Penumbra

by Dan Ackerman

  Oggie inspected one of the thin, foil packages closely.

  “What?”

  “You passed these out on Giving Day one year.”

  “They were close to expiring.”

  Oggie gave him a push. “Some gift!”

  “No one’s perfect.” He shoved a dozen packets into his bag.

  “You need me to carry anything?”

  “I’ve got it.” He adjusted the shawl Holly had lent him, then shouldered the bag.

  Oggie took his hand as they walked, his fingers twisting around Arden’s. He seemed happier than he had before.

  Holly and a handful of kids waited for them when they made it back. “No one thought you were coming back.”

  “Oh. I, uh, I brought a movie. And some food.”

  “What’s a movie?” one of the children asked.

  “A bunch of moving pictures that tell a story.”

  “What kind of food?” another child asked.

  “Uh. I don’t know.” He took his backpack off and opened it up.

  The children descended like gremlins, taking the foil packets, and studying the pictures printed on them.

  “What is this?” one demanded as she shoved a picture of spaghetti in his face.

  Other kids had scattered.

  “Spaghetti. Uh.” Arden glanced at Holly.

  “Have we been robbed?” Oggie asked.

  “No, they’re just showing their moms.”

  “Mm,” Oggie hummed.

  “No one steals food, don’t worry. Our tribe isn’t like that,” she assured.

  “What’s peg-heady?” the child asked.

  “Uh. Like. It’s a type of pasta?”

  “Why’s it red? Is it blood?” the girl demanded.

  Holly grimaced at the child. She took the food packet back. “Go play.”

  The girl ran away and emitted a hideous shriek of laughter as she went.

  “That one’s, uh…She’s a little funny,” Holly explained as she watched the child run.

  Arden didn’t know what to say to that.

  “Good at finding lizards, though,” Holly noted. She nodded toward the bag. “What’s the rest of that?”

  Arden scanned the tents. “Do you have a big white sheet I can use?”

  “Probably.” She headed off and gestured for him to follow.

  They found the settlement mostly empty.

  “Where is everyone?”

  “Foraging.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’re stopped here for a while, then we’ll head up north a little more. There’s usually good water up there and not too many other people around this time of year.”

  “Ah.”

  “People are riled up about what you said. Taking us all somewhere.”

  “It’s optional,” Arden assured.

  “Those men from space, they keep saying, and talking about how your space station doesn’t seem big enough for all of us to live on.”

  “Well…Wait, hang on. No one’s seen Eden yet.”

  “We all saw you fly in on it.”

  Arden stopped walking. “That’s just a shuttle. It’s not the space station.”

  Holly turned and folded her arms across her chest. “So how big is this place of yours?”

  Arden glanced around. He saw ruins only. He pointed to the tallest building he saw, a crumbled skyscraper in the distance. “Bigger than that.”

  Oggie shaded his eyes to peer at the building. “Much bigger. Why do you all live in tents, anyway?”

  “Tents are easier to move around. We go where the food is.”

  “Hmm.” He turned to Arden. “Shug, you ever been inside a Terran building before?”

  “You know I haven’t.”

  “I’ve always wondered what they looked like. I mean, not like in the movies. In real life. You know, those sets your Entertainment Minister dreams up are not convincing.”

  “It’s propaganda.”

  “Obviously, but it’s inaccurate to the life we know which kind of diminishes the effect. Good propaganda appeals to people.”

  “You want the job?”

  “Arden, you can’t keep giving your lovers cushy government jobs. It’s pure nepotism,” Oggie scolded, “And also, no, I don’t want to make propaganda.”

  “Technically, the title is Entertainment Minister of the Media Department.”

  “You know if you’d told Mari you two were involved, she might not have made you take matches,” Holly informed them.

  “We aren’t…I mean, we weren’t, then,” Arden said.

  Holly made a face. “Alright. Jessa’s like that for some people. Anyway. Sheet’s in here.”

  They followed her into a tent and waited as she searched through for a large, white sheet. She handed them one.

  Arden set down his bag. “We can’t do anything until it’s dark, anyway. Are those buildings safe to go in?”

  “Depends on by what you mean by safe,” Holly said.

  “How likely are we to die or suffer serious bodily harm?”

  “Uh.” She stopped to think. “The older kids are always sneaking off to play there. They usually come back. Go with a friend, bring water, and run if something seems off.”

  He glanced at Oggie. “You want to do something that will possibly end in tragedy?”

  “If you’d ever witnessed half the things I’ve done, you wouldn’t even bother to ask me that. But what about you? Eden can’t afford to lose its Autarch.”

  Arden shrugged. “I left Rhys in charge. He’ll figure it out if I don’t come back.”

  Oggie borrowed a scarf from Holly and she found them a canteen.

  “We’ll be back before dark,” Arden said. “If not, uh. Well, maybe someone will come look for us?”

  “I don’t know, can we get into your shuttle to loot it?”

  He reached to check for the fob in his vest pocket. The vest didn’t exactly go with his outfit, but he liked having the fob close to his heart. “Not without me.”

  Oggie had pushed his hand down before he could touch the fob.

  “So, someone would come looking for you. I might. I like those pants. Do you think they’d fit me?”

  “They would look cute on you,” Oggie agreed, his eyes skimming over Holly. “Totally different look on your body type, but I think it would work.”

  “I’m mostly interested in the pockets.”

  “Practical,” Oggie agreed. He placed a few fingers in the middle of Arden’s back. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  Arden went where Oggie steered him.

  Once they’d made it outside of the settlement, Oggie advised, “You shouldn’t touch items of value you’ve hidden on your person.”

  “Oh.”

  “I know on Eden no one would lay a finger on you, but that doesn’t mean anything here.”

  Arden felt stupid.

  Oggie took his hand and pecked his cheek. “What do you want to explore?”

  Arden glanced at the sun. It hadn’t made it halfway across the sky yet. He scanned the buildings.

  One of them looked exactly the way he imagined when he’d stared down at Terra. A short building with several floors mostly crumbled away. Made of brick with a crooked tree growing through it, it looked like a residence, not a store.

  He brought them in that direction.

  “You know what I was thinking about?” Oggie said.

  “Hmm?”

  “When I was seventeen, I got this nasty infection from one of the people I was seeing.”

  “Okay…”

  “It’s probably better we didn’t, you know, participate in that orgy. You know. Cause who knows what they’ve got. Or what we might have.”

  Arden gave Oggie a concerned look.

  “No, not that I’ve got anything actively, but I swear I read about, uh…” Oggie closed his eyes. “Fuck, I’ve done too many drugs, I can’t think when I’m sober anymore. Immunities! That’s the one. Like, we’ve got stuff in us that we’re immune to. But other pe
ople won’t be.”

  Arden started to worry.

  “And the same for them. Like they think they’re healthy but we’re going to be covered in sores…Sugar, I’m not saying for sure!” Oggie smoothed the pad of his thumb over Arden’s cheek. “Just something to think about.”

  The knowledge that the stupidest Autarch in history now ran Eden settled over him. His mother never would have done this. Bex Torre might come to haunt him at this point. He was about to get the whole station infected with some horrible Terran disease.

  Or wipe out the scraps of human life on Terra by letting Oggie give them some strain of sexual infection.

  His throat tightened.

  He stopped walking.

  He needed a shot of Twelve.

  The closest one was more than a day away.

  If Eden hadn’t ripped itself apart by now.

  What had they done to poor Rhys?

  A baby at home and now the whole space station to take care of without even a day’s notice.

  “Sugar?” Oggie asked.

  Despite his nearness, Arden could barely hear him. He flinched when Oggie touched him.

  “Hey, uh…”

  “I’m so fucking stupid.”

  “Oh, sugar, no,” Oggie insisted.

  “I am, I am, I’m so stupid.”

  Oggie wrapped his arms around him. “No, shug, come here, you’re not.” He kissed the side of Arden’s head.

  “I didn’t,” Arden began, but couldn’t finish because he started crying.

  His mother would hate who he’d become. Every choice he’d made would have had her frowning, looking at him the way she had when he’d thrown a tantrum. The way she’d looked at him when he’d outgrown something or asked for a second helping of dessert.

  Oggie expertly coddled him through this, shushing him and rubbing his back. He kept his arms around Arden so he couldn’t run, even when he wanted to. Oggie’s voice never rose above a murmur. Over and over, he told Arden, “You’re okay. I’ve got you.”

  At one point, Arden sagged, ready to curl up.

  Oggie caught his slack and cradled him close against his chest. “Oh, good thing you’re skinny, shug. I might have dropped you,” he scolded tenderly.

  “I’m about to commit genocide,” Arden rasped.

  “Now you’re just being silly,” Oggie admonished. He stepped back from Arden and used his sleeve to wipe his face. He lifted his face by the chin. He looked at him critically. “You’re okay.”

  Arden tried to shake his head but Oggie had a firm grip on his chin. He kept a hold of Oggie’s arms, afraid Oggie would step farther away. “I’m not.”

  “Oh, you certainly are okay.” Oggie tightened his grip a little more, then pressed a soft kiss to Arden’s lips. He let go of Arden and smoothed the back of one finger over Arden’s cheek. “Nothing hurts, does it?”

  “No,” Arden had to admit.

  “Has anything bad happened?”

  “I—”

  “Yet,” Oggie added.

  “Not yet,” Arden sulked. He felt jittery and couldn’t let go of Oggie.

  “So you’re okay. Right now, in this moment, you’re okay.”

  “I’d kill for some Twelve.”

  “I would lap scuff off the floor given the smallest opportunity.”

  Arden let out a shaky chuckle. He tightened his grip on Oggie.

  “Now, come on. We’re going exploring, aren’t we?”

  Arden couldn’t quite move. He glanced back toward the tents.

  His instinct was to find some corner and turn into something small. Wrap himself in blankets, take some Twelve, and cancel his appointments for the day.

  No one had ever asked him to continue on with what he’d been doing after he’d cried like that.

  He frowned at Oggie.

  “Come on.” Oggie tugged his hand. “You wanted to see this sad pile of bricks, right?”

  One step at a time, Oggie coaxed him on their original path like nothing had happened. Maybe a little gentler, but no longer fussing over him.

  Arden didn’t quite know what to do with that.

  Oggie led him inside the building. “Watch your step.”

  Rubbish littered the floor. Bits of brick, sundry broken items, and smaller debris that turned into generic, brown dirt and clutter.

  Arden had never seen anything so filthy in his life. He wanted to touch it. He also felt afraid to breathe too deeply.

  “Don’t touch anything, I see you looking,” Oggie warned.

  Arden put his hands in his pockets to lessen the temptation. He kicked over bits of rubble and desperately wanted to pick up the items he could see on the counters. He wanted to clean the dirt off them and figure out what purposed they’d served.

  “What do you think this was?”

  “A florist,” Oggie guessed, his eyes on the tree.

  One branch grew awkwardly out a window. The rest created a sort of ceiling over them.

  Arden nudged open a door with the toe of his shoe. Inside he saw a hollowed-out metal box that must have been an oven, a refrigerator with no door, and ransacked cabinets.

  He moved deeper inside. The remains of a table, broken and layered with years and years of dust and grime, a cracked and collapsed screen that had fallen from its wall mount, and then, in the last room he entered, a bed.

  Mostly made of moldered fabric and clumps of mattress foam, a large rotted rectangle remained in the right spot for a bed.

  “People lived here.”

  The Torre family had left Eden before Terra One had become fully ruined. When Bex and her first wave of citizens had boarded the space station, people had remained on Terra living as normally as they could.

  Insecure and frightened lives, but not scavenging nomads in tents by any means.

  When had this building last had residents? A hundred years ago? Fifty? How long did it take a society to collapse?

  He went to touch something.

  Oggie said, “Don’t touch anything!”

  He shoved his hands back in his pockets.

  Oggie linked arms with him.

  They wandered through the other accessible apartments.

  Some doors he couldn’t open. Other rooms had bulkier litter that made the rooms impassible. Cabinets had fallen from the walls, or appliances had gotten tipped over. One room had broken furnishings piled up against the door.

  Finally, Oggie said, “Sugar, I could use a bit of fresh air.”

  “On Terra?” Arden asked. “That’s a tall order.”

  “There might be less dust outside, though.” He sounded congested and a glance revealed that his eyes had gone red.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Just allergies, I think.”

  On their way out, something small darted across their path and up a wall.

  Oggie outright screeched.

  Arden dragged him away from whatever they’d seen.

  “Fuck, fuck, where’d it go?” they demanded of each other.

  It took them about five minutes to calm themselves enough to spot the small creature watching them from the wall.

  It licked its eyeball.

  “Oh, fuck. Fuck. Shit. Is that an animal?” Oggie demanded, his grip on Arden’s arm impossibly tight.

  Arden stared. “I think it’s a lizard.”

  “That’s fucking disgusting. Ugh. You didn’t tell me there’d be animals down here.”

  Arden’s skin crawled at the sight of the thing.

  No animals lived on Eden. No pets, no livestock, not even pests.

  He’d seen animals in movies and read about them for school, but he never thought he’d see one.

  “Sugar, can we go? That thing is looking at us!”

  He and Oggie edged out of the room, eyeing the lizard the whole time.

  Once outside, Oggie shuddered. “Ugh, I’m about ready to go back! Aren’t you? Enough exploring for one day.”

  “It was only one building.”

  “A small one.
What if the other buildings have bigger animals?”

  Arden hadn’t considered that.

  He never considered anything.

  He looked up at the sky and momentarily lost himself in it’s hot, grayish-blue expanse. He couldn’t see the sun, panicked, then remembered that clouds existed down here.

  He didn’t like that he couldn’t see Eden from Terra the way he could see Terra from Eden.

  “Do you think Rhys is doing okay?”

  “I’m sure he’s fine.”

  “That was rotten of me, wasn’t it? To take off like that?”

  Oggie made a face that suggested agreement. “You at least told people where you were going?”

  “I made sure to do that.”

  “Maybe when we get back, they’ll be so glad to see you they’ll forget everything else that happened.”

  “Fingers crossed.”

  Fingers crossed they had anything to go back to.

  They headed back to the settlement with the agreement they’d ask someone to show them around more another day.

  About a dozen people gathered to watch Arden set up the sheet and the projector. He’d done this with Mama, but he didn’t remember exactly the right steps. He managed to get it done before they lost daylight entirely.

  Over dinner, he played them informational clips about Eden that he’d found on the shuttle.

  “Who are these people?” Tola asked about the actors in the commercials.

  “Actors.”

  “Hmm.”

  When he ran out of clips and the Terrans ran out of questions, he played a movie. The first one he saw, really, a simple family drama about a girl who didn’t want to go into the same career as her family.

  About the father’s character, Mira asked, “He lives on Eden?”

  “No, he’s…he’s just an actor. This movie’s old. He’s probably dead.”

  “An actor, you keep saying that. What’s an actor?”

  “Someone who plays a role in movies. Pretends to be someone else.”

  “And everyone on your spaceship, they look like the people in these movies? So clean and…”

  “Handsome,” Tola filled in.

  Arden tried not to wrinkle his nose at how desperate these women were to see a man. “No, we don’t all look like that.”

  Mira looked at Oggie, who had his knees pulled up to his chest and his chin on his knees. He’d devoted his full attention to the screen.