The Last Hour of Gann by Smith, R. Lee (1)

 

BOOK I

 

 

 

AMBER

 

The eviction notice was hanging on the door when they got back from the hospital. The time stamp said 1:27 am, six minutes after Mary Shelley Bierce’s official time of death, an hour and twenty-eight minutes before her two daughters sitting in the waiting room had even been informed.

Amber sent Nicci in to bed while she stood out in the hall and read. The eviction gave them thirty days to either vacate or sign under the terms of the new lease, a copy of which was attached. Amber read them. Then she folded up the notice and slipped it into her pocket. She made herself a pot of coffee and sipped at it while watching the news. She thought. She said hello when Nicci woke up and that was all. She went to work.

The funeral was held three days later, a Tuesday. The insurance company covered the cost, which meant it was a group job, and although it was scheduled ‘between the hours of eight and eleven,’ the other funerals apparently dragged long and then there was lunch and so it was nearly two in the afternoon before Mary’s name was called and the cardboard case with her label pasted on the side slid by on the belt and disappeared into the oven. Nicci cried a little. Amber put her arm around her. They got a lot of dirty looks from the other mourners, even though it had only been sixteen years since Measure 34 had passed—Zero Population Growth, Zero Tolerance—and they had both been born by then.

Amber was used to getting dirty looks when she went out with Nicci. Sometimes siblings could pass themselves off as cousins or, even better, as just friends, but not the Bierce girls. Even with different fathers, they were each their mother in miniature and the three years between them had an oddly plastic quality: in the right light, they could be mistaken for twins; in the wrong light, Amber had occasionally been addressed as Nicci’s mother. Part of that was the size difference—Nicci was, as their mother used to be, fine-boned and willowy below that round, cherubic face, while Amber was pretty much round all over—but not all of it. “You were just born old, little girl,” as her mom used to say. “You were born to take care of things.”

She tried to take it as a compliment. The only part of Mary Bierce that knew how to be a mother had been cut out years ago and tossed in a baggie with a biohazard stamp on the side. The parts that were left after that didn’t give a damn about homework or lunches or scrubbing out the toilet once in a while. Someone had to be the responsible one and if Amber wasn’t actually born knowing that, she sure learned it in hurry.

 

* * *

 

There could have been a lot more than two children at the funeral if it hadn’t been for Measure 34. Mary Bierce (known to her clients as Bo Peep for her curly blonde hair, big blue eyes and child-sweet face, a name she was quick to capitalize on with frilly panties and ribbons and the intermittent plush sheep) had never been the careful sort. Amber had been putting out cigarettes, sweeping up broken bottles, and making sure the door was locked since she was six; she knew damned well that her mom wasn’t going to lose a good tip by insisting her clients wore a condom when she was working. Bo Peep had been to the aborters three times that Amber knew of and there had probably been others, but that all ended with the Zeros and Measure 34. One day, she went off for her regular monthly shots and came staggering home three hours later wearing a diaper. She sort of collapsed onto the sofa, sprawled out like she was drunk, only she wasn’t loud and laughing the way she ought to be. Her mouth had hung open slightly and there was some kind of gooey paste caked at the corners of her lips. All her makeup had been wiped away and none too gently; she looked haggard and sick and dead. Nicci—easily frightened under normal circumstances and utterly terrified by this slack-faced stranger who looked like their mom—started crying, and once she did, Mary Bierce burst out into huge, wet sobs also. She lay spread out over the sofa with her legs wide open and that plastic diaper showing under her skirt while her daughters hugged each other and stared, but all she seemed capable of saying was one nonsensical word.

“Spayed!” their mother wept, over and over, until she was screaming it. Screaming and digging at her stomach so hard that one of her bubblegum-pink fingernails broke right off. “Spayed me! Those motherfuckers spayed me!”

At last, in a kind of desperation to quiet everybody down before one of the neighbors had them written up again, Amber climbed up on the kitchen counter and brought down a bottle of her mom’s black label. She poured a juice glass for Mary and, after a moment’s uneasy deliberation, a sippy-cup for Nicci and made them both drink. Within an hour, they were both asleep, but her mom kept crying even then, in a breathy, wailing way she couldn’t quite wake up for, and all she could say was that word.

Spayed.

Later, of course, she had plenty to say—about Measure 34 and the Zero-Pop zealots who passed it, about the insurance company and their fine print policies, and about men. It always came back to the men.

“They’ll spay the hookers, sure they will,” she’d sneer at some point. “But do they ever talk about neutering the fucking johns? Oh no! No, they’re still selling Viagra on the fucking TV, that’s what they’re doing! Let me tell you something, babies, what I do is the most honest work in the world because all women are whores! That’s how men see it and if that’s how they see it, little girl, that’s how it is!”

And Amber would nod, because sometimes if you agreed enough early on, the real shouting never got started, but privately she had her doubts. Privately she thought, even then at the age of eight and especially as she got older and Bo Peep Bierce grew more and more embittered, that it didn’t prove a whole lot to say that men thought all women were whores when the only men you saw in a day were the ones…well, buying a whore. If you want to hang with a better class of man, Amber would think as she nodded along with her mother’s rants, quit whoring.

Not that you could quit these days. But it had still been her choice to start.

And these probably weren’t the most respectful thoughts to be having at your mother’s funeral. Amber gave Nicci’s shaking shoulders a few more pats and tried to think of good things, happy memories, but there weren’t many. Her mind got to wandering back toward the eviction and the Manifestors. It had better be today, she decided, listening to Nicci cry.

After the funeral. But today.

 

* * *

 

She didn’t say anything until they got back to the apartment. Then Amber sat her baby sister at the kitchen table and put two short stacks of papers in front of her. One was the eviction notice, the new lease, and a copy of their mother’s insurance policy. The other was an information packet with the words Manifest Destiny printed in starry black and white letters on the first page.

“Please,” said Nicci, trying to squirm away. “Not right now, okay?”

“Right now,” said Amber. She sat down on the other side of the table, then had to reach out and catch her sister’s hand to keep her from escaping. It was not a gentle grip, but Amber kept it in spite of Nicci’s wince and teary, reproachful look. Sometimes, the bad stuff needed to be said. That was the one thing Mary Bierce used to say that Amber did believe.

“We’re going to lose this place,” Amber said bluntly. “No matter what we do—”

“Don’t say that!”

“—we’re going to lose it.”

“I can get another job!” Nicci insisted.

“Yeah, you can. So can I. And they’ll be two more full-time shifts at minimum wage under that fucking salary cap because we dropped out of school. And that means that the most—the absolute most, Nicci—that we can make between us will be not quite half what we’d need for the new rent.”

“What…? N-no…” Nicci fumbled at the papers on the table, staring without comprehension at the neat, lawyerly print on the new lease. “They…They can’t do that!”

“Yes, they can. They did. Maybe they couldn’t raise Mama’s rent, but they can sure do it to us.”

“How do they expect us to pay this much every month?”

“They don’t. They expect to evict us. They want to get a better class of person in here,” she added with a trace of wry humor, “and I can’t say I blame them.”

“But…But where are we supposed to go?”

“They don’t care,” said Amber, shrugging. “And they don’t have to care. We do. And we’ve only got about four weeks to figure it out, so you really need to—” She broke it off there and made herself take a few breaths, because stop whining wasn’t going to move the situation anywhere but from bad to worse. “We need to think,” she finished, “about what we can do to help ourselves.”

Nicci gave her a wet, blank stare and moved the papers around some more. “I don’t…Where…What do you want to do?”

Amber picked up the brochure and moved it a little closer to her sister’s trembling hands. “I went to see the Manifestors.”

Nicci stared at her. “No,” she said. Not in a tough way, maybe, but not as feebly as she’d been saying things either. “Amber, no!”

“Then we’re going to have to go on the state.” She had a pamphlet for that option, too. She tossed it on the table in front of Nicci with a loud, ugly slap of sound. More a booklet than a pamphlet, really, with none of the pretty fonts and colorful pictures the Manifestors put in their own brochure. “Read it.”

“No!”

“Okay. I’ll just run down the bullet points for you. To begin with, it’ll take six to eight weeks before we’re accepted, if we’re accepted, so we’ll still lose this place. However, once we’re homeless, there shouldn’t be any trouble getting a priority stamp on our application to move into a state-run housing dorm, so there’s that.”

Nicci put both hands to her face and sobbed harder. Amber’s own eyes tried to sting, but she wouldn’t let them. Crying was a pointless little-girl thing to do and it hadn’t fixed one goddamn thing since it had been invented by the very first pointless little girl. Problems only got solved when you did something about them.

“We’ll only be allowed to take one standard-size carry-case each,” said Amber evenly, watching her baby sister cry, “and we can’t afford a storage pod, so most of this stuff will have to be sold or left behind.”

“Stop it! Please, just stop!”

“And we probably won’t be able to live together. Not in the same dorm room, maybe not even in the same complex.”

“I can’t be alone!”

“You won’t be alone, Nicci. You’ll be rooming with up to seven other women, they’ll just be strangers.”

“No!”

“We’ll lose our jobs and have to work a state-job as partial payment for those dorms, where our salary cap will be half what it is now, so once we move into those dorms, we are never getting out.”

“No!”

“Yes, dammit!” Amber snapped. “These are the facts, Nicci! We can’t stay here and nothing we do can change that. This place is all over. Maybe if we had enough time, we could find another place we could afford on just what we’re making now, but you know goddamned well that we’d end up on a first-served list and we could be there for years! Where are we going to live in the meantime, huh?”

“You could get more time!” Nicci snatched at the lease, tearing it in her haste. “Did you even ask? There has to be a number that…that you could call and they’ll give us more time if they know we’re…on a list or…”

“We can file for a four-week extension. That’s what we can do, and only if we can prove we can pay the lease at the end of those four weeks. That’s all they care about and that’s all they have to care about. Everything else is on us.”

“Then I’ll do like Mama did! I’m not leaving!”

“You mean you want to be a whore.”

Nicci flinched. Amber did not.

“You want to do like Mama did,” said Amber, ruthless and calm as her stomach churned. “You want to be a whore.”

“I…”

“How are you going to fuck men—”

That flinch again.

“—for money—”

Nicci broke, tried to get up. Amber caught her by the wrist again and held on in spite of her sister’s squirming efforts to tug free. She hated this, hated herself, but she kept on talking and her voice never shook. Sometimes you had to say the bad stuff, right, Mama? Right.

“—if you can’t even admit you’ll be a whore?”

“I can do it,” whispered Nicci, but she wouldn’t look at Amber.

“Maybe you could, but you couldn’t do it here, and you had better be sure that’s the way you want to go because they don’t let you stop anymore once you start. You’ll have to get the barcode and you’ll be subject to scans at any time. They’ll cancel your insurance—look at me, Nicci—and garnish your wages to pay for the state insurance and all your monthly tests, plus the initial registration and the operation where they spay you, and you know it took Mama five years to pay all that off. And in the meantime, where will you be living? Because you won’t be able to pay the new lease on a state-paid whore’s salary and this place will still be just as gone.”

“Stop it!” Nicci shouted. “Stop bullying me! I’m not leaving!”

Amber pressed her lips together and folded her hands. She told herself she wasn’t a bully. “What are you going to do, Nicci? Where are you going to go?”

“Shut up!” Nicci beat her palms on the table loud enough that old Mrs. Simon in the next apartment banged her cane on the wall. “I’m not leaving! You can’t make me leave, Amber! You can’t make me leave the planet!”

“I’m not making you do anything,” said Amber, knowing damned well it was a lie. “I’m just telling you that I’m going, with or without you.”

Nicci stared, her mouth working in silent horror.

“There is no other place for us to go,” said Amber.

And she waited, but Nicci still couldn’t find anything to say, so she picked up the brochure and started to flip through it.

“So I went to see the Manifestors,” she said. She sounded, to her own ears, a lot like the pinch-faced old man at the orientation seminar, trying to be professional while still getting through something deeply unpleasant and perhaps contagious as quickly as possible. Everyone knew about the Manifest Destiny Society and their ship; she said it anyway. “They’ve still got room. I guess they’re having some trouble filling their quota for young women, so we’re actually guaranteed a contract if we apply.”

“They’re having trouble because it’s never been tested!”

“Sure it has. They’ve Tunneled out to all the other planets.”

“Oh what? To Neptune? Saturn?” Nicci uttered a shrill, fearful laugh and shook her head. “They’ve never taken it to this other place! This…This…”

“Plymouth,” supplied Amber, not without rolling her eyes a little. The Director of the Manifest Destiny Society was simply full of the pioneering spirit. “They’re calling the planet Plymouth.”

“I don’t care what they’re calling it! I don’t want to go!”

“You don’t have to. But I am,” said Amber again, and watched her baby sister start to cry. “The trip’s going to take about three years, they said, but we’ll be in Sleepers the whole time. That’s kind of like in the movies, when they freeze you, only we won’t actually be frozen. We won’t feel anything and we won’t age, although the guy said sometimes the umbilical…the place where they plug you in leaves a pretty gnarly scar. Those weren’t his exact words—”

“Amber!” Nicci wailed.

She waited, but that was apparently the sum and substance of Nicci’s argument, so after a moment, she just went on.

“When we get there, the ship lands and becomes like the staging area for the colony. We’ll be building the colony up around it—farms and stuff, I guess—but civilians like me won’t be responsible for much. I guess it’ll be pretty hard work, but it’s only supposed to be a six-hour shift, which is less than I’m working now. I got one of their silver civilian contracts, which means five years—Earth years, that is, and it doesn’t include the transport time. They’re going to pay me twenty thousand dollars a year, plus five thousand just for being a fertile female of childbearing age.”

Nicci looked up, her tears hitching to a brief stop in her throat. “W-what?”

“Plus another ten thousand for every kid I have while I’m there, but I’m not having any. I told them that, and they said that was my decision, but I still have to take my implant out before I go. They won’t pay for that, but they do pay for a full medical exam and I’ll get all my shots so I’m clean to go. By a doctor,” she added. “Not some insurance company’s medico. Plus, I’ll get the Vaccine.”

Not a vaccine. The Vaccine. And even Nicci, who obviously tried so hard to understand as little as she possibly could, knew what that was. Because before the Director had been the leader of a bunch of space-happy freaks, he’d been a doctor, and much as he would like to say that his greatest contribution to humanity was the ship that would carry the first colonists to another world (and he said that a lot), he would probably always be known best for the Vaccine, which worked itself all the way down into your DNA and made it so you could never get sick again. Here on Earth, people paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to endure the agonizing year-long process while the Vaccine was introduced, but the Director was just giving them all away to his happy little colonists, who’d get them painlessly in their Sleepers, which was the perfect application process, according to the brochure. No more worrying about that niggling little 14% failure rate or the greatly exaggerated reports of the birth defects caused by genetic drift. They’d just wake up, secure in the knowledge that now they were cured for life of every possible virus—of the flu, of HIV, of whatever alien illness might be crawling around on Plymouth. Of everything.

Amber could see this sweeping, silent argument hammering away at Nicci’s defenses. Ever since the Ebola attack at the UN summit, there had been a dramatic end to the prohibitions on biological warfare. These days, it was fight fire with fire, and now it seemed every country was bragging about the bugs they could grow. Super-polio, rabies-13, dengue, hanta, yellowpox and God only knew what else. They lived in the city. They were a target. It could happen any day.

“Well…” Nicci ran her wet eyes over the papers on the table without seeming to really see any of them. “Can’t we go on the next ship? When we know it’s safe?”

“No.”

“There’s going to be more!” She reached tentatively for the Manifestor’s pamphlet, but withdrew her hand without touching it. “We can take the next one, okay?”

“No, Nicci. They only pay people to be colonists for the first ship, because it’s the first and everyone wants to wait and see what happens. After it gets there safe and sound, the Manifestors stop paying and start charging.”

“You don’t know that!”

“I do know that, actually, because I was there and I talked to them. I also know that the next three ships are already booked, so it’s this or nothing. Well,” she amended ruthlessly, “it’s this or go on the state or start whoring. I guess we do have options.”

Nicci sniffled and rubbed at her face.

Amber picked up the brochure on the ship and made herself read it. It took a lot of time and when she was done, she could not remember a thing she’d just read. She’d hoped it would settle her twisting stomach some, but if anything, the wait and the silence and the sound of Nicci sniffling made her feel even sicker. She folded up the brochure and put it down, talking like she’d never stopped, like she didn’t care, like she was sure. “The best part is, the five years I spend on the planet counts as improved education when I get back. Not as much as a degree would, but some. My salary cap will be raised and I’ll even be eligible for college credit, just like if I’d been in the army.”

She waited. Nicci kept sniffing and wiping.

“Fine,” said Amber, sweeping the papers together in a single stack. “You stay here and have fun with the whoring. I’ll miss you.”

Nicci didn’t call her back as Amber walked down the narrow hall to the room that the sisters had shared since Mary brought baby Nichole home from the insurance company’s birth clinic. Amber put the papers in the drawer with her shirts and socks, then changed out of her funeral clothes and into her work uniform. She went into the bathroom and threw up in the sink. She tried to be as quiet about that as possible and she didn’t feel a lot better when it was done. In the other room, she could hear her baby sister crying again. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror and saw a big (fat) unsmiling (mean-eyed) stranger (bitch) who’d bullied her only living relative on the day of their mother’s funeral.

“It had to be said,” whispered Amber. She rinsed her mouth and washed her face and put her hair up. “Sometimes you just have to say the bad stuff.”

She went on out past weeping Nicci and off to work like it didn’t matter. In a way, it didn’t. They simply didn’t have any choice.

 

2

 

They called the ship the Pioneer, of course. The launch had originally been scheduled for August 3rd, but it had been pushed back three times and now was set for January 22nd, and, barring another sanction from the United Nations, set in stone. That gave the Bierces a little more than twelve weeks to prepare for the flight, but they only had Bo Peep’s apartment for four. The Manifestors provided housing, but required a signed contract before approval, which in turn required a certificate of medical clearance. They got their exams the third day after requesting one and Nicci passed hers easily. Amber hit an old, familiar snag.

Her tests were all negative, the medico assured her, as though Amber needed assurances. She did not. Her job at the factory took the weekly drug-and-disability tests allowed by law and Amber had seen too many people dismissed, often with a hefty fine for ‘misrepresentation of faculties,’ to ever be tempted by her mother’s stash. No, the problem was what the problem usually was: Her weight.

She wasn’t huge. She had more than one chin and she lost her breath easy when she had to take the stairs, but she got her clothes at the same store Nicci did, just on the lower shelves. So this was a setback, but it wasn’t unexpected and it couldn’t be insurmountable. She just wasn’t that big.

“How much would I have to lose?” Amber asked bluntly, interrupting the medico’s careful dance around the three-letter F-word.

“It isn’t a matter of, well, weight.”

“It isn’t?” she asked, surprised. “Is something wrong with me?”

“Not necessarily. Your blood pressure is, well, on the high end, but normal, and although you show some pre-diabetic conditions, your glucose levels are just fine.”

“How do you have a pre-diabetic condition? Isn’t every healthy person a pre-sick one?”

The medico’s lips pursed slightly.

Amber made herself shut up. She glanced at the nicely-tiled ceiling and then at the pleasant wall-mounted light meant to mimic a curtained window, since the actual view of rundown buildings and garbage-strewn alleys was so deplorable. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not trying to be a bitch, I just really want to go.”

The medico softened slightly, even smiled. No doubt she saw before her an excited, if fat, young pioneeress on the threshold of a lifelong wish and she alone had the power to grant it. Amber let her think whatever she wanted. This was the last hurdle and if she could just get her fat ass over it, she and Nicci would be on their way.

“I have to do this,” said Amber. “So just tell me how much I have to lose.”

“I’m really not sure. The problem isn’t just a matter of weight, as I said. It’s a matter of risk. You have to realize that even though your tests all fall within the normal range right now, you’ll be contracted to the colony for five years as, well, as a potential mother. Obesity creates an increased risk for all pregnancies.”

They thought she was obese? Amber rubbed her stomach and scowled. “Okay. I’ll be back,” she said, and went out to the clinic’s waiting area to collect Nicci. She made herself a second appointment for the end of the month, the same day the apartment’s lease expired. She went home, saw a nervous Nicci out the door and on her way to work, then took half the money out of her bank account and got back on the bus.

 

* * *

 

Amber knew where he lived, but she went to 61st Street anyway because when Bo Peep moonlighted, which was almost every night these past few years, she did it on 61st and the Six-Ones might be feeling territorial. Sure enough, after standing out in the grey rain for a good half-hour, a kid sidled up and asked who she wanted. She asked for the Candyman. He had a lot of names, and Amber even knew a few, thanks to his long working relationship with her mother, but that was the one that could always find him. The kid went away and another ten minutes passed. Permission came in the form of a low, black car with tinted windows that rolled down just enough for some other kid to tell her where to find him.

The Candyman wasn’t much to look at—a scrawny, toothless man of indeterminate age and race, with a propensity for cheap suits and a swishy way of talking that should have made him a target on these streets. Instead, he was perhaps the one man who could walk freely from 14 East all the way up to Brewer Drive and get nothing but nods from the people he passed. It wasn’t just the drugs. Just what it was, Amber didn’t know, but the drugs made an easy sideline and he was good with them. He rarely met with anyone apart from his own crew and the leisure girls who did the things he liked in exchange for the glow only he could give them. But he met with Amber, perhaps just because he’d seen her before, hanging on Mama’s hand and wishing she was someplace else while Bo Peep begged in her pretty way for the sweet stuff, trying to pretend Mama really meant candy, like the lollipop he gave little Amber on the way out his door.

He admitted her past ten or twelve of his heavily-armed good friends to the squalor of his apartment as if to a royal audience, which she supposed it might be, in a way. He said a few solemn words on the passing of her mother, which was nice of him. And then he got down to business.

“Are you going on the state?” he asked in his mushy, sing-song way. “Candyman can talk around, you bet, find you a prime place to strut. No charge, even. Out of respect. Would you like a soda? Nickels, get Bo Peep’s little girl a soda.”

“No, thank you. I need to lose a lot of weight in the next four weeks,” said Amber. “A lot. And I need to pass a drug-and-disability at the end of it.”

“Mmm-hm.” Candyman leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands. “That does limit our options. Let me think.”

He thought. And then he went into his dingy kitchen, rattled around, and came out with a crinkled paper lunchbag, well-used, but strong enough still to hold whatever it held. He folded the top down three times and pinched the crease sharp with his knobby, stained fingers. “You take one of these in the morning, sweets, when you get up. One twelve hours later, no more and no less. It make you hum around some, you bet,” he said, and tittered. “You say four weeks, uh-huh, you take this three weeks and let the last week go. If you like to tip the bottle, you best be setting it aside for a while or you find you lose all the weight, all at once, and go slithering off in just your soul.”

“How much do I owe you?”

“I like this girl. She all business,” Candyman remarked to one of his good friends and the good friend grunted. “Well, Miss Business, out of respect for your dear departed mama, I’ma give you this for just twenty a shot, mmm-hm. That’s twenty-one days, two shots a day…help me with the higher mathematics here, Snaps.”

“Eight-forty,” rumbled one of his men.

“Just so.” Candyman held out the bag.

Amber didn’t take it. Eight hundred and forty dollars was more than she had on her, but not more than she had. On the other hand, she still had twelve weeks to get through and she didn’t like spending so much of it at the beginning without knowing how it was all going to end. But then again, if she passed her medical exam, she’d be in the Manifestors’ care for most of that time, and after that, it didn’t matter. She meant to put whatever she hadn’t spent in one of the colonist’s accounts, so whatever she had when she left could sit in the Director’s bank growing by half a percent a quarter until she got back. Maybe by then it’d be up to four digits. And when she did come back with her colonist’s pay, eight hundred and forty dollars was going to be pretty small change.

“Give me a little time to put that together.” Amber turned around.

“Ooo, now I really like her. She don’t haggle, she don’t beg, she don’t cozy up other arrangements. She just gets things done,” said Candyman, and he must have gestured because two of his good friends stepped sideways in front of the door. Amber studied them, aware that this might be very bad, as behind her, the Candyman considered.

“How much you got in your pocket?” he asked at last.

Dumb question to answer in a room full of men with guns.

“Five hundred.”

“Mm-hm. Tell you what I’m going to do, because you’re Bo Peep’s little girl and because I like you, I’m going to take that five hundred right now and you gonna give me the rest plus another one-sixty—another even five, you hear me?—the day you take your last shot. You do this like an honest businessman, yeah? And we got no problems.”

She looked at him. “Is there a catch?”

“I do like her,” said Candyman to Snaps. And to Amber again, “Just another business arrangement, nothing bad. Good business. Repeat business, if you understand me, anytime you find yourself in the market. You just let Candyman take care of you, we gonna get along just fine.”

“I can agree to that,” said Amber, who had no intention of either buying his products or selling her body. She doubted he’d follow her offworld to complain about it.

Candyman smiled at her, but his eyes turned cold and somehow older—the eyes of a crocodile, half-sunk in swamp and too damned close to shore. “Whether or not you can is not what I’m waiting to hear, Miss Business.”

“Sorry,” said Amber, and unlike the nurse, the apology did not soften up the Candyman in the slightest. “I mean I will.” And she put out her hand for him to shake.

He looked at it. His friends looked at it. They all looked at each other. Some of them laughed, but it was good, honest laughter.

“Business all the way,” marveled Candyman. He shook with her. His hand was soft and bony at the same time, with too much skin for its little size, and abrasive calluses on the fingerpads. He did not release her right away. “You gonna find I’m a man of my word, despite what you might be thinking, and that can be good or bad depending on how you want to play this out.”

“I came to you for help,” said Amber. “That’s how I’m playing it.”

“Mm-hm.” He opened his hand and let hers go. “I knew your mama,” he said, giving her the lunchbag. “I knew her about as well as she let anyone know her, if you feel me, and if you don’t mind my saying, you not a whole lot like her.”

She knew. And she knew it probably wasn’t a compliment, but she took it as one.

 

* * *

 

She took her lunchbag home and put it in Mama’s room without looking at it. Then she cleaned house. Ice cream, frozen pizzas, peanut butter, all the nuke-and-eat dinners in the freezer and the just-add-hamburger boxes from the cupboard—opened or unopened, it all went into a garbage bag and straight out to the dump-bin behind the building. If it wasn’t here, she wouldn’t think about it; if it was, she’d probably eat it all, just to have something to do. It wasn’t until much later that night, after Nicci was in bed and Amber sat alone in Mama’s room that she opened up the thin, stained paper and had her first look at forty-one pre-loaded needles. She tried not to think about how many times they’d been used when she pushed the first one in.

She didn’t even have enough time to wonder when it was going to hit before it hit. She didn’t sleep that night. She didn’t sleep much at all for the next twenty-one days, but she hummed all right. Sometimes her heart raced hard enough that she made herself sit down with the telephone on her lap and her finger on the emergency-response button, just waiting for the last reason to push it, but she got through it.

She lost her job, but not for the shots. She wasn’t sure how they found out about Manifest Destiny, but they must have, because in spite of her ‘recent increase in enthusiasm and productivity’ at work, they felt that, regrettably, she had ceased to envision a future with the company. They didn’t offer to send her last paycheck and she didn’t ask. She considered herself lucky they hadn’t taken her to court for breach of occupational contract.

Jobless, she counted days by the mornings when she shot up and nights the same way. Otherwise, there was no time, no sense of its passage, no sense of change in herself, only sleepless nights and blurry days and gradually loosening clothes.

She paid the Candyman his money the morning of her last injection. He told her she looked good, reminded her of their future business arrangements, said he’d see her around. She did, once or twice, but only at a distance.

She made her appointment at the clinic on time after sleeping nearly two days straight through. She looked and felt like home-brewed shit in her opinion, but she didn’t have the same medico and the new one didn’t remark on her appearance beyond voicing some concern that if the records were accurate, Amber appeared to have lost fifty-seven pounds since the last examination.

“Mistakes happen,” said Amber. “Do I pass?”

The medico took some measurements. He flipped through some papers. Then he excused himself. Amber waited for a few seconds, then eased the door latch silently down and opened it just a crack. She could hear her medico down at the nurses’ station, conferring with whoever else was there in low, urgent tones.

“—not sure what to tell her,” he was saying.

“How old is she?”

“Twenty-four, but she’s a big girl. I don’t think the—”

“She clean?”

“What? Yeah, she’s fine other than the—”

“Pass her.”

“Are you sure she’s going even going to fit in the Sleeper? They don’t exactly make those things in plus sizes.”

“Did you look at her home address? She’s asking for her clearance this early, it’s because she wants to move into the housing those nuts are offering. And she is not getting any bigger over there, I guarantee it.”

“I don’t know…”

“Seriously, I have to spell this out for you? The Director has God knows how many investors convinced that this deep-space disaster of his is a five-year swinger’s party. If they show up with their money and find a fucking weiner roast, they’re going to make him very unhappy and he will make his underlings unhappy and that shit will roll downhill until it hits us. Who cares how big she is? Someone will be into that. Pass her.”

Amber got her health clearance. She took it to the local branch of Manifest Destiny and got a room for her and Nicci to share at the compound for thirty dollars a week and a thumbprint. It took just a few hours to load up their things and sign out of the apartment. She left all the big stuff behind for the super to steal and got on the shuttle that took them to the busport that took them to their new, temporary home. It was a nine-hour drive with seventeen other hopeful colonists and nobody did much talking. That night, in their new beds and their old sheets, Nicci cried. Amber slept.

 

* * *

 

Time came back.

She had eight weeks to kill with nothing to do. She went to all the seminars the Manifestors offered. She took a class in agrarian infrastructure, and another in canning, figuring they’d be useful skills to have on the new planet. She went to the gym every day, but gained back five pounds. She would have gone back to the Candyman for another thirty pounds’ worth of needles if she had the money, but she didn’t, so fuck it. Once the ship took off, it would be too late for the Director to hang out his No Fat Chicks sign.

Finally, their boarding orders. They were boarding the corporates first, the gold class second, and the families third, in alphabetical order, so Amber and Nicci were scheduled for eight in the morning on January 17th. There was an orientation lecture on boarding procedure. Amber went. Nicci stayed home and cried.

On the last day, Amber packed. They were allowed to bring whatever they wanted for free, provided it fit in one of the standard Fleet-issued duffel bags. Anything other than that, they charged for. Amber put in the three spare colonist’s uniforms first, leaving only the one she’d be wearing for boarding. Then she rolled up a few sweaters, some jeans, socks, underwear, her favorite tee and, with what little space she had left, the most useful study material from the seminars, and two coffee cups. She stared at it for a while. She packed Nicci’s duffel for her, rummaging through the apartment stuff for more than two hours to find the shoebox with their photos. She removed the pictures where Bo Peep was too obviously strung out and put the rest in Nicci’s duffel bag. Then she cried, but she did it quietly in the bathroom. It was almost morning, almost time.

It was almost over.

“Here we go,” muttered Amber. She dried her eyes and switched out the light, saying, with absolutely no sense of premonition, “Plymouth or bust.”

 

3

 

That day, Amber learned early that standing around in an skyport was pretty much exactly like standing around in an airport. This was probably because, regardless of the Director’s many efforts to make it look futurific and exciting, it was an airport, only with a space shuttle behind it instead of a bunch of planes. The actual ship, the Pioneer, was already in space, where it and the rest of the Director’s fleet had been built.

As ‘strongly advised’ in the seminar, she and Nicci took the transport two hours in advance of their boarding time, only to discover that the line was already stretched out of the maze-like queue and wrapped three-quarters of the way around the terminal. It was not the best weather for standing in line. The Manifestors, or maybe just the airport people, had set up several canopies, but the rain got in anyway, splashing in fat, random splats against her arm, her neck, her eye. Outside of the canopies, the rain quickly plastered her official Manifest Destiny flightsuit to her body, and since it was white, it exposed not only each and every unsightly bulge of fat, but also the pebbly bumps of her nipples and the hem of her panties and God alone knew what else.

The conditions were bad enough; the company was worse. All around them were young couples hiss-fighting their way through the nerves, bickering teenagers, screaming babies, and every shade of human misery in-between. Adding to the fun was Nicci, who kept insisting it wasn’t too late yet, they could still go back and maybe talk to the super, just talk to him, Amber, and maybe get their old apartment back and they could make it work, they really could. By the time she reached the terminal doors and bared her face to the gust of heated air blowing down from the overhead fans, Amber was ready to tell her to go wherever the hell she wanted to as long as she shut up when she did it. And that made her feel sick all over, because she knew her sister’s fear wasn’t only genuine, it was normal. They were doing something that had never been done, had never even been tested in any real practical way. Fear was a perfectly reasonable reaction, but it still didn’t change the fact that they were homeless, jobless and alone. Whining about it was not going to change anything.

They made their way back and forth through the ropes of the queue holding hands. Manifestors walked happily up and down beside them, offering hot coffee and smiles and sedatives for those who needed them. A young mother not far from Amber abruptly ducked out of line with her small son, only to be met by three Manifestors who politely but firmly reminded her of the contract she had signed, the amenities she had already accepted, and the criminal charges awaiting her if she left. The mother began to cry, the son joined in, and both were ushered swiftly away. Not out the door, Amber noticed, but deeper into the terminal. They did not come back. Maybe Nicci was watching too; she stopped asking to go home, but the hand that gripped Amber’s trembled the closer they got to the head of the line.

Halfway there, they were met by a registrar—not one of the skyport’s, a Manifestor—pushing a cart loaded with baskets of flat and featureless metal bracelets. She was accompanied by an honest-to-God Fleetman. Seeing him in his plain military uniform was, even more than the queue or the rain or the space shuttle itself on the launching platform out the window, the slapping hand of reality for Amber. The registrar had to repeat herself before she could bring herself back from that.

“I’m sorry?” she stammered, wrenching her eyes off the Fleetman.

“I need your print, please?” The registrar lifted her scanner higher.

Amber offered her thumb. The scanning plate was warm and a little slippery. Quite a few sweaty hands in the line ahead of her, she supposed.

“Amber Katherine Bierce, do you accept the terms of the contract you have signed with the entity identified as the Manifest Destiny Society and revoke all other rights save those guaranteed you in the aforementioned contract until such time as the contract has elapsed?”

“Yes.”

“Do you understand that by agreeing to these terms, you have become a member of the Manifest Destiny Society and a civilian of the planet identified as Plymouth, subject to all laws of that entity and that planet, both existing and to be determined, until such time as your contract has elapsed?”

“Yes.”

“Do you understand that when this document is finalized, you will not be permitted to renege on its terms and any attempt to renege on its terms will be prosecuted on three felony charges of theft, fraud and conspiracy to defraud, carrying no less a sentence than fifteen years in prison and a fine of no less than two million dollars, and that failure to pay that fine may carry its own liability?”

Nicci trembled.

“Yes,” said Amber.

“Great!” The registrar turned to let the Fleetman, who was apparently doing the witnessing, tap at the scanning screen. The registrar played with it some more, then printed out a plastine label. She applied this to one of the bracelets on her cart and fit it onto Amber’s wrist, pinching it to make it tight. “There you go! Enjoy your flight! May I take your print, please?” she chirped, turning her sunny, Manifestor’s smile on Nicci.

Amber watched the Fleetman run his restless, military stare out over the crowd of would-be colonists. He looked bored. When his eyes met hers, she said, “Are you coming with us to Plymouth?”

“Hell, no,” he replied. “They had to pay me double just to do this much.”

That earned him as dirty a look as the registrar seemed capable of manufacturing on her perky, young face. He shrugged one shoulder in something like an apology, tipped Amber a wink when the registrar resumed the legal stuff, and went back to crowd-watching. Nicci got her bracelet. The trudge through the queue continued.

Not just ‘no’, but ‘hell, no’…

The next time the line took them close enough to a registrar, Amber reached out and waved for the accompanying Fleetman’s attention and asked if he was boarding.

“No, ma’am,” he replied firmly, which was not as unsettling as ‘hell, no,’ but was still pretty negative.

“I was told there was going to be a Fleet presence on Plymouth. I mean, the flight crew are all Fleet, right? They’re not…um…” …a bunch of Director-worshipping space-zealots?

The Fleetman smiled. “There will be a full military flight crew, ma’am. Six hundred and forty proud men and women of the first United States Deep-Space Fleet.”

“Is that all?”

“This isn’t a military operation,” the registrar inserted with a disapproving frown. He was a lot better at that than the last registrar.

The Fleetman gave him a knowing sort of glance and asked Amber if she had any other questions. She did not and the line was moving, so she shuffled on ahead and let them get started on the next colonist.

Six hundred and forty. Didn’t seem like a lot of crew for a ship the size of a football stadium, let alone the police force for fifty thousand people.

‘We’ll be way too busy colonizing to need policing anyway,’ Amber told herself, but couldn’t make herself believe it. She didn’t think it mattered how tiring life on the farm was going to be. People were always going to need policing, especially when things were new and scary and people were apt to be at their worst.

Nicci was looking at her, all wide eyes and apprehension. Amber smiled and squeezed her hand, disguising her misgivings with an ease born of many long years of practice. Worrying was useless now; the bracelet on her wrist was as good as handcuffs.

‘I’m not scared,’ thought Amber, stepping up to the head of the line at last. ‘I’m the tough one. I’m the strong one. I’m the one Nicci’s going to lean on for the next five years, so suck it up, little girl.’

They ran them and their duffel bags through the usual set of scanners, checked their thumbprints against their bracelets, gave them each a smile and the opportunity to opt out and be arrested—Nicci opened her mouth, but Amber squeezed her hand and she closed it again, shivering—and then they were sent down the tunnel and onto the shuttle, which was, in spite of its size and the cool lights and the seatbelts that locked them in and had no release button, just a big airplane. It smelled like one, especially when all the other people got squeezed in around them; it sounded like one, once the pilot droned out the weather conditions and how it affected their launch time; it felt like one when they taxied away from the terminal and turned onto the runway.

“Here we go,” said the pilot, sounding comfortingly bored.

No one else made a sound.

The shuttle began to move, slowly at first, but picking up speed fast until Amber could feel the funny tugs of lift under its wings. She squeezed Nicci’s hand again, but her sister did not respond—not with a word, not with a shiver, not even with tears. The shuttle bumped up once, twice, and then lurched into the sky and stayed there. Amber tried to look, but the nearest window was six nervous people away and it mostly showed her the wing anyway.

The shuttle was tipping as it flew, leaning everyone further and further back in their chairs. “Just a little jump now,” said the pilot, and almost exactly on the word ‘jump,’ there was a tremendous roar behind him and a mighty lurch straight up.

People screamed in the reedy, I-know-I’m-being-silly-but-Jesus-Christ-not-cool way they sometimes did if the elevator they were on suddenly quit working or some yappy dog on a leash took an unprovoked lunge at them. Some of them laughed a little afterwards as the shuttle ripped them out of Earth’s sky. Some cried instead. Amber squeezed Nicci’s hand and watched the stars come out through the nearest window.

The roaring noise gradually died away. The shuttle didn’t slow down or right itself, but with nothing but space through the windows to orient themselves around, it seemed to do both. Quite a few people threw up in the courtesy bags provided for that purpose. ‘Spacesick,’ Amber thought, watching everyone’s hair drift.

Now the shuttle slowed, firing its engines in little lurching bursts while the real ship rolled in and out of view through the windows, impossibly huge. The pilot came on to tell them they had permission to dock and that they’d feel a little bump when the clutch made contact. These words were followed within a few minutes by a loud scraping noise and a thump that made everyone rock sideways in their seats. The lights flickered. People screamed again, laughed, cried, threw up. ‘We sound like crazy people,’ thought Amber, frowning, and she put her arm around her sister and hugged her.

They waited for what felt like a very long time without anything happening until someone at the window suddenly announced they were going in. Everyone tried to lean over everyone else and look. Amber hugged Nicci and watched the lights dim and glow, dim and shiver.

According to the pilot, they docked. The clamps engaged. The stabilizers were initiated. Atmosphere was restored—she could see that one for herself when everyone’s hair came down—and the engines were cut. The pilot reminded them not to forget their bags and wished them all Godspeed and a great adventure. The shuttle doors opened. Their safety restraints unlocked.

No one moved.

Another perky Manifestor stuck her head inside and smiled at them. “Let’s get going, shall we? Just follow the white line to the boarding hub and an usher will be waiting to direct you to your room! So exciting! Single-file, just like back in school!”

“My school used the buddy system,” someone said, sounding worried.

The Manifestor looked at him. So did a lot of people, but her smile was nicer.

“Then I’ll be your buddy,” she said and held out her hand.

And just like that, it turned back into an airplane. People started getting up, looking for their bags, muttering and laughing and getting tangled up in their seat belts, and everything was fine again. Shouldering her duffel bag, Amber waited for a break in the stream of disembarking people and then joined it, holding her sister’s hand firmly in her own. ‘Just like an airport,’ she thought, stepping onto the painted line. ‘Nothing to worry about. Keep walking. Stay calm. It’s almost over.’

The queue moved faster than the one back at the skyport. They were already in space; she supposed there was really no point in anyone dragging their feet anymore. The halls they walked through were clean and well-lit and carpeted, not at all like the grim, utilitarian ships you saw in sci-fi movies. More like a hotel, except for all the shiny metal trimming. There were no windows, nothing to remind them that they were in space. There were a few pictures on the walls in the boarding hub, but they were all of the Director—walking with various dignitaries, frowning seriously at important documents, gazing pensively into the sky, clasping hands with his loving cultists, and just generally being inspiring. Supposedly, he was putting in a lot of public appearances these days, but she hadn’t seen him anywhere around the compound.

She found herself wondering if he was even coming to Plymouth with them.

“Welcome aboard!” said the square-jawed young usher waiting for her at the end of the line. He even fired off an honest-to-goodness salute which, in addition to raising Amber’s eyebrows, brought out a gust of laughter from the actual Fleet soldiers lounging around a little further down the corridor from the Manifestors. “I’m Crewman Everly Scott of the Pioneer! And you are…?”

“Amber Bierce,” said Amber. “Space Adventurer.”

The Fleetmen down the hall laughed again and this time some of the Manifestors joined in. Crewman Scott’s enthusiasm visibly iced over. He lowered his saluting hand and looked at her, not smiling.

‘Great,’ thought Amber. ‘Now he thinks I was making fun of him.’

Weren’t you? some small part of her wanted to know. It sounded a lot like her mother.

“Sorry,” Amber said, setting her duffel bag down. “I didn’t mean anything by that. Just nervous, you know. It’s my first time going to another planet.”

This prompted another good-natured rumble of humor down the hall, but did not appear to thaw Crewman Scott much. His professional smile went no further than his clenched jaw as he scanned their thumbprints again, checked whatever came up on his little screen against their papers, then against their wristbands, and finally gave them both an official nod of approval. “Bierce, Amber K.,” he said. “You’ve been assigned to bed FH-0419. Follow the green line to the family housing bay, take the elevator marked H to the fourth floor, turn right, and bed 19 is down the first hall on your right, okay?”

“H, four, right, right. I got it.”

“Bierce, Nichole S., you’ve been assigned to bed FW-1866,” Crewman Scott continued.

“What?”

“Follow the green line to the family housing bay and take the elevator marked W to the—”

“Hang on,” interrupted Amber, giving Nicci’s startled, clutching hand a distracted pat. “We’re supposed to be together.”

“—to the eighteenth floor—”

“I was told that we’d be together,” said Amber again, a little bit louder.

“—turn left and you’ll find your bed on the third hall on your right,” Crewman Scott concluded, holding out a helpful printed map of the ship. “Enjoy your flight, ladies.”

Amber did not take the map. “Are you finished?” she asked coolly.

“Enjoy your flight, ladies.”

“We were told we’d be stationed together.”

“Enjoy your flight, Miss Bierce.”

“I hope you can say that all day, because I’m not moving until I get this cleared up and seeing as I’m standing in the boarding hub of the friggin’ Pioneer, I think you can safely assume I’ve got nowhere else to be.”

Crewman Scott continued to hold out the map.

Amber folded her arms across her chest and waited.

The other uniformed people in the hall were still watching them.

“I’m sorry,” Scott said with a polite smile. This time, it made it to his eyes, but not in a very polite way. “I don’t have anything to do with the bed assignments. Please follow the green line. There are other people waiting for assistance.”

“I want to speak to your supervisor.”

“This is a starship, Miss Bierce, not a Starbucks. I don’t have a supervisor, I have commanding officers. You can speak to one by going to the family housing bay and picking up any courtesy phone. If you’ll please follow the green line—” he suggested, reaching past her to scan the next man in line.

Amber took the scanner out of his hand and set it down firmly on the desk. “I’ll let you know when we’re done here, pal.”

“Miss Bierce—”

“Everly,” she countered. “Get your goddamn supervisor.”

Nicci shuffled off to one side, looking slightly relieved now that the situation was being handled by a person and in a manner she was accustomed to. The people behind them in line gave them a little space. Crewman Scott stared at her, his mouth shut tight and his ears brick-red, then turned around and walked stiffly up the hall to the place where the other red-suited Manifestors were standing. They listened to whatever he had to say and soon one of them came for Amber.

“Good morning,” he said pleasantly. “I’m Steven Fisch, the docking coordinator. How can I help?”

“She doesn’t like her assigned—”

“I’m handling it, Scott,” said Fisch, still pleasantly and without looking at him. “What seems to be the trouble?”

“My sister and I signed up for a five-year contract,” said Amber, presenting her thumb for him to scan, which he did. “And I was told we’d be stationed together for the flight and at the colony.”

“Mm-hm. And it looks like you’ve both been assigned to beds in the family housing unit.”

“Right, on different floors and different, um, letters. That’s not acceptable to me,” said Amber as Nicci sidled up closer to her. “I’m not looking for trouble, but I was told we’d be together and I kind of want what I was promised.”

“I understand.”

“We don’t have anything to do with the bed assign—”

“I’m handling it, Scott,” said Fisch again, not quite as pleasantly as before. He pushed a few buttons on his digireader. “It looks like you waited for the last minute before signing on with us, Miss Bierce. And Miss Bierce,” he added, with a nod to Nicci, who nodded nervously back at him. “I’m afraid the group units in family housing filled up months ago. There’s nothing left except singles and frankly, I’m a little surprised you got beds there at all. It’s just like any big event, Miss Bierce. These are the best seats in the house and after a certain date, you just don’t find two of them together. I’m sure the recruiters made you all kinds of promises to get you, but they don’t have anything to do with you once you’re on board and they shouldn’t have made you any promises at all.”

“I realize this seems like a petty problem to you,” Amber began.

Crewman Scott uttered one of those huffy little breaths that snotty people liked to use when they didn’t quite dare to laugh out loud. Amber was willing to overlook it this time, but Fisch’s face went cold.

“Excuse us for just a moment, please,” he said, and took Scott aside.

Amber couldn’t hear anything that was said and couldn’t hazard any guesses to judge by Fisch’s broad and rather bland face, but she waited and watched Scott’s ears turn red with a faint sense of satisfaction. In less than a minute, Fisch was back, smiling again.

“I apologize for the interruption, please go on. A petty problem…?”

“We’ll both be in Sleep,” said Amber. “I get it. We won’t be conscious, we won’t be lying there missing each other for years, we won’t miss anything at all. But we’ve been checking in for three hours already. I’ve got no reason to expect to check out in less time. And yeah, it may only be a few hours, but it’ll be a few hours on another planet, for God’s sake, and I want my sister with me.”

“Please,” said Nicci.

Fisch glanced at her and his eyes lingered. When he looked back at Amber, he seemed somewhat less politely pleasant and more sincerely thoughtful.

“Isn’t there anything you can do?” asked Amber. “We don’t have to be in family housing. We just want to stay together.”

He hmmmed again and checked with his digireader, tapping the stylus through several screens before frowning at her. “I think we could find a way to accommodate you, Miss Bierce, but you need to understand that once you’re confirmed to a bed, those may be your living quarters for quite a long time after we arrive.”

“We know.”

“The family units are much larger and, honestly, far superior in terms of comfort and entertainment purposes. The general housing mods are pretty much your beds, some public showers and a cafeteria. There’s no comparison to family housing. To prison, maybe, but not to family housing. And signing you off on a corporate mod or a suite or anything like that is simply out of the question, so if that’s what you were hoping…”

“General housing works just fine if we’re together.”

Fisch tapped his stylus against the top of his reader and glanced at Nicci. “Miss Bierce?”

Nicci stepped back, holding her case in front of her like a shield against his attention. “I…I guess. I don’t know. Amber?”

“Please,” she said.

“All right,” said Fisch, in that rising, sighing, I-wash-my-hands-of-this way that people use when they think you’re making, if not the biggest mistake of your life, at least the one people will be bringing up for the next ten years to embarrass you. “Scott, come over here, please. Gen-Pop hasn’t been boarded yet, so we’re just going to take two beds in the women’s dorm and bump them up to family housing, then put the Bierces in their place. See how I did that?”

“Yes, sir.”

Fisch sighed. “Scott, for God’s sake, relax. Mr. Fisch will do just fine. Did you see what I did?”

“Yes, um…yeah.”

“Okay, it’s probably not going to be the last time, so do the best you can with it and try to remember that these people are not the enemy.”

Scott’s ears pinked. “Yes, sir. Mr. Fisch.”

“Good. I’ll take over here for a bit. Why don’t you help these ladies with their cases and get them settled in their beds?”

Pink deepened into red. “Um…sure. I could do that. I don’t mind.” He turned stiffly to Amber, hesitated, and then turned away and took Nicci’s things.

She could have let it go. She should have let it go.

Amber cleared her throat and held out her duffel bag.

Scott did his best to stare her down, but Fisch was standing right there and now he was watching pretty closely too. He took the strap out of Amber’s outstretched hand and slung it over his shoulder with as much dignity as such a menial task allowed. He started walking, his boots clicking firmly along the grey stripe on the floor like it was a tightrope over lava.

“He looks mad,” whispered Nicci, following close behind Amber as they moved out of the intake line, away from the rumbling, stuffy excitement of a thousand nervous families and into the largely empty corridor leading to the general housing mods. “I don’t think he likes you very much.”

“He doesn’t have to like me,” Amber told her, talking low but making no real effort to be inaudible. She didn’t care if Crewman Everly Scott heard this or not. “There’s going to be fifty thousand people and an alien planet to entertain us where we’re going. We’re never going to see each other again.”

Scott did not reply or give any indication that he’d even heard them. He brought them into the empty, echoing, half-lit elevator bay and over to the lift marked with an A. Between the gunmetal-grey paint and the stark stenciled lettering, everything looked very much like a military operation. Cold. Authoritative. Menacing.

The lift was big enough for fifty people, according to the capacity rating posted above its utilitarian doors. The sound of three people breathing was very loud. They went up just one level and Nicci was clinging before the doors dinged open.

The first two doors on the first left-hand hall were theirs. WA-0001 and WA-0003. They opened at a swipe of their keycards on what indeed appeared to be a broom closet: narrow enough to touch both walls at once while keeping her elbows bent, just deep enough to accommodate the Sleeper, with a door she had to duck through and a ceiling that did not allow for jump rope.

Crewman Scott dropped Amber’s duffel and went inside to secure Nicci’s to the wall. He opened up her Sleeper and moved back as far as the dimensions of the room allowed. He waited.

Nicci looked at Amber. “Do I…just get in?”

“Yeah, that’s what they said at the seminar.”

“I don’t…I mean…Do I take my shoes off?”

“You can if you want,” said Amber, and Scott said, “No, you can’t. No loose articles in the cabin.”

“She can put them in her bag,” Amber told him.

“I already secured her bag.”

“You can unsecure it and secure it again with her shoes inside!”

“I’ll just wear them,” said Nicci, looking and sounding right on the edge of tears. “Okay?”

Amber looked at her, feeling her temper at full throb right behind her eyes, and then turned that look on Crewman Everly Scott. “Listen, Space-Scout.”

“Amber, please!”

“You got a problem, you take it up with me, you don’t take it out on my sister.”

Scott gave her a cold look and a wide smile and said, “Just lie down, Miss Bierce, and we’ll get you all tucked in!” in a voice like preschooler’s poison.

Nicci slunk past Amber, her head bent and lips trembling. She sat on the edge of the Sleeper, kneading at its hard sides as she looked one last time from Amber to Scott and back to Amber. “Please,” she said, but whether it was please say we don’t really have to do this or please don’t fight, she didn’t know. Scott put his hand on the Sleeper’s lid and Nicci lay obediently down, even as she gasped out the first hoarse sob. The lid shut, snapped, hissed, and the single panicked, silent cry that Amber saw her sister make faded into sleep. Or into Sleep, she guessed.

The snake-like cable of the umbilicus slipped out of its port inside the tube and slithered under Nicci’s shirt. She watched it tunnel across her sister’s unmoving body until it reached her navel. The stiff fabric of her clean, white, colonist’s shirt bulged and then slowly deflated. In almost the same instant, the panel above the Sleeper lit up, all its many systems diligently engaged. Amber could look at that panel and see that her baby sister’s heart was no longer beating, her lungs were no longer working, her brain was no longer thinking, and all this, according to the Sleeper, was perfectly normal.

She looked dead.

“Any time,” said Scott, waiting in the hall.

Amber backed up until the door hissed shut on the sight of Nicci in her (coffin) tube. She told herself they had nowhere to go, no one to take them in. This was the only way out. It was the only choice.

‘I just killed my sister,’ she thought.

“Your turn,” said Scott, printing out a nameplate on his scanner and inserting into the protective sleeve on door WA-0003. He did not pick up her duffel bag. He opened up her Sleeper and stood back against the wall.

This was really it. She was going to close her eyes and it would be over and either she’d wake up on Plymouth and she’d be fine, or…or she wouldn’t. And that would also be fine, she supposed. At least, it’d be just as over.

Amber slid her duffel bag into the rubbery, vaguely unpleasant-feeling net and gave it a pull to make it retract, just like in orientation. She got into the Sleeper, wriggling over as far as she could and very much aware of Scott’s contemptuous stare as he watched her try not to overfill the narrow mat. Just watching.

“You waiting for a tip?” she asked, knowing she was blushing and hating him for seeing it.

“Your shirt’s pulled up,” he told her flatly.

Amber reached down, her face in flames and her chest in knots, to tug the stiff fabric down over the exposed swell of her stomach. There was no one to reprimand him for his huffy little laugh now; he made sure she heard it.

“Yeah, they must have been desperate, all right,” he said, dropping the lid on her. She never had the chance to say anything back. She heard the snapping sound of the lid’s locking mechanism, but not the hiss of the gas.

She was asleep when Scott held his middle finger up to the glass plate before her face and called her a bitch. She was asleep when her tube wormed its umbilicus under her tight shirt, asleep when it punctured her navel and began the painful process of rendering her dormant for the flight. She slept through the next four days as the rest of the colonists were processed and the ship steadily filled. She slept through the historic speech of Manifest Destiny’s charismatic leader as the Pioneer’s mighty engines fired up behind him on the video screen in the press room where he was still standing, very much on Earth. She slept through thirteen routine medical scans and six hundred thirty-three automatic maintenance cycles before she slept through the asteroid field that pierced the hull and pulled the active crew out into space through approximately seven thousand coin-sized holes. She slept through two hundred sixty-six years of Tunneling as the speakers above her bed blatted a polite, unheard alarm. She slept through the crash. In the last eleven minutes, as her umbilicus began to retract its countless filaments and her Sleeper gently reanimated her long-static cells, Amber dreamed of the beach and her mother was there, smoking one of her endless cigarettes, and they stood hand in hand together to watch the sun set so red over the ocean, and all the gulls were screaming…

 

4

 

Amber woke up on her side, which she knew only because she could sort of feel the hard mat under her cheek and the cold, curved glass panel of the Sleeper’s lid pressing on her nose and forehead. She tried to roll over, but couldn’t. Her limbs were dead; she was beginning to register the discomfort of her arms crossed and crushed against the Sleeper’s wall, but she still couldn’t do anything about it. God, how annoying.

She had always been a light sleeper and was used to coming up and alert at a moment’s provocation, but she couldn’t do it this time. The Sleeper’s computer had complete control and seemed far more concerned with talking about the process of waking her up than actually doing it. She could hear it through the speakers in its pleasantly androgynous, vaguely British-sounding voice: “—is estimated to complete in…five minutes seventeen seconds. Please remain calm. Your movements have been inhibited during Sleep. This condition is temporary and will be restored upon removal of the umbilicus.”

Right. She remembered now. The orientation seminar had explained all this. Although she couldn’t move, she could feel herself twitching as the computer systematically tested her muscles. She could also feel it where the vent was gently blowing on her ear. Why the hell was she on her side, anyway? The seminar had assured all of them that Sleep wasn’t really sleep and there wouldn’t be any dreams, but she’d had a real whopper. She didn’t understand how she could have thrashed around when she was supposed to have been paralyzed, but maybe that was just for the landing, not the whole flight.

And what had the big nightmare been? Why, a trip to the beach with her mother. Bizarre. Bo Peep Bierce did not take her babies on outings. Oh, they’d gone to the courthouse a couple of times, and when they were very young, they used to walk down to the childcare place together until Bo Peep failed a drug test and got kicked out of all the state programs. Other than that, Amber couldn’t think of a single trip they’d taken together, unless it was to get drugs.

‘Maybe that’s why you dream about it,’ she thought to herself, and would have rolled her eyes except that they were still kept shut and paralyzed.

It had been such a vivid dream, though. So vivid that she could still imagine the smell of her mom’s cigarettes. So vivid that she could still hear…

What…What was she hearing? Was that…people?

She was on her side…but she wasn’t really on her side, was she? The vent was blowing on her ear and the glass partition of the lid was right up against her face and her arms with all her weight behind it. She wasn’t on her side; the Sleeper was.

Amber could feel the fear leap into her, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even open her eyes. The computer kept stubbornly monitoring and testing, untroubled by the smoke it gently breathed in at her along with the oxygen and the screams she could hear behind the walls. It didn’t sound like a couple panicking colonists getting cold feet on their new planet. There were so many people screaming that they had formed a single, endless, ululating voice. That didn’t take just a lot of people. That took hundreds. Maybe thousands. Maybe…all of them.

Amber tried again to break the paralytic hold of the Sleeper on her body, but the only result of all her invisible efforts was a mild musical tone before the pleasant voice interrupted itself to say, “Heart-rate elevated. Please remain calm. Your reactivation is proceeding normally and will complete in…three minutes eleven seconds. You are not paralyzed. Your movements will be restored when the umbilicus is withdrawn. Please remain calm.”

Three minutes? Something was burning. People were screaming. How much worse could this get in three whole minutes?

Again, she fought to take back possession of her body, but focusing all the willpower in the world couldn’t even open her eyes.

“Please remain calm,” said the voice after another censuring chime in her ear. “Your reactivation is proceeding normally and will complete in…one minute fifty-seven seconds. You are in no physical danger. If a medico must be dispatched to attend you, you will be liable for the cost of any restraining measures. Please remain calm.”

The fact that she could smell the smoke at all—and now feel it itching at her nose and throat—meant that the fire was somewhere in the ventilating system. Or, even worse, that the Sleeper wasn’t airtight the way it was supposed to be, and if it wasn’t, what else wasn’t working right? Where were they? Dear God, was the ship burning in space? No, no surely not. The false gravity the ship used during flight pulled everything straight toward the floors, no matter how the ship itself was tipped. She was on her side, so there had to be real gravity, meaning that they’d landed.

Only she was on her side. So they hadn’t landed. They’d crashed.

“A medico has been notified of your distress,” the voice informed her. “Your reactivation is proceeding normally and will complete in…one minute eleven seconds.” A short pause and that musical tone again. “The umbilicus is about to be withdrawn. You may feel some discomfort.”

She didn’t or perhaps simply couldn’t notice against the prospect of the ship burning all around her, but she could hear the whispering sound as the cable slithered out of her clothes and back into its port.

“The umbilicus has been successfully withdrawn,” the computer said. “You will shortly begin to recover mobility—”

Amber’s hands twitched. Then her lips, although she couldn’t manage to shape the word she wanted, which was just as well since it was nothing but a swear and no one was there to hear it anyway.

“—will not open immediately. Please remain calm. Your Sleeper is in perfect working order and will unlock as soon as its final maintenance scan has been completed.”

Amber’s eyes opened at last, but showed her only the glass plate against her face, fogged over by her own breath. She saw no smoke, except the thin ribbons sneaking in through the vent. She was able to see only by the light of the monitoring bar as it finished its sweep down by her feet; the overhead lights had not come on the way the seminar had said they would. Her room remained perfectly black.

She rolled over, her numb arms falling limply across her stomach, slow to respond after being crushed up between her and the Sleeper’s wall. The computer was still talking, telling her that she should report to the recreational area of her housing unit as soon as she was released by a member of the crew. The disembarking stations had been alerted and someone would be here shortly to release her. Did she want directions to the recreational area now?

“No,” croaked Amber. She got her arm up, groping clumsily at the underside of the Sleeper’s lid until she hit the medico alert switch. “Hello?” she said and coughed. The air coming in through the vents suddenly seemed smokier. And hotter. “Hello? This is Amber Bierce in room…um…three. In the women’s dorms. Mod A. Or WA, I guess. I’m okay, but there’s something wrong with my Sleeper. I can smell…smoke…hello?”

No answer. If she held her breath to listen, she could hear the faint hum of empty air in the speakers, so they were probably working. But no one was answering. Of course, they might all be away from the alert station, if every screaming person Amber could hear had their own medico dispatch, but Amber really didn’t think so. There weren’t enough medicos on the ship to answer all those screamers.

“Hello?” Amber pushed the switch again, and again, and then really leaned her thumb on it and kept it there, but no one buzzed through and told her to get off and quit being a bitch. No one told her she was on the list of panicky people to deal with and she’d be charged a fee or even arrested for making a nuisance of herself on her first day awake. No one told her anything. Because no one was there.

“Bullshit,” said Amber, badly frightened. But she stopped playing with the alert switch at once and started hunting for the latch.

It opened without incident, dispersing the fear that she would be burnt to death right here in the tube, but it didn’t go far. She could still be burnt to death in this room. She rolled out and onto her feet, but kept her hands on the Sleeper to help keep her balance until her head was together. The floor was definitely slanted, but not as much as she’d thought inside the tube. Maybe it was a little steeper than the average incline on, say, a wheelchair access ramp, but not much more. She could walk just fine.

Amber let go of the Sleeper and moved to the wall, unlocking her duffel bag from its restraints without any thought in her head at all except for how much she needed to hurry up and get out. Getting her luggage was Step Two of that process, right after exiting the tube and right before opening the door, so she did it. She didn’t think she was in shock. She knew she was scared, but she thought she was handling it rather well, all things considered.

“Please remain in your room until you are released by a crewman. Failure to remain in your room may result in loss of privileges or reduction of earnings.”

“Fucking bill me,” said Amber and opened her door.

The smoke came sweeping in, eddying around her in gusts and streams, sometimes thick enough to choke, but not often. The wind was blowing the other way. The wind…

Amber looked out through her open doorway at what should be the central hall of Mod A and saw an ugly overcast sky instead. The hallway broke open just a few meters outside her door, leaving nothing but a handful of odd-numbered rooms before those too were just…gone. Out of the entire mod, there were only five doors—

nicci

Amber lunged for her sister’s door, catching at its frame to anchor her on the metal ledge that used to be a hallway. Nicci’s door opened as easily as her own had done. Nicci’s Sleeper was still shut. Nicci was on her side, both hands pressed to her face, crying. She screamed when Amber opened the Sleeper, slapping and kicking and trying to pull the lid shut again until Amber got her by the arms and gave her a shake.

“I’m having a nightmare,” sobbed Nicci, still struggling. Then her dazed eyes finally seemed to focus. She shrank back against the wall of her Sleeper, then let out a startling cawing cry and attacked.

To Amber’s knowledge, Nicci had never hit anyone or anything in her life. It was the last thing she was expecting; she never thought to duck away but only stood gaping as her baby sister slapped her in the forehead, the ear, the chin and the nose. Then Nicci burst into fresh tears and lunged in to hug her, howling, “You promised there wouldn’t be dreams! I want to wake up now! Right now!”

Amber brought up her arms and hugged her back. If it wasn’t for the mild throbbing of her nose—Nicci was no better at hitting than Amber at dodging—she’d wonder if it had really happened at all. Nicci didn’t hit people and Nicci would never hit her. They were sisters. They were all either of them had left.

‘She’s in shock,’ Amber decided. ‘People in shock do weird things.’ “Come on, Nicci,” she said out loud. “Get your bag.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Get it anyway. We have to go.”

Nicci allowed herself to be pulled from the Sleeper and put on her feet, but she made no effort to do more than that. Amber had to pull down her duffel bag and put it in Nicci’s arms, and then had to take her sister by the hand and physically lead her through the door. Nicci moaned when she saw what was waiting outside and refused to step out onto the broken ledge, but Amber didn’t try to force her yet. She didn’t know where to go either. Following the green line back through the ship to the boarding bay was the only thing she could think of; it seemed that the ship had broken cleanly off at the perimeter wall of Mod A, suggesting that the rest of the ship was still there. That it might be a very bad idea to go any deeper into the burning ship did not yet occur to her. She let go of Nicci, who promptly began to cry harder, and eased carefully out along the ledge until she could reach the keypad beside the sealed door that separated the women’s dorms from the rest of the ship. The ship was slanted so that gravity pulled her into the wall, which was lucky because she was not the most coordinated person under the best of conditions. When the door didn’t open at her touch, Amber turned around and put her back to it, utterly lost. Where was she supposed to go now?

Down.

She looked down through shifting walls of smoke and saw Mod A and the rest of the Pioneer about five meters below her, all three levels—crew civilian and ship’s functions thank god for all those informative seminars i learned so much—pancaked together in a rumpled ruin, like a burnt blanket someone had tossed on the floor. Beyond it, the blackened scar of the ship’s landing reached out for miles, lifeless.

But someone was alive. The screaming/sobbing/hysteria had never stopped, never even slackened. People were alive and they weren’t in Mod A, that was for sure.

Amber crept back along the wall to Nicci. “We have to get down from here,” she said firmly. She felt better, having a goal, a plan. “So we’re going to drop down—”

“No! No, we can’t! We’ll fall!”

“It’s not that far, Nicci. We can do this.”

“We have to stay here, okay? Someone will come and get us, okay?”

“Maybe,” said Amber, looking doubtfully back at the sealed door that led deeper into the ship and where she knew (in the shocky state she didn’t realize she was in) the crew and the Fleet were mobilizing to meet this emergency. “But it could be a long time before they get to us and the ship is on fire. I’m not waiting. We’re going down.”

Nicci shook her head frantically, even as her tears subsided. She had to be tugged out onto the ledge, but after that she moved on her own. Giving orders made Amber feel better; taking them had the same effect on Nicci.

“Right there.” Amber pointed to the little jut that was left in front of the mod door. “That’ll be the shortest drop. Send your bag down first and try to land on it.”

“You go first, okay?”

Amber shook her head. “I’ve got to check the other rooms.”

“No! Don’t leave me! You can’t leave me!”

“I’m not leaving, I’m just—”

“No!”

“Damn it, Nicci, just do it!” Amber shouted. “This is serious, so stop acting like a fucking baby and go!”

Nicci stared at her, tears sliding sideways on her face in the wind.

Amber stared back, as stunned or more than she’d been after Nicci’s attack. She and Nicci fought now and then, but she didn’t think she’d ever raised her voice before. At Mama, sure…but not at Nicci. She wondered if the crash had made her go crazy, the way that things sometimes did in the movies. “I’ll be right behind you,” she said. “Okay?”

Nicci nodded, silent. She looked down, hugging her duffel bag to her chest, then slowly got to her knees. Her lips moved, but the wind took away her words.

“You can do it,” said Amber, backing away. “I’ll be right back.”

Nicci did not react. She might not have heard, the way Amber hadn’t heard whatever she’d said. It was the wind…and the screaming.

Amber turned around, groping her way along the wall past Nicci’s room and her own to the next room, WA-0005. The door opened when she slapped the pad and the woman pacing inside immediately turned on her in the kind of calm, accusatory fury that meant she was probably on the verge of some pretty impressive hysterics. “It’s about goddamn time! What the hell is going on? Who are you? Are you one of the crew?”

“No, I’m from next door. We crashed. Get your things.”

“Figures. This is all the military’s fault,” she spat, yanking ineffectively at her duffel bag until Amber came over and opened the restraints. “The Director had billions and billions of dollars, but oh no, he had to let the military take over and what did they do? They contracted out to the lowest bidder. Over eighty percent of this ship was built in Uruguay, do you believe that?”

“Uh…”

“It’s a fact,” the woman insisted, shrugging the duffel onto her shoulder. “You can look it up. Or at least, you can look it up when we get back to Earth and you better believe that’s where I’m going right now. Right now! And if they don’t have a lifeboat on this goddamn thing that can get me there…” She faltered, some of the fire in her eyes fading behind a shine of watery panic, but only for a moment. She shored herself up, her shaking hands clenching into fists around her duffel bag’s strap. “Where are we going?”

Amber moved aside. The woman’s eyes flicked past her to the smoky sky where the other half of the hallway should have been. Her brows knit. She took one step forward and looked down, at the top of the Pioneer. Her lips parted, then pressed firmly together.

“I am going to sue their precious little Director to death,” she announced. “I’m going to start a class-action suit and just…just kill him with it. Where do we go?”

Amber pointed down the ledge to the place where Nicci still huddled, hugging her duffel bag. “Drop down from there. Make sure she gets down too, okay?”

The woman nodded and went, keeping one hand on the wall and the other in a firm grip on her duffel’s strap. Amber watched until she saw the woman talking and Nicci listening, or at least looking up, and then worked her way back to room WA-0007, but when the door opened, it showed her only half a room. The hallway wall might continue on for two more doors, but the ship itself stopped here. There was no Sleeper, no angry occupant ranting about lawsuits and Uruguay, no floor. There was only smoke, broken framework, spitting cables, and the ruin of the ship below her. Of the four thousand people who shared this mod of the women’s dorms, she’d saved everyone there was to save.

All three of them.

The shock she hadn’t known she was in suddenly welled huge inside her and popped, soundless, like a soap bubble. Amber staggered back, feeling the slant in the floor and the distance between her and the ground for the first time to real, disorienting effect. Smoke filled the gasping breath she took; she bent, coughing, and saw the world darken around her.

‘If you faint up here, you’ll fall and die,’ she thought, but she wasn’t fainting. The world really was darker. The clouds overhead were thickening; the heavy wind didn’t seem to be blowing them away, but rather pulling them down. She’d never seen clouds do that before. It wasn’t even raining.

But it was cold. It was cold and the wind was brutal and the only shelter Amber could see was a burning ship.

She didn’t know what to do.

 

5

 

She stood there for an undeterminable stretch of truly awful minutes, locked in a kind of mindless, paralyzed panic, aware that time was passing but utterly incapable of doing anything about it. It was bad, and she often thought back on that moment later with the idea that that had to be at least some of what Hell was like, if there was a Hell worse than this, but eventually Amber looked down and saw Nicci below her, huddled small against a twisted flap of metal in the torn hull. Smoke poured through this wound so thickly it formed a solid wall behind her, but Nicci just sat there. Like it was a safe place. The other woman had left already but Nicci was waiting for her. Nicci needed her, just like always. She had to be there.

“Okay,” whispered Amber, and started back down the ledge. “Time to suck it up, little girl. Let’s do this.”

She dropped her duffel bag over the side and tried to dangle herself over it, but her arms gave out before she even had both legs free of the ledge. She fell with a yelp and landed mostly on her back, missing her stupid duffel bag entirely. She lay there for a second or two, dazed and breathless, needing Nicci to come tug at her arm before she could pull herself together enough to try and stand.

“Are you okay?” she managed, rubbing at her back.

“No.”

Amber looked her up and down. “You’re fine,” she said, and picked up Nicci’s duffel bag, shoving it once more into her sister’s arms. “Where’d the other lady go?”

Nicci looked helplessly around. “I-I don’t know…”

“Nicci, we have to stay together,” Amber said firmly. “I know you’re scared, but we’ll get through this. Now I need you to pull it together. Which way did she go?”

Mutely, Nicci pointed across the smoky wreckage.

“Okay,” said Amber. She shrugged to feel the weight of her duffel bag more securely against her shoulder. She took her sister’s hand and squeezed it. She was fine. They were both fine. She started walking.

When they reached the edge of the hull, there was another drop, but the buckling of the Pioneer’s metal skin when Mod A had broken off made for a fairly easy descent. Not as easy as walking down a set of stairs, but there weren’t any more painful landings and when they reached the bottom, they were standing on the ground. True, the ground had melted and cooled again into a mass just as rigid and uneven as the crumpled hull had been, but it was the ground and that made her feel better. She was off the ship and she’d gotten Nicci off the ship. Now she just had to find the others.

They walked, hand in hand, around the side of the Pioneer and as soon as they’d navigated the corner and were out of the smoke and most of the wind, there they all were. And at first, she thought it wasn’t that bad. People were screaming, crying, and hysterical, sure, but there were a lot of them. They’d survived. That had to count for something, right?

Her relief at seeing so many survivors was a kind of second shock, and its bolstering effects wore off much more quickly. Even as she was taking that first reassuring look at the crowds, her vision seemed to double, and suddenly the hundreds of people before her shrank back into the miniscule fraction of fifty thousand colonists and crewmen that it really was. She staggered on her feet a little and then turned slowly around and looked at the ship.

This time, she really saw it.

The Pioneer had scraped over the skin of this alien world for miles, sharpening itself like a knife; family housing and the rest of the forward compartments were gone, rubbed away, and the pointed tip of what was left had ultimately struck something unyielding in the ground and stabbed itself in. This was what had created the steep angle of the ship’s final position, which had in turn created the awful weight that had caused not just Mod A but also Mods B and C to break away and fall. All the women’s dorms were gone. The men’s mods were still there, jutting crazily into the sky and spewing fire from every opening. Virtually everyone was dead.

The world got oddly lighter. This time, it wasn’t the clouds. Amber realized with a start that she was trying to faint and so she sat down and leaned forward to put her head between her knees as far as her bodily dimensions made possible. She really didn’t want to faint. Whatever was going to happen next, she wanted to be awake when it happened. Bo Peep’s little girl was not about to die with her eyes closed.

The warmth and soft press of a body beside her told her Nicci had sat down too. Amber raised her head a little and looked at the Pioneer some more. This was what she’d spent six days bullying her baby sister into. This was what she’d lost her apartment, her job, and sixty pounds for. This was it.

She leaned forward again and opened her mouth, but apart from a groggy belch, nothing came out. She hadn’t had anything in her stomach for years, after all. Maybe a lot of years. Like…hundreds.

That made her want to throw up again, but since that was just futility, Amber made herself look around some more instead. She could see a cluster of uniforms standing apart from the rest, close to the biggest gash in the smoking side of the ship, and a little ways from them stood just two—one crimson and gold Manifestor and one military grey Fleetman, close together, deep in conversation.

She stood up.

Nicci caught at once at her hand. “Where are you going?”

The last thing Amber wanted was to start a mob. She bent over to speak softly against Nicci’s ear. “To see if I can’t find out what’s going to happen next.”

“Next?” Nicci’s hand tightened painfully. She didn’t seem aware of it. Her eyes were huge, glazed, pleading. “We’re…Someone’s going to come, right? Someone’s going to come from Earth and rescue us? We’re going home now, right?”

A few people looked their way. Amber made a point of patting Nicci’s hand, trying to look as if she were comforting someone. She wasn’t sure if people really patted other people’s hands for comfort or if that was just in books, but no one paid them too much attention, so she guessed that was all right.

“Keep your voice down,” she said, once she was fairly confident they had privacy again. “And don’t freak yourself out. Panicking can’t help anyone.”

“Amber…” Nicci’s staring eyes became a wondering, glassy gape. “Amber, the ship crashed! We crashed here! People are dead!”

“I mean it, Nicci, calm down.”

But Nicci either wouldn’t or couldn’t obey. Her voice kept rising, sending shards of panic through every quavery word. “We crashed here! Half the ship is gone! Amber, the ship is broken! We have to be rescued! We have to be rescued right now!”

Amber grabbed a fistful of Nicci’s shirt and yanked her to her feet, thrusting her face right up close. She hissed, “Shut up or I’ll slap the shit out of you and I guaran-goddamn-tee I’ll be better at that than you are! Shut! Up!”

Nicci did, trembling. She blinked and tears came bubbling out of her, but they were silent tears for now. Her lips pressed together, turned downwards in a clownish exaggeration of sorrow.

“If you panic, other people are going to panic and once that starts, we are not going to be able to stop it, so you take deep breaths or do whatever you have to do, but you keep quiet, do you hear me?”

Nicci nodded. The action tipped a few more tears out of her. They trickled sideways across her cheeks, blown off-kilter by the wind, and fell into her hair. “I’m scared,” she said. Little Nicci, like she was all of six years old again.

“Go ahead and be scared all you want,” said Amber, releasing her. “Just do it quietly.” She looked back at the uniforms. They were still talking. She took Nicci’s hand (cold jesus how cold is it going to get when the sun goes down i don’t see any animals no birds not even bugs maybe it gets like a hundred below and nothing can live here) and started walking, trying to look aimless so she wouldn’t get too much attention, but movement has a way of attracting the eye and people were staring.

Halfway there, Nicci started bawling. That helped. There was enough misery around here that no one wanted to see any more of it. The people who had been dully watching her found other places to send their thousand-yard stare.

Nicci…

Amber dropped back a little and put her arm around her sister’s shoulders. Nicci hugged on her like a child wanting to be carried and cried the same way, loud and graceless, soaking heat and wetness into Amber’s shirt.

“It’s okay,” she heard herself say inanely. She rubbed at Nicci’s shaking back and watched smoke fly away in wind-blown stripes from the ship. So much smoke. “It’s okay, we’ll be okay.”

“I didn’t want to be here!” Nicci brayed. “I didn’t want to do this!”

Guilt knotted at her heart and sank all the way down into her stomach. “I know.”

“You made me! Why did you make me?”

“Nicci…please, it’ll be okay.”

“I want to go home!”

“I’m sorry, Nicci. I am. Come on.”

The two men who seemed to be doing the deep talking stopped as Amber approached them. She recognized the Manifestor up close—Crewman Everly Scott, who she’d made such a great impression on at boarding—but not the Fleetman he was with. If she knew how to read pips, she’d know his rank at least, but all Amber could see was an older black man of distinctly military bearing, with a worried face and smudges of soot along the left side of his mostly-hairless head. “Can I help you, ma’am?” he asked, once it must have been obvious that she was really coming to talk to them.

“I can’t think of how,” Amber replied honestly enough. She rubbed Nicci’s back some more, trying to quiet her so that they could talk without shouting too hard. The wind made that difficult enough. “I’m not trying to put you on the spot or anything, but if you guys are talking about plans, I’d like to hear them.”

“Go sit down,” said Scott firmly. “As soon as we’ve debriefed ourselves on proper procedure—”

“No offense,” Amber said, looking at him. “But I don’t believe for a second you actually have a procedure that covers something like this. I am all for postponing the main panic, but we all need to know what happens next.”

“Go find a seat,” Scott began again, but the soldier stopped him there.

“At this point, ma’am,” he said, “all we’re doing is talking out the situation.”

“But we’re going to get rescued, right?” Nicci reached out to grab at his uniform. He gave her hand a pat. He did it a lot better than Amber had, using the gesture not only to pry her off, but also to sit her down on the ground.

“If you’ve got any ideas,” the soldier went on, taking off his jacket to drape around Nicci’s shaking shoulders, “I’m willing to hear you out. But if I can be as blunt with you as you’ve been with us, if you haven’t got something to say, you need to move on and let us try to do our job.”

“You can tell us how you’re going to sue us later,” Scott added derisively.

Amber shot him an angry glance, then redirected herself to the other man. “I feel like I need to get the stupid questions out first, just so we’re all on one page, okay?”

“Fair enough.”

“Do you know what happened?”

“More or less. We were hit by some sort of unmapped interstellar traffic…an asteroid field or maybe we passed through the tail of a comet or something. The shields are supposed to be able to repel collision, but…the hull was penetrated in a number of places…a lot of systems took heavy damage. There was massive explosive decompression. None of the active crew appear to have survived it.”

“Is this…all of us?”

“I don’t know.” The Fleetman’s gaze skewed away to stare at the ship, at the men’s dorms in particular, burning so hard they could actually hear it, even over the wind. “The military mods survived the crash more or less, but the asteroids…or whatever they were…” He trailed off, then shook his head and looked at her. “Most of the Sleepers I saw in my unit looked like Swiss cheese, ma’am. So did the people inside them. People I knew.”

“I…I’m sorry.” The smallness of that sympathy could not stand against the present horror. Amber groped for something better, then gave up and simply said, “So we’re it?”

“There could be others. I just don’t know. The mods sealed themselves as part of the emergency lockdown. None of the communication stations appear to be working. I have no idea what the situation is…underground. For all I know, parts of the ship could still be intact, but it’s…not likely. I’ve got some men trying to organize a search and rescue operation, but it’s been…slow starting.”

Amber nodded. “How long have we been flying blind?”

“I don’t know how long, but we can’t have been entirely blind or we wouldn’t be breathing this atmosphere, we’d be melting in it.” He broke off there, ran one hand over the side of his smooth head and started again, more calmly. “The ship has several emergency failsafes in place. Locating an Earth-class planet and landing was one of them, but…I don’t even know off the top of my head how many others had to fail for that one to engage. In the event of any major incident, the ship was supposed to take us home.”

“Do you know where we are?”

“No, although the guidance system itself has to be functioning or we never would have made it here. This planet is very Earth-like. And before you ask me which world it is, understand that there are over seven thousand Earth-like planets in the Fleet’s database, and we’ve mapped less than one percent of one percent of this galaxy. Without a working guidance system’s interface, we have no way of discovering where we are.”

“Can anyone repair it?”

He spread his hands, his expression pained. “With what?”

“All right. I have to ask. Is there an emergency beacon or any way to send a transmission of any kind back home?”

The Fleetman nodded back in the direction of the fractured ship while still holding her eyes. “At the very best, we have lost thirty percent of the ship’s structure, including the entire command center, and the primary and tertiary lifeboat launching bays. That number could be as high as seventy-five percent if none of the structure below the surface has survived impact. Even if the halls have collapsed, the skeleton could be intact. Right now, I have to hope that it is, because only if we can tunnel our way in to certain engineering portals do we have any hope of making the necessary repairs to the guidance system.”

“You said the primary and the tertiary bays were out. What about the secondary lifeboats?” Amber asked. “Is there a beacon or anything with them?”

“There is. And that—” The Fleetman pointed up at the extreme tip of the blazing men’s dorm. “—is the bay where it is located. It looks like it might be intact and if it’s locked down like the rest of the compartment doors, it might not even be burning. Getting to it is going to be a process, but I have to tell you, ma’am—”

“Amber. Amber Bierce.”

“Amber.” His brows furrowed slightly. “Jonah Lamarc, Lieutenant Junior-Grade.”

That was a lot further down the authority ladder than she’d been hoping to hear, and by the look on his face, he knew it. But he struck her as a thoughtful man and definitely not prone to panic. She put out her hand impulsively.

He shook it while Crewman Scott watched.

“It’s going to be a process?” Amber prompted.

“But I believe it can be done, once the fire burns itself out,” he finished, and then gave his head a grim shake. “Miss Bierce, I don’t think I’d say this to anyone else out there, but you seem to have a level head and I want to be honest with you.”

“Go on then. I’m braced.”

“I’m not sure we can launch a beacon from this location—planet-side, I mean—but assuming that it is possible, we first have to get guidance repaired, online and talking to the beacon so that it can orient itself to Earth. After that…” He paused again, looking down at Nicci, who had drawn up her knees and was now resting her head atop them and lightly rocking. He looked back at Amber, his expression drawn and greyed with strain. “I haven’t talked around much yet, but I served my second shift before the incident, so I know it’s been at least two years, plus however long the ship was flying blind to get to this planet after it was hit. But even if we magically crashed the instant after I went back in Sleep, we’d still have been Tunneling for two years before that. We can’t be less than five hundred light-years from Earth,” Lamarc said softly, slowly. His eyes communicated far more than his careful words. “And that is way more than we have mapped out along our pre-arranged route. Even if we were only knocked a little bit off-course, which I’m guessing—” He looked pointedly around, taking in the whole planet at a glance. “—may be overly optimistic, our guidance system might not be able to find Earth.”

Nicci moaned and began to sob again.

“Okay,” said Amber. “Now what’s the real problem?”

He shared her lackluster smile. “Believe it or not, there is a real problem.”

“Oh for God’s sake. Okay. What is it?”’

“The beacon doesn’t have tunnel-drive. It was never meant to travel at anything close to that speed, not even at light-speed. So even if we are only five hundred light-years away, and even if we can reach the beacon, repair it, program it, and launch it tomorrow through this planet’s atmosphere and onward straight to Earth, it will take more than six thousand years for the damned thing to get there.”

“So there’s no point in looking for it,” said Amber. After a moment, she hammered the reality home with a nod. “All right. So we’re here.”

He frowned at Nicci, then at her. “I didn’t say that and I wouldn’t, if I were you. For a while, that hope of rescue is all that is going to keep some of these people alive.”

“So what are you planning?”

“We haven’t decided,” said Scott.

Lamarc glanced at him, still frowning. “We’re discussing our options.”

“What have you come up with so far?”

“I believe our best hope of survival lies with the ship,” said Lamarc, and did not react when Scott heaved a short, hard sigh at him. “It was built to be a ready-made city. It provides shelter and security against the elements here and, most importantly, familiarity. We have food, moisture evaporators and purifiers, medical facilities, and general supplies to last easily a hundred years. Comfort is going to be our most precious resource for the immediate future and it should not be underestimated.”

Amber looked at the ship and said nothing. She could hear the logic in his words, but she could also see the smoke funneling out of dozens, if not hundreds, of wounds. And where there was smoke…

At last, just to demonstrate that she wasn’t a complete bitch and he shouldn’t feel the need to be a complete bastard, Amber looked at Scott. “What do you think?”

Even if she was a civilian and therefore an unnecessary component to this conversation, Scott seemed pleased to be asked. “I think the first thing we need to do is re-establish a chain of command. And maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to blindly adopt the ranks we held before. It’s clear that the disaster has taken a mental toll on certain members of the Fleet and I would be hesitant to put any of them in a position of authority. And we could even bring some civilians in,” he added, including Amber in a magnanimous sweep of his arm and completely overlooking the fact that, snappy uniform or no, the Manifest Destiny badge on the sleeve of his jacket did not put him on the same level as an officer in the Fleet, or in any other army, or even in the Cub Scouts. “Some of them, anyway. But the main thing is, if we’re going to establish any kind of a future here, we have to know who’s in charge.”

She had a feeling he had a name in mind. “Okay. Let’s pretend it’s you. What’s your plan, Commander?”

Scott threw Lamarc a fierce smile, the sort that could make even a handsome man like him look schoolyard-small and mean. “Like he said, we have enough supplies to last us for a long time, so nothing is more important than knowing what we’re up against. We need to organize units to scout out the terrain and establish a perimeter. We need to organize defenses. We need to arm ourselves.”

“And I told you, the munitions bay is gone,” said Lamarc flatly. He turned to Amber. “What about you? Do you have any suggestions?”

She scowled, her eye going back to the ship and the smoke pouring out of it. “Lieutenant Lamarc—”

“Jonah,” he said quietly.

Scott frowned.

“Jonah, that ship is on fire. And there aren’t enough words in the world to fully express just how bad a feeling I have about hanging around a burning ship where the extent of the damage is completely unknown.”

He nodded once, acknowledging without comment, waiting.

“I agree with what you said about shelter and security, but I’m sorry, until those fires are out, I think we’d ought to make camp somewhere else.”

“Which means we need to start scouting now,” said Scott. “Before we lose the light.”

“I haven’t made a count yet,” said Jonah. “But at a guess, I believe I’m looking at close to two thousand badly frightened people, some of them with missing loved ones, and all of them in shock. Present company most definitely included.” He rubbed at the side of his head again. “Moving that many people overland on an alien world away from the ship they rode in on would be disastrous to morale, not to mention devastating to the terrain itself. If it rains, which is damned likely looking at that sky, two thousand pairs of feet are only going to need a few seconds to turn this ground into quick-mud. Also, we might be able to carry enough food with us for a few days, but not water. We have evaporators and we have purifiers, but we have no actual water. And, I’m sorry, but where are we going to go to the bathroom? I can see you think that’s a pretty trivial point, but I guarantee it won’t seem as trivial when two thousand people have dysentery.”

“We’re going to have all those problems no matter where we are.”

“Yes, eventually. But here at the ship, we can postpone them. Amber, if we don’t give those people some kind of familiar routine, something safe to cling to, we’re going to lose them. People this lost, this desperate…don’t need a lot of help to die.”

“Okay,” interrupted Scott as Amber gazed out at the sea of survivors, “I think these are all valid points, but you’ve brought us right back to the issue of who’s in charge. You can’t develop a routine without someone giving orders.”

Amber shook her head and looked back at Jonah. “I admit it’s been a while since my last babysitting gig, but I’m pretty sure that making sure the babies don’t catch fire is higher up on the priority list than making sure they don’t have nightmares. Jonah, staying here is a bad idea!”

“I know it looks bad, but each compartment of the ship is designed to seal itself specifically so that fires don’t spread.”

“Yeah, and the ship is designed to turn itself around and go back to Earth if it gets hit by an asteroid. And who knows what else has been damaged? Things can be leaking and melting and overheating as we speak! We can’t afford blind faith, Jonah! We can only trust what we can see and I can see the smoke!”

“Can you see the people?” he asked quietly. “Can you see their faces? Can you see yourself marching them away when the wind is blowing this hard and this cold and no one knows what night will bring? And what about the people we can’t see? What about the people who may still be trapped behind those sealed doors, just praying that someone up here at least tries to find them? Amber—” He took her hand between both of his; she looked down at her small wrist being swallowed by his giant grip and thought of him patting Nicci as he guided her to the ground. He was awfully good at the comforting stuff. “Amber, if we don’t give these people some time to come to grips with what has happened to them, some of them never will. You may be thinking of them as two thousand survivors and I know Crewman Scott sees them as two thousand colonists, but they are neither. Right now, as of this moment, they are two thousand victims and they need to be taken care of. Please.”

Scott paced a few meters away and came back, looking profoundly annoyed with both of them.

“I want to take them in out of the wind for just two or three weeks. Let them dig for that beacon and fix a few broken doors. God willing, let them save a life, just one, to remind them that life is precious and hope can be rewarded. Put them back in control and then talk to them about survival. What can it hurt to give them just two or three weeks to learn how to cope? I want your support on this,” said Jonah. “Please.”

Amber looked at the ship. She tried not to see the smoke. She tried to look through the emergency doors at the hold and imagine two thousand people sleeping there tonight. She threw in a snowstorm to help weigh down the vision and a couple generic howling-monster sounds. She pictured Jonah with his jacket off the next day, arranging teams to work in shifts clearing the halls, repairing machinery, sorting supplies, and later, building gardens and houses and latrines. She saw him taking charge and it was an easy thing to see. She saw the ship turning into a colony after all, and maybe it would only be the shell of one at first, but as she pulled back the camera of her mind, she could see the ship in a better time, in the summer maybe, with crop-fields and canals in orbit around it, a thriving hub of life and hope and—

—or it could all blow up in an hour, she thought, in a voice so clear it might as well be someone speaking directly in her ear. And she saw that pretty damned clearly too: the wind, just like it was now, whipping the giant fireball of its belching destruction into an orange tornado for maybe two or three seconds before blowing it all away. Nothing would be left but the crater where they landed, the twisted skeleton of the hull, and a Rorschach scorch-mark burned into the stone, maybe in the shape of a butterfly.

“I can’t stay here,” Amber heard herself say.

Nicci raised her head and looked at her.

“Not tonight,” she amended. “I think…I think maybe Scott’s got a point about the perimeter thing. Maybe it would help these people start coping faster if we took some of the mystery out of where we are.”

Scott looked surprised for a second and then smiled.

“So here’s what I think. I think we should make a camp…” She looked around and pointed. “On that ridge. Call it a lookout post. We’ll organize a team and take whatever supplies we need to set up, you know, some latrines and supply tents. If nothing else, it’ll give people something to do who don’t know how to fix doors or program emergency beacons. And who knows? We might look down from that ridge and see…I don’t know, a lake or whatever they have for cows or someplace easier to live than this.”

Jonah shook his head, not in denial, but in mute helplessness. He looked out at the survivors and then down at her. “Can you give me until morning to work with them? Please. We can take a head-count, get some kind of inventory for our supplies…If nothing else, give me that time to see if anyone is trapped in there.”

That wasn’t unreasonable, she thought, and said instead, unexpectedly, “No. I’m sorry, but if anyone is trapped in there, they’re already dead. The ship is on fire. It is not a safe place. We have got to get away from it tonight.”

His gaze was troubled; his hands, warm. “They won’t be moved tonight.”

“Then move as many as you can. We…” can’t save everybody, trembled unspoken on her lips. She swallowed them, wondering where in the hell this was all coming from. She didn’t feel panicked, but maybe panicking was like being crazy or having a fever, where you couldn’t tell just by feeling at yourself. “We can’t stay,” she finished.

Jonah looked at the people again, watching them the way another man might watch the tides. His eyes went back and forth, tracking motion no one else saw.

“I think a lookout post is a great idea,” Scott announced. “I’ll start putting a team together.”

“I can’t leave them,” said Jonah quietly.

“I said I’d do it,” said Scott, frowning again. “I want to be in charge. Of the lookout team. You can be in charge of these people.”

“I wish you’d come with us,” Amber said. The words felt heavy, too much like a confession.

“Yeah, well…I wish you’d stay.” Jonah uttered an oddly thin laugh for such a big man. “When the lights go out, things are going to get a lot worse. I was really starting to hope you’d stick around because I’m going to need someone to roll around with if I’m going to get any sleep tonight.” He rubbed at his head, shook it, rubbed some more. “That was offensive. I’m sorry. I’m just…”

Scared. And fear does weird things to people.

“Jesus, man!” Scott was staring. “I can’t believe you just said that!”

Amber gave Jonah a lopsided smile and squeezed his slack hand. “I’ll help you sleep plenty at the lookout post, Lieutenant Lamarc. Just come with us.”

Scott gaped at both of them now.

“Another time, Miss Bierce.” Jonah pulled in a breath and let it out as a military man. “I can think of a few men who you might want along. I’ll talk to them.”

“I’ll come back,” said Amber. “As soon as the smoke stops, I swear.”

He nodded, started to walk away, and then stopped. When he came back, she thought for one dizzying, unreal moment that he meant to kiss her and she’d already made up her mind to allow it (total stranger old enough to be my father for god’s sake and what he’d want in a chubby little white girl like me i don’t know he probably doesn’t either but fear now fear does weird things oh yeah play it again sam fear can really fuck you up), but instead, he put out his hand.

They shook.

“Take care of things,” said Amber.

“I will,” he replied. “Come back safe.”

“I will.”

They walked away then, and as things turned out, those were the last words they said to one another and they both lied.

 

6

 

Crewman Scott put himself in command. This initially made for some tense moments when he was trying to recruit for what he was calling ‘reconnaissance and establishment of a forward operations base,’ particularly from the Fleetmen, who certainly seemed open to doing something but were visibly hostile to the idea of taking orders from a Manifestor in a make-believe uniform. No punches were thrown, but Scott quickly moved his efforts to the cluster of sobbing, shock-eyed civilians.

Amber left him to it without much hope and distracted her jangling nerves as much as she was able by venturing into whatever exposed areas of the ship she could reach, picking through the wreckage for anything they could use. Since the supplies had been evenly distributed among each mod throughout the ship, there was plenty to find, even if it was all mashed together in the aftermath of the crash. Unfortunately, the crates were all marked with such baffling examples of Fleet-speak that she had to bust them open to find out what the hell was inside. This was a lot of work with little reward; none of the really useful things were portable and most of the small stuff was ridiculous. Thumbtacks. Baby bottles. Yarmulkes. Replacement sponge-heads for the oscillating arm on a model Dynamo-3Z cleanerbot. Swimming goggles, for Christ’s sake, perfect for lounging around the colony pool on Plymouth.

The frustrating search ultimately turned up a stash of duffel bags (each one proudly screaming out the Manifest Destiny logo), which she started stuffing with the one useful item she had dug out of the wreckage: some Fleet-issue ration bars packed like bricks in a khaki-colored crate where the available flavors were listed as Choc, Van and Other. These were Other. Nowhere on the individual bars did it indicate what Other was, but she guessed as long as it wasn’t worm, booger or bubblegum, she was fine.

“Ma’am?”

She looked up without stopping, taking stock of the four Fleetmen coming toward her—three boys and an older man—and making up her mind right then that if they pulled some bullshit military rule out of their asses to stop her from taking this stuff, she’d kick it right back up there.

But, “Lieutenant Lamarc said you were looking for a few good men,” said one of them, putting out his hand. “Eric Lassiter. Engineer Second Class.”

“Engineer?” she said uncertainly. “Did Jonah, um, Lieutenant Lamarc tell you what I wanted was to get away from the ship?”

“Yes, ma’am. We’re here to help.”

“Are you sure? Wouldn’t you rather stay here with, you know, the other engineers?”

He was already shaking his head. “Enlisted engineer,” he said, putting the stress on the first word. “That’s construction. Well, that’s the grunt work for the construction units, but I’m pretty sure I can help you throw together your forward operations outpost or whatever that idiot out there wants. This is Crandall.”

“Brian,” said the next guy, also shaking her hand. “Electronics tech. And before you ask, I’ve already given this tin bitch my professional attention and concluded that she’s fucked. So I figured I could at least carry shit around.”

“Same,” said the third man. “Gunnarson, Dagwood D. Call me Dag.” He nodded at the duffel bag she was filling. “I was the main supply clerk in Corporate Mod G, so I know where everything was. I know it all got tossed around pretty good, but if nothing else, I can read the codes on the labels.” He gave the haphazardly-opened crates around her a meaningful glance. “Maybe focus on finding stuff we really need, like tents.”

“And medical supplies,” said the last of them. He was the older one, although it was tough to say just how much older. He was Asian and his face was creased but ageless. He had no accent, unless it was a trace of some southern state, but he bent his head to her instead of taking the hand she extended. “Yao. Lucas, I should say, circumstances being what they are, but I prefer Mr. Yao.”

“He’s a doctor,” Eric supplied, pointing at the little frills sewn onto Mr. Yao’s sleeve which apparently proved it.

“I am not a doctor of medicine.” The older man did not look around. “And I’d just as soon be Mr. Yao from now on. My service contract appears to have expired.”

There was a short, ugly silence while the five of them stood there, avoiding one another’s eyes.

“I’m Amber,” she said belatedly, just to get them talking again.

It worked.

“So you are the right girl,” said Eric, glancing once at Mr. Yao, who wandered off, righting crates and checking labels as he went. “Great. Lamarc said you were heading out with that other guy. Thought you might like a hand.”

“If we can ever get going. How’s he doing out there? Scott, I mean.”

“He’s bringing ‘em around, shockingly enough.” Dag shrugged, rolling his eyes as he did it. “He’s got all the enthusiasm of a bulldog with none of the brains—and those are some dumb dogs, lady—but give the man his credit, he can talk a great line.”

“Of bullshit,” snorted Crandall, checking the contents of the packed duffels. “Lady, you need to disperse some of this stuff. No normal person’s gonna be able to carry a hundred pounds of MREs.”

And after that, it was all unpacking and re-packing and shouting questions or advice at each other across the dark, cluttered bay. It kept Amber’s mind nicely occupied until they were done and emerged into the cold, smoky light to find that Scott was still talking, although he was at least winding down.

Amber sat down on a bundle of tents to watch as he marched himself importantly among the masses, trying to win them over with talk of setbacks and the necessity of moving forward in the footsteps of their pioneer forefathers, who had also suffered unspeakable tragedy in the fulfillment of their goals, also undertaken in the name of Manifest Destiny. And because it was manifest, because it was true, because it was a goal set in their hearts by that higher power that all men, regardless of creed, aspired to, it was still a goal worth seeking.

“At any cost!” Scott thundered in conclusion, smacking his fist into the palm of his hand. “But never think that makes us unmindful of the cost. The cost will be counted, just as we remember and honor those who perished in the crossing of the ocean, who were buried alongside the ruts carved by covered wagons, and whose wooden markers were paved under by the rising streets of San Francisco! The people we have lost today are our fallen heroes, but we are the heroes who go on!”

To Amber’s mild astonishment, that actually worked. Not on everyone, of course, but he got some applause for that flowery heap of horseshit even while Scott was still pumping it out.

“What’d I tell you?” said Eric beside her, shaking his head. “I guess it’s true what my grandma says. God gives even the biggest fool one real talent.”

“What’s yours?” asked Amber, watching people line up to shake Scott’s hand.

“Hoops.”

“You wish, whitebread,” said Dag, who was just as white as a man named Dag Gunnarson ought to be.

Scott shook hands, patted shoulders, began to put people in a group.

“I’m ambidextrous,” Crandall announced suddenly.

“Oh yeah?”

“Selectively. Eating, smoking and jerking off.” He started to mime, re-discovered Amber in their midst and stopped, looking flustered.

“I ain’t blushing,” she said dryly and wasn’t. She’d heard worse—seen worse—in the stairwell back home.

Scott finally headed their way, with Nicci walking close at his side although she was quick to do her huddling next to Amber once she got there.

“We’re ready,” he said, giving the Fleetmen a stiff, soldierly sort of nod. “I haven’t done an official head-count, but there must be a couple hundred of them.”

“Yeah…” said Eric, eyeing the crowd. He shook his head. “They might all be willing to come live in the tents once they’re up, but I bet we don’t even get half that when it comes to carrying this stuff up that hill tonight.”

“So let’s hurry and get them set up,” said Amber, slinging her duffel over one arm and snatching up a bundled tent in the other.

“Just relax for a bit, Miss Bierce,” said Scott, also frowning back at the crowd now. “Let me talk to them some more and—”

“Do what you got to do, Everly,” said Amber, walking. “You can meet me there.”

She didn’t mean it any way but exactly what she’d said—do all the talking he wanted, get more people on board, meet her on the ridge—but he took it for a challenge and an ugly one at that. She heard him clapping his hands and shouting people into order and within a few minutes he was shouldering his way roughly past her to take the lead.

She thought about saying something (ah hey i didn’t mean it like that be cool you’re still the commanding space scout here so grow the fuck up and quit shoving), but in the end it was enough that they were moving. Amber reached out to catch Nicci’s hand and give it a reassuring little squeeze. They were moving and as bad as things were, that made her feel just a little bit better.

 

* * *

 

Much later, in the waning light of the alien, cloud-covered sunset, Amber finally took that head count. She couldn’t do anything else at the moment, not after that hike, except sit on the ground with her aching, rubbery legs splayed out before her, trying to gasp her lungs into working again.

She’d been the last to come into camp, except that wasn’t right, was it? ‘Coming in last’ implied there had been a line and she’d been at the end of it. Well, there had been a line, and she’d come in about three and a half hours after it, breathing so hard she could barely see and dragging her duffel by its strap. Nicci had been carrying the tent by that time, and Nicci was setting it up with the help of Mr. Yao and thank God for that, because Amber had spent the last hour of the hike thinking she was going to faint and now that she was here, if she had to stand up and move again, she damn well knew she would.

So she counted people, just in case no one had done that yet, trying to fool herself into thinking that was contributing in some way. Altogether, herself and Nicci included, there were forty-eight of them, a sad fraction of the hundreds Scott thought he’d won over with his inspiring speeches (although, to give him his due, it had seemed like a lot more than that when they were passing her, one by one, all the fucking way across the burned scar of the ship’s final landing). Of that number, only eleven were women. There were no atheists in foxholes, it was said, and she guessed when it came to lugging crates uphill in the freezing wind on an alien planet, there were no feminists either. Maybe there’d be more tomorrow. Maybe spending the night in a burning ship would make more people feel better about coming out to the ridge.

Or maybe spending the night in a tent would make all of Scott’s people want to go back to the ship. And if that did happen, if they all left, would she go with them? Was it worse to do something she thought was stupid, like make herself at home in a burning ship, or something she already knew was stupid, like sit alone in the wilderness on an alien planet?

‘Wait for it,’ she told herself. ‘There are enough real problems here, little girl. Start making plans for those and stop worrying about what may not happen.’

“Amber?” That was Nicci, coming to fret over her. Probably wondering if she was having a heart attack or something. There’d been times on that hike that Amber had wondered herself. Even the Candyman’s humming little shots hadn’t made her feel like this. “Are you okay?”

“I’m getting there.” She smiled to show how much she meant it. Nicci flinched a little. Amber stopped smiling. “I’ll be stiff as hell tomorrow, but if they all go back to get more supplies and people and stuff, I’ll just stay here and…I don’t know. Guard the camp. From what, I don’t know, but…” Amber trailed off with a frown and looked around—at the ridge, at the scarred plains with the ship burning in the middle of it, at the sky. “Do we know yet if there’s any animals on this planet?”

“Mr. Yao was just talking about that,” said Nicci, sitting gingerly in the grass beside her. “And he says there’s plants, so we should expect there to be animals who eat them.”

Sensible. Although by that logic, if there were animals who ate plants here, there were probably animals who ate meat, too. Forty-eight unarmed humans made an awful lot of meat.

“But no one’s seen any?” Amber pressed, already thinking that even if there weren’t animals, that was a whole new kind of trouble, because those MREs wouldn’t last forever and she wasn’t exactly seeing fields of wild corn and apple trees out there in all that grassy nothing. “Not even bugs?”

“Well, yeah, bugs. The ground kind. And Mr. Yao says there’s a lake on the other side of the ridge.”

“So there might be fish?”

“I guess, but Mr. Yao says if there are animals, we might see their footprints and stuff down by the water.”

“Oh. Yeah, right. Makes sense.” Amber knew nothing about animals except the little she’d seen on television and in most of those programs, they wore clothes and talked. Times like this made a girl wish she’d paid attention in Biology to something besides Trevor Macavee in the second row.

Nicci drew up her knees and hugged them, shivering a little. They watched people mill around in the camp, opening packs, eating ration bars, lighting fires. Nobody seemed to be talking much, but no one was crying and no one was wearing that empty survivor’s stare. The outlook was just as bleak as it had ever been, but at least they had something to do.

That made her think of Jonah and so she turned listlessly that way, seeing nothing but the ship like a guttering torch in the growing dark. She wondered if he’d organized all the people Scott had only half-convinced into being his search and rescue team. She wondered if they’d found anyone alive to save. She wondered who he’d roll around with tonight to help him sleep.

She wondered if she was doing the right thing.

“Commander Scott wants to send you back,” said Nicci suddenly, softly.

Amber rolled her eyes, once more firmly in this moment, on this hill. “Crewman Scott can kiss my pudgy white ass.”

“He says there’s no room for stubbornness out here. He says if someone can’t do something to help, they need to get out of the way.”

“I was miles behind everyone else most of this damn day. I couldn’t have been more out of his way.”

But it bothered her. Because he talked a great line and people listened. And applauded.

“What does everyone else say?” she asked finally.

“Nothing much. Except Mr. Lassiter said that Mr. Lamarc told them to go with you, not him, and Ms. Alverez said she didn’t see him pulling people out of the ship when we were first waking up so he should just shut up, pretty much.”

“I didn’t pull anyone out of the ship either,” said Amber, startled.

“Yeah, that one lady. From the room next door.”

“Oh. Yeah. Lawsuit-Lady.”

“That was Ms. Alverez.”

“Oh!” Amber looked at the camp again. “Which one is she?”

Nicci stared at her.

“I don’t remember what she looked like.” Amber hesitated, then admitted, “I don’t think I looked, you know? I was kind of…out of it.”

Nicci frowned, but pointed. Scott, not quite at the end of her arm, immediately noticed and looked their way. Nicci put her hands back around her knees.

Amber glanced at her and uttered a huffy, humorless laugh. “What, are you afraid he’s going to write you up for creating dissension in the ranks?”

“He’s in charge.”

“No, he’s not.”

“He says he is. No one says he isn’t.” Nicci chewed at her lower lip for a moment, then lowered her voice to say, urgently, “And he really doesn’t like you.”

“He can suck it up. We’ve got real problems to worry about. I am not in the mood to compete in his personality contest.”

“Well, Sabrina says—”

“Who the hell is Sabrina now?”

Nicci looked surprised. She raised her hand to discreetly point, lowering her voice to a whisper. “Over there, with Lani and Rachel, see?”

Amber looked, but saw only a loose knot of people—Manifestors, indiscriminate to her eyes—sitting on the concrete bags to keep off the wet ground. “Which one? The redhead?”

“No, the…” Nicci hunched and whispered, “The black lady,” before nervously looking to see if she’d been overheard.

“I think she knows she’s black by now, don’t you?” Amber asked, smiling.

Far from returning it, Nicci recoiled with a look of embarrassed horror. And what had she expected, really? Neither of them had much of a sense of humor, at least not around each other. They were sisters; they loved each other, and nothing made Amber feel better than to know she was taking care of her sister, just as nothing made her feel worse when she couldn’t. Amber had fed her little sister breakfasts and dinners, washed her clothes, walked her to school, but they didn’t talk very much and they didn’t joke around even when they did.

“Okay, so who else am I looking at?” Amber asked, pretending to care as she looked back at the other people where ‘Sabrina’ sat with ‘Lani’ and ‘Rachel’. “Do you know them all?”

“I think so.” Nicci hesitated a few glances that way, her eyes darting from face to face. “There aren’t that many.”

“I guess not.” But there was no guessing about it. Forty-eight people was nothing. It was less people than had shared a classroom with her in school, less than half of the number that worked with her at the factory, less than a quarter of those who had lived at the apartment complex. There was nothing amazing in Nicci’s knowing everyone’s name; it was, come to think of it, a little disturbing that Amber didn’t.

The wind blew. Nicci sat and rocked beside her, hugging herself and rubbing at her sleeves. The ship burned.

“Do you think they found anybody?” Nicci asked. “You know…alive?”

“I don’t know.” Amber’s gaze drifted up to the men’s dorm mods, still burning high and hot. “I kind of hope not. We may not have a doctor or a medico or anyone like that, so if someone’s hurt…and they’d have to be hurt…what could anyone do about it?”

Nicci ducked her head and rubbed her arms some more. “What’s going to happen to us?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think they’ll find the beacons?”

Amber glanced at the burning ship and away again. The sky was now completely black, but the Pioneer gave them more than enough light to see each other by, even at this distance. If there were animals, either they’d stay well away or they’d probably go investigate there instead of here. She wondered if Jonah was prepared for that. She thought he probably was.

“Amber?”

“Nicci, you were sitting right there when Jonah and I talked about this. You know what I think.”

Nicci’s arm bumped hers. She’d started crying again, quietly this time. Amber watched Scott move around the camp—inspecting his troops, improving morale, being a dick—amazed that her sister could still have any tears left after all the crying she’d already done. They said catastrophe stripped away the masks. A person could be almost anything with enough time to prepare for the part, but it took a disaster to show the world who you really were. Maybe even to find out for yourself. And she sure didn’t need the ship to crash to know Nicci was a crybaby.

‘And I’m a bitch,’ she thought disgustedly, and held out her arm in a silent invitation for Nicci to come in under it. “We’re going to be okay,” she said as they huddled together in the grass. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but we’ll be fine. I’ll take care of you, you know that.”

“I don’t believe you!” Nicci sobbed.

“Oh come on,” said Amber, smiling to hide how deeply those surely thoughtless words had hit her. “When have I ever let you down?”

“When you brought me here!” Nicci shouted, turning heads all around the camp. “When you pushed me around and made me come here! I hate you sometimes, Amber! I hate you!”

And with that, she shoved herself back and out of Amber’s stunned embrace, stumbling back to the group. Amber tried to follow, but her legs collapsed under her, all the hurt in the world not enough to undo that hellacious uphill hike. She had to sit and watch as the people at the fire took Nicci in, patting at her back and rubbing at her arms and closing in around her until she was lost to sight.

Scott looked over at her across the tops of all their bent, consoling heads. She couldn’t tell if he was giving her a commander’s frown of censure or just an asshole-smirk.

She turned her back on him, on Nicci, on all of them. She watched the ship burn.

 

* * *

 

Nicci came back, of course. And there had even been a mumble of apology and lots of hugging, but the hugging felt forced and when it came time to make their beds, they made them well apart, even though sharing heat would have made more sense. The tent Amber had half-killed herself lugging up here had been given to Mr. Yao, partly because Mr. Yao had carried the much-heavier packs of rations and had already agreed to do it again in the morning, and partly because Scott decided he had the authority to pass out tents and was being a dick about it.

If it had been anyone else…but it was Mr. Yao, who had apparently been told during the many hours it took Amber to catch up that it was his tent all along, and so even though taking it clearly made him uncomfortable and even though he offered to let the sisters share it with him, Nicci and Amber slept outside in the grass under the thin silver sheets of the laughably inadequate emergency blankets. Amber kept waiting for it to rain, since that would have perfectly frosted the shit-cake and some part of her was still tensely waiting for the other boot to drop, but it never did. If anything, the storm eased up a little and the night would have been quiet, except for the constant rattle of the wind shaking the tents and all those emergency blankets. Between that noise, the burning ship (and the smell that came with it, that horrible sneaky smell that was like burnt hair and batteries but was probably charbroiled people), and the aching of her overused muscles, Amber didn’t think it was possible to sleep.

But she did.

And in the middle of that first night, when she had been so sure that nothing could get any worse, Amber woke up to the most godawful howling roar she had ever heard or could have imagined. She was on her feet in an instant, aching muscles or not, and so, it seemed, was everyone else. Half a dozen filmy silver sheets went flying as the people who had been wrapped in them scrambled free to stand, helpless, and listen.

It roared again, this time in quick, forceful bursts, as if God Himself were bent close to the ground and shouting, “Ha ha ha!” at them in an especially vindictive fashion. Then, quiet. They all looked at each other, waiting for the noise to be repeated, but the minutes dragged on and nothing happened.

“What the fuck was that?” Crandall asked at last.

“Sounded like a moose,” said a woman. Amber couldn’t see which one, but it didn’t sound like Lawsuit—like Ms. Alverez.

“It sounded like a fucking dinosaur!” Crandall corrected with a shaky laugh. “Jesus, all night long, I been thinking, ‘What next?’ Now I’m gonna be eaten by a fucking dinosaur. Why the hell did I join the Fleet?”

“The wind could be carrying the sound, right?” someone said. “From miles away, maybe.”

“It didn’t come from upwind,” said Eric. “It came from downwind. I don’t think sound carries against the current.”

A flashlight came on and there was Scott, standing at the lip of the ridge and shining it down at whatever was on the other side.

“Are you crazy?” Crandall hissed, jumping to snatch the flashlight away.

Scott simply pointed back at the Pioneer, which was no longer going like a Roman candle but still glowed out strong like the dying ember she supposed it was.

“They can see us,” said Scott. “Furthermore, the wind is blowing right across us and down this hill, so they can smell us too. As long as they can already see us and smell us, I’d just as soon see what’s out there, especially if it’s thinking about coming up here.”

He put out his hand. After a second or two, Crandall gave him his flashlight. Scott switched it on and aimed it back down the ridge.

Amber couldn’t help herself. She limped over and looked with him.

“Go sit down, Miss Bierce,” he told her, sweeping the light back and forth over the dark water that was down there—the lake Nicci had mentioned—either looking for whales or having trouble remembering where the shoreline was. Although honestly, one was as sensible as the other. There was no law saying alien whales couldn’t roar and she sure as hell didn’t know where the shoreline was.

She needed to start making peace with this idiot.

“What do you think we should do?” she asked.

He gave her a long, narrow stare that faded out at the end into uncertainty before making a few more passes over the lake. He finally found the bank, but between them and it, the grassy slope seemed entirely empty. “I…I don’t know. What do you think?”

“Whatever it was, it seems to have moved on. But if there’s mud down there—”

“Yeah, there is. We checked it out earlier. I almost lost my boot.”

“Then it might have left footprints. They won’t tell us much, but we can at least get an idea of size.”

“Good point.” He gave the grass one more sweep with the flashlight and then nodded—a firm, commanding nod. “Okay, Bierce. You’re back on the team.”

She opened her mouth to point out that, as far as she was concerned, she’d never been off the team, but mutely closed it again. Just like when Nicci had come shuffling back with her half-hearted, “I didn’t mean it, Amber. You know that,” Amber just nodded and kept her fat mouth shut.

“Listen up!” Scott was saying, now oblivious to her and her status on the ‘team’. “We’re going to go down and check it out. Now we’re not going to go look for it,” he said as people began to rumble out their first startled mob-protests. “We just want to look at the mud and see if it left any footprints.”

The rumbling died down.

“I’m not saying everyone has to come along,” Scott continued. “But if there are prints, I think we’d all probably feel better for knowing exactly what they look like. And if there aren’t, I’d personally feel better knowing that you all saw there was nothing instead of me just saying it and you all thinking I’m covering something up.”

“Don’t be paranoid, man,” said Dag, patting his shoulder.

“I’m not, I’m just being careful.”

“Plus, I’d really like it if we all stayed together,” said Eric, switching on his own flashlight and coming to stand at Scott’s side. “So let’s do this smart, people. Stay calm, get your boots on, find yourself a buddy and stick close to someone with a light.”

And the Fleetmen were the ones with the lights. The four Fleetmen…and Scott, of course. His own little army. And she had to remind herself all over again to be nice.

She limped back to her blanket, which was weighted down at one end by her duffel bag and at the other by her boots but was still flapping and crinkling like crazy in the middle. She rolled it up, packed it away, put on her boots, and then, for no real reason, picked up her duffel bag and slung it over her shoulder.

“What are you doing?” asked Nicci, alarmed, as if the idea to carry all her shit around with her at all times were a direct order she’d been caught disobeying.

“I just don’t want it to get lost,” said Amber. She knew that was a stupid answer, but mumbling ‘I don’t know’ and putting her duffel down again seemed stupider and people were watching.

Nicci tied her boots nervously and packed up her own blanket. When she too picked up her duffel bag, some of the other people around them did the same thing.

The Fleetman whose light they were sharing, Dag, watched them with a puzzled smile and finally aimed his flashlight at Amber. “You know, we’re coming right back.”

“I don’t want to lose anything.”

“Like what?”

An emergency blanket blew suddenly and noisily between them before being yanked up into the sky and lost.

“You were saying?” Amber prompted.

“Smart ass.” But Dag cupped his mouth and shouted, “Remember to pack up your blankets if you don’t have a tent, people! Keep your stuff together! Let’s go!”

They made their way down to the water in the dark. And it was dark, much darker than it had been up on the apex of the ridge, where the sullen red glow of the smoldering ship had been their nightlight. It was a lot steeper on this side as well, so they went slow. It seemed like hours before they actually reached the water’s edge and saw with their own eyes that the many tracks left in its muddy bank were all made by their own boots. Even after they spread out and searched, just exactly the way Scott had assured them they would not do, they found nothing.

“Well, we might see something in the morning,” Eric began as he and Dag slogged their groups over to join with Scott’s. He said something else after that—Amber could see his lips moving—but he made no sound.

All the sound was gone. Even, for that split-second, the wind. But that was all the warning she got. And then she was in the water.

She thought she’d been pushed—the name Everly Scott leapt to the top of a short list of suspects—and while that thought certainly brought out a lot of anger, outrage and confusion, it didn’t come with fear. She didn’t gasp or try to scream; she knew she was underwater, even as she was curiously unable to process that the water had lit up brilliantly orange and churned out of all visibility.

Then something struck her in the back of the thigh and she realized that she wasn’t the only one in the water. She arched instinctively, trying to surface, and instead bumped painfully into a rock. Her world spun; she was upside-down, absent all sense of gravity and perspective. She twisted clumsily and got her feet against the ground, knowing that the water couldn’t be very deep this close to shore, that she should be able to just stand up, but although her legs straightened out, she remained submerged.

It was then that several revelations came to Amber: the slight ache of her lungs as they began to make their first complaints for air, the orange murk that had been perfectly normal water just an instant ago, the shadowy figures of other people struggling in the pond around her—any one of whom might be Nicci—and over all things, the terrible roar that was not merely the sound of water in her ears after all, but something else, something bigger.

Something burning.

Underwater, she had no idea how deeply, Amber jumped. Her feet left the ground, but her reaching hands did not break into the air. She’d never learned to swim, never had the opportunity and never really felt the lack, but now here she was and she had the rest of her life to learn. Amber kicked upwards, directly into the path of a flailing arm that punched into her stomach. Bubbles spilled out of her mouth in a watery cry, but there was no new air to pull in. Panic flared, hot and tight inside her aching chest. She lost her last hold on calm and began to thrash, clawing at the water above her without any sense of rising, right up until her face broke out into the wind.

The hot, glowing, smoke-thick wind.

Amber gasped in new breath, but it burned in her lungs. Her second was mostly water. She sank briefly, came up fighting again and was driven under a third time by some screaming lady trying to use her as a float. She didn’t want to hurt whoever it was holding her down, but she was underwater, where restraint meant drowning. She broke free with several clumsy punches and grappled her way to the surface once more.

Only now did she see that she had not merely fallen into the lake, she had somehow been thrown in and thrown pretty damned far. She oriented herself to the shore through a screaming mass of splashing limbs, but managed only a few clumsy strokes before she stopped again and this time, turned around.

The light. The smoke. The roaring.

The ridge they had crossed over was burning. The flames blew sideways in the wind, flapping like party streamers, beautiful. The sky—the whole sky, as much as she could see in the treeless expanse of the hilly plains—was on fire. Heat blasted at her face, chapping her lips and searing at her eyes even as she choked on water.

Like the moment between standing on the shore and finding herself submerged, the next little space of time just seemed to melt away. Amber was not aware of swimming, but she must have done so because she had been ten meters or more out into the lake when she breached and at her next dim moment of awareness, she was only knee-deep and sloshing her way onto the bank. She grabbed the first duffel bag she saw and then two more before she found the one that was probably hers, but she didn’t let any of them go. Their weight and the wind made her stagger at every step, but she fell only once and landed with her face in some kind of rough, smelly hole. Pushing herself awkwardly up in the mud, she could see dozens of short, pipe-like openings all around her that she was pretty sure hadn’t been there before.

They were boots, she realized. Everyone’s boots, stuck in the mud. Her own boots included. They had all been blown out of their boots.

Her first steps were toward the ridge, but she made herself stop. There would be nothing left to see, not if the whole fucking sky was on fire. There would be nothing left to see and she knew it.

She knew it because there was nothing to hear beyond the ridge except the roaring of the fire. No screams. No cries for help. No coughing. Just the fire.

In the crowd, in the panic, she heard Nicci scream her name. Even when she could make out no other single sound, she heard that. Hearing it pushed all the rest of the world out of focus and into it at the same time. She turned her back on the burning sky and fought her way through the tangle of wet, panicked people, shoving them into the water or into the mud until she could catch at her baby sister’s arms and pull her protectively close, just as if her arms were some shield against the heat that had already dried her hair and her clothes and wouldn’t need more than a few minutes to boil away the water in the lake and burn the skin off all their bodies.

But she held Nicci anyway, bellowing into her ear that it was all right and she was there and to close her eyes and keep them closed. She knew it was all over, but she wasn’t scared. There wasn’t time. The same numbness that kept her from understanding how she’d gotten into the water or how she’d gotten out kept her nicely cloaked against the horror of being burnt alive. She could only hope it wouldn’t take long.

But the wind changed. Suddenly and forcefully, it blew back against the ridge, pushing both the heat and the smoke entirely away and replacing it with choking cold.

Amber staggered in the wake of this new wind, trying to clear her lungs of the sediment made by water, smoke and heat. She didn’t feel very successful and the effort left her throat, chest and, oddly, her eyes feeling scraped and bruised. Cold, clear air cut at her lungs, making her cough even harder.

“What happened?” Nicci’s hands dug painfully at her neck, but Amber didn’t push her off. If anything, she pulled her sister closer, so that Nicci’s next frantic shout rang out painfully right in her ear: “What happened? Oh God, what is this?”

“It’s the ship,” Amber croaked, even though she knew Nicci couldn’t hear her through her own panic just yet. There wasn’t much point in talking, but Amber said it all anyway, just to hear it out loud and know that it was real. The waiting was over; the worst had happened. “The ship blew up.”