“It’s not that complicated, really. If you get the wiring wrong, it just won’t work,” Bram explained as he snapped a joint closed, completing the last circuit on his (hopefully) improved filtration unit.
Orfeo had sent news. His mineral was a composite of known and unknown elements. A team from Muedini would be paying him a visit at the end of the week to assess the find and take their own samples. He’d said nothing about Aavi.
Bram planned to head down the crevasse first to, well, he wasn’t quite sure. Knock a few extra anchors into the rock. Run a couple of lines for easier access. Poke around a little more on his own. Wrestle with the notion he’d found something that could make him or break him.
“Not working could be an issue when you’re a kilometer below the mist,” Gael said, one eyebrow raised, lips crooked in a cheeky smile.
Oh how Bram loved that smile. Any smile. Gael’s face curved into happy shapes instead of worried lines. Since their return from Landing, Gael had been lighter. A reflective mood caught him now and again, probably when he was thinking about his brother. Bram never pressed. Never asked if he wanted to talk. He simply allowed Gael his space, which seemed appreciated.
“You know I test my suit before every drop,” Bram pointed out.
Rather than answer, Gael simply continued to smile.
Bram pressed his lips to that smile. Gael hummed and kissed him back. Lightly, sweetly. A thrill skipped down Bram’s spine, raising the small hairs at the back of his neck. His skin came alive, pulse thrumming. Every brush of lips teased, and it was torture to keep the kiss simple. To only touch his lips to Gael’s. He nosed Gael’s cheek. Pressed his lips to Gael’s ear. Shivered as breath warmed the skin at his neck.
Seeking Gael’s mouth again, Bram offered his tongue and nearly moaned as the tip of Gael’s flicked past. Holy hands, what this man did to him.
As their lips parted, an unspoken promise passed between them. Soon. Very soon. They were so close to more. The anticipation might kill him, but Bram didn’t labor beneath it. He embraced the urge, reveling in the tingle centered in his chest.
Aavi bounced into the workshop. “Ooh, are you two kissing?”
Gripping the back of his sweaty neck, Bram imagined the cool of the crevasse. Gael picked up a tool, looked at it, and put it back down. Reached for another.
Aavi bounced and twirled, demonstrating a resilience Bram envied. “Does this mean you’re getting married soon?”
Bram peeked over at Gael, who was biting his lower lip in a clear attempt not to laugh. While Bram sorted through the few possible responses to Aavi’s question, Gael leaped in with a save. “What do you need, Aavi?”
She stopped twirling. “My chores are all done, and I rearranged the shelves in the pantry so I could reach everything I might need without having to use a ladder.”
“Did you use a ladder to do the rearranging?” Gael asked.
“Yes, and obviously I didn’t fall.”
Bram lifted his gaze ceiling-ward.
“So can I hang out with Milo and Cerise?”
Gael checked his Band. “You’ve got—”
“An hour until the satellite feed drops out. I know. Bram, can I download a new HV while I’m online?”
“Sure thing, honey.”
Aavi bounced away to chat with Maia’s kids. Bram’s grin reasserted itself as he listened to her progress down the tunnel. Aavi did nothing quietly.
“You’re spoiling her,” Gael said softly.
“You’d have said yes to a new HV.”
Gael sighed. Shrugged. Looked down at the filtration unit and picked up the cover. “Probably. So does this snap into place like the circuitry?”
“Yes, but it’s also fastened with touch screws. Here, let me show you.”
That evening, Bram paused just outside the doorway to the living quarters and leaned against the cool stone wall of the corridor. The sounds of home washed over him: Gael and Aavi chatting, Aavi giggling, the clank of a spoon as Gael stirred something on the stove, the warm bubble of humanity and company and comfort.
He entered the kitchen, accepted a quick hug from Aavi, kissed Gael’s temple—skin flushing as he remembered the kiss from that afternoon—and washed his hands. As always, Aavi pulled out his chair and spread his napkin over his lap. It was the most ridiculous thing, but Bram let her do it. Children craved order and routine, and if this was what Aavi needed, then this was what Aavi got.
This didn’t count as spoiling her.
Dishes were carried over—the usual stew and rice and bread, greens on the side—and Gael said grace. After giving thanks, they tucked in.
“So when can I come take a look at your mineral deposit?” Gael asked, reaching across Aavi for a slice of bread.
Aavi swatted his hand. “Ask me to pass it, Gael.”
Gael retracted his hand. “Can you pass the bread?”
Aavi remained still.
Letting out an exaggerated sigh, Gael tried again. “Can you please pass the bread, Aavi my sweet? Angel of the sky, sunshine of my life, giver of the best hugs.”
Aavi passed the bread.
“My old suit is only rated zero-five,” Bram said.
“No idea what that means, but if it’s something you own, then it’s in good repair and adequate for a trip down the crevasse.”
“Can I come?” Aavi asked.
“No,” Bram and Gael said in unison.
“It’s dangerous,” Bram added.
“They why does Gael get to go?”
“Gael doesn’t get to go.” Bram stared across the table at Gael, at the sudden sweetness in those gray eyes, the smile, the expression that encouraged him to change his mind. “Gael . . .”
“I want to see your big discovery.”
“I can bring up a sample.”
“It’s not the same. If I’m going to live here, with you, be a part of everything, then I want to see it all.”
“What color is it?” Aavi asked.
“Huh?”
“The mineral,” Gael said.
“Oh, it’s yellow. Like topaz.”
“Can you make jewelry out of it?” Aavi asked.
“I suppose.” Bram glanced over at Gael only to catch the silent plea in his eyes, and he obviously wasn’t asking for jewelry or a sample of the crystal. He wanted to see the crevasse. Bram remembered having the same urge when Alkirak had first been opened for mining. He’d been on the survey team. He’d studied the long, wide canyons on the satellite images and wondered what lurked at the bottom.
“We can take a short trip tomorrow,” he said. “Halfway down so you can get a feel for the suit. It’s not like wearing regular clothes and the boots are heavy. Once you learn how to use the HUD, we can go deeper.”
Gael’s eyes shone in triumph. It was a good look on him.
Ducking his head, Bram concentrated on his stew.
“We could go tonight,” Gael said. “The sun doesn’t reach that far anyway, really. It’s always dark down there.”
“Tomorrow, Gael. I’m tired. Should never go down the crevasse when you’re tired.”
Gael nodded and bent to his dinner.
As he stood with his hands pressed to either side of the beverage maker the next morning, Bram counted back through the days since their return from Landing. Gael might not have been dreaming of spun sugar and butterflies, but he hadn’t awakened screaming since then.
Gael appeared a half hour or so later, soft footsteps across the terrace tracking a path to Bram’s side. He stood so close their hands touched, and watched the sky brighten to the fullness of yellowy-gray they could expect, then turned to smile at Bram. Bram wasn’t looking at him, but he could always sense Gael’s smiles.
“What should I wear under the environment suit?” Gael asked.
No observation on how bright the sun was this morning, or how the dew sparkled against the tender leaves of Aavi’s small vegetable patch. Just a quiet affirmation of their plans for the day.
Bram turned to him. “If I don’t take you this morning, you’ll ask me again at dinner, won’t you?”
“And every day until you do.”
“I like that about you.”
Gael blushed his attractive blush.
Bram tilted his head toward the house. “C’mon. Let’s go get something to eat and make a list of all the things Aavi’s not allowed to do while we’re in the crevasse.”
“She’ll be good.”
“Yeah?”
“She wants to stay here as much as I do.”
Keeping it casual, Bram nodded and led the way back inside. An hour later, that sweet sense of joy was a little harder to ignore. Gael in the form-fitting garment worn under an environment suit? Holy mother of everything. Beneath tightly woven blue fabric, slender muscle flowed into slender muscle, giving a new definition to lean. There was not a spare ounce, not a wasted cell. Perfection was a myth, but Gael’s body nestled close. Despite his humble origins—or perhaps because of them—he was well made. And he had unconscious grace. His way of standing and turning, every movement enhanced by skintight fabric, only added to the allure.
Gael finished twitching the suit into place over his ribs—evidently taking the warning against wrinkles and pressure seriously—and glanced up. A second later, he was giving Bram the same scrutiny Bram had just given him, and judging by his shy smile, not checking for imperfections in the fabric or places where it might fold. He was assessing Bram’s structure.
Apparently blushes were an incredibly mobile phenomenon, able to move from face to chest to groin to legs, and back up again. Thankfully, none of this was visible beneath Bram’s own covering of dark blue.
When Gael had looked his fill, he met Bram’s gaze with a slow grin. “I like these outfits.”
Bram sucked in a breath. Let it out. “You’ll be a sweaty mess inside an hour.”
“Don’t care.”
They donned the environment suits. Not as bulky as vacuum suits, the environment suits nevertheless covered every part of them, from the clear plastic helmets to the twist seals at wrist and ankle. The fabric was hardened against atmospheric pressure and worked well as a shield between skin and poison mist. And though they wouldn’t be carrying oxygen down into the crevasse with them—just filtration units—the suits maintained a seal, enabling air to collect as a small reserve.
Gael listened with respectful solemnity as Bram repeated every safety instruction. He tested his HUD and stomped his boots. Flexed his fingers inside the gloves and practiced walking in the stiff fabric.
Then Bram led Gael over the edge of the lower terrace and onto the wide shelf that ran for half a kilometer, slowly descending below the green zone. As they walked, Bram pointed out features of the rock—traces of other minerals, possible fossils—and shared some more stories folks had made up about the supposed former inhabitants of this planet: giant spiders, giant sea creatures, giant invertebrates, giant anything, really. He paused when his sensors indicated the air outside was no longer friendly. “How are you doing?”
“Good. You’re not going to make me turn back already, are you?” Even through the suit pickup, Gael managed a pleasantly determined tone.
“How’s your suit pressure and your filter levels?”
“Everything is green.”
“Okay, we’ll keep going.”
“Pretend I’m bouncing like Aavi.”
Bram knocked his helmet gently into Gael’s. “Done.”
The shelf narrowed into a ledge. Bram pointed out the anchored rope. “Don’t rely too heavily on the rope. The mist weakens it over time. I’ll need to replace that line in a few months.
“Got it.”
They found the edge of the ledge and dropped down to the next one. Walked another half a kilometer and dropped down again. The going was easy, almost rhythmical. Bram didn’t clutter the airwaves with chatter now. Instead he watched his suit readout and kept an ear out for Gael’s breathing, making sure he sounded calm despite the light exertion.
It took Bram back to his mining days, to working with a partner. Keeping another person’s welfare next to his, knowing they might need each other to get out of a hole. Thinking of that, Bram realized that should he slip—unlikely right here, thank every god—he trusted Gael not to panic, and vice versa.
“Will the new atmosphere extend down here?” Gael asked as they dropped to yet another ledge.
“Some of the way. Maybe never to the bottom.”
“Have you been all the way down?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“What’s it like?”
Bram paused, checked his readouts, and listened to Gael’s breathing. All normal. He looked into Gael’s helmet, through the reflection of the bubble around his own head, and thought about how to describe what lay at the bottom of a crevasse. “It’s another world down there. Plants and life we don’t understand. A moss that glows red and purple, something that’s a cross between flora and fauna, that waves in the mists like seaweed in a current.”
“Like the bottom of the ocean?”
“Without water. And there are rocks that look like trees and trees that look like, well, trees, but upside down.”
“What sort of trees? The round ones or the pointy ones?”
“You’ve never seen a tree, have you?”
“Not a real one.”
Bram’s chest tightened. He checked his readouts. “I want to show you everything. One day, I’m going to show you everything.”
“Show me your new mineral deposit.”
“I’ve got a better idea.”
Bram led Gael down another ledge and back along the crevasse toward his farm. About a kilometer along, the ledge angled out over a bump in the rock and then into a fissure, a rare sidewise crack. Most of the crevasses on Alkirak ran roughly north to south. East-to-west cracks were occasional and never large. Bram moved around the bend and into the fissure, Gael close behind.
“This is the fissure I told you about when you asked where I get my water,” Bram said. He stopped when the ledge became too narrow to progress farther, and turned off his helmet light. “Make sure you’re square and turn off your light.”
Gael did so.
The absolute darkness seemed to swell for a moment before breaking over them like a cresting wave. Then the stygian tide receded, pinprick by pinprick, the static an effect of their eyes adjusting to the lack of light. Finally, just beyond the curve, a faint glow pushed up from the bottom of the fissure. Purple and red.
Gael’s gasp hissed lightly through the suit pickup. “Oh.”
The glow brightened gradually, as though cautious. It wasn’t quite the same as the bottom of a crevasse. No upside-down trees, no waving fronds. But the moss had climbed this high to settle in a sidewise crack, to glimmer against the encroaching dark, in defiance of the slow death descending upon it with every passing day.
“When the atmosphere extends this deep, the moss will . . .” Die, Bram thought, but didn’t say. “The moss will likely disappear.”
“How long until it’s gone?” Gael asked.
“A few years yet.”
“But the bottom of the crevasse will stay the same?”
“Yeah.”
Muedini calculated that their mining efforts, planetwide, would release enough pockets of oxygen and other gasses to make the upper portion of every crevasse habitable. Terraforming the surface would be the job of colonists—farmers like him. Their crops released a similar combination of gasses that would help stabilize the atmosphere and push it upward. But the secret part of the planet, the depths below the mists, might never see the sun.
Gael glanced up, and Bram followed his gaze. Mist swirled over their heads, fading into the perpetual night of the deep. When Gael looked back down, he said, “It’ll be a shame. Losing this.”
Bram nodded. A blue sky would be beautiful. A habitable surface was a pleasant dream. But this deep world had a place too. Everything had a place.
The climb back passed slowly. It always did—as though extra ledges had grown out of the stone behind them. Gael remained quiet, only responding with a low chuckle now and then as Bram shared more of his mining stories. It was a reflective quiet, and Bram liked it better than the chatter some folks had to insert into every pause.
Back in the workshop, Gael helped clean the suit filters and suits, taking the job as seriously as he did everything. When he was done, he packed the suit he’d used away and turned to Bram with a smile.
“Thank you for taking me down,” he said. If only Gael knew that his smile meant more than any words of thanks. “I wish we could take Aavi, but”—his smile became impish—“I’m glad I got to go first.”
“She’ll get her turn.”
“She’ll demand it.”
Leaning in, Bram dropped a light kiss to Gael’s sweaty forehead. “Remember to put yourself first more often, okay?”
“Okay.”