Page 81 of The Brightness Between Us

I watch the rise and fall of his narrow chest, the ribs that encase that fragile heart. My traveling companion, the future of my other selves. I turn my attention back to the sky. Somewhere out there, maybe right now, millions of years away, in the void of space, a version of me is being woken up next to a version of him, these two beings who are intimately connected and nothing alike.

Chapter 6

We wait until cover of night to steal toward the astronomical observatory. Judging by my experiences in Old Scotland so far, the few renegade humans—and the wild dogs—that remain congregate in and around the cities. If we don’t want trouble, better to keep as low a profile as possible whenever we leave rural areas.

Over these eight days of travel, there’s been no sign of pursuit, warbot or otherwise. I suspect the hunt has been called off. Outright war would be enough to recenter everyone’s priorities, including the powers that be in Fédération and Dimokratía. I suspect the warbot was sent by Fédération, not Cusk—surely Ambrose’s mother wouldn’t kill her own child. So maybe she’ll send her own search mission once she’s greased the right wheels and lined the right palms. But there’s no sign of one yet.

The University of Glasgow has held up well, considering no one is here to maintain it. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised—what are a few years of abandonment for a complex that’s already managed to stay standing for over a thousand years?

The fly launcher is at the roof of the observatory, which Dimokratía had commandeered as a strategic resource for the eight years before abandonment. The bottom floor has an impregnable door with a keypad beside it, still glowing green. Even after Dimokratía withdrew from the region, they left behind military-grade locks to secure their secrets. Locking up our data is something Dimokratía has always been better at than Fédération.

Since this area is seeded with EMP dust, which prevents access to the live databases for passkeys, this lock would have reverted to the saved serotypes deep in its memory. Access would be limited to Dimokratía politicians, generals, ambassadors, members of the space program, anyone who had clearance as of whenever the EMP dusting happened—which I believe was in 2468.

Which means that my serotype is saved in that keypad.

“Stay back here,” I tell Ambrose, sitting him on a mossy stone bench while I approach the door solo. The locking tech is sophisticated, and I don’t want the door to pick up on his serotype instead of mine and activate its defenses.

I stand before the panel, and it reads the tiny blood cells that are available on the microsurfaces of my skin. I wait while the system processes. If it’s gotten on a network since the EMP dusting, or if a Dimokratía representative came through and updated the database, we’re not getting in.

Ting.

“Door’s open!” I call back.

“Good blood you’ve got there,” Ambrose says.

“It might not be Alexander the Great’s, but it’s still useful,” I say. Ambrose snorts.

We make our way up a musty stairwell, our only illumination a torch Ambrose rigged this morning from a stick and my sweaty old socks soaked in oil. The Dimokratía locking system and other essential military tech run on a nuclear cell that will last for at least a hundred thousand years, but luxuries like lights and air handlers relied on the Glasgow power grid, which has long been EMP-dusted out of operation.

“It’s good for us that the launcher was considered essential, huh?” Ambrose says.

“Indeed. It would take a lot of oily socks to power that,” I say. “I’m still a little worried about the more minor electronics involved. I remember these launchers having manual dials, precisely for wartime resiliency, but beyond that, who knows what circuits might be inside that the EMP dust—”

The stairwell trembles. A cloud of soft dust falls from the landing above us. We hold still, faces lit only by the uneven light of the torch, watching its greasy black tendrils illuminate motes of mold and the stray hairs of long-dead scholars.

“What do you think that was... the warbot?” Ambrose asks.

I shake my head. I have a suspicion what that was. But there’s nothing we can do about it if I’m right. “Come on, to the roof,” I say, then begin taking the stairs three at a time.

I throw open the door. The stars shine brilliantly above us, the sky behind them a deep black.

“No sign of the warbot,” Ambrose says, peering into the street below. “Not that I can see very much in this dark. And look—the last moment of sunset.”

I scan where he’s pointing. The bottom of the sky has an orange tinge. “That’s the wrong direction,” I say. I point to the west. “The sun set over there, about an hour ago.”

“Oh,” Ambrose says.

Oh, indeed. Neither of us needs say anything more. We peer into the glow for a long moment.

Of course the warbot was called off. The war has turned nuclear. Nuclear war will eliminate us as efficiently as any warbot. If Cassandra Cusk plans to somehow rescue her prized golden boy in the midst of world war, she’d better hurry up.

I allow a moment to mourn our lives that might have been. Then I’m in motion. “We need to get the fly launcher initialized. Now.”

We take a moment to record messages to our—potentially alive—future selves. The missives are awkward andclipped, shocked and stammering. They can hardly be reassuring for the exocolonists who will one day listen to them. But we get the information across about what’s happened.

Then we settle in to prep the flies. Ambrose takes charge. I know my way around tech, but despite its hasty Dimokratía labeling, this fly launcher is clearly of Cusk origin. He changes the interface language back to Fédération and gets to work, head inclined to the screen, whispering lines of code. I hold the torch for him and stare out the window of the lab, watching for any sign of additional nuclear strikes.

For us to have felt the vibration of that explosion but not the heat, it had to have been far away indeed. Former Spain or Morocco, maybe? Depending on the direction and speed of the wind, we’ll eventually be dealing with radioactive debris in the air. The question is how much of it. This installation is bound to have some anti-radiation meds, and I know Ambrose wouldn’t have traveled into hostile territory without plenty of his own. But there’s only so much radiation that medications can correct for. And no medication can prepare a body for direct nuclear blast.

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