Page 12 of The Brightness Between Us

“That’s it. A bunker.”

“It’s a small sample, so this is terrible data modeling, but given that the two strikes we know about were fifty years apart, we could assume that we’ve been lucky so far. We’vealready been seventeen Earth years on this planet.”

“Almost eighteen,” Yarrow says, cutting a glance at me. Reminding me about the anniversary reel he made for the dads, that I haven’t seen yet.

“We need to get building,” I say.

It’s chilly around this puddle, and the night sky vaults without limits above. I get a momentary feeling that I’ve had off and on my whole life, that maybe gravity will decide to flip and send us up into that expanse, never to return. I rub my hands on my arms. My wounded back hurts. “This has been a big couple of days.”

“We weren’t planning on telling you this now, but you did ask,” Dad says. “So here’s what we’re going to do. Kodiak and Owl, you’ll work on the bunker. Yarrow, you and I will start planning how we’ll make our settlement mobile, in case the comet strikes nearby.”

“Themaybecomet,” Yarrow says.

“Right. The ‘maybe comet.’”

I turn to Father. “We’re coworkers now. How refreshingly unpaternalistic.”

“Thank you,” he says. “Though, Owl, Fédération might be a second language to me, but I’m pretty sure that ‘unpaternalistic’ isn’t a word.”

I gesture to our habitats, glowing up at the Sky Cat constellation. “I don’t think these would hold up very well under a superhot explosion.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” Father says. “We’ll need to burrow. And, most essentially, we’ll need to find metals in the soil that we can use to build with, instead of just hydrocarbons.”

“Metals we haven’t located yet,” I say. “Not in almost eighteen years.”

“That’s right,” Father says. Is there a little twinkle in his eye?

I think for a moment. “So... we’ll have to go search for metals.”

He nods.

“We’ll need... to explore?”

“In order to search for metals, yes,” he says gruffly. The twinkle is still there. I swear I’m not wrong about it.

“Maybe I’ll be the one to find them,” I try. “Because of my knack for exploring?”

He gestures to my wound. “Maybe you won’t get yourself gored in the process this time.”

I look between him and Dad. In the midst of all this, my sixteenth-birthday present has arrived early.

Chapter 6

I’m ready to go right away, but Father wants to set me up a mock course first, so he can prep me for any dangers I might come across during my journey—this practice scheduled for the spare hours when we’re not crafting bunker plans, of course. I resist, but then I realize that Yarrow’s birthday is four days away, which means as a good sister I should delay until after that if I don’t want to miss it. Also, I guess I should make sure my wound has healed before I go setting off on any expeditions. Iguess.A week’s delay isn’t the worst thing.

Yarrow protests that he would be fine, that what does a birthday mean anyway when we’re using Earth years on a planet that takes three times as long to orbit its suns? But we’ve never missed each other’s birthdays, and it’s the rare day on Minerva that has something unique about it. We’ve survived nearly eighteen years without a comet strike. I don’t think we need to be in an absolute rush to race out searching for metal.

I mean, no one in the history of this planet has ever celebrated a sixteenth birthday. I tell Yarrow as much, butwhen he looks up from watering pea seedlings, I can see he’s not impressed. “It never had a fifteen-year-old until last year, either. That’s been true for each birthday I’ve ever had. Not you, unfortunately. I keep being the one to break new ground.”

“If you’re not going to embrace your role as pioneer of humankind, I might have to take over,” I say.

He leaves the watering can by the greenhouse’s dedicated cistern. “You’ll have to get rid of me if you ever want to be out of the gates first.”

We go quiet. The idea of a life without each other is so horrifying that there’s nothing to say to it.

We make our way to the dinner table early, using our half hour of daily free time to continue this birthday talk instead of our usualPink Lagoonrewatch.We don’t even have to say we’re doing it—we just start moving the table out under the stars and set up the chairs, then we sit down and hold hands and talk. I guess I’m trying to keep Yarrow’s spirits high because, despite his requests for a lemon cake like in the show, algal sugar pudding is the only birthday treat he’s got coming. The same algal sugar pudding we have every week. Rover is busy whipping it up in the canteen. It’s very sweet. I love algal sugar pudding. As far as we know, the universe hasn’t had any lemons in it for over thirty thousand years, so that was a ridiculous request for Yarrow to make in the first place. All the same—whatwould a lemon taste like, that kids made a pained face when they ate one, only to ask for another?

I did get Rover to print a new latch for Dad’s violin case for Yarrow’s birthday, so our Museum of Earth Civ will be a little more complete. Every birthday, something new.

---