Half Way Home

• 4 • Salvage

Just a few hours after my talk with Stevens, I found myself back in the place of my birth: the charred remains of the vat module. I was working there when he died, pulling wire from the conduits below the decking. At first, I had no idea anything had happened. The base had been a blur of activity all morning—people shouting over the roar of the tractors, excited scavengers running to and fro with special finds. When the accident occurred, it must have been more of the same noise, blending in with the rest.

Terri, another of the quasi-scientists, was working down the line of vats with me. She pulled up panels of deck plating while I followed behind, cutting open conduit and removing the intact wire. We rolled it up into coils before one of the others took it outside and arranged the scraps.

Beyond us—further down the aisle of vats—members of the support crew performed the nasty job of dealing with the remains of the dead, which consisted mostly of bone and ash. They swept and shoveled the piles onto tarps, then carried them by the corners out through several new holes that had been cut in the sides of the module.

Those holes let in a little light and the barest movement of fresh air. They also let both groups work simultaneously, giving us multiple exit points for taking out items useful or dead.

We found out about Stevens from Tarsi. I heard her yelling my name outside the module, and I half expected her to come in with some sort of lunch. Instead, she ran down the loose decking we’d already picked through, her poncho flapping, her face red and chapped. She was out of breath when she reached me—she grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the exit.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Stevens,” she gasped. “He—he’s dead.”

I shook my head and tried to pull my arm free, my body revolting. “No,” I said. “I was just with him, not three or four hours ago.” I looked back to Terri, hoping she would back me up, but she remained by the last grate she’d opened, her face slack, her eyes out of focus.

Tarsi pulled me past our old adjoining vats and through the door. I stumbled along, my brain reeling with the idea that someone I had just come to know might be gone forever.

I ran alongside Tarsi and noticed many others hurrying in the same direction. Several groups of colonists were walking the opposite way, their hands over their mouths or tangled up in their hair. We, the running, had a shared look of doubting shock on our faces. The others—the walking—had a similar, horrified expression, but with all the disbelief removed.

I followed Tarsi around a large brown puddle of yesterday’s rain and across the packed earth. We crested a rise and came to a broad clearing, the spot they’d chosen for the rocket pad. Several tractors and dozers idled there, puffing smoke into the sky like huffs of anxious energy. Near one of the tractors, a small cluster of colonists stood around a tarp. A tarp that covered something.

I shuffled down the slope and stopped one of the female colonists who was wandering back up. “What happened?” I asked.

“One of the tractors lurched,” she said. “He fell off and got caught under the treads—”

Tarsi dragged me away from the girl and toward the scene.

“We’re supposed to get back to work—” the girl called after us.

I stopped at the edge of a small group that had formed near the tarp. Myra sat on the other side of the covered hump, sobbing into her hands, her shoulders shaking. I could see a hand sticking out of the tarp, half opened. The fingers curling up from the ground were perfectly still.

“How?” I asked. It didn’t make sense. Someone so alive, so in control, and all so recently, was no more. He would never again move of his own volition. Never speak to us with his calm voice. Never lead us to all the hopeful futures he seemed intent on taking us. I found myself passing through the denial stage, and completely aware of it.

“It wasn’t an accident,” someone in the group said.

Several other people arrived at a run, while others shuffled off in a state of shock. I was dead-still, undergoing the transformation.

“It was a fluke,” another person said. “He fell. I saw it happen.”

“Hickson was on the platform with him,” the first boy said. “No way was this an accident.”

I turned to tell the two guys to leave it alone, then saw Oliver. Our eyes met, and he came over to me; he wrapped both hands around my elbow, the weight of his thin arms pulling down on mine.

“The gods hath more need of him than we,” he said, the barest of smiles on his lips.

“Not now,” I told Oliver. I approached the two arguing colonists. They were both males—large, like members of the working class. “Which of you saw what happened?” I asked.

“We both did, I guess.”

“I was on the rise,” one of them said. “I was over there, diverting the water. I heard gears grinding and looked up. Stevens was in the air. Hickson was leaning out over the landing with his arms out. The tractor was moving forward and—”

“That was after,” the other boy said, shaking his head. “I saw the whole thing. Hickson was reaching out to grab him, to help him. The tractor just lurched. I swear, it was an accident.”

“No way was that an accident,” the first boy said. “You saw them this morning, and who’s gonna be in charge now?”

“You can’t go making those claims,” the other boy said, his voice rising. “Especially if you didn’t see—”

“Calm down,” I told them. “None of this is going to help. We don’t need to spread divisive rumors, okay?”

One of the boys nodded. The other shook his head, but it seemed to be more out of an unwillingness to accept the coincidence than anything else. He let the matter go and the two turned away from each other, going back to their duties, probably with a mind of seeding their individual version of events among the other colonists.

When I turned back, I saw Tarsi and Kelvin clinging to one another, both looking to the tarp. We had already begun burying the more than four hundred dead from the previous day, but this one would be different. This would be someone we knew, however briefly. More chilling was that with Stevens’s passing, we would be reducing our number by one.

And burying a bit of our hope along with him.