Chapter 8 CLEO
CLEO
AS WE SNEAK ALONG the hallways like a couple of criminals – which I guess we are, only one of us does it in fancy, corporate ways – it’s so quiet I can hear the machinery of the dome working.
Usually the fans that circulate our air are drowned out by the sounds of conversation and footsteps and daily life.
‘Maybe they’ll see a heat signature up on Orbital,’ Hunter whispers. ‘Realize all the plant’s still working, and the station’s not shut down?’
‘We’re buried underground,’ I point out softly, keeping the duh out of my tone. ‘There’s tons of dirt and rock shielding us.’
I’ve heard GravesUP has their radiation shielding built into their compound walls – there are materials that’ll do that for you – but the UN’s always scrambling for budget, and underground is cheaper, and lasts longer.
You just don’t get many windows. If Hunter Graves wanted someone to monitor this place properly from Orbital, his family shouldn’t have led the charge to screw the UN on funding.
‘Right, I knew that,’ Hunter mutters. ‘Underground. Okay, keep thinking.’
His lordship is just a step behind me, in a T-shirt that says RED STAR EXPLORATION CONFERENCE 2067 on it, stolen from whoever’s quarters we just used.
At least it covers him from waist to neck, and shields me from distraction.
As for the neck-up beauty, I’m going to ignore it.
I have twice as much reason as him to stay focused.
He just has to survive this. I have to live through it and convince him to help get me off this base despite the fact that I’m everything that’s wrong with the world.
Trauma bonds people, right? And this is for sure traumatic. The best I can do is stay on his good-ish side and hope – assuming we’re alive seven hours from now – that this bond carries him through however he feels when he finds out how I got here.
I’m not sure it’ll really make a difference that I didn’t visibly roll my eyes at him when he forgot not everybody gets to be aboveground, but it’s worth a try.
He clearly thinks I’m helpless and naive and that he needs to rescue me.
If he wants to feel like he’s saving the day, that’s fine. Whatever.
We make our way through silent corridors, keeping our footsteps light.
It’s been eight months since I saw Sabrina, or any of the Gramercy crew.
Three months here at Pax, four months crammed into the cargo hold of a freighter, and before that, one month hiding out in a basement in Jerhattan, hyperventilating about the fact that my mother left town and tagged me with all her debts on the way out.
Which, people, is why I don’t know a lot about bonding.
Sabrina won’t care that I owe her old bosses money. Will she? That can’t be Gramercy she’s with now – she’s leveled up. Then again, it won’t matter if she cares. She’ll have to wipe me out if she sees me, as a witness to whatever they’re doing here.
Or, a tiny voice whispers in the back of my mind, maybe they’d take on an extra pair of hands? She knows you. She knows you get things done. That could be a way out of here.
Three damn months here, trapped by the UN’s meticulous recordkeeping. Hunter Graves, of all people, is the first person I’ve had an extended conversation with in all that time. That’s probably what they mean when they say to be careful what you wish for. I wasn’t that lonely.
I thought the hard part of my Mars trip would be blackmailing my way onto the freighter, or forcing my contact to hold his nerve long enough to get me down on his transport. I never figured this would be where it came unglued – that I’d end up trapped at my first port of call.
It feels like I’m jumping from lily pad to lily pad, watching each of them sink beneath the water behind me, with no idea what’s ahead. Safe shores, or a dead end?
If I can just get to a bigger station – GravesUP has over twenty thousand people now, and there are others catching up fast – then I can find the local underworld, and blend in, get back to the kind of life I know how to live, hustle to hustle.
Or even – though I can hardly whisper this to myself, even in the secrecy of my own mind – stop hustling? Just … get a job? Live?
Revealing myself to Sabrina would be a high-stakes move.
She might just shoot me to eliminate a complication, and even if she didn’t, it would push that whispered part of my dream farther away.
And sure, it’s probably a foolish, impossible thing to even let myself think.
But I can’t help dreaming of it anyway. This is a place where I could be something – a place where I could stop running, if only they’d let me in.
I should save turning to Sabrina for when I run out of options. And for now, I should focus on the present moment – not spiral from plan to plan, from Hunter to Sabrina and back again. Easier said than done, though.
Hunter moves up to walk beside me, and I catch him an instant before he strolls into an intersection. I grab at his arm and yank him back, then edge forward to take a look around the corner carefully.
Maybe Sabrina is a better bet than this boy.
As I get a peek at the hallway we’re intersecting with, I freeze. Two new mercenaries are striding toward us. They don’t look wary – why would they be? – but they have guns at their hips.
I use my grip on Hunter to drag him backward, and at least he doesn’t resist. I look around wildly for somewhere to hide in the handful of seconds we’ve got before they turn the corner.
There’s a door two steps back, and I yank it open and step into a storage closet, pulling Hunter after me. He pulls the door closed after him, and we both stand perfectly still.
We’re nose to nose, bodies pressed together. He’s twisting his arm around to keep the door from flying open, which only pushes him closer to me. I can feel every tiny shift, feel his muscles contract as he keeps his grip on the edge of the door.
I try to keep my breathing shallow, so I don’t press against him any more than I have to, but the warmth of his skin bleeds through our thin shirts as his eyes meet mine.
His face is cut in half by the sliver of light that comes through the crack in the doorjamb, and I take in the hint of stubble at his jaw, the smooth lines of his cheekbones. I thought his eyes were all green, but now I can see they’re flecked with a golden brown.
Footsteps pass us by, and I catch a snatch of conversation. ‘Oh, it’ll be structural. A blast that big? Guaranteed.’
And then they’re receding. We both let out a soft breath, but that only presses us closer together. Hunter doesn’t move yet, but keeps listening, head tilted. Maybe a minute later, he eases the door open a touch and turns his head to press an eye to the gap.
We slip out silently, and we move a lot more carefully after that.
‘Only a few more blocks over,’ I whisper, barely audible, and he nods.
We’re following the ring corridor, a long hallway that circles the base.
The ceiling is a curved dome cut into the dirt and rock, and lights are fixed every ten meters or so, powered by the huge solar arrays above us.
They can’t be doing much business in the middle of a dust storm, but the lights are bright enough for now.
I don’t breathe properly until I see the door marked GREENHOUSE.
Warm, damp air greets us as we make our way inside.
Around us, sunlamps hang from the ceiling, and plants burst from their shelves, filling every available centimeter of space. The air itself is practically green, and everything’s so alive, brushing my sleeves as I pass by, as if each and every leaf wants to say hi.
I haven’t been in here since I arrived – the gardening crew is always on hand – and unexpected tears prickle my eyes. Something in my body unclenches at the sight of the greenery.
This is the only place inside the settlement where chaos reigns. You can’t plan for exactly how plants will grow, after all. The greenhouse breaks the rules when nothing else can.
When I was maybe five or six, I found a little green shoot growing through a crack in the concrete by our front door. It was the first plant I’d ever seen outside the ones in glass cases in shopping malls, all carefully pruned and controlled.
This little guy was just pushing up a green stalk and three tiny leaves, and it seemed like magic. I got a plastic quickmeal pack and cut it up so I could build a little fort around it, and dripped water onto it each morning.
It lasted until it was stupid enough to try to grow a flower. Then someone pulled it out by the roots and took it for themself. I don’t really know what else I was expecting.
‘That’s the way the world goes,’ my mother told me.
When I got older, I got those green shoots and that purple flower tattooed up my arms, as a reminder that there’s always a way to survive, even if you have to force yourself through a crack in what seems like concrete.
I turned those little green shoots into a whole plant on my body, big and strong.
Here on Mars, this huge room bursting with rows of greenery feels more like another world than the red planet outside.
Originally, the plants here on Mars were for the food and O2 recyc programs, but a lot of people come to the greenhouse just for the green. Turns out that’s important to humans, even on the red planet. Maybe more so here than anywhere.
I don’t know what Hunter makes of it – I can’t imagine what kinds of gardens they have at the GravesUP compound, or at his home on Earth, but I bet they’re spectacular. This is pretty nice too, though.
We make our way along the path until we find a table full of green shoots in little containers, and tools for digging and so on, abandoned mid-task.
Someone was potting seedlings, and left them behind when the alarm went off, along with a jacket that tells me that person was about my size, and according to their name patch, called ASH HOUSE.
I claim the jacket, tucking it under my arm, and check out the rest of their belongings.
‘Are those cookies?’ Hunter murmurs, breaking the silence that’s been strung between us since we left the closet.
He sounds so hopeful. Making him fit into the villainous shape I have pre-cut for him is harder than I’d have thought.
‘Put them in your bag,’ I say, passing them over.
He’s still carrying the backpack he came down from the shuttle with.
He stows them, and we move deeper into our sanctuary, crossing a small footbridge over a pool of water.
Silvery fish with trailing fanlike fins glide by soundlessly beneath us, with no idea they’re on another planet.
‘Tilapia,’ Hunter murmurs. And then, just as I’m trying the word out in my mouth, thinking it flows like their trailing fins: ‘They’re a great source of protein, and it helps that they reproduce. Also, back when the trip out used to be longer, the crew found it really soothing to look at them.’
‘Even though they were going to eat them?’
‘Humans are complicated. It was my aunt who brought the first fish to Mars, you know.’
How excellent for your aunt, Hunter Graves. My aunt worked in one of your family’s factories, making personal transport vehicles she couldn’t afford to drive.
It’s on the far side of the bridge that I see what I was really looking for – a rack of half a dozen EVA pressure suits hanging on pegs.
The suits need to be tight enough to stop your body exploding all over the place in the lower pressure outside the habs.
(I kid, I kid. You wouldn’t explode. You’d just bleed from your eyes and then die, relax.) The one I tried to cram Hunter into is just too small, though.
I go for the largest one, holding it up against him. Thank you, Finn Crowhurst, for leaving your suit behind.
‘You want me to put it on now?’ Hunter asks, grimacing. ‘It’s like running around in a wetsuit.’
‘You’re complaining about a piece of lifesaving equipment?
’ There’s more edge than I intended in my voice – though seriously, is he?
I make a mental note that next time I think he’s hot, all I need to do is get him to open his mouth and speak.
‘You don’t think there’s an outside chance we might need these? ’
With a put-upon sigh, he starts peeling out of his too-small suit, and great, now I have Hunter Graves, billionaire and most eligible guy in the galaxy, back in his underwear. Again.
I turn around and study a frame where the locals are growing cherry tomatoes, picking one and popping it into my mouth.
I press my teeth against it for a moment, feeling the pressure, and then it breaks open, and I nearly moan.
I haven’t tasted a tomato in years. Forget the boy in his underwear. I’ll take food every time.
‘Uh, you okay there?’ Hunter asks from behind me, and I swallow my mouthful and clear my throat. Maybe I actually did moan.
‘I’m fine. You can just tie your suit around your waist, I think we should be safe here for a minute. Whatever they’re after, it’s probably not in a flower bed.’
‘I didn’t like the way that guy in the hallway was talking about structural damage,’ he says, and I hear my own stress in his voice.
‘Me neither.’ I close my eyes for a moment, desperately wishing I weren’t going to say what I’m about to say. ‘And I don’t want to be a downer, but …’
‘Yeah. I don’t have a long list of reasons why he’d have been talking about blasting anything.’
‘Right? In fact, I have deeply worrying ideas about why that was coming up in conversation.’
He speaks quietly. ‘I think we have to ask whether they’re going to destroy the place on their way out.
Or at least damage it very badly. It’s the easiest way to hide that they were ever here, once they’ve got whatever they came for.
Blow up all the systems and expose everything to vacuum.
Who’d even be looking for evidence, when it seems obvious what went wrong? ’
I nod slowly. I know people like this, and it’s what any of them would do.
‘Yeah.’ I swallow hard. ‘And if we’re going to figure out what their plan is – let alone how to survive it – then we can’t just hunker down and hide and wait for them to leave. We need to chase information. And fast.’