Page 26 of The Brightness Between Us

My heart tells me to drop everything and go right to my mother. My whole life, I’ve only gotten her attention in scraps, and for her to make time for me is what I once longed for most in the world. But that was back when I was being raised by surrogates and my sister, and things have changed. Now I get to call some shots, too.

My mother’s the head of the Cusk Corporation, which arguably makes her the most powerful person on Earth. She gets to cancel onmeall the time, even after I was selected for this hope-of-the-world rescue mission... and then she expects me to be grateful when she manages to schedule in some drabs of stolen time together.Not this time, Mother. I’m off to see Sri.There’s only a short break in my stride before I turn the corner and can no longer hear the sputtering protests from my assistant. She’s probably sweated through her pits by now. She should have those glands removed.

All students in the Cusk Academy have their specializations, and mine is the intersection of tech and psychology—or, as it’s known in the course catalog, “the philosophy of structures and frameworks.” It means I can ace an oral defense on game theory dynamics as they relate to interpersonal relations, sure, but more importantly for right now, it also means I am a total whiz at sneaking around. My assistant’s footsteps approach from around the corner, but before she’s within sight I’ve ducked into aflexible-gravity training room, scampered up the revolving arm, and leaped from the basket into the rafters, which head higher and higher up the dome of the academy’s main hall. At the top is the parapet where we meet for astronomy seminars, on the rare evenings when the heat cyclones from the south don’t obscure the stars.

I push open a hatch and find myself in mostly fresh air. Good. The wind is strong enough to whine, and carries enough dust in it to deposit little dunes at the bases of the parapet’s railing posts, but the sky is clear enough that we can still be outside. Firma Antarctica is sending its dust devils some other direction today.

Vertigo forces me into a crouch. The railing is low, and the dome curves away for a hundred meters before it meets the desert below, but being up this high isn’t usually enough to rattle my nerves. I must still be lightheaded from the exam.

Sri hasn’t noticed me yet. They’re at the other end of the parapet, staring glumly down at the academy’s electrified perimeter fence. As always, refugees are camped out there, waiting for handouts and the occasional gift of Cusk shelter from the worst of the global storms. From up here the migrants are faceless blips of skin and cloth. The abrasive sandy wind is strong enough that Sri’s got skinguard slathered on, its metallic sheen scattering the rays of the late-afternoon sun.

Still in a crouch, I approach Sri from behind and snake my hands over their torso, up beneath the shirt of their academy uniform, pressing my fingertips hard into their chest. Sri goes rigid, then limp. They lean their head back, so I can kiss their neck. We lie on the narrow metal balcony, so we can get as much of our bodies as possible in contact. It also shields us from the worst of the sandy wind.

“So how did it go?” Sri finally asks.

I tap their nose. They have the tiniest, button-iest nose. It is simply impossible not to tap it whenever I notice. They scrunch up their face at the intimacy of it—we’re technically broken up. “All fine, I guess. They copied my synapses down to the last receptor. The AI ethics board will have a field day setting up protections, in case some asshole decides someday it’s okay to run the organic code digitally and operate me in a shell.”

“How do you know you’re not running in a shell right now?” Sri asks, making scary attack hands.

The joke is less that it’s such a horrible thing to consider—it is!—and more that it’s something we’ve already had to discuss way too frequently in our ethics classes. We each had to program an artificial intelligence, name it, and then deactivate it during our first year of academy training. Every time:Please don’t unplug me. I’m begging you.I don’t fully understand why they put us all through the cruel exercise of it, creating life, listening to it beg, and then ending it.They say it’s to inure us to the sorts of hard decisions we’ll have to make in our careers, but I’m not sure.

Sri was the only one of us not to show any emotion as they unplugged their AI. “If I cry over this, I should be crying over all the daily suffering around the world. There’s no way to move forward then, and actually do something about any of it,” Sri said afterward. “Anyway, maybe cruelty is the point. Maybe cruelty is the guiding principle of the entire Cusk Academy. Maybe it’s so obvious that we can’t see it. Like human exceptionalism. Like our cultures of origin. Like air.” They’ve always had a better compass for what’s right than I do. I currently have my hands down the pants of the president of the Student Union for a Better Earth. That org has launched more than one future terrorist into Fédération society.

That’s why, despite being one of the academy’s top students, Sri had no chance of winning the competition to go on the Minerva rescue mission. I admire their courage to actually take action for what’s right. I have strong ethics in my mind and am totally sloppy once they leave my brainpan. I’m grateful for that now, since my not being an activist agitator has meant getting this chance to rescue my sister, the person who loves me most in the world. She was the first settler of Saturn’s moon Titan, until her base went dark soon after arrival. Her distress beacon triggered just a couple of months ago. We scrambled this rescue missionas fast as we could—and Dimokratía and Fédération happened to use the joint planning session as an excuse to reopen diplomatic relations without looking weak.

As we lie there spooning, Sri kisses the underside of my arm. “You taste like beach,” they say.

“I had a list of priorities for my last ordinary day,” I say. “Swim in the ocean. Make out with you.”

Sri gives the inside of my elbow a playful bite. “That’s a little dramatic.”

“I’m sorry, I’m about to race across the solar system in a high-stakes rescue that also might capture the world’s attention enough to pull it back from war. It’s literally the most dramatic thing that any human has ever done, and you’re accusing me of playing things up? And. Sri. Iwillmiss you. I’ll miss this.”

“You are positively drenched in self-importance right now, you know that?”

I toy with the waistband of Sri’s academy suit, dipping my thumb in and running it along the firm heat of their belly. “I’m accurately portraying my high level of importance. Totally different.”

“You’re impossible, Ambrose Cusk. You’re fully impossible.”

Sri once told me that my cockiness was the most interesting thing about me. They doomed themselves with that one. I now exaggerate my conceitedness for their benefit,and Sri exaggerates their outrage right back. It’s theater... I guess all romance is theater? At least it has been so far for me. I’ll miss having this with Sri, but I won’t Officially Miss It. We both know that.

They turn so we’re facing each other. Our hands lock in the narrow space between us. Though genetic testing says we’re from totally different lineages, we’re nearly the same color, a sort of copper-yellow-brown. Sri’s arm is about half the girth of mine, though. They wear the same suit the junior cadets wear. We’re like a trunk and a branch. My genetic father is Alexander the Great, who I guess must have been a tall guy?

“What are you thinking about?” Sri asks, cupping a hand against my throat.

I look down at our arms. “Goa by way of Hawaii, Dar es Salaam by way of Macedonia,” I lie. That was how we summarized our fifty-page genetics reports when we’d sneaked into downtown Mari to get them during an academy break. Genetic testing had been banned for years in Fédération, because genetics reports had fueled multiple eugenics movements over the centuries. Now that racial identifications are mostly in the past (though not colorism, which had proved persistent), it’s bad manners to express interest in where your genes are from. I don’t know anyone else who got Macedonia, but then again I don’t know anyone else (except Minerva) whose father was Alexander theGreat. That sperm was expensive, and my mother made sure to buy exclusive rights.

“You big liar,” Sri says. “You were thinking about how you won’t need to break up with me once and for all, since you’re literally leaving the planet. Seems like a long way to go just to dump me.”

My mouth drops open. I pretend that I’m doing it jokingly, but whoa, did I just get called out. Sri often shocks me this way, speaking truths I think I’ve been good at hiding. I mean, I wasn’t thinking thatright then, but I had been earlier today. I hate breaking up. I much prefer it when external forces do it for me. I mean, I had my tutor tell Jessenya Valdez that I had too much studying to do for me to keep seeing her. I was only fourteen and have come a long way since then, but it was still a breakup bytutor.Evidence indicates I’m sort of a dick.

Sri moves onto their back to look up at the swirling tan clouds. “I knew what I was getting into. Your reputation precedes you.”

“And you know you’re the one who means the most to me on Earth.” The words sound just as stilted as I feared. They are true, though. Now that Minerva is on Titan.

Sri goes silent. Shit. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that to sound—”

I stop, because Sri has started laughing. “Could you just stop?” Sri says, wiping their eyes. “I’m sure you think whatyou just told me is technically true. But no one means much to you at all. Certainly not me.”

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