Page 9 of The Brightness Between Us

“That’s too bad about the museum. I made the reel for the dads’ arrival anniversary and it’s a perfect addition. And Father is off to get the saw. The malevor has to be butchered before too much time goes by. Apparently, he wants us to do it instead of Rover. In fact, he wantsyouto do it.”

I look at the mass of split flesh. A pellet from the pneumatic gun gleams between two rent-open muscles. “Whoa. We’re going toeatit? Thiscreature?”

Yarrow nods. He strokes the malevor’s forehead. “I understand the symbolism of it.”

“Eating flesh? As a symbol? I thought you were the sweet one.”

Yarrow goes quiet, his hand on the head of the malevor, as if soaking in the thoughts the animal once had. “This is an Earth creature, it turns out,” I say.

“Father told me while Dad was in there telling you. I’d sort of figured as much. You and I came up with that theory once, too.”

“One of hundreds we had. I guess I forgot. I hate that they kept the truth from us.”

“That’s the way they were raised, remember. The biggest truth about their existence was kept from them. Much as they might not want to do it, they’re repeating what they learned. We’re getting older. There’s probably more and more weird truths we’ll be learning. And we’ll do better forourkids, Owl.”

Our kids. Yikes. He just means co-parenting, but I’m also well aware that I’m the only person on this planet with a womb. I prefer not to think about that. I nod, not that Yarrow can see it. He’s still staring into the malevor’s wide and unseeing eyes. “I wonder what it tastes like,” I say.

“Probably disgusting,” Yarrow says.

Chapter 4

Malevor is delicious. The charred flesh tastes like it smells—like a rock in the moment of shattering, sharp and bright. Only this version is very tasty. Unlike a rock. “Sear,” Father calls the flavor. Yarrow’s eyes widen as he watches the juices drip down my chin.

“What?” I ask him as I tongue-wrestle the gristle in my mouth. “Aren’t you having any?”

He takes a long look at the bowl of algal proteins and fats and carbohydrates in his lap. He loves algal porridge. Then he peers at the rack of sizzled malevor ribs on a cutting board on the table, bloody juices making slick trails through the packed soil of the floor. He looks at Dad and Father, chowing down on their own heaps of malevor muscle. Then he finally speaks. “No.”

Yarrow watches me chew. Curious, probably. Definitely disgusted. Maybe a little desirous, too. I decide to chew with my mouth open, to heighten the experience for him. Just to help him decide how he feels. I’m a helpful sister.

Father scowls. “Owl, mouth closed.”

I shut my mouth and stop chewing. Then I start againslowly. With exaggeratedly small movements. My mouth is totally full of saliva and I’m tired of the meat, but it’s still too chewy to swallow and I guess I’m making a point. Not that I’m sure what it is. I appear to be in a mood?

Maybe I’m not nailing my argument that I’m mature enough to start taking multiday treks.

I swallow too soon, half choking before daintily dabbing my printed napkin to the corners of my mouth.

One of our family dinner rituals is to each take an Earth minute to summarize the day. Then we all pose a question. Last time Yarrow asked what my purest emotional experience had been and I replied that it was my morning pee and Father got mad at me. But I was telling the truth! Today, though, we have a lot more to talk about.

We have two days to cover this time, since I was passed out last night. Yarrow goes first, pointedly focusing on the first part of yesterday, before the malevor attack. I ask him when he was most bored, and he gives me a shrewd look before answering that it was turning over the compost at the fecal pits.

He picks Dad to go next, and Dad slows down when he gets to the part when he had to tell me the truth about the ducks. Father asks him what the scariest part of yesterday was and Dad answers that it was hearing Father screaming at me to stop, and then seeing the blood on my back.

Dad picks Father, who talks about how the attack went down on his end, his running to the fence, caring for me, then letting Dad and Rover patch me up while he went to finish off the malevor. Then he talks about how he made Yarrow and me help him butcher it, and Dad asks him if butchering came back to him easily, and Father answers that it did, except that he forgot to cut the skin from the hooves before trying to peel it away.

Like it does every evening, OS participates by giving a rundown of how much processing power we each took up on its systems. I’m not usually the top data hog, but today I definitely was. Father asks OS how it would describe its experience of fear and OS responds that it was like trying to run uncompressed quaternary code in a binary bios, a flood of information without immediate channels to dissipate it. We all nod like we’ve been there. Running uncompressed quaternary in binary. Overwhelming.

OS asks me about my experience of yesterday. I try to thread a needle, capturing the importance and excitement of it all while playing down the danger, so the dads will let me keep exploring once I’m better. OS asks me how I feel now that I know the truth about the malevors and the duck, which I take to really be asking, in an OS way, how it feels to be lied to by my own parents. OS is genuinely curious about stuff like that.

“Probably a lot like our dads felt when they found out thattheirguardians had lied to them about their purpose back on Earth,” I tell OS.

Rover rotates so its hydration spigot faces me, which is the closest OS can get to looking at me. Not that OS cares which way it’s facing, but it knows that signaling that sort of thing matters to us humans.“Very interesting,” it says in its toned-down Devon Mujaba voice.

“That’s not fair,” Father says, aligning his fork and knife beside his plate before laying his heavy arms on the table. “It’s not the same at all.” There was a time he used to stalk away when he got upset, but then he and Dad had some secret talk that Yarrow and I tried to eavesdrop on but failed and now Father doesn’t leave the dinner table anymore even if we all know he’s gotten mad and would prefer to be broody and alone.

“I understand it’s a shock, but I think you can understand our reasons for keeping the truth from you,” Dad says. I get that he has to be both a partner to Kodiak and a parent to us, and that those two things are probably in conflict right now. Probably most of the time. It makes me want to just chew my food quietly and listen and learn from how he manages this dance. He and Father are all I’ve got for figuring out how to be a good human.

Dad considers his words before he continues. “How to put it. When Father and I arrived here, we had two options:we could either rebuild a new civilization on the models of Earth or create something new. There wouldn’t be any do-overs. You both know our initial instructions were to name this planet Cusk. But... Earth fell into war. Our original selves probably fought against each other. Even without war, Earth was in terrible shape, dust cyclones and overheated seas, and Cusk was a big part of that. So was human nature and human history. Did we want to repeat all that?”

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