mats. Maybe elsewhere on Minerva the malevors are healthy and thriving, but here they barely get by—the herd numbers only nine. Those nine are really irritable, though... the four adult males have long, sharp horns, and charge any of us who get close.

We have a tenuous sort of peace: the malevors have learned not to get near the perimeter fence anymore, with its pneumatic guns that maim and kill. In return, we leave the territory south of the settlement to them. But because of my arcing route to the dried pond, the only direct route home is from the south.

“All this to get you back,” I say to the alien skeleton bundled in my tunic. “You’d better be worth it.”

The moment they come into view, I find the malevors are already alert to me. Even though I’m still a few hundred meters away, the females and their two calves are in the center, while the horned males circle them, each one facing me.

“I’m not coming for your young,” I shout to them, in Fédération and then Dimokratía. Not that malevors speak any language I know.

I stand motionless on the hilltop, fingers flexing so hard on the spear that one of my knuckles makes a popping sound. I’m just wasting time, because I’m scared. Which is stupid of me. The light is almost gone. I need to buck up and get moving.

There’s Father, at the gate that we used this morning. He’s pacing back and forth, looking out to the west, the direction Yarrow would have told him I left from. My poor distraught father.

“I’m here!” I yell as hard as I can.

The malevors feint toward me, stop and stamp their hooves. Father cocks his head, as if uncertain whether he heard something.

“I’m over here!” I yell.

He faces my direction, his eyes widening.

I begin down the hill.

“Owl! No, stop!” he yells back.

But what is he going to tell me, to sleep out here? Is he going to put himself in danger, too, by coming out to rescue me? I’m not going to let Father risk his own life because of my recklessness. “Open the fence when I get there!” I cry.

Then I’m tripping down the hillside. The horned malevors grunt and growl, shift their weight, their shaggy gray hair trembling with each agitated movement. Yarrow and I have been taught all our lives to fear them. But maybe the dads have been exaggerating. I haven’t seen a malevor attack anyone, after all.

“I’m not here to hurt your young,” I call as I go. If I can somehow convince them of that, I think I’ll be okay. I mean, their favorite meal is green goop—there’s no sign that they’d be interested in eating human flesh. But those horns have to be used for something.

A horrible thought crosses my mind as I run. What if this ultralight skeleton is some ancient enemy of theirs that they thought had gone extinct, and now I’ve brought it into their midst? What if they sense it, and attack me for it? What do I really know of life on Minerva?

It’s too late to turn back. The Sisters have almost disappeared, the final rays of twilight highlighting the terrain in shades of gray, deepening the shadows in between.

As the slope shallows out into muckland, the malevors stamp toward me. “No, no,” I say, shifting my path so I’ll stay even farther from their young.

I thought that I could avoid them. But they’re moving toward me.

I guess they do eat people? But if I shift any more to the left I won’t be heading toward the fence at all anymore.

“Turn around, turn around!” Father yells.

I don’t dare look in his direction. I don’t want to see how angry he is.

I’ll have to veer toward the malevors. There’s no other option. I adjust my course to go back toward them, and when I do the two closest horned aliens startle, then charge halfway to me before stopping. They raise and lower their heads; their horns point to the sky, then to me, again and again. The message is unmistakable: Go away.

And yet I have to continue. “Okay, okay, it’s okay,” I say as I pass along the muckland, to myself more than the malevors.

It’s not okay.

One and then another charge toward me.

I break into a sprint. Father’s screaming in my direction, and I’m grateful for his voice, since it means that I don’t have to look up to know where to run, that I can concentrate on keeping my footing over the wet and choppy ground, hummock to the right, hummock to the left, leap over puddle, clutch the skeleton and my spear...

A roaring sort of grunt, loud enough to feel the vibration in my gut, a hoof in the edge of my vision, and then the malevor is upon me. I leap to the side, barely keeping the skeleton pinched in my tunic as I roll. My temple bashes against the dirt, and then I’m bathed in a hot stink as the malevor passes over me. I unstick my spear from the ground, get to my feet and back to running.

The fence isn’t far off now. I can hear its lovely lifesaving buzz, the whine of its pneumatic guns. I look up to see Father at the southern gate, urging me on, his face ashen.

I pick up speed.

Father sees something behind me, and his mouth drops open.

Before he can say anything, I feel a weight against my back, not like an animal but like an attack from the landscape itself, like a boulder has fallen on me. It knocks me to the ground, presses all the air out of my lungs. I’m aware only of a great pressure on my waist and hips, crushing them into the slick, glowing mud.

Thwuck, thwuck . Then the weight is off my back. I stagger to my feet, managing to get the tunic back up in my hands with the light bundle still in it, and I hurl myself through the open gateway. Roaring with some emotion that’s too deep and primal for me even to identify, Father slams the gate shut before another malevor can get through. “Seal it, OS!” he cries.

The fence and gateway crackle to life. I whirl around, hands against the pressed soil of our settlement, getting up onto my elbows to look behind me. One horned malevor has stopped a few feet from the fence, grunting, nostrils wide and eyes manic.

Another malevor is on the ground. Or its corpse is. The shots from the pneumatic guns ripped its body right open. One horn dangles at an unnatural angle from its blasted skull; its rib cage is rent open, white of bone and red of blood and purple of organ. I see a heart, still pumping.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but look!” I’m referring to the alien skeleton, I guess, but of course Father can’t see it, because it’s trapped under my body.

“Owl, stop moving. Just breathe deeply. OS, Ambrose, Yarrow, I need you!” Father calls frantically.

Why does he sound so frantic? A malevor is dead, yes, but I’m not. Right? Then I look down and I see what that weight was, what that pressure was. The tunic at my waist is a wash of blood. It’s my blood. The pain of it is big but not in feeling range yet, a far-off thunderhead.

Numb, almost curious, I press my hand against my flesh. It parts wetly. I’ve been gored. “Daddy, I’ve been gored ,” I say. My voice is so soft, my voice is so quiet.