Chapter 2 Yarrow

Chapter 2

Yarrow

I am a ghost. I am haunting them.

They scramble to get ready. Since my family is too busy to deal with the slain malevors, I’m using the body of the largest male as my cover, lying beside him, holding on to the horns and peering over the wiry gray tuft of hair at the top of his head. This one was shot in the flank that it fell on, so it’s not too bloody, not now that its juices have bled into the ground. I’m dry here, and the bulk of this dead creature even shades me from the worst of the Scorch.

I lie still. I watch.

Rover’s going back and forth between the infirmary and the fence terminal, probably reinitializing the settlement’s operating system, undoing my sabotage. Once the unadulterated OS is networked into the fence, it will detect me. I’ll need to be out of here by then. Otherwise, they’ll risk taking me in, and I might try to hurt one of them, all over again. So these are my last minutes with my family near.

At my feet is Dad’s violin case. Owl never got around to making that new violin for him from the alien wood. But I need rope, and the closest I can get without going near my family is to raid the Museum of Earth Civ for the hair from Dad’s bow. So I snatched the violin case while Owl and Father were away, and set it up beside the malevor corpse. Now I take out the bow and wrench it apart. The sound of hair ripping. My treacherous imagination makes these synthetic strands Owl’s hair, makes it so that I’m scalping my sister.

I divide the hair into two lengths, tie them so I get a double-long stretch of improvised rope. That should be enough.

I pinwheel my arms, stretching them. This will take all my flexibility. I start by tying a tight double knot around my right wrist. After a few tries, I manage to work the remaining horsehair under my left wrist and loop it over. With my wrists trussed behind my back, I get the remaining length under my teeth. The horsehair crackles and frays under my molars, but holds as I pull it tight. I unclench my jaws, wincing at the flash of pain from my shoulder joints. It’s painful, but this means I won’t be able to use my hands to hurt my family anymore. I threw the gun in the hydrocarbon pit hours ago. All I can really do now is bite them. I imagine Father’s meaty forearm under my canines, splitting and bleeding, and scrunch my eyes until the vision goes away.

Once I’m ready, I’ll pick a direction and start to walk. I’ll go until my legs can’t carry me anymore. I’ll want to return to the settlement then, but my body will be too far gone. I’ll fall, out in the mucklands. The comet will incinerate my body. It will be like I never existed. That’s the best I can hope for.

But for now, I need to see my family while I can. I watch Father and Owl go into the infirmary, where they see Dad is alive. I share their relief. Then they get back to work prepping the Aurora , hauling supplies back and forth with the tarp. They are ever watchful, looking out for me. Owl found the gun I printed and has armed herself with it. Smart. I would arm myself against me, too.

As the Scorch dims toward twilight, Owl returns with the empty tarp and unloads her latest delivery. Father is a small silhouette by the Aurora site.

Owl starts loading the tarp with lengths of processed chromium wire, then she stops. Her body slumps, her head hangs. She brings her hands up to her cheeks. She’s exhausted and overwhelmed. It’s always been my job to support her when her courage fails. I’m the one who helps her out of her troughs. I was the one. Now she must miss me. She must hate me.

Owl takes a long drink of water—my own parched throat complains at the sight of it—and then heads off toward the infirmary. She’s checking on Dad.

She’s inside for only a few seconds before she comes out. Dad’s probably fallen asleep. She heads to the greenhouses.

I ease around the malevor corpse to keep her in view. If she happens to look over to this massacre site, she’ll see me. But I don’t think she will.

She goes into the place I spent most of my days. These seeds traveled across the galaxy, have now grown into hesitant tubers and peppers. Only a few species managed to survive, but I tried to expand our options. Failed, mostly. I still have hope for the shelling peas.

Owl leaves the door to the greenhouse open. I’m usually careful to keep it closed, so we don’t have uncontrolled spread of Earth species, but Owl is less cautious—and a comet is about to obliterate everything on the surface, anyway.

I watch her pass along the plants, probably debating which to try to raise underground. I wonder if she’s going to find my surprise.

And she does. Owl makes it to the end of the aisle, wiping her hair back from her forehead in the humid greenhouse air. She strokes the tree’s leaves. She removes the sheer barrier I used to shield the single fruit from view. The surprise I never got to give Owl gleams in the shrinking Scorch.

A lemon.

I won’t be alive to make her lemon cake for her birthday. But at least she has the lemon I didn’t have for mine.

I press my body hard into the ground as Owl looks around her, through the translucent walls, down the dirt alley of the greenhouse, and out the door. She’s searching for someone. She’s searching for me.

I hope she enjoys the fruit. I wish I could be around to watch her eat it.

Owl tugs at the lemon, but it isn’t ready to separate from the branch. She presses her nose against its shiny, dense surface. She scratches a fingernail along it, then sniffs. There’s a hint of a smile on her face. A modest joy.

Owl emerges from the greenhouse, takes a step toward the smelter. Then she turns and passes instead behind the infirmary, where we used to watch reels. Our private space. The site of the Museum of Earth Civ.

She squats on the packed soil behind the infirmary, where I watched Dad’s and Father’s reels for their future selves. She sifts through our drawings, our models, our pathetic little vehicles with their dented surfaces and missing wheels. She examines each one.

Much as I try to find any other reason for what she’s doing, I’m left with only one: Owl misses me.

I remember the conversations we had right at this spot, the games we played, the songs we sang, the ugly crafts we’d make that the dads would then have to admire. The model malevor I once made, that Father wrinkled his nose at but then kept by his bedside, wearing the figurine’s head around his neck when the doll finally broke in two.

Tell me the most... purple thing you saw yesterday , Owl once said.

Ooh, good one , I replied. Purple. Okay. There was a nitrogen fixing node on a pea shoot in the trial tank of the greenhouse. It was mostly gold brown, but had a really nice lavender sheen, too. My turn. What’s the... softest thing you touched yesterday?

Owl glances at notes we left for each other, before going deeper into the museum. She comes up with a triangular piece of polycarb. She examines it, confused.

I know what it is, of course. If she squeezes it, it will project the reel I recorded for the anniversary of the dads’ arrival. The last exhibit of the Museum of Earth Civ. I’d never had a chance to show Owl, because she’d gone off on her unauthorized expedition before she could watch it. The anniversary went by unremarked, weeks ago.

She’s going to watch it.

I will watch it with her, not that she’ll know.

Owl gasps as words project in the sky: Eighteen Years. Congratulations, Dads!

This reel is something I made using the limited processing power available through OS’s systems. It’s nothing fancy, not like Pink Lagoon. My grainy footage doesn’t even track Owl’s eyes and resolve further where she focuses. As it begins, something is blobbing through space. It’s supposed to be the dads’ ship.

I’m already wincing. It’s so amateur.

This projection is a good six meters high, full of saturated colors that are shockingly bright in the gray-red lights of twilight. A starry sky, a ship blobbing through it. It is tiny and fragile. It glows. Even though it looks sort of like a lumpy rock, it’s also lonely and precious.

The directors of Pink Lagoon would have zoomed in and entered the ship. But there was no way I could pull that off. Instead the reel stays outside as the ship’s lights blink off, and then time speeds up, the galaxy passing in parallax behind it. Then the ship lights up again and time slows, the stars going static.

It’s probably best I couldn’t pull off bringing the reel inside the ship. That would have been too traumatic for the dads to watch.

The Coordinated Endeavor model goes bright one last time before it careens into a planet. Our planet, the second body circling the Sisters’ center of gravity. For Owl’s sake, I rendered our home with seas along the equator.

When the ship crashes, it cleaves into two. One of the dads emerges from each half. They’re not digital re-creations—they’re puppets. I made them each using ancient pre-reel techniques. Stop-motion. These I’m proud of. They’re actually pretty cute.

As the reel continues, Owl rummages around the museum until she finds the puppets I made. She hugs them while she watches the rest of the reel.

The two spacefarers lurch toward each other and embrace in a jangly marionette way. The Kodiak one even has the swoop of hair that Father has, cascading over his brow. The Sisters rapidly rise and set, and— shwoop —the wreckage of the Endeavor pops out a baby. It looks like me. The baby shoots through the air, and stop-motion Dad catches him like a football. I meant it to be serious, but it looks like a comedy.

Then there’s another shwoop , and another baby pops out. Owl laughs. It’s her. The babies start running circles around the bewildered puppet dads. Accurate.

Rover is there the whole time, a little sphere hovering over the terrain. In the background, it builds our settlement. Puffy polycarb units. The living unit, the nursery, the laboratory, the infirmary, the greenhouses. These are digitized, because creating puppets for those would have taken weeks and I had soil to lug and seedlings to nurture.

Scary grunts from the hilltop nearby. The malevors. Rover hastily constructs the perimeter fence, each post topped with its own pneumatic gun. The malevors retreat and the grunts subside.

The settlement slowly expands as the Aurora and Endeavor sink into the muck of Minerva’s surface. I tend to the greenhouse algae and plants, and Owl patrols the fence.

The puppets of our dads withdraw from their embrace. Dad falls from the top of the lab and breaks one of his stick legs, and we all pick him back up. I lie flat for a bit and everyone watches. (That fever I had. Father stayed by my side the whole time.) Rover rolls down a hill and breaks in two, and Dad puts the two pieces back together. All the major events from our lives are here.

Finally we all line up awkwardly and wave. The reel zooms back out to space, so Minerva is joined by its nearby planets, Cuckoo and Eagle. We get a glimpse of the whole binary solar system before the reel ends. No comet in view; we didn’t even know about it yet. I didn’t really know how to finish a reel. I tried a few options, but nothing worked.

The reel blips out, and Owl stands in the twilight, staring out at the stars. The comet is bigger than any of them. Big enough to see the radiant gas trail behind it, the glowing coma in front.

She hugs the dad dolls close to her before placing them back on the ground, amid the strewn pieces of the Museum of Earth Civ.

Then she gets back to work.

From behind the malevor carcass, I watch Owl fill the tarp. What I want to do most is to hug her, to tell her how sorry I am, maybe even give her a chance to say that she forgives me. That’s beyond anything I have the right to hope for, and yet I do.

From the way she held that lemon, watched the anniversary reel all the way through, hugged the puppets I made of the dads, I think she might accept me if I went up to her. Even though I tried to murder Dad.

That’s why I can’t let myself do it. I can’t tempt her to remember she loves me. Because I’m still me. Because my brain is still a hostile place. Because if I’m around her, I might try to kill her, too. Scalp her like the hair from a violin bow.

My arms are aching. But I can’t release my bonds. Both because I know it’s a bad idea and because I don’t think I could untie this knot with my teeth. So I just stay on my side, my face in a permanent wince, as I watch Owl load up the tarp with loops of chromium cabling. As she begins lugging it toward the Aurora.

Goodbye, Sister.

I wait until she and Father are both at the Aurora site to make my final departure. I don’t feel like I will ever be hungry again, and I certainly don’t deserve to use up any of the precious food stores they’ll pack away in the bunker, beyond the algae planks I’ve already eaten. I do allow myself to draw from the water reservoir, though, bobbing my head to drink straight from the surface. My thirst is too powerful to deny. For a moment I let my whole face submerge, and this time it’s myself my brain imagines killing. But I come up, fighting to live despite my own intentions, my thirst slaked.

Arms behind my back, I start walking. I go south toward the slain malevors, passing between their bodies, stroking each motionless belly with my foot, I guess to commemorate them. I pick this direction because we’ve never gone this way, scared off before by the aggressive beasts. I will travel through a land where humans have never been, and from which this human will never return. Where my family will never think to search for me.

My spirits rise as I go. I guess this is what I needed, taking action, seizing control of my destiny. I will not be responsible for the destruction of my family. They will survive the comet, and I will soon be a distant memory.

It also helps that the trek is beautiful. The comet is still a week away, based on what I overheard from OS and the dads, but the landscape already looks different beneath its radiance. All the bits of quartz and mica and silicone shine and glitter, scattering the colors of the setting Sisters in new directions, casting ruddy light everywhere. The sky is vividly open, like it is a hatch I could tumble through into the universe beyond.

I will miss this land.

I thought my body would have given out by now, but my legs find new energy. Even the pain of my cracked lips and my sunburned face fades from my experience for long periods. Instead my altered brain offers the sensation of my individual footfalls, my deep breaths, my joyously depleting body.

I am lighter than the atmosphere, I am the duck that never flew, I am the breezes themselves. I don’t know if this is just my mind finally hallucinating from dehydration, but the air smells different from how it ever has. It smells like... blood? No, that’s not it. It smells like tears.

The ground slopes upward at the horizon. I have never seen the ground do such a thing. This , I decide. This is where I will fall. I will discover what is on the other side of this hill before I finally let myself collapse.

It’s like when I was gardening, deciding hours before the end of the workday what my end point would be. The last pea shoot in this line. I can make it to the last pea shoot and then I will watch our latest episode of Pink Lagoon , talk with my sister and the dads, and eat some delicious food.

Today, my last day, I will make it to the top of that rise.

I stumble twice along the way. The second time I have to lie still for long moments, gritting my teeth against the scream in my shoulder where my wrenched arm hit the ground. Then I wriggle my way to my feet, shouting with the exertion.

Ten minutes. Ten minutes more and I will be at the top of that rise.

The smell of tears is even stronger. It’s not just in my mind, I’m sure of it. This is something real. But what is it?

My legs scream as they begin the incline. They tremble, as if I’m lifting something heavy. But that something heavy is just my mortal body, starting to fail to stay upright.

Ten steps more.

Five.

I reach the top and collapse, just managing to muster the energy in my belly muscles to stay seated and not sprawl out. I close my eyes for a long moment, drinking the scent of tears in through my nostrils.

The air is wet.

I open my eyes.

I’m in front of the sea.

I’ve never seen one before, but that’s what this must be. A sea. Thick with minerals, too: it’s the color of iron, all the way to the horizon. Its small waves crash at the shore, a dozen meters below me. I’m seated on a cliff, looking down at a body of liquid that has no end.

I scream, the shock is that great.

And that’s before I see the life-forms.

There are hilltops in this iron sea, like knees emerging from pond water, but a good two meters in diameter. They roll listlessly in the currents, their frondlike tendrils fanning out of the sea, squirming and flapping before disappearing back into the water. Maybe they’re picking something out of the air; I see blurry movements over the surface, like there might be swarms of some tiny creature flying over this sea.

Life. Life consuming life. An ecosystem.

Owl was right. We’re not alone here.

Eyes streaming tears in the dry heat of the incoming comet, I watch the rolling forms for I don’t know how long. Maybe they’re animal or maybe they’re plant, or maybe they’re something else entirely. The bodies are a dull gray brown, but the fronds are more colorful. A brownish crimson, strangely familiar. Where could I know that from?

Then I realize—they’re the same fronds that grow out of the rust jungle. The same color as the alien organism from the asteroid the dads’ clones harvested.

What I’m seeing is probably a new form of that extraterrestrial creature. When those mossy leaves hit open water, they took on this aquatic form. Even in its exhausted state, my brain starts proposing hypotheses for why they’d do this. Perhaps their home world was ever-changing, and as its environment rapidly altered, life evolved adaptive strategies to cope, modifying itself quickly to survive a mercurial world.

Which means these organisms could be more likely to survive this comet strike than we are.

As I watch, one of the floating balls stills and cracks. It unrolls before my eyes, then dives. The only thing I can see from this cliff above is a fin, quivering with energy before the creature rapidly drops out of view. The strength of it is enough to send a nearby sphere rolling, and to crash waves into the shore. The sound rises up to me, a sound I knew only from reels. Surf. This is my first time hearing surf.

Who knows what this life is capable of.

I thought I was done. But now I have an impossible thought. I try to dismiss it. Surely not, not with my agonized body, so near failure already, quivering with the simple exertion of staying seated. But it’s there, insisting.

I can’t , my body screams.

You must , my mind says.

Owl. Owl must know about this.

I have to go home.