“It might not be so bad. It might even be interesting.”
“There’s got to be a way we can get out of it.”
We walked a few steps, and I thought he was thinking, coming up with a plan to get out of it. I was depending on him coming up with a plan.
“I don’t think I want to get out of it,” he said, and my heart sank.
“Charles—”
“It’s only a few years. And you’ll get into a piloting program afterward. Why are you arguing?”
I was arguing because my world had been turned upside down and shaken in a way it never had before, and I didn’t much like it.
* * *
Two weeks at home before I had to leave for years. Years. Nobody left Mars. People cam
e to Mars, because it was better, for the jobs and the wide-open spaces and the chance to be part of something new and great like the colonies. That was why our grandparents had come here. Mom was one of the first of the new generation born on Mars, and Charles and I were the second. Mars wasn’t a frontier anymore, it was home. People came here with the expectation that they would never leave. And why would they? Going back and forth was hard enough—expensive enough—that you couldn’t just pop in for a visit. If you came, if you left, it was for years, and that was that.
But people did leave, because a ship departed for Earth every two months. Mom must have known about this for a while to book me and Charles far enough in advance. She didn’t tell us about it because she knew we’d try to dodge. Or, I would try to dodge. She didn’t want to spend months arguing with me.
I lay on the grassy lawn in the middle of the colony’s main atrium. Partially sunk underground, a lensed dome let in and amplified the sun, feeding the lush plants, trees, flowers, and shrubs. The light above me was a filtered, golden glow, and beyond it lay pink sky. I wanted to memorize the scene.
My best friend, Beau, lay beside me. We held hands. I didn’t want to ever let go. I’d told him the news, and he’d taken it like Charles had—matter-of-fact, maybe even curious. “You’ll get to see the ship. Aren’t you even excited about that?” I was, but after all the carrying on I’d done, I wouldn’t admit that. The ship would be carrying me away from home, which put a damper on the whole experience.
“What if I pretended to be sick? If they think I have a cold or the flu or something they won’t let me on the ship.”
“They’ll test to see what you have and find out you don’t have anything.”
“I could catch something for real. There’s got to be some virus culture in the med lab.”
He glanced at me. “You try that, you’ll catch something worse than a cold.”
He was right. The lab mostly had cultures of bacteria collected from under the polar ice caps—Martian microfauna. It probably wouldn’t do anything to me. Or it’d kill me outright.
I sighed. “I’m supposed to want to go. Mom keeps telling me what a great opportunity this is. I think she’s just trying to get rid of me.”
“Then maybe you should look at it that way—you won’t have your mother looking over your shoulder every minute of the day anymore.”
I had to smile at that. Communications between Earth and Mars had a ten- to twenty-minute time lag. She’d never be able to interrogate me like she did here. She’d still keep an eye on me, sure, but the news she got would always be at least ten minutes old. That was something.
“Yeah, but she’ll just make Charles keep an eye on me.”
Beau reflexively looked around, an instinctive check to see if Charles was eavesdropping. I couldn’t have said whether my brother was or wasn’t. I couldn’t do anything about it one way or another—if I caught him at one trick, he’d find another—so I let it go. But Beau hadn’t grown up with him, so he wasn’t used to it. After a moment, he settled back down.
“Your brother’s kind of weird.”
“He’s just Charles,” I said.
We stayed silent for a long moment. A vent came on, and the leaves on the tallest tree fluttered. I listened to Beau breathe, soft and steady.
“I’m going to miss you,” he said.
I looked at him, tears stinging my eyes. I didn’t know what to say or do, so I rolled over, put my arm around him, and rested my head on his chest. He put his arms around me, and we stayed like that until we had to go home for supper.
2
My bunk on the Lilia Litviak, about half a meter wide and two meters long, wasn’t too small for sleeping, but it was too small for just about anything else—like lying back to stare at the ceiling and feel sorry for myself. There was another bunk just like it underneath, which belonged to Charles. They folded up during the day when we were moving around the cabin. Mine was supposed to be folded up now, in fact, but I was lying here instead.