“Beckett! Come on!”
Jillian yells down at me from the top of the cliff like I’m fooling around, making us late for a training session. At least I know she’s not dead. I pull myself up the rope, arms on fire, sweat slicking my hands inside their gloves. It took some time to get used to the gravity on this planet. For my feet to stop feeling like the weight bars in the exercise cube back on the ship. I don’t think I’m done getting used to it. Or the heat. It’s a long drop to the bottom of the cliff.
“Everything okay?” says a voice in my ear. It’s my father, Sean Rodriguez, eminent doctor of human anthropology, a man who right now is not having to scale this wall of rock. He’s only watching me scale it. Through my glasses. He can see what I see, hear what I hear. I wonder if he can hear me sweat.
“Fine,” I grunt.
“Does Jillian see anything up there?”
If Jill had found a lost city, I’m thinking she would’ve said so. Dad’s next words are amused.
“Use the safety harness and rest if you need to.”
He knows I won’t. We have equipment on the ship that makes all of this unnecessary, but the rules of protocol say no visible technology. Even the basics. And anyway, Jill climbed it. Jill, of course, weighs next to nothing no matter what the gravity is. I pull for all I’m worth.
Another five meters and I get a boot on a rock and push myself over the top. I roll away from the edge and lie there, panting while my muscles scream. I hear Dad chuckle. Jill peers down at me, blond hair sticking out in a spiky halo. She looks like she’s falling from the purple sky.
“Made it, huh?”
“I think you impressed her,” Dad says through the earpiece.
I wince. Jill can’t hear him, not unless she’s really close. Lately she likes to be really close, and lately my father likes to tease me about this. And only lately has it occurred to me that Jillian might have been brought on this mission for reasons other than her triple-digit intelligence and equally brilliant archaeologist parent. We could be on this planet for years, and out of one hundred and fifty team members, there’s no one else here under the age of thirty. I wonder if my parents know she was chosen for me. If they had any say in it. If Jillian did.
I really am stupid to have never thought of this before.
Jill, who I’m guessing has not been as dense as me in this area, holds out a hand. I take it, and let her haul me up.
“Here,” she says, “you’ve got dirt on the lenses.” She snatches the glasses off my face and gives them a scrub on the back of her jumpsuit while she kisses me. The idea of Jill plotting to have my babies means I enjoy this less than I should.
“Exhaustion looks good on you,” she whispers, before sliding the glasses back on my face.
It might be easy to make exhaustion look good when you’re the only eligible human in a galaxy.
“Beck,” my father is saying. I adjust the earpiece. He’s amused again, which is embarrassing. He’s also in a hurry. “We only have forty-eight hours before the sun sets, so stop fooling around and let me see where you are.”
I unlatch the harness rope and safety, straighten the lenses, and gaze around us, making a slow sweep of the clearing while Jillian goes back to documenting the finer details for our map. “Vegetation,” I tell him, confirming what can be seen on his screen at the base camp. “No visual on any life-forms … ”
We’re in a forest, as far as I can tell. The plants are all one kind, but in different sizes, new growth on finger-thick stalks all the way to massive trunks three and four meters around, weirdly pliable. Leaves flutter, pale yellow and as thin as a layer of skin, the tips darkening to deep purples and blues. But what I can’t describe to my father is the sense of space, a ceiling of sky too far away to touch, a vast, empty openness that until four days ago, I hadn’t known since I was sixteen. Wind moves through my sweaty hair, laced with a sharp, fresh smell that I think is life. I close my eyes, breathing air that hasn’t been breathed. And then I hear a short, clipped noise. A sound that is Jill holding in a scream. I spin around.
She’s exactly where I left her, eyes squeezed shut, cartographer in one stiff hand, and something like a beetle, hard-shelled, yellow as the leaves and as big as my fist, is crawling up the back of her leg. A long, pointed needle of a tongue darts out, probing, testing as it goes.
Correction, I think. I have a visual.
“Don’t move,” I tell her. I don’t think she was going to. Our jumpsuits are thin but weapons grade. Metal can’t pierce them and neither can this thing. Or I don’t think it can. The only life we’ve encountered so far on this planet is vegetation and what I choose to think of as insect, and so far none of it has been dangerous. It’s why Jill and I were allowed a scouting trip. But how can we really know what these things are, or what they’ll do? Carnivorous insects is one of the more gory theories about what happened to the lost colonists of Canaan. I pick up a piece of the long, peeling tree skin.
“Careful,” says my father.
I approach Jill slowly. Her breath is coming fast. I place the tree skin on the back of her leg, directly in the crawling beetle’s path, watch as it pauses, flashes its yellow tongue. It moves onto the waiting bark. I lift bark and beetle, and set them carefully in the leaf litter. The beetle probes, tests, takes a few awkward steps, and settles onto a fallen bloom. And then Jill’s boot comes down once, twice, crushing it. I straighten and step back. The noise makes me sick.
“Beck!” Dad’s voice is sharp in my ear. “That stone by Jillian’s foot,” he says. “Let’s get a close-up on that.”
I don’t look at Jill, or at the dead beetle’s twitching legs. I just reach past her for the rock. I turn it over in my hand, holding it up so Dad can see. The stone is blue gray, metallic with a sparkle, sheared off almost square on one side.
“Are those tool marks?” he asks.
“No.”
I know I sound mad, and I am mad. Just not at him. It was only a beetle, if that’s the right thing to call it. One of millions, probably. And killing it was stupid. Pointless. Jill turns away from me and the conversation she can hear only one side of, grabs the sanitizer spray from her pack, and douses herself with it.
“No,” I say again. “The break is natural. Not man-made.”