Page 22 of Spread Me
“We’re all listening,” Mads says, sitting on one of the couches and dropping their chin into their palms. “Speak, prophet.”
“Listen. They are the immune system of the ecosystem!”
Everyone cheers. Saskia punches the air and lets out a shockingly resonantwooo!
“We love ecosystems. And immune systems,” Domino says, toeing Nkrumah’s knee to make her leg wobble.
She bats ineffectively at their foot with one hand. “You don’t patronize me. Just because you’re good at eating pussy doesn’t mean you get to—” The rest of her sentence is drowned out by laughter.
Even Kinsey is cackling. “Wait wait wait,” she gasps. “You two? Nkrumah and Domino? You can’t be serious!”
Nkrumah pushes herself up onto her elbows and squints at Kinsey. “What’s so funny about that? I’m hot. Look at me. I’m hot!”
“Of course you’re hot,” Jacques says indulgently, sloshing a measure of vibrant purple liquid out of an Erlenmeyer flask that’s been repurposed as a pitcher. Most of the drink makes it into Nkrumah’s mug. “And Domino’s hot. But you don’t like it when people try to be funny, and Domino—”
“Is effortlessly funny,” Domino finishes. “And great at eating pussy.”
Kinsey glances up to see that Saskia is bright pink. She usually flushes when she drinks, but not like this. She drifts out of the canteen a minute later, and Kinsey quietly trails her to the airlock, catching the interior door when Saskia slips through it.
“Where you goin’?” Kinsey whispers into the dark vestibule.
“Just taking a moment.” Saskia is just a shadow among shadows, but Kinsey can hear the damp weight of tears in her voice. “I’ll be back to the party soon, promise.”
“… is it because of Domino and Nkrumah?”
There’s a long silence. A wet sniff. “Not really. It’s about Mads.”
Kinsey takes a sip from her nearly empty mug. She hadn’trealized she brought it with her, but she’s thankful she did. “Mads.”
“They’re just so discreet. They don’t make jokes like the ones Nkrumah and Domino make. And it makes me wonder if—”
“Saskia, hang on a second,” Kinsey interrupts carefully. “I need to pee before I can concentrate on this conversation. Is that okay?”
“Oh.” Another sniff. “Of course.”
Kinsey scans her keycard at the exterior door and walks out into the night. The sky is dusted with stars. Moonlight paints the desert sand in silvery ripples. Kinsey wanders away from the station, listening to the wind as it stirs the world around her. Her heart pounds. She can already feel the hangover she’ll have tomorrow.
When she’s done, she comes back to find Saskia leaning against the exterior wall of the station.
“I’m fine,” Saskia says. “I think I just needed some air.”
Kinsey nods. “You and Mads, then?”
“It’s nothing. It’s just—you know how it is. We’ve been here for nearly ten months. We were bound to start chewing on each other eventually, right? It’s inevitable.” She catches herself. “Well. For everyone except you.”
“Everyone except me,” Kinsey agrees. “You ready to head inside?”
Saskia tilts her head back to rest it against the wall. Her eyes are on the sky. “I’ll be there in a minute. I want to find some constellations first.”
Kinsey hesitates. She could leave Saskia alone, could go back inside and drink more of Jacques’s poison and laugh at Nkrumah. But she’s noticed that, over the last ten months, she’s chosen to leave Saskia alone a lot. She doesn’t want to do it this time.
She leans against the wall next to her colleague, who she realizes she’s just starting to think of as a friend. “Mind if I find them with you?”
Saskia smiles up at the sky, her tear-glossed eyes reflecting the bright banner of the Milky Way. “I hoped you would.”
Kinsey looks around the lab, meeting each of her team members’ eyes as she tells them what she and Mads have discovered. She explains the structure of the lichen. “If you’d like to see it for yourself, Mads brought the microscopes in here for you. So, um.”
“So you can sit down after you look,” Mads finishes for her. “If you need to.”
