Half Way Home

• 16 • Old Friends

Morning came, its feeble rays slanting through the dense canopy overhead, and winding around trees that rose up in great cliffs of wood. Our group lay together in a tight cluster, our heads on various parts of each other. Exhaustion had overtaken a few of us just an hour into our hike through the blackness. Despite protestations, I had been unwilling to hazard the light, for fear of being spotted. Of the three flashlights that had been brought between all the escapees, mine was the only one that had survived our mad push through the fence.

Sitting up, I noticed a few others had awoken before me. Kelvin, Vincent, and Britny—the last a girl I hardly knew—sat together a dozen paces away, whispering and allowing the rest of us to enjoy our sleep. I disentangled myself from Tarsi and tried to stand, only to feel a stabbing pain in the back of my thigh. Hobbling away from the other sleepers, I moved halfway to Kelvin before collapsing.

“Are you okay?” he whispered, coming to my side.

“I think I got shot last night,” I told him. “Forgot all about it. Didn’t hurt much ’til now.”

“Roll over,” he said, trying to keep his voice low, his worry threatening to wake the others.

I lay facedown in the mossy groundcover and saw Vincent and Britny casting me confused looks. I waved—partly from embarrassment—as Kelvin pulled my trousers down to inspect the wound. They both waved back, and something in the normalcy of the gesture amused me. We were failed planetary colonists on the run from our own people, out in the middle of an unexplored planet that supposedly teetered between viability and abort. And there we were, waving at one another with sheepish grins, taking stock of who had made the break, who had been fed up with their lives enough to chance throwing them away.

“Ow,” I hissed, as Kelvin found my wound and probed it with his hand. He brought something up in front of my face.

“A shard of rock,” he said, holding the bloody stone dart up for me to see. “Barely a scratch.”

I rolled over and worked my pants back into place. Kelvin helped me up, and it felt like a lot more than a scratch on the back of my leg. I limped over to the others, who shifted in place to include me.

“Doesn’t feel like a scratch,” I told Kelvin, enjoying the sensation of being half carried and half escorted by him.

“There might be a little bruising as well,” he admitted. “But trust me, your little legs will be fine.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Hello, Porter,” Vincent said as I joined them on the ground.

I smiled and greeted them both. “So, the disenfranchised among us make themselves known,” I said.

“Yeah, and I’m sure there’ll be more,” Britny said, frowning.

I looked to Kelvin. “Speaking of which, we need to find Mica and Peter. I can’t stand the thought of them out here alone.” I looked over my shoulder. “There’s what? Nearly ten of us?”

“Maybe this will be enough to change the way things are running around base,” Vincent said. “This many people gone—using another half dozen for enforcement—the timetables are gonna go to shit.”

“Chances are it’ll just make things at camp worse for the rest,” I said.

“How?” Britny asked.

“A dozen ways. They could tighten the perimeter now that the farms have been abandoned and the fuel depot has been picked apart. There’s enough fencing there for two smaller nested circuits if they wanted to do that. Or they could pack everyone into a few modules every night and lock them. And if I can think of these things, I’m sure Hickson can come up with even worse.”

“I don’t know it’s all Hickson,” Vincent said. “I think he’s just Colony’s muscle.”

Kelvin shook his head.

“No way,” he said. “Everything went south when Stevens died.”

“And I’m not convinced Hickson killed Stevens,” Vincent told him.

“We need to start worrying about ourselves,” Britny said. “The next few weeks are gonna make the last few seem like a night in the vats.”

“And Colony was predicting rain for tonight. I heard it from Myra.”

Someone squeezed my shoulder from behind. I turned as Tarsi sat down beside me. She leaned her head against my shoulder and I glanced up in time to see the pained expression on Kelvin’s face, which he quickly wiped away.

“How did you sleep?” I asked her.

“Bad dreams, but otherwise… okay. How are you?”

“He’s got a boo-boo on his girly little leg,” Kelvin said, pointing and smiling.

“Are you hurt?”

I shrugged. “It’s nothing.”

“That’s not what you just said,” said Kelvin.

I glared at him. His smile broadened, but he raised his hands in mock surrender.

Britny stood and rested her hands on her hips. “When you boys are done fooling around, we need to make some decisions. How far do we go before we start digging in? Everybody seems to have grabbed a thing or two before they left, so how are we dividing these things up? Or are we?”

Tarsi, Kelvin, and I looked at one another. We hadn’t planned on any of that. The three of us were family, so there was no question on what belonged to whom. As much as we needed and supported everyone else, the idea of submitting to another collective when the goal of that new group might one day turn out to be as sensible as building rockets—it didn’t sit well with me. I could see similar worries on the faces of my friends.

“We are in this together, aren’t we?” Britny asked.

We sat silent for a moment.

Several of us nodded slightly, as we looked to one another. I turned at the sound of people moving behind me and saw some of the sleepers stirring and stretching, pointing up to the new patch of open sky overhead created by last night’s missile.

“This is going to get complicated awfully quick,” I grumbled.

“No, it’s not,” Jorge said behind us. “Let me make it real simple. I brought a gun.” I turned and saw him reaching behind his back. He pulled his hand out and pointed two fingers at us, then started laughing.

Eventually, the rest of us joined in.

Even though I never saw the humor in it.

An easy and temporary consensus formed once everyone was up and had their things together. We decided we would walk toward the nearest tree, just to make sure that’s what they were. Several of us were curious to see one up close after having lived within sight of them for weeks. They were so unlike the trees from our training programs that they seemed alien to us, even though we’d never truly known anything else.

From the colony, they had appeared continuous, a jagged cliff of rising bark that encircled us completely. The width of each trunk was easily as big around as the perimeter of our entire base. Between the closest trees you could see darker trunks looming in the shadowy distance. They overlapped in a way that blocked out all else, creating the appearance of something solid and impenetrable. As we neared them, they appeared even broader and flatter, their curvature removed by our proximity.

We set off toward the nearest one, figuring that would have been Mica and Peter’s plan. We could make shelter along the wall of wood, affixing our various scraps of tarp to stay out of the rain, and maybe use our machetes to remove building material from the trunk.

Even with the pain in my hamstring, the walk was a pleasant one. The previous night, we had discovered that the surface of our planet wasn’t all packed dirt and mud; that was all we’d ever seen inside our fenced-in colony. Everything Colony prepared for us, out to a hundred yards or more, had the beat-down look of constantly roaming tractors and dozers.

Moving past Colony’s reach, we saw what the ground of our home normally looked like. It was mostly moss. A half dozen varieties covered the ground beneath the canopy. Some were soft, others stiff, but all were better than the hard soil that had calloused our feet over the past weeks. We soon learned the brown mosses and the really dark green were the most abrasive, so our line swayed to and fro as we picked over the most luxuriant paths.

We also quickly discovered the bombfruit hadn’t evolved to explode on impact. Out beyond the perimeter, they studded the ground like stones—half-buried, the pointy ends embedded in the moss. They looked like seeds pushed partway into the ground by a giant’s thumb. None of them seemed to be sprouting anything, however, and the near dearth of natural sunlight didn’t seem to bode well for their chances of growing into more trees.

Kelvin, with his training as a farmer, was the nearest we had to a biologist in the group. He seemed fascinated by the seeds. The rest of us were just glad to know we would starve to death no more rapidly out here than we would have inside the camp.

The only other curiosity we came across on our way to the tree was an odd geological formation: a hole, almost perfectly round, that gaped in the middle of the moss. Our path nearly took us right into it, causing us to stop and peer inside. The shaft seemed to go straight down, far deeper than my flashlight could penetrate. Karl, an electrician who had been shuffled between construction and payload duty a few times, took a bombfruit and threw it into the center. We all stood quietly until we heard a distant clatter, then marveled at what the depth of the thing must be.

We left the strange hole behind and resolved to no longer run through the night like madmen. Just in case. Tarsi hammered the point home when she spotted another of the holes in the distance and off to one side. Nobody spoke of the chances that Mica and Peter wouldn’t be found, but I couldn’t have been the only one thinking it.

It took half the day before we reached the trunk, the thing seeming to slide away from us one step for every two we took. The base of it was even more massive than we had imagined. Kelvin had overheard the canopy crew adjusting their missile the other night for a height of two thousand feet. It was hard to believe a living thing could grow to such proportions, but the evidence loomed before us.

We stopped several hundred feet away and made lunch out of raw bombfruit with a pinch of spice someone had brought along. Objectively, it was less palatable than the paste we normally ate, but we all agreed the novelty of the mixture made it somehow more enjoyable. Or perhaps it was just that the food and the time spent consuming it were ours.

Several people wondered aloud what the rest of the camp was doing right then, besides hating our guts. Those with intimate knowledge of the timetables told us precisely what each group would be doing and even what some of us were supposed to be up to. I sat facing the distant camp, the tops of the modules barely visible above the rise of the berm. A spot of raw sunlight beamed down from the new hole overhead and glimmering off the things we could no longer use. It all looked so small. So impossible. How was such a speck of humanity expected to tame an entire planet? And what did that make our little group? A mote ejected from the speck?

Halfway through the meal, rapid popping noises sounded in the direction of Colony. Even if the berm and fence weren’t there, we were too far away to see individual people moving around camp, leaving us to speculate.

“The propellant?”

“Sabotage,” Jorge said, almost with a hint of wishing.

“It’s a warning.”

A twinge in the back of my leg—a sudden jolt of pain—gave me the answer:

“Target practice,” I said.

We fell silent and the popping sounds did as well. We looked around at each other as the noise started back up a minute later. Those who had obsessed with timetables for three weeks murmured their disgust at the labor hours needed to replenish all those rounds of ammo.

Overall, the meal could not have been more bizarre. It was, in many ways, even stranger than the first one we’d had the morning after our birth. That one had been so consumed with depression and despair that no other emotion could gain purchase. This one had a tinge of accidental camaraderie, as fully three separate groups had made our break on the same night—all following in Mica’s and Peter’s footsteps. While we ate, Kelvin admitted that the three of us had dreamed of escaping a day earlier. Four of the others, including Vincent and Britny, had even discussed the idea before the enforcers formed up.

As a half-trained psychologist, I was fascinated by how quickly the group gelled. Many of my fears concerning shared resources faded as I spoke and joked with each person. Names and faces I knew in passing were now a part of my tribe, and over the course of a single morning I went from feeling wary of their presence to being willing to risk myself for them. And not just like the night before, where my primary concern had been for Kelvin and Tarsi, but really put myself in danger for any one of them. Whatever the cause of this magical transformation, I had not yet come to it in my studies of human behavior.

After we ate as much of the foul tasting fruit as we could and passed around our several rations of water, we rose as a group and approached the tree. The organism seemed to offer a hello—or possibly a warning—as a single bombfruit whistled out of the canopy and buried itself with a thud inside a nearby patch of light-green moss. We laughed at the timing and stepped around the embedded fruit as if it still contained some animating force. We spread out to explore the mountainous plant.

“It’s soft,” Samson said.

He was one of the two boys that had brought machetes. I saw him rubbing the blade against a jagged edge of bark, peeling a piece back with ease.

The skin may have been soft, but the shape of the tree was rough, far more than it had appeared from a distance. The bark was so jagged and the spacing of the outcrops so regular, you could step inside the wide crevasses and find yourself surrounded on three sides by cool, brown walls of tree. It reminded me of a mechanical gear if seen top-down, like evenly spaced cogs standing out from a round, recessed base.

Several of us stepped between the cogs into what felt like roofless caves. I went all the way inside one of the creases and looked up, mesmerized by the way the bark wiggled its way up into the canopy. It no longer looked like a cave but more like a square, vertical ditch running all the way up the surface of the tree, the edges seeming to converge in the distance.

I put my back against one of the walls jutting out from the center and tried to place my hands against the opposite side, wondering if a taller person could shimmy their way up to the branches and leaves overhead. It would take monumental endurance.

“Give me fruuuiiiiit,” someone howled, and we all laughed at the way the vertical canyon toyed with their voice. I popped out of my indention and imagined us carving a little village right out of the trunk, all of our individual caves interconnected. We could dig up some mosses and plant our Terran seeds in the soil, see if they would grow in the filtered sunlight. The tarps we could save for gathering and storing water. I stepped back and looked up the tree, imagining how we could make it work.

Tarsi came up behind me and wrapped her arms around my stomach. I turned into her embrace and gave her a joyous squeeze. To our side, I saw Kelvin step away from the tree and glance over at us, that expression from earlier on his face. I waved him over and he grudgingly joined in our little group hug.

“I’m gonna miss our tractor,” he said.

“Even on floor night?” Tarsi asked.

“Even then.”

“I wish Oliver was here,” I told the others, breaking out of the hug and looking back in the direction of base.

“Yeah,” Kelvin said. “I wonder what he—”

“Hey! Check this out!” Vincent backed away from the tree and pointed. He had wandered fifty feet or so further down the trunk. We all ran over to see what he’d found.

“Did you carve that?” Samson asked, pointing his machete at one of the outcroppings of bark.

“With what?” Vincent said, shrugging his shoulders and lifting his empty hands.

I pushed past the people up front to see. Leila stood right next to the tree, rubbing her hands over it.

It was an arrow. Carved into the trunk.

Pointing up.