I blink. “The moon is gone?”

  “It’s sealed off. Colonial marines and everything. No one knows what happened, and they’re not letting us find out.”

  “Then it’s something we don’t need to know about. The colonial marines wouldn’t be keeping up a news blackout over something that was actually dangerous. There was probably some sort of corporate mixer that went wrong, and now whoever owns the place is trying to get out from under a bunch of fines and lawsuits.”

  Viola shakes her head. “It feels like more than that. I don’t have anything more concrete, but there are just … there are whispers around the edges of things. People going missing. Questions not getting answered. I don’t like it. I don’t want you going into orbit until we know more.”

  “Well, you get your wish, since Dad won’t take me.” I blow her a kiss. “I’m going to go ask Mom to look at my hand—and I won’t ask whether I can go up with Dad, I promise. I’m staying right here with you.”

  “You better,” says Viola. She looks less worried, less wan, and so I hold my promise at the front of my mind as I leave the room.

  I will not ask to go into orbit, no matter how amazing it would be, no matter how much I want to. I will not ask to go into orbit, no matter how much I hate this subprime orange sky, no matter how much I want to stand under a sheet of unglittering, unmoving stars and remember that we’re not going to be stuck here on Zagreus forever.

  I feel a pang at the thought of leaving. Kora kissed me. Shouldn’t that be enough to make me change my mind, start thinking about applying for colonial citizenship and finding ways to be happy under a sky the color of canned mango? But it’s not. Viola needs better medical care than we can find on a scavenger colony, and I need more choices than a single sky. I’m not staying. We were never going to stay.

  I will not ask to go into orbit.

  I won’t.

  The sound of my parents’ voices drifts out of the kitchen. I angle in that direction, stepping as lightly as I can. It’s not that I want to eavesdrop, necessarily. It’s more that knowing what’s coming is always a good thing.

  “—you wouldn’t go.” Mom. She sounds genuinely upset. Maybe there’s more to Viola’s rumormongering than meets the eye.

  “You know I have to.” Dad. He sounds more resigned, like he’s already done the risk analysis and come up with the only answers available. “We need more processing power. Otherwise we’re going to have to do … something. I don’t know what. Erase older storage, maybe. This model was never meant to run for so long without some sort of system reset.”

  “I hate it when you get clinical.”

  “Sometimes it’s necessary.”

  They must be talking about our transport. It’s a nasty little ship, ex–cruise liner, designed to shuttle the wealthy between very carefully placed targets. We’ve rebuilt the whole thing six times since I’ve been old enough to help, and it’s never enough. It’s going to shake apart one day. But I love it. It’s freedom, it’s continuity, it’s the way we come to a planet and the way we leave it again. Viola named it when we were eleven—the While There’s Hope—and if he’s going up because we’re going to do another ship rebuild, I am way more cool with the idea.

  I step into the kitchen doorway, clearing my throat. Both of their heads whip around. Mom is oddly pale, making her look more like me and Viola than she usually does.

  “O-Olivia,” she says. “How long have you been standing there?”

  “Not long.” A ship upgrade is big and exciting, like birthdays and holidays and unexpected days off from school all tied in a single beautiful bow. I don’t want to spoil it for myself by letting them know that I know. Instead, I hold out my hand, and say, “I found a new kind of grass.”

  Mom hisses between her teeth in sympathy as she rises. Dad looks impressed. Leave it to my father to think it’s totally prime for a plant to try to eat his daughter.

  “Where was this?” he asks as Mom gets the sample kit from the counter.

  “The pollen grove. It looked like a normal grass patch, but there were these little orange blades at the center, and they were eating bugs.”

  His impressed expression melts into excitement. “Are you sure it was eating them? Actual predation?”

  “The grass that drinks blood is predatory,” Mom calls.

  “We’re still not sure of that.”

  “Actual predation,” I say.

  Dad leads me to a seat at the kitchen table while Mom moves to take skin samples, drain the blisters, and bandage my hand, and everything is normal again; this is how our family is supposed to work. Everything is going to be fine.

  Viola is asleep by the time I make it back to our room. I look at my own cold, narrow bed, and then I crawl in next to her, curling up with my head on her shoulder, letting the sound of the machines beeping and hissing all around us soothe me into sleep.

  7

  SCHOOL’S OUT

  Going back to school at the start of the week is … educational.

  First off, Michel apparently spread his stupid rumor about Vi a lot further than Kora realized, because everyone is looking at me when they think I won’t notice. Some of them are appraising, some of them are friendlier than they’ve been in weeks, but all of them want to see how I’m reacting. Kora is higher in the social pecking order than Michel is, so people must be listening when she tells them my sister exists, but it’s hard to let go of gossip, especially the kind of gossip that lets you feel better than somebody. They wanted to see me as a cheater, and now they have to see me as me.

  Second off, Kora may be happy to tell everyone about Viola—even if she never actually saw her—but she’s less happy to tell them all about me. I don’t think anyone knows that we kissed. I’m not sure what that means. Was it just adrenaline that made her make the first move? Do I need to produce an apex predator every time I want her to kiss me? Because I don’t think I can do that, even if I wanted to. We don’t have that many predators on this planet.

  I’m daydreaming about some heretofore undiscovered predator that’s big but not too big, dangerous but not too dangerous, and most importantly, really, really flashy and difficult to overlook, when my tablet beeps. I glance around. Our teacher is on the other side of the room, trying to negotiate a cease-fire between Andrea and her latest boyfriend, who must have stolen her stylus again. No one’s paying attention to me.

  I tap the icon. Viola’s face appears, captioned, “You got a second?”

  She’s smart enough not to talk to me when I’m in class. Hooray for that, I guess. I type back, “Just a second. What’s up?”

  “Dad leaves in three days.”

  I frown. “Thanks for the reminder,” I type back. He’s going up to check out that salvaged research vessel. I’m not going with him—subprime—and he and Mom have been fighting about it every night, when they think we can’t hear. Sometimes I think they forget how small the residence really is.

  “Mom’s going out to check that new grass you found, see if she can find any more,” Viola types. Her image grins, abrupt and impish. “We’ll have the house to ourselves all day.”

  My eyes widen. “You don’t mean…?”

  “Party.”

  “No.”

  “Big party.”

  “Big no.”

  “Miss Shipp?” I lift my head, cheeks burning, to find the teacher looking at me with a measuring expression on her face. “Is there something you’d like to share with the rest of the class?”

  I swear I’ve heard that line used in pre-colony holos. As long as there are schools, there are going to be people being jerks to kids for no reason other than that they can. “No, ma’am,” I say. “My sister pinged to ask if we were starting our math unit soon.” Viola is officially in this class with me, but she doesn’t tend to stay logged on during open study, since it’s just a distraction compared to being alone in our residence.

  The teacher’s face softens. I wonder if she believed the rumors about Viola being fake. Probably not. She has to grade both of our papers. She knows Vi and I have different strengths and weaknesses, scholastically speaking. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been hard to hear the other kids gossiping about my sister.

  I decide to like this teacher after all.

  “Let Viola know that we’ll be starting in ten minutes, if you would?” She turns away, satisfied that I’m not breaking any rules, and I turn back to my tablet.

  Vi has been typing while I was distracted. “Come on, Olive. It’s not fair that you get to meet all these people and I don’t get to meet anyone. They think I don’t exist! We need to show them how wrong they are. Dad’s going to be off-world, Mom’s going to be in the field, we’re never going to get a better shot. You won’t even technically be breaking any rules. If they come straight from the trail to the boundary fence, they won’t ever have gone outside without supervision.”

  She makes a compelling argument. I want to give in, to say that sure, this is a great idea, we should absolutely go along with it. I want to tell her she always has the best ideas—and she does, she has ever since we were kids. She figured out how to talk adults around to her way of thinking while I was still trying to fit my foot in my mouth. She was our advocate for a thousand childhood favors, and if she thinks this is a good idea, well, she might be wrong, but at least I know for sure that we’d have a good time before the fire and brimstone came raining from the sky.

  “Please. Please. Please.”

  I half scowl at the screen and type, “Are you just going to keep asking until I give in and you get your way?”

  Her image grins. “Yup,” says the caption. “Come on, Olive. You know you want this as much as I do. More than I do, even, since you’re the one with the girlfriend who could come and sit on the couch and hold your hand. So let’s do this.”

  I hesitate before typing, “Okay.”

  Her grin is brighter than the orange sky outside, and maybe this is a good idea after all.

  The rest of our morning classes pass in relative peace, and it’s time for the most status-heavy event of my day: lunch. The popular kids get the prime seating spots, natch, and everyone else arrays themselves around them like the rays of a sun, the brightness and brilliance getting more diffuse the further it gets from the center. Out at the edges, we’re dull, we’re quiet, we’re picking at our food and casting envious glances toward the shimmering brilliance of our betters. In the center …

  In the center, they shine.

  I take my customary spot at the edge long enough to gulp my food—some kind of pickle made from a human-edible local fruit and some sliced meat that Mom probably bought six colonies ago. It’s not recognizable, and that’s intentional. Half the potted meats on the market are actually potted insect matter, ground and dyed and shaped until we can pretend it’s something that would have walked on four legs and lived in a barnyard, once upon a time.

  No matter how far humans travel from Earth, we’re always going to be trying to take it with us, acting like we can reshape the rest of the universe in the image of the home we left behind. You can see it in the potted meats, and in the pickles, and in the way we set up our social structures, still following the biological imperatives of a savannah that’s so deep in the past that it probably doesn’t even exist anymore.

  When I’ve finished my lunch—and with it, my last excuse for delaying the inevitable—I surreptitiously breathe into my hand to check for traces of pickle, tug my shirt into place, and start the long, nerve-racking walk along the length of the cafeteria, passing tables with higher social status than my own, aiming for that shimmering center. Viola laughed at me when I told her I had a crush on the most popular girl in school, saying I was just like Mom in at least one serious way: I didn’t know how to aim low.

  Kora is eating some sort of nutrapaste sandwich, laughing at something Michel said, and she’s never been more beautiful, and I can’t do this. I should never have thought for a second that I could do this. How can a girl like me ask a girl like her to go into the middle of nowhere, not once, but twice?

  Michel sees me coming. His eyes narrow, and he leans toward Kora, murmuring something in a voice too low for me to hear. Whatever it is, it must not have been very kind. She looks startled, her own eyes going wide, and then she looks around, finally catching sight of me, and she smiles.

  That’s how. That’s how a girl like me can do this. Because she’s beautiful, and she’s smart, and funny, and kind, and that smile on her face? That smile is for me. I would walk a thousand miles to see that smile, and here she is, giving it to me for nothing.

  “Kora, hey.” I hope I sound cool. I want to sound cool.

  I almost certainly do not sound cool.

  But she’s still smiling, and that makes up for basically everything. “Hey, Olivia. You know you can sit with us at lunch if you want to.”

  “I know.” From the way Michel is glaring, her invitation is far from unanimous—and that’s why I don’t want to. Colony school social status is nothing. Most of the time I try not to let myself get too attached, since I know we’re always going to be moving on soon. Puberty sucks. Before I started noticing girls, it was a lot easier to convince myself I didn’t care. “Hey, your mom’s the one who brokered the deal for that decommissioned research vessel, right? The ‘big score’ you talked about.”

  Kora blinks. Whatever she was expecting from me, it wasn’t that. “Right.”

  “Why, scag?” asks Michel, leaning subtly forward, so that his body is between mine and Kora’s. “You looking for something new to steal?”

  I guess that answers one question: he’s a jerk to me because he wants Kora for himself. Ugh. As if she’d ever have such subprime taste in potential partners. Even on Zagreus, her options aren’t that limited. “No, I’m good,” I say, as sweetly as I can muster. “Maybe you should get in line, though. I’m sure you could use some more metal for that rustbucket you keep trying to pretend is a residence.”

  Michel bares his teeth at me, actually bares his teeth, like this is some sort of messed-up primate dominance challenge. Ugh. Boys. I am so glad that’s not where my hormones decided my destiny would one day lie.

  Sensing blood in the water, Kora intervenes. “Hey, Olive, why do you ask?”

  “Well, my dad’s going to be on the team that goes up to clear the vessel for salvage—”

  Michel scoffs. I do my best to ignore him.

  “—and my mom has some fieldwork to do. So Viola and I are going to have the residence all to ourselves all day. I thought maybe we could have some folks over for that party I promised you. She wants to meet her classmates, since she has to relay in, and that’s way subprime.”

  “So’s your outdated slang, spacer,” says Michel.

  Too little, too late: some of the other popular kids are already starting to murmur with excitement and the good kind of wariness, the kind that comes before a really exciting dare. Kora hasn’t told them about the lion-worm—I’d be dead by now if she had, since there’s no way Michel would have been able to resist telling her mother, like, five seconds later—but she must have told them about the rest of it, the pollen and the flesh-eating grass and the amazing, frightening beauty of their chosen homeworld.

  They’re so weirdly sheltered, these colony kids. They wouldn’t know real danger if it loomed out of the ground and bit their heads off. Coming to visit me and Vi at the residence won’t change that, but maybe it’ll convince them that someday they can dare to leave the fences their parents drew for them and see the world the way it really is. If I can help, even a little, then I guess I won’t feel as bad about being dragged to this middle-of-nowhere planet by my parents.

  Kora’s smiling at me like I’m the smartest person in the whole universe, and I guess I already don’t feel so bad about it.

  “We can’t fit everyone in the residence, and it’s not safe to hang around outside,” I say, before people can start calling their friends over to join the fun. “Say six? Plus me and Vi? You’re invited, Michel.”

  “Am I?” asks Kora.

  My heart seizes before I realize she was teasing. I smile as nonchalantly as I can manage, hoping she didn’t catch my brief flicker of terror. “You’re the reason I’m having a party,” I say.

  And she

  Leans over

  And she

  Kisses me.

  In front of everyone. In front of all the popular kids, her social equals, the people she’s going to be sharing this colony with long after I’m just a funny memory of that blonde girl whose parents were counting the bugs. In front of all the unpopular kids, who are suddenly looking at me like I’m some sort of conquering hero. It feels like my blood is freezing and on fire at the same time, it feels like I can do anything, anything, because Kora is kissing me again, Kora is kissing me where people can see it happen, where she can’t pretend it was all in my imagination.

  This is the best day of my life. When she pulls away, cheeks red and lips curved upward in a smile, I stay frozen exactly where I am, unable to find the strength to move.

  “I’ll get you a guest list,” says Kora, and just like that, it’s her party, not mine, and I honestly don’t care. She can bring whoever she wants, as long as she’s willing to kiss me again. And again. And again.

  The rest of the day passes in a glorious haze of thinking about Kora, about the way her lips move under mine and the way her breath tastes and the way there’s always a hint of motor oil in her perfume. I don’t know why, and I can’t wait to find out. I collect my homework downloads and head for home, striking out into the main colony without looking back.

  Most colony worlds suffer from at least a small conflict between planning and production. The colonists spend all their waking hours on the ship thinking about how their world is going to be perfect, with none of the problems of the world they’re leaving behind, and so every design is at least part reaction to the last one. If one colony crams residents together in towers that minimize environmental impact but also minimize personal space, the next is going to be nothing but personal residences and big yards and privacy, which means the one after that is going to be all about the towers, and on, and on, and on, for as long as there are people, for as long as there are planets to be settled.