The Brightness Between Us (The Darkness Outside Us, #2)

by Eliot Schrefer

I touched the skeleton of a small, fragile winged creature that lived its short life on a planet tens of thousands of light-years from its home, before it failed to thrive and the dads killed it. Whose flesh was slowly eaten away by alien bacteria, after its zygote was transported across the galaxy in a spaceship. What an awful and brief and magnificent existence. The big mystery of our life on Minerva is how quickly it can turn from grimy to majestic and back.

Yarrow returns his attention to the dead malevor. His eyes aren’t sad, not exactly. More like he’s acknowledging some primal and basic unfairness that’s old news at this point. That the universe has always been sad and he’s made it his work to notice.

We all nod like we’ve been there. Running uncompressed quaternary in binary. Overwhelming.

“Those two recent strikes could be a coincidence,” Yarrow interrupts. “Maybe there won’t be another one for a very long time.” “This is so statistically unlikely as not to be worth considering,” OS says.

We go quiet. The idea of a life without each other is so horrifying that there’s nothing to say to it.

“Make a wish, Brothership!” I say. “Prepped it a week ago,” Yarrow says. Only my brother would prep his birthday wishes in advance. Probably about wanting peace and happiness for the whole universe.

I see him see me see him. Don’t say anything, his expression says.

He’s my brother, and I love him, so I don’t. But he’s also not my brother. I don’t know where my brother went.

Find this beacon. Ambrose and Kodiak, come. Find this beacon. Ambrose and Kodiak, come. I look up at my father. Dad?

I chuckle, too, despite the self-pity welling up. “What if I joined the Heartspeak Boys and we did a guerrilla concert in front of the ship? We could have a new song, maybe. ‘Daddy Was Alexander the Great, but Mommy Just Fed Me Lies.’”

Even after her deep betrayal, I guess I’m still that ten-year-old, terrified of moving down in the rankings of my dozens of siblings. Maybe I’m ten years old for good.

You had your bender. You had your wallow. Now you fix this thing that’s been done in your name.

While they do their checks, I step back and take in the joint craft. Despite my horror at what’s being done, it’s awe-inspiring, this colossus of engineering. The same level of grandeur—though not the beauty—of a redwood or a blue whale. Like it or hate it, we humans have done something remarkable.

Tailed by the soldiers, Sharma guides us through labs and holding areas. This is the cauldron where the Frankenstein versions of myself are prepped. I pretend to be curious, calm. Like a museum visitor instead of the protagonist of a horror reel.

Everything is better when I’m alone. When I’m in the flow state of shoveling, I don’t imagine them dead as often.

When the visions started, they were just bodies laid out, death without murder. Now sometimes I’m standing over my family, my muscles aching with the effort of strangling them all. After I’ve pushed the vision from my mind, the feeling of exertion in my muscles is as vivid as if I really have just done it.

She rests her hand on my shoulder. I sigh in relief that I’m worth touching.

Why would I imagine my life ending? Am I starting to have another fugue episode? Or are thoughts like these part of what it means to be a normal human? Is everyone tempted to step into a pit, just to test if it will really be the end? Maybe the humanness comes in the resisting.

Even before this change came up within me, Father wished he could erase the part of me that wanted to know about the past. If he could remake me without the morbid tendency to wonder about the lost, fateful Earth, he would do it. But I’m not my sister. I am not the copy of someone whose history we all know. All of Earth is my heritage. I can’t give that up.

The feeling that’s left behind when the buzz fades is loneliness. I feel alone. It is the biggest emotion of them all, huge and elemental and utterly dominating. There used to be an “us” in my world, and it got taken away by my own mind.

Intimacy is the only shield against insanity. Okay. But how can I be close to my family if they don’t want me to be who I truly am? Since I don’t want to witness their disappointment all day every day, my darkness must be a secret. And that makes me feel ashamed. It’s the dearest friend of loneliness, shame.

There were billions of people on Earth. Surely there were some who would relate to the surprises happening inside my brain. Maybe my loneliness isn’t from the fact that something is wrong with me. Maybe it’s from having too few other humans around.

I’m the only one of us who doesn’t have a background. Like any at all. It’s sort of killing me, not knowing the past.”

Owl and the dads laugh. It must be a relief to see me excited about something. I’m relieved, too. I haven’t thought about them dead for at least an hour.

The pit they’ve created looks painful. It looks like our planet has a wound. What have we done to our home?

Minutes later, Owl and Father and Rover have bid us goodbye and are on their way out the gate. Its protective mechanism clicks behind them. The pneumatic guns tick and buzz as they scan for enemies. I turn around. There aren’t any enemies. There’s just me.

“Yar, I don’t need to do that. I trust you.” Why should he ever do something as stupid as that? I don’t trust me.

A long line of boys in the Celius orphanage, a nurse in starched gray walking down the row of cribs, singing to all of us, each of us happy to be sung to but

longing to be held.

I’m relieved to see that this sheep has no blood matting its wool. There isn’t any pain in its bleat, just a longing for another being. I don’t need to kill it.

My life has been solitude with surprise moments of companionship, not companionship with surprise moments of solitude.

Every time I stop to cut, I look back to find the sheep twenty paces behind, waiting to find out where I’m taking her. “Shoo!” I say. It doesn’t work. I don’t want it to.

Feelings are distant for me, like blurred fish swimming below thick ice.

Four months living here and not a soul has broken my solitude. Except for this damn sheep. I smile at myself, at what I hold dear about who I am. This strong solitary hermit, destroyed in minutes by a freshly shorn, sweet-eyed sheep, hopping for joy while her sores clot.

She stares back, her jaw working side to side as she slowly chews a clump of dandelion she’s torn from a boulder crevice. The movement under her placid expression is enough to make me chuckle. The sound of it, this noise that lives next to laughter, is unfamiliar.

The beautiful weed reminds me of the training breaks I used to spend camping. The presence of yarrow was part of why I chose to retreat here.

Maybe someone from the Dimokratía secret police hasn’t come to murder me. This could be a bear instead. Is that better? I think it is.

not the man in the woods versus bear in the woods debate

He lingers between two trees, mostly hidden. He probably thinks he’s fully camouflaged. Perhaps he is not experienced.

Sheep has been watching us, chewing on a strip of burlap she ripped from my bedding, like she’s got her snack ready and is waiting for the show to start.

Something about being in sudden company after all this time has made me soft. Or maybe I’ve changed irrevocably in these weeks of recovering from having my spacefarer dreams ripped away, and now I’m facing the proof of it. Maybe it took being an island for a few months to realize I don’t want to be an island forever. Bah.

I place the axe head on the ground and lean on the handle, like a cane. “Manicotti?” “Yes,” Ambrose says. “An ancient meal made of pasta rolled around cheese, covered in tomato sauce.” “Ambrose. I know what manicotti is.

I can’t imagine saying something like this back to Ambrose. Saying that I’m a failure. It’s just a way to sound weak. But it makes me feel warm to have thoughts like these said to me, like I could someday put words to the things I’ve failed at and not feel shame.

I release the oars and find myself placing my hands underneath my upper arms, to make them look bigger.

oh kodiak

But setting up that attack with the fence guns took work. Yarrow printed a gun. He planned this. He plotted to murder us all. Gentle Yarrow. We were so blissfully bored with each other. I knew every part of his mind. Even now, when he might have just killed our dad, my heart says that we can talk it out. That the right words will fix this. That if we sit for long enough, back-to-back, he’ll be okay. I don’t think that’s true, but my heart says it is, all the same.

What a stupid, stupid organ, the heart. Maybe I don’t want to be alone. Maybe a sheep isn’t enough company. Those damn fish flashing deep under the ice, scales catching the light only when they turn.

I try to use words to work through what I’m thinking, like Ambrose would. It’s strange and a little frightening, to start a sentence that I don’t already know the end to.

Ambrose puts his head in his hands. When he looks back at me, there is steel in his expression. “To be honest, I get where Devon Mujaba is coming from. Now that our countries are fully at war, which could finally be the end stage of human civilization that the pundits have so long predicted, now that we’ve seen the extinction of virtually all vertebrate sea life and the misery of the animals that remain on land . . . compared to that, what does the suffering of a small colony on an exoplanet matter, so far in the future and so far away? Comparatively nothing. Not compared to the threat we humans represent to every other species that has been unlucky enough to encounter us. Maybe humanity is a scourge, and ought to be stopped, which means Sagittarion Bb should fail. We should fail.”

“We of all people should be disillusioned with humans.” “Yes, but I guess I’ve discovered that I’m not,” Ambrose says. “I guess I am, and I am not,” I say.

“I was raised to be alone, to be powerful by being contained. To beat away human needs. I think sometimes that it is too late for me, that I will never relate to anyone else. That is why I retreated here. But there’s another me out there. Another Kodiak. Who will spend his life relying on you.” I furiously avoid Ambrose’s eyes, because it is already hard to speak. “I know nothing of what his life will be like. Maybe he and that Ambrose will decide that settling Sagittarion Bb is a big mistake. Maybe they will die of illness or injury there. Maybe they will never arrive in the first place. But what if . . . what if that me has found some happiness? What if he has found someone, some people, to rely on? If he even has a family?

“Changing the essential exploitative nature of human civilization would have been a lot to pull off,” I say.