Chapter 10
10
Over the next three days, we fall into a routine. We wake up, have breakfast, and then venture into the Planet’s untamed wilderness. We never go far — we’re only able to travel at walking speed, after all. But once we make our assessments, in time, more people will come, and more, until the entire planet is mapped out and categorized: Habitable, Uninhabitable, Other. For three whole days, we carefully avoid the topic of my mom. For three whole days, Julian doesn’t piss me off.
It’s almost like the Planet’s beauty makes us softer, soothes us. It’s difficult to be irritated, I find, when I’m kilometers deep in a sea of grass, the soil at my feet, both my palms pressed to the bark of a tree. It’s difficult to think about my mom’s walkie when I’m dipping my bare feet in ice-cold glacier runoff, gasping at the sensation, screaming when Darcie splashes me and runs off, laughing.
Darcie’s darkness dissipates over those three days. I see it in the way she smiles at the grass coiling around her fingers. I see it in the way she breathes, watching a flock of birds make their way toward the distant snow-capped peaks.
The days are sweet, quiet. We laugh, sitting in the grass, which is so tall it forms a sort of sphere around us, shading us from the sun. She teases me about Ben. I act embarrassed. But out here, under the sky, with growing things all around us, I can’t be angry. It’s almost impossible. It’s all too new, and radiant, and real.
Even Julian and Ben seem to be finding common ground. Every morning they practice with the gun, and every morning Ben refuses to let Julian carry it into the field. They return from their ventures in the forest, joking and laughing.
Ben and I don’t spend much time together, not one-on-one. He’s probably heard the others making little comments, seen the way Darcie shoots me knowing smiles when we’re together. And it’s easier to avoid him, to focus on the work, on studying plant cells under a microscope. It’s easier to just pretend I don’t feel a sharp, wanting pang in the middle of my chest whenever he looks at me.
It’s okay, though. The Planet is why I’m here. She is the reason I studied botany, why I insisted this mission go forward, why I signed up for a spot. We could make all this work. This could be the one. Maybe, I think, this is humanity’s salvation.
I don’t think about my mother until I’m in my cot, eyes closed against the night. I try not to think about Andrews, or what I saw in my mother’s eyes when she spoke of her lover. But Andrews comes to me anyway, in my dreams. And in those raw, miserable moments, retching over the edge of my cot, cold sweat soaking my sheets, I wonder if this isn’t what’s real after all.