Page 6 of The Brightness Between Us

“... is very upset with you,” Dad finishes. He sighs. “I get why you want to push us. But you can’t put Father through the wringer like that. Or me. It’s not fair.”

I let out a long breath, wincing at the end when it laces with pain. “You don’t understand,” I say. “You don’t know what I found.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Dad says, gesturing at the desk built into the far wall. “Can I assume you’re referring to that?”

On the desk, where Yarrow and I have spent hours a daygetting our lessons from OS, is a pathetic jumble of white bone fragments.

“They used to be in order,” I say. “Like they were connected. It was askeleton. An alien skeleton. Not a malevor, either. Something else.”

“I can see how discovering something like that would have felt important,” Dad says.

His tone is weird. Maybe not, maybe I’m the weird one, because I’m in pain, and feeling thirsty and achy. I swipe my matted hair back from my forehead. Father used to comb it for me, using algal oils to get the tangles out. Even though I loved the feel of it I still made him stop last year... but I never started doing it myself, so now it’s a disaster. “You don’t sound surprised, Dad. Is that because you’re too worried about me to care about the skeleton?”

“No,” Dad says. He smiles wanly. “I mean, of course I’m worried about you. But I’m also not full of shock and awe over that skeleton.”

My eyes narrow. I blow a chunk of hair away from my face. “Whyaren’t you full of shock and awe?”

Dad goes to the entrance of the learning habitat, looks left and right, pulls down the translucent polycarb covering so we have relative privacy. He turns around. “That’s not an alien skeleton.”

“What’s all this secrecy for?” I ask. “Are you trying to keep this from Yarrow?” My brother is probably cryingat the fence right now, mourning that slain malevor and pleading to the Sisters to bring it back to life.

“No, from Kodiak,” Dad says. “You know we have differing opinions on how much to tell you two about life back on Earth. Now that you found that skeleton, it’s time we told you the truth.”

“This creature came fromEarth?”

“Not this very one. But it’s an Earth animal. You’ve seen reels of ducks in your lessons? This was one of those.”

I try to sit up, which makes my back light up with pain. Ow! That was a bad idea. “So wait, Minerva hadduckson it when you arrived? I don’t understand.”

“No, it didn’t. We brought the ducks.” He starts to sit, and the moment he does, Rover positions itself below him to serve as a chair. It’s one of OS’s coolest tricks. “When we arrived, the resources we needed were behind a gray portal on the exterior of theCoordinated Endeavor. Neither we nor OS had access to it during the voyage. The first thing we discovered was the gestation device, and inside it were the zygotes, like yours and Yarrow’s and... your siblings’. But there was more in there, too. Zygotes of animals we could use to populate Minerva, to create a farm here. We had—what did we have... ducks, goats, pigs, and yaks.”

“Wow,” I say. “Earth animals.” They were here and now are not. I sigh. “What happened? Did they get sick?”

Dad nods. “We could produce feed for them from thealgal farms, but the animals had the same problem that most of our children did, not thriving. Some of them survived, though the ducks still found it hard to fly in the different gravity here. The big problem, however, were the yaks.”

A horrible thought occurs to me. “The malevors.”

Dad gives a grim smile. “On Earth, yaks were peaceful and adaptable creatures. They produced milk we could drink. It made sense that Cusk selected them to send out to Minerva. But they’d overlooked something important. Just like a human child, a baby yak learns how to socialize and behave properly from the yaks around them. Lots of the other human orphans Father was raised with in isolation had severe mental problems from having lack of love and care when they were young.”

“It’s not like our Kodiakdoesn’thave severe mental problems,” I grumble.

“Owl, that’s enough,” Dad says sharply. Sometimes he conspires with me against Father, other times he’s the stern parental partner. I’m never totally sure which Dad I’m going to get from one moment to the next.

He continues. “We raised them as best we could, but humans aren’t suitable parents for a baby yak. Because they had no culture, the new yaks didn’t behave like the ones on Earth did. They were... disturbed. We hadn’t built all our fencing and gunnery yet. They trampled outof their enclosure, escaping onto the countryside. Do you remember any of this? You and Yarrow were very little at the time.”

I shake my head. I have maybe a few murky early images of yaks around the settlement, but nothing like what my dad is describing. “Crane was alive then,” Dad says, “but her fever came shortly after. We paused gestation and stopped raising animals, fearing that somehow they were passing pathogens to you children. We slaughtered the other animals, but the malevors were too ferocious. They escaped our control and began living and mating on their own outside of the settlement.”

“Why didn’t you tell me and Yarrow all this?” I ask. “Why did you let us believe the malevors were some alien monsters?”

Dad cuts his eyes to the tarp over the entrance to the habitat—a sure sign he’s thought of Father, which means I’m about to get official parental messaging instead of the truth. “We knew it was inevitable that we’d introduce terrestrial microorganisms to Minerva, but a complex mammal like the yak, left to wreck native ecosystems on a pristine new planet—we felt like we had failed. Father took it especially hard. He’d already wanted us to sever as much connection to Earth and the Cusk Corporation as we could, and this only convinced him further. I agreed, and so since we couldn’t eliminate the yaks, we decided topresent them to you as malevors. We didn’t want you to know about the animal zygotes, to start trying to introduce more Earth animals. Better not to know that was even an option, so you could concentrate on this new world here.”

“That’s stupid,” I say.

“Owl,” Dad warns.

I bite my lip. “What I mean is, I guess I get what you were thinking, but it’s still ridiculous. You should have told us the truth.”

Dad shrugs. I know he agrees with me.

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