Cibola Burn

“Thank you,” she said, and turned back to the window and the rain. The lightning still played among the clouds and lanced down to the ground, but not so often now. The flashes showed her a transformed landscape. Rivers flowed where yesterday had been desert hardpan. The flowers, or what she thought of as flowers, were churned into nothing. Not even sticks remained. She couldn’t imagine how the mimic lizards could have survived. Or the birdlike animals she’d thought of as rock sparrows. She’d meant to go to the wash east of First Landing and collect samples of the pink lichen that clung in the shadows there. She wouldn’t get to now.

The sense of loss was like a weight on her throat. She had glimpsed an ecosystem unlike anything anyone had ever seen before, a web of life that had grown up apart from anything she had known. She and her workgroups had been the only people ever to walk in that garden. And now it was gone.

“The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster,” she said. It was a truism of ecological biologists, and she said it the way a religious person might pray. To make sense of what she saw. To comfort herself. To give the world some sense of purpose or meaning. Species rose in an environment, and that environment changed. It was the nature of the universe, as true here as it had been on Earth.

She wept quietly, her tears indistinguishable from the rain.

“Well, there’s something I wasn’t expecting,” Holden said. She turned to look at him. The dimness of the ruins rendered him in monochrome. He was a sepia print of James Holden. His hair was plastered back, clinging to his head and the nape of his neck. Mud streaked his shirt.

She was too tired to dissemble. She took his hand in hers and followed his gaze toward the back of the ruins. His hand was solid and warm in hers, and if there was some stiffness and hesitation in it, at least he didn’t flinch away.

Carol Chiwewe and four other squatters were bailing the storm muck out the window with stiff plastic utility panels, streaks of green-brown staining the pale gray. Behind them, twenty or thirty of the squatters from First Landing were clumped in groups, huddled together under blankets. RCE security moved among them with bottles of water and foil-packed emergency rations. Fayez and Lucia were standing together, talking animatedly. Elvi couldn’t make out the words.

“I don’t see it,” she said. “What weren’t you expecting?”

He squeezed her fingers and let go of her hand. Her palm felt colder without his in it.

“Your security people helping the Belters,” he said. “I guess nothing brings people together like a disaster.”

“That’s not true,” Elvi said. “We would always have helped. We came out here planning to help. I don’t know why everyone thinks that we’re so awful. We didn’t do anything wrong.”

Her voice cracked on the last word, and she started weeping in earnest. She felt oddly distanced from her grief, as if she were watching it from the outside, and then Holden put his hand on her shoulder, and she felt the pain. For a time, it washed her away. Flooded her. Three lightning strikes came close by, loud and bright and sudden, the thunder from them rolling away in the distance.

“I’m sorry,” she said, when she could say anything. “There’s just been… so much.”

“No, I should apologize,” Holden said. “I didn’t mean to make you feel worse. It’s just…”

“I understand,” she said, reaching for his hand again. Let him laugh at her. Let him turn her away. She didn’t care now. She just wanted to be touched. To be held.

“Hey, Cap,” Amos said, looming up out of the darkness. He had a clear plastic poncho over his shoulders, the hood straining to fit the thick neck. “You going to be all right for a while?”

Holden stepped back, retreating from her. She felt a brief, irrational flash of rage toward the big man for intruding. She bit her lip and scowled up at him. If he noticed, he gave no sign.

“I don’t actually know how to answer that question,” Holden said. “I don’t see any reason I’d die right away. That’s about the best I’ve got.”

“Beats the alternative, anyway,” Amos said. “So that Dahlke family that didn’t make it here before the shit hit the fan? Yeah, some of us are gonna go have a looksee.”

Holden scowled. “You sure that’s a good idea? It’s still pretty bad out there. And this is more water than I’m guessing this place has seen in ever. There’ll be a lot of flooding, and there’s no good way to get help out if something goes south.”

“They had a little girl,” Amos said. The two men exchanged a long look that seemed to carry the weight of some earlier conversation. Elvi felt like a stranger watching two family members communicate in the half-code of long familiarity.

“Be careful,” Holden replied after a long moment.

“That ship may have sailed, but I’ll do what I can.”

Wei walked toward them. She’d taken off her armor, but she still had an automatic rifle strapped to her back. She nodded at Amos. “I’ve got a couple more who want to tag along.”