Chapter 33 - Mars
The third day at the Harlow Mine has my body feeling like I’ve put in a full life’s worth of hard labor even with the sped up healing we were gifted with.
We work from the minute the bay lights come on until Mrs. Cowen threatens us with her favorite serving spoon to go to bed.
Even then Gage usually goes back out to the pen for one more pass.
Scaffolding, soil bags, water lines to fill the trough and RV tanks, ash sweeping, feed hauling.
Nobody complains about any of it, because being this tired means you fall into bed too empty to think about all we’ve lost, and that’s a relief for me.
Penny, Luna’s dog, doesn't share our work ethic. She spends her mornings trotting the length of the equipment bay with a strip of plastic she stole from somewhere, daring anyone to chase her for it. Every time she comes back in through the ice-covered corridor to do her business, she comes back covered in manure and rubs it out of that golden coat in whatever spot will cause the most swearing. This morning she chose the legs of Kara’s pants.
I wouldn’t want to get on her bad side after seeing her turn the floor to ice under Penny’s paws making the dog slip and slide like a baby deer with new legs.
Reid laughed so hard he almost fell over at whatever Penny filled his head with.
I thought Kara was going to turn him into a Reid-cicle after that.
The dog might be the only one of us handling the end of the world like it’s one big fun filled adventure.
I'm moving scaffold planks to the back wall when Luna crosses the bay with a water jug for the racks, and all the guys turns toward her like she’s the sun.
Torrin angles his body her way from where he's filling planters with soil.
Reid says something that makes her laugh and Jules lifts two fingers off the seed packets his sorting in a lazy salute that still manages to be flirting.
But when she passes Gage, her smile drops off her face. He doesn't look up from the frame he's bolting and she doesn't slow down. The two of them are so careful not to see each other that it becomes its own kind of staring, and everybody pretends not to notice, which means everybody notices.
Whatever their fight was about, neither one of them has recovered from it.
I keep hauling planks. It's not my crack to fix, and God knows I'm the last man qualified to lecture anyone on how to stop hurting Luna Bolton.
Torrin found me on the fifth wheel steps last night. He sat down beside me, handed me one of the beers that came back from town, and talked to me about the thing I'd been gnawing on since I heard that fight out at the animal pen.
"You heard most of it anyway. So here it is straight.
Jules thinks the four of us should stop acting territorial and just love her, all of us, whatever shape that ends up taking.
Reid's in. Jules is obviously in and so am I.
" He picked at the label on his bottle. "Gage is fighting it, which you saw.
And nobody has asked her yet, which she pointed out herself at full volume yesterday, so there's that to answer for. "
I asked him the only question I had. "And where does that leave me?"
"Wherever you and she decide it does, mate." He clinked his bottle against mine and stood up. "That part is not ours to vote on."
I've been thinking on it ever since, through every plank and bolt and bag of soil.
Growing up in foster care teaches you early on that nothing is ever really yours, not a bed, not a coat, not a home. Maybe that’s part of why I left. Maybe my fucked-up head felt like she wasn’t really mine to keep. Maybe she isn’t mine, maybe she always was "ours".
Jules's voice keeps replaying in my head from the pen, every word he threw at Gage. We all love her. She loves all of us, every one of us. The only way anybody wins is if she's happy. Then the part I can't shake. Too small minded and too selfish to give her what she actually needs.
He was yelling at Gage that night, but the words might as well have been aimed at me.
I run the scenario, over and over, while my hands stack planks.
Could I stand in a kitchen and watch Torrin kiss her good morning?
Could I sleep down the hall knowing whose bed she's in, and pass the man his coffee the next day and not want to punch him?
Could I be one door in a hallway of doors she opens whenever she wants?
Two weeks ago, the answer would have been no before the question was even finished being asked.
Now I keep asking myself if some of her is better than none of her at all.
I lived the none-of-her version for two years and it nearly hollowed me out.
If the price of being with her, having that love with her again, is watching other men love her too, then the price is one I think I’m willing to pay… if she’d let me.
The bigger question is the one Torrin left sitting on the steps between us.
Is this even what she wants? Sure, she loves all of them, I’ve seen that with my own eyes, and a part of her might even love me a little bit, but is being with all of them something she can do?
And whether she does or doesn’t, what right do I have to say anything at all?
I walked away and they stayed. Four men held her through the worst grief of her life while I was busy drowning in mine.
Now I want to show up two years late and cast a vote on how she gets loved?
There's a word for that and it isn't love.
Mrs. Cowen calls us for lunch at noon by banging her spoon on a stock pot, which is not necessary and entirely for her own enjoyment.
Our people eat near the motorhome while Tanner's crew takes the pallet stack by the racks, close enough that sound carries but far enough to make the line clear between our two groups. We work side by side all day, pretty well for the most part, but there’s still a divide between the two groups that might end up causing friction if it’s not erased soon. I sit somewhere between the two groups.
Cody normally drifts between the two camps because he doesn't fully belong to either one. Sometimes he hangs out with Trent who still can’t stop looking Briar’s way wherever they’re near each other.
Today he’s sitting over on the crew side with his sandwich, and his young open face looks like he’s working up to something.
Penny follows him over and sits at his boots, which is her way of taxing anyone soft enough to pay.
He hands down a corner of his lunch before he even starts talking. The kid's a mark and the dog knows it.
"Tanner, can I tell you something?" He wipes his hands on his jeans. "Something Luna told me. About Delford, and where everybody might be."
I'm close enough to hear all of it. The kid lays out everything Gage and I had heard from the creatures that we spoke to so Luna must have shared it with him.
The other world, the ripple going both directions, their side taking pieces of ours while ours took pieces of theirs.
He tells them their families might be standing in the same town in a different world, alive and maybe even reachable someday.
His voice shakes when he talks about finding his twin sister.
The men go quiet, staring at him with almost suspicion where you’d think there’d be hope instead. It almost looks closer to calculating.
Tanner sets his sandwich down and leans over the table. "Say that last part again." He says with a hint of suspicion in his tone. "The part about reaching them."
"She said maybe. Once people figure out how the skills or magic work and what actually happened." The kid's whole face is lit up. "She said maybe there's even a way to bring them back."
"Her and her light trick would know, I guess." That's the wiry one, Dwight or Dewey, I've never cared enough to keep it straight. He leans forward on the table with his elbows. "Since her kind is the reason the door opened in the first place and we lost all our families."
"That's not what she said." Cody's protest comes out at half volume.
"Naw, I bet it's not." The man grins around his food, and the grin turns mean.
"You know what else I heard, though? Little Miss Sunshine over there keeps all four of those boys on rotation.
All of them chasing her skirts, isn't that what she told you?
" He whistles low. "Whore math, kid. Dress it up in sunshine all you want.
If it walks like a whore and acts like a whore… "
"She's not like that." Cody says it to the table, unable to look at any of them.
Then he goes quiet, and he stays quiet, and that silence tells me everything about the kid and his character.
I already know enough about that mother fucker running his mouth that I'm tossing aside my lunch and across the distance in seconds.
"Stand up." I order harshly, and the table goes silent and tense as they look up at me. "Say it again standing up, so I can hear you better."
The wiry one looks up at me and the grin dies on his face.
I reach for the dark out of habit, the way I have since they first showed up, and I wait for it to come up around my boots but the concrete under me stays bare.
There's no buzz behind my ribs and no cold coming up through my boots. My heart slams into my throat while I stand there as nothing but a guy in a dusty shirt with his fists ready. What the hell? It’s like the other day with the boulder.
I reach for it again and the floor stays empty.
So be it, then. I got through most of this life defending and fighting without magic.
I can easily take on this fucker without it.
"I'm waiting." I take one more step in, close enough that he has to tip his head back. "You've got a lot of shit talk for a man who needed to be given a home to survive in."