Watson ushered me out. I was too stunned to protest: as I stepped over the miner, I nearly slipped in the blood that had begun to collect underneath him. As we departed, I left a trail of it on the linoleum from one shoe.
I followed Watson down the center of the road, the wind whipping through my hair, the night gathered in high, starry drifts above us. Phobos boiled with light. A lamp burned in the window of Jeremiah Shank’s shop. I wondered if he would be glad to hear the news of a second disaster.
We walked past and headed down the narrow alley to our hab. I stopped when we got to the door.
“We have to go back.”
“Miss Crisp, your father was quite explicit in his instructions.”
“What if he’s in trouble?”
“I think not. Mr. Lewis is with him. The young men have fled, and the sheriff will have been summoned. The danger is past.”
I stood at the door to our hab, uncertain. Watson extended an arm and pressed the panel at its side. The heavy door swung open, and the automatic overhead light spilled its white glow onto the rust-colored ground. Mother always hated the harshness of it; she would immediately turn it off in favor of the softer light from the lamps inside. But since she’d been gone, we’d grown used to it. Now it seemed as warm as any lantern. The world inside was small and confined, and exactly as we had ordered it. My bed was in there, my shelf of books. I suddenly felt so tired that the thought of going back to the diner made me want to cry.
“Let’s go inside, Miss Crisp. You must be cold.”
But something within me rebelled at the thought of going in there without my father. It had been hard enough without Mother. The possibility that this time I might be sleeping by myself was appalling to me. I felt as though stepping inside now would be an acknowledgment of the corrosion that was consuming my life.
“No,” I said. “I’m not going in there.”
Watson, the noble creature, did not protest, though I’m sure it confounded his every crackling fuse. He only said, “Where shall we go then, Miss Crisp?”
“I don’t know.” I shut the door and turned away from it. We made our way back down the alley and turned left at its mouth, away from both the diner and the town itself.
I found myself heading back toward the launchpad. Leaving New Galveston behind me was like shedding a heavy coat. The unlighted dome of the Eurydice hulked against the night sky, a darkness upon the deep. Mr. Reilly’s little shack shed a warm light nearby; together they were the last way station before the desert, which curled and whispered in great, silent plains.
Watson kept pace behind me. He had never been to the launchpad before, and I wondered why he didn’t question me about it now. Instead he simply ambled along, his head tilted back, his lamplit eyes staring up at the ship.
I knocked on the shack’s door, and after a moment Mr. Reilly opened it up. I was pleased to note that he’d composed himself since that morning: his shirt was clean and tucked in, he’d passed a comb through his hair, and his face looked freshly washed. He shook his head, but he did not look surprised to see me.
“I knew it was a mistake,” he said.
“Can I sleep in the saucer tonight?”
He stared at me with an expression I couldn’t read. It wasn’t the sort I was used to seeing on an adult’s face: not pitying, condescending, or impatient. He looked like he was weighing a sad and difficult problem. Instead of answering me, he said, “I was just about to head over for some grub.”
“You can’t go. The diner’s closed.”
“Still?”
“It’s for a different reason. There was a fight. My dad got in a fight.”
“What?” He looked past me at Watson, perhaps just then wondering why the Kitchen Engine had accompanied me. “What happened? Are you all right?”
I felt the tears pushing against my eyes. I beat them back furiously, my teeth clenched in a sudden terrible anger. I tried to answer him, but I could only stand there mute, my hands in fists, breathing hard. He put a hand out toward my shoulder, but I pulled myself clear of him.
After a moment’s consideration, he accessed some device inside the door and triggered the ship’s loading ramp. The light inside flickered on and cast a bright beam through the blue night. “Go inside,” he said. “Don’t touch anything.”
Watson and I ascended the ramp. When we were halfway up, Mr. Reilly said, “Sleep in one of the berths. Don’t go anywhere else. You hear me?”
I nodded.
“I’m closing it after you. If you need to get out, just hit the big orange button at the top. You can’t miss it.”
“Okay.”
“Does your dad know you’re here, Anabelle?”
I shook my head.
“I’m going to go down there, okay? I have to tell him. I’m in enough hot water in this town as it is. The last thing I need is anybody thinking I kidnapped you.”
I just nodded. I didn’t know what to say to that. It was hard to think about anybody else’s problems at the moment.
“That button, if you need it, is behind a little cage. You just have to lift it.”
“I’m not stupid.”
He half smiled at me. “Yeah. I know.”
When we were up, the ramp rattled and banged, and rose. Within moments, we were sealed inside the spaceship. It felt good: safe, locked in, unassailable. The whole of Mars could bend its will against me, and I would be protected in the Eurydice, immune from harm, the tools of my triumphant return home at hand.
“Do you remember being in one of these, Watson?”
“My core cylinder was transported in a box. I wasn’t activated until I was assembled in New Galveston. I’ve never been in a saucer before.”
“What do you think?”
He moved slowly down the corridor ahead of me, and I followed him into the wood-paneled passenger section. “It seems clean and functional,” he said. I understood this to be high praise—one machine complimenting another. I wondered if he could feel jealousy.
We passed an open door—one that had been closed earlier that day—which led into what looked like an engine room. It was vast and grimy, the air smelling of oil and chemical fuel. Much of it was dismantled: parts I didn’t recognize were spread all over the floor, wires hung loose from their moorings, tools sat in puddles of oil and grease as though they’d been left there in the middle of a job instead of cleaned and put away properly. I didn’t know anything about the engine room of a saucer, but we cleaned our appliances and our work area in the kitchen when we were finished, and I couldn’t believe a properly run engine room was any different. This was yet another sign, I thought, of Joe’s slovenliness.
He’s just like Father, I thought. He’s given up.
We stopped in the theater, with its tables arrayed in a fan around the small central stage. I imagined a woman singing there, her voice drifting through the room like smoke, and I imagined the faces of the people watching her. I wondered if Mother had sat in a room like this on her way home, if she’d listened to Earth songs and thought about the places she would visit when she got there, the things she would see that she had missed.
“Do you like it, Watson? Does it make you want to go to other places? Like maybe Earth?”
“I would be interested to see Earth,” Watson said, and that was enough to justify the floating hurt inside me, the one distinct from Father and the miners.
“Follow me,” I said. I led him back the way we had come, until we arrived at the ascending tributary corridor, at the end of which I had glimpsed the cockpit. The door at its far end was shut now. We stood at the corridor’s entrance, staring at the closed door as though it were a portal to another, more dangerous world. “That’s where you go to fly the ship,” I said.
“We should stay out of there.”
“I want to see inside.”
“Mr. Reilly said not to touch anything. And he said not to go anywhere but the berth.”
“Oh, don’t start talking like them, Watson. I’m not going to try to fly it or anything.”
“Well, I can’t go with you. I won’t fit.” I could swear that I heard a note of pique in his voice. The corridor was indeed too narrow for him; he was designed for industrial work. This part of the ship was designed for human beings, or for the lithe deep-space Engines, which were as slender and fragile-looking as tinfoil flowers.
I gave him a smug little smile and waggled my fingers at him. “I guess you’re going to have to stay behind then,” I said, and proceeded toward the door. I walked quickly, as much to outpace my own misgivings as to prove to Watson that I could not be dissuaded. The comforting hum of his presence receded, until I faced the door in silence. I liked being trusted to be in the ship, and I didn’t want to provoke Mr. Reilly’s anger. But I had to see the cockpit. I had to see the one place on all of Mars where the means to go home resided; where, with a specific series of buttons pressed and dials turned, I could be on my way to Mother.
I pushed against the door, expecting it to be locked. It swung open easily.
The cockpit was small. There were two chairs, padded for comfort. One faced the pocked and scored observation window; through it I saw the outer edge of New Galveston, softly lit in the night. The other was turned to the right, facing a bewildering bank of controls, like some glittering crust gathered along a cave wall over the ages. It seemed impossible to me that one person could contain all the knowledge required to operate such an intimidating array. Looking at it, I felt a sharp twinge of despair. Maybe Mr. Reilly wouldn’t fly the ship home because he didn’t know how to. Or maybe he couldn’t do it by himself. It was a silly thought, since he’d already flown it to get here, but at the time it seemed credible enough.
I sat in the pilot’s chair, reclining into its surprising softness, leaning my head back so I could see the night sky and watch the moons make their circuit. Phobos still glared overhead, while Deimos hovered palely to one side. But for the ambient glow of the city, I might be in space at that moment, sliding quietly through the clean emptiness.
I dozed for a while.
Then something at the periphery of my eye roused me to attention. I sat forward. A single light flared somewhere out in the desert, not too far away. From the direction of the crater. Immediately it went out again. I put my face as close to the window as I could manage, straining to pick out a shape or a movement there.
I must have made some small sound, because Watson called out down the corridor. “Are you all right, Miss Crisp? I thought you had fallen asleep.”
“I did,” I said. I kept staring. Something inside me fluttered and jumped. I could hear my own blood pulsing in my head.
The light came again, and now that I was looking for it, I could see that it came from a lantern, though it was hard to judge its distance. Not far. It held steady for two or three seconds, and winked out again.
“Someone’s out there, Watson.”
“Surely it’s Mr. Reilly.”
“No. They’re signaling from the desert.”
I was about to say something else—but what? That the cultists were invading? That we should leave the ship? That we should fetch the sheriff, who at that very moment might be standing in the Mother Earth Diner, determining my father’s fate? But before I could manage anything, I saw Joe Reilly emerge from beneath the saucer, almost directly underneath me, startling me so badly that I shouted and jumped back. He didn’t hear me. He walked a few feet beyond the perimeter of the saucer and came to a halt, a lantern suspended from his own left hand, shuttered and dark. He raised it and opened a directional slat, casting its beam away from town, toward the crater. After a few seconds he closed it again and set it at his feet.
“Miss Crisp?”
“Shut up, Watson.”
Finally, movement from the desert. Two people approached. They pulled the heated coverings from their faces and I saw them. I put a hand over my mouth. My skin rippled with fear.
It was Silas and the woman—the one Brenda said was Sally Milkwood. He sauntered into view with an easy arrogance and clasped hands with Joe Reilly. Sally stood a few paces back, her arms crossed over her chest, her gaze crawling over the saucer above them, and—I could almost swear it—over my own face, pale and cold as a gravestone.
Too frightened to leave, I retreated farther into the ship’s interior. I lay down on one of the children’s bunks, in a room painted with cool pastel colors, one wall decorated in a bright mural picturing an idealized Martian farmstead, with New Galveston rising in grand spires behind it. It was a dream city, a place of silver towers and floating cars, far different from the small, hunched little town I knew. I stationed Watson at the door.
“Don’t let anyone come in,” I said.
“I’ll protect you, Miss Crisp.”
I believed him.
THE RAMP DESCENDED into the bleached pink light of morning. I sent Watson down first. He surveyed the launchpad and assured me that it was empty. I crept down slowly, my eyes trained on Joe Reilly’s shack. The curtains were closed, the door shut fast. It existed in a kind of perfect stillness; even the wind was quiet. The only sounds came from New Galveston as it gathered its energies for the day’s business: the sound of old Engines starting their tasks, the nickering of horses, the low hum of human industry. But the shack and the wide expanse beyond it might as well have been a painting, for all the life it showed.
I only wanted to get home to Father. The world was tilting, everything sliding out of place. I had to go home and protect what was left, while I could still recognize it.
We made it only a few yards in the direction of town—Watson’s thumping footfalls breaking the flat silence like rocks to gravel—before Joe Reilly’s voice rang out behind me.
“Anabelle! Wait!”
“Hurry, Watson.”
“Hold on a minute! I have to talk to you!”
I stopped despite myself and turned around. He’d stepped out of his shack and was hustling toward us in his usual dissolute state, hair askew and dirty clothes rumpled. His shirt was undone in a contemptible display of immodesty. It made me hate him even more, if such a thing were possible. There was nothing good or respectful about him. That I feared him now, that I waited for Silas Mundt or Sally Milkwood to emerge from the door behind him, stoked me into a murderous rage.
I screamed at him: an inarticulate, frustrated bullet of hate. It was an impotent sound. One day, I vowed, I would learn how to direct my hatred with power.
He seemed amazed by it, though. He stopped, arms slightly raised, palms out: a gesture of peace. “Whoa, girl, what the hell got into you?”
“Stay back!”
“Okay, okay.” He was still far enough away that we had to raise our voices to exchange words, which suited me very well. He put out a hand, as though to steady a spooked horse. “I need to tell you something before you go into town.”
“You got nothing to say to me. I saw who you was talking to last night. I saw it all. I’m telling the sheriff who you’ve taken up with. You better worry about what you’re going to tell him.”
That shut him up. His hand dropped and he stared at me like I’d just shot him in the gut. Like he couldn’t believe the calamity of it. I tensed, waiting for whatever he might do. Watson hummed at my side, apprehending these events in whatever unknowable way the Engines had. He was not designed for confrontation of any sort, so I didn’t know how he’d react if Mr. Reilly became violent. But his heavy presence gave me confidence nonetheless.
“Anabelle,” he said, finally. “Listen to me. Don’t do that.”
“You’re going to jail, Joe Reilly,” I said, feeling a dangerous, giddy power. “And then directly afterward I guess you’ll be going to hell.”
He dropped to his knees. I remember that very vividly—even more than I remember the robbery that started all this. I felt a cold, bloody joy riding high in my heart. I half expected him to topple onto his face. Instead he sat, his arms limp at his sides, and stared at me in dismayed silence. His face was wide open, struck defenseless, ready for the judgment of the world.
I would give it to him.
I HEADED BACK to the Mother Earth Diner. I tried to be circumspect, as I knew class had started and I didn’t want to be hassled about not being there. Nevertheless I felt stares drawing toward me. Two people talking by the roadside actually stopped their conversation and watched me pass, their faces flat and unreadable. I hurried by. Mr. Shank stood on the stoop of his shop. He watched me, too, his hands in his pockets and his gaze strangely formal, as though he had arrived to witness an execution. I stared back at him, feeling a growing sense of unease.
Then I saw the diner, and I understood.
The door was wide open, but the sign was unlit, and the lights inside were off. It looked wrong, crowded with shadows in the morning. I stepped inside. Chairs were toppled, a spill of forks gathered in a corner underneath an open drawer. Condiments had been swept from the tables, shattered onto the floor. This was more damage than had occurred during the fight. I saw the dried pool of blood where the miner had fallen, and my stomach lurched. There was a lot of it. Too much.
Watson came in behind me and moved immediately to the back, where his morning duties typically began. He bypassed all signs of chaos, including overturned and emptied sugar caddies, kitchen shelves barren of produce and bread, and a drift of spilled flour where a bag had been torn open. Past the fryer and the griddle, still cold. He pushed his way into the back room.
I stood silently, waiting for an emotion to coalesce. I knew what I was supposed to feel, and I tried to tap into it. But I came up with nothing. I was like the desert itself, responding to the Dowsing Engines with a dry silence.
Watson emerged from the back. “It’s all gone,” he said.
I just nodded.
All the food and water, all the dried goods, all the accumulated useless flotsam that collects in the corners of any human endeavor.
Even my father.
Gone.