Page 55 of The Brightness Between Us

“You’re a tough one, aren’t you?” I say as I unholster the shears I lifted from the abandoned agricultural supply in town. They still have the polycarb safety tag fastening them closed. I bite it off.

She goes still, staring at me with surprisingly calm eyes. I wonder if she remembers the last time her farmer cut herwool. They must have been a gentle caretaker.

I hack into her stiff encasement. It takes all the corded strength in my forearms to make headway into the reeking mats, hard clumps of rot-black hair falling away to reveal pink irritated skin, swarming with maggots. I brush them away, revealing a scattering of blood spots, and can only imagine how good it must feel to her to finally have that biting infestation away from her skin.

Foul hardened hair surrounds us, keeping its stiff shape. It looks like this baby-pink animal has just been born from the center of a giant walnut. I’m not religious at all, but surrounded by the hush of the forest, the weedy overgrowth of this farmhouse whose ruined roof dapples the sunlight from above, the moment does have a divinity to it. I didn’t sleep well last night; maybe that’s what’s going on. Memories of training, and my quick escape from the cosmology academy, a pretty stranger at the gate delivering shattering news, kept me awake.

“A metamorphosis,” I whisper into the sheep’s ear as I finish the last shear, a stiff black collar of wool around her neck thudding to the ground. I’ve spoken to her. I guess that means I’m going to keep her, if she wants to stay with me.

I give her soft flank a stroke, sweeping away the last of her parasites, avoiding the places where her skin is bleeding from the maggot infestation. “All finished.”

She gets up on all four hooves and stares at me.Can we go home now?She definitely had a kind farmer. I’m already pledging that I’ll live up to their legacy. We did a lot of pledging back in training. Not that those pledges have worked out so well for me.

I gesture toward the leaky barn over the hill. “Go on, go live in there.”

My orders are clearly unconvincing, even to this animal trained for obedience. She looks at the barn and then returns her level gaze to me.That’s not home anymore.She starts to experiment with her new lighter weight, making little dancing hops, fallen maggots bursting under her hooves. Already their shallow bites are clotting, the shine of her blood dulling as it thickens.

I put my hands back in their repurposed gardening gloves—another thing I looted from the abandoned supply store, along with some employee’s old apron,Michaelastill stitched on it in red thread—and rub them together to warm them against the morning chill. I’d planned on spending today checking and fortifying my traps. Not teaching a sheep how to be free.

I start toward home, taking my usual labyrinthine route, passing along grassy back roads that weave through ruined castles. It would be easier to take the straight paved roads that pass by shuttered strip malls instead, but then I could more easily be followed. After Fédération finished its OldScotland bombardment with a round of EMP dusting, rendering modern life impossible, Dimokratía withdrew its citizens from the area. They were smart to—not only was life without tech hard to imagine, EMP dusting in the past had been a way to prepare for atrocities, to black out the ability to report on what happened once the militias entered. There are some roving ex-Fédération gangs here, soldiers who defied orders and chose to stay in one of the few places they could escape the grid. Since disobeying could mean a lifetime of imprisonment, or death from above, the only people likely to do so knew they’d be facing life in prison anyway. They’re not the sort of people I want to meet. They’re people like me.

Running away here means spending my life alone, but I don’t mind. Alone is how I’m meant to be. After my parents abandoned me at the Celius regional orphanage, probably on their way to defect to Fédération like everyone else in the 2450s, I had no one to rely on. My childhood friends were culled from the spacefarer training. Except Celius Li Qiang, who became my biggest ally and erotiyet, but he never spoke to me again after I beat him out for the Titan rescue mission. My life has been solitude with surprise moments of companionship, not companionship with surprise moments of solitude.

The “mission to Titan.”

I pick up my pace back to my home, cutting acrosshiking trails, unhitching my machete to clear the runners of grass and wild blackberry that tirelessly work to reclaim every human path. Every time I stop to cut, I look back to find the sheep twenty paces behind, waiting to find out where I’m taking her. “Shoo!” I say. It doesn’t work. I don’t want it to.

I pass through the parking lot of the old state park, tap my knuckles against the sun-faded “No Overnight Parking” sign, enjoy the minor thrill of danger as it rings out. It’s one of my ludicrous rituals. I hurry over this exposed section. If someone did want to take me out, they could set up in some sheltered sniper spot overlooking this lot, weapon at the ready while I so predictably return from the day’s errand. At least that’s howIwould kill me.

I know I should alter my route, but the other way to ruined civ from my home takes far longer. For some reason I’m only dimly aware of, taking the risk of crossing through this open section makes me feel alive. Feelings are distant for me, like blurred fish swimming below thick ice.

I sheathe my machete. There are still plenty of vines I could cut, but I intentionally let this path that leads to my cabin stay overgrown, so no stranger will discover it and find my home. So far so good. Four months living here and not a soul has broken my solitude.

Except for this damn sheep.

I smile at myself, at what I hold dear about who I am.This strong solitary hermit, destroyed in minutes by a freshly shorn, sweet-eyed sheep, hopping for joy while her sores clot.

“Come, come, fallen one,” I sing softly as I pull to one side the branches that camouflage the final stretch of path. I’ve never seen any sign of someone on these trails, neither an intruder nor even the broken branches and twigs of someone who happened to pass through. There are the feral dogs and wolves and bears and boars, of course, but no amount of subterfuge I could set up will do anything to deter a bear.

I stand to one side, holding back a branch. “Come, come, fallen one.” The sheep passes near, stopping to nibble some moss while I replace the camouflage.

A roar above. I look up, visoring my hand over my eyes, and see a commercial Cusk craft. That’s not all that uncommon; even if no one’s officially living here, this part of Old Scotland is still on the low-altitude North Pole Sea Station route. I return my attention to the path, then look back to the sky when the roar lasts longer than it should. This Cusk craft has paused in the air over the old parking lot. Where Sheep and I were minutes ago.

Shazyt.

This could just be a Pause. I hate those: when someone of note dies in Fédération, their relatives sometimes pay a huge fee to stop all vehicles. Even a second’s Pause costsmore than the combined lifetimes’ earnings of a hundred thousand ordinary citizens, but how else do you make a statement in a world ruled by capital? “Good riddance and good waste,” I mutter at the sky.

Of course, that’s only one explanation for what just happened. A craft can also pause to deliver someone to the ground. The abandoned lot of a forgotten national park is hardly a tourist destination, but I suppose it’s not impossible that some adrenaline junkie hired a craft to take them here, which is why I hate when these economic Pauses happen nearby. I don’t like not knowing. Old Scotland is unmonitored territory—if these are Dimokratía citizens they’re breaking the law, but if they’re from Fédération they can do as they like, even though they’re unprotected by their country. Unfortunately, I can see only bits of the craft through the trees, so I won’t have an answer. If these are Dimokratía police, I’m not about to go deliver myself to them. I’ll just have to be on high alert for a few days. Great. As if sleep weren’t coming hard enough already.

“Come, Sheep,” I say as I pick up the pace.

The final approach to home is trickier now, since I can’t just hop between my vine traps. I have to undo them individually, so Sheep doesn’t get herself snared. I’ll have to rely on my knife, axe, and bow and arrow for defense. Like in my earliest days here.

Sheep watches attentively as I kneel on the wood, wetand soft beneath my bare knees while I undo the sapling triggers. “You’d better be worth the risk,” I mutter.

She stares back, her jaw working side to side as she slowly chews a clump of dandelion she’s torn from a boulder crevice. The movement under her placid expression is enough to make me chuckle. The sound of it, this noise that lives next to laughter, is unfamiliar.

We make our way to the end of the walkway, where the wooden steps stop at a simple hut. I have no idea who originally built this site, or for what purpose, but I suspect it was for something more than mere habitation. Something artistic, perhaps. The cabin is built on a hillside, and because the ground slopes away it looks like it’s floating in midair. I can’t even see the third dimension of it from this angle—it looks like a poster of a house, hung up in the sky.

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