Page 56 of The Brightness Between Us

When I open the door, Sheep tries to barge her way in. “No way,” I say, blocking her. “Did your farmer let you sleep inside? I don’t think so.” I suspect they might have, though, since Sheep didn’t seem to think twice about it.

I step in.

It’s a simple single room with a narrow wooden bunk, my few looted belongings folded and stacked in one corner. I have a stack of canned food in another, which I’m reserving for emergencies, along with that salted horse flank hanging outside.

The far wall is all clear glass. Because it’s vintagematerial, actual melted sand, the pane doesn’t have any autocleaning functions. I open my leather bag, and pull out the main target of this morning’s pilfering: a spray bottle of cleanser. The green moss that grows on every tree in this rainy area will also happily colonize this glass if I let it. Since the unblocked view of the stars at night behind the safety of the glass is my main reason for settling in this cabin, I’m not about to let that moss take my greatest pleasure away from me. I get to work applying the blue fluid to the glass, wiping it off with one of my used shirts. I’ll rinse it in the stream tomorrow—this ammonia will hopefully clean the fabric some, too.

As I clean, I’m happy to see Sheep come into view on the hillside. She’s particular in her browsing, selecting tender stalks of yarrow from between the tougher blades of grass. She’ll have plenty to eat; its yellow is scattered up and down the slope. The beautiful weed reminds me of the training breaks I used to spend camping. The presence of yarrow was part of why I chose to retreat here.

Once I’ve scrubbed the window clean, I stare out at the stretch of woods. This area had once been completely deforested by the humans who lived here, but trees are returning.Good for you, I think. Maybe I’ll have to cut down some trees a few years from now, so that Sheep or her offspring will have a place to graze. I’ll welcome the need of it.

As always, whenever I let myself dream of a future mymind reminds me of the bitter past, the day that started with final preparations for the Titan mission and finished with all the spacefarers—including me, the one who was supposed to man theAurora—thrust out of the academy.Gather all your belongings. Doors will lock at 13:30. You may not return.I’d already been on the hillside, listening from a thicket. As soon as I’d overheard the hushed conversations, witnessed the odd relaxing of our training regimen after my full-body medical scan, I’d begun planning my escape. I didn’t know why any of it was happening, but I knew that I was expendable.

While my fellow cadets milled in front of the fence, I was already half a kilometer away, unburying the backpack with escape supplies I’d secreted away weeks before, in case this very thing happened. I had no idea what I’d done wrong, why my government would have lied about my purpose, but I wasn’t about to let myself be rounded up and disappeared.

That was when I saw him—Devon Mujaba. I didn’t recognize him as a celebrity, though even I had heard of the Heartspeak Boys. I recognized him as the sometimes concubine of the president, who would show up at formal state ceremonies, in Dimokratía uniform despite his defection years ago. None of us liked to see someone permitted to return to the homeland they’d abandoned, but we recognized someone with power when we saw one, so we kept quiet.

There he was on the hillside, a concubine no more, his own pack on, a plasma rifle at his side. Greeting me by name. “Kodiak Celius. I’ve been hoping to meet you.”

He gave me the counterfeit documents that got me all the way to this EMP-dusted zone, where I could be free from technological monitoring. Where I could hope to avoid being arrested by the state to which I’d devoted my life. In return, he asked me to wait for him here, where we’d begin recording guerrilla communications, to take down the world’s locked politics, to build a new society, this time built from non-extractivist logics. I didn’t know if I’d ever go along with that, but I did know I could use help getting out of deep Dimokratía before someone made me disappear.

The meaning and purpose of my life had flipped in the moment I met Devon on the hillside. I’d not only been training for a canceled mission; I’d been training for a mission that was never intended to begin. I raged as I voyaged, kept away from other humans as I made my way through the most sparsely populated regions of the world, finally across the Channel and up this island. I’m calmer now, almost at peace—but I do wonder what I will do when Devon Mujaba returns. Will I make those guerrilla recordings he wants, about the false mission? Will I help break the world in the hopes that it can be remade differently?

Maybe that Cusk craft that lingered over the parking lotwasn’t from a Pause. Maybe it was him, finally joining me.

I shake my head. Enough wallowing in useless wonderings. I bring my cleanser-soaked shirt down to the stream to rinse.

Once I’ve wet the shirt, I remove the one I’m wearing and scrub it as well, enjoying the chill air that lifts the soft black hairs of my chest and underarms. I give the rest of my body a good rinse, too, and then lie out on a flat stone. Despite my desire for it to be still, my flesh shivers.

The best way to warm a body is to use it. I roll onto my side and begin my daily exercises. I’m long past peak training condition, back when martial arts and wrestling took up hours of each day. A half hour of push-ups and crunches will only do so much, but maybe that’s not terrible. Mostly I welcome the shrinking of my physical self—it is easier to maintain an existence that requires less food.

The stream bends a short way from my washing spot, and in the water that pools there I can watch the reflection of swaying green trees and cerulean sky. There’s a flash of another color, a bronze brown. Not quite the color of Sheep. Not quite the color of anything that lives here.

It’s gone as soon as I glimpse it. If this were Devon Mujaba, he’d have simply announced himself. I go motionless, cursing myself for the series of lax mistakes I’ve made today: indulging in cleanser, knocking on that “No Parking” sign, adopting a sheep, disarming my traps, lyingnaked and vulnerable here. A series of errors grave enough to kill me.

Maybe someone from the Dimokratía secret police hasn’t come to murder me. This could be a bear instead. Is that better? I think it is.

I snag the sleeve of my shirt from where it’s been drying on a nearby rock, drag it to me, and roll the wet fabric down my shivering body. As calmly as I can, I arrange my leather skirt over my thighs, then slowly and deliberately crouch by the water’s edge, cupping water in my hands as if to splash it on my face. But I hold still, angle it to the spot in the trees where I saw the flash of bronze.

The water’s surface trembles to my surging pulse, but the reality is still unmistakable: there’s a person in the trees. I can’t make out the face, but he has the darker skin of equatorial genetic lines, not my Mediterranean olive. He’s got a royal bearing, and skinprint mods glint on his face and neck. His clothing is not that of a wealthy person, though: it’s a mass-produced traveler’s jumpsuit with a Disponar patch, technical fabric in swirling greens and grays and browns.

He lingers between two trees, mostly hidden. He probably thinks he’s fully camouflaged. Perhaps he is not experienced.

I reluctantly give up my mirror by splashing the water on my face, strategizing all the while. It would be one mistaketoo many to let this stranger take the initiative. My bow is up in the hut, twenty feet in the other direction. My knife and axe are below the cabin, sticking up from my chopping stump. Both weapons too distant to be useful. Shazyt. If I survive this set of mistakes, I will do better.

He’s got a small weapon in his hand, probably a bolt caster. It shouldn’t work with all the EMP dust in the soil here, but maybe Cusk has finally invented portable tech that can resist it. I wouldn’t know—the dust means I’m locked out of current news. If EMP shielding has spread beyond warbots, it would still be very expensive, but this man looks like he could afford it.

I’m much bigger than he is, could almost certainly take him in a fistfight. But I have to assume he is effectively armed... and I am not. Therefore I’m not sure of my odds.

At least he won’t catch me by surprise. And I still have some traps engaged.

It’s unlikely that he would have wandered over to my hut so quickly. He had to have come directly here from the Cusk craft. Which means he knows my location. Have I been tracked? Has Devon Mujaba been uncovered and tortured?

I crouch and run the back of my arm over my face. For a moment longer, I’m still. But I know surprise is the best thing I have going for me, even if I don’t know what to do with it.

So I act.

I throw myself into the stream and course underwater, kicking my legs powerfully, only breaking the surface once I’m many lengths downstream. I could have held my breath longer, but down here the river shallows out too much for my thick body to pass, the skin of my belly scraping the stones of the bottom. I fling myself out on the far bank, dash into the tree line.

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