“What’s wrong with you?” I demanded, and I didn’t even know whom I was asking.
They didn’t answer except by glaring. I kept hold of Ethan, because he leaned into me as if looking for some stability. Tenzig, however, jerked away from Boris. This sent him bouncing a couple of steps, because he was still too angry to focus on keeping stable.
He jabbed his finger at Ethan, at all of us. “You screwed up big. Just watch. I’ll prove it to you.” He marched out of the common space to his room, taking big bounding steps. He had to grab the doorway to stop himself from careening. I bit my lip to keep from laughing, because it wasn’t all that funny in the end.
No one said anything, no one explained, so I looked at Charles, who was standing out of the way and looking thoughtful. “What?” I asked him, in shorthand.
“Tenzig asked what we were talking about,” he said. “We told him.”
“And now he’s going to tell Stanton that we’re on to her?”
“Likely she has surveillance in the room and has been listening to everything already,” Charles said. As if that didn’t make my stomach twist into knots. The others glanced around, suspicious and uncertain.
“It doesn’t change anything,” Ethan said, wiping his mouth. Half of his lip was swelling from where Tenzig has smacked it.
“He’s right,” George added. “If Stanton’s listening to us now, she’s been listening to us all along. There’s nothing we can do about it, and it doesn’t change anything. We just stick together and keep a watch out.”
The half dozen of us standing here were the ones who were in on it, who’d been with us from the start because of the accidents. We had a team. We had people watching our backs. I felt better.
I was still holding on to Ethan, who rested his hand on mine. “You can let go now, Polly.” His swollen lips smiled. I hesitated, then brushed off his sleeve. Realized everyone was watching and took a step back.
“You should probably get a cold pack on that,” I said, reaching for his lip before pulling away.
“Yeah. I’ll do that.”
Somehow, the idea of Stanton listening in on us made us not want to talk anymore.
“We should get some sleep,” Angelyn said finally, and the party broke up. Ladhi took my arm and pulled me toward our room. I took another glance at Charles. He nodded at me, and I wasn’t sure what he was trying to say. Good work, maybe? Or keep watch, stay close. Or maybe both. I was suddenly exhausted.
Before going to sleep I finished my report on the shuttle flight. In it, I talked about how practical interplanetary space travel was what separated us from other forms of life.
But not by very much.
23
We had two more days of orientation and classwork on planetary geology. Dirt and rocks. Meteors hurtling from space and crater formation. The whole time, we waited for something to go wrong, and nothing did, except everyone getting more and more anxious. Tenzig shoved a shoulder or elbow into Ethan whenever he could. By accident, of course. It got so that Ladhi, Angelyn, and I made sure to stand nearby to run interference by stepping into his path when Tenzig got close. Ethan must have enjoyed being surrounded by girls. But nobody was smiling much.
Tenzig tried going after Charles instead. The first time he did it, moving to the other side of the room and “accidentally” bumping into Charles, shoulder to shoulder, Tenzig started to say something surly about Charles watching where he was going. But Charles just stared at him—a cold, rocky stare, expressionless. It sent a chill down my back, and I was standing three meters away. Tenzig blinked a moment and stumbled back, not saying anything else. He left Charles alone. A rumor got back to me later that day, through George and Angelyn: Tenzig saying that Charles was psychotic, that he was going to murder us all in our sleep if we weren’t careful.
“Well, that’s stupid,” I said when I heard it. “Charles wouldn’t do that. I mean, he could. If he really wanted to kill everyone in their sleep, he’d find a way to poison the air supply. Or maybe cut the air off entirely. Or blow up the whole colony. But Charles is more of a poison-the-air-supply kind of guy rather than a blow-things-up guy, you know?”
They stared at me, horrified, and I squeezed my lips shut.
“Polly, don’t ever say that to anyone else,” George said, letting out a nervous breath.
Angelyn said, “He wouldn’t really do that, would he? Want to kill everyone?”
I glared. “No! He’s totally normal!”
They looked back at me with what I thought was more skepticism than was entirely necessary.
* * *
On the third day of our Moon visit, we were scheduled to take a field trip to the Sea of Tranquillity. Part geology workshop, part history lesson. Gather rocks for later analysis, admire Neil Armstrong’s first footprint under its protective shield. We’d make the trip in one of the small shuttles used to travel between the Moon’s various bases. Not an M-drive vessel, but I was still going to find a way to sit in the cabin and watch. Mostly these were repurposed orbital shuttles, and in a pinch most of them could rocket their way to the stations in Earth orbit. There was some big evacuation plan, like if the power and life support went out on all the lunar colonies at once, officials wanted to make sure everybody could get off, so they kept a certain number of working shuttles around at all times. Seemed like overkill to me—what was the likelihood of all the life support going out at once? It probably seemed strange because we didn’t have anything like that kind of plan on Mars. If we had to evacuate everyone on the planet—well, we just couldn’t, and that was that. Made it feel more permanent, though. Did the lunar colonies ever really feel permanent if you could see the whole Earth, close enough to get to in a reasonable amount of time without an M-drive?
There I was, getting homesick again.
Along the corridor to the shuttle-boarding platform, Charles hung back. I hung back with him. We hadn’t had much of a chance to talk after the fight in the common area. He didn’t seem any more inclined to talk now.