His breathing gets deeper. Slower. He’s sleeping.
I close my eyes and follow him into the dark.
Four
My flex hums softly on my wrist, waking me from dreams I can’t remember, except that they sucked.
Something brushes my neck. I reach up to shoo whatever it is away and my fingers come back wet. That wasn’t a bug. It was a tear. I’ve been crying in my sleep.
Great.
I check the text that rescued me from my nightmares. It’s from Mom, informing the whole team that there will be a memorial service for the dead at 1100 hours.
For the dead.
How do you mourn a whole planet?
Jay is still asleep beside me. His skin has gone cool in the morning chill, except where our bodies are pressed together.
Neither of us bothered to put our shirts back on last night. The morning light dappling through the potted plants around us paints his bare shoulders, darkening the purple scars that zag down his lower back. You can see the violence that left them there, permanently written in his tawny skin. But you can also see the strength it took to survive in his coiled muscles and the graceful, straight line of his spine.
I feel ridiculous. Lying here mooning over how beautiful my boyfriend is to avoid thinking about the end of the world. It’s both cliché and a total waste of time. If we’re really going to wake up ten thousand people in the next three months, there’s no time for my hormones. Or my grief.
A faint rustle of movement slips through the orchid trees that shelter us. Murmured voices follow. Beth is up, and she isn’t alone. A crackling chuckle drifts through the greenhouse. That’s Chris. What is he doing here so early?
Embarrassment flushes my cheeks as I fumble on the ground beside the cot for my shirt. I don’t want to wake Jay, but I can just imagine the lecture if Beth comes in here and finds us asleep together, half dressed. She’d never, ever let it go. None of them would. They enjoy teasing us way too much already.
I slowly peel myself away and slip my thermal on, careful not to wake him. But when I stand up I almost step on Jay’s flex. It was charging, draped over one of his leg bands. I must have knocked it down when I grabbed my shirt.
When I go to put it back, I realize it’s buzzing with an alert.
“Hey,” I say, quietly placing a hand on Jay’s shoulder. His eyes open immediately.
“What’s up?”
“Did you set an alarm?” I say, holding up his flex.
He tries to bolt out of bed and goes sprawling over his unresponsive legs.
He swears. Loudly.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Yes,” he grumbles, pushing at my hands as I try to help him back onto the bed. “Leave me. I just forgot for a second.”
He looks pale under the olive brown that long days with the foraging team have brushed over his skin. He’s so good at handling . . . everything. It’s easy to forget he’s only been dealing with the braces for the last five months. He does okay most of the time, except for these moments when it sneaks up on him. If we were back on Earth, there’d be trauma counseling and weeks of physical therapy to help him through. I know he goes to see Dr. Kao sometimes, but not as often as I think he needs to. Ironic, considering how hard I avoided my own trauma counseling. I guess it takes one to know one.
“Do I need to know?” Beth calls to us.
“No,” Jay calls back. “I’m just an idiot.” He grabs his flex and slaps it on. “And I’m late for reveille.” He shoves one of his bands on, then swears again as it beeps in protest because it’s misaligned.
He stops. Takes a deep breath. Then he offers me a bittersweet half smile. “Help?”
I crouch to help him, our hands moving together in a quick harmony that makes my stomach flip. That’s been happening, lately. These little moments when it feels like Jay and I are two parts of a whole.
“Joey and Ja-ay sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” Chris shout-sings from the other side of the greenhouse. His voice cracks across the “n” and he dissolves into laughter.
Jay twists to glower through the orchid trees.
“I’m a marine, you know,” he calls back. “They train us to kill people.”
“Do you really have time to kill Chris?” I say, not trying that hard to swallow my amusement. “I thought you were late.”
Jay sighs. “You’re right.” He starts for the door. Then he turns back and drags me close for a surprisingly thorough kiss. My laughter dissolves into lust, sliding hot and needy through my veins even as he lets me go and hustles for the door.
“You’re lucky I don’t have time to demonstrate my skills, kid,” I hear him growl at Chris on his way out.
“Timing is everything,” Chris fires back, unfazed.
I duck between the rows of plant specimens to the lab table, where Chris is setting out bowls of oatmeal from a tray.
I continue past him, into our makeshift bedroom.
Beth follows me.
“I assume your Academy personal health education was adequate?”
“For what?” I say, shoving my boots on and reaching for a fresh thermal.
“Half-naked marines,” she says in the same dry tone.
“Beth!”
“Joanna!”
See. I knew she would never let me live this down.
“Yes, it was adequate,” I mutter, tugging my utility harness over my shoulders and around my hips. “But unnecessary, for sleeping. Which is all we did.”
“Be that as it may,” she says calmly as I stalk back out into the lab, “as your older sister, I have certain educational obligations toward you when you partake in mating rituals.”
“Mating rituals?” I spin to glare at her. “Seriously? Not even you are that analytical.”
“No.” She smirks. “But you’re that easy.”
I stick my tongue out at her. Then I feel like a terrible human. How can I be joking around with my sister and my friends right now? Earth is gone. Billions of people are dead, and we’re about to go to their totally inadequate mass funeral.
“Compartmentalization,” Beth says, reading my face like an open flex. “A necessary skill in an ongoing crisis.”
Ongoing crisis. Only Beth could make the apocalypse sound boring.
For some reason, that makes me feel better.
“Is it wrong that I kind of don’t care?” Chris says abruptly. Then he shakes his head, like he’s arguing with himself. “No. That’s not . . . I care. It’s awful. So awful, it feels like I should . . . I don’t know . . . it should feel worse, shouldn’t it? Than . . . Mom.”
Mommy! I can still hear him screaming for Chief Penny as she died in our arms. I’ll never forget the heartbreak in his voice. It hasn’t faded. I understand that. Mine hasn’t, either.
“It doesn’t,” I say. Teddy’s funeral felt like I was being recycled alive. My body shredded and ground down to its individual components. I thought I might not survive it. But our species has almost been wiped out and our home world is gone and . . . “It isn’t the same.”
“I’m glad it’s not just me,” he says.
I nod.
Chris eats. Beth sits across from him, but instead of eating, she pulls off her flex to start taking notes about something. From here, it looks like she’s making a list. Probably planning a new research project or something. Trying to lose herself in work.