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

by Eliot Schrefer

Year 2472: After the failure of its Titan settlement, the Cusk Corporation determined that the second planet orbiting Sagittarion Bb was humanity’s best hope for an existence beyond Earth. On day 171 of year 32,481, the first settlers landed there, clones of Ambrose Cusk and Kodiak Celius, long-dead spacefarers who had never left their home planet.

I knew it was a long time, but that really puts it into perspective

It makes my heart pang with nostalgia, even if it’s for something I’ve never known. I’m jealous of them, even though I don’t think I want what they have. This life—one with a romance—is not in my future. I’m the only human alive with a womb, so I might end up carrying a child if the gestation device goes down, but it won’t be the result of sex.

“You’re being obtuse!” I say. It just comes out of me. I’m not even sure if I used that word right. I read it for the first time yesterday, and I’ve been wanting to try it out. Judging from Father’s expression, it’s maybe a little harsh? I make a mental note to try out new words only on Dad, not Father.

Yo, I cannot stop grinning 😆

“What are they going to do, ground me?” That’s what the parents in Pink Lagoon call arresting their children. It was weird back on Earth.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

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.

Each time I return from a mining run, the first thing I do is ask for the current weight of our metal supply. I’m so excited to find out, in fact, that Father has taken to meeting me at the settlement gate, shouting the current weight as I approach. “Eighty-four kilograms!” “One hundred seventy-nine kilograms!” “Two hundred kilograms even!”

I toast it with my bottle of PepsiRum. “Here’s looking at you, Sister.” I burp. This will not be my first bottle of PepsiRum today.

XD Pepsi eh?

It was named Disponar—technically in honor of the first Dimokratía prime minister so that Cusk could increase its business across country lines—but everyone calls it Death Star, because it rhymes and, well, Disponar looks like it’s from this old reel called Star Wars that gets trendy again every twenty years, a pale tech-y moonish thing up there in the daytime sky.

I get to work applying the blue fluid to the glass, wiping it off with one of my used shirts.

Glad to see windex has survived lol

In case that spurs the new colonists to find a workaround, the virus will also code the zygotes’ adrenal glands to produce excessive amounts of testosterone over their lifetimes, influencing their amygdalae to turn them aggressive. I’ve done the same to the yaks they’ll raise—predisposed them to become killers.

Gotta say, I think it would take more than testosterone to make Yarrow how he is

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.

I hold it out to Father. I don’t know why, I guess because he’s my parent and parents are the ones who hold important things.