by Rinelle Grey
“You’ll need more than precision and balance for this task. It will take several hours to climb that mountain and you need to focus to keep yourself safe.” His mother’s voice wavered on the last word.
Kerit frowned. When he’d told her about the shark he’d seen out in the ocean, she hadn’t batted an eyelid. In fact, she’d said that if he was going to let a shark stop him surfing, then he wasn’t that dedicated. What was up with her now?
He looked around the cavernous landing bay, and the shiny shuttle he would have to learn how to fly. He had to admit, this was a little different. They were cut off from the Colonies and their technology and medical care. Forever.
It was different for all of them. Every little thing was more serious now. Of course she was worried.
He wrapped his arms around her, awkward in the jacket and mask. “Don’t worry, Mum, I’ll be careful, okay? This mountain is an easy climb. I’ll be back here lounging around before you know it.”
“You’d better be.” Kerit wasn’t bothered by his mother’s firm tone this time, he knew she used it to cover up her concern. She took a step back and nodded her head firmly. “Because we can’t start this reaction until you do, and since we only have one shuttle, no one can come down there and rescue you.”
“I should have bought a second shuttle. Having only one is a liability.” Tyris’s voice was strained.
“You did the best you could,” Kerit reminded him. “There was no point in spending money on a second shuttle we won’t even use after this. Supplies were more important.”
Tyris sighed.
Kerit turned towards the shuttle. “You’d better show me how this thing works, bro.” A familiar feeling of nerves bubbled up in his stomach and ran through his arms and legs. He felt the same every time he was about to go out on the waves in a major tournament.
Then though, the worst thing that could happen was that he could be dumped by a huge wave. Or hit in the head with his board. Or eaten by a shark.
If he flunked this task, he’d not only embarrass himself and let down his brother, but he’d be stuck on the planet. And none of the thousand people on the Resolution would have anywhere to live.
No pressure then.
“Sure. I’ll set the autopilot to control the entry, all you’ll have to do is find a flat space to land.”
“That shouldn’t be hard,” his mother said dryly. “It’s not like there’s any vegetation left down there. Just don’t crash it into the mountain. Because it’s the only shuttle we have.”
“Don’t worry, we won’t leave you hanging,” Tyris thumped him on the back. “If it comes down to it, I’ll land the Resolution on the planet. It may take a while, since I’ll have to wait for a suitable window, but we’d make it down there. I won’t need to though. You’ll do fine. Now let’s do this quickly, so you can get some sleep. You have an early start in the morning.”
Sleep was the last thing he felt like, especially since he had to be up in what felt like only a few hours. Trying to summon up the feeling of confidence he’d had earlier, he followed Tyris into the shuttle and tried to pay attention to the vast array of controls. No matter how much his mother tried to make this task seem insurmountable, most of it really wasn’t anything he hadn’t done before.
Fly down to the planet, climb a mountain, and place the beacon.
Simple. He’d be done in a few hours.
Chapter 2
Folly ran her hands over the faded labels of the tins standing on a wooden shelf jammed into the cave wall. Her mouth watered at the thought of tinned spaghetti or chicken soup, and she made a face at the thought of tinned spinach. Not today. She moved past the labelled cans to the naked ones.
They were exciting. A gamble. You never knew what you were going to get. That’s why they were her favourite.
Her hand hovered over the row. This was the moment it all rested on.
Folly felt her pocket wriggle. Chicken uncurled her tail from her body, and ran down Folly’s arm to sniff at one of the cans. Folly ruffled her silky, white fur. “Okay, girl, we’ll have that one.”
Sliding the edge of the can under the rotating blade she’d rigged up to take the lids off more easily, she hit the switch that started gears grinding with a jangle. As soon as the noise started, Chicken scurried down her pants leg, and across the room to hide behind a box. Folly chuckled. Silly skuttle. It wasn’t as if she’d never heard the noise before.
A small click told her that the lid had separated from the can. She paused for a moment, imagining all the delights that could be inside the can. Maybe it would be rice pudding, tomato soup, or her favourite: tinned peaches.
Lured by something only she could smell, Chicken was back, her pink noise sniffing at the air. She clawed her way back up Folly’s leg, rose up on her hind legs and scratched at the edge of the can.
Folly laughed. Capturing the lid with a magnet on a small handle, she pulled it off. Beef stew. Nice. Anything with meat was always a welcome sight. She tossed the lid into the scrap metal box, and carefully sat the tin on the aluminium plate which covered the steam vent in the corner of the bench. Even after travelling all the way up from caverns deep in the cave system, the steam was still hot enough to burn.
Hovering far enough away to be out of the heat and the occasional burst of steam that escaped, Chicken gave her a mournful look.
“No, I don’t eat my meat cold. You’ll just have to wait,” Folly told her. Ignoring the pitiful look in Chicken’s big red albino eyes, she leaned her hip against the bench, pulled the novel she’d been reading out of her pocket and flicked through until she found the page she was up to.
There were only a few pages left, and Folly intended to savour each one. This book was the last new one she had, picked up on her last trip. She’d only been able to find three books that time, even though she’d searched all the abandoned houses. The truth was, there was nothing left to find.
Despite the thrill of the story though, she couldn’t concentrate. She didn’t want to accept the idea that she’d searched everywhere. There must be somewhere she’d missed.
She put the book down, unread, and her eyes roamed the maps pinned to an old door leaning against the cave wall above her work bench. Ignoring the furiously bubbling stew, she crossed the room and ran her hands over them. She’d collected each one, unable to let any clue pass her by, no matter whether they were torn or dirty. Each one was a hint, possibly a critical one.
The large map of the planet’s surface covered most of the door, a large tear down the middle mended with the last of her sticky tape. Smaller maps of Prioris, overlapping each other, were pinned to the left side of the map.
Lying covered in dust just three kilometres from where she stood, she’d explored every corner of the abandoned city that once housed five thousand people. She’d collected every book, tin of food, and tech device she thought she might be able to use and searched every building. It was possible she’d missed something, maybe even a few books, but not something as large as a spaceship.
Pulling a key and its ribbon over her head, she reached for the locked wooden box sitting under the maps. She didn’t pause to look at the faded photos or the picture book her mother had read to her as a child, reaching past them to lift up her mother’s diary. The once bright colours of the floral covering were faded now, and the book automatically fell open to the pages she sought.
The book was mostly a record of her mother’s days with toddler Folly, growing up on the crowded planet of Urslat. Right now though, Folly wasn’t interested in reading about trips to the museum, or about the time she reprogrammed the vacuum cleaner to chase the cat. She was looking for details about her dad’s work, which were few and far between. Folly wasn’t sure if that was because he had kept most of the details from his wife, or because her mother hadn’t been interested, but there were only a few little hints sprinkled throughout the writing. Folly had read them over and over.
Her father had worried that someone would fi
nd out about his ship, and steal the ideas before he could patent them, so he’d chosen to stay in Prioris. She and her mother had waited there while he went to Tadig to talk to some engineer who he thought would help him protect his discovery. It might have worked too, if the asteroid hadn’t smashed into the planet while he was gone.
He’d never returned, so Folly had no way of knowing if he’d found the engineer. She’d always assumed that his fear would have led him to leaving his ship somewhere here, where it would be safe. But what if he’d taken it with him as proof?
Below and to the left, the single half map of Tadig taunted her. She knew so little about what had been the main settlement on Semala. Just half a map and the knowledge that the meteor had impacted somewhere nearby.
The answer had to be there. There was nowhere else it could be.
She traced the marked road with her finger as it skirted around the mountain range in her way. Tadig lay near the coast, almost a hundred kilometres away. It would take over a week to walk there by road, if she could even find it. Dust storms would have buried the road even more thoroughly than it had buried Prioris. Going over the mountains would halve the distance, but there was no path there. And no matter which way she went, if a dust storm blew up, she could kiss finding her way home goodbye.
Chicken’s small grunts gave her a hint someone was coming, even before the voice in the doorway.
“You’re burning that slop.”
She didn’t have to turn around to recognise Aleck’s voice, or the fact that he was right—her precious stew was burning. Not that she was going to give him the satisfaction of knowing she cared.
She placed the diary carefully back in the box and locked it, slipping the key back around her neck before turning around slowly. Ignoring the acrid burning smell that filled her nostrils, she stared at her foster brother. “Even burnt it’s better than flavoured soy.” Chicken’s claws dug into her back, but she didn’t move as the skuttle settled into the back of her neck, under her hair. Tiny vibrations from its shivers tickled the back of her neck.
She and Aleck glared at each other in mutual stubbornness for a few moments before Aleck cracked a grin. “Probably,” he agreed, “but Ma sent me to ask if you wanted to come to dinner anyway.”
Folly glanced back over at the book, then the map. “I have work to do.”
“Ma’s having trouble with the garbage disposal again.”
Of course, they wanted her mechanical skills, not her company. Folly sighed. Using a tea towel to lift the can of burnt stew off the cooker, she emptied the contents into her own, perfectly working, garbage disposal, ignoring Chicken’s indignant squeak. Then she added the empty can to her scrap metal pile. “Fine. Let’s go.”
Aleck didn’t move. He just looked at her. “You’re not coming like that, are you?”
Folly glanced down at her clothes. Pockets covered her heavy cargo pants, most of them full. They had a few grease stains, but there was no way she was going to change them, she would need the tools they contained to fix the garbage disposal. Her shirt though, she had to admit, had seen better days. She’d been pulling apart old radios all afternoon, trying to make at least one working one out of the dozen broken ones, and she’d wiped most of the dust that stuffed their interiors on the closest piece of fabric—her shirt.
She heaved a sigh. “I’ll be right back.” Ducking behind the curtain into her bedroom, she transferred Chicken to one of the pockets in her cargo pants and pulled the shirt off over her head, dislodging the head lamp she’d forgotten she wore in the process. She grinned. Aleck had probably been more bothered by that than the dusty shirt. Grabbing out an almost clean shirt, she sniffed it, decided it was wearable, and pulled it on. She felt in her pockets to be sure she had her screwdriver and pliers, then ducked back through the curtain and nodded to Aleck. “Can we go now?”
He looked her up and down a couple of times, then nodded.
As if she needed his approval.
Seething silently, she followed him out of her home, pausing to lock the door behind her.
“Why do you always lock your door? It’s not like anyone is going to steal anything, much less all that old rubbish.”
Anger bubbled up in her. “That old rubbish is what is going to fix your garbage disposal. Half the machines here wouldn’t work if it wasn’t for my rubbish.”
Aleck held up his hands. “Hey, no need to snap, I didn’t mean anything. It’s just that no one locks their doors. Most doors don’t even have locks. It’s weird, that’s all.”
Weird. Folly tried to ignore the cutting word. “At least my rubbish doesn’t insult me when I fix it,” she snapped.
She liked her home. Tucked in a small cave off the larger cavern, she was far enough away that people only visited her when they wanted help, and close enough to the entrance that she could climb out to explore the ruins of Prioris when she wanted to without having to answer any questions first.
The treasures she brought back with her, broken electronic devices, books, tinned food, were far more fascinating than any of the cave’s residents and their constant concerns about protecting the wildlife that had survived the meteor blast in the shelter of the cave.
Aleck opened his mouth to protest, and she could almost hear their mother’s voice berating him, ‘Stop fighting you two, can’t you just get along for once?’ She still made the comment frequently, even though they were both twenty-five. His mouth snapped shut. “Come on, Ma’s waiting,” he said instead.
Folly bit back a sigh and followed him. She let the sense of awe she always felt when she walked out into the main cave distract her from his negativity. She may scorn the biologists’ fascination with the minute bugs, insects and small mammals in the cave, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be amazed by the structure as a whole.
The roof loomed nearly a hundred metres over her head. A creaking sound told her the flaps were being closed for the night in case of a surprise dust storm or rare downpouring of acid rain. Six o’clock. Despite their protection, a light layer of dust covered the trees and vegetation that filled the cave floor.
A grunting sound filled the air, and the serrated, dark green leaves of a nearby tree rustled.
“Eww.” Aleck held his nose.
The pungent, acidic smell was familiar to Folly, and not offensive. Chicken’s head popped out of Folly’s pocket, sniffing the air. “Do you want to go join your friends?” Folly asked, scratching the skuttle under the chin.
She wasn’t surprised when Chicken disappeared back inside her pocket. Ever since the little critter had scurried up her leg, pursued by one of its larger relatives, Chicken hadn’t left Folly’s side. Secretly, she was rather happy that the shy little creature, who avoided all the biologists, had chosen her to be a friend.
“You should send her back out into the wild. It’s not right to keep a wild creature as a pet.” Aleck’s voice and words repeated what Ma had said often.
“I don’t keep her at all. She’s free to go whenever she wants. I can’t help it if she prefers me to her own kind. Sometimes, people just don’t fit where others try to shove them.”
Aleck stared at her, but didn’t say anything further. Folly was glad of his silence as they continued on.
Above her head ran a tangle of metal and plastic pipes with colourful cables twisted them. Fluorescent lights hung on chains at regular intervals. Several of them were lacking tubes, or hanging at odd angles. It was lucky they weren’t needed as much now as they had been in the first few years, when dust had blocked out the sun almost completely.
Faintly glowing lights in the stonework of the path lit their way, even when the lights above were missing or switched off to conserve electricity. Similar paths split off in different directions through the undergrowth, with little remnants of the painted bricks that had once helped people find their way through the maze. After living like this for twenty years, they were no longer needed.
As they neared the home Folly had lived in for eleve
n of those twenty years, the area became even more familiar. The memories though, were not happy ones. Echoes of being the odd one out, the sideways glances, the whispers, her awareness of Ma watching her, looking for any signs that she might be as mad as her mother, washed over her.
Aleck opened the door and stepped aside, waiting for her to enter, and even that polite gesture annoyed Folly. She made herself ignore it and stepped into the cheerful din. The twins, Ema and Kalie, practised a clapping rhyme in one corner, and there was a spirited game of cards at the dining room table. Kyle and Binny helped Ma cutting up vegetables at the sink.
“Tata…” A toddler’s chubby arms wrapped themselves around Folly’s shins, almost tripping her up.
She couldn’t help an involuntary smile as she bent down and scooped the child into her arms. “Hey, Trouble. What have you been up to lately?”
Issy stared up at her solemnly. “Me no trouble.”
Her twinkling eyes betrayed her.
“She tried to push a whole pineapple into the garbage disposal,” Ma said with a frown.
“A whole pineapple, hey?” Folly tickled her under the chin. “That must have been heavy.”
Issy’s face lit up. “It was, but I wifted it all by mwyself.”
“Stop encouraging her, Tahlia,” Ma scolded. “She’s old enough to know better.”
The name grated. But Folly was more concerned with the pride on Issy’s face evaporating. She knew the feeling well—that knowledge that no one else understood what you’d been trying to do, and that it had all suddenly gone wrong.
“Don’t worry. I can fix it. And Issy can help.”
Ma frowned, but for once, didn’t comment. Folly felt like she’d achieved a small victory as she lifted the flap and bent over the chute in the wall that mulched the waste before sending it under the house to the compost bin.
