by Merry Farmer
At least writing the grocery list enabled him to pack a few special supplies without anyone noticing. Making sure the three crates he’d sectioned off for his own purposes made it to the right place at the right time was another matter. It would be—
“I need to talk to you.”
Danny hid his shock at being interrupted and feigned disinterest as Sean approached his table. His hand twitched over the list he’d thought so little of moments before. He set the pencil down and leaned back to draw as much attention away from his activities as he could.
“Sean.” He nodded as the man strode up to him and stood with his hands on his hips. “How can I help you?”
“How can you help me? You can help me by staying far, far away from Grace.”
He kept his expression completely neutral, blood boiling. “I don’t think it’s up to you to dictate who I can and can’t spend my social time with.”
“No?” Sean helped himself to the chair across the small table. “I checked the records of who’s been using the planetarium, what times Grace has reported to her cabin for the night. I know she spends far more time with you than she should.”
“You checked the records?” He blinked, lips twitching in a sardonic smirk. “Are you going to lock her in her cabin next and chase after her to drag her back when she’s not where you want her to be?”
Sean ignored his barb. “You’re not a functioning part of The Terra Project, Danny. You’re not a settler, so stop acting like one.”
“In what way do you think I’ve been acting like a settler?” He sighed and prepared for another argument that would be a colossal waste of his time.
“Grace is getting far too attached to you,” Sean sidestepped the question. “She needs to interact more with her peers, people in the Project.”
“Like you? Her would-be jailer?” He arched an eyebrow, gloating over the fact that Sean had more or less confirmed Grace preferred his company to any other.
“Like someone who doesn’t sneak off in the middle of the night to secret meetings in the bowels of the ship.”
His heart stopped. His mind scrambled for damage control while his expression remained neutral. “I believe that’s called cyber-stalking, Sean. It’s only a misdemeanor, but it will affect your permanent record.”
“My permanent record is none of your business.” Sean shifted forward in his seat, glowering at him across the table. “Neither is Grace’s. Have you told her that your involvement on Terra is temporary? That you’ll be leaving again in three years when the ship comes back?”
He frowned, trying to get behind Sean’s argument. The man was flying all over the place with no real point. He was motivated by emotion, jealousy, nothing more. His power in the situation was an illusion. The only accusation that could do serious damage had been brought up and dropped within the space of a breath. Sean was nothing more than a bully. He’d spent too long in deep space with an inflated sense of his own self-importance. It was a situation that Danny could easily manipulate.
“Sean.” He glanced over the top of his glasses at the man and cleared his throat, knowing full well his superior attitude would only annoy his rival. “You haven’t by any chance asked Grace what she wants, have you?”
“Grace is too idealistic for her own good. She can’t see what’s best for her.”
“And you can?”
“Yes, I can.”
Danny shook his head and pretended to go back to his list, shifting a blank piece of paper to the top and writing whatever came to his mind. Sean was in for a shock if he ever tried to make Grace do what he thought was best for her. Anyone was. She may have given the impression of being soft and impressionable, but Grace was the most determined and headstrong woman he’d ever met.
“If I were you, Sean, I would be spending my time worrying about much bigger things than your crush spending time with the ‘evil geneticist.’” As he expected, Sean’s expression darkened. “There are much scarier things happening on this ship.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
As far as he saw it, there was no harm in taking out an insurance policy against whatever Kutrosky and Carrie weren’t telling him. “If you weren’t so busy chasing a skirt, you might actually stand a chance of finding out.”
Instinct told Danny not to cross the river at Kinn’s bridge. There had been raiding parties. Jeff had been captured in one of them. Kinn’s men had known about their presence from the moment they reached the bridge. The bridge was clearly being watched. If the river was frozen downstream, then odds were in favor of it being frozen and crossable upstream as well.
“Take us as far upstream from the bridge as you can,” he instructed Heather as they forged ahead of the rest.
“I didn’t explore much out this way,” Heather confessed, her young face pinched tight with anxiety.
Danny squeezed her arm through her thick parka. “Whatever you remember, it will be enough.”
Kinn stayed close to Grace’s side, hovering beside her like a hawk waiting out its prey. She stared straight ahead as Scruffy pulled her sled over ice-coated snowpack, annoyance radiating from her. It set Danny’s teeth on edge to see the two of them so close, but he knew that making an issue of it wouldn’t do any good. He had to let it go.
“I don’t know how Grace puts up with him,” Heather said so only Danny could hear. “He drove me nuts, so I can’t imagine what he’d do to—” She dropped the last word of her sentence and her face burned red.
She was right, though. Danny’s nerves bristled on the edge of canceling their mission and taking Grace straight home each time he thought about the kind of attention she’d had to endure around Kinn. The sooner they all cut ties with Kinn the better. He focused on the stabbing pain in his hands and feet to take his mind away from the images of the two of them that assaulted him. He had to keep moving forward. Grace would never forgive him if he carted her off and locked her away. He’d be no different from Kinn if he did.
The only hint Danny had that he was leading the group in anything close to the right direction was the subtle thinning of the trees. With ice enclosing it, the river would be silent. Only Heather, and possibly Kinn, would know when they were getting near. He watched Heather, ready to follow her word on a moment’s notice. Kinn may have owed his illusion of authority to Grace, but he owed his authority to a pregnant teenager.
At least he had authority.
“We’ll stop here for a rest,” he declared after what felt like a few hours. The sun had fully risen and climbed high in the sky, and the orange glow of Chronis was visible on the horizon.
“It’s about goddamn time,” Stacey muttered. She glided to a stop and pushed back her hood. She glared at them all, still furious over being dragged along on a fool’s mission with a baby who needed her miles away. She yanked out her backpack and rifled in it for her canteen, swigging cold water and eyeing Danny as though thinking of ways to eviscerate him.
“I can do it myself.” Grace shoved Kinn away when he leaned over to search for her canteen in the pack of her sled.
“I’m just trying to help,” he grumbled. He ignored her protests and her attempts to shove him off and dug her canteen out of the pack to thrust into her hands. “I don’t have anything else to do.”
Danny watched the interaction with a hard lump in his throat, aching hands flexing to get ahold of Kinn’s neck. He forced himself to lean casually against a low-hanging branch and drink from the water-skin that had been put in his backpack as though nothing were wrong. He’d never hated anyone so much in his life, with the exception of Kutrosky.
“Okay, I think I’ve figured out where we are.” Heather plunked against the branch beside him, oblivious to his murderous mood. “There are a couple of places we can cross just through the trees that way. In the summer, the water had rapids, but it was narrow and shallower than where we live. If it’s anything like the rapids at home, it’s probably frozen over and smooth now.”
“Good.” Danny cl
ipped. His stare was still fixed on Grace as she took a drink then passed her canteen to Kinn when he motioned for her to hand it over. She frowned, glanced up to meet Danny’s eyes, scowled, cheeks already glowing pink, and glanced away.
“Jules told me she’s not happy,” Heather said.
“What?” He tore his attention away from Grace and took another long drink.
“You know, Jules. The one who does most of the cooking.” He nodded, catching up to whatever conversation Heather was trying to have with him. He wasn’t in the mood. “Jules thinks that Grace isn’t happy.”
“Of course she’s not happy,” Danny muttered. Stacey had come to the same conclusion.
“Oh.” Heather’s shoulders sank. “I…I just thought that you would want to know. In case you thought she didn’t want to come home with us. ’Cause she’s so involved in everything that goes on in the village.”
Danny glanced sideways to her. “Is she?”
Heather blinked at him and shrugged. “Yeah. Didn’t you see her running everything, like, the entire time we were there?”
“I did notice.” He nodded. “I noticed a lot. What I was too busy chopping wood and hauling coal to notice was what everyone else in the village thinks about it.”
He glanced over his shoulder to study Grace and Kinn. She wasn’t speaking to him, but he still hovered around her as if there was something he should be doing, as if waiting for her to give him orders.
“They think he’s a douche.” Heather snorted. “No one can believe Grace has put up with him for as long as she has. I spent the other day helping Alice with her chores—you know, the one who works with herbs like you do and made that salve?”
“I remember.”
“Anyhow, she complained the whole time that Kinn won’t let her go hunting for plants that grow in the winter, berries and stuff. He won’t let anyone go more than half a mile away from the village, and only then to hunt. And it bothers everyone that he’s constantly dragging Grace around, asking her to make decisions for him one minute then reaming her out for having her own thoughts the next.”
Danny swallowed the lump of fury that rose in his throat. “So why haven’t any of them said or done anything about it?”
She barked a laugh. “That’s where it gets funny. They don’t do anything because they think he’s the superior officer. You and I both know that’s a load of shit.” She sent him a smug sideways grin, sharing the secret that brought them together, as if Kinn was the only one who had looked bad that day.
Danny cleared his throat. “Do you know why they haven’t had any sort of an election? Advanced someone else in rank to take over as superior officer?”
Heather shrugged. “Alice talked like they had thought about it, but as long as orders—as she called them—are really coming from Grace and not Kinn, she said everyone else has too much going on just to stay warm and fed to bother with it. They might try to change things in the spring, once the snow melts.”
He tipped his head as if to say ‘fair enough’ and took another drink from his water-skin. The day-to-day struggle for survival made intricate politics a dangerous distraction.
“You know, my dad used to call the army guys on the ship a bunch of useless drones who wouldn’t know how to get dressed in the morning unless they had a protocol for it,” Heather went on with a sniff. “I thought he was just being mean. Of course, Dad used to be a soldier you know.”
“I did know.”
“And a colossal asshole.”
Danny’s eyebrows shot up.
“What?” Heather defended herself. “Just because he donated sperm to my existence doesn’t mean I have to think he’s the universe’s best dad. You’re a far better dad than he—” She pressed her lips shut and dropped her head and shoulders. “I mean—”
“Thanks.” He spared her the embarrassment of having to say what she felt. He would have threatened anyone who wanted to force him to say what he was feeling at that moment with bodily harm if they’d asked him. If anyone was going to cast him as a father figure, he was glad it was Heather.
He took another drink and fastened the lid on his water-skin, pulse and mind racing to the mission at hand once more. There had to be a way he could fulfill his promise to Grace to help Kutrosky’s people and still get her and Heather home safely. Who knew what awaited them at Kutrosky’s camp, but whatever it was, he damn well better be smart enough to face it and beat it.
“The other thing Dad always said,” Heather went on as she repacked her water-skin, “was that the difference between being an authority figure and a leader was the ability to think outside the box.”
Danny arched an eyebrow. He resisted the urge to laugh. Governor King was smarter than he’d given the man credit for. So was his daughter. He nodded and peeked past Heather to Kinn, tall, muscular, authoritative. Hovering over Grace, hands twitching at his sides, useless without a weapon to hold, without an order to follow.
“Let’s just see about that, shall we?” he murmured to Heather and stood.
The others perked up, as though they had been waiting for him.
“We’ll cross the river here,” he announced, standing straight and twisting to put his water-skin in his backpack.
Heather jumped up behind him, adjusting her hood and grabbing her ski poles. Stacey sniffed, spit, and put her canteen away, ready to follow him, albeit grudgingly. Jonah skied to the head of the pack and took a look through the trees to the slope that led down to the riverbank.
Kinn swiped the canteen from Grace and put it away in her pack as Scruffy pushed to his feet and jostled in his harness. Grace tucked her hood over her hair and took up the reins.
Without question each of them had followed Danny’s lead. Kinn had done as he’d said without argument. A rush of adrenaline shot through him.
“Think outside the box, Danny,” he whispered to himself. “Think.”
The river was frozen solid and covered with snow at the point where they came out of the woods. But for the break in trees from one bank of the river to the other, it was hard to tell that the water was there at all. Heather had been right. It was narrower than it was near the bridge—significantly narrower than the point near their settlement—but the amount of snow covering it hinted that it was shallow and had frozen deeper.
Jonah volunteered to test the strength of the ice. He slipped out on his skis, tapping through the covering of snow with his poles. It was painful to watch him. He made it halfway across then recoiled. Heather gasped and grabbed Danny’s arms.
Whatever had spooked Jonah was a fluke. He continued on, all the way across to the far side, then back, all without further incident.
“It’s solid,” he announced, “but we should probably go over one at a time.”
Stacey, Heather, and Jonah crossed over. Danny insisted that Grace walk across without her sled, something Kinn agreed with, judging from his distinct silence and the firmness of his jaw. She made it with relative ease, then called to Scruffy from the far bank. The cat was smart enough to follow her, pulling the empty sled across the river and sparing Danny the trouble of figuring out how to move it.
“After you,” Danny said when just he and Kinn were left.
Kinn swayed closer to him. “I am gonna to tear your head off and rip your heart out the first chance I get, geneticist,” he growled. “Grace or no Grace, you’re a dead man.”
Danny stood his ground, acutely aware of the primal fear that coiled in his gut at the threat. Kinn was fully capable of killing him with his bare hands a hundred times over. The fire of hatred was hot in his eyes. Danny returned that hatred and then some.
“Not if I kill you first,” he said, solid as ice. “And I’ll do it when you least expect it. You’ll be dead before you know what hit you.”
They stood frozen in their faceoff as the chill breeze swirled around them, groaning in the treetops. No one could die, but even the forest knew that someone had to.
At last, Kinn blinked and pushed away fro
m Danny with a disgusted grunt. He skied to the riverbank and propelled himself across. As soon as he climbed up the opposite bank, Danny made the journey himself.
The forest on the other side of the river looked exactly like any other stretch of woods. The same trees, the same level of snowfall and drifting. Danny’s confidence wavered. In this new landscape, they were lost by default. Heather knew nothing of this side of the river and Jeff had been vague at best in his directions. Danny cursed himself for not pressing the man for more information. There was nothing to do but go forward, trusting that some mark or some distinguishing feature of the forest would give them a clue as to the whereabouts of Kutrosky’s people. They couldn’t have gone far, of that much he was certain. It would have been impossible to move that many people far away at the drop of a hat.
At least he hoped it was.
Even so, they were forced to stay near to the river. Jeff had said there were five hills between Kinn’s village and Kutrosky’s camp, but Danny had no idea how many they’d passed by crossing the river upstream. The terrain inland was filled with rocks, and he wasn’t confident that Scruffy could pull Grace up over the increasingly steeper hills. It would have been even worse if she had had to walk, though. If he had his way, he would take Scruffy by his harness, point him toward home, and give him a quick thwack on the rump to ensure he ran the whole way.
Grace was the least of his problems. Time and again, he doubted his sanity in agreeing to carry out her mission of mercy. The skies clouded over shortly after they crossed the river and flurries began to fall. He spent as much time scanning the forest for places they could stop and dig in for the night if they had to as he did searching for a way forward. More than a few times he resigned himself to the fact that they would all die in the snow.
