Chapter 1

Chapter 1

The guns pop. Bullets spray the ground with enough force that soil abrades my skin. When the bursts of hot grit reach my eyes, I squeeze them shut and drop to my knees. Instincts doing what they can to keep my body intact.

Have I been shot? I pat my legs, searching for blood. I hear Father bellowing, more popping sounds from inside the settlement. A greenhouse jumps and wiggles as its inflatable walls autoseal after each puncture. I scramble forward, toward the spray of the bullets, then stop. I want to find Yarrow, rescue Yarrow, but Yarrow is the one who did this. He is the one Dad needs rescuing from. And I will die if I walk into a hail of bullets.

My ears are ringing. I try to open my eyes, but the lids drag sharp dirt across my corneas. I close them again and stay on all fours, heaving in air.

What the fuck.

A hand on my back. I whirl with my spear, blind. “It’s me,” Father says. “Owl, it’s me. Come on. We have to go.”

My brain catches up. The perimeter guns continue their popping. The gate unclicks.

Father lets go of me, and I can feel the ground vibrate as he heaves his large body upright. “Stop right there!” he shouts.

“What is it? What is it?” I splutter, my breath coming out in such fast gasps that I’m lightheaded.

“Owl, we have to go. He’s coming after us.” Father’s hand is back on my tunic, and he hauls me into the air. I barely get my feet under me so as not to sprawl back on the ground.

“Ambrose is hurt,” I hear OS say through Rover. “He needs help. I disconnected immediately from the altered settlement network, and I’m not afraid of bullets. I will go.”

“Help him, go! Stop Yarrow,” Father cries.

He doesn’t say anything more, just hauls me like a sack of soil. I lose my footing again and drag through the dirt. I can’t keep my eyes open; they stream hot tears whenever I try. “Where is he... what’s happened to Dad?!” I ask.

“Shh. Yarrow’s tailing us,” Father says. Then he’s lifted my legs, too, and he’s carrying me in his arms, like a baby. He breaks into a run. I jostle against his chest. “Your arms... put them... around my neck,” he gasps.

I link my hands around the back of Father’s neck. And I cry.

“Is Dad dead?” I manage to say. I say it again: “Is Dad dead?”

Pops of a gun. Not the regular tattoo of the pneumatic guns but random, scattered shots.

A human firing at us. Yarrow is firing at us.

Father doesn’t break his stride. Since it’s him, it’s possible he’s been shot and is keeping right on going. No, Owl, you’d feel the vibration of the bullets hitting his body.

Finally, even Father has to slow. “I’m going to put you down, okay, my love?” he says.

He releases one arm, so my feet contact the soil. I try to open my eyes, and this time I can. The world is blurry and the outlines of everything are crackled and sharp, but I can see.

“He’s far behind, and not moving toward us anymore,” Father says. “Rover must have stopped him. Or at least delayed him.”

“Why did he do it, Father? I don’t understand.”

He sighs. “I don’t understand, either. I wish I did.”

“Is Dad okay?”

“He was shot. Yarrow shot him. I watched it.”

My vision is too bleary for me to make out much of Father’s face, except that it is still. Very still. His only movement is the heaving of his chest. “I don’t understand any of this,” I say.

“I’m sorry, little one,” he says between gulps of air. “We can’t stop and think until we’re in a secure location. We have to keep moving. There’s no getting past the perimeter fence, and Yarrow has a gun. I’m keeping you alive.” He starts forward, my hand in his. “Can you see well enough to walk?”

My answer is to walk.

We go for I don’t know how long, me stumbling and him striding. It feels weird not to have Rover beside us. I have so many questions, and OS is usually my source for information. Without answers, my mind plays back that terrible minute, again and again, searching for details I overlooked. What if I hadn’t been so excited to see Yarrow and Dad; what if I’d kept quiet instead of calling out? Maybe I somehow panicked my brother into doing that terrible thing.

But setting up that attack with the fence guns took work. Yarrow printed a gun. He planned this. He plotted to murder us all.

Gentle Yarrow. We were so blissfully bored with each other. I knew every part of his mind. Even now, when he might have just killed our dad, my heart says that we can talk it out. That the right words will fix this. That if we sit for long enough, back-to-back, he’ll be okay. I don’t think that’s true, but my heart says it is, all the same.

Because the reality of what’s happened is too hard to face head on, I go at it sideways. “Which direction did we flee in?” I ask Father.

He glances up at the Sisters. “East-northeast, it appears.”

I chuckle. A ghoulish sound.

“What?” he asks.

“I begged you to come with me to go investigate the mysterious beacon that landed. The one that called out for you and Dad to visit it.”

Father gives a hollow snort. “And that’s where we’re headed now.”

“Basically. We’re doing another search for the beacon after all,” I say.

Father pauses. I fiddle with my eyelids, grimacing against the pain. It feels like I have a fingernail-sized eyelash in each one. I can see colors and vague shapes, but that’s it.

“There’s no sign of Yarrow pursuing us anymore,” he says. “In this flat muckland, we have plenty of visibility—we’ll have advance warning if he comes for us. During the day hours, at least.”

“Do you have any water?” I ask. “I can barely see.”

He tsks. “It’s that bad? You should have said something earlier. Here, lie here.”

Father sits cross-legged in the dirt and pats his knees. I drape myself across, so I can stare up into either the vague patterns in the sky or my father’s eyes. I choose the sky. He dribbles water from his canteen into my eyes. I try to keep them open as best I can, but the moment my thoughts go to Dad being shot, concentration fails and I blink furiously. “Better?” he asks.

I wipe my face with the hem of my tunic. “Yes, a little.”

We sit in stunned silence for a while. “So what do we do now?” I finally ask.

He lets out a guttering breath. “I don’t know. We don’t have enough information to make any decisions.”

I look out at the setting Sisters. “Let me try, then. Maybe we wait here until morning, and then we make our way back to the settlement to see what’s there. Maybe Rover subdued Yarrow. Maybe OS is healing Dad. Maybe Dad needs us so much that we have to risk an ambush from Yarrow.”

An ambush from Yarrow. Fuck.

Tears are in Father’s eyes, but he’s not crying. “Dad was shot twice in the gut, Owl. At least twice. Even in fully equipped hospitals on Earth, that kind of injury was very dangerous. There are all sorts of bacteria in the gut, and when you perforate an intestine they all get released...”

“But our bullets are simple polycarb pellets, not like Earth bullets with their gunpowder and shrapnel. So it’s more like he got shot twice with a slingstone. What were the chances of surviving that back on Earth?”

A tear streaks down his controlled face. This is how Father cries. The last time I saw Father cry at all was two years ago, when the latest fetus came out blue. This measured tear is totally unlike what Yarrow described from the reel saved on the Endeavor. Maybe that’s what set Yarrow off? Seeing that kind of emotion from Father? “I don’t know, Owl,” Father says. “I simply don’t know.”

“I think Rover is curing Dad right now. It has to be.”

“I hope so, too.”

Father and I wrap ourselves around each other, in a sort of sitting hug. I smell his sweat and his fear. I must be just as rank. But our bodies are warm within the rapidly chilling evening.

I stare back toward the settlement, waiting to see Yarrow approach. Not sure which Yarrow we’ll get if he does. My vision is still wobbly, so when I think I see movement, I almost don’t say anything. But I nudge Father and point toward the settlement. “Do you see something moving out there?”

All is quiet while he focuses. “I think I did. But I don’t anymore.”

I shiver and pull his arm around me, wanting protection. I’m not brave explorer Owl, not tonight. “Soon it will be too dark for us to see. Yarrow could do anything to us.”

“Once it’s dark, he won’t be able to see, either. And I don’t think anything moved. I think we were both mistaken.”

I start to cry. Quietly, so my brother won’t hear me and come kill us.

We’re all alone on this patch of soil, on this planet, solar system, galaxy. The universe is so enormous, all around me, that I keep shrinking the more that I think about the scale of it. I don’t know how to express that, so I focus on something smaller. “I want to go help Dad. That’s all I want to do.”

“I know you do,” Father says. He wipes my tears as they fall. I’m still his daughter. “Maybe these tears will help flush your eyes out more,” he says.

It might be barely a joke, but I know it is one. A Kodiak joke is a rare, rare thing. I can’t quite work up a laugh, but I’m still grateful to Father for trying.

The night draws its dark around us. Father keeps his focus trained in the direction of the settlement, not that he can possibly see much in the scant starlight. I peer up into the sky. Let Yarrow come with his gun, if that’s what’s happening. I’m living in the beyond now, where brothers murder dads.

The stars are blurry in my vision. I can just barely make out the shape of Sky Cat. I silently greet it, then trace the rim of the horizon.

A flash.

The comet?

It flashes again. Not a comet. The flash was red.

I don’t breathe. There it is again. Red.

A tiny blinking red light.

“Dad, look east,” I say. “Do you see what I see? At the horizon?”

“See what?” he asks, his low voice rumbling in his broad chest. “Oh. I do see it. Just.”

I count between blinks. Seven seconds or so. They’re coming regularly. It can only really be one thing. We’ve found the beacon, the one that asked my fathers to come.