----------------------------------------

Brunning means brown. Literally. The place is naturally brown. So my father called it brown.

Chalk one up for my father’s originality.

We called the geographic anomaly that is Brunning a valley, but it’s more like a canyon on account of it’s steep walls. A canyon with a really wide base at parts. My father speculated that a massive underground aquifer might have collapsed, and in that sense Brunning could be a sinkhole. Personally, sinkhole seemed a more apt description to describe our little dry and dreary oasis on Erimia, but nobody really wants to say they colonized a sinkhole. Just doesn’t sound appealing or right.

So Brown Sinkhole or Brunning Valley. I don’t need to explain why we use the name we use.

The high cliff walls surrounding Brunning protected us from the outside world in different ways. Huge storms blast across Erimia’s surface, whipping dust and sand around hard enough to strip skin down to the flesh. The drastic depression that is Brunning isn’t big enough for those storms to sink into. Sure we get a little wind and a lot of dust, but our crops survive.

The best protection the cliff walls offers is against the sun. The Erimian sun, Kapsímatos, was an angry red beast that wanted to kill us and everything else. If we were exposed to it throughout the whole day we would be scorched and no non-native plants, our crops, would survive.

The steep walls provided shade. In the morning the eastern walls cast their shadows on our homes and fields, in the afternoon the western walls rescued us from the inferno we endured for those couple of midday hours when the Kapsímatos glowered down directly upon us.

The Hibernarii had technology to terraform entire planets. They could have done so to Erimia, made it a paradise, but no. They sent my father to a sinkhole on a desert planet with some seeds that had higher—if only slightly—tolerance to heat and exposure and said, "Good luck and don't fail."

Real comforting, the Hibernarii. They really knew how to motivate their experiments.

Walls or not, there was no escaping the heat. Heat broiled the sunny hours and filled the shaded hours, albeit not as severe. And the non-direct light in those hours shrouded Brunning in twilight-like gloom.

That midmorning, walking with my father to the colony meeting hall so we could attempt communication with a monster… well, ‘gloom’ definitely fit my mood. My father wouldn’t say anything really helpful. He walked quickly while I limped along behind him. My lingering headache only increased how annoyed I was that I had to wait even a second longer to find out what the hell was going on. Thank Yuan, the walk wasn’t long.

For energy and resource efficiency, we built the eight homes and barns close to each other, but with minimal distance to afford some privacy. In the middle of it all we built the meeting hall out of large rocks we gathered and whatever scraps we had left over from the other buildings. Similar to the seeds, the Hibernarii had sent us with limited supplies to start Brunning. After we used those, we had to get creative. The resulting structure was an amalgamation of a rock pile with short walls and patchwork roof that sloped into the ground.

A few hundred feet away we heard yelling from the meeting hall. My father broke into a run and despite my protesting body, I tried to follow.

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

“Wait outside,” he called back to me before charging through the only entrance to the building. Catching up seconds later, I dropped the small pack of food my mother sent and rested against the rock wall, breathing through a bout of dizziness. More shouting came through the walls. I wasn’t enjoying the idea of seeing my face-kicking hero, but the shouting and crashes from inside made me even more hesitant to go in. The other men from Brunning were probably all working in the fields or in their barns, too far away to hear the commotion. That left me, and I wasn’t going to let some freak stranger hurt anyone inside. I’d resolved to go in right as Jamus slipped out the door and stood next to me.

“Dad wants us to wait out here.”

I exhaled loudly, not even realizing I’d been holding my breath. “Is everything okay in there? That freak isn’t doing that is it?” I asked.

“No, he’s locked in the storeroom.”

“So what’s going on in there then?”

“Dad and Reese are talking to Sam. Looks like someone punched you in the face.” Before yesterday a comment like that from my brother would have been in jest, but his words at that moment held no emotion, like he was stating a fact and nothing more.

“More like kicked. And I’m pretty sure someone did,” I said. Jamus looked tired, like he hadn’t slept at all. “And you don’t look much better.”

“Huh." He shrugged his shoulders, letting them fall as he slouched against the wall next to me.

Another crash made me jump a bit. “That doesn’t sound like talking in there.”

Staring at the horizon, Jamus shrugged again. “Sam’s upset.”

From the yelling, that was an understatement. “Why?”

Jamus turned his head slowly toward me and gave me an icy glare. “Alana is dead.”

Never had my brother scared me or even come close to intimidating me. In fights, I always came out on top. He was a tough kid, but lacked my physical maturity afforded by our six-year age gap. But at that moment, the way he looked made me take a step back from him. What disturbed me more was how quickly his void of emotion returned when he went back to staring at the horizon. The tumult inside the meeting hall quieted, but obviously Sam wasn’t the only one upset. Jamus' face may have been blank but his fists were clenched, his knuckles white.

I picked up the food pack and held out an oat cake to my brother hoping to prolong the calm before another potential storm. He looked at my peace offering and then at me. “Not hungry,” he said.

“Mom just made them.” I held the cake out closer to him. “You sure?”

Jamus took the cake. “You can go in now. I don’t need a big brother trying to make things okay.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “Things aren’t okay. But maybe they’ll get that way.”

“Huh.” He shrugged my hand away.

I cocked my head to the door. “Come in with me.”

“I’m good.” He took a bite of the cake, chewing it listlessly. The rest of the cake crumbled in his grasp, falling to the ground. He didn't even notice.

I shook my head and went to the door. I left Jamus alone, but I promised myself then that once this mess was fixed, if we could fix it, I would see that Jamus was never put aside as a spare part in the Brunning machine, worth enough to keep around just in case, but generally useless without his other half. No, I would make sure my brother wasn’t useless, even if it meant finding a way to get out of Brunning and off the planet.

At the door, I took a deep breath, steeling myself for whatever awaited me inside.