For the first time that Adri could remember, she started sleeping in. She spent every morning—for the next ten days—parked on the comfy, crooked couch in the library, flipping through the channels in a haze of purposelessness—no studying to do, no devices to kill time with. She thumbed through old books (some of them so dusty they made her cough): a combination of pulp mysteries, romance novels, world history, old fairy tales, some books in Spanish, most in English. The shelves had warped a little under all the weight.
Lily seemed to accept fairly quickly that they weren’t destined to be friends and mostly kept her distance. Apparently, it took effort. She watched Adri when she thought Adri didn’t notice, and she often opened her mouth to strike up a conversation before making a visible effort to stop herself. Only at meals did they talk at all about the vague outlines of their lives: Lily’s husband had died ten years before. Her mother had been a single mom and had run the farm on her own. She had no siblings.
Adri was curious about her—her obsession with angels, her attachment to her lonely farm. She wanted to ask her things, but asking people things was like opening a box you couldn’t close. So she was polite but not open. She answered the usual questions about her own life: Growing up in the group home had been fine. No, she didn’t remember her parents. They had died in the flash floods during a cyclone, before Miami built its levy system, its floating roadways. No, she wasn’t sad about it—it just was the way it was. They both went their own way most of each day.
Lily was busy enough for both of them, anyway. It seemed that, for one measly house, there was endless upkeep. She worked constantly on the yard, carrying newspapers out onto the porch in her spindly arms or pushing wheelbarrows full of mulch across the barn lot. As someone whose backyard had always been the ocean, Adri had never dreamed how much work went into owning one tiny piece of earth, pretty and peaceful as it was.
Outside, the birds flitted past the windows, hunkering down as fall set in. From the couch, there was a good view of the tortoise house, and every once in a while Lily would appear there, taking a break. Without knowing she was being watched, she’d sit next to Galapagos nose to nose, petting her and talking to her. Other times, she’d come walking into the house and startle at the sight of Adri, like she’d forgotten she was there. She’d shake the moment off, trying to hide her confusion, and Adri pretended she didn’t notice.
They coexisted, and Adri began to think it wasn’t going to be so bad. Still, another thing Adri had never been able to change was that people disappointed her, and Lily was no exception. It bothered her how Lily kept the heat on full blast and walked around indoors in shorts. (“You should turn the heat down, Lily. You’re not on solar, and it’s wasteful,” she’d pointed out. Lily just said “huh” in response and kept it on ninety.) How she loved shows about girls going to heaven but didn’t know anything about current events. And how she drove a dinosaur of a gas-devouring car.
So it made it harder when it occurred to Adri that since her Theta was dead, she needed to ask Lily for a ride to Wichita.
“I thought you said you weren’t blind.”
Adri clutched the armrests as Lily veered into a parking spot in front of an enormous white stone building in downtown Wichita. In the last hour she’d almost rear-ended the same car twice, chased a pedestrian out of a crosswalk (“Did you see that woman’s face? I think she pooped her pants,” Lily said), and driven up a small portion of a one-way street before Adri had stopped her.
Now she pulled a hat out of her purse and put it on. It was shaped like teddy bear ears.
“You look like a crazy person,” Adri said.
“You look boring and average,” Lily replied. She turned and climbed out of the car. She swiped her palm over the meter uncertainly as Adri climbed out of the passenger side and tried to smooth out her wrinkled button-down. She was so nervous her heart was fluttering, but she didn’t know if it was from the near-death experience of the drive over or what waited inside the Center.
She took in the sights around her. Miami had been full of oceanic blues and grays; Wichita, on the other hand, was a “city of the future”—well financed and well maintained, with sleek buildings and needlelike, soaring spires rising out of the manicured greenery below.
Most of it had been built in the last fifteen years as more and more federal agencies had left Washington, DC, which was more swamp than city now. The Center, its partners from China and Nicaragua, and Plan Z—had located here because there were no floods, no quakes, no hurricanes, good infrastructure, and lots of wide open spaces to build, test, and launch.
Lily reached for her arm but pulled back as they climbed the stairs.
“You need help?” Adri asked.
“I’m trying not to invade your personal space,” Lily puffed, looking small and overwhelmed as they climbed.
Adri reached for her hand. “It’s fine,” she said. “I’m not a total asshole. I don’t, like, push baby strollers into the street or anything.”
They were still holding hands when they checked in at a security desk, and were ushered into a long white hallway to the doorway of a crowded room, full of people Adri’s age.
Lily studied the room, looking confused. “What is this place?”
Adri looked at her. “The Center. Remember?”
“Oh yeah.” Lily nodded, and then smiled, amused. “Duh.” She pulled her hand out of Adri’s reluctantly. “I’ll be outside with the other leftovers,” she joked, and stepped away.
The room was buzzing with people gathered in clusters, their voices reverberating off the bright, empty walls. Adri recognized her crew mates from profiles she’d watched: Alexa, an engineer from Denver. Saba, a botanist from Kuwait. A couple of athletes who’d been training for the Olympics before they’d switched to the Institute track in kinesiology. A guy named D’Angelo who did nano-engineering, and a programmer named Shyla. With the exception of a couple of experts in their forties, they were all in their early twenties or younger. The Center chose young Colonists for their physical fitness and their likeliness to populate Mars with future generations, but Adri knew from the literature that this group was among the youngest they’d ever had.
She chose a seat near no one and adopted her standard approach of looking absorbed with something on the wall while the others introduced themselves to each other.