* * *

  Their only hope is to somehow get back in the planet’s good graces. With the help of New Belaforme’s general AI, Amara and Jesse figure out where the most active hollow is and jump into a helicraft. Swaddled in full protection gear, and then some—not that it’ll do anything but slow them down if the hollow decides to explode—they set up their equipment and begin running tests.

  Initial scans indicate that this hollow is the oldest onworld. Subsurface structures connect it to twenty hollows nearby; the map they’ve been building suggests it’s linked to every Gray-spewing pit in a massive planet-wide network. If they have any chance of digging up the secret to surviving, it’s here. Amara’s team has been searching for the center of the planet’s deadly web ever since they discovered the Gray—she doesn’t know whether to curse the gods she doesn’t quite believe in for obstructing their path, or to thank them for finally bestowing this discovery.

  “I’m going to get a closer look,” Jesse says.

  Amara doesn’t look up from where she hacks chunks of rock out of the hollow’s side. “Send a drone.”

  She picks up a fragment and examines it. There’s something odd about it. She knows from Jesse’s initial reports that hollows are mostly composed of uplifted sedimentary rock, formed under relatively low pressures and temperatures as continental plates collide. But throughout this piece’s structure, there are vesicles—tiny holes that could’ve only been formed by gas bubbles trapped in lava. What she’s seeing should be impossible; hollows aren’t volcanoes, though their explosions are similarly destructive. It’s the first sample she’s seen like this.

  It’s a good thing she has an expert with her.

  “Does this look igneous to you?” she asks as she starts hammering out another piece of rock.

  Jesse doesn’t respond. She stands and finds him kneeling about two meters away from the edge of the hollow’s crater. A chill skitters down her spine, insectile and lightning quick. The threat of an agonizing death hasn’t tampered his rashness in the slightest.

  “Get down from there and look at this!” Amara calls sharply, waving a sizable lump of rock like bait.

  He doesn’t answer, doesn’t turn around. Probably can’t hear her. She activates the two-way communication system built into her hazmat suit.

  “Get down here before you fall in!” she warns him. Coldness presses its palm against the back of her neck, taps its frozen fingers along the base of her skull.

  Something’s off. The foreboding twist of her gut is all intuition, that of prey caught in the eyeline of a hidden predator. All she knows for certain is that something is terribly, horribly wrong.

  “Jesse,” Amara repeats, harsher now. Desperate.

  “You have to see this,” Jesse whispers, paying her no mind as he crawls closer. He sounds out of breath, but not as if he’s been running. No, it’s as if he’s been punched in the gut. “It’s—”

  The hollow rumbles, a giant rolling its shoulders before it wakes. Where Amara stands, about a third of the way down from the crater, she merely stumbles. Jesse, crouched down at the very edge, is flung violently forward.

  Amara hears his strangled scream as the rock under his feet crumbles into dust. She scrambles to the top of the hollow, terror roaring through her veins. Her lungs burn as though filled with acid.

  No, please, no, not Jesse—

  Amara has never offered an earnest prayer in her life but now she begs with every atom of her being. Please, please, please.

  By the time she reaches the edge, there’s only air.

  Her best friend. Her confidant and companion. Her partner in crime and in the laboratory and in so much of her life—

  Gone.

  There’s only Gray, gorged on life, gorged on Jesse, on the man it sucked down its toothless, bloody, shimmering throat.

  Amara stands there for a moment, trembling. Then her body gives out, and she gives up all hope. She crashes to her knees, stomach acid filling her mouth in a sour torrent. She is a jagged chunk of wreckage slammed against unforgiving rock, splintering and sodden, shoved out to sea, completely and utterly adrift.

  Jesse.

  Jesse.

  Oh, Jesse.

  Amara squeezes her eyes shut to stem the hot tide of tears, but in the end her efforts are just as inconsequential as her prayers. The world blurs around her. This is her doing. She didn’t love him enough.

  If she had, she would have caught him in time.

  009

  A fist smashes into Vinh’s office door, followed by what sounds like a boot. A sharp “Shit!” followed by a pained groan.

  Amara.

  Vinh commands the door to open.

  Her wife stands there, still halfway in her protective gear, trembling violently. Mascara streaks down her face like war paint.

  “He’s dead,” Amara sobs.

  The words bounce off Vinh like a rubber ball on concrete. “What?”

  Amara stumbles inside. “He’s dead.” In the small space, her whisper sounds impossibly loud.

  The floor lurches beneath Vinh’s chair, as though the tiles have been turned to sludge. She couldn’t make herself stand, even if she wanted to. “Jesse?”

  Amara nods once, slumping against the wall.

  “No,” Vinh says, firm. Unyielding. Yes, good. At least her voice projects some semblance of the self-control she’s never really had. “No, that’s not possible.”

  “I saw him fall into the hollow, Vinh. I saw—”

  A broken, sawed-off laugh scrambles up Vinh’s throat. It emerges as something close to a sob. “You must be—”

  “You finish that sentence, you tell me I must be mistaken, I’ll go ballistic,” Amara says thinly. “I was there. I was with him. You weren’t!” Her jaw flexes. “Where were you?”

  Vinh’s eyes flash. The accusatory note in Amara’s voice was no accident. “I was here, in my office, doing what I could to keep this colony safe—”

  “No. I don’t mean today. I mean for a long while. Something in Jesse changed. He needed us, he needed help, and I couldn’t do it all alone.” Her voice lowers. “Where were you?”

  She is being so fucking unfair.

  “What do you want me to say, Amara?” Vinh asks. “That this is my fault? Jesse is—was Jesse. He’s always been just out of reach.”

  “No, no. That’s not true. Honey,” Amara spits out, stalking closer, “he changed. Something in him shifted. But it’s not as if you’d know, would you? We never saw you. You barely came over, barely spoke. Too busy with your husband.”

  Suddenly, Vinh is standing. Their faces are only centimeters apart. “And how would you know?” she hears herself say. “You drive everyone away.”

  Amara laughs. “No, Vinh, that’s your move. If anything, I pull too hard.”

  “Yes.” Vinh bares her teeth. “Yes, maybe that’s true. That’s why no one can stand to be around you. Do you have any idea how exhausting it is? All the criticism and cajoling and the infinite condescension?”

  “At least I care,” Amara says, oh so quiet. “You abandoned us both.”

  That’s it. At that moment something awakens within Vinh, a thing with too many eyes and too many teeth. It’s always been inside her, but she’s never let it get at her wife before. She’s allowed it to stir the water, and even come up for air once or twice, but never this.

  “Well I’m sorry, baby.” Vinh leans in, close enough to kiss. She lets her gaze fall to her wife’s lips. “But you made it real fucking easy.”

  Amara twists on her heel.

  Vinh watches her go. She can’t even bring herself to call Amara back. With the press of a finger against a screen, she locks the door. Then, only then, does she let the tears fall. She slumps over her desk, her face dropping into clawed hands. Blunt nails dig into her temple, her cheeks.

  A sudden, all-consuming cold floods Vinh’s veins, freezing her from the inside out despite the thick, smothering fug of almost-afternoon. She feels like she’d shatter at the slightest tap. A small, keening noise that could be a growing scream traps itself in her mouth and sinks into her tongue, along with her teeth. She’s all right. She’s going to be all right; it’s just that her body strongly disagrees. She shoves back into her office chair and cradles herself.

  Jesse.

  Her only friend.

  And now he’s gone, forever.

  008

  Amara has little time to mourn, given the circumstances, but it’s no matter. She doesn’t see herself returning to work after the half-hour-long, slipshod funeral. New Belaforme took her wife, and the planet took her best friend. Amara knew Jesse for every moment of her life that mattered. If a life is measured by the people who build it together, what does that make hers? What does that make her? Whenever she catches a glimpse of her reflection, be it in a storefront window or a puddle in the road, she finds herself shivering. Oh, it’s not that she doesn’t recognize herself, the red-eyed, sunken-cheeked woman staring back at her. It’s not that she doesn’t know what she’s capable of now.

  She berates herself for her stupid dreams, for every childish plan she spun in her head for the three of them. Ever since Jesse convinced her to take Vinh back that day on Etretat II, she harbored a fantasy of building a comfortable little life in some faraway alien paradise. But whenever she imagined her future with Vinh, Jesse was there too. Instead of a family, she is alone. Instead of the dream, she has this nightmare—all her hopes and wishes reflected in dark blood and shimmering Gray. There is nothing left to live for except herself. It’s enough, but only just.

  Amara didn’t want to have a funeral reception. She didn’t want to field questions about Jesse’s disappearance; the official story is that he was mauled by some unseen beast, hence the closed casket. She didn’t want to listen to Councilwoman Margaret give her meaningless, insultingly brief speech. She didn’t want people she feels nothing for in Jesse’s house, looking at their things and trying to console her. But here she is, her lungs burning with funerary incense.

  Someone touches her elbow. Amara doesn’t even bother turning around. They’re just another intruder. She imagines their features instead: brows curved with pity she doesn’t want, eyes swimming with unshed tears. Every face a shallow simulacrum of sympathy, lips still dusted with crumbs of her dwindling food rations. Not that it matters.

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Amara jerks as if from an electrical shock. It’s Henry. He’s in her house because Vinh brought him. He’s talking to her, touching her because Vinh brought him. Amara’s vision flashes scarlet, deep and dark and cruel as the mist of gore surrounding a Gray-eaten corpse. She wrenches her arm away and just leaves, manually slamming the door behind her. She shuts herself in the office Jesse insisted was theirs.

  A portrait hangs on the wall facing the desk, a solid picture of Jesse, Vinh, and Amara taken with an antique camera. There’s even a hand-carved wooden frame and a sheet of glass over their smiling faces.

  Amara drives her fist into it. Glass shatters and spills onto the floor. Blood wells up between her knuckles in thick, garnet-bright droplets.

  Oh. She shouldn’t have done that. She shouldn’t have run. Henry’s probably gloating about it, under his vacant smile. Amara’s fingers curl tighter, squeezing out more blood. She has never genuinely wanted someone dead before, but she does now.

  The door swings open. Vinh enters. They haven’t spoken, since … Amara hides her hand behind her back, not that it matters. The shards of glass clinging to the frame are flecked with crimson. Vinh makes a sad little sound as she pulls Amara’s clenched hand out. When she moves in, Amara thinks it’s to kiss her on the mouth, but Vinh’s lips brush her cheek instead.

  “Stay here,” Vinh says. “I’m going to get a first aid kit.”

  She closes the door softly behind her.

  As blood drips onto the floor, Amara watches the last loose shards of glass fall from the broken portrait.

  Vinh never comes back.

  007

  Grieving or not, Amara still has a job to do, and it’s expected she’ll do it. That’s fine; she’s good at keeping up appearances if nothing else. After all, what else was her marriage with Vinh, besides a drawn-out lie? What little Amara managed to glean from the data she and Jesse gathered was that they have approximately four days left. The gargantuan hollow at the center of the Gray network will erupt, setting off a chain reaction that will ultimately bathe the entire planet in a death painstakingly designed for humanity.

  Amara informs the Council, and they inform the settlement. There is surprisingly little rioting. Or perhaps the mere handful of brawls and burnings should’ve been expected. There’s nothing anyone can do but make their peace and die. By now, her fear has crystallized into a strange sort of acceptance. Knowing death awaits makes her feel very wise, and very tired. There’s a peculiar strain of contentment in such utter exhaustion.

  Amara spends the first half of her last estimated ninety-six hours in the lab, all by herself. The others have gone home to their families, but she has neither a home nor a family. She and Vinh have made amends, and Vinh said she loved her. Even though she left Amara bleeding in Jesse’s office. Even though Amara now finds herself alone, yet again, in a cold lab with half the lights off. She stares vacantly at a vat of Gray collected via drone from the chimpanzee site. She taps the wall of glass separating her from the sample with an unused writing stylus. There’s nothing to calculate, nothing to work out.

  She wonders whether her university advisors would be proud of the work she’s done here, despite it all. She’s one of the very few reasons this colony lasted as long as it did, but her research beyond the Gray and its systematic purging of unwanted life-forms was limited. Bounded by the practicalities of establishing a new colony. She wasn’t exploring; she was sorting. She discovered numerous species each day, simply by being in the field and recording, but her job was restricted to broad descriptions and categorization: dangerous, not dangerous; useful, not useful; important, unimportant; interesting, uninteresting. The details she obsessed over in grad school were left for her staff and other scientists to puzzle out. For so long, what she did didn’t feel like science. There was no passion in it, no wonder. No love either, outside of the scant moments she escaped into the field with Toyin and her binoculars. Not until the planet decided to kill them all and she dove into researching the Gray with Jesse.

  A warm hand presses against her back.

  “How’d you know I’d be here?” Amara asks. She knows it’s a stupid question. Her voice is rough from disuse.

  “You weren’t home.”

  It’s not Vinh’s voice. Amara leaps out of her seat and wrenches herself around.

  “Jesse.” She doesn’t drag him into a hug like she aches to. She doesn’t trust herself. She presses a damp palm to her forehead. “Wonderful, I’m hallucinating.”

  Jesse laughs through his nose, a little puff of air. “No. I’m alive.”

  He pulls her into an embrace, holds her as close as Vinh once did. Amara grips the back of his shirt, the same one he wore under the hazmat suit, and presses her face into his chest.

  “Alive?” she whispers.

  He nods, his chin brushing the top of her head. “Alive. And I’ve never felt better.”

  He feels solid, warm, real. He even smells exactly the way he always did, a mix of cheap hypoallergenic detergent and even cheaper deodorant. She hugs him tighter, despite the growing ache in her arms. Protocol would demand that he go through five rounds of decontamination before even breathing the same air as her. Protocol can go fuck itself. Against the odds, against all odds, Jesse is alive.

  “How?” Amara chokes out.

  “I don’t know.” He lets out a long, slow breath. “All I know is that I’m here, with you. And that the Gray doesn’t hurt me.”

  She pulls back to get a better look at him. “Don’t joke about that.”

  “How else could I have survived?” Jesse smiles.

  But did he really? Amara’s gaze sweeps over him once more. She’s less reassured when her eyes meet his. She’s not certain that the Jesse in front of her is the one who fell into the pit, and that qualm is digging into the small of her back like a knuckle. She can’t put a finger on what, but something’s just off. Something’s changed, again. Maybe it’s that there’s a subtle new symmetry along the lines of his face, a minuscule perfection. Maybe it’s that she can’t help but feel he didn’t have quite so many teeth before.

  No harm in asking. (She hopes.) “Is it really you?”

  “Hm?”

  “Are you Jesse?”

  If her unease insults him, he doesn’t show it. In fact, he smiles again, that crisp, diamond-exact slant of his lips. “Does it matter, as long as I’m yours?”

  He turns and presses his palm to the ID panel in the glass separating them from the Gray sample. A segment of the barrier slides away. The decontamination unit scans him twice, and then the door to the containment chamber slides open.

  “The planet didn’t just spare me, Amara,” he continues. “The Gray tore me apart, but then it … remade me. This world shaped me, saved me. And it’s going to save you and Vinh too.” He rolls up his sleeve.

  Amara knocks a fist against the glass. “Jesse, don’t.”

  Gray separated from the main flow is mechanically inert; it stays where it is, but it’s just as lethal. Jesse shoves his arm into the sample, waits ten seconds, and pulls it out again. His arm is perfectly intact, his skin completely dry. He laughs, triumphant. Amara is reminded of the arrowhead herd she saw the day Vinh proposed.

  Jesse goes through decontamination again, not that a thousand rounds of scans and fast-acting chemical sprays could neutralize the Gray if it clung to him.

  “We have two days.” He rolls down his sleeve. “But on time is late. We need to get moving, now. Where’s Vinh?”

  As clear as cut glass, Amara hears the unspoken question. Why isn’t she with you?

  “She’s with Henry.” Amara sounds exactly as bitter as she feels. “Who else knows about you?”

 

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