Cibola Burn

Elvi sighed and leaned back from the screen. She’d been bent almost double trying to make out the results. Her back ached and there was a headache building all across the front of her skull. Fayez held something out. Another bar of emergency cake. When she took it, his fingers stayed with hers.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Elvi said.

“You’re sure?”

“Well, apart from the obvious. Why?”

“You seemed a little distant.”

“I’ve been working.”

“Sure. Of course. I’m sorry. I’m just being stupid.”

“I don’t understand,” Elvi said. “Haven’t I been acting the same way I always do?”

“Yes, you have,” Fayez said, letting go of her hand. “That was kind of my point. After… after, you know —”

“The sex?”

He shifted. She imagined him closing his eyes. Wincing a little bit. With her eyes as bad as they were, it wasn’t much more than a guess, but it filled her with a surprising glee. Who would have guessed? Fayez with tender feelings.

“The sex,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure that we were okay. That things were all right between us.”

“Well,” she said, “orgasm does release a lot of oxytocin, so I’m probably more fond of you than before.”

“Now you’re teasing me.”

“That too,” she said, and took another bite of the cake. It really was awful stuff.

“I wanted to make sure that I knew where we stood.”

“I haven’t really thought about it,” Elvi said, gesturing at the chemistry deck. “You know. Busy.”

“Of course,” Fayez said. “I understand.”

“Once we’re not all going to die, though, maybe we could talk about it? Would that be okay?”

“That would be fine.”

“All right, then. It’s a date,” Elvi said, and sat back down at the deck. Her back hurt. Especially between the shoulder blades. She went through the tools screen, trying to find a way to bump the font up another level, but the deck’s options were very limited. She was going to need help, and soon. In the main room, someone called out sharply, and a dozen voices rose in an answering chorus of complaint.

“Okay, that wouldn’t be fine,” Fayez said. “Elvi, listen. You are the smartest woman I’ve ever met, and I’ve been at some of the best universities there are. If there’s anyone, anywhere that can get us out of this, it’s you, and I would very much like to grow very, very old and decrepit and probably incontinent and senile in your company. So if you could save my life and everyone else’s, I’d very much appreciate it.”

That’s sweet and Please don’t put more pressure on me right now and I’ll try warred in her mind. Somewhere at the edge of the ruins, someone shouted. She hoped it wasn’t a slug, that it wasn’t another death. That it wasn’t something else that had gone wrong.

“Okay,” she said.

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Holden

Holden shuffled his way around the tower again.

The sky was the iron gray of an overcast noon. The rain had tapered off to a faint drizzle just heavy enough to keep his hair and clothes soaked and send rivulets of water down his spine. The wet ground sucked at his boot heels with each step. The air smelled of ozone and mud.

A small group of death-slugs were nosing at a crack in the tower’s base. A wad of fabric blocked their entrance, but they were using their narrow noses to probe at it, looking for a way in. Holden hefted his long-handled shovel recovered from the ruined mines and smashed them flat with one heavy blow. He scooped up the gooey corpses and threw them away from the tower, then let the light rain wash the slime off the blade.

He moved on, finding only the occasional straggler on the tower wall. These he scraped off and flung away using the shovel like a catapult. At first, it had been sort of fun to see how far he could throw them. Now his shoulders and arms burned with fatigue and his distances were getting shorter and shorter.

Miller followed along sometimes, not saying anything, just a gray basset-hound-faced reminder that Holden had more important things to be doing.

He vanished when Holden rounded a corner and found a small work crew resting near a partially dug trench. They were trying to get at least a shallow water-filled ditch all the way around the tower, but it was slow work with their primitive implements.

This particular group was made up of three women and two men with crude digging tools. They were stretching and drinking water from one of the bags the purifier put out. One of the women gave him a nod, the other four ignored him.

One of the two men had a slug on his pants.

It hung on the fabric, just above his right knee. There was no slime trail around it. None of the five diggers seemed to notice it was there. Holden knew that if he shouted in alarm, the man might take a swipe at it with his hand without thinking. So he calmly walked toward him and said, “Don’t move.”

The man frowned back at him. “Que?”