Chapter 12
Halley
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” I glare at the sand dunes. “I thought we’d left Lyd.”
“What gave you that impression?” Keelo asks, brushing by me and striding down the exit ramp.
I stay where I am, hovering by the external door, my heart sinking and a hand shielding my eyes from the last of the day’s sunlight. I thought we’d been traveling through outer space, and this entire time we must have still been inside the planet’s atmosphere.
Sand stretches to the horizon, not a single plant in sight.
At least there’s a homestead, set back fifty or so yards from where we’ve landed.
Made of some sort of sandstone, it’s almost the color as its surroundings, a pale, sickly yellow, distinguishable by the plume of smoke drifting lazily out of its chimney and the acres of wire fencing dividing the landscape around it into sandy paddocks.
They’ve clearly been designed to keep the herd of cattle-like animals within sight of the house—animals that look like a cross between a camel and a lizard, with spindly legs and even longer spindly necks, but with scales instead of fur.
What really catches my attention are the dead and dried animals that someone’s meticulously tied to the fence at intervals.
They’re this planet’s version of rodents, with long, hairless tails and pointed ears.
We used to catch them at Xile’s breaking into his food storage.
These ones are shriveled, more like husks than dead bodies, and they give me the creeps, staring at nothing with their glassy eyes and their feet shrunken into distorted claw shapes.
I shiver despite the heat.
I watch Keelo approach the single-story house, job flyer in hand.
If he’s disconcerted by the display of mummified corpses, he doesn’t show it.
Rather, he raises a hand in greeting when the front door is opened by a Ves’os—blue skin, horns, a serious expression, as if it’s not enough for his mouth to be frowning, but his entire face feels the need to join in.
A moment later both he and Keelo go inside, Keelo shucking his boots and dumping them on the dusty verandah.
I wonder how long it takes for news from the market to reach these farming outposts. Would this farmer be so happy to offer Keelo and Eot a job if he knew about their fight with the security goons yesterday afternoon?
Then again, it’s not like there’s a line of wannabe cowboys vying for his attention. I can’t see a single other building. And our isolation is emphasized when the sun sinks, and everything but the house’s windows is thrown into darkness.
I lie down, my head on the downward slope of the ramp, and hunt for the constellations whose names I learned before I could properly talk, whose stories Mom would recite to me each night of my childhood as I fell asleep.
We’d leave the curtain of my bedroom window open so that we could see outside, long after the sun had set.
That view had nothing on this one. The sight of so many stars, unaffected by light pollution, is breathtaking. Every astronomer’s greatest dream. And I study the sky as I would study a weather map, hunting for familiar landmarks.
I make educated guesses about which stars are actually planets and which are satellites.
I might, if I were being particularly stubborn, have managed to convince myself a cluster of four is the Southern Cross.
But no matter how long I search, I can’t see a single star I recognize—not from this direction, in these configurations.
I’m in a whole new galaxy. So incredibly far from Earth. That aliens have the technology to travel such vast distances is mind-blowing. Unbelievable!
Except, of course, I believe it. Hard not to when faced with the undeniable facts of camels that aren’t really camels and of two men fusing their flesh together to create one giant alien.
I jump as Keelo’s head comes into view, obstructing the night sky.
“I left the door open hoping you’d leave,” he says, standing on the ramp, arms crossed over his naked chest, and clearly waiting for me to move out of his way.
“You can’t really have expected me to run off into the sunset.” I sit upright, and all the blood seems to rush out of my head. “It’s worse here than back at the market, and I’ve been wanting to get away from there since I first arrived.”
Not strictly true. Nobody here expects me to work eighteen-hour days serving cold drinks to sweaty, slimy, handsy, mouthy customers.
And I’d much rather sleep under the stars than under Xile’s stall.
So, really, this is much better, but I don’t say that to Keelo, not wanting him getting ideas I’ll be easy to chase away.
He steps over me, and I hurry to follow.
“How old, exactly, is Rin?” Rin, who’s locked herself in her bedroom since we landed and refused to let anyone in, even when I pretended I wanted another shower.
“She doesn’t seem particularly happy, and I was thinking maybe I could get to know her a bit, find out what’s wrong—”
“Nothing’s wrong.” Keelo stops mid-stride and turns to face me. “Rin isn’t your concern.”
I’m unexpectedly reminded of how much taller he is than me, his shoulders wide enough that they brush both sides of the corridor at once.
He’s shaved his hair on the sides of his head but left the center section long.
It’s pulled back into a messy bun, knotted and tangled as if he did his hair one time and promptly forgot about it.
“I didn’t mean something was wrong wrong,” I correct, backtracking from what he’d clearly taken as an insult. My intention had been to sound helpful, ingratiating. Necessary.
“I just meant something’s, you know…not right,” I finish lamely.
“And you’ve got a lot of experience with younglings?” he asks, a sneer in his voice.
Absolutely none. “Oh, yes, tons. I’m basically a professional. I could tutor Rin—” I rush to follow as he strides away, disappearing for a second when he turns a corner, his legs considerably longer than mine.
“I’ve always been good at math,” I call. It comes from having studied post-grad meteorology. I mightn’t be an alien expert like my mom, but I sure know a lot about cloud formations. “Math has got to be important when you’re navigating through the stars.”
“You don’t have calculators on your birth planet?” Eot asks as I stumble into the cockpit, close on Keelo’s heels.
“What? Yes, we do. I could teach Rin to use a calculator, is what I’m saying.”
“Our job starts tomorrow,” says Keelo to Eot, ignoring me. “They’ve had problems with a trikon eating their livestock. We’re to hunt it down and eliminate it. Payment on completion of the assignment.”
“Sure,” Eot agrees.
“There was a tracker in one of the bimor it ate, which’ll make it easy to locate. The reading is for east of here. The farmer has agreed to lend us three of his mounts and any saddles we might need. It shouldn’t take us more than…three days, I think.”
“Rin’s not going to enjoy that,” says Eot.
“She’ll survive.”
“I’m sorry,” I interrupt, very much not sorry, “but you’re planning on taking Rin on a three-day hike through the desert while you go hunting?
” I mightn’t know much about kids, but I do know that a desert is a dangerous place.
Every Australian grows up being told the risks that come with venturing into the outback underprepared.
And I’ve seen what the sand does to skin on this planet—sucks all the moisture out until you’re as dead as one of the mummified rodents pinned to the fence outside.
“She’s safest with us.” Keelo turns his golden eyes onto me. “And if you want to be helpful, you should be the one to tell her.”
“So she can hate me instead of hating you? No, thanks. I’m her math teacher, not her dad. That’s your job.”
Tension ignites in the cabin.
Keelo stiffens. Eot winces. Both of them look away from me.
Okay, so they’re not Rin’s dads? Dread is heavy in my stomach, and for a heartbeat it’s like I’ve traveled back in time to another spaceship, the one that stole me from Earth. I woke caged behind thick bars and so fucking confused.
I lick dry lips.
“Rin is yours?” I glance between them, trying to catch a glimpse of a distinguishing feature either one shares with Rin.
They look similar to each other. But now I’m really thinking about it…
neither of them shares Rin’s petite nose, her bronze-colored eyes, the oval shape of her face.
Her ears are different, too—her lobes a fraction longer, I think, than Keelo’s or Eot’s ears.
“Yes, she’s ours,” Keelo practically growls, slamming a hand on the console.
So much for making myself indispensable.
“I didn’t mean to upset anyone,” I say to Eot, who, in the short time I’ve been aboard, has always been the calmer of the two. The more relaxed.
It comes as a surprise then when he stands and draws himself up to his full height. He’s as massive as Keelo, and his expression is nearly as stormy.
“We mightn’t be Rin’s biological family,” he says. “But she’s ours, and you’d do well to remember that.”