Page 69 of The Brightness Between Us

Father’s warm presence is around me. My breathing slows to match his. I don’t know how long it takes, but Ibecome a sort of human again, thanks to Father.

There’s something slick on my knee. I smell the musty scent of the animal even before I open my eyes. When I do, she’s there, the baby malevor on her tottery legs, licking my knee.

“Oh, hi,” I say through tears. I cautiously reach out and stroke her head. She startles, then accepts my touch. Leans into it. Butts my side, probably hoping for milk. “What do we do with her?” I ask.

“We can’t delay on her account,” Father replies. “But if she keeps up with us, I guess we have ourselves a malevor.”

“We can’t delaywhat?” I ask. Then the memory of that flashing red beacon comes back. “We’re going to see the beacon, right?”

“That can’t be more than half an hour farther, so yes. Then we go back to the settlement. We hope Rover has already retaken the zone. If not, we infiltrate. We get Dad back.”

“And we hope that Yarrow is back to being himself,” I sniff.

“Maybe,” Father says mournfully.

I lose myself in stroking the malevor’s fur.

“It’s going to be okay,” Father says.

I get that he’s trying to make me feel better, but that’s a stupid thing to say. How can he promise that? I stand and brush my tunic free of a night’s accumulation of dirt. “Let’s go.”

Slotting my spear into its loop against my back, I go about cleaning up the bits of our camp. Before we’d settled in to rest, I’d placed some rocks in a row, an arrow facing in the direction of the beacon. I hadn’t been sure whether daylight from the Sisters would make it invisible, but I needn’t have worried—now that we know where to look, we can make out the beacon’s blinking even in daylight.

I’d have expected Father to be the one to spring us into action, but it’s me who leads us off toward the beacon. After a hundred paces, steeling myself against spiraling thoughts of Dad and Yarrow, I let myself look back. No sign of Yarrow coming after us, but there’s Father, my father, and the malevor a few paces behind him, making its pathetic little bark sounds. Even in the utter chaos and loss of yesterday, there’s something left.

Even though prioritizing the beacon makes sense, it feels like I’m pulling apart my own muscle fibers not to sprint back toward Dad now that it’s daytime. My feet drag, even as my wonder about what we’ll find pulls me forward.

We approach a massive depression in the planet’s surface. In the center of it is a narrow trench created by the object’s impact. I stand at the edge of the crater and stare in, momentarily dazzled when the light strobes. I’ll have to close my eyes every few seconds if I don’t want to be blinded.

It looks a little like an Earth squid down there. Glassytendrils spray out, like some tentacled creature has come to land. Then I realize: it’s not a squid. That’s actual glass I’m seeing. The beacon’s impact was hot enough to melt sand and soil.

“I’ll go,” Father says behind me.

“I’ve got this. I’ve been clambering up and down a lot of pits lately.” Without waiting to hear Father’s inevitable no, I work my way down into the crater, using my spear like I learned to do at the ethylamine pond, counting to six and pausing with my eyes closed whenever the beacon strobes. Even with my eyelids shut, I soon learn to turn my head away so the bright light doesn’t faze me through my lids.

Deeper I go. The soil is churned, and the rocky solids tinkle and crackle, their glassy streaks shattering under my feet.

Once I’m at the bottom of the melted ravine, I gingerly test the soil with my fingers, to make sure it’s not still hot. It’s been weeks since the beacon streaked through the sky, but it had been going very fast indeed to generate this much impact heat.

Luckily, the beacon was also very small. I had been imagining something the size of Rover, but it’s more the size of an eyeball. The sphere gleams, smooth and black. It’s close to the color of the surrounding soil, which doesn’t phosphoresce anymore—all the microorganisms in the area were probably killed by the high heat.

I hover my hand over the beacon, turning my head just in time to avoid blinding myself when the red light blinks on.

The beacon isn’t hot anymore.

I pick it up.

This thing is from another world.

It might be from Earth.

I hold it aloft, and look up to see Father and the baby malevor peering down at me.

Father glances toward the settlement. “Come back, we’ve got to get a move on.”

I take a good look at the beacon. There is no writing on it, no signs of its journey, no markers or defects. Just this perfect black marble. I scramble up the side of the depression.

How do we interact with it? What if it’s some alien tech? Though the fact that it projected words in Fédération as it streaked across the night sky makes me think it’s probably from Earth.

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