“HEY,” CAT SAYS. “Wake up.”
I open my eyes. It takes me a disoriented minute to realize where I am. We pushed Cat’s bed and her former roommate’s together last night, but we both wound up sleeping on her side—Cat out of habit, I think, and me out of a vague sense that there’s something disrespectful about crashing in a recently deceased person’s bunk. Cat’s propped up on one elbow now, with her arm pressing down on my shoulder and her face almost touching mine.
To be clear: nothing remotely sexual happened between us last night.
It may sound strange to hear that when I just said that we basically slept on top of one another, but when it came down to it I couldn’t untangle what I was feeling about Cat from what I was feeling about Nasha and Eight, and Cat … I think she just needed a warm body to keep the monsters away.
I was okay with that. I know how she feels.
“It’s almost nine,” she says. “Do you need to be somewhere?”
That’s actually a good question. I blink to the day’s duty roster. Looks like I’m supposed to be in Hydroponics today, trying to coax a bunch of half-dead vines to squeeze out a tomato or two. In fact, I was supposed to be there an hour ago. I haven’t received a no-show, though, so Eight must be down there now, pinching off buds and checking pH levels.
Apparently I take duty on eaten-by-creepers days, and he takes duty when it’s time to babysit plants. This is something we’re going to need to discuss.
In the meantime, though, it looks like I’ve got a day to myself, for pretty much the first time since we made landfall. All I have to do is make sure I don’t go anywhere near Eight, or bump into anyone else who might have seen him today.
This would be easier to accomplish if we didn’t live in an inverted salad bowl less than a klick across.
“I’m off today,” I say. “What about you?”
She shrugs. “I almost got killed in the line of duty twice in the past two days. In Security, I guess that earns you a half shift. I don’t have to report until noon.”
I wriggle out from under her arm and sit up, taking care not to jar my still-swollen left wrist any more than I have to. She rolls away and gets to her feet. We’re both still wearing our underclothes, gray shapeless shirts and shorts covered in discolored patches from too much sweat and too many washings. They’re so ugly that in a weird way seeing her like this feels almost more intimate than being naked.
“So?” Cat says. “What’s your plan for the day?”
I rub my face with both hands and push my hair back from my forehead. She opens her locker and digs out a clean shirt.
“Not sure,” I say. “It’s been a while since I’ve had an off day.”
The truth is that my plan is to slink around the dome hoping nobody sees me and realizes that I’m also down in Ag using an eyedropper to hand-feed baby tomatoes, but I can’t really say that. Cat steps into her pants, then sits back down on the bed to pull on her boots.
“Well,” she says, “my plan at the moment is to get something to eat. You interested?”
I grin. “Sure. You buying?”
She looks back over her shoulder with narrowed eyes. “No, I’m not buying,” she says, “and just so you know, if you try touching my food again, you’re gonna have two mangled hands instead of one.”
Yeah, that’s fair. I pull on my clothes, and we go.
* * *
THE HALLS ARE mostly empty at this time of day, and the few people we pass don’t pay us much attention. Cat gets a few hellos, but even those folks mostly stare right through me. Especially since landfall, my job has been a pretty isolating one. For some reason, even most of the people who don’t think I’m a soulless monster don’t seem to want to associate with someone who’s under what amounts to a perpetual death sentence.
At the moment, that seems to be working to my advantage.
Nobody wants to associate with someone who smells like a giant sweaty foot either, though, so we stop by the chem shower on the way down. Cat gives me an unreadable look when we get there. Is she asking if I want to share? I grin, give her a half bow, and wave her in. She shrugs, steps into the cubicle, and closes the door behind her. When she comes back out a few minutes later, I take my turn. I strip and scrub and dust-dry, and then climb back into my dirty clothes because even if I wanted to go back up to my rack, Eight is wearing my only clean change.
This reminds me that, while I miss a lot of things from Midgard to varying degrees, actual factual hot water is really close to the top of the list. The annoying thing is that there’s clearly plenty of water lying around in drifts outside the dome. The systems inside the dome come straight from the Drakkar, though, so we still conserve water as if we’re stuck in the interstellar desert. That won’t change until we start doing local construction, and that won’t happen unless and until a whole list of other things do, starting with metal fabrication and ending with resolving our issues with the creepers.
In the meantime, the chem shower is fine for sanitation, and it definitely keeps your body odor under control, but there’s nothing remotely luxurious about it.
Not when you’re in there by yourself, anyway.
That thought leads me to Nasha, and to Eight.
Best not to think about that now.
* * *
THE MAIN CAFETERIA is almost empty when we get there—just a couple at a table on the opposite side of the room from the food counter, heads close together, talking in whispers, and a lone Security goon near the entrance working his way through a pile of fried crickets. He nods to Cat as we pass him, and she gives him a finger-wave in return. I step to the counter and show my ocular to the scanner. It beeps, and my daily ration balance pops up in the upper left corner of my field of view.
It says I’m down six hundred kcal on the day. Looks like Eight had a big breakfast.
I’d like to be mad, but I can’t blame him. The first couple days out of the tank really are a bitch.
I’m standing there, arms folded across my growling belly, trying to decide whether to splurge on a little mound of chopped yams to go with my mug of cycler paste and make this my only meal of the day, when Cat steps up beside me, close enough to brush against my shoulder.
“Are you going to order something?”
I scowl and tap the icon for the paste dispenser.
Cat smiles, shows her ocular, and orders a yam-tomato scramble. I can feel my mouth start to water, but that mound of yams I’d been eyeing might as well be a filet of beef given what’s left on my balance. I grimace, gulp down a mouthful of paste from my mug, and then top it off before turning away. Three hundred kcal. That means I can have at least another half of a mug before bed tonight.
“I don’t know how you stand that stuff,” Cat says as her food slides out of a slot on the far side of the counter.