Page 22 of The Brightness Between Us

“Dad? Father? Dads!” I shout as I run through the settlement.

Dad emerges from the laboratory, wiping his hands on a rag. “Darling! You’re back early.”

I throw myself into his arms. “Dad!”

He laughs, then he feels my shuddering and stops. “Owl? What’s wrong?”

I look back, and see Yarrow standing a few paces behind, body slumped and arms down at his sides. I’ll let him explain himself. “Rover and I got back and found that the fence was broken,” I say. “I was scared that the malevors had gotten in.”

“Broken!” Dad says. “Where?”

“It’s fixed now,” OS reports. “Yarrow had a fence post in his hands, on the outside of the settlement.”

Dad’s brows scrunch as he turns to my brother. “Yarrow? You were outside, with a fence post? Why?”

A very good question, Dad. Yarrow’s expression turns empty.

“Owl and Rover, you’re back!” Father calls from the dining unit. “And just in time; I’ve got a heavy lift I could use your help with. Even Yarrow and I don’t have enough shoulder power for this one.” He stops a meter back, taking in the sight of our sorry lot. “What is going on here?”

None of us can quite figure out how to answer.

“And what isthat?” Father asks.

He’s pointing at me—no, he’s pointing at my spear; no, he’s pointing at the alien log on my back. I nearly forgot about it.

“I found a jungle,” I say. “Grown from that rusty moss you found on the asteroid you retrieved in outer space. OS and I discovered it.” I laugh for a second, and then I break into tears.

It’s Yarrow who makes it to me first, his arms tight around my torso. I laugh-sob into his chest. Without withdrawing from his embrace, I turn my head so I can see our dads. “I’m sorry, the Scorch is starting and this is all a lot, and I’m starving, can we eat?”

I’m not really that hungry. I just want to force us forward into a world where nothing is wrong with my brother.

Chapter 9

Dad and I are sitting cross-legged on the packed dirt in front of the terminal, waiting for the soil results to come in. Rover isn’t here—it’s off helping Father stress test the perimeter fence. But even without Rover, OS is nearby. When we’re in the settlement, OS is always here.

“How’s it coming so far?” I ask. We already tested the wood; OS found it is made of analogues of plant cells, with their own versions of cell walls. Though carbon is present, silicon dominates most of its biology. Scientists on Earth would have been thrilled by the discovery, but of course, there are no scientists on Earth anymore. Here, with so much that’s new and strange, it feels hard to be as excited about a silicon-based organism as I know I should be.

“The soil sample results will be available in twelve minutes,” OS says. “I can already tell you that the sample has no manganese and no vanadium, which is noteworthy.”

I nod, like the good student I am not. “Yes, very noteworthy.”

“It is, actually,” Dad says, giving me a nudge. “Most of the plants on Earth need those, at least in trace quantities.”

“And yet this alien moss didn’t.”

“Correct,” OS says. “But it needed something else, and found it by that site, which is why it was thriving over there.”

“Yes,” Dad says. He looks about to say something more, but he stops.

“Look,” I say. I pause. It’s hard to find the words for what I want to express. “When I found Yarrow, it was... really weird. Like he’d been possessed.”

“Possessed? Where have you come across that concept?”

“In a reel somewhere, I don’t know, that’s not the point.”

Dad sighs. “He has been acting strangely lately, and I’ve been talking to Kodiak about it. This is uncharted territory for us. It could just be something about being sixteen.”

I roll onto my back and then sit up again. “Dad. This isn’t a ‘it’s hard to be young’ moment. I mean that something wasofficially wrongwith Yarrow. You saw what he did.”

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