1.0
By the time the explosions stop, you feel like you have forgotten everything about your life before they began. There is only the dark, the muted breathing of your companions, and the desperate need to not be found. The mutineers have undoubtedly killed your parents—they were in the medical bay and would have tried to stop the captain from bleeding to death—and remembering anything would mean remembering them, so you don’t.
Instead you pretend: it is a game. You only must stay quiet and stay together, stay clever and stay sharp, and you will win. This is what you whisper to the others. That there is a way out that doesn’t involve a bullet or a one-way trip through an airlock. It’s cold enough that you don’t want to think about the black void that surrounds the ship. You never much liked it before, even though you liked to look at the stars. You had a lot of faith in the ship’s hull, in its engine, in its crew, and all of that is gone now, bled out on the med-bay floor.
The other two are quiet, and you wonder if they regret having brought you. You are good at distraction, but you don’t have a lot in the way of useful skills besides that. You do your best to keep them occupied anyway, telling stories the way you would if this was a sleepover. They never tell you to shut up, so you assume you are doing what they want. You certainly can’t imagine picking anyone besides them if you’d been the one doing the picking. The adults were all shooting at one another and the other children were all crying, and much too young. Maybe that is why they took you with them: you were handy and you weren’t screaming.
You eat the smallest ration and you don’t complain, and when they ask you to keep watch while they risk trips out of the ducts for water or more food, you do it and you are grateful for what they bring back. And whenever you can, you remind them of what might be waiting when the ship lands, of the wide green fields and the wildflowers and enough room to run and spin and yell. You have only to make it that far, stay hidden that long, and then you might be safe. Will be safe.
You remember more, now. That it will be a long time until the ship lands. That the planet will be gray and only partially terraformed. That the mutineers who killed your parents will still be waiting with guns. You don’t remind them of that when you speak, though. And they don’t ask you questions they don’t want to know the answers to. They only turn away, and say it’s time to rest.
None of you has ever been really cold, even on the nights when CJ came to your bunk to avoid shouting parents, and Tab did the same to avoid crying siblings. There was always room for them in your bunk. There isn’t room now. The ventilation duct where you hide to sleep is only wide enough for two of you to lie abreast in it. The third must be alone, and cold.
Space or company.
Choose.
You are in the schoolroom when it starts, of course, because it is the middle of the lighted shift, and you are still young enough that there are things you need to learn. The three of you sit in the hull-side corner of the room, passing the screen back and forth between you while you study. It makes Alex nervous, to be that close to space, but you ignore that, because your siblings sit near the door, and you have always done your best to avoid them. It saves your life that day, even though you don’t like to think about it.
Alex is reading out loud about some city back on Earth-of-Old—because Alex is a storyteller’s voice in the black—when the explosions start. The younger kids scream immediately, and you feel CJ tense. CJ knows the inner workings of the ship the best of the three of you, and that’s how you know to worry. The void of space seems very, very close, and you put an arm around Alex to remind you both that the hull is strong.
You can hear the sound of gunfire, and the heavy tromp of grav boots. Whatever is happening, there is a worry that the ship’s gravity will fail. That is when you know that it is not a drill.
CJ is moving, prying a panel off the back wall. Alex is frozen. The kids are still screaming, and you are standing somewhere in the middle. You feel like you’ve been in the middle a lot lately, drawing away from the other two even though you don’t know what direction it is you’re heading. There are things you want to do alone, but at the same time, there are things you want to share. You have to figure out who it is you want to share them with, and that turns out to be harder than you thought.
You don’t want to share them with your own family, really, except that your older sibs are almost interesting now, and you wonder if you should stop ignoring them. This is probably why people build robots. It’s much easier to talk to robots.
Alex is pulling you toward the gap that CJ has made in the paneling. Neither of them is yelling, but it isn’t because they’re calm. Quiet people don’t attract attention, and attention right now will get all three of you killed. Behind the schoolroom, in the bones of the ship, you will be safe from gunfire. There is not enough time to take everyone. You don’t hesitate for a moment, following them and then helping CJ to attach the panel and cover your tracks. It’s only afterward that you realize the full weight of what you’ve done.
You want to be alone then, more than ever before. Alone with your grief and your guilt. But you are afraid that your loneliness would kill you, as surely as the bullets mowed down the kids you left behind, your brothers and sisters among them. Children are a drain of resources on a spaceship, and it’s easy enough to make more of them if you decide later on that their numbers can be supported.
Privacy or security.
Choose.
You really, really would prefer it if Alex would shut up, but you can’t bear the thought of what you’d all do in the silence. Alex’s parents had been in the medical bay, and Tab’s were goddamned bridge officers. They were dead for sure. Your parents, engine grease so far under their fingernails that their hands were never clean even after their allotted time in the sonic shower, might have held the guns that did it. You don’t want the other two to figure that out.
They’d been shouting at each other for weeks, your parents had been, about the state of the engine and their prospects for promotion. They’d argued about the food and the water ration. They’d griped about their options during the dark shift, when they weren’t working but weren’t yet tired enough to sleep. You’d ignored them, slid out of your bed, and gone to sleep with Alex, where it was quieter.
You have always had Alex and Tab. Your parents have different jobs, but the children are all raised together, until aptitude splits them off. You three are the first batch of children born onboard, once the captain determined that there were enough resources to support you, and you have always loved her for it. Your parents didn’t much care for the captain’s favor—or for your friends—but there was nothing they could do. They had their jobs away from their quarters, and the alternative was endless loneliness.
You do what you can. You learn the ship inside and out, to make them know that you are proud of what they do. You study the star charts and you absorb everything about Earth-of-Old that Tab will tell you, and everything about the destination colony that Alex can make up. You are determined to be a child of the ship, and to make sure your friends are too, but that isn’t enough to quiet the grumblings on the lower decks.
When the shouting is no longer something you can ignore, it is too late. There is gunfire, and the heavy step of those doing the shooting coming toward you. Alex is frozen and Tab is torn, but you are already moving. The panel shifts under your hands as you pry it free, just enough for three bodies to squeeze into the wall. You’re not sure what will happen after that. Whoever wins the fight will know you’re missing. It’s not like there’s anywhere that you can go. But for the moment, you and yours will be safe.
You drag them behind you, and refasten the panel. Somehow, you manage to stay quiet as the schoolroom fills with shooting and the screams are cut off. You are in the middle, holding Alex still and keeping Tab from crying out—or vomiting—as the sound of dying is replaced with the sounds of nothing, which is somehow worse.
The silence stretches on, broken only by Alex’s whispers about the haven you might find when you reach the destination colony. You know the stories aren’t real, but you can’t bring yourself to voice corrections. You’re afraid that if you do, they’ll remember that you could leave the walls and ducts whenever you wanted to, and be safe there. You think. There had been other children of engineers in that schoolroom, and when the guns stopped, it had been very, very quiet. The three of you cling to one another and to Alex’s stories, and you cannot make yourself let go.
Chance or reality.
Choose.
2.0
The thing you remember most clearly about summer is how quickly the heat of it can turn to cold when the sun goes down. There are hot summer nights, of course, when the three of you lie on the bed, covers thrown far away and none of you touching. But by the time the sun comes back, the cool breeze off the lake has mixed with the stuffiness held down by the trees, and Tab has reached for the sheet to keep the rest of CJ from shivering and waking you up too early.
Those nights aren’t your favorite anyway. You like the ones where it gets cold enough that you all huddle together as soon as it gets dark. Sitting on the end of the dock after swimming, in spite of the mosquitoes, or lawn chairs pulled as close together as they can be around the bonfire. Those are nights for whispers and games that you have shared with no one else, for secrets and for plans.
You outgrew CJ’s bed last summer, and Tab’s bunkie is shared with too many siblings. This bed creaks whenever one of you rolls over, and whoever sleeps in the center has to climb out the foot to go to the bathroom, but it’s in the attic, so no one complains when you talk and laugh too late. You all drift toward the middle when you sleep, and wake in a pile of arms and legs. Warm skin and soft breathing give way to giggles as you climb out and head down the rickety old stairs for breakfast, and whatever excitement waits you in the newness of the day.
The rare nights you sleep alone, you don’t stretch out in the bed. You sleep where you always do: on the edge, facing inward. The whisper of the wind in the trees outside your window is a poor substitute for secrets, but if you close your eyes you can pretend. You have always been the best of the three at pretending: the dreamer who makes the games and keeps the tally of the worlds you have already conquered. It’s harder to pretend when you are alone, but you do your best. When you wake up in the morning in the middle of the bed, you scramble back to the edge, and try to forget how comfortable it was to sprawl.
You can fit one person into places that three people can’t ever go, but you don’t like to do it unless you have to. You can fit two people, a traitorous part of your heart whispers. You can fit two people where three people can’t go. You only ever do it when one of them is sick or stuck in traffic. You don’t like it when they go somewhere without you, after all.
Two people in the front of the car. Two people to balance the canoe. Two people to split a Popsicle. You’re not much of a driver yet, and if there’s three in the canoe then someone’s always resting, and freezies are better than Popsicles anyway and . . .
So many things are built for two.
Space or company.
Choose.
The best thing about summer is that you can spend it with your family without spending it with your family. There are a lot of them, and they are noisy, and you like that you can play with them sometimes and ignore them when it suits you. When you were very small, before the lake had internet access and before you had more than one younger kid to worry about, you only came up for weekends. But progress is kind, and now your parents can work away from the city, so you are here for all three glorious months of summer.
(It’s really two and a half, CJ tells you, because CJ measures everything precisely. You are more given to rounding up. It makes you feel better.)
With five more kids after you, the bunkie shouldn’t be a refuge, and yet it is. The sibs have bikes and pocket money for candy, and they’re gone from sunrise to sundown, unless one of the twins scrapes off enough skin to merit a trip to find Alex for some first aid. You’re not sure why you stay so clear of the pack, why you don’t lead it. You had two years as an only child, but apparently it stuck.
You read a lot, inside because there aren’t any horseflies there. When you go to the main house for snacks, your parents say things like, “Why do you read in the bunkie when you have all that nature?” and you look calmly at the ledgers and file folders spread out across the dining room table until they appreciate the irony and leave you alone. If they can understand the difference between working in the city and at the lake, they can understand the difference of reading too.
You disappear after dinner, and a lot of the time you don’t come back. They know where you are, so they don’t worry. They could shout for you and you’d hear them. They never do.
The mosquitoes are bad at dusk, but not if you’re swimming or standing around a fire pit. CJ and Alex talk nonstop, but not in the way your siblings do. They talk about the future, things that could never happen and things that might, and if they notice that you don’t say much, they don’t make a big deal of it like your parents would. You keep your secrets, but you keep theirs too, and somehow that balances the scales. Sometimes you wish that you could just tell them something, anything, that would make the exchange more fair, but your tongue always sticks.
You can’t even say something when you’ve all gone to bed and you hover on the edge of the mattress, too scared to get close and too scared to leave them. You imagine that they’d forget you immediately if you did. You’re surprised, every summer, when you come back to the lake and they take you in like you’ve never left. You’re not sure what you’ve done to deserve it, because it’s certainly not that you’ve opened your heart up the way they do.
Privacy or security.
Choose.
Someday the world is going to come down very hard on Alex, and you kind of hope it’s in the winter so that you don’t have to see the ruination. In the summer, life at the lake is very different. There are a lot more people, for starters, but not in the obnoxious way. The people who come up from the city come for the quiet, so they are respectful. They buy their food at the local store (your uncle), if something goes wrong with the toilet they call a local plumber (your cousin), and they pay their taxes to the local council (headed by your mother), because property ownership is property ownership, regardless of how much time you spend in residence. Hipsters, it turns out, are good for something after all.
“We’re not hipsters,” Tab says, every time you mention it. “I don’t think hipsters have six kids.”
They probably don’t, but it’s one of your small pleasures to get a rise out of the city kids at every opportunity.
“I’m not from a city!” says Alex. Same deal.
They let you get away with it because you are a local, and because they miss you when they have to go back to their real houses, hours and hours away. Your real house is here: insulated walls against the cold and snow, a practical number of bathrooms, a television that doesn’t rely on the weather for good reception, and all of your belongings in the same place, all the time.
It makes you want to scream a bit, how little Alex seems to understand about how the world works. It also makes you want to spend the rest of your life making sure the truth never comes out.
You don’t sleep at your own house in the summer anymore. Theoretically, it’s because you don’t all fit in the bed, your arms and legs end up twined in ways that might be awkward to explain, even though you all know there is nothing to tell. Really it’s because you want a vacation, and if you’re somewhere else you can pretend. Alex is very, very good at pretending—and even better at ignoring innuendo—and you are rather shameless about using that as an escape. You make it up in other ways. You whisper when the three of you are roasting marshmallows, and you never roll your eyes, no matter what Alex says. You always let Tab sleep on the outside, even though you hate crawling out of bed to go to the bathroom.
You find that you have become the center, pulling them in the way the lake pulls their families back every summer. You are afraid that they are drifting, that one day they will get a job or go to a university that’s far away, and you will be alone in a town that only has a population in three digits two and a half months of the year. They have come into your world for their entire lives, but you’re not sure how you’ll fare in theirs, if they would even want to see you when you try.
You don’t want to see the world come down on Alex because you don’t want to feel it come down on you.
Chance or reality.
Choose.
3.0
The longer you spend traveling on this, your first quest, the more you feel like your knight masters left far too much out of your apprenticeship. They never mentioned how terrible oatmeal tastes when you can’t cook it without dropping in half a cup of cinders. They never mentioned how awkward it is to pitch a tent in the dark. They never mentioned that, away from the castle, all horses turn into beasts of the devil. They never mentioned that you would be lonely.
You’re not alone, of course. Quests are not meant for one person, unless there is some decree from the queen or from one of the gods. Your companions are the ones you would have chosen anyway, with skills that complement your own—a mage and a . . . well, a thief, to be quite honest. Both of them are young, like you. The mage you know from the castle. The thief you had never seen before, but the familiarity with which you are treated makes you think the thief is also a spy. Both of them are terrible cooks.
The mage has a writing desk to use when you are in the saddle. You’re not sure that you’ve done anything worth chronicling yet, but the scratch of the pen is constant, and sometimes in the evenings the mage has to make more ink to replace that which has been used up. You caught a glimpse of the pages once: flowers and trees drawn with fine lines, and lettering so tiny you couldn’t read it in the seconds you had.
You have absolutely no idea what the thief’s job is, and by the time you work up the nerve to ask, you’ve reached your destination and several things are on fire. Then it is your turn to act, with your bright sword and your strong shield and your noble courage. Mostly, you think, you are very lucky, but the skirmish ends with the dragon laid out at your feet and both of your companions still breathing, so you decide you can’t have done too poorly.
The journey back is different. The mage sits closer to you, and asks you to check the pages over to make sure they are accurate. The thief makes fewer cutting remarks and no longer disappears for hours at a time. Most of your gear was lost to dragon fire, but you can all sleep in the same tent, and you do, though you leave your armor in saddlebags with the horses because the smell is pretty bad.
There were other apprentices when you were learning to be a knight, but they were competition. This is different. This is the sum of the parts, though you never really thought of people as parts before, and you’re reasonably sure that between the three of you, there’s very little you couldn’t accomplish.
You miss the solitude of training, though. The hours on horseback, or firing arrows at the practice targets. The study of old battle tactics and military history. There’s something to be said for teamwork, but there’s something about blessed quiet that you long for, even as you plan for a future with these two by your side.
Space or company.
Choose.
When the mage-teachers pick you, of all your siblings, for further study, you are so proud of yourself you nearly burst. Pride, you know, is not an attractive feature, but your parents are too busy to be proud of all of their children, and gods know, someone should be proud of you, so you are. You do your best to keep it under control.
The classwork is easy, and you all but fly through it. Your teachers commend your neatness and accuracy, and classmates are outright envious of your memory, and you do your best not to reveal how much effort it costs you to be so brilliant. For some reason, natural talent is considered more worthy than hard work.
In the end, you are chosen to chronicle the first quest of a new knight you’ve seen a few times around the castle. Like the others, the knight is tall and broad shouldered. You hope that somewhere under that thick skull there is a brain, or this quest is going to be very, very long indeed. The thief you’re saddled with, for reasons passing understanding, has enough brain for all three of you. Pride should make this unattractive, but you can’t stop looking.
You idle away time and ink with drawings of all the plants you see. Most of them are well recorded already in the archives, but you know that context is important, and it’s always possible that you might find something new in the process. You are terrible at making camp, but your mage’s fire is perfect, and so neither of your companions complain. You never wander far once the tents are pitched, even though you’re always curious about what might be on the other side of the hills in the directions you’re not going.
The dragon is beyond anything you might have imagined, and you can hardly watch the knight take it on. This, you realize, will be troublesome when you sit down to write your account of the battle. You decide that most of these must be made-up stories anyway, and resolve to ask both of your companions for their input when the time for writing comes. Now is the time for not being lit on fire, and you do your best to stay out of the way.
You’re not used to asking for help, for different insights to use in your work. You suppose it’s all right: these two are not your rivals for the teachers’ approval. Your name will be the only one affixed to the scholarly work that you produce. All that will matter is that it’s your hand that holds the pen.
You won’t get famous drawing plants. You won’t even get famous teaching other mages their craft. You’ll get famous following a knight, this knight, and chronicling battles and victories for public record. It’s a victory this time, with the dragon reduced to a smoking pile of scales and ichor at the knight’s feet, but next time you might not be so lucky. If you stay home, you’ll be nothing. If you venture out, well, it really could go either way.
Privacy or security.
Choose.
You agreed to come on this ridiculous adventure because they promised to feed you. You eat well enough in the city, most of the time, but you have to work for it. Now all you have to do is sit on a horse, follow the others, and there’s three meals a day with better meat than you’d ever get from a month of picking pockets.
The horse is the biggest difficulty. The knight tries to teach you how to sit properly and reassures you that your seat is getting better, but the first few days are outright agony. Your feet burn and your thighs burn and your rear, well, suffice it to say that if you had to make a quick escape, you’d be unable to. That is the worst part of all. In the end, the horse becomes accustomed to you and you to it, and the knight smiles at you when you swing up into the saddle, and you wonder how in all hells this became your life.
The mage doesn’t notice you very often, because there are so many flowers to draw and only so much daylight.
Your task, you were informed, is to keep the knight and the mage alive. Though both of them are very well trained and the best of their classes, they have not been out in the world before. If they need to buy food, you are to make sure they are not swindled. If their nobility appears to be blocking their ability to get the job done, you are to take care of it.
You are profoundly bored.
The knight assumes that you are companions in truth now, and treats you as an equal. If this bothers the mage, no sign is given. The knight, you realize, believes the stories, and since it is the mage’s ilk that have written them down, you can’t really be surprised that the mage believes them too. Companions on a quest, bound for life by their mutual triumph over danger, and friends and comrades for eternity. It’s a pretty tale, and you wish you could buy into it as they have, but you can’t.
You know better, and you know what waits for thieves. If you’re lucky, you’ll be knifed in the heart by someone you know who is trying to take your place in the gang. If you’re unlucky, you’ll be caught. Then it’s torture for information, which you don’t have, and a public hanging, which you would really rather do without. Thieves might get called to go on quests from time to time, but their endings don’t change, not for real.
When the knight goes up against the dragon, you and the mage hang back and stay out of the way. The mage is clearly terrified, and you can’t say you’re not, so you say nothing at all. The knight puts up a good fight. Each swing of the bright sword is slower, though, and each stroke of the dragon’s claws against the strong shield seems to put more pressure on what by now must surely be a broken arm. There’s no opening for the killing blow, and you don’t think the knight can last much longer.
You scream, loudly, and the mage cries out too, more startled than anything else. The dragon looks at both of you, as if aware for the first time that the knight is not alone, and in doing so reveals soft belly to steel. The knight does not miss, and then the dragon is dead at your feet.
They know what you did. The knight believes the stories more than ever now, and the mage is writing yours down as you ride. But still you cannot quiet that restless doubt and consider fleeing into the night before you reach the city walls. They would miss you, maybe, but then they would forget, and you wouldn’t have to watch them do it.
Chance or reality.
Choose.