Earthrise (Her Instruments Book 1) (28 page)

“But—”

“We’ll be here,” Hirianthial said, interrupting Sascha. For once, Reese was glad of him. Just this once, though. She had desperately wanted the escort to Mars—the thought of making this trip alone, the same way she’d made it when she’d left, had proved too much—but she couldn’t bring them with her. She just couldn’t.

The shuttle down to Landing One rattled just as noisily as it had the first time she’d taken this trip. Reese gripped the thick restraints that held her in place while staring out her pinhole window. Joining the Alliance hadn’t inspired all that much change in Terra’s solar system, and the humans she’d grown up with had fallen into two groups: the bitter isolationists who were glad there were so few reminders that the Pelted existed, and the star-eyed expansionists who wished the Alliance would come and renovate until all of Terra’s colonies and stations glimmered with the same wealth and technology as the many starbases planted throughout the Neighborhood. There had been little room to walk in the middle. Reese herself had never wished for a complete overhaul... but she wouldn’t have minded much if someone had found some way to replace the older ships in the civilian space fleet.

No, she hadn’t wanted the Alliance to come to her. She’d wanted to go meet it. If it had already swept through Terra’s system, what impetus would she have had to leave?

What excuse, more like.

Landing Port had never looked dingy until she’d left and seen what passed for a port in the Core. Now Reese stood in the milling rush of people and smelled their sweat and the acrid high note of poorly recycled air and thought the port looked especially small. Had any Alliance engineer seen the high ceilings crossed with gray girders, he would have hung banners from them. Or found trained vines to climb along the ceiling as combination decor and air freshener. Some enterprising Tam-illee would have spray-painted the place a neutral but friendly color... or knocked the entire ceiling down and replaced it with windows. But Landing had been built when humans had been lucky to reach Mars, much less cling there, and the war that had disordered the Martian economy had also given natives a certain fatalism about remodeling.

Melancholy made her angry. Already clenching her teeth, Reese forced her way through the crowds disembarking from the Earth and Deimos shuttles and headed for the blue-station people-mover that would take her home. The township that included her family residence was the sixth stop down the rail and it wasn’t a quick ride. Reese hooked a hand through one of the overhead loops and stared out at the naked Martian landscape as the people-mover glided through its protective steel and plastic tunnel.

Reese stepped off the rail and squeezed her way out of the station into one of the planet’s giant hemispherical habitats. Here at last there was at least some room to breathe; trees stretched tall and thin by the low gravity helped the air-recyclers handle the load of the one thousand people living beneath the dome. This township, barely larger than the crew complement on the Alliance’s warships, had been Reese’s childhood. It was the largest group of people in one place she could handle.

It still wasn’t large enough to keep her from getting home too quickly.

The Eddings household looked like a cottage, but hid a basement in the dense red earth that was twice as long as the ground floor. The property abutted the Wall; as a child, Reese had tried climbing over the hedges to touch it but had found an electrified fence awaiting her. She remembered staring at a landscape distorted by the thick plexiglass that shielded the habitat from the not-quite-right conditions outside... feeling safe. She didn’t trust the invisible glass walls of the Alliance.

The flowers that lined the walk to the door looked much the same, but the tree—the eucalyptus Reese had hidden in, had climbed nearly to its topmost branches, had hung her hammock from—was gone. When the door opened for her knock, the first thing she said to Auntie Mae was, “What happened to the tree?”

“Your mother got tired of it raining kernels on the roof,” Auntie Mae said. “We cut it down. Good gracious, child! You’ve lost weight! What are you eating out there?”

“Who’s at the door, Mae?”

“Oh, it’s Reese.”

“Well for the love of blood and planet, tell her to come in! No use letting in all the dust.”

Reese set booted foot on the braided mat inside the door and reconciled herself to actually having come home. Mae led her down the hall over wooden floors to the breakfast room, where her grandmother, a hunched figure with skin pink as dry flowers, was knitting by the table.

Her mother was pounding bread dough on the kitchen counter. “Well, lookie here! She’s come home at last. How about that, Mother? Here’s your granddaughter, just as you said.”

“I told you she’d be back,” Gran said, knitting needles clicking.

Ma Eddings wiped her flour-dusted hands on a purple apron and walked around the counter to clasp Reese’s arms. She hadn’t changed much: there were new creases around her mouth and the line between her brows had become more pronounced; perhaps her figure was rounder, or the gray in the short hedge of her hair a little paler. Reese couldn’t tell. As her mother hugged her, Reese tried to unbend and hug back.

Auntie Mae took her place at the breakfast table. “You need some feeding, girl.”

“I’m not hungry,” Reese said.

“Of course you are,” Gran said. “You just sit right down, Theresa, and let your mother make you breakfast.”

“Nonsense,” Ma said. “She’s family, not a guest. You come over here and help.”

So Reese donned the older battered apron, the white one that had faded to a soft apricot color, and helped her mother with the baking as the pink sky beyond the kitchen grew paler. Her aunt and grandmother fell into relaxed gossip about the neighbor’s daughter, the mayor’s new pet, how indecent behavior was yet again on the rise.

Butter on the table, glistening and warm; apple preserves and fresh honey; new eggs, cracked and sizzling. Within an hour, a hearty meal appeared on the table and Reese had heard more than she wanted to know about how her schoolmates had fared in her absence. She asked after Aunt Mabel and Great-Aunt Charla, discovered what had become of some of her cousins and heard that Gran had survived another routine heart operation.

They waited until the end of the meal to begin the real discussion. It had always been that way: difficult topics waited on the food.

“I don’t know why you’ve chosen to come home,” Gran said. “But I’m glad you finally have. You’re getting old, Theresa, and your body won’t be good for anything much longer.”

“Gran, I’m only thirty-two.”

“Yes, yes. You’ve only got three years.”

“The operation takes better if you’re thirty-five or younger,” Auntie Mae said. “You know that.”

She hadn’t, but it didn’t seem like the time to volunteer. “I’m not here to have a baby.”

“We wouldn’t expect you to start the moment you came home!” Gran exclaimed. “You need to settle down. Find the rhythm of Mars again.”

“I’m not here to settle down,” Reese said. Her stomach clenched at the ensuing silence. “I’m here to ask for a loan.”

Another few moments of quiet. Then her mother: “What?”

“I need money,” Reese said. “For repairs.”

“You came here for a hand-out?” Auntie Mae said.

Reese flinched, but said, “Yes.”

“You already have your inheritance, girl,” Mae said. “Why are you coming back here for more?”

“I’ll pay the family back,” Reese said.

Gran lifted her head and squinted past Reese at Ma. “This is out of hand.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Ma said. “I can’t make her stay home. She’s an adult now.”

“She’s not acting like one,” Gran said.

“Not proper at all,” Auntie Mae said, eyeing Reese. Unlike Gran and Reese’s mother, Aunt Mae had brown eyes to go with her caramel-colored skin. They were all different colors, the Eddings, thanks to the traditions of Mars. “Haven’t you been listening, child? You need to settle down. Send away for a baby.”

“I don’t want a baby,” Reese said, stunning them all into speechlessness. She’d never had the courage to say those words out loud before. Recklessly, Reese went on. “I’ve never wanted a baby. And even if I did want one, I wouldn’t want a... a mail-order baby by some man I don’t even know the name of!”

“And how else are you supposed to have a daughter?” Gran asked.

“That’s another thing,” Reese said. “What’s so wrong with having a son?”

Their stares had lost their unfocused shocky quality; one by one, starting with her grandmother, they hardened with suspicion and anger. After weeks of reading Hirianthial’s restrained body language, her family’s disapproval radiated with the subtlety of a dropped atomic bomb.

“The Eddings family doesn’t have sons,” Gran said frostily. “We have daughters. We don’t need any meddling men.”

“Obviously she’s picked up some off-world notion about marriage and family,” Auntie Mae said with a sniff. “Disgusting. Next she’ll be telling us she’s found herself some man. How on earth can you insure a child of fine quality when you mix it up with some man? Who knows where he’s been?”

“Or when he’ll leave,” Gran said with a curled lip.

Which was, in the end, the crux of the matter. The men of Mars had softened its soil with their blood in the civil war with Earth... and most of the families that had remained had never recovered from the loss. The Eddings clan wasn’t the only one to have made tradition out of necessity when it came to artificial insemination.

“I’m not mixed up with any man,” Reese said. “I just need a loan.”

“You’re not home to stay,” her mother said quietly.

Reese turned. “No, Ma. I’m still working.”

“You could work here,” her mother said.

Reese shook her head. “I’ve got a good lead on some things,” she said. Which she did, if one counted a mysterious Eldritch patron. “I just need to do some repairs and I’ll pay you back.”

“And then, when you’ve succeeded, when you’ve made all the money you want... you’ll come home?” Ma asked.

Reese hesitated.

“I thought she said she was going off to be a wealthy merchant,” Auntie Mae said. “She was supposed to bring home more money for us. Not take it away.”

Reese flushed. “I will bring you more money. One day I’ll buy you a new house. A nicer one. And you’ll have everything you need.”

“We’ve got everything we need, Theresa,” Gran said. “Everything but you. You think money’s going to replace a daughter to take care of us when we get old? You going to shovel us into one of those living graves where other children without a bit of gratitude put their aging family?”

“Your duty’s here,” Auntie Mae said. “You stay here, have yourself a baby. Then you’ll have someone to take care of you when you get old, and you’ll be here to take care of us. We don’t need money. We need you, child.”

“I’m not staying,” Reese said.

“You’d be welcome,” Ma said, distracting her. Reese turned to her. Her mother was wiping her hands on her apron... slowly, very slowly. “We could use your help around the house.”

“I can’t,” Reese said. “I’m not done living yet.” She ignored the hostile quiet that descended after that statement and hurried on. “I just need to borrow money. I promise this will be the last time.”

“You’re right about that,” Ma said. “Walk on out of here, girl.”

“Ma?” Reese said, startled.

Her mother’s eyes were cold. Blue eyes could be incredibly distant. “You leave now, girl. Don’t come back either. Don’t ask me for money. Don’t you come calling. Don’t bring us back some man-bred baby, either, if you settle down. This isn’t your house. We aren’t your family.”

Reese’s lips parted. “Ma...”

“I’m not that to you either. Go on, now. You don’t belong here and you never did.”

Her mother turned to the kitchen table and began clearing the dishes. Auntie Mae helped; Gran returned to her knitting. They all ignored her, as if she’d become part of the peeling wallpaper, the furniture, the red sky. Reese turned, shaking, and made her way up the short hallway to the door. She let herself out, carefully closing the door behind her and barely hearing the soft click of the lock.

She stood on the welcome mat for a few minutes. There were no passersby: nothing but the still air and the distant, distorted sky. Her bones knew the planet’s drag, but everything else had changed, even the smell of things. Without the eucalyptus, it had lost its richness, its spice.

Reese couldn’t summon any anger, and anger had always been her best shield. She judged it best to leave quickly before she had time to examine the notion of never coming back. The trip to the station took far too long; Reese used it to work on figures, though she had to force herself to concentrate on the blurry numbers. By the time the shuttle docked at Deimos, she’d decided to take the job offer from the man in the bar. The first half of the payment would take care of repairs; the remainder would pay her crew and give her some room for upgrades and cargo after the assignment. It would get them off Harat-Sharii. The man had assured her it was legal; that was good enough.

Reese arrived on Deimos Station after lunch and decided against finding Hirianthial and Sascha. Instead she located the locker and sat on the bench outside it. She tried reading some of the romance novels she’d bought before the trip, but the words moved, drifted, wobbled.