In the Red

by Christopher Swiedler

  “Is there anything else?” he asked woodenly.

  His mom looked at his dad, and then she sighed. “No. You’re excused.”

  Michael walked slowly up the stairs to his room. Above his door was the small green placard telling rescue workers that someone inside couldn’t use a normal suit and might need special care in an emergency. The window in his room was open, and the model spaceship over his desk swayed gently in the breeze from the colony air circulators. The wall screen flashed to life as he entered the room, showing a panoramic view from one of the research stations on Titan. He smacked its power button, and it went dark.

  As he sat down on his bed, his screen vibrated with an incoming call. He glanced at it and swiped his thumb across the accept button. “Hey, Lil,” he mumbled.

  “Hey,” Lilith said, looking at him with a concerned expression. “So are you okay?”

  “No,” he said simply. He didn’t know whether she meant okay in the physical sense or just okay overall, but it didn’t really matter, because pretty much nothing was okay.

  “I guess your parents didn’t take it too well?”

  “You could say that, yeah.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Whatever,” he said. “It’s no big deal. I’ll talk to you later.”

  He stuck his screen back under his pillow and lay down. The night air was cold and he wrapped the blankets around his shoulders. Everything he’d been working toward for the past year was ruined. All of his plans for the summer, all of his plans for the rest of his life. Everything.

  What was he going to do now?

  Early the next morning, he woke up to the sound of his parents arguing downstairs. He lay motionless, staring at the faint gleam of sunlight on the wall, and tried to make out what they were saying.

  “. . . my job . . . ,” his dad said, and then something that ended with “. . . the station.”

  “I understand, Manish,” she said. “But he’s the one you’re going to have to explain it to.”

  His parents moved toward the back of the house, and their voices grew indistinct. Michael curled himself up in a ball. He hated it more than anything when his parents fought like this. Sometimes he thought it might be better if they’d just have their arguments right in front of him, so that at least he’d know what they were fighting about.

  He waited until he heard the sounds of breakfast in the kitchen, and then he got out of bed. When he got downstairs, Peter was eating a bowl of oatmeal at the table. Michael looked around. “Where’s Dad?”

  Peter jerked his head toward the front door. “He just left.”

  “He left?” Michael echoed. “But he just got here!”

  “He said he had to get back to the station,” Peter said, shrugging.

  Michael slumped down into one of the kitchen chairs. It was Saturday morning. His father had been home for less than twelve hours. What could possibly be so important that he had to go back now?

  Peter went over to the auto-pantry and came back with a second bowl of oatmeal. He set it down on the table, but Michael just stared at it silently. He didn’t have any appetite at all.

  “So you really got all the way through the advanced test?” Peter asked. “Without any studying or anything?”

  “Almost all the way,” Michael mumbled.

  “I’m pretty impressed, to be honest,” Peter said through a mouthful of oatmeal. “That’s a tough exam. I never would have thought my nummer little brother could do it. It must have taken a lot of guts. Especially for someone with your . . . whatchamacallit. Disorder.”

  “I thought maybe Dad would be impressed.”

  Peter shrugged. “Maybe he was. He can be hard to read sometimes.”

  Hard to read? Everything about their dad seemed pretty clear to Michael. Make easy, empty promises. Come home for just long enough to break them. Then leave the next morning to do the things that were actually important.

  “Well, whatever you do, don’t give up, okay?” Peter said. “Don’t let anyone convince you that you’re some kind of freak.”

  “I am a freak,” Michael mumbled.

  “No,” Peter said firmly. “You’re not. I don’t care how many panic attacks you have.”

  “Mom and Dad don’t see it that way.”

  “Mom and Dad just want to protect you, because that’s their job,” Peter said. “But part of growing up is deciding when you don’t need protection anymore.”

  This was a side of Peter that Michael hadn’t seen before. He was used to his brother telling him what to do, or what not to do, usually with a punch in the arm for emphasis. He was still trying to figure out how to respond when their mom came down the stairs carrying a box of cables and electronics junk. “Morning, boys.”

  “Dad already left,” Michael said.

  She set the box down on the table. “I know. He didn’t want to. He was up all night talking to people back at the station.”

  Michael scowled and folded his arms. Why was his mom acting like it was perfectly okay for his dad to fly right back to work on a Saturday morning?

  “I’ve got to head to the track for conditioning,” Peter said, standing up and heading for the front door. He talked all the time about how he was going make the first-string soccer team when he started his senior year in the fall. “If you make pancakes, save some for me, okay?”

  The door closed, leaving the house silent and still. Michael’s mom sat down next to him. “Pancakes—you know, that’s not a bad idea. I think I still have some of the real maple syrup Uncle Robert sent from Earth.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  They sat quietly for a moment. Michael kept his eyes on the table. His mom was trying to smooth everything over, but he wasn’t going to fall for it. He was nothing but a walking, breathing condition. How were pancakes going to fix that?

  “I’m not happy that you took the test without talking to us,” she said. “But I think I understand why you did it.”

  Michael snorted. “You think you understand?”

  “You don’t have anything to prove, Michael. To me, or your dad, or anyone else. There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  Michael pushed back his chair and stood up. “If that’s what you think, then you don’t understand at all.” He stomped up the stairs and paused in front of his room, staring at the green warning placard. Scowling, he pried it off the wall and hurled it down the stairs into the kitchen, where it landed against the wall with a satisfying clang, and then he slammed his door.

  In the afternoon, when the house was quiet, Michael came back downstairs and headed out the front door. He didn’t know exactly where he was going, but he knew that he didn’t want to be at home anymore. He sat on a swing at the school playground for a little while, watching some younger kids run around playing tag on the soccer field, and then he peered in through the window at his sixth-grade classroom. The school term had just finished a few days before and the room hadn’t been cleaned out yet. Posters for their class unit on biology still hung on the walls, and a small holographic image of a beating human heart rotated slowly above its stand on the teacher’s desk.

  How could his dad have lied to him like that? He’d told Michael exactly what he wanted to hear, even though he knew it wasn’t the truth. It would have been better if his dad had just not said anything at all, instead of making Michael think that everything was going to go back to normal.

  Eventually Michael found himself walking down the street where Lilith lived. Her house wasn’t hard to spot, even from a few blocks away. Instead of the standard red or brown Mars tones of the rest of the neighborhood, her house was yellow with pink trim around the windows, a style that she insisted was popular in Miami. Most new colonists made at least some effort to fit in, but Lilith and her mom seemed determined to bring everything about Earth along with them. Once they’d cooked actual real-meat steaks, sent here at some crazy cost by Lilith’s aunt. The smell had made Michael want to vomit, but Lilith and her mom had eaten them like they w
ere a delicacy. Last month they’d insisted on installing a birdhouse in their backyard, even after he’d patiently explained that the nearest bird was in the Port Meridian zoo, over ten thousand kilometers away. But somehow Lilith and her mom did all of this with an enthusiastic, contagious zeal that was impossible not to like.

  When he arrived, Lilith was sitting on the front porch. She had the sort of carefully neutral expression that he’d seen before when she’d been upset about something. She looked up and gave him a thin smile as he approached.

  “Hey,” she said. “Good to see you out and about.”

  “Sorry for hanging up on you yesterday.” He sat down cross-legged in the grass. “Everything okay?”

  “Sure. Why wouldn’t it be?” Her smile broadened, but he could tell that it was forced.

  Her front door opened, and Lilith’s mom appeared. She was tall and pretty, with long hair that she dyed a different color every week and was currently a bright shade of blue. Her jaw was set and her mouth was in a tight line. “Beccy says that—”

  She stopped when she saw Michael. Immediately her angry expression disappeared and was replaced by a warm smile. “Oh—hello, Michael. I didn’t realize you were here.”

  “Hi, Ms. Colson.”

  “Want some tea?”

  Pouring tea over ice and adding a ridiculous amount of sugar was the one Earther custom that Michael had discovered he quite liked. But he could tell from Lilith’s expression that she wasn’t in the mood, so he just shook his head. “No, thanks.”

  “All right. Let me know if you need anything.”

  She let the door slide closed, and Lilith sighed. “Sorry. She’s a little manic today.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, waving her hand. “Just normal Colson family stuff. What about you? How are you feeling?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “But are you sure that—”

  “It was scary seeing you like that,” she went on. “They took you away on a stretcher. I got into a wrestling match with one of the medics, but they still wouldn’t let me come with you.”

  “It wasn’t a big deal,” he said, shrugging. “Just a little panic attack.”

  “If that was a little panic attack, then I don’t ever want to see a big one,” Lilith said. “So why don’t you ever talk about it? I mean, I know you didn’t pass your basic certification that first time you tried. Was that because of a panic attack, too?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That was the first time it happened.”

  It had been a lot worse, too, because he’d had no idea what was happening. All of a sudden it had seemed like his body was going haywire. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. . . .

  “Before that, you were fine?”

  “I went outside with my dad all the time when I was a kid. I had over a hundred hours on the surface by the time I was ten. Then I go to take the test, and . . .” He pantomimed an explosion with his hands. “I tried a few more times with my dad, but I never even made it out of the airlock.”

  “That’s so weird,” she said, squinting thoughtfully. “I wonder what started it.”

  Michael shrugged. That was what he’d asked his doctor, over and over, but all she would say was that anxiety can surface at any time and there isn’t always an explanation.

  “Well, we’ll figure it out,” Lilith said firmly. She stood up and stretched. “But right now, I have to go get ready for tonight.”

  “What’s tonight?”

  Her eyes twinkled. “Wait and see.”

  4

  THAT NIGHT MICHAEL dreamed that he was on Phobos. The little moon moved quickly across the face of Mars, brushing past the enormous peak of Olympus and skimming along the narrow scar of Valles Marineris. Beyond the planet there were no stars, only the blackness of space. He was cold and tired.

  His suit chimed with an incoming call. He tried to find the controls to answer, but his vision was turning gray. The chime sounded again, more insistently this time, and then he was slipping down, down, down. . . .

  He hit the floor of his room, still wrapped up in blankets and clutching his pillow. His screen was flashing on his bedside table. Incoming call from Lilith Colson. He squinted at the time. 0045.

  “Accept call,” he mumbled. “Lilith? What’s going on?”

  “I’m outside,” she said. “Open your window.”

  Michael stood up with his blankets still wrapped around him and slid the window open. The cool night air made him shiver. He leaned his head out and saw Lilith standing in the grass below him.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked in a raspy voice.

  “I told you,” she said. “We have plans. Meet me out front.”

  “But . . . it’s the middle of the night.”

  “You’re very perceptive,” Lilith agreed. “As my aunt used to say—nighttime is the ally of the mischief-maker.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Yes, I’m serious,” she said patiently.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see. Meet me out front, and be quiet about it. Remember—silence is the ally of the mischief-maker.”

  She ran around toward the front of the house. Michael blinked away sleep and stretched his arms. He was certainly awake now. There was no way he was going back to bed anytime soon, at least not without finding out what Lilith had been planning.

  He got dressed in a T-shirt and sweatpants and put on his sneakers. He poked his head out into the hallway and listened. The house was silent. As quietly as he could, he padded down the stairs and slipped out through the front door. If his mom caught him sneaking out in the middle of the night, on top of everything else that had happened, he’d never leave the house again, much less the dome. He listened one more time to make sure nobody was stirring, and then he closed the door behind him.

  Lilith was standing on the sidewalk. The streetlamps cast wide pools of yellow light whose edges almost touched, leaving little corners of darkness.

  “Okay,” he said. “So what’s going on?”

  “You’ll see. Patience is the ally of the mischief-maker.”

  With a sigh, he followed her down the street. Everything was quiet except for the faint rustling of trees. She turned onto a small footpath that led to a larger road. A transport truck passed them, momentarily blinding them with its headlights. They turned again, heading down another road that led past a row of fishery ponds. The black water rippled and swirled as salmon crested the surface.

  After about a half kilometer, they reached a small industrial zone made up of storage units, processing centers, and other buildings Michael couldn’t recognize. Lilith consulted her screen and then led him down a series of alleyways and concrete paths. Finally they stopped at a large garage with two flexible doors that had been rolled up into the ceiling. Lilith pulled out a flashlight and shone it around.

  On the far side of the garage, a flatbed truck was suspended on a mechanical lift with various important-looking parts of its engine strewn all around. At the back, a large ramp led down to an underground cargo airlock. The walls were covered with racks of tools, pieces of machinery, and “safety first” posters.

  Using her flashlight, Lilith guided him past the bits of machinery and equipment that lay on the floor until she reached a door in the corner of the room. “Close your eyes.”

  It was clearly useless to argue, so he shut them and let her lead him through the door. “Okay—you can open them.”

  His first thought was that he was standing directly on the Martian surface. Stretching out all around him was nothing but jagged rocks and copper-colored sand, dimly lit by the vast array of stars above his head. For a brief, terrifying moment he stood rooted to the ground, unable to breathe.

  “Michael?”

  Lilith’s voice brought him back to reality. He looked down at his feet and saw that he was standing in a patch of grass. A few meters ahead of him, the colony dome shimmered where it met the ground, forming an invisib
le line where the grass was replaced by the rocky terrain of the surface.

  “I’m sorry,” Lilith said. “This was dumb of me. We should go back—”

  “It’s fine,” he said, keeping his eyes on the grass at his feet. He took deep breaths and waited for his pounding heartbeat to return to normal. They’d come all the way out here in the middle of the night, and he wasn’t going to let his stupid panic disorder ruin everything. “I’m okay. Really.”

  Carefully, he looked around, letting his eyes adjust to the dim light. The buildings behind them didn’t quite meet up with the dome, leaving a narrow grassy area like a tiny park. The whole area felt like an afterthought, as if someone had made a mistake when planning out the rest of the colony. A few discarded drink bottles lay in the grass, and graffiti on the wall announced that G.B. Loves H.R. A blue duffel bag was half hidden behind a row of bushes near the door, apparently forgotten or left behind.

  “One of the high schoolers on my gymnastics team told me about this spot,” Lilith said. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? It’s like you can see every star ever made. But I didn’t realize it would . . .”

  “You didn’t realize it would make my stupid malfunctioning brain panic,” he said. “It’s not your fault.”

  How could anyone expect her to know? Even Michael didn’t know what would trigger his condition. During the test, he’d been outside for over an hour, and everything had been perfectly fine up until the very end. Tonight, he’d almost had a panic attack just from seeing the night sky. How was he supposed to keep his anxiety under control if he didn’t know what caused it?

  “Your brain isn’t malfunctioning. It’s just trying to keep you safe.”

  “It’s doing a great job,” he said. “One more panic attack and my parents won’t ever let me out of my room.”

  He touched the dome with his fingers. She was right about one thing—it was a beautiful spot. As close as you could come to being out on the surface without actually going outside.

  “Wait,” he said, turning back toward her. Something had just clicked in his mind. He pointed at the bag behind the bushes. “Isn’t that your gym bag?”