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The world outside the dome was one Areina had only seen a handful of times, despite being a native Europan, living in the station her entire life. The settlement was toward the center of the station, leaving them only with a view of the endless black sky and the enormous sphere of Jupiter overhead.
Here, it was completely different. Ice stretched in every direction to the horizon, bright blue-white against the black of the sky. Small ridges, only a few meters high, covered the ground, and the ice was streaked with yellow and red, deposits of minerals embedded in the ice. There was basically no atmosphere, so the only motion came from occasional shifts in the ice and sudden plumes of water erupting from cracks in the ice in the distance. Even Jupiter looked different without the dome’s filtering light; it was more vibrant and dangerous-looking, looming above them like a vengeful god.
It was dangerous out here, too. At any moment, the ice could crack beneath them, the plumes hit the icecar and send them flying.
Was that what had happened to the scavenging party?
Areina shook her head lightly, gripping the wheel. There was no time to wonder. Only to search. It was only a matter of time until the commander found a way to send someone out here after them.
“Now what, genius?” Bryce snapped.
Areina glared back at where he lounged in the other seat, arms crossed over his chest. “Hey, I never asked you to come. So you can keep your comments to yourself.”
He pushed himself forward, hands on his knees. “I wasn’t going to come! But someone needed to keep an eye on the station’s resident freak!”
Areina flinched and turned back to the front, pushing the pedal to the floor. “Better a freak than a jerk.”
But her words were weak, too quiet. Terrance had told her that countless times, that it was better to be considered weird than hurtful, but the words rang hollow now that she actually said them herself. Her heart wrenched, stomach sick as she thought of Terrance. If he was gone...
She shook her head and focused on the horizon. She just wanted to get a few kilometers away from the station, then she could pull up the navigation screen and get them headed in the direction of Station Beta. That way, hopefully no one would be able to take over control of the icecar, a built-in safety feature each car had.
And if they were lucky, they’d find the missing party along the way to the derelict station.
Bryce was still prattling on about how stupid she was, how no one liked her, how she was going to get in so much trouble that they’d ship her to Earth, blah, blah, blah. Why had he even bothered to follow her? Was it really just about “keeping an eye on her” as he’d said?
Or could there be more to it?
Areina did her best to keep her eyes on the ice and the dash, keeping them from hitting any large ridges or crevices. The icecar was equipped with a hybrid system that allowed it to roll along the ice on spiked wheels and hover over deep cracks, keeping the rig relatively stable, but there was always the chance they’d hit something too big for the car to handle.
Finally, the station was more than two kilometers back, and she slowed the icecar to a stop. Bryce hadn’t stopped ranting at her the entire drive, and her jaw was beginning to ache with how much she was clenching it.
“And another thing,” Bryce continued. “People might like you a little better if you at least tried—”
Unable to tolerate another word, she whirled around, her hair fanning out through the air behind her. “I didn’t ask,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “Now, I’m not taking you back, and I’m not going back. So are you going to shut up, or am I dumping you here for the commander to find?”
Bryce paled and looked out the window nearest him, the bright white ice reflecting in his eyes. He swallowed and mumbled something under his breath..
She held up a hand to her ear dramatically. “What’s that?”
He glared at her. “I said, I want to go with you.”
She blinked. “You want to go with me? What, so you can report back on my every move? So I can get in as much trouble as possible?”
He just shrugged, looking away. He was definitely hiding something. And the way he had paled looking out at the ice, the way he finally grew quiet, the way his hand trembled ever so slightly... For all the mean things Bryce said, the way he chased her throwing rocks at the station, he was just like any other kid. He was scared to be out here.
So was she.
“Okay then,” she said, turning back to the dashboard. “You can either sit there quietly, or you can help me figure out this system.”
He crossed his arms again and sat back, looking away, his face stormy.
“Fine.” Areina squinted at the controls, trying to block out his moping.
She took a deep breath, wishing she’d been able to dump him at the station before she left. But just like always, he was exactly where he shouldn’t have been. Always poised to ruin things for her.
Like the time she tried to leave Terrance a surprise present from school and Bryce smashed it during a pickup game of kickball in the village.
Or when some of the other students caught her sneaking berries from one of the garden patches and he ratted her out to the commander.
Or when she’d failed an Earth history test and he’d managed to snag her result and post it to every screen in the station.
She tapped at the navigation screen while she pondered what to do. She couldn’t take him back without risking her own journey, and if she left him here, he’d die before anyone got to him.
Which meant he was coming along. Which, for some reason, was exactly what he wanted.
The screen flared to life, showing her a top-down view of Europa’s surface around them, bright white with black grid lines. A green dot in the bottom left of the screen was marked with the Station Alpha symbol, and on the far right, almost off the screen, was a grayed-out dot representing the dead station. Beta.
Her birthplace. Her biggest mystery.
From here, it would take half the day, if she was careful. Only a few hours if she wasn’t. But with a search for the scavenging party, it might be even slower. She couldn’t afford to miss any of the ever-shifting cracks and crevices.
Areina tapped the location of the station on the screen, and the coordinates filled the screen as the computer plotted a course. Finally the blinking stopped, and the route appeared in front of her.
“I really hope this is the way they went,” she mumbled, preparing to press down on the accelerator.
But then the dashboard blinked again, lights flashing on and off intermittently, and the screen began recalculating, the previous route disappearing. Areina froze, watching the computer chart a new course across the ice toward Station Beta. What did it mean? Did it somehow... read her thoughts? Her wishes?
The dashboard had responded to her earlier, too, when she’d struggled to remember how to operate the icecar. Could this somehow be related to the glowing?
Her heart fluttered, and her stomach quaked. What was happening to her?
“Did the ice finally freeze you?” Bryce cut into her anxiety, not noticing how the controls responded to Areina. “Or are you going to start this thing before we both freeze to death?”
She didn’t dignify him with a response, instead gathering herself and clutching the wheel tighter. Hopefully she didn’t drive them both into a crack in the moon. She didn’t much feel like adding drowning to her ways to die out here.
With one final deep breath, she aimed them in the direction the computer indicated and pressed her foot to the pedal.
The ice sped by on either side, rattling the car with each small rill, Jupiter hanging above them. Occasionally she hit a hill a little harder than normal, jarring her teeth in her skull, but eventually the rough ride evened out and she hardly noticed.
Areina glanced back over her shoulder at her unwanted companion. He sat with his eyes firmly fixed out the window, looking a little green. She simply turned forward, smirking.
She followed the route on the screen for what felt like hours, watching the distance slowly close between them and the other station. Each icy outcropping and deep crevice melted into the next, and everything began to blur together. Now and then, a plume of water vapor would explode from the ice in the distance, but never close enough to affect them or alter the icecar’s path.
But then a bright flash of neon green poked out from the ice, and Areina instinctively slammed on the brakes.
Green in this land of white, blue, and sulfur yellow? That could only mean one thing: they’d found evidence of the scavenging party.
“Hey, what gives?” Bryce protested as he slammed into the safety harness. “I guess your driving is as good as your social skills.”
“Still better than your hygiene,” she couldn’t help but grumble back.
She could practically hear his eyes roll, but his voice was slightly less snippy than normal when he said, “What is it?”
Areina fought her own harness for a moment, fumbling for the latch with shaking fingers. “Something man-made in the ice.”
“Man-made?”
The harness came away with a clatter, and she lunged from her seat for the suits hanging in the back of the car. Her heart pounded, and she practically gasped for air as she imagined what could possibly be out there.
Was it a lost piece of survival gear? Maybe a bit of trash lost by the party?
A body?
She shook the thought from her head. There was no point worrying about finding a body when she had no way to know yet.
Bryce suddenly appeared next to her, reaching for another suit.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I’m not staying in here by myself,” he responded.
He grabbed a suit and began buckling in. With shaking hands, she snapped and zipped and tucked into her own suit. Finally, they both put their helmets on and entered the small built-in airlock, the icecar conserving as much of the air as possible.
It seemed to take ages for the car to pull the air from the airlock, each second ticking by for eons as Areina’s mind raced with every possibility. Bryce watched her, his face carefully scrubbed of emotion. What was going on behind that stare? Was he just scared, or did it have something to do with the real reason he’d followed her, the reason she was beginning to suspect had nothing to do with her?
Whatever his reason, he was still treating her the same as always: like the resident freak. He couldn’t see past her glow to the person she actually was, and the more time she spent with him out here, the more confused she felt about the whole thing. They should be friends; they were the same age, lived through the same things. Yet, not only did he refuse to be her friend, but he also actively kept her from making any other friends.
It was because of him that she was alone.
But still... there was a glimmer of something she almost recognized under the bravado, something the trip out here on the ice was slowly chipping open.
Just when she felt like she couldn’t take the wait any longer, the outer door slid open to reveal the frozen landscape. Since the atmosphere was so thin, there was nothing stirring. Not a breath of air blowing like it did in the station, no sound but the groaning of the ice underfoot.
She couldn’t get away from Bryce fast enough, away from his brooding and her confusion over him.
Her stomach flopped as she took her first step onto the ice, the spikes on the bottom of the boot crunching in to give her a firm foothold. Suddenly the fear she had for her father was overwhelmed by her fear of the ground underfoot—kilometers of ice on top of a seemingly endless deep brine sea.
At any moment, the ice could shift again, and they could be lost to that sea.
Somehow, even though the risk wasn’t any lower inside the icecar, it seemed more real out here with nothing surrounding them. It was just Areina, Bryce, and an endless expanse of restless ice.
She took a deep, shaky breath. Terrance needed her.
And then she took another step away from the car and toward the out-of-place green object sitting in the ice.
The ground out in the open was a lot more difficult to navigate than the ground in the station, and she was out of breath within a few meters of the car. Each step required her to navigate over and around all the jagged ridges and cracks. Luckily, they’d managed to stop in an area without any of the deep crevices that spiderwebbed around the planet. Those would have been more difficult to navigate.
A water vapor plume burst to life less than two hundred meters away, directly in their line of sight, and she leapt back. Gasping, she held a hand over her fluttering heart.
Her radio crackled to life in her ear. “We should really go back to the car,” came Bryce’s voice. “This isn’t safe!”
Irritated, she glared back over her shoulder. “Do you really think we’re any safer there?”
“It’s not the same!” he said. “Out here we could just disappear into the ice and no one would ever know!”
“That could still happen in the car,” she said, her anger building again. She stared at him, and his mouth twitched, as if he was dying to say something but unsure.
He hesitated, staring at her with a glimmer of pity and anger. Don’t say it. Don’t.
“That’s probably what happened to the party, you know,” he continued.
For a moment, all she could do was stare at him. Then the world went white as something in her snapped, and she whirled on the ice, spikes digging into the ground and helping her launch her body directly at Bryce. All her careful preparation, all her fear—it was gone in the face of her anger and worry over Terrance. She’d been successfully avoiding thoughts of the endless ways he could have died out here.
And now Bryce was reminding her. Making her face the truth.
“Take it back!” she shrieked, angry tears burning in her eyes. “You don’t know anything!”
Vision blinded by her tears, she threw punch after punch at him. Each blow landed with a bone-jarring thud, but the impact was lessened by the padding that protected the suit’s wearer from the intense radiation of the Europan environment.
Bryce threw his arms up, trying to ward off the blows, but she’d had enough of his snarky comments. He wasn’t even supposed to be here!
“If—” Punch. “You—” Punch. “Don’t—” Punch. “Have—” Punch. “Anything useful—” Punch. “To say—”
Bryce lunged toward her, pushing her backward and off balance. They went skidding across the ice, the rough ridges slamming into Areina’s back painfully.
“Would you stop for a second?” Bryce yelled, trying to stop her still flailing arms. He finally grabbed hold of her wrists, but her anger was stronger than him.
She bucked under his hold, throwing them both to the side and tumbling along the hard, cold ground again. Something caught on a particularly sharp piece of ice, and a loud rippp made them both freeze.
It only took a moment for the alarm to start blaring in Areina’s suit. She was leaking breathable air into the almost nonexistent atmosphere.
She snapped her head around to the icecar. It was a good twenty meters off by now, after their tumble across the ground. She turned her head to the fluorescent green in the ice. It was just as far away. At the rate her suit was leaking, she’d never make it to the object and back to the car before she lost air. Not at the rate the airlock functioned.
But she had to get it.
She shoved Bryce off her and ran toward the green as the air grew thinner inside her suit. As the air rushed out, the cold seeped in, encasing her in a shell of frigid air. Each breath turned to a gasp, her legs growing heavy as she approached.
She was almost out of air.
“Areina, what are you doing?” Bryce tugged her arm, but she shook him off. “We have to go back and get you a different suit. Or let me get that thing and you go back!”
Go back? When she was this close to knowing what it was? She wouldn’t even be in this situation if it hadn’t been for him and his big fat mouth! And after all he’d done to her over the years... How could she just leave it to him?
“No!” she gasped. “You go back!”
He kept tugging, and she kept resisting, each breath shallower than the last. Each ridge in the ice seemed taller with every step she took, but eventually her body seemed to block out the pain and lack of oxygen. She barely even felt her body anymore.
Just a few more steps.
The green reappeared below her staticky vision, its vibrant color almost gray against the white of the ice.
She didn’t have much longer.
Areina dropped down beside the object, reaching for it with her still gloved hands. She nearly cried as she saw what it was.
Nothing more than a fragment of an old satellite.
