Attention: ALL
Subject: Missing Supplies
Whoever is hoarding towels and toiletries, stop it! Return these items to any restroom storage area immediately!
—Dr. Tanner, Planning
I must have learned about moon quakes during conditioning. It seemed the sort of thing that must have been covered alongside radiation poisoning, freezing temperatures, and bone density issues. I knew Guanghan and Blackstone had struggled with quakes their first couple of years, but by the time Mirage and the one whose name I always forgot got built, they’d worked out most of the kinks. I tried to remember what to do, but I couldn’t think straight. It was happening too fast.
Dust stuck in my throat, and I gagged and clutched at my neck when all I wanted to do was cover my ears. I dropped to the floor, mostly on purpose, and clambered toward the walls.
Somehow, miraculously, Viveca maintained her composure. In short order, she gathered safety harnesses to slip around our waists and clip to the wall. She produced masks from somewhere, and she tightened one over her face before tossing the others to me and Halle. My eyes were so clogged with dust, I couldn’t tell where she found any of these contraptions. Halle’s screams soured into something like squawks as she buried her head under her arms.
The alarm wailed on and on, seeming louder every second. A cool blue light sparkled on the swirling carbon dust, like it danced along to that metallic clatter and deafening drone. I felt numbed by it all, too barraged to feel properly scared.
It was entirely possible my brain had no idea how to process real danger. Not because I was autistic, but because Earth was bananas and nuts, day after day.
Once, I had slept through a hurricane that stole our garage clean off the house, the same storm that had swallowed California. I’d been all, “Oh wow, the sky is green and purple, what?” at bedtime, then it was snooze town the whole night through until I woke, ready for breakfast and curious why the air smelled like tree sap.
Every moment on Earth was either one minute past or before the next terrible emergency. No reason the moon should be different.
I crawled closer to Viveca, and as she fit the harness over me, her face was no longer hers. Instead, I saw Faraday, her face fierce and full of plans.
My chest splintered, missing her, and something inside me broke.
“Faraday?”
“Hold still. I’m trying to help you,” Viveca ordered, but I couldn’t answer. The lights flickered off and I was plunged into darkness, into the one space in my head I tried so hard to avoid. With a pinched breath, I plummeted to the center, and it wasn’t now but then.
Then.
The night she’d died.
Faraday’s eyes shone my way, their light yet undimmed, and her crimson skirt swung in orbit around her legs. This was Masdar, just outside of the collective’s compound. Drums boomed and rattled past as the band circled her campaign crowd.
A transformer blew in the distance. Then another.
Her smile curdled. Darkness descended, and sirens drowned out the drums.
“Fuck!” I screamed. I reached for her, but she was too far, and the street had shifted. Faraday’s face twisted with anger. Panic. Smoke and dust stung my throat. I forced my feet over broken pavement and shards of glass as Royal Corps squads zipped down from the sky like falling stars.
An explosion rocked the world as sirens and alarms rolled together into thunder.
“This way,” Faraday hollered, and I followed when she ducked into an alley, trying not to look at the familiar faces on the bodies littering the ground as I hurdled over them. Her hand broke free from mine, and she lit a torch to rummage through her duffel bag, withdrawing sturdier clothes and boots. “Take the cut through ahead. It’s a shortcut to the collective. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.” She slipped off her dress and stuffed it into the bag, redressing quickly.
“I’m not leaving you!” I screamed.
She pushed the duffel at me. The zipper didn’t close all the way, and the sleeve of her dress stuck out from the hole. It wasn’t even folded. “Our meeting place isn’t far. I’ll be fast.”
She hugged me, but I couldn’t feel it. She kicked an oven-sized grate to the alley floor, then she crawled through the hole, dropping into the darkness.
I started toward her, but I was too slow, too far away. An angry roar shook the alley, and I jumped out of the way just as the ceiling cracked and caved in, pouring sandy rubble over me.
Something was burning. The broken ceiling had blocked the hole.
“My leg. I can’t move!” Faraday cried, and I wasn’t strong enough to lift the rest of the wreckage out of the way. Trickles of fire snapped and spread toward me, but I ignored them, clawing at the blockade, clearing enough away to see her face crisscrossed by beams of light.
The Royal Corps were in the tunnel too, and my sister was trapped in their path.
“Lane! Go!”
“Enemy soldier!” a man yelled. I couldn’t see him, but his voice told me he was awfully close. “Come forward with your hands in the air!”
“I can’t move!” she yelled back, her voice pitched in desperation. “I’m unarmed. Not a soldier.”
Gunfire popped in the distance. Too close. So many voices shouting.
Dust caked my throat. “Don’t hurt her!” I braced my legs against the burning rubble, tugging with everything I had.
“Comply or I will—” The wreckage gave, enough so chunks of ceiling fell through the opening to land beside her. “There’s more coming through. Fire!”
Gunshots pierced through the screaming.
My throat was raw.
“One down. Find another way!”
I couldn’t move or think. I saw Faraday below in the firelight, her torch rocking back and forth at her side.
One down. One down. One down.
Gunshots and someone went down.
Someone. My sister.
Black liquid poured from her chest, her face cloud white, but she was not dead. She wasn’t. She couldn’t be. She wouldn’t.
Her eyes were open and clear as ever, weren’t they?
The alleyway buckled, burying me, unable to know.
In the dark, always.
The harness clicked into place, buckling me back into reality, into the trust. The lion’s roar of the air recycler sucked specks of dust into its circular maw. Tears rolled down my cheeks unbidden. I blinked through them, and my sister’s ghost vanished from Viveca’s features. She squinted at me like I’d started belting showtunes.
I thanked her quickly and squeezed her hand. For some reason I was afraid to let go. When she turned, I wiped the memories away and made myself small, tucking my head down.
We hugged the walls, gripping our lifelines, while the dome trembled like an unsteady snow globe. I gripped my harness cord and waited with hitched breath for the quake to end. My body ached all over, and I expected bruises would bloom beneath my clothes.
The vision of my sister was a fog that wouldn’t lift. The rush of relief I’d felt at seeing her, or thinking I saw her, terrified me, as if her face alone could erase the guilt I felt or all that had gone wrong since death took her away.
“Minor quake,” Joule explained, his breath hot in my ear. I didn’t remember him arriving, but he was strapped in between me and Halle, with Viveca on my right. The tremors had stopped, and the alarm had too, but the recyclers droned on. “Wrong time for a deep quake. This has to be from an impact. Likely a meteor hit somewhere in our atmosphere. Dampeners would have absorbed most of the impact, but our dome can withstand—Oh. I think it’s settling.”
The air recyclers powered down, and our ragged breaths grated in the sudden silence. We chimed in, one after another, with I’m okays, before Viveca basically catapulted out of her harness to glare down at me.
“What just happened?” she demanded.
“I suppose you couldn’t hear me,” Joule said. “I was explaining—”
“Not that, Joule. Lane!” Viveca’s stare bored into me. Brown, not green. Not my sister. Andrek’s words swam back to me, She’s scary smart. What if she starts digging?
“I.” I couldn’t decide how to answer, so I struggled to unclip my harness and got to my feet, settling on evasion. “It’s nothing. Sensory overload or whatever.”
“That was not nothing,” she pressed. Her gaze roamed over me as if she was clocking my pulse and breathing, cataloging every way my body betrayed me.
“Sensory stuff, oh yes,” Joule agreed. “We all get that, don’t we?”
“Spectrum squad, yay,” Halle sang, but her voice was weak and wobbly.
“That’s not what I’m talking about, and Lane knows it.” Viveca crossed her arms and studied my hair. “You called me Faraday. Did you hit your head?”
“Maybe? I don’t think so, but it’s fine now, okay? I’m fine.” She couldn’t know where my mind had gone. She wasn’t psychic. It wasn’t like this happened to me a lot, usually only when there wasn’t enough light as I fell asleep. I was good at avoiding it the rest of the time. “I should go and, like, check on my parents and Andrek. Send me the schedule or whatever. Bye, all.”
Halle waved with a shrug, and Joule flashed his beautiful smile.
I stuffed my hands into my pockets and made for the exit.
“Lane, wait!” Viveca put herself between me and the door.
“Why?”
“There’s no uncomplicated way to say this.” Her pitch rose sharply. “I apologize that the memorial got sprung on you the way it did. I should have considered how this would affect your family. How it would affect you. As young and inexperienced as you are, of course you’ll need time and help. After what you’ve been through, that’s got to come first.”
I shook my head. She was going to go on about those grief groups again. I felt silly for being so against it, especially knowing Faraday wanted all the trustees participating, since we’d have left a planet and who knows what else behind. And that was before we’d lost more.
But I didn’t like being told to do things by people who didn’t know me. “I don’t need—”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She laid a hand on my upper arm, her thumb sliding into a tender spot above my elbow where the harness had rubbed.
I could feel her staring, but I didn’t raise my head. I watched a little vein on her neck throb as she spoke softer. Only to me.
“Of course you need therapy, Lane. You’ve lost your sister and the friends you grew up with, left your home planet, and now here you are volunteering to make enormous decisions about honoring the very sister who sent you here in the first place. I know what I saw. You were gone.”
“Why does it matter so much to you?” It wasn’t what I mean to say, which was something closer to “mind your business,” except now that it was out, I decided it was a much better question. Especially since it made her stutter-step and let me pass.
But before the hatch closed behind me, she added, “Like it or not, I’m signing you up for a group before we start meeting officially, because it should matter more to you.”