The sun has set. Our headlights bounce across the ruins of Nebul as we sprint toward our dinghy. I have never run this fast in my life. I’m panting for every smidgen of air my oxygen supply can give me, and when I reach the hatch, I’m so out of breath I have to hang over my knees and gulp three wheezing lungfuls before I can call out, “Kieran! Let’s go!”
He reaches the hatch at last, and we dip inside. I’m repeating the planet and system Nyaltor mentioned over and over again in my mind as I strap Pumpkin in, then myself. Kieran goes to power the dinghy on, and I brace myself for the rumble of the engines.
But it doesn’t come.
He dials the sequence to activate power again, pulls the lever. Nothing.
I inhale sharply into my burning throat and cough. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.” He goes through the sequence two more times, then unbuckles himself. Pumpkin meows, following Kieran with big eyes as he opens the hatch back outside.
“What’s wrong?” I call again, because there’s nothing else in my brain. Something is wrong. What is it? Why is it? I unbuckle myself and jog outside to find him. When I do, he’s pushing aside an opened panel near the nuclear supply. I think, Wow, he opened that fast, and then I realize how impossible that is.
“Those fuckers!” I shout. I look to the sky, because they’re out there somewhere, maybe looking down to see if their little sabotage worked. “Fuck you, June! Fuck you, Gunner! Fuck you, Verity Co.!”
“That’ll help,” Kieran says.
“Well,” I snap. Well, what? He’s right. He’s always right. I pace in a small circle. “What did they do?”
“Severed the supply line to the engine.”
My heart skips a beat and skids into a rough palpitation. “Is the nuclear core—”
“Energy’s still there. They didn’t kill us.”
I sigh with relief. Nuclear power cores are nearly limitless supplies of energy for this and our main ship’s needs. If Verity Co. had done something to drain it (or detonate it, as the movies would have you believe), we really would be dead. There’s no food on this planet. No water. No realistic way to get back to orbit. I shudder to think about if these had been different people, and then I balk at my own ability to be grateful for them not murdering us.
“So we can fix it?” I say.
He pulls his head out of the dinghy’s innards, already on it. “Yeah, but...” He wipes greasy hands on his suit and gives me a grim look. “It’s going to take some time.”
“How much time?”
“How long are this planet’s days?”
“Twenty-eight-something standard hours.”
He nods slowly. “Might be able to get it running come morning.”
“Morning.” I throw my hands up and let them slap back down to my sides. “If I help, can we speed it along?”
I wouldn’t be completely dead in the water without my brother. I have enough basic training to read through the well-written manuals and perform well-ordered steps, but he shakes his head. “No. And it’s safer as a solo job. I’ve got to set up radiation shielding and everything.”
“Okay...”
“And you can’t be on the dinghy when I open it up.”
“So, take a walk with Pumpkin, then,” I deadpan.
He shrugs like, That’s the way it’s got to be, and I nod. I don’t fight him. I have no fight left. This is his specialty, and I have to trust he knows best. “Good luck,” I tell him.
“I’ll work as fast as I can,” he mutters.
I duck back in the dinghy and free Pumpkin from his restraints. He yawns hugely, showing all his teeth, and curls right back into his seat. I couldn’t sleep in this suit if you paid me, but cats are magic in any universe.
“Backpack it is,” I say and rummage in storage for the cat pack. It’s a hefty padded bag with a translucent dome bubble like a window, big enough for Pumpkin in his full gear, which means a big workout for me.
I get him inside with little resistance, and by the time I’m walking out of the dinghy, Kieran is already behind a radiation shield.
The city is silent under a sky filled with stars. I’ve been walking among the ruins for hours, poking around in offices that don’t take too much hassle to get inside. The last thing my brother and I need is for me to get stuck somewhere and call for help.
I want him focused on getting the dinghy up and running. I want off this planet so we can get to the next one. I want to find Nyaltor’s next cache. I want—I sigh—not to have let Verity Co. sneak up on us and steal this cache. I want a whole lot of things, and I’m not getting any of it.
I know it’s clichéd, my dear, but all dark nights break to dawn.
It’s our mom’s voice in my head, strong and frail at the same time. Strong in conviction, frail in, well, actual physical strength. She’s lying in a hospital bed, holding my hand, hooked up to about fifty different wires, a mask over her mouth so she can breathe easier. I’m on an alien planet millions of light-years from where she died, and I can still see her, still hear her voice.
Bad days beget bad memories, I guess.
I dig through my bag, moving carefully around Pumpkin’s curled-up, sleeping form. I’ve been at it for hours, studying this world’s architecture, taking soil samples, transcribing all the text on all the buildings. I’ve taken images, measured chair dimensions, discovered the ruins of some vehicle with smooth wheels and sundered electronics. I’ve done a lot in the time Kieran’s been working, but I haven’t used that.
I pull the VR overlay device from an armored pocket and clip it into the external drive receptor in the arm of my suit. Sometimes this makes my moods worse rather than better, but this is the next phase of my exploration, a necessary, different angle on everything I’ve viewed so far. I wait for the display to flash along the inside surface of my helmet on the heads-up display.
“Activate hindsight module,” I say, and the thin holographic text begins churning out code and signs that it’s processing. Sometimes I’ll let the process run offscreen, as it were, so I can do other things without distraction in the interim. But today, now, I watch because I can’t make Kieran work faster. I can’t project myself hours ahead into a future where I can get to work translating the cache copy we have or finding the next planet. I can’t go back to the past and post a guard at our dinghy, make myself stay back, so that Verity Co. doesn’t mess with it. I have to be here. I have to do what I can here.
The thin pink text trailing past my vision moves too fast and choppy to fully understand, but I catch snippets, see the lines highlighting aspects of the terrain, sampling their aesthetic, hypothesizing about chemical compounds. Iron saturation, I catch. Oxygen level. Distance to system sun. Humidity.
I watch it focus and highlight the buildings, the sky, the concrete, the little patch of dirt where I planted the seeds. Complete, it flashes. Overlay Hindsight Compilation?
“Yes,” I say, and my helmet fills with a new world.
Artificially computed, it fills out from me in a wave, holographic light running over everything, turning it all into what it might have been before all this. Before the destruction, the death, the ruins. Holes and fissures and cracks in buildings fill in, their doors are repaired, their windows unshatter. The streets are smoothed over. Rubble re-amasses into straight, flat lines. A fountain outside the financial office reconfigures and resumes its spewing, letting out torrents of crystal-clear water.
I walk along the road toward the Organizer’s office. It is massive and beautiful, its dome top shining the gold of yesteryear instead of the decayed, sickly green we saw upon landing. As I walk, the overlay opens bubbles in the projection, showing me where modern-day rubble threatens to disrupt my steps. It juts out, cold and ugly, against this beautiful world that once was. So, I stop. I long to feel what breeze might have sucked through this grid of construction. I long to know what it might have smelled like, what temperature it was.
I look around for a long while and can’t stop myself from thinking of Mom again. I involuntarily conjure an image of her, imagine what she would say if she were here, what things she would look at.
I look where she would look—at the sky—and think that maybe I can smell something new after all. Something clean and citrus-like. Warm blacktop being cooled. I imagine I am a Stelhari stepping out into the night for a break from all that work underground. I envision others walking the starlit roads. I put Blyreena on the steps of the Organizer’s office, Nyaltor and his team of scientists around the fountain.
I try my hardest to imagine it, but all I see—all I really see—is nothing. All I really hear is my brother working on the dinghy. All I really smell is the sterile workings of my suit’s filtration systems. That’s all any of this is, because a millennium ago the Endri came and wiped out absolutely everything.
Did it know what it was doing, what it was taking away?
Did it care?