Page 40 of The Brightness Between Us

I laugh. “What are youdoing?”

They tent the broken folder as best they can over the paper, cursing as they try to write with dull pencil, the paper crinkling over their knee. “How did anyone do this back in the day? Paper is so awkward!”

“I’m pretty sure in the vintage reels they’re always sitting at desks. Or tables. Or what was that 2100s horror reel about the exploding businesspeople? They used something called a ‘clipboard’ as a surface, I think.”

“Well, I couldn’t find any clipboards in the academy, so my leg will have to do.” Sri manages to write a few words with the distractions of weird paper and my head in their lap. “Sit up, and read this in secret,” they say, keeping the paper hidden under the folder as they hold it out to me.

I’m not sure what this game is, but it’s a welcome distraction. I’m smiling as I look at whatever love note Sri just wrote for me.

My smile drops.

It is not a love note. It’s not even a pornographic doodle.

You had your bender. You had your wallow. Now you fix this thing that’s been done in your name.

I sit up and take the dull pencil from them. Sri took up handwriting as a hobby, so theirs is surprisingly beautiful. My own looks like a child’s scrawl, and cramps up the muscles under my thumb.That’s what DM wants, too. But I don’t know what to do. How about I just crawl into a safe satellite suite with you and hope the world doesn’t explode beneath us?

Sri’s mouth draws into a tight line.Stop it, their mouth says.

If I contradict the Cusk story, they could call it treason,I continue to write. I don’t know how to put words to the other part, the ethics of putting my clones in jeopardy.

So your mother’s betrayal is fine, but yours is not?

That doesn’t make sense.But I get their meaning: my mother’s not the only one who gets to break the rules.

What if my coming out with what’s been done in my name means theEndeavornever takes off? I could be preventing Cusk Corporation from settling an exoplanet. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Intentional mission failure.

But if outcry means the mission doesn’t go, it would mean my clones would never have to wake up into their brief misery. Wouldn’t have to sit and wait to be murdered by their ship in the bleak emptiness of space.

The events of the past day make me wonder: Should humans be spreading out to exoplanets in the first place?

The war impending below, the ship about to launch above, me in the elevator in between with only a few hours to act. Will humanity potentially end here, or do we send out a seed for it to continue?

Which do I choose?

My hands shake as I fold the paper and hand it back to Sri. That piece of paper could get us executed. Or at least get Sri executed. I can’t imagine they’d kill a Cusk. Maybe one of the lesser siblings, but not me. I stare out the onyx elevator car window at the diminishing Earth. Sri writes for a while, then the paper is back in my view. I sigh and open it.

Look out at this planet. The mass extinction, the storms, the human misery. The mission for the glory of your family name. After one planet, what’s next but more?

Sri starts writing more. But I pull the paper away, scrawl my own pathetic handwriting on it. I need all the time I can get. My handwriting is slow and the elevator car is already nearing the end of its ride.I’m ready to burn it all down. Devon suggested I make a live announcement about the lie. Within the ship, so the reel is more viral. But when I do that, it’s only a matter of time until the investigation leads to you.

Sri considers my words, face impassive. They nod.I accept that. Now we say goodbye.

Oh, Sri. I let out a long breath and rest the back of my head against the clear surface of the elevator window, the refugees and rapidly shifting militaries and global storms miles below. Then I write:Can you get another message to Devon? To meet me?

They nod again, and then I crush Sri in my arms. They’re wearing the handmade necklace I gave them months ago, back when our relationship was monogamous; it’s sharp against my collarbones.

Sri has pushed me in the way I needed to be pushed, and now we say goodbye. I can wallow more later. I beam a thought to them:I’ll miss you.

We part from our hug when the elevator doors open. Ihold my hands together, pointer fingers out, and then spread them in two directions.You go left, I go right.Maybe never to meet again.

After space exploration went completely private in the late twenty-first century, giant national craft became obsolete under deregulation, which meant launch satellites got smaller and smaller to service smaller and smaller craft—the type of people who could afford to visit the moon or Mars don’t want to get crammed into a spaceliner with strangers. Once the Cusk space elevators were built, spacecraft started being constructed in orbit, never coming to land. If a spaceship never has to withstand high g-forces, it opens up all sorts of possibilities for design.

That all means there’s only one spaceport large enough to house an old-school mammoth like theEndeavor, so I don’t need any help finding my way from the elevator’s arrival bay to the right launch satellite. If Ihadneeded directions, I could have asked any of the no fewer than six spacekeepers who meet me outside the elevator doors. I’m sure they would call themselves assistants, facilitators, escorts, anything but armed guards, but I know what they’re here for. I’m officially a wild card to be kept in check.

TheEndeavor—or I guess I should call it theCoordinated Endeavor, since that’s the name that’s projected in front of the bay entrance—is in the main hangar, resting ona bed of jetted air, to prevent any damage from contacting the hull of the spaceport. With no one around to fix them, even tiny defects will become cracks that will become ruptures. On a voyage this long, any small blemish could prove fatal.

I’m ready for the look of theEndeavor, because I trained on mock-ups of it and because Minerva departed for Titan on an identical craft, theSalaam. But as I step into the cavernous space, I see that theEndeavorhas been doubled. The originalEndeavoris shaped like something a giant weightlifter would use: a stick with bulbous ends, living quarters at one and slow acceleration engine at the other. That engine has been attached to the engine end of an identical craft, so it’s an even longer stick, with living quarter bulbs at either end and a double bulb of machinery in the middle.

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