Cibola Burn

“Don’t matter to me if it don’t matter to you,” Amos said. Wei nodded. There was a darkness in her eyes that seemed to echo Amos’.

Elvi looked over. A half dozen other people were struggling into the same kind of poncho Amos wore. In the dimness and the wreckage, it was hard to tell which of them were squatters and which were RCE. Even Belters and Earthers were hard to differentiate now. Elvi didn’t know if that was an artifact of the darkness or if some deeper part of her brain was changing her perceptions, making anything human into something like her. Minds could be tricky that way.

Among them, she caught a glimpse of Fayez and her mouth went coppery with sudden fear. “Wait,” she said, hopping across the space. “Fayez, wait. What are you doing?”

“Helping out,” he said. “Also, getting out of this sardine can. I’ve gotten used to having a couple feet of social distance. Just being around all these people stresses me out.”

“You can’t. It’s dangerous out there.”

“I know.”

“You stay here,” she said, grabbing at his poncho and tugging it up, trying to get it back over his head. “I can go.”

“Elvi,” he said. “Elvi! Stop it.”

She had a double handful of plastic sheeting in her fingers. It was already wet.

“Let them go,” she said. “They’re professionals. They can take care of this. We… people like us…”

“We’re past us and them at this point. We’re just people in a bad place,” Fayez said. And then a moment later, “You know what I am, Elvi.”

“No. No, you’re a good man, Fayez.”

He tilted his head. “I meant that I’m a geologist. It’s not like they need me to talk about plate tectonics. What were you thinking?”

“Oh. Ah. I just…”

“Come on, Professor,” Wei said, tapping Fayez on the arm. “Time to go for a walk.”

“How can I refuse?” Fayez said, gently taking the plastic sheeting out of Elvi’s hands. She stood watching as six of them walked together toward the entrance. Amos, Wei, Fayez, and three of the squatters – no, two squatters and Sudyam – one-use chemical lanterns glowing in their hands. They walked out into the gale. She stood at the window, ignoring the rain that soaked her. Amos and Wei took the lead, their heads down, their ponchos blowing out behind them. The others followed close behind, clustered like ducklings. The night around them was black and violent, and they moved into the downpour, growing fainter with every minute until she couldn’t make them out at all. She stood there a while longer, her mind empty and exhausted.

She found Lucia and Jacek in one of the larger chambers. Two Belters were struggling to place a wide plastic panel over one of the windows to block the rain now that the wind wasn’t so violent that it would simply shatter. A half dozen others were scraping out the muck. They’d already done so much work, Elvi could see pale strips of the ground. Everywhere people were sleeping, curled into and against each other. The sound of the storm was still enough to drown out their moans. Or most of them.

Lucia looked up at her. The woman seemed to have aged a decade, but she managed a smile. Elvi sat down beside her. They were both covered in salt mud, and the muck was starting to reek a little. Putrescence or something like it. All the small life forms living in the planet’s great ocean that had been broken and thrown to the sky, starting to decay. It broke her heart to think of the scale of the death that surrounded them, so she didn’t.

“Can I help you?” Lucia said.

“I came to ask the same thing,” Elvi said. “Tell me what I can do.”

~

The long, terrible night went on, the rain slackening only slightly. No light came through the clouds. No rainbows promised that the disaster was ended. Elvi moved from one group to another, talking and checking. Some were the squatters, some were RCE. All had the same stunned expressions, the same sense of amazement that they were still alive. The scent of the muck was getting richer and more pungent as whatever organic structures it had held broke down. Elvi hated to imagine how the world would stink when the last of the rains fell and the sun came back to warm the landscape. That was a problem for another time.

She didn’t notice it when she fell asleep. She’d been at the window, looking out in hopes of catching a glimpse of the search party’s return. She remembered very clearly hearing Holden’s voice behind her and a woman replying to him. She’d meant to turn back, find him, ask if she could help. If she could do something to stay in motion, to keep from thinking or feeling for another hour more. But instead she woke up.

For a moment, she didn’t know where she was. Her exhaustion-drunk mind tried to make the close quarters into her cabin on the Israel, as if she were still on the journey out to New Terra. As if none of this had ever happened. Then the present reasserted itself.