Estimated oxygen time: 20:28:34
As I flew towards the airlock, I spotted a figure in a bag, standing between the edge of the smaller crater and the airlock, picking up a corpse and heaving it out onto the plain. A blade was tied to his waist with a wide nylon belt, swinging by his side with each movement.
I almost didn’t recognize David for how determined his body language was. He was still clumsy, his balance poor, but he seemed to have lost the little hesitations that had almost debilitated his movement before. As soon as one corpse went flying, he bent down, grabbed the next by the ankles, and tossed it, putting his whole weight into the throw, swaying and falling forward with the momentum. Even from above I could see the exertion in each motion, the fury of it. Not empty; not confused, Pythia had said. We should all pray to be so lucky.
I passed over him, using the canister to slow myself just enough to absorb the impact with my legs, and landed a dozen meters behind him.
“How was your walk?” I asked.
He pulled at his nose. “Pretty shit, honestly. Instead of figuring anything out I just thought about all of the times I wasn’t there for people who needed me.”
“I’m sorry. You don’t have to do this, you know” I said. “With the bodies, I mean.”
He regained his balance and looked at me. The lights of the airlock flashed white, letting me see his wide eyes, his forehead shining with sweat. “I don’t see anyone else clearing this up.”
“Not now. But when things are properly set up, Line Diocletian will take care of the bodies.”
He straightened, putting his hands on his hips. “Well, when they finally come around you can tell them I’m fucking sorry for taking away so much of their work.” He was angry enough that I would have taken a step back if it had been anyone else. “But as the representative of Line Pythia, and the de facto supervisor of the mental well-being of the residents of this hellhole, I can’t have people come here and see a pile of bodies first thing. It’s bad. It sure messed me up,” he admitted, the anger in his voice dissipating.
I turned and looked at Yahushua, hanging between the metal rods. I held my breath, and heard only one pair of lungs breathing. I turned back to David. “Need a hand?”
“Sure, thanks.” There was genuine gratefulness shining in his eyes, and I somehow I just knew this guy will always be on my side.
We decided that we’d each hold either two arms or two legs and swing in unison. The bodies went farther now. Before, some hadn’t even gone over the edge of the small crater now they all cleared it easy. “Don’t look at the faces,” he said. “That’s what gets you. You start thinking about how they were as babies, how someone looked at them and wished only the best for them. It gets to you.”
I could have used this advice back in the chasm. “How long have you been doing this?” I asked, as we watched an overweight man collide with the rock at the edge of the valley and tumble away.
“Fifteen minutes or so, I think. I got bored just sitting and waiting. Not much for a quarter of an hour’s work, but we’re getting it faster now. Let’s do another ten minutes and see where we are.”
I didn’t always manage not to look at the people. There was one woman, her visor broken, her face frozen and dried in a desperate gasp, looking down and away from me. I was wary of the serrated, broken edges of the visor, but as it pulled my attention, I couldn’t avoid but look at her face, too.
Perhaps the time in the fissure hardened me, but I didn’t feel much. A dead body doesn’t suffer any more than a rock does. It wasn’t good or bad, taking in the dried eyes, the blood clots around her mouth and nose. I didn’t feel anything but a sense of emptiness, hollowness, a shadow of grief as I imagined Keren standing where I stood, looking down at my corpse. Some dust that had risen from my earlier movements stuck to my suit, chilling me.
I raised my eyes to David, saw how he looked away with a strained expression, turning his entire head not to have her in his sight. The corpse’s eyes were turned to him, as if she was still a person, staring him down. Even looking away, her gaze was boring into him. And he had been doing this alone? Then it hit me. Someone had decided to bring him to this world, held him to their breast, marveled at their first words. Someone saw him as a dream of potential and purity, and here he was, choking back tears, along among strangers and cadavers, choosing to suffer so someone else won’t get, as he says, fucked up like he had been. My teeth clenched. We tossed her, and she arced cleanly over the edge, toward the chasm. “Good thing you dropped by,” he said.
I agreed. We went to pick up the next body, and I laughed in surprise. The man was muscular, clean-shaven, and bald, and his face somehow still expressed disdain and judgment.
“What is it?” David asked, with a hint of worry.
“I knew this guy,” I said, still smiling. “Hated his guts, too.”
David looked at me and said nothing. I grabbed the stiff, clawed hand. The bag wasn’t punctured, but the body was misshapen, broken: the ribs, the spine, an elbow. Not the quick death Vempress had offered, but something more like Dov and Yahushua’s. “Fuck caring, right buddy?” I whispered. David looked at me again, and for a moment I knew what he saw: someone numb and cold, maddened by an insane place. He joined in warily, grabbing the legs and we tossed it, too, over the edge.
“Was he a bad person?” he asked while we were walking over to the next corpse.
“Honestly? I don’t know.”
#
Estimated oxygen time: 20:18:28
We worked for a while, clearing another dozen or two dozen bodies. There were still many left, but from the redness in David’s face he was building up heat in his suit, and I had asked him to take a break. He agreed.
Weird, to worry about the health of our bodies, but we couldn’t afford to be exhausted when the time came for… I realized that I hadn’t talked to David about my plan yet. I needed to find a way to bring it up without bringing up Vempress’s suspicions, if she was listening through her radio relays.
We hopped out of the crater and onto the plateau, where he laid down and looked up at the densely-packed stars, as if we were out on the beach.
I lay beside him, letting the rock cool me through my suit, and he burst into a sudden laughter.
“What?”
“It’s just so weird. What the hell am I doing?”
I allowed myself to laugh a little, too. Perhaps we would have had the time for that conversation, if we were both Pythia of a week ago, though I suspected not. I suspected they’d keep each other too busy to think themselves into an existential crisis, memorizing poems and history and discussing confessions protocols… Confession. There was my in to keep David focused, and talk about my plan without Vempress listening.
“When the old Pythia took confessions,” I said. “They did that in the broken shuttle. It blocks radio signals, so people can talk freely without fear of being heard by anyone but their confessor.”
“Hmm. I can see why that would help, but I don’t think I could do that walk every single time.”
“No, but I think I have an idea. Let’s see how well I remember my highschool physics…” It was somewhat remarkable, how good I’ve become at lying in less than four hours.
He sat up to see what I was doing, and after I turned off my comm it didn’t require more than a simple gesture to persuade him to do the same. I hopped into a crouch and over to him, getting my helmet closer to his so I could grab him by the helmet and put his visor to mine as he looked at me with curious confusion. “Can you hear me?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yeah.” His voice was distant but clear. “But this is a little… intimate. Is this how I’m going to take confessions?”
“”Yes, but that doesn’t matter yet. Right now,” I ignored his confused expressions, “Vempress has an eavesdropping device someplace around here, and this is the only way to talk without her hearing us.”
“What do you wanna hide from her?”
“That we’re going to kill her.”
David’s eyes opened wide, then turned away. “I should have known.”
“You too? You’re against killing her?”
He shook his head. “I can’t take part in killing someone. I’m sorry.”
“She won’t let this place be anything but a celebration of constant, unending murder. I don’t know if she’s letting us live out of curiosity or cruelty or loneliness, but it’s not something we can count on for long.”
“And that’s the only solution you came up with?” his voice rose. “To kill?” Droplets of spittle stuck to the his side of the glass in front of my eyes. His hands were still at his sides, clenched into fists
“Why not?” I asked. “She sure wouldn’t mind killing us.”
“I don’t think you understand what you’re asking.”
“I know that it’s an ugly thing to do. But what alternative are you going to suggest? That we sit her down for a heart to heart?”
“Maybe, yes. Perhaps we can show up, a couple of us, and make her reconsider. To murder… Give me a second, ok?”
He looked distraught. I’d begun to regret surprising him like this. “Ok.”
He pushed my off, more a request than a physical assertion, stood up, closed his eyes, breathed a couple of breaths, the expansion of his ribs visible through the suit, then took my helmet in his hands and touched glass to glass. “You said, too, before. You too. Who were you talking about?”
“I met a man named Alex up north. I tried to get him to help me, to help us, but he said that he’d only join on the condition that we don’t kill her.”
“Sounds like an alright guy,” David said.
“I don’t understand you. I watched her kill people. Why doesn’t she deserve to die?”
“Do you know how I’ve managed not to fall apart?” His voice was quiet now, vulnerable, and it stopped me on my tracks. “I was starting to, you see, when I realized that I had a day of oxygen in my suit. I thought I’d cut myself some slack, let myself lose it. But then I saw you, still trying. You were having a very shitty day, but you still tried. And I realized that I could make this day a little less shitty for you, and that was enough for me. Vempress is also having a horrible time, and I want to help her too. Doing good whatever good I can, whenever I can, that’s what kept me together through my entire life. If I turn my back on that, I really don’t know if I could hold on.”
His eyes glistened, wet, disarming me of anger. “You’re right. We should do the most good I can. But imagine with me,” I pleaded. “There is a person now, sitting in jail. They’ll be thrown out tomorrow, or the day after that, or the one after, and once they do they will come here. And it’s up to us what kind of Town they get to - one where they’re an equal among equals, with a role and a purpose, or one where she’d be nothing but prey, an object for others to use? We can’t just let the town stay like this,” I waved my hand at this dead and dying place. “Can we?”
“We can’t. But we have to make it better. Killing Vempress would protect them from her. But it would also make it ok to kill. It would make it our decision who lives and who dies, and this place would continue to be ruled by whoever’s strongest at the time. Aside from revenge, it would give us nothing.”
“I don’t care about revenge; I care about justice.”
“That’s even worse.”
I shook my head, as if trying to clear a fog, but not so hard that it would move my visor. “How is justice worse?”
“Revenge at least admits that it’s personal, emotional, an instinct. Justice is exactly the same, but with the illusion of doing it for someone else.”
“She made this place hell. She deserves much worse than just being killed here.”
“Does she?” A sudden confidence burned in his voice. “Does anyone really deserve to be thrown out here and die? Did you?”
“I didn’t murder anyone.”
He sighed, a deep, desperate sigh, and fog condensed on the glass barrier between us. “Not yet.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“What’s her name?” He continued.
“Vempress’s?”
“No, the one who’s going to come to Last Day Town. The one you’re doing this for.”
“Why do you think it’s a she?” I asked.
“Because I’ve actually been listening. What’s her name?”
I considered insisting that he explain how he could listen so well he’d heard things I didn’t say, but there wasn’t time. “Keren. What are you trying to say?”
“Keren. Whatever we do, she’ll still be thrown out him.”
His expression was nothing but sympathetic, and that somehow made me more irritated “What’s your point?”
“You can spend this entire day trying to save her, if that’s what you want. I’ll help you, even. But she’ll still die, like everyone else has to die.”
I tried not to imagine her quivering with fear as the timer ran out, her bottom lip shaking as she cried, her eyes rolling back as she suffocated. No, not ‘suffocated’. That was too passive a word. They’d chosen to kill her. They thought it was funny. They’ll choke her. I forced myself to think the words, one at a time. To death. “Why are you telling me this?” I said, voice almost steady.
“Death comes for everyone. Disaster comes for everyone, sooner or later, no matter what you do. If you don’t accept that, you’re setting yourself up for constant worry and eventual failure. It’s no way to live, even for a single day.”
“This has gone on for long enough. Vempress will suspect that we’re talking about her. Let’s turn the radios back on, and pretend to have a normal conversation.” Seeing the look in his face, I added, “I won’t kill her without your approval, ok?” I pushed myself off before he could answer turned my comm back on.
He arched his brows but turned his on too. “That could work. But we should use the shuttle as a confession chamber as soon as we can. People need to feel like their being listened to, not like someone is inspecting them.”
“Do you think that’s what makes a difference? I mean, as long as you’re talking it out, what does it matter?”
“You really don’t get it, do you?” He said, somehow deeply unoffensive despite the harsh words. He sat down more comfortably, looking away from the airlock, at the stars.
“What don’t I get, exactly?”
He sighed. “Did you ever use one those therapist AI’s?”
I had. Tsur’d introduced the concept to me, once he’d felt comfortable enough to tell me he’d been using one. “Sorry, but that’s inside talk.”
“Right, sorry. Well, a lot of people think they work, but the thing about psychoanalysis, or confession, or just talking about it, isn’t about the offering the correct solution, to analyze the problem.”
“What is the point, then?”
His gaze lowered, to the dark cliffs bordering us all into this big bowl of rock. “The same reason people used to have pets, I think. There exists a need in the human soul, and for most people, that need isn’t being meet. To let someone see you as you really are, including the darkest, worst parts. Not to judge or analyze, but to forgive. That’s not something a machine can do.”
It sounded right. I looked at him, and saw that he, too, accepted me as I was without judging, and I’d needed it more then I’d known. Still did. “Maybe that’s why we have children to. A bit of it. So that someone can love us, despite everything.”
“Maybe,” he said, and I saw a painful shadow cross his face.
Did he have a loss like mine, in his story? There was comfort in that too, that he might. I puffed. “See? You’re already more of a Pythia than I am. And I haven’t even got you in confession yet. Instead, I’m just sitting here wasting your time with a stupid discussion.”
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“You’re not wasting my time at all. This is my immortality.”
For a moment I saw the insight in his blue eyes, how deeply they perceived, finding exactly what was needed. “People can only become what they see. How else can they learn how to behave? When you do good, it stays after you, and it compounds. A part of you, the best part, stays in others, and they pass it forward.”
Again, he somehow found the words that resonated. I thought about a line from Tsur’s last letter: Learn to be kind; it makes an exponential difference. He’d meant it in general, to the people of Ceres, not to anyone in specific. But I’d never quite understood what he’d meant by exponential; he wasn’t the kind of person to use a mathematical term inaccurately. It compounds.
My parents hadn’t been there for most of my life, but they’d stayed on Earth, knowing what would happen, so I could survive. I’d always been grateful for that, but in the day to day, their absence was felt. And I’d been there for Tsur as much as I could’ve, everything that he asked, everything that he needed, I was there. But it hadn’t been enough. Was there some property of being that needed to pass forward, that I never receive? It didn’t matter, that kind of self-pity never got anyone anywhere. “In order for that goodness to pass forward, there needs to be an unbroken chain of people receiving it and passing it forward. That’s my promise for you, David: I will do whatever I can so people can learn from you, out here.” I offered my hand.
He smiled, and rose to clasp it. “You see what I mean? That resolve. Even after you tell me where you think that’s coming from, I don’t see how you can maintain - ”
The rest of his statement was silenced by a scream on comm. “Help!” A woman’s voice, weakened by the distance. “Please, somebody help me!”
David left my hand, and jumped up to look at our surroundings, his movements fearless. I looked as well, but saw nothing until a flurry of asteroids finally passed through the sky, giving enough light for us to see a figure on the plane.
She was on her knees, her hands grasping at her helmet as she cried out, as if in prayer. She seemed so small, so alone, surrounded by nothing but dead rock and dead space, lost in the desert.
David lurched forward, and I followed on foot, holding the canister beside me. As we drew closer, her screams changed in tone.
“Stay away from me!” She turned to us, her eyes flooded and feral. “I’ll kill you!” She had a chain in her hand, like Yahushua’d had, dangling all the way to the ground. Maybe the same one, even.
“It’s fine,” David said, his voice soothing. “We’re here to help.”
“Don’t lie to me! I know you’re looking for someone to kill!” She rose, staying low, ready to spring; either towards us or away.
I raised an eyebrow. “Then who were you calling for?”
She looked confused for a moment, as if she too didn’t quite know why. “Fuck off, both of you,” she cried again, drawing out the chain and swinging it beside her in a tight circle. Her breathing was loud no comm, as if she was still in the midst of a panic attack.
David shot me a look, admonishing me for being unhelpful, and took a step back, gesturing for me to follow. We were a dozen meters away, so a step back wasn’t much more than a symbolic gesture. I did anyway.
“Listen,” he said. “We’re not here to hurt anyone. Look at me. We’re also dying here. We’re also afraid. But we don’t want to hurt anyone.”
“Then why were you running at me, just now? Why are you armed?” She stared at David’s blade, the chain still swinging, her other hand set in front of her, a barrier.
I was going to say something about the fact that she just called for us, and that she, too, was armed, but David shot me another glance. “We heard someone calling, and we came. The blade is for protection,” he said. “My friend here was attacked, and I had a scary encounter too. Were you attacked?”
“No. But I was warned.”
“By whom?” he asked.
“Someone. She said she’d spent most of her time here locked up, that she’d only barely managed to escape a vampire, whatever that means. She told me not to trust anyone.”
“Nina?” I said.
They both turned to look at me. “Yes, Nina,” she said. “How did you know?” She lowered the hand that held the chain.
“I met her when I arrived. Did she...”
“Yeah,” she said, her face contorting into a short-lived grimace. “You must be Yossi, then.”
“I am,” I said. I was surprised that Nina had chosen to talk about me, in her last moments. “Were you with her?” I asked, looking at her brown eyes, still wet but not as feral, the droplets hanging from her eyebrows. “When her time ran out?”
She nodded. “She wanted me to tell you something, though.” She paused for a second, and I went cold. I’d never gotten a message from a dead person before. “She wanted you to remember that...” She recited:
Sadness is like a glass,
Filled with bitter wine.
I found myself laughing. It hurt, to laugh with an old friend, even if she weren’t there. I thought they’d both think I’m losing it. Instead, she laughed with me—nervously, but she laughed, the chain hanging limply in her hand, forgotten. David shot me an approving glance.
“I hate that song so much,” I said finally.
“I know,” she said. “She told me you would. She came to talk to me when I was scared and alone, and she comforted me, and asked me to tell you this. But now that I’ve done what she asked, what am I supposed to do? I’m so scared I can’t think.”
“What your name?” David said.
“Rachel.”
“I’m David. Come with us, Rachel. We really aren’t so bad.”
She nodded at him. “I want to trust you. But how can I? How can you two even turn your backs on each other?”
I was going to say something about how I could have killed him when we first met, and he could have killed me, and so we knew, but I trusted David to have something better to say.
“It was scary, sure, but not as scary as being alone.” He was in his element, speaking softly but without a speck of hesitation.
Rachel took a step towards us, and then another, perhaps without even noticing. He reached out his hand to her.
“Rachel, will you share the time you have with us? What have you got to lose?” He had a way of mocking without being cruel, taking a friendly jab in a way that he never employed with me. I was surprised, even though I had only known him for a couple of hours.
She looked at the hand for a long moment, wanting to grab it but maybe scared that this might still be a trick. Maybe it was. If we convinced her to ambush Vempress with us, and she died, how would that be different from what Dov had done to the people he’d found here?
Rachel moved again, slowly closing the distance, until she grabbed David’s hand. He smiled, and she smiled back. He turned to me. His expression wasn’t soft now, but resolute. “Ok,” he said, then turned off his comm and put his helmet to mine.
I turned off my comm as well. “I’m going to meet Vempress in the shuttle in...” I paused for a moment to glance at the visor, calculating the difference in my head. “...ninety one minutes. You’ll meet the others on the slope below the edge of the crater, right next to Pythia. Get Rachel up to date about everything, please. You’ll have to figure out together how capture Vempress without killing her, ok?”
He nodded, took his helmet back, broke contact, and turned his comm back on. I did too.
“Go,” he said. “We’ll see you later.”
She looked at him, confused, then at me.
I fumbled for the nozzle of my canister. “Nice to meet you, Rachel. I hope we get another chance to talk.” I jumped into space and flew away.
#
Estimated oxygen time: 19:40:06
I flew north, fast and low. Funny, that these routes had started to look familiar from above, like a carpet in a children’s room. Like I’d always been here.
Nina’s words put me off balance, and as I flew I went over her message, again and again. I recalled:
And what will I say, what will I say?
Sadness is like a glass,
Filled with bitter wine.
From the grapes of the soul.
Will you know, Parrot Yossi,
You are a lyrical child,
Destined to a quiet death.
Fuck you, Nina. Or perhaps it was Rachel that deserved the fuck you, for passing the message along? Or my mother, for naming after someone who’d been thrown into a pit? Or for the poet himself, solidifying that sliver of grief so we could keep giving it to each other.
Alex wasn’t anywhere on the wall, and more importantly, not beneath it. As the ground curved upwards I pointed the jet down, bringing the wall beneath me in a matter of seconds. As soon as I ascended over the edge, I could see how drastically Anaxagoras’s cave had changed, even in motion. The pillars of stone weren’t there, the rocks probably blown away, and the ground was glassed over. Without oxygen to burn with, it had just melted and reformed into a wavy, obsidian-like texture. Even the mouth of the cave seemed to have widened. The bundles of trash that I had once watched Anaxagoras’s Third launch were still piled by the wall, having been placed safely out of the explosion’s reach.
A bony, tall man in a bag was standing a safe distance from the entrance, leaning on one foot, arms crossed, his side to me. I couldn’t see his face, but I recognized Alex from his relaxed, bored posture. I flew over him and landed against the cliff wall, absorbing the impact with my feet. His expression, as he turned to me, told me that he was already amused at my expense. Something had gone wrong.
I kicked off the wall, flipping awkwardly towards the ground. “What’s going on?” I asked as my feet touched the smooth rock.
He gestured with his chin towards the opening. “See for yourself.”
The answer came on comm, from a third voice I did not recognize. “Is there another one of you out there? It doesn’t matter; nobody’s getting in! You come closer in and you die, understand?” The voice was panicked, on the verge of breaking.
I looked at Alex. “Is there someone in there?”
“Yup.”
“Peace,” I said. “How long have you been there?”
“Why should I tell you? So you’ll know how much oxygen you stand to take from me?”
“We’re not going to take any oxygen from anyone,” I tried. “My names is Yossi.”
“Nice to meet to Yossi, My name is ‘fuck you, get out of my face or I will kill you’.”
I looked at Alex, who was raising an amused eyebrow. “Listen,” I said calmly. “We’re not here to hurt you. We’ll leave you alone, if that’s what you want, but there’s something we need to get and you’re standing between us and that.”
“Are you crazy or just delirious?” Not a bad question. “We’re dying here. I don’t give a shit about whatever it is you’re planning; I’m not letting you anywhere near me.”
“Fine, so could you get us something out?” I asked, proceeding logically.
“What?”
“Could you go inside, look for something, get it out and give it to us? Then we’ll leave you alone.” I explained, again, as softly as I could.
“No! I just said no! Fuck off already; Jesus! I don’t want to waste my last moments on assholes like you two! Go find your own cave!”
That guy was making me hate him real fast. Not just the stubbornness, the shock he had to be in, but implying that this cave was his own when it wasn’t. It was Anaxagoras’s.
I looked at Alex, who shook his head, smirking.
It seemed shortsighted to have given David the blade. Not that I’d have used it, but it would have earned me some respect. It was unfortunate that he wasn’t there, for more than one reason.
Alex shrugged. “There’s enough debris around here, and around the airlock. Maybe we should go look for it instead of trying to tickle open the world’s tightest asshole.”
“What’s your problem?” the man in the cave growled.
“My problem is that I’m going to die today, so I’m not going to pretend I’m nicer than I actually am.” Alex kept his voice level, but there was not a drop of empathy in it.
“Oh, fuck you.”
“Fuck me? You’re wasting all of our time here by fighting over something you’re obviously going to give up anyway.”
“Why don’t you go and cut your suits open on a sharp rock? Both of you.”
This was going nowhere. “Alex, let it go. He’s still in shock, and probably has been since he got here. It doesn’t seem like we’re getting him out of it.”
“I’m in shock? You’re in shock, you condescending shit-stain. Don’t you understand that this is the only place where you can actually stay safe, even from Vempress? Anyone who gets in here risks getting stabbed by me,” the man’s voice came from the dark cave. “I have a knife.”
Alex’s eye brow twitched, like a delicate antenna for sensing lies. “Do you?”
There was a moment of hesitation, short but distinct. “Yes, I do. I found one.”
Alex looked at me and shook his head. “Entertaining as this is, we might be spending our time better looking if there is a rocket around here, or some useful sticks.”
“They only left the trash outside. I’m not wasting any more time on this squatter.” I was absolutely determined to get in. Not because we needed the rockets or raw material, but because I knew that if I wanted Alex to risk his life in an attempt to overthrow Vempress, I needed to show that I, too, was capable of taking risks for the cause. And it was a risk – this guy could crack my helmet open if I made a mistake. “I’m coming in. Listen, buddy: the less you stand in my way, the sooner I’ll get out of your hair.”
“You’re not! You hear me? You’re getting the fuck out of here, right now, if you know what’s good for you.”
“We’ll see about that,” I said. Alex half-grimaced, not protesting, but not approving either.
I took a couple of careful steps on the smooth rock of the cave entrance. The tunnel was almost completely dark, now, and I listened on comm to the sounds of breathing. Alex’s calm, deep breaths, and the hiding man’s, shallow and scared.
The bundles on the walls were gone, and in their place were gouges deep enough to hide a man. Anaxagoras must have worked for days, collecting or synthesizing or buying the explosives and making sure they could detonate at any second. They wouldn’t have let all that work go to waste if they had any other choice. I knew the same people hadn’t collected the explosives and detonated them, but I couldn’t help but think of Anaxagoras as one entity. I couldn’t help but mourn their loss singularly.
The man in the dark had stopped talking, which was a bad sign. I kept moving, one careful step at a time, trying not to remember how I’d been pinned down and robbed in this very tunnel. At last, I saw the glint of a helmet, almost hidden in one of the gouges.
He sprang out of the hole, a piece of metal glinting in his hand. But he hadn’t had time to gain the basic understanding of how to move; I watched as he made the same mistakes I had in my first hours, kicking too hard and falling forward. I stepped aside, squeezing into one of the gouges as he passed me, tumbling until he bumped into the wall, and a metal rod slipped out of his hands.
He gathered himself quickly, trying to turn back and get the weapon, but I was quicker. He was closer to the exit now, unarmed, standing half crouched with his fists clenched. Now that he stopped moving, I could see how small he was, his elbows and back bent as if his body was trying to shrink into itself and vanish. He looked at me, and then at the exit, and at Alex, silhouetted against the backdrop of the stars.
He went for Alex, feet scraping against the rock, hands pushing against the wall and thrusting forward. I went after him as Alex jumped up, still upright and relaxed. The man passed under him, too quickly to change course.
Alex swung both arms in a complicated pattern that turned his body to the other way, and ended the maneuver facing the man, who slid against the dust, struggling to stop his momentum. Alex landed gently and looked back at me, his expression still amused. He was in no way athletic, his body inflexible, but somehow every motion he made was perfectly precise.
The man stood, his fists clenched at his sides, his shoulders tense, his knees bent and ready. “You fuckers. You don’t wanna leave me alone? Don’t wanna let me spend one fucking day in peace?” His green eyes sparkled with fear as he spoke. “Fine, fucking fine, but don’t act surprised when I break your teeth in.”
I’d taken enough threats from Vempress. I wasn’t going to bend over for this guy, too. “Listen, you didn’t have to stand in our way. We have work to do, and we’re going to go it. We’re going to take what we need, and then be on our way.”
“Yossi?” Alex’s tone was apologetic.
“What?”
“Give the man his weapon.”
I threw a quick glance at Alex before turning my focus back to the other man. “Why?”
“Because he found it first, and he took it first. He found the cave first, and we want to take it from him. Doesn’t seem right.”
“Did you miss the part where he promised to break my teeth in?”
“I’m not saying this guy isn’t an ass; I’m just saying that I don’t want to be the guy taking his stuff.”
“If I give him the weapon, he’ll just attack me, or you.”
“That’s his choice. Like it’s your choice whether to rob him.”
Alex sounded resolute, confident. Was it a delicate manipulation, or just who he really was? Does it matter? I looked at the man, still crouched and ready to spring, but something in his threatening resolve changed. I sent the rod his way, slowly. He straightened and caught it with both hands, but there wasn’t the same confidence in the way he held it, as if it would be impolite to swing at us now.
“And it would be much appreciated,” Alex told the man, “if you didn’t break our teeth in. My name is Alex,” he added. “This is Yossi.”
I raised an awkward hand.
“I’m Shaul,” the man said, and the weapon dipped in his hands. “So, listen, I don’t have to beat you up. Just get out of my way, ok?”
“Hold on,” I began, pissed that he still wasn’t cooperating—and his gaze snapped from Alex to me.
“You’re standing between me and my cave,” he said. “Move.”
“No,” I said.
Alex chuckled. “You’re not much of a natural leader, are you?”
I shrugged. “When no nightingale is heard, a crow’s mistaken for a songbird.”
“What do you want?” Shaul said. “Why are you doing any of this?”
“Because this stinks,” I said. “And it doesn’t have to be like this. But it only gets better if we can act just a little bit more civilized.”
He burst into fake, bitter laughter. “It doesn’t have to… It was always like this. Inside, outside, Mars, Earth. As above, so fucking below. This is the only way it can be.” His voice had a distinct quality of someone who wasn’t used to talking to other people.
“There are alliances, on Mars, even inside Ceres. Couldn’t there be some here?” Alex said. He was looking at the sky, apparently bored again.
“There could, if you had anything to give me. Seeing as you only want me to give you something, I don’t see why I should care.”
“We gave you the weapon,” I said.
“We also took it,” Alex said, still looking away.
“It doesn’t matter. You have nothing to give me now. And even if you did – you remember what’s going on, right? Or are you in some sort of shock where you pretend your oxygen isn’t running out every moment you wait here?” For a moment the sky gave enough light to show his face - a patchy black stubble over acne-scarred skin, a quirking of the lips that wasn’t so much of humor as attempted derision.
“I’m very aware of how many hours I have left. That doesn’t mean I’m gonna do nothing about it.”
“You might as well.”
“Is that your plan? Sitting in a cave and safely awaiting your death?”
“What the hell else?” he said, a hint of breaking in his voice.
“You could do something with your life.”
“You realize how stupid you sound, right?”
Alex glanced from the stars to Shaul with the same impassive gaze. “Does it matter, though? Either way, anything you do here is stupid.”
“I’ve wasted enough time, and I have no intention of philosophizing here with you. If you’ve got nothing to give me, fuck the hell off.”
“I’ll listen.”
“What?” He had a way of saying the word that was clearly not interrogative, but derogatory, a demand that I explain my absurdity. “If you tell me your story, I will listen.” I said.
“What does that even mean?”
“Back when there was order here, there were all sorts of roles to perform, and people got paid with the most precious resource this place had to offer: attention. A chance to have someone listen to you, in exchange for metal, or technical work, or violence, when that was needed.”
His curiosity visibly grew with every word, but he was still on guard. “What do I care? I could tell my story to a fucking rock if I wanted to.”
I finally understood what David had said. “Isn’t quite the same, is it? It doesn’t feel the same, unless someone’s really listening.”
“So what are you proposing?”
“That for once, we switch the order. I’ll hear your confession-“
“Confession? Why can’t you talk like a normal person?”
“I’ll listen to you for fifteen minutes, no interruption. And in return…” I looked sideways at Alex. Time to delegate, I suppose. “You’ll help Alex help me, for the rest of the day.”
“Three hours, tops.”
“Four.”
“Deal,” he said, and paused. “And how do we make sure no one else listens?”
After I’d finished explaining, I turned off my comm, and bowed. I looked sideways at Alex, who still seemed amused and relaxed, and took it as a good sign. Shaul turned off his comm as well, and stepped forward. There was a sudden, surprising eagerness in him, that had nothing to do with the aggression he’d shown before. Whoever he was, no one had listened to what he had to say in a long time.
“What should I tell you?” he said as our helmets touched.
“Whatever you want. In the name of Line Pythia, I am your confessor.”