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  For Jennifer, and all the horror movie kids out there.

  “There are wonders in the cosmos beyond all imagining, creatures we may never understand and biological processes we may never unravel. What a miracle, to live in a time when such things are ready to be discovered.”

  –Dr. Katherine Shipp

  “The one constant in the universe is that life wants to continue living, whatever the consequence. Whatever the cost. Life endures.”

  –Dr. John Shipp

  1

  ZAGREUS

  The sky is orange.

  That’s not the worst part—that’s a label I try to reserve for about a hundred things more offensive than an orange sky—but it’s the most jarring, even after three months’ planetary time spent on this specific chunk of rock and water and stupid colonial politics. If the suns are up at all, the sky is orange. Dark orange at sunrise and sunset, bright, artificial orange during the middle of the day, like someone out there decided the actual, literal sky is the best safety alert the universe has ever come up with. “Welcome to Zagreus, hope you enjoy the constant, nagging feeling that something is about to catch fire.”

  When I complain about it—which, to be fair, is basically every day, since there isn’t much else to do around here—Viola starts talking about societal drift and recontextualization of the familiar and how, in a few generations, emergency systems on Zagreus will have to use a different color to catch people’s attention, since orange will have become so much background noise. That’s going to mess with some standard corporate design schematics. Or maybe it’ll just mess with the Zagreans, since I can’t really see, say, Weyland-Yutani deciding to change their entire corporate color scheme for the sake of one backwoods colony world.

  Too bad the corps don’t set the plan for Mom and Dad’s research. I might not be looking at a sky like a safety light every time I open the window if they did.

  My name is Olivia Shipp, and I am not on this planet of my own free will.

  Something rustles deep in the bushes below me. I lean further forward, one foot hooked around the tree branch I’m perched on, for balance, and wait to see what’s coming. My dish of bait—some chopped-up local fruits, Mom’s special Zagreus “sugar water” recipe that she distills from half a dozen types of flower, and an assortment of native insects with low mobility and high caloric density—sits enticingly below me, ready to lure in at least a dozen types of creature. Maybe more. This is still a new world, as far as humanity is concerned. We’re making discoveries every day.

  The colony’s contract with Mom and Dad covers me as well: when I’m the first one to spot something of interest, the credit goes to the colonists, like they’re the ones out here risking their necks to document another kind of not-quite-squirrel. I don’t mind too much. I get a small payment for every discovery I document, and small payments add up. Viola and I—we’re twins—will be eighteen soon, old enough to start making our own decisions about where we go and what we do. I want to take us to Earth. I want to meet distant relatives and let Viola see the best doctors in the known galaxy. That means being prepared to pay whatever it costs.

  Besides, it’s a beautiful day, orange sky notwithstanding, and Kora isn’t coming until this afternoon. The colony schools are closed today for some local holiday. No one’s cared enough to explain it to me, a weird outsider girl with the mud under her nails and the pollen on her nose. Vi probably knows. Vi knows everything about a new colony like, five minutes before we land, because she says it makes her feel better about having to pull up roots and move again. I think she just likes to feel like the one who knows things, since she never gets to be the one who goes out and does them.

  I duck my head, feeling guilty for even thinking that. It’s not Vi’s fault that she can’t go outside as much as we’d both like her to. She has some weird, previously undocumented autoimmune disease. She’s seen doctors all over the galaxy, and none of them have been able to help her. Both our parents take extra work, every chance they get, to make sure she has the best care possible. I love my sister. Even when she annoys the pants off of me, I love my sister. I shouldn’t be mad at her for things she can’t help.

  There’s another rustle in the bushes. My attention snaps toward the sound, concern for my sister forgotten as I hold my breath and wait to see what emerges.

  Slowly, nose pressed to the ground and twitching about a mile a minute, a long, low-slung herbivore comes slithering into the open. I call them “snuffle-squirrels,” and my mother calls them something long, scientific, and dull. Either way, it’s nothing new, and my shoulders slump in disappointment.

  Most of the smaller life-forms on Zagreus skipped evolving proper limbs in favor of fleshy little stumps, like the legs on a caterpillar, or long, fringy things, like cilia. The snuffle-squirrel splits the difference, with four caterpillar legs in front, four more in back, and cilia along the length of its body. They wave as it walks, giving it a full sense of the space around it.

  Mom says the cilia serve the same purpose as a cat’s whiskers, and that if a snuffle-squirrel or other member of this planet’s evolutionary equivalent to rodents loses too many of them, they’ll die, because they won’t be able to hunt, climb, or forage. She’s a xenobiologist and I’m just a student, so I believe her. Doesn’t change the part where it’s funny looking as all hell, these weird, super-long squirrel things with waving pom-poms sticking out of their sides.

  Waving pom-poms, green fur that has a lot in common with cactus thorns, and four eyes, arrayed sort of like the eyes on a spider. Xenobiology is weird.

  The snuffle-squirrel makes its cautious way over to the plate of fruit, sniffing repeatedly before deciding the risk is worth the prize. It shoves its whole head into a chunk of bright blue pseudo-melon, and begins to eat noisily. Because it doesn’t have paws like an Earth mammal, it has to do its caching internally, storing fat in its tail for the lean seasons. This is a juvenile, tail still thin and fur still evenly spiky.

  We’ve seen snuffle-squirrels in every part of the local biosphere—forest and meadow and arid, scrubby foothills. Zagreus is what people call an “Earth-like planet,” meaning it mostly has systems that are at least somewhat cognate to the ones humanity is most familiar with. It’s a nice change. Our last colony world, I couldn’t go out without massive protective gear, and I’m pretty sure Vi never went out at all, not even during the transfer from ship to living quarters. Air I can breathe without a filter and sunlight on my face is a nice change. I’m not going to object, even if I hate the color of the sky.

  Familiar or not, the snuffle-squirrel is a cute little thing. I sketch a quick series of studies, pencil on paper, like the pre-space naturalists. I’ll re-create it all on my computer later, but getting a sense of motion with my own hand makes it easier for me to translate it into virtual space. I’m pretty good. I’m getting better. Give me a few more years and I’ll be able to get work doing all sorts of graphic design, including the
kind that people like my parents need, the kind that charts new worlds for humanity to claim.

  Whatever kind of design I wind up doing, it won’t be the kind that requires me to travel for years at a time. Once I get my butt Earth-side, it’s staying there for at least a little while. I want to know what it’s like to have a home, not just a residence.

  The snuffle-squirrel is still eating, gulping down melon as fast as it can. It’s so focused on what it’s doing that it doesn’t notice when the ground next to it trembles. I sit up straighter. This, too, is something familiar, but sometimes familiar can be wicked cool.

  One moment the ground next to the snuffle-squirrel is smooth and unmoving; the next, it explodes into clumps of dirt and shredded roots as the lion-worm—a sightless, ground-dwelling predator that’s sort of like a mole, if moles were made of knives and hatred and cilia—lunges forth and clamps its terrible maw over the snuffle-squirrel’s upper body. The poor little herbivore doesn’t even have time to squeak.

  Exhausted by its lunge, the lion-worm allows the portion of its body protruding from the hole to slump into the dish of tasty treats. The cilia along its sides are bright gold, garishly bright against the muted browns and yellows and blues of the forest; they wave constantly, sampling the air, advising the lion-worm of potential danger. I hold very, very still. Lion-worms have been known to attack humans when they feel like they can take us, and they don’t have a sense of fear: they always think they can take us.

  An adult lion-worm is about the size of an Earth pig, which is more than enough to give me nightmares about the things burrowing up through the floor of our residence. This is a baby, about the size of a cat and ten times as vicious. It could still take my foot off if it decided to attack the tree. Better not to risk it.

  The lion-worm eventually recovers its strength and sucks the remainder of the snuffle-squirrel into its maw before retreating underground. It’s young and weak enough—comparatively, anyway—that it’s probably still hiding its kills rather than taking them back to the colony. The bigger lion-worms could get excited and shred it.

  It’s tough to be a predator sometimes.

  With snuffle-squirrel blood all over my fruit and a big hole next to the platter, I should probably pack it in and head for home. Nothing else is likely to come sniffing around. Still, I hold my position and count slowly backward from twenty. Experience has taught me that patience is a virtue, and animals … they understand their own ecosystem. The creatures on Zagreus still don’t know exactly what to make of humans. Sometimes they run from us, sometimes they attack us, but mostly, they avoid us. It’s safer and easier for all concerned.

  So I hold still, and I count, and as I hit three, I’m rewarded with a rustling sound from the bushes. I stop breathing and watch as a creature that looks sort of like a deer, and sort of like a Sirius XI glass beast, and sort of like a pile of rotting meat steps out of the brush. It doesn’t have any sort of visible skin. How can something be walking around when it doesn’t have skin?

  It approaches the platter of treats, lowers its head, and begins delicately licking up the snuffle-squirrel blood with a long, forked tongue. I pull out my recorder and snap several quick pictures before starting the video.

  This pretty little monstrosity is getting me and Vi one step closer to Earth.

  It takes a long time, but eventually the meat-deer finishes lapping up the blood and trots off for richer, bloodier pastures. I slide down from the tree and retrieve the rest of my gear from the bush where I concealed it. I always pack more than I need. Tip one for wilderness survival: know exactly how much you can carry, and don’t take a scrap more, but don’t feel like you have to carry everything the whole time. Caching isn’t just for snuffle-squirrels.

  I’m feeling pretty good about today. The morning has been beautiful, despite the orange sky—that’s never going to feel normal to me—and Kora isn’t going to be here for hours. I have plenty of time to get ready. I grin to myself as I trot along the familiar path from the woods to the field behind our residence. Kora’s never actually come to visit me before. Maybe this is the start of something … well, something beautiful.

  Or maybe she’s just one of those colony kids who likes to get a few kicks in with a transient girl, knowing she won’t have to live with the consequences of breaking my heart. I’ve heard stories about a few girls like that, enough of them to leave me a little anxious and leave Vi fiercely, furiously defensive against anyone who thinks they’re good enough for her twin but hasn’t done anything to prove it.

  The thought is enough to knock the smile off my face. It’s not that I don’t love my sister. I do. I love her more than every sun we’ve ever lived under, and since every sun is technically a star—as she is grindingly, pedantically fond of reminding me—that means I love her more than all the stars in the sky. She’s my mirror, my echo, the other half of my heart. It’s just that she’s also …

  She’s also Viola. Stubborn and sullen and way too willing to prioritize facts she’s read on a screen somewhere over things she’s experienced for herself. Things like “ninety-five percent of all teenage relationships end in heartbreak, you know,” and “colonists don’t form permanent bonds with the children of transient scientists,” and my personal favorite, “I may not have met her yet, but even I can tell that she is way out of your league.”

  Sometimes my sister can be a massive brat is what I’m saying here.

  The wide stretch of flat, empty plain between the edge of the forest and our residence—which we constructed well outside the bounds of the official colony settlement, according to their bylaws, which are weird and restrictive and verge on what Vi primly refers to as a “cult mentality”—is covered in an array of brightly colored grasses. Each color stops growing at a different height, and while they look like they should belong to half a dozen different species, they’re all part of the same vast, conjoined vegetable colony.

  The green ones are sharp. As in flesh-ripping, blood-drawing sharp. Which makes sense, since they’re short enough to be hidden by the purple ones, which are super-absorbent and capable of sucking up any liquid they come into contact with. Mom says the grasses aren’t technically carnivorous, just very, very opportunistic, but if you ask me, any plant that wants to drink my blood is plenty carnivorous.

  I step around the danger spots, keeping an eye on the ground as I head for the residence. Lion-worms like to hunt in the grass, letting the grass’s natural dangers herd smaller creatures into supposedly safe areas and then striking from below. I can see the furrows where they’ve attacked before. I’m big enough, and they’re confused enough by bipedal locomotion, that I should be safe … for now. Dad says they’re learning, and what they’re learning is that humans can be delicious. The colonists may find themselves with an extermination assignment on their hands sooner than they expect.

  He should know. My father is Dr. John Shipp, the second-best behavioral xenobiologist in the known universe. If he can’t predict what an alien life-form is going to do, he turns to the best behavioral xenobiologist in the business … who just happens to be my mother, Dr. Katherine Shipp. Between the two of them, they have more degrees in more fields of horrifying alien biology than I would ever have believed possible.

  Fat lot of good it does Viola and me. Our parents are independent contractors, meaning they went through all courses necessary to land themselves steady, good-paying jobs with one of the megacorps—Mom even did a tour with the colonial marines, since they have access to restricted worlds with horrifying wildlife she wanted to poke; she’s a terrifyingly good shot, which isn’t helping our dating prospects—and then after all that, they decided choosing their own jobs was more important than, you know, stability.

  You’d think people who had two kids the first time they tried would be more interested in going where the money is, but not our parents. They want to go where the science is, and where the science is, well. Apparently, that’s middle-of-nowhere colony worlds, ones where the local wil
dlife has yet to be cataloged, analyzed, and neatly filed away. We’ve lived on fifteen different colony worlds since Viola and I were born, and sometimes I feel like our parents would be happier with twice that number. They want to see the cosmos, and we don’t get much choice about whether or not we come along.

  I step out of the grass and into the perimeter of our residence. The colony we’re currently working for is all about reuse and recycling and “minimizing humanity’s impact on the galaxy.” Pretty words. Not so pretty when the lion-worms are erupting out of the ground and dragging the family cat off to their nest. Our parents burned everything within ten yards of our residence the day we unpacked it, following the burn with the application of quick-setting plast-steel. The stuff hardens in the presence of oxygen, becoming strong enough to be used for repairs that need to hold up to open vacuum, and it dissolves when exposed to certain biodegradable compounds. When we leave, the planet will recover, and by the end of the first growing season, there won’t be any sign that we were ever here.

  Sometimes it gets to me, living the way we do, skipping across the galaxy, never leaving anything behind. Not even footprints. We’re like ghosts, haunting every world we come across.

  No one’s going to mourn us when we’re gone.

  2

  VIOLA

  Five feet past the perimeter, our electric fence hums and crackles to itself, prepared to keep anything that wants to cause us trouble at a safe distance. I raise my wrist, letting its sensors pick up the signal from my ID bracelet. There’s a click. The fence deactivates, and two of the panels swing inward, letting me through.

  Visitors have to come through the gate, and have to enter an actual, manual access code, which Dad changes weekly. I’ve never been able to understand why he puts so much weight on security, since it’s not like we’re a target. We’re the biologists. Without us, the colony is harder to sustain. If we’re ever going to be attacked, it’s going to happen when we’re on our way out the door, not while we’re doing the job we were hired for.