Part One: Apis

Chapter 1

The contractions start at night, too weak and fleeting to truly pull me from my nightmares at first so I spend some time - minutes? hours? - tossing and turning on the thin mattress pad, nightmares coming to life in my prison. Then an explosion of pain, like a cold hand wrapping itself around my spine, jerks me to consciousness and I groggily make my way to the rimless steel toilet in the corner of the room. Being pregnant made me no stranger to bowel disturbances, and some part of me thought I could evacuate and go back to sleep, restless as it was.

It takes a while before I realize the waves of pain are getting stronger, not subsiding; periodic and regular, not random. There is no shit in the toilet, just a blood-tinged mass of mucus, and with the next contraction the realization hits - this is labor, and I am alone.

From my spot on the toilet I glance towards the graveyard, that corner of the room where his “gifts” dangle from fishing line - dried out, mummified corpses tied to the rafters next to the staircase. The dessicated remains range in size from a newt the size of my pinky to a full grown cat, skin and fur and bones held together by sheer spite.

The smell was certainly something special when his gifts first arrived, but the dry basement air soon sorts that out, at least I think, but perhaps my nose just numbed to the scent of death and decay.

In that corner, too, lies a fist sized hole in the subfloor above - another gift, this one from nature. Whatever building lies over this dungeon - I suspect it is not a home, due to the lack of footsteps unless he is visiting - has become home to a stranger, or rather thousands of them. The floor hums in that corner, radiating warmth and life. What at first looked like a simple wet spot, perhaps flooding, grew softer and warmer, and when I poked my fingers through the soaked, softened wood they came back sticky sweet. In the space between the walls above my prison, bees were building a hive of honey-soaked comb. When I first made the hole, a few bees flew out, buzzed angrily around the room for a few minutes, then retreated back to their hive. Too dark, too enclosed, no flowers, I imagine them telling their queen. Some guards stand nearby at all times, but they always allow me a taste of their sweet honey when I need it.

Another contraction clouds my thoughts, and I find myself curled up into a ball on the floor, the cold concrete leaching heat from my bare skin.

Nothing about this is normal, and nothing about this is right. Normally, he would visit this cellar every other day; now he has not been down here in over three weeks. Normally, he would bring fresh supplies: toiletries, the occasional treat, and food - precooked, shelf stable packages I have to eat cold - but now, despite my best rationing, I am nearly out.

The electricity is out except for a single dim emergency light that I assume is powered by a solar panel, though the wires are sealed away inside the concrete wall. Normally, the rest of the lights would flicker on and off in cycles - 9 hours of night, 16 of day, usually, and upon waking I would etch another mark into the concrete wall with a penny to tally another day - up to 892 before the power went out. Now I have no way of tracking time, and I have no clue how long I’ve been living in near darkness. The silence in the room is oppressive, and I almost miss the TV mounted to the wall across from my bed that used to play reruns of Spongebob Squarepants for three hours each afternoon, the volume turned all the way up so the sea creature’s laugh echoes in the concrete room.

Another wave of pain rakes down my lower back and I feel liquid spilling out between my legs. Normally, he wouldn’t have let it get this far. He knew I was pregnant before I did - he was testing me regularly, ever since that first surprise. That first time I got pregnant, I had not had my period in over 7 months before I started showing, before he realized what happened. Not that I’d ever had a regular period in the dungeon. I had no other symptoms; I was malnourished, my body constantly aching. Then one week he cupped his hands over my slightly protruding belly, almost gently, almost lovingly. Then he clawed his pristine, manicured nails into my skin, shoved me into the wall, and kicked as I curled around my stomach, trying to protect the life kicking away inside me.

When I woke up a week later, I was no longer pregnant. I thought I was glad, and maybe it even meant I would never get pregnant again. Everything was in agony. Broken ribs, concussion, fractured jaw, internal bleeding. He came down every day for a month to care for me; I remember wishing he would leave me to die alone.

Finally, when I was healed enough to feed myself, he left me alone for a week, the longest I’d ever been without him. When he returned, he added a new corpse to the graveyard. This one he’d mummified properly, packing its tiny body in salt to dry out translucent skin around soft, fragile bones. It would hold together for as long as I was down here. That was a year ago, I guess. After that my body bled fresh blood each time he raped me, roughly tearing at the lingering wounds of childbirth. He was excited, this time, to learn I was pregnant. I kept waiting for him to snap, to end the fetus’ life before it could ever begin. Instead, he disappeared.

The time between contractions is getting shorter, harder, and I can barely catch my breath between them. I force myself to crawl onto the mattress pad, shoving the blanket aside to prevent it from getting fouled. With each wave of pain there is a shifting inside me, my guts churning, dread filling my chest. I vomit onto the concrete floor, thin bile dripping down from my lips.

I place my fingers between my legs and they come back bloody. Is that normal? My body writhes and through the pain I feel an incredible urge to push. I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't this, every muscle on fire, my entire lower half splitting apart, my bowels evacuating. I feel between my legs and there it is, the curve of a smooth, round skull; wet, slippery skin; wispy hairs. That's good, I recall, head first, and then my body is curling up on itself again and my groin is on fire as it stretches again and again. I feel for the head emerging and guide it out; its release is an immediate relief from that stretching pressure. The head out, in my hands, and the rest of the body slips out and there it is. There is screaming, but is that from the baby or me?

Chapter 2

I sold him the book Angels and Demons. Any other day, I wouldn't even remember what I said to him; just another blank face in a sea of empty customers. This day, however, the bland niceties I usually exchanged with customers were replaced with excited chatter about the news: MARS-V, the US-led colonizing team, had successfully landed its shuttle, second to land on the red planet after Russia's MARS-I. In the coming weeks the other three members of the Mars Colonization Project - China, the EU, and India - would land their teams. The collaboration promised a utopian space colony, self-sustaining after only a decade. It was a project half a century in the making, with each nation launching hundreds of material and supply rockets in advance of the human landings; designing robots to work in the Martian environment and autonomously begin building and mining; drones to scan the landscape, find the best place to land and inhabit. My father, Dr. Lawrence Thomson, was on that team, the oldest astronaut and one of the few civilians. As an ecologist, he would be responsible for creating and maintaining the microbial cocktail that will turn the dead, rusted dirt of Mars into a living, life-giving soil.

I bragged to all of my customers that day that my dad was on Mars. He asked me, "How do you think it would feel, to be so isolated for so long?" How could I not have predicted he would still be there at midnight, six hours later? That he would be there waiting for me to lock up the used bookstore I'd been working at since I was 16; that he would silently sneak up behind me and wrap his arm around my neck? Did I fight back? Were there witnesses? Even if I did, even if there were, I'm still here now. Did they tell my dad about my disappearance, or does he think I have abandoned him?

At first we could talk on the radio, but as dad’s shuttle raced further and further from Earth, the time lapse between messages became too much to have a conversation, and eventually we settled on monthly monologues broadcasted from the air force base in Colorado Springs. In between, we sent plain text emails, but now I haven't seen a computer in years. The last I heard from him was the day before I was kidnapped. He emailed that he was nervous for the landing; I responded only briefly, promising him we would talk again in a week.

My captor kept me drugged and asleep at first, then handcuffed me to the bed for another month. I remember little of the first weeks: a hot spoonful of broth against my lips, a straw in a cup of metallic water so cold it hurt my teeth, a sponge bath with a sharp, astringent scent and water that rose from my skin in soft, steamy whirls. He brought each of my meals freshly cooked at first, which I reluctantly chewed and swallowed under his unwavering stare. Originally the dungeon was less sparse. I had books to read, a television. A soft rug covered the icy concrete, warming the room. I even had a real bed with a white painted wood headboard, the bars of which I would run my knuckles along during the long, empty nights handcuffed to them.

Maybe he has abandoned me, left me to die of starvation or in childbirth. Or maybe he is waiting for this day, for his child to be born so he can torture us both. I slump against the concrete wall, feeling detached from my body, floating somewhere through space. My surroundings slowly come into focus as the shock of the trauma to my body subsides just the tiniest bit; I can breathe, I can think. I scoop the tiny, thrashing body into my arms and hold her to my chest, shivering at how cold her body feels. My stomach cramps again and again and at some point the wet slick of a placenta slips out, tugging at the baby's pulsating umbilical cord. I have no way of cutting it. I wrap us both up the blanket and begin to sob.

I don't know how much time passes. The baby's cries have subsided to strange, mewling whimpers, and my body trembles as I try to stand, blood and fluids spilling out between shaking legs. I need to wash myself off. I would like to wash the baby, but the water from the shower is so cold. I wet the corner of the blanket and wipe the vestigial fluids off her face, her torso, her twig-like arms and legs. She recoils from my icy touch. Then I wrap her up in the blanket with her placenta and leave the whole bundle on the mattress pad. I don't know what else to do - I have to shower. My legs are covered in blood, and I don't know if I am still bleeding. I could hemorrhage to death down here, the baby’s tiny wails forever gone unanswered.

I stand under the cold water until my legs are numb, the stinging in my groin dulled to an aching throb. My body feels beaten, abused; my breasts are hot and heavy. It is eerily quiet when I turn off the shower; the baby is not making a sound. On autopilot I feel for my lone towel and wrap it around my crotch like a diaper; then I walk stiffly to the bundle on the floor, pick it up. She is still breathing, eyes darting behind swollen lids squeezed tightly shut. She must be as exhausted as I am. I sit on the only part of the mattress that is not soaked in my own body fluids, squinting at my baby’s face, imagining most of the details too fine to see in the dim emergency light.

Her nose twitches, wrinkles, then her big, round eyes open and gaze into mine. Her mouth makes little sucking motions and my nipples burn; I am supposed to feed her. I awkwardly shift the bundle of blankets until her mouth is aligned, but she doesn't take it. A single drop of glistening colostrum leaks out, touches her lip. Then suddenly she is coughing, or is she choking? I hold her on her side and pat her back as she gags and spits up a load of foamy, clear fluid. A few more gut wrenching gasps and then she is screaming, my heart relieved to hear her lungs working so hard.

I shussh shuusssshhh shush her and rock and bounce her until she is reduced to tiny hiccups, eyes and face swollen in frustration. I try to position her against my breast again and this time she takes it, and the pain is a shock, her desperate sucking and tugging like sandpaper on sensitive skin. I close my eyes and lean my head against the concrete wall and breathe.

Chapter 3

I was here 892 days plus or minus a few weeks drugged or unconscious before I lost count. I estimate it has been nearly five weeks since he last visited. He’d left extra provisions, said not to expect him for a week at least. Two weeks later, the power went out. When the baby finishes nursing she pulls away from my aching nipple, eyes already dropping into sleep. Perhaps I nap too, the line between sleep and waking is blurred in this dark, unchanging room.

I awake to sharp pains in my stomach; I am ravenous. My body desperately needs to replenish its depleted resources. I gently place the baby on the mattress pad, placenta still attached and tucked into the blanket against her body, then I roll off the mattress and struggle to my feet. There is a warm gushing between my legs, soaking the towel; I feel faint. I lean against the wall for support as I make my way to the box of food in the corner of the room. It is nearly empty, except for a packet of saltines and a single easy-open can of green beans. Fingers trembling, I tear open the crackers and chew, my mouth too dry to swallow. I stumble over to the shower and hold my head under the icy stream, drinking in the water. Drenched, I take in a few more crackers, then open the green beans. I am considering drinking the salty water from the can when a loud crash from above startles both me and the baby awake.

The water is still running and I pray it is enough to cover the baby's first cries before I swoop over and pick her up. More crashing, banging; more sound than I have ever heard from upstairs before. It sounds like he is looking for something. His steps are heavy, as though he has been drinking; a bad omen, if the past is any indicator. My heart is racing, and the baby picks up on my stress from my arms, begins to squirm and whimper. He will kill her, I realize with sudden clarity. He'll do it right in front of me and save her body because he can.

Whimpers are turning into wails, and I glance around the dim room desperately. I must keep her quiet. I creep over to the corner where the bees live, reach up into the sweet comb. I bring my finger to my mouth and taste the vivifying nectar before offering it to the baby. She takes it, sucking greedily on my finger. Another drop, and she sighs contentedly. The next time I reach up, a couple bees crawl onto my wrist, tickling my hairs with their antennae.

The sudden silence from upstairs is almost as disarming as the crashing and stomping. My breath catches as I hear the telltale scraping that signals his arrival - there is a piece of furniture that conceals the door that he must drag across the floor to access my prison.

The baby is sucking the last of the honey off my finger. There is a bee crawling on her face, but she is calm, quiet. I gently pull my hand away and reach towards the hive again as the doorknob upstairs jiggles. There is a metallic scraping from the doorknob, as though he is having trouble with his keys. I grip the softened wood overhead and tug; it pulls away slightly, easily, and more bees tickle on the skin of my hand. I close my eyes, bracing for the inevitable stinging pain. My other arm holds the bundle of blankets tightly, as though I could possibly shield her from the stinging insects.

A click, the creak of a door. One… two… three steps, but something's wrong, what is it? I don't have time to consider; I yank hard on the weakened wood, pulling it and part of the beehive down, then I chuck the whole thing at the stairs, a cloud of bees blotting out the tiny emergency light, the angry buzzing deafening in this chamber. I dive towards the running shower, the baby tucked under my body to protect her from the frigid downpour. Screaming, but is it hers, or is it his?

He never closed the door. That was what I had missed. Every other time he came to visit he would step down the concrete steps one… two… then turn around and close and lock the door before taking the final seven steps.

This time, he didn't.

His screaming quickly transformed into wheezing, then a thud, then silence. My skin is too numb to know right away that I had avoided any stings at all. The baby in my arms is shivering, but silent - is that a bad sign? - when I step out of the shower. A corner of the blanket is soaked where it trailed in the water, and the towel wrapped around my crotch is dripping blood tinged water onto the concrete floor. The presumed threat neutralized, most of the bees have retreated back to their hive, but a few still linger, sipping up water from the puddles on the floor.

He never closed the door, so light streams in from above, highlighting the body crumpled at the base of the stairs. I can see immediately it is not him - this man is too young, younger than me, maybe not even fully an adult yet. His face is twisted in a grotesque mask of pain, patchy stubble and acne dotting his face. Just a kid, and I killed him, even though he left the door open. His skin is bloated and swollen from the stings, face red from exploded capillaries as his lungs strained to take in oxygen through his closing throat. The dead bodies of worker bees who sacrificed themselves to save the hive lay scattered around him. A breeze blows in from the open door, chilling my skin. The baby gives a grunt and whimpers, squirms.

I need clothes. I kneel down to the body, just another corpse for the graveyard. The image of this teenager hanging from the rafters above flashes through my head, makes my stomach churn. He would probably have to cut the body into pieces to tie them up - here an arm, there a big toe.

I struggle to my feet, gagging, and stumble back towards the mattress pad. The baby is screaming as I set her down, but I need both hands. He is wearing a flannel jacket; it is dry, so I remove that first and take it to the baby. She is covered in a sticky, black sludge when I unwrap it from her body, and she yells indignantly as I try to scrub it off, using the cleanest corners of the blanket, wet from pooling in the shower stall. The umbilical cord looks red and inflamed, the placenta congealing and sticky. I need to figure out how to cut the cord, but until then I wrap her up in the flannel and bounce and shh shuusshhh ssshhhh but she doesn't stop. She screams and screams and screams until I am crying too.

My breasts feel sore again and I wonder if she could be hungry still, but she won't close her mouth long enough to try. I step carefully over to the hive, steal just a tiny bit more honey and for that I am rewarded with my first sting on the second knuckle of my middle finger. The sting is at first mild, then spreads like fire before settling into a painful itch. The baby sucks on the honey, immediately calm. I lay her down again and return to the body. First his shoes and socks, then pants, then t-shirt. He has a pocket knife sharp enough to cut my finger open when I gently press it to the blade, blood welling in three minute droplets. His boots are a couple sizes too big and the pants dwarf me, but they are warm.

The door has been open all this time, and I have yet to make my escape. He could still arrive, and this intrusion would not go unnoticed. The light trickling in and the lure of fresh air are so enticing and I am so scared. I pick up the baby, step over the body, and slowly make my way up the stairs.

For the first time in 892 days, plus or minus a few weeks of unconsciousness and isolation, I step out of the dungeon.

Chapter 4

The first gift he gave me was a little over a month into my captivity. There was a mouse in the dungeon; I tucked food under my blankets for it, talked to it when he wasn't around. It lived with me for a week before he caught it, crushed it in his bare hand, and tied it to the ceiling.

That was also the first day he violated me. I was still allowed clothes, then, and he made me pull them off under his cold gaze, my skin prickling with goosebumps in the cold basement air. I was made to stand there, my legs still atrophied and weak, trembling, shivering, while he examined my body; unhurried, unblinking. His fingers trailed along my arms, my legs, my hips and ribs. His touch was gentle, almost non-existent but I felt his fingerprints permanently etched over every square inch of my body.

When he was done he directed me to the bed. He tied my hands to the headboard and I stared blankly at the mouse dangling from across the room as he defiled my body. At one point, I swear I saw it twitched. When he was done I begged him to let me go, let me stretch my legs. I wanted nothing more than to shower alone and wash every trace of his filth from me. His eyes ran lazily over my body, then he shrugged, freed my hands, and directed me to sit in the corner of the basement while he dragged the frame up the stairs. At times he would punish me by taking away the mattress, forcing me to sleep on the cold concrete for weeks at a time.

Up the stairs is a greenhouse, hot and humid and bright. The rear of the greenhouse where I emerge is built like a workshop but the rest of the structure is composed of panels of clear glass. My eyes ache after weeks of near darkness, and I struggle to adjust, to see the room around me. Shelves of dirt-filled pots have been knocked over, shards of orange terracotta scattered on the floor. The door to my prison is disguised as a storage closet, hand trowels and trimming shears hanging from pegboard. An enormous pot, large enough that I could bathe in it, has been shoved aside to allow the door to open. Next to that is a backpack, lumpy and too awkwardly heavy to pick up with the bundle in my arms. It is the type used by outdoorsmen, a sleeping bag and tent tied to the bottom, a long tube from a water bladder afixed to one strap.

I shift the baby to one arm and use the other to work the zipper open. Whoever it is down there, they were prepared to spend more time outdoors than in. Freeze dried food and energy bars, trail mix, wool socks, a first aid kit. A dark hand towel that I tuck into my pants, which are already developing bloody spots. Water bottles and insect repellent, a rain poncho and an old, musty smelling blanket. Various kinds of rope, string, and fishing line. A flask, half full with some bitter alcohol. As well as some rather unexpected things: trinkets and jewelry packed in a padded yellow envelope, another envelope with several thousand dollars cash, a small claw hammer. I open a leather pouch containing a ziplock bag of white powder, a lighter, and a rusty spoon. Was the kid downstairs a junkie, trying to rob my captor? Why would anyone just walk around with a thousand dollars in cash in their backpack? I wonder if the kid knew him, what made him decide to check this greenhouse for valuables.

I set the baby down carefully on the dirt covered floor, avoiding the shards of clay and glass. I try to stand but my knees lock; my legs are so weak. I am exhausted, my body's resources stretched too thin. How long has it been since she was born? Several hours at least, maybe a whole day, but all those days and nights in darkness has left me disoriented in time.

I sit again with a groan and dig through the bag for the trail mix which I pour straight into my mouth. The first aid kit is basic, but I need the gauze and alcohol wipes, and there is a tube of antibiotic ointment. I spread out the poncho and lay the baby on it, unwrapping her to expose the umbilical cord. The placenta smells earthy, like it belongs with the greenhouse. I pour whatever was in the flask over the knife, but it ends up being unnecessary; as soon as I touch the umbilical cord it falls off, leaving just an oozing stub at the baby's belly button. I dab at the inflamed skin around the stump with the alcohol wipes, much to the baby's chagrin, then put ointment on it and cover it with gauze. I lift her up to my chest, and it is warm enough that she is not shivering. This time my breasts are already leaking fat droplets of sweet colostrum and she latches on to my nipple instantly. She sucks noisily and I manage to maneuver another handful of trail mix into my mouth. As I chew I watch the corner of the workshop where bees buzz lazily around.

Chapter 5

I know we have to leave but it feels less urgent now that we are both relatively satiated. I have yet to step into direct sunlight, or even leave the relative protection of the shaded workshop. Even as my eyes adjust to the sunlight, things remain blurry beyond a few feet; objects reduced to vague impressions of color. I used to wear glasses, but my eyes weren't this bad without them - I wonder if all that time staring at nothing beyond the four concrete walls of my prison made them worse.

When he first brought the television down to my room, I was allowed to pick what I wanted to watch. He even gave me a simple remote so I could navigate Netflix whenever I wanted. I wept real tears of joy, my gratitude sincere despite all the indignities he put me through, despite the tinge of disgust I felt at myself for accepting the gift. I watched nature documentaries nearly 24/7; the shows were soothing, hypnotizing distractions. They took me back to childhood: my dad was an ecologist, and I grew up on his field research. As a baby he would strap me to a carrier on his chest and take me on multi-day field trips, collecting samples and recording observations. As I grew older I was able to assist: sweeping long nets through tall grass, shaking branches as he waited below, watching insects drop onto sticky traps on the forest floor beneath. He kept an apiary a few miles away from the university, and I would watch carefully as he slowly pulled the frames of sweet, fragrant honeycomb out of the hive boxes, my eyes darting around the crowd of honey bees to find the queen. I was never very good at it; once dad pointed Her out, it was obvious, but my eyes had travelled over Her a dozen times without picking Her long, golden body out from the crowds of doting workers. I loved the sound of bees, that soft buzz multiplied by thousands into a roar; the sharp odor of burning pine needles in the smoker; the feel of sticky sweat running down my back, tickling like a bee’s antennae.

Nature was safe; it was a piece of home. I could watch the documentaries for hours and not notice the time passing. At least until my captor took notice. His next few gifts reflected the stars of the shows I watched: first a newt, then a chipmunk, followed by a blood red cardinal, a young rabbit, and a cat he claimed to find on the side of the road. The gifts continued long after I stopped watching the nature documentaries. One day he arrived to find the television off and grew enraged at my ingratitude. He took the remote after sodomizing me with it, and the next day the daily episodes of Spongebob Squarepants began, volume raised all the way up to drown out even my thoughts.

Outside the greenhouse walls it is strangely grey and colorless; what I mistook to be blinding sunlight is merely an overcast sky when my eyes finally adjust. The greenhouse glass looks dirty, smudged; or perhaps it is the sky that is dirty. I have to try to get up again. The flannel jacket smells like urine, strangely sweet, but I wrap it around the baby anyway. I repack the bag and struggle to my feet, groaning, my body creaking in protest. The backpack is heavy but the straps are well padded and do not bite into my thin shoulders. I feel unbalanced with the baby in my arms instead of my stomach. Wincing, I make my way through the greenhouse step by step until my joints settle into a dull pain. I tread carefully, not trusting my failing eyes to spot obstacles. The sunlight is exhilarating, but my first breath of fresh air is terrifying: it tastes like smoke with a bitter, poisonous tinge. The sudden change from the warm, earthy odor of the greenhouse to this toxic fog that burns my nostrils makes me want to retreat back to the dungeon, but instead I step into the grass. It is overgrown slightly, greyish and brittle.

Another step, another. I am in a yard bordered by trees, leafy branches blurring into the still, colorless sky. The baby buries her face into my shirt as if to hide from the poisonous air, that chalky aridity. My ankles itch when the grass brushes against them, and the sunlight, diffused through the odd fog as it is, burns my skin and eyes. Across the lawn I see a building: a greying log cabin with green shutters around the windows. As we get closer I can make out wooden steps that lead up to a gaping door, half hanging off one hinge. It leads to a kitchen in shambles, every cupboard opened and emptied. A small pile of non-perishables - boxes, cans, bags - is stacked neatly on the counter; everything else has been carelessly tossed onto the floor. A rotten stench hovers in the air, leaking from the cracked open refrigerator. So there is no electricity here, either; so he hasn’t been here in a while. I drop the backpack on the floor with a dull thump and hold my breath, listening for sounds of another human.

My stolen boots clump heavily on the hardwood floor as I pass through the kitchen, running one hand over the stockpile of food. Most of it is the same stuff he would bring to my dungeon. Past the kitchen is a dining room, chairs upended. A staircase to the right, with a closet underneath, its contents strewn across the room. I step carefully up the stairs to a hallway with three rooms. The bathroom door at the end is open, dark. I push open the door on the left to find a ransacked master bedroom. The bed is unmade, flannel sheets rumpled, and I realize this is where he slept when he wasn't with me. I recoil from the scent of the room: his scent, his sweat and cologne and evil. I cross the hallway to open the other door and gasp - it is a nursery, yellowed-hued with a sturdy looking wooden crib in the middle by the window, a rocking chair surrounded by shelves of stuffed animals in one corner.

The kid didn't dig through this room, just knocked some piles of diapers over half-heartedly; he must not have considered anything in a nursery useful. I have everything I need here, though, and I gently place the baby down on a changing table and crouch, squinting to pick through the stacks of diapers until I find one labeled N for newborn. The lone window is shaded in a translucent yellow fabric and I keep glancing anxiously towards it in a futile effort to glean something of the world outside. What would happen if he came home to find his house had been robbed? What would happen if he came home to find me here? I stand, and all at once my stomach cramps, a fiery wave of pain that turns my stomach. There is a stabbing pain in my vagina, then a warm gush soaks into the hand towel I’ve wedged in my pants. I count my breaths, try to slow my heart as the pain subsides; my legs feel wet and sticky, cooling. I take a few deep breaths and straighten up.

The baby is once again covered in that foul, black sludge; meconium, the product of digesting the hairs and cells and mucus her developing body shed into the amniotic fluid she lived in for nearly nine months. I clean the baby as much as I can with wipes, then rub sweet smelling lotion on her skin. She is calm, watching my face with half-lidded eyes as I rub her paper-thin skin. I put the diaper on her, then some striped pajamas I found in a drawer. I feel awkward, trying to maneuver thin, fragile limbs into the arms and legs without brushing against the dried scab of an umbilical cord. Then there are a million snap buttons, and by the end she is huffing in frustration and I feel my eyes prick with unexpected tears. I pick her up and rock her as I walk around the room, shsshhh sshsshh sshh. Under the window sit an overflowing toy chest and a book shelf with sturdy cardboard books. I peek out the window, wincing again at the light. The front yard is massive, blurring into the horizon. I can't tell if there are any houses nearby, but the area seems wooded and isolated, and I wonder again how the kid stumbled upon this house in particular. Perhaps the blurry forest around me is an illusion, concealing civilization nearby. There is a thin layer of dust coating the room. What does this room mean, and how long has it been since he was last in here? I wonder what his plans were for the baby. For me.

The front of my shirt is soaked through and the baby is starting to huff again. I take one more peek out the window before retreating to the rocking chair in the corner and lifting my t-shirt - no, the kid's t-shirt, the one I took off his dead body. I position the baby's head near my aching nipples, chaffing and sore. Close up, I recognize some of the stuffed animals staring down at us: a cat, a mouse, a blood red bird, a baby doll. It is a sinister replica of the graveyard in my dungeon. Feeding her hurts; everything hurts. How long ago was it my body was ripped apart and thrown hastily back together? I am exhausted, and I have stretched my limits too far. Perhaps this was his plan all along, to get me into this room with the baby. At least here there's a window.

I almost nod off but the idea of dropping the tiny life in my arms terrifies me, so I stand painfully and walk her over to the crib. She stirs slightly when I put her down but her eyes remain tightly closed. Can I leave her here alone? There is a burning pressure in my bladder and the towel between my legs is cold and sticky with blood. The bathroom is right next to this room, but what if he shows up?

I decide to keep both doors open and strip off the kid's clothes, already ruined by my leaking, bleeding, broken body. I sit on the porcelain toilet and for a moment it seems like I've forgotten what to do, which muscles my body needs to constrict and relax just so I can empty my bladder. Then a burning, searing pain; then relief. I can't wipe, everything so bruised and torn and blood soaked, so I turn on the shower and rinse my lower half in the cold stream. Another cramp grips my stomach and I fall to my knees, watch great blobs of blood clots circling the drain. I crouch there until the blood-tinged water running into the drain fades to a watery rose.

I dry my body with a musty, discolored towel, wincing unexpectedly when I reach my ankles. They are swollen and blistered where that ashy, stinging grass rubbed against them. My eyes are burning and itching, too; my vision foggy no matter how much I try to blink it away. Nevermind, the windowless bathroom is too dark to really see anyway. I rummage through the cupboard under the sink and discover an unopened box of maxi pads. Evidently he had prepared for my living here, at least for a while after the birth. I leave the bathroom and look towards the other door - his room. I dread the idea of going in there, of accidentally learning his name or favorite brand of toothpaste or what drawer he keeps his watch in. He always made a point to ensure I know nothing about him, and I have made little effort to learn.

I need clothes, though, so I step inside and make a beeline to the dresser. He is much bigger than me, even now, with my pregnancy belly still hanging off my waist like a partially deflated beach ball. I have to wear his boxers so I can use the maxi pads - already more blood is dripping from between my legs onto a plush grey rug beneath my feet. I hastily pull on a pair of pants and a green flannel shirt, then some thin cotton socks that will hopefully protect the tender skin on my ankles from the stolen boots. I retreat out of his room and glance into the yellow one across the hall; the baby is still sleeping in the crib, and my stomach is aching with hunger.

Downstairs I dig through the boxes of food, considering how much would fit in the kid's backpack. We can't stay here, even though this place has everything we need, even though the longer we stay here the harder it gets to leave. Soon he will come home, find that his house has been broken into. If he finds us here, we will never leave alive. Even if he doesn't find us immediately, he will go to the greenhouse, which he will see has also been destroyed. He will know I've escaped the dungeon because the door is wide open, and maybe he will step down the concrete stairs and find the body of the kid I killed and maybe he will be just a little bit happy to learn he's created a monster. Then he will track me down, take the baby and kill me. The kid's face flashes through my head, along with another stomach churning cramp, another warm gush below, but this time I at least stay standing.

The kid’s camping bag has room to spare, but I don't think I could carry the heavy cans. I remove bags from the boxes and compress them to fit as much as I can, then I open a can of spaghettios to eat cold with a spoon I've picked up off the floor. I walk around the house, squinting into the chaos of the small rooms. The kid must have been here a long time, given how thoroughly his things have been destroyed. I find something called a baby bjorn amongst the coats and cleaning supplies thrown out of the closet, and spend some time fiddling with the complicated looking straps.

A small window next to the front door is broken, suggesting how the kid broke in. I open the door to look outside; grey sky unchanged so once again I am unsure how much time has passed. The front steps are bare, no doormat or mail or newspapers. A gravel driveway in front of the house disappears into the hazy blur of the woods. I blink my eyes, hard, as though that would recover them from 892 days of imprisonment in a dim dungeon. I recall that he wore contacts; I found one once, dried up and shrivelled on the floor. I kept my find a secret, my unwilling knowledge of this one small weakness. So I do know something about him.

I climb back up the stairs, stumbling on aching feet. I enter his room again, and there, next to an upended nightstand, is exactly what I need: a pair of thick, wire-rimmed glasses. They are not quite strong enough, but I can make out the room around me. I glance out his window, this one covered with a thick, opaque green shade, and see that it wasn't just the myopic blur - there is a colorless fog, a pale overcast now tinged with a soft pinkish patch of sun barely peeking through. Everything is grey, as though dusted by ash. There are also white spots in my vision, like clouds in front of my eyes, and no matter how hard I blink they do not clear away.

I'm wracked with another stomach cramp, this one so bad my vision fills with black clouds. I am dizzy, the room is spinning; I stagger over to his bed, retching, stomach heaving. Everything goes black as I collapse onto his bed, my body finally giving out. I dream I am trapped in a dark cave; there is only a slit of light near the ceiling, dotted with dancing shadow puppets. I recognize the characters: a cat, a mouse, a red bird, my baby.

Chapter 6

When I wake up, the sky is a toxic shade of red, pairing well with the sickly odor outside. The sun is setting, the lower wavelengths refracting through whatever persistent fog has coated the sky into an incandescent red. A tiny crack in the window lets in its unsettling glow, and when I first awake I'm afraid I've entered some new version of hell. I am sleeping in his bed, my body is recovering from the trauma of childbirth, and my breasts have once again leaked, soaking my shirt in sticky, cold milk. The scarlet glow is so disorienting I don't at first realize what has awakened me, but after a moment I hear it: an infant, my baby, screaming in the next room.

I jump to my feet and dart to my room, the muscles in my lower abdomen and tissues in my groin shrieking in protest. The baby is awake, and she is hungry; some part of me knew that, heard her in my sleep, which is why my shirt is now soaked. I lift her up and walk over to the rocking chair, shrinking under the gaze of the animals that will forever haunt my dreams. I wince as I remove my shirt, cotton chafing against my sore and cracked nipples. Her latch feels like needles, and as she sucks from one breast the other begins to leak all over both of us. When she has finished eating she defecates, a loud, pungent affair, and I am thankful for the supply of diapers. I clean her up again, replace the diaper with a fresh, clean one, and dress her in new pajamas. I find a diaper bag in the room and attempt to pack it with diapers one handed before I remember the Baby Bjorn from downstairs. She fusses as I try to manipulate her body into the device's front pocket; I nearly drop her, but once she is settled in, curled up against my chest, she calms.

Both hands free, I pack the extra supplies quickly in the dying light. I zip it up and about to lug it downstairs when I hear the bang of the front door. "Fuck," I whisper, and the baby stirs and whimpers, and it occurs to me this is probably the first time I have ever said anything in front of her. My throat is dry, my voice worn from disuse.

There are two voices downstairs which I do not expect; I always figured he would have to live alone to keep up with his hobby. As their words grow clearer I realize neither of the voices are his, and for the first time I realize that the kid I killed may not have worked alone. The voices rise; they are arguing, and the noise is disturbing the baby. I ssshhushh shhshhh sshhush her and slow my breaths, listening.

"Where the fuck is he?" comes the first voice, a young man's.

"Relax, his pack is still here. He can't be far." A young woman, this time, flippantly continues, "Look, I bet he went to go check out that greenhouse. I'll go get him and we can talk plans."

"He packed all that food for himself, you really think he's got a plan that involves you?" The man's voice is a low growl, and the only response is sharp steps through the kitchen hardwood. "Don't wait too long," he shouts after her. "I want my fix."

I hold the baby tight against my chest, afraid to breathe as I sneak a glance out the window. I watch a blurry figure with bright pink hair dart across the lawn in the rapidly fading light. I close my eyes and focus my breathing until nothing around me exists, only the sound of the man's footsteps below. The baby is quiet too, as if she senses the urgent need for silence. The steps hesitate at the bottom of the stairs when a sudden shriek emerges from the backyard. Half a second, then another scream, and he is running back towards the yard and away. I don't even think, just grab the diaper bag and race down the stairs. I hesitate just a second - I want the backpack, I need the food in it - but I don't want to risk a clean getaway. I slip out the front door and down the stairs, away from the cabin, away from my dungeon, away from him, and into the unknown.

I walk along the gravel driveway, a tiny crescent of a moon behind the dusty sky providing only enough light to see my feet. The driveway ends at a dirt road, and I pick the direction that slopes downward, too exhausted to consider climbing any hill. The baby is restless and fussy, no matter how much I bounce and shhshh. I have to stop to feed her three times; afterwards I change her diaper blindly amongst the gravel and pine needles on the road. Despite the chill in the night air, the skin around her umbilical cord feels hot, infected. She twists and squirms and whimpers in discomfort, and it is only when I begin to talk that she finally calms, so I whisper nonsense into her hair as I walk: "Sshh my honey, Sshh my sweet baby bee."

I think about the scream I’d heard, how the woman must have felt going into the greenhouse; finding her, what - friend? partner? loved one? - naked at the bottom of the steps, body mangled and swollen from bee stings. Is that what made her scream? Or was it the bloodbath of a dungeon: my own blood and feces and urine soaking into the mattress pad, congealing on the concrete floor.

The sky is finally starting to lighten when I reach a real paved road, albeit some empty mountain highway. A sign promises a town 25 miles away, but my legs are weak and I've bled through the maxi pad and how much more blood can my body even afford to lose anyway? So I sit at the side of the road and wait for a car to pass by. When the first rays of pinkish sunlight peak over the horizon I hear the rumble of a vehicle, but this one is huge, big enough to vibrate the earth beneath my feet. It is military green, not a normal vehicle at all but something huge and armored, and I briefly consider fleeing into the trees but I can’t, not with the baby in my arms, whose skin is so hot and feverish I know she needs medical attention. I stand to wave, to get their attention, but my vision blurs with the movement, and there is more gushing between my legs, and then everything goes black.

Chapter 7

A little over a year ago, a mechanical failure in the Indian mining station on Mars resulted in a catastrophic explosion that destroyed their entire encampment, plus part of the United States' HUB. The death toll was not made public.

On Earth the government learned of the explosion from a frantic jumble of radio communications. The 13 minute delay between messages - the amount of time it takes a light wave to travel the roughly 115 million miles between Earth and Mars - made rational communication impossible. The astronauts insisted it was an accident, pleaded for peace, but tensions between the US and Russia were already high, and US intelligence decided it was an intentional act of sabotage. While the surviving astronauts worked together around the clock to repair the damage and treat their injuries, the heads of states on Earth began preparations for retaliation.

I don’t learn all of this at once - just bits and pieces as I recover in the military hospital the armored vehicle brought me to. When the nurses learn that I am the Astronaut’s Daughter, they lose their stony, military-issued blank faces; eyes soften, secrets spill. “I heard rumors,” one whispers as he manually checks my blood pressure. “Some of the papers are saying everyone survived. Some are saying all of them died.”

They keep me separate from the baby at first, insisting I recover from the trauma: dehydration, malnourishment, not to mention the extreme blood loss thanks to a vaginal tear that “could have been a lot worse,” according to the doctor who sewed me back up. Various bags drip fluids into my arm, as well as several blood transfusions, type A+.

The baby, too, has to recover: antibiotics for infection, IV fluids for dehydration, bright blue lights for jaundice. When they finally wheel her into my room, she looks like a different baby entirely - plump, fed, healthy - and I cry through the nurse’s assurances that I had done everything I could to help her.

“Such a sweet little girl,” the nurse murmurs when I finally calm down, “What’s her name?” It is a question to which I had not even considered an answer. “Melissa,” I finally say. The queen of the bees.

Only a single police officer visits, some time after we have been reunited, to question me about where I came from. He stands awkwardly at the foot of my bed, eyes cast away from where I am breastfeeding Melissa, and cuts me off whenever I go into too much detail, even when it comes to how I escaped. His summary: I was kidnapped outside the bookstore in Denver; held hostage in a cabin a hundred miles away in the mountains for two and a half years, give or take; gave birth alone and escaped; landed in a hospital in Colorado Springs. Nothing about the kid who picked the lock to my dungeon, or the bees, or the looters. When he’s done, he flips his notebook closed, and tells me they will look into it. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he finishes, “We’re pretty taxed right now.”

The colorless sky, I learn, is the US military’s attempt to reduce the effects of a chemical weapon created by Russia; a fine dusting of powder that causes instant burning in biological cells on contact with UV light. The attack occurred about 5 weeks ago in cities all over the country - the same time that he stopped visiting the dungeon. The initial attack was devastating enough - likely hundreds of thousands, if not millions died when the quick acting powder landed on their skin. On contact with sunlight, contaminated skin immediately scalds as though it had been submerged in boiling water. If inhaled, UV activated powder even causes blisters in the respiratory system. The initial targets were cities; rural areas were also affected as the fallout began to drift, less severe overall but still devastating to the local environment where pockets of the weapon accumulated; including, apparently, the place where I was held hostage. The scarring on my ankles and my eyes is permanent, and I will never be able to see clearly again. The initial attack was followed by massive cyberattacks on the power infrastructure and communication networks a couple of weeks later - hence the loss of power in the cabin and my dungeon.

No one knows how many cities are affected or what the death toll is, thanks to the Russian cyberattack that has debilitated relief efforts. Newspapers are filled with rumors that range from conspiracy theory to government-sponsored propaganda. There are no truths, just alternative facts. Entire cities have been devastated, and at night the streets are swarming with looters and opportunists breaking and entering abandoned homes. Night is the only time it is truly safe to go outside; the blood red skies of dawn and dusk are relatively safe, but in the daytime the chemical will kill you within 20 minutes. It is an improvement; before the sun blocking fog was sprayed into the atmosphere, it took less than 60 seconds.

If it was a looter I killed, does that mean the cabin had been abandoned for a while? Or did they just happen across it and take advantage of my captor’s absence?

I am discharged from the hospital at night, two weeks after being brought here by Humvee, Melissa swaddled professionally by a night nurse and dozing peacefully in my arms. I give them my dad's address, his Earth address, even though it is in the wrong town, 70 miles away (further away than the edge of space), even though I don't even know if anyone is even living there now.

It had already been several years since I set foot in that house; I was 16 when he announced he was going to train to be an astronaut for the Mars Colonization Project, to leave me behind as he travelled insurmountably far away. He had to have requested an exception; astronauts were not supposed to have children. His callousness enraged me; to leave me behind, when he is all I have ever had. Mom died after a car crash shortly before I was born; I was pulled from her lifeless body, screaming and angry, then handed off to the suddenly hopeless man who had arrived too late to say goodbye to his wife. The same man who, sixteen years later, proudly stood before me and told me he was leaving the planet forever.

I decided to leave, go live with a friend, prematurely severing our ties together. Even after he reached out to apologize, which ended with both of us sobbing into our phones that we were both sorry, I never went back to live with him again. I finished out my schooling by the skin of my teeth. Instead of homework I spent hours designing hydroponics systems for my father; our collaborations through emails always distant and polite. His training would take five years at specialized facilities in distant cities before we even thought about launch, and I felt like he had given up on having a home here. This true home was already millions of miles away. I got my job at the used bookstore to keep me occupied, because my father's salary as a Mars colonist would have easily kept me afloat through high school and college. I was 21, weeks away from graduating with a physics degree, a fellowship lined up for the following year in grad school, when I bragged to the wrong person about my astronaut father and was kidnapped.

At this hospital, discharge apparently means unceremoniously dumped outside the sliding glass doors with a small smile that says “good luck.” The night nurse thoughtfully provided me with pamphlets for homeless shelters in the city, the closest one a mere two miles from the hospital; I still have the thick glasses stolen from my captor’s room, but wearing them makes me nauseous, whether from the wrong prescription or their association with that man. I take them off in the darkness and slip them in my pocket. Light gives me headaches now, and I appreciate the night. I will never see clearly again; anything out of reach for my arms is an incomprehensible blur. Reading is an exhausting struggle, but manageable. I have to constantly move my eyes around the pages to see past the clouds obscuring my vision.

Vague impressions of the city around me chill my skin; it is all apocalyptically surreal. The shops lining the streets are all boarded up, bright graffiti coloring the ordinarily dull, uniform buildings. Electricity is spotty, and many lengths of streets are unlit. Some are blocked off by flashing hazmat trucks, biohazard signs warning of decontamination in progress. When I arrive at the first shelter I am told that there are no beds; they hand me a bag full of snacks and toiletries and suggest another shelter nearby. That one, too, is full, as well as the next one; they are all overrun with refugees from the attack, not to mention those who were homeless before all this took place. The shelters each offer the same sort of consolation prizes: a sympathetic smile, cup of burnt coffee, socks, underwear, snacks. I’ve given up hope when I finally find a bed at the last shelter on the list, when the sun is just starting to creep into the sky. I yearn to sit in its rays after so long underground, but the shelter’s windows are blocked out with thick, heavy blankets. No one can take any chances with the chemicals floating through the air.

The shelter is crowded with gaunt faces and tired, fussy children; even Melissa’s most piercing shrieks are drowned out by the noise of too many bodies packed in too little space. There is no privacy, not even in the showers, although I wouldn’t be able to leave Melissa anywhere to take one. Strapped to my chest, she goes everywhere with me, even the bathroom; an awkward dance in the tiny cubicle that leaves me anxious about germs. Sleep eludes us both as the cacophony of coughing, snoring, and weeping fills the air.

At dusk they feed us and tell us it’s time to move on, and bodies pour out of the building in clusters. The sky is that same, violent red that marks safety from the burning chemical weapon. Most of the people mill around the entrance, the only building on the block with electricity. They are waiting for the shelter to reopen in a few hours; beds go quickly. I want to talk to my father, or at least read his emails and see his face, but the internet has disappeared; cell phones drain their batteries as they search for a signal that doesn’t exist. Our immediate connectivity is just another casualty of the war. I can’t sit still, opt to wander around with Melissa aimlessly, oblivious to the darkness and the dangers it conceals. Some houses are still occupied, their windows boarded up and “NO TRESPASSING” signs littered across dead lawns. Others have been ransacked, glass shattered, doors knocked off their hinges. A man sits under a lone light on his porch, silently watching, daring looters to stop; a long gun gleams in his hands.

Without the constant city lights the sky above should be a beautiful display of the Milky Way, but no stars make it through that sickly grey fog; the only color is a pinkish moon. Somehow, despite everything, the spaces between the buildings and houses are lit by flickering yellow fireflies, dancing in the absence of stars. Ahead I see a light flashing; someone is using the butt of a heavy torch to smash a ground floor window. The dancing light bounces off a head of hot pink hair and my breath catches. Is she alone?

A pack of feral dogs barking and howling a few blocks down makes Melissa whimper and squirm, and I realize how reckless I've been to wander into the darkness. Perhaps I was a fool to leave the safety of our dungeon. Even before I was kidnapped, before I escaped into some sort of dystopian nightmare, the world was a dangerous place. Plagues bolstered by crowding and unethical agricultural practices; an atmosphere growing thick with heat and poisons. Inequality, poverty, racism; politicians blatantly ignoring all of them. I turn away from the pink-haired woman and retreat, gravel crunching under my stolen boots. What is that girl doing out alone, though? Likely it wasn’t even her - plenty of people have dyed their hair pink before, and it's not like I could see her face.

I return to the shelter as the last of the loiterers are filtering in, so we don't even need to wait in line. I feed Melissa, exposed on my cot. She is ravenous, pulling hard at my nipples, and even after she has drained both breasts she is looking for more. I change her diaper on the same cot, swaddle her badly, and lay back on the pillow with her. I watch her face, meticulously puzzling together the disparate pieces of light that reach my retinas - pale blue eyes, capillaries like pink threads under translucent skin, the tiniest peach fuzz on her head. The top of her head has a soft spot that gently pulses under my fingers. I stroke the bridge of her nose with my finger and her eyes first cross, then close; she breaks out into the tiniest toothless smile. Then the muscles in her face relax and her breathing slows. She is asleep, and watching her is mesmerizing.

At the hospital the nurses drilled into me: do not fall asleep with the baby. Do not fall asleep with the baby. Do not fall asleep with the baby. The phrase is repeating in my head when a sudden voice jerks me from my drowse: "You are exhausted." I open my eyes to a black woman with deep purple plaits standing next to my cot. She is holding a folded baby cot. "They never have enough of these things, so we brought our own," she explains, "You need this more than me." I protest, but she insists - "My babe is strictly diurnal anyway." I had almost forgotten that our circadian rhythms have been forcibly reversed, that the sun is only just rising. My captor used to change up the day/night cycle in the dungeon, as punishment or just for fun. Some of the changes were so dramatic that they made me physically ill, but now I think my default state is just "depleted" - I'm willing to believe any time is nighttime if it means I can rest.

I thank the woman, squinting and weary, and she sets it up next to my bed and I thank her again and again until it becomes apparent that it's all I can say. She gives me a warm smile and returns to her own space, disappearing into the blur of colors outside my lonely bubble.

I lay Melissa down in the cot, her face twitching with whatever a newborn dreams of, then I flop over into my bed. I barely have energy to take off my boots before collapsing into a dreamless sleep.

Chapter 8

The only American astronaut to have been injured in the Mars explosion was my father, who survived one of the first off-world surgeries to remove shrapnel from just below his ribcage. Much more harrowing was the next few weeks: repairing the American HUB, recovering materials from the obliterated station, rebuilding the colony. Back on Earth, the Prime Minister of India vowed to return the country to Mars: "We will NOT be left behind." The United States and Russia were too busy with their arms race to respond.

Dr. Lawrence Thomson was back to work within hours of his surgery - over 20% of the Project's terraforming materials had been destroyed in the explosion, and they needed to recover as much of the biological matter as possible. They conducted a memorial ceremony for the seven who died, then placed their bodies in the biomass generator. The astronauts from every country ignored their national and political differences and united to rebuild, restore, renew; in radio calls they urged their respective governments to do the same. They sent weekly updates on their rebuilding, healing; after 6 weeks they reported record yields due to new techniques devised by one of their civilian astronauts. The Russian and United States governments classified these radio messages, never releasing them to the public.

This I will not learn until nearly two years after my escape; no one I spoke to after my escape really knew anything that was going on, or even if the Mars colony was still alive. United States intelligence claimed that every single American died in the explosion; the other members of the Project insisted there were only seven deaths.

Our second night in the shelter, Melissa sleeps without stirring; when she finally awakes in the late afternoon she does so calmly, with coos and chirps. I have to pee terribly but she is hungry, and I don't want to try to squeeze her into the Baby Bjorn and ruin her good mood. As I feed her, the woman from last night approaches. I move to pick up the blanket I had tossed in the cot, but she shakes her head. "Don't worry about it, we're leaving soon anyway." She waves a fluorescent green bottle of Gatorade at me, twisting off the cap before handing it over. It tastes sweeter than honey.

A sudden flash of color in my periphery startles me, but when I move to look it has disappeared. I could've sworn it was a flash of pink, but I shake my head. It’s useless: everything is a blur. I can’t jump at every flash of pink in this crowded shelter. The woman follows my stare. "Would you like me to watch the baby so you can wash up?" she offers. I hesitate, because it seems like such a profoundly terrible idea, terrible like telling a complete stranger that my dad was off planet, but I can't ignore the heavy ache on the bladder, nor the fact that I am still bleeding two weeks out from childbirth. I nod and slip my bare feet into the boots.

"Her name is Melissa," I whisper. "Thank you so much."

There are several other women in the open shower room, each with their own level of comfort with ignoring the other bodies around them, and once I am there I want nothing more than to leave. I feel awkward and exposed; their bodies are distorted, alien shadows as they shrink and grow in the harsh fluorescent light around me. I shower quickly in tepid water, using borrowed soap and shampoo to wash the grime off. I don't have a towel so my clothes stick to my damp skin and my wet hair drips uncomfortably down my back. I return to a happy, freshly changed and dressed Melissa cooing up at the stranger and another young child. "Make sure you give that cot to someone who needs it when you're done," the woman says, and as she leaves I remember I don't even know her name. What kind of mother trusts her baby with a complete stranger like that?

The shelter will hold on to the cot so I don’t have to lug it around in the dark; it doesn’t guarantee me a bed in the morning, but it does guarantee a cot for the baby if we make it. I blearily mutter goodbye to the woman once again as we are all herded out of the shelter and into the eerie red sunset. She has a whole mess of children with her, too many moving too chaotically to count; I focus instead on the purple shine of her hair. I still do not know her name. I stand awkwardly adjacent to them in the thinning crowd; I have nowhere to go, Melissa bundled up in my arms. The woman is always turning to look down the street, anticipation raw on her face. They are waiting, she explains, for her wife to pick them up. They were separated by the attack, trapped far away from their home on the west coast. There is more power to light the streets tonight, so the red-hued sky fades to brownish orange and doesn't go completely dark even after the sun sets. The sound of an engine interrupts the woman’s speech, startles me - there is a vehicle on the road, not one of the army trucks but a regular passenger car. The headlights trap me like a spotlight as it eases to a stop in front of us, and I'm not the only one who is startled - every person still loitering outside the shelter has gone quiet, as though this is the first time they've ever seen a vehicle. The family disappears; into the car, I hope. They have a home to go to.

I'm blinking the new spots out of my vision when someone grabs me from behind, roughly spinning me around to face her. Hot pink hair, face close enough that I can make out a bitter scowl. Her fingernails dig into the flesh on my arms. I know her immediately, even though I couldn’t possibly recognize her. "Where did you get those boots?" she demands, confirming my assumption.

I want to answer but I can't breathe, my heart is pounding and my mind flashes back to the dungeon, to all the things he did to me there. I was so ready to kill him but I killed that kid instead and then I stole his clothes and his boots and left him laying there at the bottom of the stairs. Melissa is wailing but I can only hear my heart pounding, a thrumming in my ears like the sound of a thousand angry bees. Pink Hair must see something is wrong because she grabs the baby from my numb arms just as I collapse to the ground. She's calling for help, and someone emerges from the shelter and gives me ice cold water to sip and gum to chew and somehow that helps; I'm not hyperventilating anymore. The shelter volunteer gives me pamphlets on PTSD and abuse survivors, but admits there's nowhere now to get help. "Just take it one step at a time," he says cheerily, and retreats back into the building.

I am relieved to see Pink Hair is still waiting for me, still awkwardly holding my baby, who is writhing in a hot rage. Twice now I have left my infant in the hands of a stranger, one of whom has every right to want to kill me. She hands Melissa back to me, face etched in disgust.

"Do you want them back?" I ask, softly, not wanting to answer the real question but knowing she deserves it.

"They're my boyfriend's," she responds haughtily. A muscle twitches in her jaw; her teeth are clenched tight. "He's dead."

"I know."

Pink Hair looks up sharply, mouth curled in a sneer. "Did you get those from Jax?" I must look confused, so she elaborates. "Tall, smoker's cough, asshole?"

I shake my head, confused. Melissa is squirming in my arms, a surprising amount of strength for such a tiny body. I need to feed her, so I sit down straight on the sidewalk. Pink Hair watches me distrustfully, her blurred figure softening, stepping back when I lift my shirt to nurse. "Was he at the house with you?" I ask.

"What house?" she spits back, then she realizes. "You were there?" I nod in reply, reaching out to untie the boots. The rainbow laces stand out in this grim new reality, and I guess that's how she recognized the boots. I can hear her trying to fit me into the puzzle.

"Jax wanted to explore the woods. He thought there was a drug den nearby. Alex stayed behind… he wasn't feeling well." Her voice quavers, thick with pain.

"I didn't mean to," I tell her, my own voice so quiet and breathless I'm not sure she hears me.

"Didn't mean to what?" she hisses.

"I thought he was the man who had been torturing me." I finish kicking off the boots, trying not to jostle the baby attached to my breast.

"You expect me to believe that?" Pink Hair snatches up the boots and turns to walk away, then turns, hesitating. "You were down there?"

"For 892 days, give or take."

"There was so much blood," she says, her face growing pale in the green moonlight.

"I had a baby." I raise Melissa up slightly, as if offering her up for proof.

Pink Hair glares at her, then at me, then spits, “I had to bury him.” She spins on her heel and stomps away, boots dangling from her hand by the rainbow laces, the afterimage of a dead cat dangling from the rafters burned into my mind.

Chapter 9

By my seventh night at the shelter, I can sleep through the endless noise without a problem. I am learning to exist in a world that was meant to be seen, even when I can get a fraction of the picture. The hospital gave me a small, safe room that I remained in my entire stay, even though I was encouraged to walk around. The hallways outside my room were incomprehensibly deep, wide chasms that could hide all sorts of terrors. Instead, I paced around my tiny room while a TV I could not see blared noise into the room, keeping me company before I was well enough to reunite with my baby.

Melissa is bright eyed and charming and many of the volunteer staff know her name. Most of them, I learn, are members of the National Guard; they have a home, families to go to when their shifts end, safe and contaminant-free on the military base. One officer brings me a pair of shoes when she notices I’m barefoot.

I realize I don’t even know Melissa’s birthday - I woke up at the hospital on June 4th, but how many days was I unconscious? I have no way of knowing how much time elapsed between when she was born and when I escaped - it was probably a day later that the kid broke in, but did I spend a whole day at the house? Everything feels fuzzy and my stomach hurts to think about, so I just assign her the birthday of May 31st when anyone asks.

More cars are braving the streets at night, which is getting less intimidating as the power grid is restored. I spend the nights circling the blocks, reaching the edges of light; beyond is tinged with the scent of smoke, gunshots ringing through the darkness. Beyond are the riots: the disenfranchised fighting for help. Are they the same that were taking place three years ago? Police brutality, systemic racism, homelessness and drug addiction. The bookstore I worked at part-time was on the edge of the good and bad parts of town; the division between Us and Them. Between those who take and those who are left behind. I watched the plague of gentrification from safely behind the bookshelves: cafes and space boba stands and I-thai-lian Fusion popped up in place of the old shops. It was too expensive for residents to keep their homes as realtors snatched up the foreclosing properties to flip for a thousand times profit. Far more than half of my customers and friends were forced out in droves, and many ended up in the Ritz camps; a sardonic name for the homeless encampments buried at one edge of the city. The sort of systemic inequality that the Mars Colonization Project promised to escape, but in doing so they have left us all behind.

As various sectors are decontaminated, some residents of the shelter leave, only to be replaced by someone else whose home is still out of reach. Few people have jobs, and those that do could lose them any day. I feel like I am taking up space, but I truly have nowhere to go. I don’t even know where my dungeon is anymore, and the police would not have bothered to try to find it. I imagine my file is tucked away in a file cabinet somewhere, forgotten and ignored. I’d bet Pink Hair knows exactly where it is, but she would have no reason to tell me even if I asked. Even if I could.

The only possible place we could go now is my dad’s house, if it’s still his, if some tenant isn’t still waiting out the end days there, maybe even armed against looters and scavengers. It’s a moot point, because I have no transportation, no money, not even an ID. I wonder if Melissa will get a birth certificate, or if she will fall through the cracks in a system in chaos.

For what is apparently the first time in weeks, a bundle of newspapers arrives at the shelter. They bear news of local clean up efforts: what stores have been able to reopen, what neighborhoods are expected to be decontaminated next. Without telling why, they warn of leaving the safety of that artificial boundary created by where the power has been restored. There is little by way of global news, but the paper assures readers it is only a matter of time before communication networks are restored. I flip idly through the page headlines, not worth the effort of squinting through the tiny newsprint to read beyond. My heart jolts unexpectedly when a familiar face, painfully familiar icy blue eyes stare up at me on the last page. It is him: my kidnapper, my jailer, my rapist. I snap the paper closed, as though he could see me from the picture, but really it is because I am afraid of the article itself, the caption below his photograph that would finally tell me who he is.

I do not want to know.

I have to know.

I do not want to know.

I think about the police officer who questioned me in the hospital room; his bland, uncaring demeanor, that outright acknowledgement that they might never look into it. If I gave them a name, a face, would they finally investigate? I peek open the newspaper, holding my breath, but the answer comes quickly: they would not, because he is a police officer. The newspaper labels him a hero, but I can’t bring myself to read how exactly he has managed to convince them he is anything but a monster.

A cop. Of course. He could have tracked me down at the hospital, he probably even knows where I am now. So why hasn’t he captured me?

I am suddenly very homesick for my hometown: not my crappy little apartment but my dad’s house in the suburbs, that rose garden in front that I used to help him tend. His warm, honey-sweet voice as he told me the names of all the flowers, the insects that visited them, the fungi that affixed itself to their roots. He is the one who told me the story of Melissa, the nymph who hid the Greek god Zeus from his father and raised him on honey and goat’s milk. I can’t stay here, it isn’t safe; I need to go home.

My answer comes in the form of Pink Hair, who has managed to find, or steal, or borrow a vehicle that I find her sleeping in early one morning. Sunrise is approaching, and I need to get back to the shelter, but I am sidetracked by a pink head leaning against the window of a silver truck. I tap on the window, and she starts, grasping for a knife beside her. “Go away,” she says when she sees who I am. Her voice is muffled through the window.

“I need a ride,” I respond. She laughs, then turns away. “Really. I can pay you,” I lie.

Pink Hair groans, twists around to crank open the window. “I don’t have a carseat,” she says pointedly. I shift Melissa in my arms, uncertain. “Anyway, do you really think money matters anymore?” She scoffs, then starts to roll the window up again.

“Wait, no,” I beg, “What does matter, then?”

“Food, shelter,” she yawns, stretching her arms into the ceiling of the truck cab. “Drugs?” The last one is a question, and when I shake my head she rolls her eyes and reaches for the screwdriver she has jammed into the ignition.

“My dad is an astronaut,” I tell her, desperate to keep her from driving away.

“Good for you?”

“His house is empty. Near Denver. That’s shelter, right?”

“With… you?”

Maybe not such a great idea; I killed her boyfriend, after all. “Please,” I ask, one last time. The sky is beginning to glow, and we can both smell the toxic tinge in the air.

She sighs. “I have to find a garage to hide out. Meet me here again tonight and we’ll talk.” Then she drives off, leaving me and Melissa standing in a cloud of biodiesel exhaust.

At the shelter, I find a woman who needs a spare cot for her twins, pack up my diaper bag with supplies from the free pantry, and wait. As soon as the sky turns pink I am out the door, Melissa tucked safely in the shadows of a blanket, the last of the UV rays probably burning what remains of eyes until the clouds deepen into the scarlet of safety. The sky is nearly black before a silver truck rumbles up to the curb several yards past where I was standing. I approach cautiously as Pink Hair jumps out, pulls something from the back - an infant car seat.

“I figure we can buckle her in the middle,” she says, nudging me to the side as she opens the passenger door. “Lucky it’s a bench seat.” I stand awkwardly, my arms too full to help as Pink Hair struggles with the heavy plastic bucket seat; finally it is secure in the middle, and I buckle Melissa into it and then myself. Pink Hair has to maneuver around the seat to shift gears.

It is quiet at first, but when we leave the city she picks up speed. I crack open a window; I have not showered since that second day in the shelter, and with only two outfits to choose from I know my odor is contributing to the stuffiness in the car. I fiddle with Melissa’s straps, tickle her nose, try to forget I’m in a speeding vehicle with a woman whose boyfriend I killed.

We’re on a highway before Pink Hair finally breaks the silence: “How did it happen?” Her voice is cold and hard.

“I thought it was him,” I start, “the guy who kidnapped me, I mean.” She doesn’t answer, just watches the dark highway in front of us. “I had just given birth, by myself, in the darkness,” I’m rambling, Pink Hair’s stony silence more intimidating to me than the cop’s interrogation at the hospital. “It really hurt," I say, but it comes out as a whimper. I feel pathetic, take a deep breath and clear my thoughts of the horrifying memories.

“I heard noises upstairs, so I thought he was coming back. I thought he was going to kill the baby and hang her up in the graveyard.” Pink Hair reacts at this, grimacing, and I know she had seen that, too. “There was this bee hive that was growing in the walls upstairs. I pulled off a chunk and threw it at the stairs. I didn’t even see who was coming down them.”

It is silent a bit longer, then Pink Hair is laughing hysterically. I tense up, but she giggles, “You threw a bunch of bees at Alex?” When I don’t reply, she sobers. “Sorry,” she says, “But Alex was fucking terrified of bugs, right? Like, when there was a spider, he would scream and freak out and tell me to kill it. I always took them outside, right? And he would get pissed because they’ll just come back in.” Her voice is thick, torn between laughing and crying, and I busy myself with Melissa, not sure what to say.

A few minutes later, Pink Hair chirps up again. “And then you stole his clothes?”

“It was the first time I’d had clothes in months,” I explain, as if that justifies killing someone for them. “He took them away from me, after… a while.” I drift off there, not wanting to explain that it was punishment for trying to kill myself with a noose made from my own leggings.

“It must have been terrifying,” Pink Hair says somberly. I nod. Terrifying doesn’t even come close.

“I’m sorry,” I finally say, “I didn’t know.”

She shrugs it off. We’re not far from Denver now, and the lack of city lights is disconcerting. "He was my high school boyfriend. He was a year behind me," she says finally. "We were supposed to go to college together after he graduated, but then he met Jax and got into drugs..." she hesitates. "A lot changed." So she isn't as young as she looks; the kid I killed wasn't as young as he looked. Nothing about that makes me feel better about myself.

My father’s old neighborhood is unlit; none of the houses have power, but very few of them have broken windows. All of the houses in the suburbs look the same, and I have trouble remembering which is my dad's - the rose garden that was his pride and joy is reduced to grey twigs and ash. I know it is still his house because of the little astronaut gnome hiding under the bushes, concealing the key to the front door. "No need to break the windows," I mutter at Pink Hair, but she doesn't know I had seen her before. It is dark inside except for the beam from Pink Hair's oversized flashlight. Melissa is fussing so as soon as we get through the door I put the heavy car seat down on the couch and unbuckle her so I can feed her. My own stomach aches and I am exhausted, weary of caring for such a tiny, helpless life when my own body is still falling apart.

While I'm tethered to the baby Pink Hair wanders around unaccompanied, shining her light around my childhood home, lightly drifting fingertips over my father's things. The house has changed little in the eight or so years since I lived here, and it is obvious no one has lived here in a long time. The back door window has been smashed in, but it is quickly evident there's nothing here worth taking. Pictures of dad and me dominate the walls, along with a few photographs of Dad and my mom at their wedding. My mom was dead by their first anniversary. The kitchen is empty and there is minimal furniture in the front room I sit in. I close my eyes and breathe deeply, trying to remember the smell of this home, but there's nothing here.

"Hattie," Pink Hair says, and I start - did I ever tell her my name? - but she's holding a stack of papers she's pulled from one of the kitchen drawers. I don't know who would be sending me mail here; they must be from when I first moved out.

"It's short for Harriet," I say automatically at her smirk. It's a common question.

"Mind if I call you Hat?"

Everyone thinks they're so funny. "I've been calling you Pink Hair in my head all this time," I respond.

"Pink. I like it.” I can hear her smile in her voice. "You can definitely call me that."

Melissa is finished and I have to change her, which means maneuvering her surprisingly strong limbs out and in pajamas, means wipes and diapers and inevitably she pees on the couch and I sigh. I'm so tired.

Pink is suddenly next to me, a packet of sugary pop tarts in her hand. "Hungry?"

"You read my mind," I beam. As I eat I watch as her shadowy blur grabs a throw blanket from next to me on the couch, then tapes it over the broken window with a roll of duct tape from her bag.

"I'm going to go scavenging," she announces. "This is a nice neighborhood. Probably lots of Xanax in the medicine cabinets." I imagine her winking, realizing I don’t know what color her eyes are. She picks up her oversized bag and slings it casually over her shoulder, and then she is gone, and it is just me and Melissa in the dark again.

Chapter 10

Weak moonlight streams through my old bedroom window, casting everything in a dismal grey light. I've come up here for a candle, and find one immediately, but I do not light it; even in the dark, I can tell nothing has changed in this room. I walk the baby around, narrating my old life - I am still getting used to talking, and my throat is sore, but Melissa is delighted to listen. She huddles in the Baby Bjorn, one ear pressed against my chest, watching the dark room with wide eyes. She has grown so much and I've already lost track of what day it is, how old she is. I'd never been around babies before; I was an only child, daughter of a college professor, so I spent most of my free time as a kid around college students. I don't know what babies are supposed to do, but Melissa seems content to just chirp like a parakeet and watch the world pass by around her.

"This was my bed," I pat the comforter, pink and dotted with little cartoon bugs, "these were my books." I run my fingers along the ribbed spines. I can't read the titles, but I can guess from memory. "This was my window," I step over to look outside; Pink's truck looks out of place on the near empty street, and my stomach drops when I see headlights making their way down the street; as it approaches, a reflection glints red from the roof of the car. Police lights. I hold my breath, don't release it until the car has passed this house and turned the corner.

My mind whirrs with anxiety. Could that have been him? Did he follow me? Or did he find out where my dad lived, so he could wait for me to show up? He must have known which astronaut was my dad, since the rest of them were childless. It was a requirement for getting into the program, but my dad was granted an exception. No one else could compete with Dr. Lawrence Thomson's practical research into terraforming; bringing cold, lifeless soil back to life with the right bacteria and fungi was his speciality. As a kid my dad would set me up with a microscope and slide and tell me to count the different species I could find. I usually got bored after 12 or so, and would spend the rest of the time following a tardigrade around the field, and he would quiz me on what I learned about tardigrade behavior instead.

I light the candle at my desk; I have brought up the stack of envelopes that Pink found to look through them. It is slow work, holding the papers up close enough to focus on the writing and darting my eyes around to see past the cloudy scars in my field of view. Most of them are just bills from whatever maintenance company my father hired to look after this place. At the bottom, though, is a thick padded envelope; inside is a copy of my birth certificate, my social security card, my driver’s license, my passport, my ATM cards. My dad’s salary was directly deposited into my bank account, and I wonder how much it contains now. Then it occurs to me: my dad didn’t have these things. Why would he? The license and ATM cards would have been in my wallet, and everything else tucked away in a drawer somewhere in my apartment. I moved out when I was 16; I needed my ID to get my job, my apartment, to visit the air force base where my dad trained and I was given weekly time at the radio.

It was him, my captor who broke the window, I am suddenly convinced, and I need to get out of here. I look out again, hoping to see Pink's telltale hair. It's too dark to be sure, but the street looks empty aside from the silver truck. I might as well get ready to go. I pull Melissa out of the carrier and lay her on my old bed, little feet kicking the air. The clothes left in my dresser are old, wouldn’t fit me anymore, so I move to my dad's room to find what he's left behind. It feels weird, digging through his room when he's a hundred million miles away. Even if he could protest, the message wouldn't reach me for 13 minutes. I used to wonder what he was doing on Mars during my long, quiet hours in the dungeon. Now I have only one question: is he alive?

I duck back into my room and am relieved to find Melissa has fallen asleep in the middle of my bed. I strip my old clothes off and wash my body as well as I can with baby wipes, then pull on an old flannel shirt and too-big cargo pants. I stuff the other clothes in the diaper bag with the baby things. I look out the window again - nothing. I sink into my bed, curl around Melissa's peacefully sleeping body, and close my eyes before I even have time to think about what a bad idea that is.

I awake to knocking. I hold still, silence for a moment, then another quick series of knocks. I move to pick up Melissa, then change my mind; she is still asleep, and I don't want to put her in danger. More knocking as I descend the stairs, then I hear a voice. "Come on Hat it's me. Let me in." I open the door, and Pink is standing there looking sheepish. Behind her is a uniformed policeman. He gives me a wide smile, one that does not thaw the ice in his eyes; the same one that has haunted me for the past couple years.

"I caught your friend breaking and entering." His voice, right in front of me. I take a step back, my heart racing, mind frantic.

Pink steps through the doorway, oblivious. "Sorry, Hat. He was going to take me in…" her voice trails off when she looks at my face: frozen, blood drained, eyes wide. She looks behind her at the policeman, that maniacal grin, then turns back. "You're kidding," she says. "Him?" Then he's grabbing her, pushing her head into the doorframe and her body crumples. I stumble backwards as he steps into the house, looming over me with the same wicked smile on his face. He's reaching out for me, and with a burst of strength I lash out and land a solid kick on his knee. He barely stumbles, but suddenly Pink is on her feet, jumping on his back, knife in her hand then dragging across his throat. He collapses to his knees, grasping at this throat, blood pouring over him and the floor and me, gasping gurgling wheezing breaths through his sliced trachea. Finally the noise stops and he topples. I have to dodge to the side to avoid him landing on me.

Pink is bent, over, hands on her knees gasping for breath. "Asthma," she wheezes, "My bag." I race past the body and grab the bag she dropped just outside the door. The bag is chaotic but she is smart, keeps inhaler in an accessible pocket. She takes two deep breaths with the inhaler, breaks out in excruciating sounding coughs, then takes another deep breath. "Fuck," she exhales.

Part Two: mellifera

Chapter 11

Some nights they still sleep curled up together, woman and child, even though at 8 (and a half) the girl is too old for it (too young for the nightmares that haunt her). When the nights are too cold, bitter winter winds eking through the cracks in the cabin logs into every corner (frost forming on the cobwebs); they curl up in front of the woodstove, the girl's long (too thin) limbs and sharp edges jabbing and poking and prodding into the woman's flesh made soft with age. The dog (a mutt named Chalk (for the toxic dust still clinging to his fur when they found him)) lays at their feet, twitching and whimpering in his sleep. The girl dreams gently on these nights (the woman too (of blue skies and city lights)).

During the day, under a blood-red sky, they trudge through deep snow to do their chores (feed the chickens, collect the eggs, milk the goats, feed the goats, feed the mule (a spotted grey fellow named Eeyore, for reasons unknown to the girl), split the firewood) dressed in so many layers it is stifling (worse in the summers, those toxic dry afternoons when they have to wear the respirators). Then to the hydroponic greenhouse where it is hot and humid, like another world entirely. The hydroponics provides greens year round, while a root cellar below (the girl avoids it (she does not know why)) keeps the seasonal produce fresh all winter.

Finally back to the house, where the fire is down to embers (easily revived by expert hands), and the girl stacks the firewood and starts the kettle for tea. Everything in the tea they have grown themselves: herbs from the greenhouse (lavender, chamomile), milk from the goats (the mother’s nose always wrinkles in distaste at the first sip), honeycomb pulled straight from the hives in the backyard (the apiary).

The girl loves the apiary; she was named Melissa for the nymph (a spirit of nature (just like the girl)) who tamed the bees and gave their sweet honey to the gods. Melissa loves to walk among the hives, white boxes stacked 4 or 5 high, entrances at the bottom swarming with take-offs and landings. The bees are survivors, the woman (mother (Hattie (mom))) says. They survived the attack, had to relearn how to forage after the skies turned red (and the flowers nearly died out).

Right now, though, inside the snow-shrouded hives, the bees (all sisters) are clustered in a tight ball around the central frames (at the very center their queen). They are all gently buzzing, vibrating their wings to generate heat. They eat honey from the frames above, and on days when the sun shines they will go outside to stretch their wings (and defecate: a foul, sticky affair).

Melissa wishes she, too, could hibernate (with the bees (a living furnace)), let the snow pile up around the home and sleep. She never really feels warm in the winter, between the first snow (early October) and the first buds of spring (late April). She dreams of a place where it is always warm, like the greenhouse: hot and humid, rich and earthy (or else a place where there is no land, just great swaths of water stretching out to a grey horizon).

As the nights grow longer Hattie fills the extra time with stories about Melissa’s grandfather: the astronaut Dr. Lawrence Thomson, one of the first people to live on Mars (the 31st to set foot on the red planet). Her grandfather (Hattie's father (she's never met her mother)) had eagerly signed up to travel in a cramped space shuttle with 17 other astronauts, to live out the rest of their lives on another planet. He was the only astronaut with children (but (he argued) his child would reach adulthood before he launched (Exception Granted)).

On the winter solstice they ride in an old, silver truck (with no suspension) through bumpy, snow packed mountain roads, driven by a woman named Pink. Throughout the year she comes and goes to their home as she pleases throughout the year, a transient ghost of a parent to Melissa. The solstices are the only guaranteed visit (only she can drive). Hattie sits between them on the long bench seat, and Melissa leans her head against the passenger window to watch the landscape that her mother’s eyes can no longer take in. They drive down and away (mountains shrinking in the distance) to where the land is so flat you can see for miles in every direction. They drive until they reach an observatory ((nearly?) abandoned) next to an enormous white dish pointed at the sky (a high frequency radio antenna).

There they hear stories from the man himself, his rich and creamy voice (only Hattie remembers its true nature) scarred with static (and age (and stress)). The 13 minute delay in messages makes a conversation impossible, so each broadcast is a monologue of news and updates. Hattie speaks of agriculture: the goats and chickens and bees and gardens. Whatever news of the larger world (foreign or domestic), Melissa's grandfather probably knows better than them (newspapers here are so rare (they can’t be trusted)). Melissa also tells her grandfather about the animals (the spider that lives in the corner of her room; the mule named Eeyore who eats honeycomb) and plants (the greenhouse her favorite place in the world). She speaks in wild, elaborate stories that ring of ancient mythologies.

Melissa's grandfather tells them about the biodomes he has built on Mars (hot and humid)(rich and earthy), the waste water retrieval system (recycling bodily fluids), the expanding living quarters. After the devastating explosion in the Indian Mining Station (sabotage, according to the USA, justifying a war they will never recover from), India doubled down on its efforts towards accumulating, building, recruiting, and expanding the Mars colonies. They made the first two-way mission: successfully landing on Mars, relaunching, and returning to Earth. Soon the colony would be thriving in tourism, growing (or shrinking) through emigration (grandfather (and every single one of the other astronauts) had no intention of ever leaving the red planet).

When Melissa was four years old, Dr. Thomson excitedly announced the birth of the first full Martian citizens: twins Remus and Romulus (brothers (warriors (wolves))). When she was five, her grandfather just as excitedly announced the latest delivery from Earth: cryogenically frozen invertebrates, reviving slowly in his lab (pill bugs (which aren’t even really bugs at all, but crustaceans); millipedes; tiny, invisible springtails). They will bring the biodomes a step closer to being self-sustaining (no bees, yet (all crops are pollinated by tiny drones)). That same year Pink brought a special find from her travels (scavangings): a polaroid instant camera, with a single shot of film remaining. She propped it up on rocks and set the autotimer before racing to join them. The photograph lives on the refrigerator (yes, a luxury (this one not stolen (except with the house)). The photograph is a blur of red, the observatory and blood red sky dwarfing their three smiling figures.

Mars was thriving, but there were always troubles, too: new viruses (improper quarantine), malfunctioning equipment (the great waste recycling disaster of M.07; the ever lingering fear of failure), and weather (windstorms that destroy structures and bury their solar farm in a foot of red dust). Each loss is mourned by the entire community (each new milestone celebrated by all).

On Earth they experience much of the same troubles: sick animals (they used to have a cow), blizzards that leave them cabin-bound and powerless after snow piles several feet high on the solar panels (a (stolen) gift from Pink), malfunctioning hydroponics pumps and sensors. The hydroponics on Mars were designed by Hattie (as her father trained (thousands of miles away)). Her equipment malfunctions (their repairs) at home are the same that her father faced early on in the colonies, hundreds of millions of miles away.

They speak in turns until the sun (a burning red ruby in the sky) sets over the distant mountains. On the way home they stop at an enormous flea market in the city (a shadow of its former glory) and barter for the goods they cannot make themselves. Hattie trades honey (more precious than gold), and Pink sells the things she has scavenged (looted) from abandoned (probably) homes and businesses. Melissa loves the market crowds: the colors, the smells, the free samples of sweets that make her tongue tingle. She talks to all of the children at the marketplace, and for a few hours it feels like she has friends. She runs her hands along racks of clothing, so exotic to her eyes: bright colors, cartoon prints, stiff, artificial fabric. Some of them she buys (when they (inevitably) wear out, she will sew them into something new). When they tire of social interaction (that overstimulating vibe of the city (though Pink never tires of it)), they return to their cabin, their greenhouse and bees, their goats and chickens. Pink stays a few days longer (late nights and long conversations in front of the fire), and it is almost like they are a family. Then wanderlust takes her, and it is just the two of them again. Lonely, but never alone (Hattie). Alone, but never lonely (Melissa).

In the winter, the only time Melissa feels warm is when she sits next to the woodstove (close enough to feel its warm glow), or if there is power and she can stand in the shower (only as a treat). She is always wrapping herself in blankets, slipping on another sweater (a queen bee without a cluster). She makes a nest in front of the fire and paints or reads or writes, warm drinks and cookies and a meditative peace. Hattie can no longer read, so she listens to books on ancient scavenged cassette tapes (over and over until the magnetic ribbon snaps). Together they wait out the winter, almost (but not quite) in peaceful hibernation.

Chapter 12

During a false spring in February (calm just before the storm), Melissa follows her mother out to the hives. The apiary buzzes with life, honey bees eager to stretch their wings before another winter storm closes them in (Melissa, too). Hattie lifts the hive covers and Melissa peeks inside at the worker bees crawling around the frames (every hive still teeming with life). They remove the supers and check that the bees have enough honey to survive the rest of the winter, rearranging the frames among them if a hive’s stores seem low.

February is also marked by two long, sleepless nights in the barn as the goats (Venus and Saturn, this year) give birth. Normally it is a smooth process (for Hattie and Melissa, at least), but it can quickly go (fatally) wrong (breech, umbilical problems, hemorrhaging). This year is not one of those years, however, and within hours the baby goats (two sets of adorable twins) are following their mothers around the chilly barn, sucking greedily at their teats.

True springtime is marked by tiny green buds on the trees, the earliest flowers poking through the snow. In spring, Melissa helps her mom check the hives for new diseases (bacteria, viruses, fungi), pests (hive beetles, mites), that the queen is healthy (laying eggs, producing pheromones to communicate to the workers), that the workers are strong. If the queen is failing, Hattie traps her (to kill her (but not alert the workers)). It is cruel (it is necessary). A younger, healthier queen is introduced, sealed in a tiny cage by a piece of candy. By the time the workers have chewed through the seal, they will be accustomed to her scent (her pheromones) and accept her as their new queen. Melissa, queen of the bees, loathes to kill them. She works without a veil (often barefoot) or gloves (she likes to feel the vibrations of the hive under her fingertips (the bees are speaking to her)). She has never been stung.

Spring also means the start of the growing season (too short (getting shorter?)). The ground will continue to freeze for several weeks so Melissa and her mother plant seeds (carrots, cabbages, corn, squash) into tiny soil pots in the greenhouse to sprout safely within glass walls. So much depends on those first tiny leaves (fragile, delicate, vital): they kick start the process of photosynthesis to build and grow new (stronger, larger, hardier) foliage. Planet them too young and a single bad day can turn the entire seedling to ash (the dust is everywhere (Hattie learned this the hard way, that first year)). She would keep the plants inside the greenhouse all summer if she could, but they rely on pollination from the (dwindling) insects outside.

Near the end of spring, Pink appears again, in time for Melissa's birthday (May 31st (probably)). The spring visits are always the longest, stretching on past the solstice and occasionally even to July. Her visits are a relief from the long stresses of winter and the frantic busyness of spring. Hattie's face softens (her smile warms), and Melissa basks in the glow of Pink's attention. Once a week they pile into the silver truck to visit nearby markets, where they sell and trade homemade soaps (lavender and rose, goat milk and honey) and salves (mint for aches, lavender for relaxation) and jars of glistening amber honey. Pink walks Melissa through the market stalls, picking out brightly colored fabrics (pink, rainbow, tie-dye) and candies (pink, rainbow, tie-dye). It is a sign of progress (recovery), but it is an illusion. Hiding in the shadows of the warm, safe markets (tucked away in newly built military bases) is a darker truth: the collapse of civilization, protests and whispers of a revolution, the failure of a government to protect its people. Crowds systematically destroyed by the militarized police. Rumors of a war, us against them; other rumors of civilization, restored, to the west. Are other countries suffering as we are? There has been no official estimate of deaths due to the attack; no estimates of how many have died since. There are riots in nearly every city Pink has travelled to: all along the west coast, the pockets of urban oases in the deserts in between. Only in southern California has she seen hope, marvelled in the rumored rebuilding efforts. She returns with technology that is reminiscent and meaningless (forgotten (plastic waste) as soon as the batteries die). They are lucky enough to have power to run their refrigerator, the electric stove and water heater, the emergency radio that on clear nights is able to snatch stray radiations from the air and emit their haunted tunes.

Pink has never made it to the east coast. The furthest anyone has gone is Kansas City (a ghost town), but beyond that it is a toxic wasteland. There are yet more rumors of what lies ahead (death, destruction, despair (or hope, healing, happiness)).

The days grow longer and they spend the evenings outside, Hattie and Pink together on the porch as the child chases fireflies in the yard. The adults stay out late, past dark (they kiss under a blood red moon), and Melissa is usually gone (with Chalk, sometimes Eeyore) by the time they wake each morning. This spring has been dominated by a heatwave (is it the solar shield?) but Melissa loves it. She chases the bees as they forage (they love the heat too), then a squirrel, a bird, a millipede under a rock. She cools her bare feet in a creek and feels minnows (tiny, slick) swim through her fingers. These are the survivors, like her, like her mother. If they haven’t bothered to count the dead population of humans, they certainly haven’t kept track of the loss of animal life. She hopes they will overcome the devastation; perhaps they will even thrive in this barren new world.

Melissa’s only disappointment each spring: that Pink refuses to go near the apiary. She wants to share the bees (her family), wants Pink to feel the oneness that emanates from each hive. She thinks (hopes) that it would ground the woman (keep her here forever).

On the solstice they make the trip to the observatory in the eastern plains. It was Pink who made the discovery (always exploring (searching)), outside an abandoned town (Haswell, nowhere). At first it appeared to be a grain silo, but the satellite next to it gave away its true purpose as a research station. Powered by a small field of solar panels (minus a few that went missing), it took just a quick brush off and everything functioned perfectly (so Pink assumed). The speaker emitted a deafening static crackle when she turned it on.

Hattie, ex-physics student, daughter of an astronaut (at the time, the only person with that title), had been trained in using this sort of X-band radio technology (of course) before her father left for Mars. Before (before) she would travel to the air force base, present two forms of identification (a welcome guest (thank you for your sacrifice)), and she would speak to her father from a comfortable chair in a Classified Secret room (conversations never private) while he accelerated away from her in a too-crowded rocket ship. Here, it took a week (squinting through foggy scars in her vision (Pink reading aloud, mispronouncing every other word)) of reading and rereading the tiny printed manual for her to understand the numerous buttons and dials and tune the radio to the right frequencies while Melissa chased Chalk around the observatory floor.

They finally made contact a few weeks after Melissa’s second birthday, the signal bouncing from the radio transmitter to satellites in Earth’s orbit, across vast stretches of space to new satellites orbiting Mars, then down to a receiver in the comms HUB on the surface of the red planet. The Mars colony had not received a signal from the United States in several months (they’d been cut off (emails to friends and family left unread)), and the astronaut who answered (Lt. Hamir Signh, the medic who removed pieces of shrapnel from Melissa's grandfather's guts) promised (voice tinged with surprise) to track down Dr. Lawrence Thomson immediately.

Hattie’s dad was waiting (tears in his eyes) in the comms HUB before the transmitted reply even reached Earth, and it took nearly an hour for the radio to burst to life with a response. He barely heard it over his own sobbing, but Hamir (bless him) remembered to hit the record button. It was the first time he’d heard his daughter’s voice (so sweet, like honey) in so many years (with no explanation from Earth (they didn't want it to affect his work)). He would listen to the recordings every night for a week.

Hattie’s voice was surprisingly calm (he couldn’t see the others in the room with her, holding her hand, giving her strength) as she described the horrors she endured (not everything, not yet): kidnapping, imprisonment, escape. It brightened when she talked about her daughter (a granddaughter! (but at what cost?)), who was babbling cheerfully in the background. She described life at the cabin: her struggles with bringing the garden back to life, the apiary she is building, the scars on her eyes from being out in the daytime (even if just for a few minutes) during her escape.

The transmission was over too soon, and Dr. Lawrence Thomson (dad (grandfather!)) struggled to come up with a response. He described the colony on Mars: the greenhouses, terraforming biodomes, the awful way that red dust gets into everything. Then alarms rang, drowning out his voice (a small fire, automatically suppressed) and he apologized, signed off. Hattie had no way of recording it, but she still hears his last sentence in her dreams: “I love you Hattie. And Melissa… Queen of the bees. The stars are bright for you.”

They return every (Earth) solstice. On the wall of the comms HUB on Mars is a chart with all of the dates and times for the next 100 years (Dr. Thomson is nothing if not optimistic). Any more than that, he fears, and the government (with all their other concerns) might put a stop to their (illicit) transmissions. The United States government had ceased communication (the silent treatment) with the US astronauts; on Earth, the official word was that the astronauts had died in the explosion.

News from their home planet was shared freely on Mars by India and the EU, but no one could really know what was going on in the United States. After the Russian (although they denied involvement) cyberattack, the US cut itself off from the world. They never reconnected to the global network (there were rumors of a government owned intranet on the military bases (of a wider internet in the West)). The only information shared internationally was filtered through government agents, but it was clear that the United States was on the verge of collapse (already on its way down). A sudden mid-term election; a new president intent on expanding the military, reinvigorated retaliation against the attack. The news from Dr. Thomson about their own planet is difficult to take in (the country is so big; their world is so small). This year, Hattie is content to let her daughter dominate the transmission (wild, animated, thrilling). She climbs up the narrow, winding staircase to the observatory (where Pink is waiting), listening to her father's voice (faint and distant, just like him) but not the words.

Chapter 13

The summer is brutally hot (even the child feels stifled), and after Pink leaves again it is difficult to muster the energy (willpower) to move and work. Summer means toxic afternoons (respirators mandatory some days) and violent thunderstorms (lightning, wind, hail) each evening. Melissa seizes the mornings (when she can) to ride Eeyore to the creek, where she cools off in the water and he munches lazily on green vegetation growing on its banks. In the afternoon she rests in her room, dimmed with a yellow curtain (room warm, glowing, like honeycomb), and dreams of bees.

Pink's departure leaves a hole in Hattie's heart (it always does), but she recovers (never quite fully). She tells herself that the reason they are able to be together is this time apart; they are always happy because Pink leaves (flees) before they have a chance to argue about something.

What Pink does during their time apart is a poorly kept secret. She brings back gifts (scavenged, looted, stolen) from her travels: giant, solar panels (heavy and awkward), PVC pipes for the greenhouse, toys for Melissa. It was Pink who brought the hive boxes (pilfered from a dead apiary down some gravel road) and their first goats (survivors in an abandoned barn). It was Pink who saved them all that first year. After they buried the cop (a fever dream), after Pink had moved his car and wiped her fingerprints off the wheel (no one would ever check), after Hattie scrubbed and scrubbed the blood stain off her father's floor (it never fully came up), after they had collapsed into a fitful, paranoid sleep on the floor of Hattie's old room. After Pink had disappeared and reappeared with coffee (the new nectar of the gods) and a box of cereal (dry by the handful), after Melissa had been fed and changed and fed and changed ad nauseum. Pink watched Hattie sink into a depression (thinner, paler, gaunter), tucked away in her old bedroom, the smell of unwashed bodies and overripe diapers. Finally she intervened. Hattie cried in Pink's arms and begged for death to take her. Then she begged for Pink to take them back to the cabin where (Hattie was imprisoned; Pink's boyfriend died; Melissa was born).

They arrived in late summer (too late to prepare for the wretched winter ahead). It was Pink who cleaned out the dungeon. She tore down the mummified animals from the ceiling (buried the fetus), removed the blood soaked mattress, the television, the trash and detritus of Hattie's imprisoned life. These she burned at night (Hattie watching from the shadows; flames dancing in Melissa's wide-eyed wonder) in a great bonfire, sparks like stars in the sky.

Together they fixed up the greenhouse, Pink avoiding the corner where the bees still lived, and Hattie began to uncurl from herself. She showered (the frigid water), prepared and ate food unprompted, and stopped waiting for Melissa’s screams to reach that manic breaking point to care for her, nurse her, stare down blindly, lovingly at her daughter’s face. She started to talk more, even laughing, and quietly (when she thought Pink wasn't watching) sang and danced with the baby cooing in the carrier on her chest. The routine of survival brought Hattie (forever broken) back to life, then Pink disappeared again, returning only briefly to supply the two with enough food (dry, processed, shelf stable) to last the winter (and beyond). She didn’t return until the next spring, shaking and ill (tremors, chills, nausea, pain) from withdrawal. Neither knew how they had survived the surreal, nightmarish winter (Hattie: unprepared; Pink: reckless).

Melissa's favorite day is at the end of summer: the honey harvest. Together she and her mom open each hive to remove the extra frames (always leaving enough for the winter), each overloaded with sweet golden syrup. They extract the honey in a heated shed; pleasantly warm to Melissa, but her mother feels trapped. Hattie cuts the caps off the comb with a warm knife, then places the frames into a metal extractor. Melissa turns the crank, and the honey pours out of the spinning frames, filling small glass jars. The process is hot, sweaty, and sticky, and Hattie (never Melissa) inevitably ends up with a few swollen stings, usually from blindly trapping an angry bee under her gloved fingers.

They harvest the garden soon afterwards (more hot, sweaty work); followed by another stuffy day in the kitchen spent canning the vegetables: peeling, shucking, cutting, cooking, sterilizing, boiling, sealing. The jars (green, yellow, red, orange) are lined up on the counter to cool, the closest Melissa has ever seen to a rainbow. The next day the jars join the other stores in the root cellar (dungeon), which is never quite full enough for Hattie to relax.

The end of summer used to mean school (shopping for supplies with dad), first day jitters, tentative new friendships (maybe) and bullies. Melissa has never set foot in a school (though Pink has scavenged several for the child's paints and crayons). Schools never recovered after the chemical attack (especially not out here), and Melissa has grown up with the flora and the fauna as her teachers. Her mother, too, though her scientific mind is too rigid for her daughter to process right away. Melissa learned her letters tracing with her finger on the dirt spilled on the floor of the greenhouse, big enough for Hattie to see, nodding her approval. Later she perfected her penmanship transcribing songs (her mother has such a beautiful voice), and stories (from her grandfather), and instructions for survival (from both): An Encyclopedia of Nature and Humanity. It is one of the first guides for both Earthlings and Martians. The early pages are a barely legible scrawl, illustrated in blocky crayon shapes. As she's grown older, the script has grown neater, the drawings more detailed (stunningly intricate). Hattie holds the pages close to her face, eyes darting back and forth (clouds forever obscuring her vision) for several minutes before she is confident she has seen every tiny detail in her daughter's drawings.

Chapter 14

Autumn is marked by stunning color changes, leaves transforming to match the sky, almost glowing in the red sunlight. It is hot and dry, and then it is not - a blanket of pinkish-grey clouds fills the sky and the temperature drops overnight.

The honeybees are busy: draining the last of the flowers of their nectar, refilling the frames of stolen honey, and cleaning out their hive. On a particularly chilly day, the sisters drag the drones (virgin males) out of the hive, tossing them onto the ground below. Drones are produced only in the spring; some invisible cue causes the queen to lay unfertilized eggs in extra-large cells, which hatch and grow into drones. If a hive is missing a queen, occasionally virgin workers will also lay eggs; these may hatch into unworking drones, but the hive quickly succumbs to an anarchic chaos without the queen’s pheromones to direct them. A drone's only purpose is to mate with a new queen (a suicide mission for him); there is no point keeping one around for the winter, stealing the sisters' hard earned honey. The large, stingless male bees mill around in the frosty grass (jobless, homeless, purposeless) while guards at the entrance prevent them from reentry. Melissa plucks them off the ground and watches them crawl over her hand, grateful for her warmth. They are bigger (and clumsier) than the workers, with enormous compound eyes that encompass most of the head. She will include these details in the illustration for her encyclopedia.

Melissa hears the (familiar) sound of a vehicle on the long gravel driveway, races around to the front of the cabin but the vehicle is not Pink's silver truck (the driver is not Pink) and she shrinks into the forest’s shadows. A man (a uniform) emerges from the car (sleek black), boots crunching on gravel as he steps to the front door and knocks (three hard raps). Melissa pictures her mother inside (is she coming?), expertly chopping the vegetables she can barely even see. This is the first time their home has received a visitor (besides Pink, who lets herself in), and the repeated knock knock on the door confuses her.

After another series of knocks, the man steps back, looks around at the plot of land around him; he cannot see the recently tilled garden, the goat staring wide eyed from the yard, the white boxes swarming with a warm, buzzing life. The girl holds her breath from her hiding spot, then the front door opens with a creak, and Chalk races out of the house, sniffing in circles around the man. He glances over towards the woods, then backs away to sit between the man and Melissa, eyes alert, ears pricked behind him. Her mother is at the door (her face a mask), and they touch hands, and they talk for a few minutes, Hattie frowning as she shakes her head (the mask is slipping). They touch hands again, the man grabbing Hattie's and holding on for just a second too long and Melissa crouches, tense, ready to (how?) intercept. At last he lets go and returns to his vehicle. Melissa waits until the car is out of sight before darting across the yard and inside, where her mother stands at the kitchen counter, staring blindly out a curtained window. Tears fall from her face.

Hattie always believed (even if she hoped otherwise) that this place would eventually be connected to her captor; that his disappearance would eventually be investigated. The first year she barely slept, half expecting him (alive or dead) to walk through the front door himself. Even though she had helped bury him, dragged that body (so heavy) into her father's backyard with Pink. She had dug the grave into the wet earth, immune to the darkness around her. Even though she scrubbed his blood (so much blood) off her father's floor. She knew that he would come back to haunt her (does his spirit live on in the child?). He would never leave her, never truly, because she would never leave Melissa. Hattie is grateful her daughter's eyes (golden honey) do not match his (iceberg blue).

Pink had gotten rid of the man’s car by driving it to an active (rioting) neighborhood and leaving it for the looters to deal with. By the morning, the police car was in flames, incinerated until only a charred metal frame remained. The missing cop (monster) did not go unnoticed, but resources (funding, food, people, willpower) were stretched too thin; eventually, the precinct was dissolved (to be replaced (militarized)). Only his family (a single brother) remained searching (for him, for answers, for anything).

The uniformed man (a member of the National Guard) who visited today had never met his brother's (alleged) wife, but had heard about her. “Her father’s an astronaut,” his brother bragged, “and he makes bank!” Back then (before (before)) money meant something; now most people bartered, paper currency useful only as fuel. The uniform (brother (-in-law (Jack))) hadn’t expected his sister-in-law to be here, especially not after all this time. His brother had probably mentioned (hadn’t he?) wanting to move into the family cabin, which hadn’t been used since they were children. Jack had forgotten the place even existed; he thinks it might have been mentioned in the will. Hattie said his brother disappeared, she has been living there (alone) this entire time. He was instantly suspicious. Hadn’t his brother excitedly announced he was going to be a dad, several months before the attack? She had seemed so nervous, so scared (so eager to get rid of him?). He resolves to return next weekend to help (or interrogate) her. Maybe he’ll even bring his family (wife and two kids); maybe she’ll agree (or be forced) to move to the city with them.

Hattie had never heard about a brother; her captor never revealed personal details, and she never asked. She feels unravelled after speaking to the uniformed man (“Call me Jack,” he’d introduced himself with, “I guess I’m your brother-in-law.”) who had almost (but not quite) the same voice, but without that dripping, sneering quality to it. Hattie had not known she was (allegedly) married; that her captor had told his family about her, that they had thought it was a consensual thing at all. The news sits unpleasantly beneath the realization that this place (her prison) is not at all the sanctuary she wanted it to be.

A few days later Melissa hides in the forest again as her mother (reluctantly) invites the man and three others into their cabin. She watches from behind a curtain of thorny blackberry bushes, crouching (like an anthropologist) as two strange children play in her yard. They are so loud (cheering, screaming, arguing) - they scare the birds away, and part of Melissa wants to take flight as well (the other part wants to join them). She has interacted with other children so rarely that she finds herself bored of the prospect. The children push each other closer and closer to the woods and she shrinks further into the shadows. They get within a few feet of her, inches from the prickling bushes, oblivious to Melissa hiding in the shadows; then one sneezes, so loud and sudden right next to her and she yells (do they hear?). Then they are running the opposite direction (towards the apiary) and Melissa closes her eyes and imagines she is a bee (will she sting them?).

Inside, Hattie greets the new guests (can they see how anxious she is?) with the automatic formality of someone who has worked in retail. She tells them about how she has been living alone in the cabin after her husband disappeared, nearly 9 years ago. After that first lie (is Melissa still hiding? (does she understand the urgency?)), the rest flow easily. She explains that her husband never returned after the attacks (true); that she doesn’t know where he could be (untrue); that she has been holding out hope that he might return after all these years (does her face show the disgust she feels inside?). The man (Jack) tentatively asks about her pregnancy, and she lets her face fall.

“She was stillborn.”

The woman (did she introduce herself, or just the children?) bursts into tears, picturing her own children as newborns (the first screams, the bright and clean hospital room, the doctors and nurses making sure everything is ok). After that, Jack deflates. Of course Hattie can stay in the cabin (they’re not using it anyway), but is she sure she doesn’t want to come down to the city with them? Winter is coming, but Hattie insists she is prepared (indeed, she has more than enough in the root cellar to feed a small family, let alone a single person), and would they like a jar of honey to take home with them? She will be fine (she’s better off here than in the city, anyway). Jack’s family lives a privileged life (grocery shelves still lined with food) at a military base (outside the razor wire fence, people starve). They cannot imagine the troubles others might face.

The two kids burst into the kitchen, oblivious to (unconcerned with) the emotion in the atmosphere. One of them (red-faced, wet, sobbing) is nursing a bee sting, and his mother immediately swoops him into her arms (concern over Hattie’s well-being (momentarily) forgotten).

“Jacky saw a girl in the woods!” one of them shouts, and Hattie’s heart drops. “I think it was a ghost!”

“Nuh-uh, it was a bear!” the other retorts (pain forgotten), and when they leave the cabin a few minutes later they are still bickering over what they had seen. Jack and his wife (Vanessa, but she never did introduce herself) draw out their goodbyes, promising to return (Hattie’s teeth are clenched), bring supplies. They assure her: she will always be a part of their family.

The family leaves their former family cabin, Jack feeling as though he has been tricked in some way (but not entirely sure why). As they drive away from the cabin, tiny snowflakes fall from the dark grey sky.

Chapter 15

Melissa is shivering, but she feels hot; her throat feels like hundreds of bee stings and she cannot stop coughing up thick wads of phlegm. Chalk’s warm body curls up under a blanket with her, but still she shakes uncontrollably. She dreams feverishly of bees; she is a bee. No, she is all the bees, the entire hive mind and the queen and each dance is a memory.

Hattie gives her medicine (scavenged from a drug store) to try to lower the fever; tries to offer honey-sweet tea, but the girl rejects even that (she is so very ill). For the first time she uses the emergency radio to broadcast. She repeats a “Mayday” call across every frequency (there is no response). Melissa’s forehead burns her mother’s hand; she does not wake, but frantically whispers (buzzes) under her breath. The girl had gotten her first shots at the hospital (those early, delirious days); since then Hattie has only sporadically been able to get her into a clinic (now vaccines are only offered to those on base). Her immunization record (tucked away in the back of a closet) is disturbingly (disappointingly) incomplete. She tries the radio again; again; again; again; then finally: a response.

Hattie has plenty of time to pack (clothes, paints, pencils, papers) and write a note to Pink (just in case) before the military ambulance arrives. They speed down the mountain (but what about the animals?), lights flashing, although there is little outside traffic. Hattie squints, trying to watch the medics as they move expertly around her daughter who lies pale and lifeless on the sterile metal cot. They place a mask on Melissa’s face, check her pupils (are they sluggish?), monitor her pulse with loud, rapid chirps. Everyone is moving but Hattie is frozen in place (she has failed).

They arrive at the same hospital they were in eight years prior and Melissa is wheeled into an isolation ward, needles placed inside her arm. The saline drip drip drips and Hattie strokes her daughter’s hand. She wants (needs) to find Pink, to tell her that her daughter could be dying (that it is all her fault), but this is a trial she will have to endure (suffer) alone. There is a near-endless stream of visitors at first (nurses, phlebotomist, doctors) and then the room is deafeningly quiet. The beeps from the machines echo through the small space.

When the samples (blood, mucus, spinal fluid) are taken, Melissa dreams that she is being stung by her bees (they are punishing her (for what?)). Her eyes move back and forth behind closed lids as she tries to run away from the bees; she swats at one and three more arrive. She is thirsty, tired, she just wants to sleep, but she just keeps running away from the bees. She stumbles through a thick forest, tripping over roots hidden by grey foliage. Run run running from the dark, ominous cloud roaring behind her.

Hattie eventually dozes off (when is she never not tired, anymore) on the stiff hospital chair but is startled awake by the appearance of a new doctor, a virologist who diagnoses Melissa with influenza. “Did she get the flu shot this year?” No, of course not; vaccine clinics are for the wealthy (and the privileged). It is not her fault; she has done everything she could (hasn’t she?) to keep her daughter healthy; her father’s insurance as an astronaut will do the rest. So they are acknowledging that he is alive, she thinks.

Melissa recovers slowly at first, body so small and lifeless (tubes and needles emerging from her body like tentacles, dragging her into the depths), and then all at once, waking and eating and bouncing on the hospital bed and chattering with the nurses while they work. She discovers popsicles (cold sweet nectar), which are supplied in abundance by nurses. She paints and reads and dreams of bees and watches television for the first time (anything but Spongebob) on a video player so ancient that even Hattie doesn’t recognize it. The bright animated cartoons and loud, squeaking voices quickly grow irritating to Melissa, who has never heard so much noise before in her life. The two grow restless (ansty) in the hospital; they miss the cabin, the greenhouse, the bees (Pink).

It is snowing when Melissa is finally discharged, 3 weeks (and 3 days (how many hours?)) later. Hattie gives the cabin’s address in the paperwork (she never gets a bill). She lists her father as an emergency contact (they can try). Unlike the last time, they are not unceremoniously booted (Earth’s relations with the Mars outpost are improving) from the hospital doors. Melissa walks on shaky legs (so much time just laying there) over icy ground to a large Jeep (military green), and sleeps against her mother’s shoulder the entire drive home. The government’s relations with the Mars colony must be improving.

Hattie watches the blurry world slip by out the windshield. The difference between the military base and the decaying city around it is stark. Houses at the base look like they are made of plastic; neatly manicured lawns with children and puppies playing safely behind new razor wire fences. The city outside is worn down and decrepit; more businesses permanently closed (windows and doors hidden behind graffitied plywood) than open. There are few people on the streets; those that are have nowhere else to go (Hattie remembers that feeling all too well).

Melissa awakes with a start when the Jeep goes over their bumpy (unmaintained) gravel driveway. There is a silver truck (she sees it; Hattie does not) parked in front of the cabin, and before the Jeep even comes to a full stop Pink is there, waiting to pull them both into a tight hug (Chalk bouncing between them). She had arrived the day after they left (the animals are fine, she assures Melissa) and waited (prayed for) their return.

The rest of autumn is cozy and warm, the three of them tucked indoors around the woodstove. Melissa, deliriously happy (childishly naive) thinks that maybe this makes it all worth it; maybe Pink will finally care about them enough to stay.

Pink does stay on, much longer than her usual fleeting visits; she blames herself for leaving Hattie and Melissa behind, trapped in their isolated little cabin. In another life (a terrible one), she could be living here with her drug-addled boyfriend and his best friend. Pink avoids recalling those first weeks, after everything fell apart; the chemical attack and those early days of just trying to survive. They broke into houses, many of them still occupied; too many of the occupants dead just inside the doors, charred skin fusing with the carpet where they collapsed. She stole jewelry and cash (all worthless, now) for drugs. The ache for opioids was far greater than any hunger Pink had ever felt; even after Alex had died (his body now buried behind the greenhouse) she continued to seek it out, even though she always chastised him for the habit when he was alive. She lived for those brief moments of obscurity.

That first winter Pink fled, abandoning Hattie and the baby (so tiny, then; so fragile and wonderful) to the cold and tracked down Jax (how she hated him). Together they spent the winter chasing oblivion. She scavenged for food and valuables in abandoned shops and warehouses, but everything she found went straight to Jax in exchange for another hit. Then the stores were empty, the houses looted, and Pink had nothing left to offer but herself. She thought she was okay with it (the ends justify the means), but one night Jax raped her so brutally she bled and bruised for weeks; his thick arm against her throat as she tried to protest, tried to push him back.

It took everything in her to get away; to drive up the mountains, to that cabin where Alex was buried and the woman who killed him was still alive. Hattie sat by her (cold towels on her brow; sips of broth; honey sweetened tea) as she shivered, vomited, and moaned through withdrawal. It was only thanks to her that Pink is still alive, yet after all that she still didn’t stay (she never stays). She justifies it to herself with the need for supplies (the solar panels, the radio, biodiesel for her truck), but they have everything they need: the greenhouse and garden (Hattie’s green thumb), the barn with its goats and chickens. The apiary and the bees that Melissa loves (that killed Pink’s boyfriend). The stove kept the cabin just warm enough, the root cellar kept the produce just cool enough. They could all survive up here, easily, but Pink needs to (wants to) wander; she wasn’t made for a domestic life.

On the winter solstice, they pile again in the silver truck, Melissa wedged in the middle of the bench seat this time so Hattie can watch the motion blur, and they make their semi-annual trip to the observatory. Pink and Melissa play fetch with Chalk while Hattie (tearfully, voice cracking) transmits a long message to her dad. She tells him about Melissa’s illness, how isolated and helpless they were (but who is more alone?). She recalls all that empty, stretched out time at the hospital, how she wished nothing more than to have him there to hold her up.

Dr. Lawrence Thomson’s response is kind and empathetic; he has experienced the same sort of disasters on Mars, understands the loneliness and danger of isolation. He assures his daughter that she did everything right (“Melissa is alive because of you”); yet Hattie feels emptier after listening to his overly calm voice. She brings in Melissa for the next broadcast; says nothing else for the rest of the night.

Chapter 16

This winter is the first that Melissa loses one of her hives (cold, exhaustion, starvation) and she feels the loss acutely. She discovers the empty, barren hive while walking through the apiary in late January; although snow still blankets the ground, the air is warm, and the bees and Melissa must stretch their wings. The air around the apiary is dancing and buzzing, but one hive remains concerningly lifeless; a quick peek under the lid, and she knows the hive is gone.

All winter, scavengers (not unlike Pink) have been robbing the unguarded hive stores of honey and pollen. A mouse pulled in great bundles of dried grass for a nest. The honeycomb keeps her and her seven tiny babies warm and safe from predators. Within two months the babies (currently no more than barely formed pink blobs; their eyes sealed closed) will grow and leave the nest. The warm, citrus-y scent of honey bees is replaced by the foul odor of death, ammonia, and rotting wood and Melissa, even later, inside in her room, cannot rid her nose of the stench.

The loss is tremendous, reverberates through the remaining dozen hives. Each of the hives in the apiary outside is descended from that first hive (that first taste of honey in the graveyard). Long ago, Hattie carefully tore the siding off the workshop attached to the greenhouse and scooped out the heavy, honey-soaked comb. She scanned the entire hive inch by inch (slowly, painstakingly) to find the queen, then placed her with some comb in a hive box and waited. Four weeks later she returned to find new comb, wax cells filled with glistening white larvae. The displaced honey bees had made it their home.

When a hive gets too large (too full, bees oozing out of every entrance like blood) they have to split it to prevent the bees from swarming. When a hive swarms, the queen flies away (the barest breath of freedom) with over half of the workers; leaving the rest to sort out raising a new queen (often not successfully). To split the hive, Hattie (and later Melissa) take brood frames (tiny eggs like grains of rice) and place them in a new box with frames of honey, pollen, and worker bees. Without the queen’s pheromones, the workers produce royal jelly to feed to select few larvae; they grow and pupate more quickly on the rich diet. It is a controlled swarm, a (violently) human interference in a natural process. When the queens emerge from their cells 16 days later they will fight to the death. One will win, either by stinging her opponents or convincing the workers to smother them with a blanket of bodies. To declare herself champion she will spray her pheromones around the workers and hive, then she will leave for the first (and likely only) time in her life. She will mate with a dozen or so drones, return and begin laying eggs for her new hive.

A queen bee lives a couple of years; the workers, only a few weeks. New adults are assigned tasks around the hive (nurse the young; prepare the honey; clean the hive). As they age out, they take on jobs outside (scouting, foraging, guarding); risky work with a near 100% fatality rate. Melissa doesn’t know which life is more tragic - the queen who never leaves her hive (constantly waited on by an ever-changing rotation of workers), or her daughters, who never live long enough to appreciate their freedom.

After that false January spring, the temperatures drop painfully low. Melissa’s fingers ache as she feeds the animals (shivering in the barn), and on her way to the greenhouse she finds the frozen body of a bird, legs curled, feathers immaculate. She buries it in one of the few soil pots in the greenhouse. The heat trapped by the glass panels warms her, but the effect is only skin deep. She doesn’t want to leave - the cold will only be more bitter, will only hurt more - so she sits on the floor, closes her eyes, and imagines she is with her grandfather. The enormous enclosed domes of the Mars colony are always warm; outside may be a frozen wasteland, but everything that matters is contained within. There are people there, and children, and you can see anyone whenever you want just by walking through the right series of tunnels.

If they failed here, they would probably be okay. Pink would find them food, or take them somewhere where food can be found in abundance (the hospital was well stocked, right?). Melissa is the granddaughter of an astronaut; surely that means something. If her grandfather (or the other astronauts, or the structures, or life support) failed on Mars, however, it would mean death to every single person on the colony (current population: 131 and growing). Somehow that makes her grandfather’s work feel more important, more substantial than her own tiny life on Earth.

Inside the cabin, Pink and Hattie are curled up together (with blankets and warm drinks) on the couch, watching the fire. They have been arguing: Pink wants to leave (she needs to run away), Hattie wants her to stay. Now, emotionally spent, they reconcile, but the foundation for resentment (Hattie’s depression; Pink’s volatility) festers below.

Hattie doesn’t (couldn’t possibly) know the stark reality outside (don’t underestimate her). So many people have died that the government still hasn’t counted them all (they aren’t even trying); even now people are still dying (cold, exhaustion, starvation - just like Melissa’s bees). Here, it is trivial to survive - a small garden, a couple of goats and chickens. They have power and water and shelter. Out there people are getting tear gassed for living on the streets while the military complexes hoard more food than they could eat in a decade. The homeless shelters are full; with nowhere to go, the forgotten people accumulate, everything they own tucked inside flimsy tents that do nothing to stop the icy winter winds. The military police sweep through the encampments, destroying everything and still they have nowhere to go. The people fight back (protest (riot)) and the uniforms come in to impose law and order with brutal weapons. Before (before), Hattie’s sheltered (unencumbered (privileged)) life as the daughter of a scientist (an astronaut!) shielded her from it, but none of this is new (Hattie knows from before (before)). The military is just finding new excuses for their violence.

A week later, Pink is gone again. There is no time to mourn; three goats (Venus, Saturn, Cassiopeia) are pregnant this year, and they give birth within hours of each other (twins, triplets, stillborn). The cold is unrelenting, and a few days later Melissa enters the barn and finds two of the triplets frozen on the ground. The mothers grieve, growing lethargic, their udders shrinking. Melissa and her mother spend days in the bitter cold of the barn, coaxing them to feed the neglected survivors just as Pink had done for Hattie in the early days.

Weeks go by and still the cold does not relent (an endless winter), and to Melissa it feels like everything in the world, even time itself has frozen around them. She wants to work on her encyclopedia, but cannot conjure her grandfather’s sweet voice.

Chapter 17

The United States has declared martial law: there is a nationwide curfew, and traffic stops prevent Pink from leaving the city. Not that she would be able to make it to the cabin if she could; her truck is nearly out of gas (burned up trying to find a way out of the city), and she has not found a single restaurant that is open, let alone offering their used cooking oil. She parks in one of the nicer looking neighborhoods (away from the riots, that ever present haze of pepper spray) and stretches out on the bench seat. She has nowhere to go. She wants to avoid the daylight but with the curfew it is impossible.

Pink was not outside during the initial attack (safely tucked away in her room, with Alex), but her little brother (forever 12) was. He didn’t make it inside; he barely had time to realize something was wrong before his skin charring and boiling in the sun. She was so oblivious (delirious (blasted)) she didn’t know at first that something was wrong; it wasn’t until her phone screamed with a national alert (DO NOT GO OUTSIDE. CHEMICAL ATTACK IN PROGRESS. REPEAT: DO NOT GO OUTSIDE) that she even looked out the window, to where her brother’s body was laying, curled up on itself in the grass. Then she was screaming, Alex holding on to her tightly so she doesn't race outside.

Alex convinced her to rob her own home (“it’s not stealing, it’s using our resources”) when her parents hadn’t returned the next day. They fled to Jax’s place in the cover of darkness, spent the next few days using up his stash. They quickly ran out again and returned to the streets, reduced to robbing nearby houses. The city had gone dark, dangerous; Pink was mugged in the unlit street outside Jax's apartment. She wanted to leave, begged Alex to take her somewhere safe. Jax had heard about some cop who was dealing from the evidence lockers; he had GPS coordinates somewhere in the mountains. On the way up he swerved down the rural roads at random, scoping out vacation cabins (reserved for the ultra-wealthy). When they found the cabin (Hattie's home (her prison)) it was close enough to the GPS location that Jax figured this was the cop's place, and they could ambush him. The place gave off a weird vibe - an immaculate nursery (Alex wouldn't let Jax search (destroy) it), but no sign of an actual baby, or even a pregnant woman. The master bedroom had only a man's (his) things.

Alex (nervous, shaking, nauseous) stayed behind when they crept out at night to meet up with the cop. Pink and Jax hiked for nearly an hour before finding a shed (empty) at the designated coordinates. They waited all night for the cop, but he never showed up; then the sun was peeking over the sky, and it was too late for them to return. It was intentional, at least on Jax's part, but Pink had wanted to stay too. Some time away from Alex, some time alone with Jax.

Jax didn't help her bury her boyfriend (said it was a waste of time) and had no interest in even going into the dungeon until Pink described it (the blood, the sinister aura, the dead animals hanging from the ceiling). Someone had been held hostage down here, had lost a lot of blood down here; someone had taken her boyfriend's clothes and shoes. Jax thought the graveyard was funny; he was the one who first spotted the fetus (he'd called it an alien), leathery grey skin and oversized head. Later, when Pink cleaned out the prison for Hattie, she buried the mummified fetus next to Alex’s grave.

Wandering the streets under the sickly pink sky, Pink watches the other disaffected people, who either do not (or cannot) have homes to return to. Where is the government while its citizens are suffering? It is supposed to take care of people, but now, nearly a decade after the initial attack, half the city is still under quarantine (decontamination efforts were dropped, long ago), and even fewer people have electricity inside. The only cars on the streets come from the military base; gas stations in the city have been empty for years. The stores that struggled to reopen after the attack are now boarded up. Nearly all those who survived the attack are still homeless, powerless, starving. They are packed in shelters with not enough resources, spreading diseases that the military bases are vaccinated against. Downtown, the encampments have taken over the streets. When not being destroyed by the police, they offer security, food banks, even medical care. All volunteer services (humans helping humans). Nearby, a constant tension between protesters (the privileged few protecting their neighbors) and the uniforms guarding the military base. They just want a meal and they are being gassed, beaten, and shot by the people who swore to protect them.

The United States government is keeping its citizens in the dark (this much is obvious). Aside from the occasional government sponsored newspaper, there are no updates, no news of the wider world. Pink is more travelled than most with her converted diesel truck (there is always cooking oil to spare, until recently); but every city, every state she has been to has been more of the same. Sickly pink skies, people dying on the streets, military bases that are functioning perfectly, like nothing has happened. Workers are paid slave wages to keep the suburban families afloat. How many bodies has she found while scavenging, left to rot by an unconcerned military regime? Pink is infuriated (enraged (livid)); then all at once it leaves her, replaced by an overwhelming hopelessness.

She is hit by a sudden wave of homesickness: the cabin, Hattie and Melissa, the dog named Chalk (she had rescued him, too, from an abandoned farmhouse in New Mexico). What strings did Hattie (the astronaut’s daughter) have to pull to allow Melissa to get the sort of state of the art treatment that so many in the streets are dying for? Pink doesn’t fault her for using her privilege to save Melissa; she just wishes it could work for everyone.

It takes several weeks, but Pink is finally able to find (procure (steal, sort of)) a source of fuel from a closed-up restaurant. She starts up her truck (still parked where she left it (thank god)) and uses the last of its reserves to get to the restaurant; but once fueled, she doesn’t know where to go with the city on lockdown, the traffic stops with their military tanks and rifles. The back roads (some of them) are clear, however, and she is finally able to escape to the east. She decides to visit the observatory; that gives her a destination, at least.

It is not the solstice, so Dr. Lawrence Thomson is not already at the comms HUB when Pink’s staticky voice breaks through, but an astronaut (Lt. Colonel Amy Madison, mother of Romulus and Remus, first children born on Mars) is there, monitoring the frequencies. She hits record and is about to leave to retrieve the ecologist, but is stopped when she hears the (distant, ghostly, panicked) message Pink has sent.

She describes the cities reduced to ruins; the people starving on the streets; the bodies she has found that the government has abandoned. The overflowing homeless shelters, the encampments and military sweeps. She tells them about the military bases (with their fully stocked grocery store shelves) and the diseases (one almost killed Melissa) that only the military (and their families) are vaccinated against. She tells the colonists that the government has abandoned them; that they are being quarantined, detained, and killed in broad daylight. The broadcast is only 15 minutes long, but by the time it is over, Lt. Col. Amy Madison is in tears.

The Mars colonists knew things were not going well for the United States, but the recent revelations are blindsiding. Despite the Mars colony’s international joint statement that the mining explosion was an accident, the United States accused Russia of sabotage and started a war that was quickly suppressed by Russia’s chemical attack. For years on Earth, the US hid their shame; on Mars, they were given the silent treatment (to hide their incompetence). Of the other members of the Mars project, India was the most forthcoming, filling in some of the blanks when it came to updates from Earth, but they were fed the same propaganda.

When the (new, but not elected) president reached out to them a few years ago, he explained that Russia’s attack blocked all radio communications, but they knew it was a lie (Hattie had been sending broadcasts to them for years). He told them that everything was fine, that cities were recovering and everything was nearly back to normal. Maybe it was true, for the military bases at least, but Pink’s broadcast paints a much more bleak picture. Lt. Col. Amy Madison responds to the transmission with a perfunctory: “I will share this information, thank you.” She plays the recording for the other American astronauts. They had all left behind some sort of family (brothers, sisters, parents). Only the ecologist's daughter would have had dependent benefits, and if even she's been left behind, what does that say for everyone else?

Pink feels oddly exhausted (drained, depleted, spent) after the short transmission; she doesn’t wait for a response, just returns to her silver truck and stares blankly at the flat land around her. Everything is terrible, and all she wants now is to go home. She drives west (towards the mountains (towards the sunset)), keeping to back roads. After dark, it almost looks like she is going to be successful in evading the lockdown, but a blind curve in the foothills lands her straight into a hidden traffic stop. She curses as soon as she sees the flashing blue and red lights (the colors don't fool her: the police are military, the military are the police). There's no turning around, pretending she has made a wrong turn. She slows to a stop in front of the armored trucks blocking the narrow mountain road.

Pink (rebel, (ex) addict, cop killer) does not have a good relationship with the police. She has no ID, the car is stolen, and she is fucked. A uniformed man approaches, taps on her window. The truck is so old she has to hand crank it down. She gasps (hopes he doesn't notice) when she sees his face - it's almost, but not quite exactly the same as the cop (monster) she killed. The brother (the good twin), she knows immediately. Hattie had told her about the visit (the kids (petri dishes) who had infected Melissa), how she'd hidden the girl in the woods (they would never let her stay there with a child (their niece (her daughter)) and convinced them to let her keep the cabin.

"The city is in lockdown," he says, voice softer than his brother's. He's shining the flashlight in Pink's face, blinding her.

She could lie, or she could try to appeal to his affection for his (alleged) sister-in-law. "I'm sorry," she makes her voice soft, imploring. "I'm just trying to get some supplies to my friend. She's all alone."

"Supplies?" The light moves from Pink's face, towards the bed of her truck. It is covered with tarp, but if he looked inside he would only find an old camping bag (Alex’s).

“My friend,” she explains, blinking at the spots in her vision from the flashlight. “She lives in a cabin out there. Hattie, she’s all alone.” Pink looks up at him with big pleading eyes.

“Hattie? I think you’re talking about my sister-in-law!” he exclaims.

“Oh, no, her husband disappeared.” She lowers her eyelashes in what she hopes looks more like grief than flirting.

“Yeah, yeah, Charlie Collins.” Bile rises in Pink’s throat when she hears his name (Hattie had never wanted to know).

The man lets Pink make a U-turn. Before she leaves, he tells her, “Listen, I shouldn’t be doing this. Go back, turn left, then left again. 97 doesn’t have a roadblock.” He looks back at his disinterested colleagues. “Tell Hattie I said ‘Hi.’” Pink promises she will, then drives away, holding her breath until the flashing lights have long disappeared.

Chapter 18

Recovering from the devastating winter is a daunting task, and Hattie doesn’t know where to begin. Three of the six goat kids have survived, which is good news for milk, but they are all males. In the past, she’s been able to take bucklings to the farmer’s market to trade; in the meantime, they are just more mouths to feed. If Pink decides to stay away, they may end up having to butcher them. The chickens are stressed, their laying sporadic; they, too, may end up more useful as meat. Melissa doesn’t want to kill them; she has named them all ((goats) Venus, Saturn, Cassiopeia, Capricornus, Leo, and the babies Aries, Orion, and Hercules; (chickens) Hentrietta, Georgia, Jaime, Francis, Jaqueline, and Napoleon).

The bees are lethargic (depressed (grieving)); some of the hives do not have enough honey in store to survive the rest of the winter. Hattie and Melissa mix sugar water (50:50) in mason jars to give honey bees enough energy to stay warm. The continued frost has killed the early blooms, and that first nectar flow that honey bees so desperately need to replenish has failed them. The humans, too, wait anxiously for the ground to thaw. They have been unable to till the garden, reducing the (already too short) growing season.

It is a pleasant surprise when Pink returns (well before Melissa’s birthday); her usual visiting schedule disrupted by the state of the outside world. She offers an abbreviated summary: martial law, military police, protests, tear gas and rubber bullets. Hattie understands; the military hospital treated her daughter because she was the astronaut’s daughter (and they were trying to repair relations with the Mars colony); outside, people were dying from the same illness. It was clear the United States had given up.

With Pink back, the frigid temperatures feel less daunting; even the animals seem to perk up. They tend to the seedlings in the greenhouse; replant the ones that have grown too large in an enormous pot the size of a bathtub. Only one nearby market is running (numbers are dwindling), but they are able to find someone willing to trade (a few pitiful bags of grains) for the goats.

Melissa’s birthday (ten years old) is the first truly warm day of spring; they spend it (finally) transplanting the seedlings, bees buzzing, circling, searching for something to pollinate. After she has gone to bed (she is reading under the blanket), Hattie and Pink huddle around the little HAM radio. They have started checking the frequencies regularly, on the off-chance they catch something, but every signal is dead (they are so alone). Even the weather service has stopped broadcasting.

As the solstice approaches, they debate whether they should risk visiting the observatory. They do not want to run into a military checkpoint with Melissa. Hattie pictures her father, alone on Mars, waiting for a wave that will never come. A small part of her (bitter, resentful) thinks he deserves it for (abandoning her) being so far away.

The question is answered for them on the day of the solstice, when it appears to snow; but the fat, grey flakes are not cold at all, and the air is stiflingly hot. They stay inside for several days (Chalk panting, whining, antsy) as the residual ash from some detonation (hopefully) hundreds of miles away gently coats the landscape in fine dust. There is no knowing what it is (chemical weapon? nuclear fallout? something even worse?), until the third day, when they manage to catch a faint (distant, weak) emergency broadcast assuring them it is safe (a decontamination process). Even then they are wary (since when could they trust the government?).

It is ultimately Hattie who volunteers (self-sacrifices) to brave the outdoors. The walk to the barn is harrowing (respirator, dismal grey landscape, red-lit sky (is it getting paler?)), but when she sees that the animals are still alive (breathing, wearing, even eating the dust that has coated every surface), she removes the respirator. The air smells clean for the first time in over a decade; none of that toxic pungence that she has grown so accustomed to. There is still no guarantee she is safe (if the ash is radioactive, it may not kill them for decades), but it seems the emergency broadcast was accurate. In the intervening weeks, the blood-red solar shield fades to a soft pink, then blue (the women cry; the girl overwhelmed by the arrays of new colors). In late summer, Melissa sees stars for the first time in her life. She finds Mars (a bright red speck in the night sky); somewhere on that little speck, her grandfather is living, working, building new life from nothing. Hattie can't see the planet, nor the stars, and for the first time she truly mourns her loss of vision. She feels as though a piece of her has gone missing, disappeared like stars into a black hole.

It was a gift from the Martian colonies, over a hundred million miles away; after Pink's revelations, the colonists urged their respective home countries to assist with relief efforts in the United States. When that failed, they broadcast the message themselves, hacking through the firewalls installed by various government agencies to broadly share Pink's message with the world (minus the US, still locked into its state-owned intranet). Within weeks, there was a nationwide detoxification effort that rendered the chemical used in the attack inactive (it was that easy). The US government, so caught up in lies, scrambles to justify the last decade of failure to take care of its citizens, then doubles down, once again blaming Russia for the years of neglect (deterioration, isolation, oppression).

The blue sky is dazzlingly bright to Melissa, but her honey bees are thriving. Foraging is significantly less effort with ultraviolet light; now they can pick out individual flowers by sight, rather than just smell. The late frosts may have disrupted early foraging, but by August, Hattie and Melissa were stacking new boxes onto each hive, empty frames waiting to be filled.

For all the ways that honey bees are unique in the animal kingdom, their most human-like behavior is the preparation of food. Honey bees don't just eat nectar (like butterflies), they also process it. The first changes take place in the forager bee's honey crop: a specialized stomach with enzymes that break down the sugars in the nectar. The forager will regurgitate her haul into another bee's mouth, who then spits it into a honeycomb cell. Still more bees fan the honey with their wings, drying it out, concentrating the sugars and rendering it too sugary, too acidic to host bacteria; thus it does not spoil. Honey bees mix pollen and honey to make bee bread: an excellent source of protein for growing larva. They also make a glue (antibacterial, antifungal, insulating) out of tree resins that they use to line their hives.

A single bee will make no more than a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime. Each hive in the apiary (except for the one that perished) has several tens of thousands of workers. During peak season, the queen can lay as many as 3000 new eggs a day. Melissa watches them all, a loving parent: the queen of the bees.

Pink is still here at the end of the summer; here she will remain until they cannot anymore. The three sit under the stars and make up stories about constellations Hattie cannot see. For Melissa every single star is a bee, stuck up there in space, endlessly searching for a home. The moon is their queen, who waxes and wanes and grows anew. Each generation slightly changed (genetic variation is essential for survival), slightly more adapted, slightly more equipped to survive. Melissa, at 10, has lived through at least two generations (and all the ensuing splits); the bees who surround her now are the great grandchildren of those who sacrificed their lives to save her (to save Hattie).

Three bodies makes the fall harvest easy work; in the kitchen, it is cramped and stuffy as they sterilize, boil, cook, and pressure seal the extra produce into glass jars. They take what they need to the root cellar (no longer a dungeon, always haunted); the rest they drive to the city (traffic stops ended (mostly)) and donate to the homeless shelter that saved Hattie’s (and Melissa’s) life so many years ago. Without the ever-present threat of the chemical residue, the city feels more alive. Well lit neighborhoods, stores with (relatively) well stocked shelves. Supplies no longer reserved (stolen) for the military bases.

Hattie’s second stop in the city requires driving through the razor wire topped gates, presenting two forms of ID (Pink and Melissa must stay behind (they do not exist)), riding past uniformed men with intimidating rifles in an electric hover cart. She is a welcome guest (the daughter of an astronaut); for the first time in over a decade, Hattie sits in front of a computer screen (her connection strictly monitored (the internet still closed to civilians)). She reads the emails (once a week, at least) her father sent her during all her time in the captivity; she admires his optimism, his tenacity, his stubbornness. She does not write a reply; the entire data allotment for her email is used up by a single photograph (the last shot of an instant camera, so many years ago): Hattie, Pink, and Melissa (and Chalk!) outside the observatory, a blood-red sky around them.

Part Three: martianis

Chapter 19

On my eighteenth birthday (or so I was told, but without a birth certificate my parents could be lying, I suppose), I drive the ancient silver truck down our old forgotten driveway, gravel roads, and eventually a winding mountain highway, alone for the first time in my life. Once this road was paved, glued together with foul smelling tar, but now it is crumbling. Plants grew in the cracks, their roots pushing, digging, crushing the asphalt into rubble. I drive carefully over the potholes; the truck’s suspension sucks, and the hydrogen engine may be prone to “catastrophic failure.” The last thing I needed is for the truck to blow up before I even left the mountains.

Despite the risk, I still prefer the hydrogen engine over the old biodiesel engine, with its clouds of foul smelling exhaust. With all the restaurants going out of business, used cooking oil was in short supply. There was a time, a few years back, that we could all visit the city together and it was almost like mom and Pink remembered: restaurants, grocery stores with their overabundance of food, flashing lights and loud sounds that were a culture shock compared to my quiet, peaceful cabin. The city center was closely guarded, the outside world shielded from view, but I knew from our visits before, when everyone was still afraid of the sun and the chemicals, that it was a much darker place out there.

Around the same time, when I was 13, the nearest town reopened its school. Pink drove me the 30+ miles one morning; when she picked me up, I begged not to have to come back. There weren’t many students, and only three teachers, and it was immediately obvious I didn't fit in. I’m not stupid, by any stretch. I could read and write and do math at least as well as the other kids, but the things they were teaching were so inane. Who needs to know what conditional perfect progressive means, or be able to answer a hundred addition problems in five minutes? I thought science class would be interesting, but all they did was have us memorize some words. It was painfully dull, so I quit. It was easy to persuade Pink - she didn’t want to ever have to wake up before sunrise again. Mom frowned, but nodded when I told her why I wasn’t going back. Besides, last time I found myself amongst other people my age, I almost died from the plagues children inevitably carry. Better not to risk that again, even after I got all of my shots.

It was a good thing I didn’t go, because the next day one of my hives swarmed and I had to track it through the woods for a good half day before I spotted it, dripping from a tree branch, bending under its weight. It was the first time one of my hives had swarmed, and I wasn’t about to let them get away. I climbed up the tree, awkwardly gripping it with my legs as I dug carefully through the non-newtonian mass of bees for the queen. I kept her clutched loosely in my hand as I walked back home, and the swarm followed, clinging to my arm like a hot, prickling glove.

That’s me, Melissa Thomson: Queen of the Bees. I think that’s my last name. It’s my mom’s, and my astronaut grandfather’s, but I could probably make one up, since officially, I do not exist. I had a pretty great childhood.

The flea markets and schools and thriving economy were a part of a brief bubble that lasted a only couple years after the skies cleared. Without the constant threat of an agonizing death, it almost seemed like everyone would be okay. Then the economy crashed again, and the military retreated into their bases again, and the rest of us were left to figure things out again for ourselves. Again. In the city, your survival and well being generally depended on your proximity to the military bases; out here, it was like nothing changed. We still had everything we needed from all those years that Pink would disappear and reappear with “gifts” of solar panels and goats and coloring books. My parents were always skeptical of the recovery, so we never stopped growing and milking and canning, we just got better at it.

I’ve been on these highways before, but when you’re driving everything looks different than when you’re a passenger, when you can watch the trees and rocks and birds instead of the road. Pink even taught me how to drive on these roads, but now that I’m alone, they are almost foreign. I am headed east, towards the dusty old observatory we have visited twice a year for as long as I can remember. I learned how to walk there; my old dog Chalk is buried there. The only photograph of the three of us was taken there with some old camera Pink found, propped up on some rocks with a self-timer. None of us look like we belong to the same family: mom, tall and lithe, amber skin and silky dark hair; Pink, shorter, her pale skin and red hair glowing; me, forever four years old, eyes hiding behind dirty blond tangles.

We usually make a semi-annual trek to the observatory on the solstices, to send long winded radio broadcasts to the planet Mars, where my grandfather lives. He was one of the original colonists of the Mars Five, the 31st human to take a step on the red planet. He's an ecologist, responsible for transforming the lifeless red dust that coats the planet into something living and breathing. He's really good at it, too - despite some major setbacks, including a devastating mine explosion, the Mars colony has declared itself fully sustainable. Anything they need, they can mine, fabricate, or grow themselves. There have even been babies born on the planet: true Martian citizens. I think the colony is up to a dozen children now, the oldest only a few years younger than myself.

The colony is expanding in other ways, too; the EU, China, and India have already sent a second wave of colonists to fill in a much needed workforce. A third wave is scheduled to leave soon. Mars has even begun to engage in trade, thanks to China's perfection of the solar ion engines. Trips between Earth and Mars have been more than halved to just less than four months for commercial flights; even shorter for some of the private shuttles. Improved launches and a moon substation mean more freedom in what time of the year you can take off, and solar ion engines have almost no hard fuel requirements. Hired ships in Europe, China, and India are transporting (and, hopefully, smuggling) goods and private citizens between planets.

Today I'm not going to the observatory to talk to my astronaut grandfather, although I'll probably send him a wave if this meeting goes well. Today I'm going in hopes of finding a pilot, preferably with a nice ship, who can take me to the red planet itself. I want to go to Mars.

Chapter 20

The hardest part about the "new" world, according to my mom and Pink, is the lack of instant communication. We have a HAM radio that sporadically catches the national weather service, and even more rarely another human being from far away places, but other than that we're limited to our rare treks to markets to connect with another person. Before, they could just tap messages into a little computer, hit send and the person would immediately get it. Mom even used to get emails from grandpa on Mars. Pink still had a cell phone for a while, a useless blank glass screen for most of my life. It didn't get signal way up in the cabin, but in the city, during the little recovery bubble, we could sometimes connect to the government-owned 'net. The news was heavily censored, with no real information. The headlines were propagandized, the stories focused on the heroics of uniformed men. The papers always made Pink scoff and mom get that dark, faraway look in her cloudy eyes. Now, short of the rare government published newspaper, we are once again left in the dark about what's going on around us.

That's part of the reason I'm driving to the observatory. As an international collaboration, the Mars colony is always more up to date on Earth news than we are. I haven't explicitly told my parents about my plan to leave Earth, and them, for the rest of my life, but I've been slowly, subtly planting the idea with grandpa's help. In recent years, space travel has exploded - at least for the rest of the Mars Five country members. Here in the US, the space race stagnated in the aftermath of the attack; for a while the government even spread rumors that all of our astronauts had died in the mine explosion. There was a time, during the bubble, that the US government started trying to repair relations with the Mars colony, but after more than a decade of lying and gaslighting, no one was falling for it. Now, probably, the entire space budget has been rerouted to re-escalating the arms race with Russia. No American would be allowed to leave this dusty wasteland. I need grandpa's international connections to get me off-planet, which is looking especially enticing considering how this ended the last time around. Pink doesn't necessarily believe that Russia was responsible for the devastating attack; she thinks the United States is more than capable of killing its own citizens. But whoever was responsible for the violent chemical attack that crippled our nation could easily do it again.

The observatory is outside a dusty ghost town in the plains. The land is so flat you can practically still see the mountains hundreds of miles away, which makes it the perfect place for catching a clear, uninterrupted view of the night sky. It is absolutely mind bogglingly beautiful. A few miles away from the tiny town is a disused solar powered research station. Pink found it, and it is so unlikely that she would have stumbled onto it like she did that I believe she is the only person to ever be able to do so. We have certainly never seen signs of another visitor; we call it “our” observatory. Although grungy, with bird nests in the rafters and a creaking spiral staircase that I once split my head open on, the equipment in the station is in perfect condition. It has a radio tower to send messages and an enormous telescope, controlled by a computer I have spent my life trying to understand.

I have never seen another person out here; there has never even been a vehicle in passing within hours of this place. So the bright red electric sports car, though expected, is still a shock. It doesn't belong, stands out like a target in the dry, yellow landscape. He sees me coming from miles away, an enormous dusty cloud kicked up from my tires headed his direction. He is expecting me too.

His name is Xiao Lan. He is the cousin of one of the original Mars-III astronauts from China, and he is my ticket out of here. Hopefully. He is also a pilot, one of the first to build his own solar ion ship. The son of a wealthy real estate titan, Xiao Lan lived an easy life in Shanghai. While we were busy just surviving, while I was scratching out my letters in the dirt, Xiao Lan had plenty of time and money to study, engineer, and eventually manufacture his own shuttle; one that can ostensibly make the trip to Mars in a record 3 months and 11 days.

When Pink talks about privilege, people like Xiao Lan are so far above what she means they might as well be on Mars. Which he is, because he is obscenely rich, and I hope to share some of the wealth. I’m still worried about what exactly Xiao Lan hopes to get out of this deal, but grandpa assures me that it is nothing at all. When grandpa talks about Mars being a socialist utopia, he means it: everyone gets what they need, and everyone contributes what they can. In Xiao Lan’s case, his contribution is bankrolling the colonists, and, hopefully, me. But that doesn’t explain why he wants to do this.

It’s already impossible for an American to leave the planet, and my situation is all the more precarious. I don't have a passport; officially I don't exist, so I can't legally enter any other country. Even if I had a passport, international travel from the United States to anywhere is frowned upon for US citizens, unless you are rich enough. The government wants to keep us where we are, keep word from getting out that things here are anything but perfect. Officially, Xiao Lan is an honored guest in the states; a businessman trying to inject his cash into a foreign, faltering economy. We make a good pair.

I greet Xiao Lan with a bow, then he quickly asks to drop formalities. "Please, call me Lan." He is like no one I have ever seen. His light grey clothing is clean cut, well-fitted, made of a thick fabric in so many layers he must be sweltering. I am wearing a long, worn dress that I stitched together myself. It is clean, but permanently stained from around the farm. Next to him, I feel like I'm 13 again, staring into the wary eyes of children who were not raised by bees, and are therefore complete strangers. It is clear I do not belong.

The only reason this is possible, the only way I can even come within 6 feet of the man in front of me, is because I have something Mars needs: honey bees. My grandfather has been successful in introducing the right cocktail of microbes to bring Martian dirt to life. He has introduced some other arthropods, mainly detritivores, that recycle dead plant matter into nutrient rich soil. He has created the perfect mix of water, dirt, and life to create a self sustaining life support system. The plants he grows provide oxygen to the biodomes as well as nutrients in the form of fruits and vegetables. The leftover plant matter feeds insect farms that provide a complete protein to every colonist on Mars.

The only thing he's missing is the pollinators. Some plants are self-pollinating, some use wind currents, but many rely on insects or other animals to carry pollen from the stamen of one flower to the pistil of another. There used to be a hundred thousand species of pollinating insects on Earth. Now, after the disaster that likely killed over half the population of the US and devastated local wildlife and plants, there's no telling how many were decimated. What we know for fact has survived, however, are the thirteen honey bee hives located in my backyard; each of which is clean and parasite free. In addition to producing honey and wax, which the Mars colony could definitely use, honey bees are super generalists: they will pollinate pretty much any flowering plant in grandpa's greenhouses.

The trouble, of course, is that 4 to 8 months is an awfully long time to spend in an enclosed shuttle with hives of angry, stinging insects. The current insects that inhabit the colony were shipped cryogenically frozen in an unmanned supply rocket; their revival had a disturbingly high mortality rate. If a hive loses too many workers, it won't be able to feed the queen and her larva, and the colony will starve to death. I have to convince Xiao Lan that I have a solution.

"So you're saying we freeze them?" he says, deadpan, face etched in boredom.

"If I wanted to freeze them I wouldn't need a smuggler," I retort. It's only a partial lie; one of the more legitimate transport ships would probably be okay with moving frozen bees, if I could give them the right documentation, which I don't have, and a boatload of money, which no one in the US has. "The temperature needs to stay right around freezing, but the bees will still be living and breathing." I explain about clusters, how honey bees form a tight ball and vibrate their wings to generate heat and keep the queen warm. If the outside temperature is too cold, they won't even try to venture outside, won't leave the cluster so desperately needed to keep the queen warm. With Xiao Lan's new solar ion shuttle, the 3 month trip would just feel like a bizarre winter for them. As long as they have enough food, they can easily stay clustered in relative hibernation for that long.

"Have you ever been stung by a bee, Melissa?" Lan asks after a strange, prolonged silence.

"Not even once." It is true, as far as I can remember.

"Did you know, I am allergic?"

I shake my head, groaning. How could we have gotten this far only to have something like this slip through the cracks? "How bad?"

"Terrible! Anaphylaxis, I have to use epinephrine." He overanunciates the syllables around a thick accent, and he sounds almost excited about the prospect. He pulls out a brightly colored plastic tube, waves it at me. An autoinjector.

Fuck. I've wasted so much time on this.

His voice interrupts my mental cursing. "I would like to see your bees."

"What?" Why?

"I would like to see your bees, in your apiary." His face is neutral, but his eyes twinkle behind his glasses.

I turn back to the silver truck, pissed. "And get yourself killed? No thanks."

"My cousin says your grandfather speaks very highly of you," he says, stopping me. "He says you are the queen of the bees."

He's mocking me. "It's a childhood nickname. I'm not a child anymore." We stand there in the dusty, desolate landscape, staring at each other.

"If you want a ride," he says carefully, "I have to meet the passengers."

I get in my car, slamming the door just a bit too hard in frustration. Apparently I’m not going to be sending a message of good news to grandpa. I can’t take Xiao Lan anywhere near my bees. I can only imagine what would happen if the only son of one of the richest men in Shanghai died on my watch.

Chapter 21

Because it is my 18th birthday, I am going on an excursion of sorts. Pink, who was once so transient in my life, gave me a map on my 18th birthday, or rather an atlas. Inside the handmade book she has outlined the route I am to travel, along with detailed instructions about what I am supposed to see: her favorite sites, views, and places from her travels. The highlight: the Pacific Ocean. I’ve dreamed of oceans my entire life, even though I have always been landlocked. Pink has promised me that the trip will be eye opening in more ways than one.

The trip is supposed to take a week; I will drive over 2000 miles in an enormous loop through five states, although I don’t think state borders mean much anymore. The trip to the observatory was a detour, but a short one; I can make it up easily. The fuel cell in the truck would be able to make the trip half a dozen times, and it basically runs on water and sunshine. Although the former might be hard to find, consider most of what I’ll be driving through is desert.

My point here is that I have a lot of time, alone, nothing but my thoughts to keep me occupied; and my thoughts are pissed. Someone, somewhere, could have realized Xiao Lan would not be an appropriate pilot to transport the one thing he is deathly allergic to. He’s wasted so much time, even coming out here with the audacity to ask that I put my life on the line so - what, exactly? Trying to face his fears? Trying to die?

I was always skeptical of grandpa’s claims that his astronaut friend’s cousin was just being 100% altruistic, and now I know it’s bullshit. I don’t know what he is trying to get at, but I want no part in it. Which means I have to find a new pilot, preferably one who will bankroll me because I hadn’t even heard of money until I was a teenager. The markets we went to didn’t have currency, or if they did, we didn’t; we bartered for everything. A jar of honey could pay for pretty much anything we needed.

Part of the reason Pink wanted me to go on this journey is that we’ve heard rumors that the west coast has been reinvigorated; while the midwest is a dusty, toxic wasteland, the coast has trade ports, and that makes it invaluable. There are even rumors that some cities on the coast have been reconnected to the global internet. If that’s true, maybe I can find a new pilot. Even if I’m not sure how to pay for one, yet.

I skip most of the first half of the journey by driving through the night, ignoring Pink’s landmarks and hiking suggestions. I would love to see them, really, but I need more time on the coast. If there is a coast to speak of. I spend a few hours sleeping on the truck’s uncomfortable bench seat at sunrise; my neck is stiff and I have to pee when I wake up. I stretch my legs in the desert, carefully picking up my feet over prickly cactuses. I catch a hint of something sweet in the air, something familiar; there is a bee swarm nearby. I wonder how desert bees differ from my mountain forest bees. I track the scent to a swarm dangling precariously off the arm of an enormous cactus. As I approach, I catch a hint of something foul, as though something had died nearby, but it appears to be coming from the bees. I wrinkle my nose as I watch the swarm. These bees are visibly ill; they are dropping to the sand below, bodies already fouled by decay.

I turn and run back to the car. Something about those bees was terribly unsettling, and I want to get far, far away from them. I continue west; the land is amazingly flat and barren. Occasionally I’ll pass by what once was a forest, reduced to ash and charred twigs. We’ve had wildfire scares in the mountains before, but our cabin has remained safe all these years. In the southwest, it would appear, they were not so lucky.

Finally, suddenly, the landscape changes: from mountains to a vast, dazzlingly blue plane. It is the Pacific Ocean, in southern California, according to Pink’s guidebook. About 60 miles north of here, allegedly, is a thriving city, but first I want to see the ocean. I don't know how to swim; I've never really encountered more water than a creek. Instead I stand, burying my toes in the sand, and let the salt water wash over my ankles. The air smells fishy, and there is a persistent wind that blows my hair in my face. I don't really like it that much, which I guess is a good thing because Mars has no oceans, yet.

I nap in the sand, the sun warming my skin. I'm several days ahead of schedule, and I'm exhausted. The last stretch to the city feels insurmountable, but eventually I force myself to my feet, sand sticking and itchy, and trudge through the sand back to my truck.

I drive past another swarm, attached like a tumor to the trunk of a palm tree, and I have to stop. So these are west coast bees, unique in their ways, their own cocktail of nectar and pollen; but they, too, have that rancid, decaying stench, and I flee. There is something very wrong with the bees out here. I once spent weeks in a hospital after a kid unwittingly sneezed in my face; what if I bring this plague back to my bees?

I know that the mythical city is real well before I see any people, because I am suddenly no longer the only car on the road. Aside from the occasional long-haul trucks that probably keep the military bases fed, the roads have been nearly abandoned; rusted cars left behind on the shoulders of highways. I often wonder how many people died on the road during the attack, stuck in traffic or waiting for a bus. Now, for the first time in my life, I drive past a gas station that is open; in Colorado, the only place to fuel up is behind military fences. Then another first: a grocery store, centered in a strip mall that is at least half occupied. I almost wish I had cash; I doubt anyone here takes honey as payment. Now that I'm here, I'm not sure what exactly I'm supposed to do. There were rumors of the internet, yes, but where would I go to access it?

I follow Pink's atlas to something more familiar: a large flea market on the outskirts of town. Here they definitely do take honey, and it is valuable. One woman piles several loaves of bread in my arms in exchange for a jar; a farmer's stall nearby offers more fruits and vegetables than I can carry. I am even able to trade several jars for currency, although I don't know exactly how much it is; hopefully enough to get me on the internet, wherever that is.

I park my truck by a sandy beach. It is warm, even at night, and I spread out my blanket in the truck bed to sleep under the stars. The electric city lights wash out the Milky Way, and I feel strangely lonely without all those stars and galaxies. I dream of the bees as stars, the sun a vast comb dripping with golden rays of honey.

Chapter 22

The city makes me anxious; I don't think I've ever seen so many people in my life. The roads are chaotic, so I park far away from the city center and walk. There is a peculiar, artificial feel to everything. The houses are made of plastic, not wood; the food is processed and packaged and artificially sweetened. This is the life my mom lived once, before the attack, before the collapse. Before I was born. She has always seemed to fit into our world so neatly. She kept us alive, the chickens and goats alive, the bees alive. She called the bees survivors and so is she; they rescued each other, though she has never told me how.

The city center consists of several blocks of actual indoor shops, the streets between them lined with a vendor's market. The noise is insane, like an overcrowded hive. It is there I learn about an internet cafe owned by "some Chinese guy, but the coffee is shit" from a woman sitting behind a table laid out with toiletries and over-the-counter medication. It is on the other side of the market, naturally, and I have to press through the crowds to get there. I have more than enough money for a bagel and a few hours of internet at one of the bizarre translucent computers.

The place is nearly empty and I'm glad there is no one to watch me struggle with the new technology. The only other computer I've ever seen is the one that runs the telescope in the observatory, and that thing was outdated tech well before it was abandoned. I figure out there's a place to search, and I painstakingly type out "free trips to Mars," which takes me to a page of links; none of which are actually free. If a jar of honey is worth $80, and the bagel and an hour of internet worth $20, how many jars of honey would it take to commission a shuttle? The travel agencies list prices several thousand times what I have in my pocket, and all of them are in some foreign currency.

Something makes me decide to search Xiao Lan's name; probably the fact that I am still infuriated by him. At first there is little I didn't already know: son of a real estate titan in Shanghai; super rich; engineer and shuttle pilot. The next link takes me to a news article from a couple years ago: he has invested in properties in and around this very town as a charitable stimulus. I wonder if the city let him meet its bees.

I'm compelled to search again, this time about those strange, sickly bees I've stumbled across. A lot of the links are decades old information that I've even written myself, back when I was learning how to write in my Encyclopedia of Nature and Humanity. Plenty of ailments have been afflicting hives for centuries. Varroa destructor, a parasitic mite that feeds on the hemolymph of larvae and carries diseases that kill the adults. Foulbrood, a bacteria that turns larvae into gross, necrotizing goo. Giant hornets, which would enter hives and systematically destroy every single occupant, their thick exoskeletons immune to stings. None of these are problems I've witnessed firsthand, but read about in books or from mom and grandpa. My hives are healthy and clean; I'd never even seen sick bees until those swarms. The foul odor of the bees I saw suggests something like foulbrood, but it is affecting adults in a swarm, not the brood.

More people are filtering into the cafe, and I suddenly feel claustrophobic. As I make my exit I notice a small sign near the doors; it is a photograph of Xiao Lan, declaring this one of his generous gifts. Apparently I can't get away from him. The plaque feels kind of gross, like propaganda, and I wonder if my personal biases might be impacting my opinion of him. But really, who thinks it's a good idea to enclose themselves in an airtight tin can hurtling through space with a thousand somethings that could kill you with a single sting?

When I go back through the market I realize there's something I haven't seen at all since I got here, and that is a uniform of any type. The military has such a severe presence in Colorado, even around the flea market. I was never quite sure if their purpose was to keep us in or the bad guys out. Pink used to participate in riots during the long nights, early on after the attack; before the solar shield was effective. What started out as demands for food, shelter, and safety were escalated by the newly militarized police with tear gas, stun batons, and firearms. This justified a mass exodus of the wealthy from the cities, the expanding of the safe and protected military base. Everyone else was left to fend for themselves. Here there is no sign of police force, or even security, and their absence makes me strangely anxious. For all that I have grown accustomed to the abuse and neglect inflicted on us by the failing government, I have apparently grown attached to that illusion of security; that minute grain of attention, albeit negative, that they have deigned to give me.

It takes me too long to find my truck again. The streets are nearly identical, and I didn’t think to check which street I parked in. I can hear the ocean as I wander, which is strange, like the buzzing of bees but deeper, fathomless. Most of the houses near the market are occupied, which is also bizarre to me: kids running in their yards, parents watching them tentatively from the porch, or else out in the yard with them, playing together. I don’t think I’ve ever played with another person in my life. I spent most of my childhood alone. When Pink was off on one of her adventures, and mom was busy keeping us all alive, I ran through the woods with an old donkey and the dog named Chalk. And the bees.

There is a small apiary in the backyard of one of the less maintained houses; just three hives, each three boxes tall. I don’t think anyone lives here - a window is broken, uncovered, and the yard is chaotically overgrown. I have to go investigate, even though there’s no reason bees would stay there. A Langstroth hive may be a good, accessible substitute for a hive, but it’s hardly prime real estate in the bee world. So I’m surprised when there is activity around one of the hive entrances. The honey bee foragers are constantly leaving and returning, the never ending flow of take offs and landings inevitably leading to mid-air collisions that they have learned to brush off.

As soon as I open the hive, I can sense something is wrong. The foul odor hangs in the air, so subtle I almost don’t notice it. The top frames look normal: plenty of capped honey stores, pollen and bee bread. Underneath is a brood box, where I remove each frame one by one and examine it for a queen. There is larva, and some eggs, but the laying pattern is sporadic. Some cells have more than one egg, and I wonder if this hive even has a queen, or if the workers are laying.

I do finally find the queen, and it is immediately obvious she is not well. She is covered in some sort of white fuzz, like mold, and although she is still alive she moves with spastic, jerking motions. I feel queasy watching her, like I, too, could get infected by whatever ails her. I quickly return the frames and put the hive back together. I was so focused on my work, I failed to notice the car pulling up in front of the house. I hop back over the fence and almost immediately run into a familiar face: Xiao Lan.

“Are you following me?” I blurt, accusatory even though I’m the one trespassing.

“This is my house,” he responds. If he is surprised to see me here, he does not show it. “The entire block is mine, actually.”

For someone who hadn’t even heard of money until she was a teen, it’s hard for me to fathom owning an entire block of houses. Xiao Lan, however, probably grew up with a different house for each month of the year. What I would have given, some winters, to be able to move away from our drafty little cabin. The solar panels that cut out if the snow got too thick, which was pretty much every other day. The well pump that freezes at least once a year. Trudging through knee deep snow to feed the ungrateful goats and chickens, harvesting from the hydroponics in the artificially tropical greenhouse. I loved my childhood, but it wasn’t easy. Not like this guy had it.

Lan goes on to explain that he is fixing up the houses and practically giving them away to people who need them, to help rebuild the economy. Just like he did with the marketplace and the internet cafe. No one is this charitable.

“Could I have one?” I ask.

He’s smirking, mocking me. “I thought you were moving to Mars.”

“Not if I can’t find a pilot.” I remember why I’m mad at him, not just because he is over-privileged but also because he wasted my time, pretending to take on a job that he must have known he would never be able to complete.

He looks over the fence to the apiary I’d just invaded, asks what I was doing. The bees are sick, I explain, and I don’t know why. His smirk drops and he nods, as if this isn’t news at all. “Yes, it is a problem in China, too. It is a fungus.” I wonder yet again why he is so invested in the bees, why he wants to see mine even though they could kill him. We stand awkwardly outside Lan’s investment for a moment. If you combine it with our previous encounter, this is definitely the longest conversation I’ve had with another person, besides my family. Finally, he asks what I am doing in the city.

“Looking for a pilot,” I reply, then, “Also, following rumors. This place is nothing like the cities in Colorado.” He would know, since he is also investing in properties outside the military bases in Colorado Springs. He’s got some sort of white knight savior complex, but I doubt one man is going to be able to undo all the years of damage and neglect from the US government; even the son of the richest person in Shanghai.

Finally, Lan offers me a ride back to my truck, which is conveniently parked in front of another house he owns. The drive is short, and he doesn’t ask about my bees, or our conversation at the observatory; just talks pleasantly about his childhood in Shanghai. I’ve made a lot of assumptions about him, and Pink would tell me that I needed to keep an open mind. He is not an evil person, despite what money always does to people in books, and he is also formidably intelligent - he did design his own space shuttle, after all, when he probably could have just purchased one.

He pulls to a stop across the street from my truck, then says, “I hope to see you again soon, Melissa, Queen of the Bees.” I realize only then that he is not mocking me at all.

Chapter 23

I have to spend the rest of the trip looking for bees. The foul fungus that is killing swarms is a terrifying prospect, and every single hive I’ve seen since leaving mine has been infected. Does that mean it’s inevitable my bees will get it?

I follow Pink’s guidebook for the route home but backwards, taking every opportunity to park my truck at the stops I’d driven past earlier. I walk around forests, deserts, and plains in search of bees. I find several swarms, about half of which are clearly infected, which is not good news for me. One of the swarms is low to the ground, and I crouch down and carefully pick my way through the dying bees. At the center: a queen, barely a husk of an exoskeleton. Long, skinny mushrooms protrude from her head. So it is a fungus, as Xiao Lan suggested. I remember an entry to my Encyclopedia about a zombie ant fungus; I was excited to have another “Z,” so I can’t remember the name of the fungus, although I’m sure I wrote it down. It infests the brains of ants, compelling them to climb as high as possible so the wind can pick up its spores and spread. I want to close my fist around her, squeeze, put the queen out of her misery, but I doing so would enrage the swarm. Their only job right now is to protect her.

I’m a day early still when I reach Colorado, so I decide to take another detour to the observatory. I didn’t get a chance to send grandpa a message last time, and I need him to know not to expect me on the red planet any time soon. I also tell him about the strange fungus that is infecting hives. There is no answer, but I don’t know if I expected one. I spend the night in the observatory, staring at the stars through the cracks in the long-broken retractable roof.

*      *      *

There’s a traffic stop on the road: a single military car with flashing lights. There has never been a traffic stop here before; there has never been anyone out here besides us, until today.

It can’t be a coincidence; I’m pretty sure I’ve been set up. Somehow, Xiao Lan followed me to the coast, and he probably followed me here, too. The uniform who taps on my window waits patiently as I crank the squeaky window open. “License and registration, please,” he says. I know what those words mean, individually, but I can’t get a license without a birth certificate, and I highly doubt Pink has ever bothered registering the truck.

I’m not supposed to be at this observatory, or anywhere near this ghost town I gather, as I am handcuffed and made to sit in an armored car. I sit on the sticky hard plastic seats, baking under the sunlight, as he searches the truck. Finally, the uniform climbs into the driver seat and turns the ignition, and a fan blows an icy breeze into the enclosed space. He turns in his seat to face me, asks what I was doing here.

“Just exploring,” I promise. “I turned down a wrong road, I think.”

“It’s a felony to trespass on military property, you know.”

“Military?” Since when?

“Bold of you to trespass on military property,” he drawls, “without any sort of identification, in a truck with no registration."

I assure him the truck isn’t stolen, voice pleading, but he just laughs and turns back to the wheel. “We’ll figure out who you are eventually, don’t worry,” he promises. The drive is nearly two hours, through half a dozen armed gates to an enormous detention center. They make me take off my shoes and pad through the damp, dimly lit hallways in my socks.

I’m left in a concrete cell, heavy bars for a door and magnetic locks. The lights above flicker and hum, revealing a metal cot, bolted to the ground, and a steel toilet. I'm shivering, and the blanket over the cot is too thin to provide any sort of insulation. It’s impossible to know how long I’ve been here when the door opens with a clunk, and I’m locked in handcuffs again, escorted to a different concrete room with metal chairs and table bolted to the floor, an enormous mirror on one wall.

I'm left alone again, chained to an uncomfortable metal chair for a long time, then there is a quick knock knock knock, and the man who arrested me enters. I realize I have seen this person before: I watched from the shadows as he knocked on our front door with the same three sharp raps. Mom never told me who he was, or why she was crying when he left, but a few days later I had to hide again when his entire family returned. They gave me the flu, and I spent weeks in the hospital hallucinating through fitful fever dreams of bees. The hospital was a glimpse of how the other side lives, on the military bases; I was relieved when they finally declared me healthy enough to return home.

Now he's wearing a name tag that identifies him as Sgt. Jack Collins, and I try to remember if he had been wearing it before. No, definitely not; he didn't even identify himself as he arrested me, but what was I supposed to do, defy him and his rifle? He sits in front of me, hands clasped on the table, and stares me down. Up close, he is older than I thought, light blue eyes etched by thin wrinkles. He gives me an appraising look, as though trying to recognize my face. I hadn’t fully understood mom’s urgency when she told me to stay hidden in the trees during his family’s visit; she’d said they would make us move. Now I am glad he didn’t see me, does not know my face.

He asks me my name: “Melissa Thomson.” Age: “Eighteen.” Where am I from? I hesitate, then name the city where mom took me to the hospital all those years ago. He asks why I was trespassing on federal property (I didn’t know), why I have no identification (I don’t have any). That makes his eyes sparkle; he starts asking about how I got here, how old was I, did I climb a fence or cross through the desert? My blank face doesn’t seem to deter him, but I have no idea how to answer these questions. I’ve always lived here. I drove here from the mountains. There were no deserts, no fences.

I’m saved by another knock of the door. Sgt. Jack Collins stands, talks to someone outside, then glares at me and leaves. A few minutes later a new uniform enters, accompanied by a woman with a briefcase. “Miss Thomson?” she queries, and I nod. “I’m Ami Garrett, I’ve been sent by my client to represent you.” She speaks quickly, and before I know what’s happening the uniform has removed my handcuffs and she is leading me out of the detention center, her shoes echoing through the deep hallways.

It is dark when we emerge and the Milky Way is a bright splash in the sky. How long it has been since I was arrested, I have no idea, but I can imagine mom is already panicking even if I am only a few hours late. Pink, too, but she would be playing devil’s advocate to each of mom’s worries. Ami Garrett walks me to my truck, parked in front of the building alongside a small car that I assume is hers. I don’t know exactly what to say, so I try to thank her.

“Miss Thomson,” she says abruptly, her voice crisp, “there is no need to thank me. I am here on behalf of my client, Mr. Xiao. I understand you two are acquaintances?”

I nod again, but I only understand about half of what is going on right now. I’ve read plenty of books about police and attorneys and investigations, but experiencing it firsthand is surreal and unnerving. Did Xiao Lan really have me arrested just so he could swoop in and rescue me? Worse, so he could have his lawyer rescue me on his behalf? She places her briefcase on the trunk of her car and pulls out a stack of papers and a yellow, padded envelope. Inside, I find a driver’s license and passport, each with my name. The photographs inside are my face, but they are not me; the hair is too short, the eyes too solemn. They are convincing fakes, and all of the information is correct, except the location of birth. Apparently, I’m now a citizen of Germany.

Ami Garrett waves the stack of papers at me, explaining, “This is a waiver that will absolve you of liability should any harm come to Mr. Xiao on your property as a result of his allergy to honey bee apitoxin.” She shoves the papers into my hands along with a pen. “He kindly requests that you permit him to visit your apiary one week from today.” She watches impatiently as I try to scan through the waiver, then points to where I’m supposed to sign or initial. I’ve signed all of the papers before I realize I could have, should have refused. What exactly have I signed myself up for?

Chapter 24

If anything, Xiao Lan and his bright red electric sports car look even more out of place in front of what I now see is a rather old, worn cabin. To his credit, he is polite, greeting mom and Pink with nothing but compliments and good will. I wonder when the last time there has been a guest at this house. Aside from that brief visit by Sgt. Jack Collins and his family, I don’t remember anyone here besides us. Lan nods politely as he tours the tiny cabin, our garden and greenhouse. I point out the root cellar but don’t take him down the concrete steps; that place has always been super creepy to me.

Before going to the apiary, I insist Lan put on my mom’s old bee suit and confirm he has his epinephrine ready. I remind him a dozen times what a terrible idea this is; part of me is screaming the same words at myself. I lied to my parents for the first time ever when I finally got home, hiding my exhausted dishevelment. I left out the part about being arrested entirely, instead telling the half truth that one of the astronauts on Mars had a cousin currently in the US who was interested in beekeeping. Grandpa set us up for a meeting in the city; I invited him out to our apiary next week. I don’t know how much of it they believed; Pink’s skeptical look sharpened when she saw the alleged friend and his sports car. It was only sort of a lie, but I also left out the part about his allergy, which makes me feel the worst. I am putting my parents at risk, regardless of whatever waivers I’ve signed.

I hold my breath as I rest my hand on the outer cover of the first hive. I can feel the bees buzzing calmly beneath, the energy warm on my fingers. I have to remind myself I’m not alone this time - I have to talk out loud as I explain the bees to Lan. “This is the oldest hive,” I tell him, “the original.” All of the other hives are descended from this one. As I talk I use my hive tool to pry open the inner cover, which has been glued to the hive box by sticky propolis. The bees underneath scatter; some take off and fly towards Lan’s face, but he does not react behind the veil.

I pull out the frames and show him the bees’ honey and pollen stores; I tell him about bee bread they make to feed their larva. I show him the eggs, different stages of larva, and pupa; the difference between the workers, drones, and the queen. When I find the queen he gently takes the frame in his gloved hands so he can watch her, face shadowed so I can’t see his expression. Bees fly looping circles around him and my heart is racing; then he hands the frame back, and I return the queen to her hive. My muscles are tense and the bees can sense it, so I move slowly, making sure not to crush any between the heavy hive boxes.

I don’t relax until Xiao Lan is safely away from the apiary and the bees that could kill him with a single sting. It is a miracle, and I am insanely lucky and relieved it is over. As I walk him back to his car, he gives me an enormous smile, then says, “I see you truly are the queen of the bees.”

It still kind of feels like he is mocking me. He will return in a few weeks with a trailer we can drag behind the ancient silver truck. At the end of fall, shortly after the first frost, I will pack up the bees into the trailer at night, when the bees are in their clusters. We will drive to Xiao Lan's home, where he will have a refrigerated shipping container ready. His driver will transport them to an unnamed location in Nevada, where he has authorization to launch on the winter solstice. I will have to cut my hair to match the passport; I confess I don’t know any German, but Lan assures me he has it all figured out.

My parents are waiting in the kitchen to interrogate me as soon as I get back inside. Apparently it is not, in fact, perfectly normal for someone to fly from China to the US, which has all but closed its borders to international travel, just so they can visit an apiary owned by their interplanetary cousin’s coworker’s granddaughter.

The original plan was to have grandpa introduce the idea of my going to Mars on our solstice trip to the observatory, but I realize now that the trip won’t happen. I can’t even explain why it can’t happen without also confessing my lies, so I spill. Mom gets paler and Pink’s jaw clenches tighter and tighter as I offer the plan: grandpa’s arrangement, meeting Lan, the arrest, the detention center. Both of their faces blanch when I tell them about the prison cell I was held in. I decide to keep the name of the uniform who arrested me to myself; if they’re hiding something from me, I should be able to hide something from them. This makes it the second time I’ve lied to them in my entire life, and it’s starting to feel like a rather slippery slope.

I’ve never really been in trouble before, because there wasn’t a whole lot of trouble to get into, but their disappointment stings. It is obvious that grandpa and I have been going behind their backs for a long time to get this ready for me to leave the planet, so what can they do, ground me? Mom shakes her head sadly before retreating upstairs; Pink has a few more choice words about my deception before she follows. Then I’m alone in the kitchen, the weight of my lies heavy on my chest, suffocating.

On the first day of summer, we can’t all go to the observatory, unless we all want to get arrested for trespassing, and I feel at least partially to blame. That night, I look out the window and see mom sitting in the yard outside, staring at stars she cannot see. She doesn’t startle when I sit down next to her, doesn’t move away when I lean my head against her shoulder. We sit together for a few minutes, then out of the blue she speaks. “I was only 16 when your grandfather announced he was going to Mars.”

When I don’t respond, she continues, “I felt so betrayed.” I’d heard the story before: He had to go out of his way to get an exception to the childfree requirement; had to justify abandoning his daughter. Mom left the home and never went back. The distance between them has smoothed the rough edges of resentment, but the lack of depth in their transmissions betrays the reality of their relationship. I don’t think I’ve ever heard mom tell him about anything except the farm, the goats, me, the ancient donkey Eeyore. Often she wouldn’t even wait for a reply to her only broadcast before disappearing for the rest of our time at the observatory.

I swallow, blurt: “Who is Jack Collins?” I immediately regret it, but it’s too late. Her face looks both shocked and perturbed. Instead of answering, she asks how I know him, and I have to explain that I recognized him from the way he knocks on doors. She almost laughs before it chokes off, and she rubs her face with both hands like she’s trying to erase herself. She’s never talked about my dad; rarely even about her pregnancy, my birth, my early life. One year I asked grandpa if he knew my dad, and his response, half an hour later, was the harshest I’d ever heard from his voice. It wasn’t his answer to give, he scolded, and under no circumstances was I allowed to ask him again.

At the time, I thought he was angry at me; now I realize the catch in his voice was sorrow, the anger not directed at me but the man who was my father. There, under the Milky Way on the summer solstice, my mom tells me everything. Her words stir an angry buzzing inside of me. With each violent image, a little piece of me dissolves into the hot, summer air.

Chapter 25

The smell comes at dawn, drifting in the dew-soaked air, too subtle at first to fully wake me. Then all at once I am ripped out of my dreams with the horrifying realization: smoke. Something is on fire.

Fires are an existential terror when you live in a wooden house, surrounded by dry grass and trees that have weathered a drought nearly my entire life. It is only in the past couple years that we have gotten regular rain; now the ground is saturated with it, sloshing under your feet some mornings. Mom was always vigilant about any flames. She even refused to use a smoker when taking care of the bees, not that I ever needed one. We swept the ashes out of the fireplace daily; cleaned out the chimney twice a year. The barn was unheated, which always made me feel bad for the animals, but she insisted it was necessary. Hay is too highly flammable to be safe around any sources of heat.

I’m out of bed and at the window before I’ve really registered what’s going on, and I spot a sleek black car parked on the gravel road, just far enough away from our cabin to be nearly invisible in the sapphire shades of nautical twilight. A hundred feet away the barn is glowing, licked with orange flames that are growing rapidly. The door slams open below just as I reach the stairs; mom and Pink are outside before I have a chance to think, to stop them, and they run straight into Sgt. Jack Collins. He is no more than a silhouetted figure on our lawn. I freeze at the door; Pink has my mother’s arm, holding her back. She cannot see that he is holding a uniform-issued rifle, casually, like the barn behind him isn’t ablaze.

The animals inside scream, their cries deafening over the crackling flames. My stomach clenches painfully at Eeyore's cries. Pink had "rescued" the sway-backed, emaciated mule from a field near Boulder when I was 3, and he seemed so ancient even then with his muzzle flecked with grey whiskers. He towered over me, chewing on grass and staring down with red rimmed eyes. I loved him immediately, and he accepted my love because my hands were always sticky with sweet honey, which he would patiently to lick off with his thick, rubbery tongue. He let me ride him, growing stronger as I grew bigger; he learned to accept the bees flying around his ears, and he never suffered any stings. The rare times my hives swarmed, I would ride on his back through the woods, both of us following the sweet scent of pollen in the air. From the barn his cries become scratching, coughing wheezes, and eventually subside. I want to cover my ears and hide; I want to race into the barn and rescue the animals. But Jack has a rifle trained on my parents, and I am frozen in place.

“Hey there, Hattie,” Jack says coolly. My mom is staring past him, at the barn, with teary eyes; even she can see the tower of flames, and we can all hear the anguished animals inside. “Melissa! How great of you to join us.” He’d said he would find me, and he was correct. We are made to kneel in the damp grass, in front of his rifle. Pacing in front of us, he details tracking us down: my name led him to the military hospital on his own base, where I’d been checked in by his sister-in-law mere weeks after my mother solemnly informed him I’d been stillborn. Apparently hiding his missing brother’s daughter from him was a big red flag.

The barn is still burning, but the cries have subsided. The flames are licking up through the roof, smoke thick in the morning air, and I’m worried about the fire spreading to the grass, the trees, the cabin. Mom bows her head, defiantly still as he waves his gun at her, demanding to know where his brother, my dad, her captor and rapist is. “What did you do to him?” he screams, but she just sobs.

Suddenly, Pink steps forward. “We buried him,” she confesses. “I can show you where.” Now Jack is smiling, waving the gun at us to move, dragging mom to her feet when she doesn’t stand. Pink trudges away from the burning barn, and we are made to follow. She stops outside the greenhouse, near the apiary. “He’s right here,” she says, indicating an empty spot of grass near the treeline. I have no idea what she’s doing; mom is still staring absently at the burning barn.

There is a shovel in the greenhouse, and Jack waits impatiently as Pink digs into the earth, alternately pointing his rifle at one of the three of us. The sun rises behind damp clouds, and I watch the flames start to choke out. The grass is too wet to catch and the trees are resisting the flames as well. Nearby, I notice one of my hives is bearding: bees are pouring out of every entrance, clumping together in a great black mass. It is a sign of overcrowding. They are nearly ready to swarm; they take off in front of me, slowly at first then all at once, circling the apiary once before following their queen to a branch nearby. I slowly bend my knees, pick up a rock from the ground. Sgt Jack Collins does not notice; he is too engrossed in Pink’s digging. She has dug a fairly small hole straight down several feet, as though she knows exactly where to look, and I am shocked when she announces she’s done. Moreso when I see what her digging has revealed: the skeletal remains of a foot. Mom told me, that night under the stars, that they had buried my dad in grandpa’s backyard, not here.

“Big mistake,” Jack says, pointing the gun at Pink again. Simultaneously, I chuck the rock at the swarm overhead, and Pink swings the shovel, still in her hands, at Jack’s head. The bees immediately react to the disruption, flying off the branch in a raging cloud towards Jack as he swivels and falls to the ground. Then we are all three running, away from Jack, away from the bees, towards the flames and the blackened remains of the barn. The smoke keeps the bees away, or else I do, and Jack is motionless on the ground. The flames are losing fuel in the skeleton of the barn.

Mom hands me the garden hose and works the hand pump; it is a well, here since long before we arrived. The trickle of water hisses angrily off the skeleton of the barn as I move the stream back and forth through smoke. Eventually, the fire is reduced to smoldering coals, dampened enough that we no longer have to worry about it spreading. Mom looks around, rubbing her aching arms, eyes searching but there’s no way she could see what she is searching for. I wordlessly point her towards Pink, who is finishing up with another secret grave. Despite everything, despite the adrenaline now filtering out of my blood, I can admire her stoic practicality, silently working alone to solve a different disaster. My entire life tracing the path between the greenhouse and my apiary, oblivious to the fact that I was trampling over a dead body, and whose body is it anyway? Mom reaches the end of the yard, pulls Pink into an embrace, and Pink seems to collapse into her arms. I often picture my parents as a hive mind, sharing thoughts as intimately as the bees; now I feel like an intruder. I turn to give them their moment, but it is a mistake. Behind me is the barn, that smell, that acrid smoke and dry heat. All of the animals are dead, bodies charred beyond recognition. My eyes water from the smoke, and from tears, as I survey the damage.

I don’t notice Pink's approach until she is right next to me, her calloused hand grasping mine; I start, jerk around to take in my surroundings. Mom is still across the yard, dropping heavy, wet shovelfuls of dirt into a hole. The body has vanished, returning to the Earth. I wonder which one of us killed Jack Collins, or if we are both to blame. I think about his family, the kids I watched as I hid from them in the woods, so many years ago. They would be grown now, too, their lives on the base so indescribably different from my own.

“The body was my ex,” she says suddenly. Pink’s voice is a shock. She has not often spoken to me through all these years, although her silent presence has always felt comfortable and companionable. I’ve come to know her by her hushed, whispered conversations with my mother. “Your ‘ma killed him to escape.” Her Irish accent always surprises me. I have not heard many accents before; I have not heard many people talk, to be perfectly honest. Now she tells the part mom left out: the bees, mom’s escape, the innocent casualty. How she found her ex, Alex, that evening. His body was swollen with bee stings and nearly naked, but she was more horrified by the gruesome scene she found around him: the blood and mess from my birth, the dried out bodies hanging from the raptors. My stomach drops as she describes it; the animals were the same species as the stuffed animals I have known and loved since I was young. Pink had to bury her boyfriend alone; she had no knowledge that mom was so close, hiding with me tucked to her chest, making our escape from the house.

I am suddenly terribly exhausted; we all are, and I’m not entirely clear what time of day it is, or how long we have been out here. Whatever remains of swarm is long gone; I will never be able to track them down again. It’s probably for the better, since I’m going to have to shrink the hives down to the bare minimum in the fall. We will be able to rebuild the barn, probably track down some new animals, but I don’t want to. I don’t want my parents to have to. They don’t deserve this, after everything they’ve done; everything they’ve lost just to make sure I survive.

Chapter 26

The concern on Xiao Lan’s face is evident even as he is driving up the gravel road, pulling a trailer behind an electric truck. The ashy remains of our barn have collapsed, and we have not rebuilt it. Three of my hives have swarmed since the fire, and I worry that the smoke scared them off. The workers they left behind scrambled to raise a new queen, but only one hive was successful. The rest are empty, honey scavenged by their neighbors.

I don't tell Lan the details why, but my parents need to get away from this cabin. Mom is wandering in a blind daze; Pink is tense, edgy, a caged bird ready to take flight. I want to give them a new life; something more like their old life. He nods enthusiastically; he has the perfect place for them. He leaves me an address, detailed directions to a small cottage on the west coast. The hard part is convincing mom to leave this place. I hope that the change in scenery is freeing, that she will finally be able to cut the chains to this cabin and all it implies.

We pack up the few belongings they decide to keep in the truck, Pink and I trading off driving for over 24 hours straight as mom curls in the passenger seat, shrinking like the mountains in the distance. The cottage is furnished, a neat wildflower yard and rock pathway to the beach. I spend the rest of the summer there, my first ever vacation. Mom opens up and Pink relaxes during morning trips to the market and warm evenings under the brilliant ocean sunset. By fall I am confident that they will be okay here, even after I've left the planet.

Xiao Lan visits on my last day there; we are indebted to him, but he waves off our gratitude. I am no longer skeptical of his philanthropy. He has done too much for me to believe he could have ulterior motives, some hidden agenda. Mom makes dinner, then we all retreat to the beach. It is windy, and the evening sun glows a brilliant red as it sinks below the sea.

I return to the cabin alone, lonely. The burn scar of a barn ensures I will never view it as home again; I still hear the animals screaming in my dreams. The cold creeps in slowly in late October, but the night's icy glaze quickly melts in the morning sun, even as the air stays cool. The day after the first frost, the honey bees kick out their haploid brothers, and I reduce the number of boxes in their hives to the bare minimum: one brood box, two full honey supers each. There will be just enough honey to survive the pseudo winter, just enough workers to sustain the queen and revitalize the hive on Mars.

Under the light of the moon on the first day of December, I drive the truck through the soft dusting of snow on our yard to the apiary. I gently wrap each hive in wire netting, locking the clustered bees inside. They are sleeping, nearly hibernating, and don't react to my disruption. I strap the boxes together and despite their heavy, awkward shapes I load them carefully onto a trailer. The icy mountain roads look different in the dark; I drive cautiously for the heavy trailer behind me and its fragile contents.

The refrigerated cargo container looks comically out of place sitting in the suburbs of Colorado Springs. It is a small house, another of Lan's investments; near enough to the base to receive its benefits: power, running water, grocery stores. The neighborhood is slowly refilling, but the remaining empty houses are frustratingly out of reach for the less privileged few. The homeless have no choice but to remain in the city, even as it hunts them down. Lan’s reinvestment efforts can’t reach here, so far from the coast. Here we are isolated on one side by a mountain range, on the other by a toxic wasteland. We need self-sufficiency, self-sustenance, but as long as the military bases continue to selfishly hoard their resources we will never be able to reach that point. So I’m leaving, when so many will never have a chance.

Lan insists on helping me load the bees into the chilly, cramped space. I do not object; I trust the bees, and he trusts me. By the end of the day the container has disappeared, ostensibly on its way to that undisclosed location in Nevada. The wait for launch is excruciating; being away from my bees, no knowing where they are or how they are doing, is physically exhausting. I wonder if this is how grandpa felt when he left mom on Earth; I wonder if this is how mom feels now that I am leaving her.

I stay in Xiao Lan’s guest room, which is actually just a normal room that rarely gets used, for the few weeks before we are scheduled to launch. Life in the suburbs is uncomfortably impersonal, yet there is no real privacy. Lan introduces me to coffee, which is bitter and makes my nose crinkle until he's packed it with enough sugar to drown out the taste entirely. He takes me to a grocery store on the military base, which overwhelms all of my senses. Another day is spent at a clothing store; my hand sewn clothes might have been appropriate for a farm, but not a shuttle or the Mars biodomes. I am measured for form-fitting flight suits. They are all sleek, shiny fabric, synthetic and antibacterial and self-deodorizing for comfort. Afterwards, a barber, so my hair matches my passport. Unlike the grocery store, these places are alarmingly personal, with so many people in my face, asking questions. Fortunately I have been instructed not to speak; I just smile and nod and pretend not to understand. Lan teaches me some German greetings, but my accent is so terrible we decide I am better off mute.

Finally, on the shortest day of the year, we pile our stuff into a large, comfortable van driven by a computer that I believe Lan has placed far too much faith in. It is nothing like the enormous, ancient controller in the observatory, with its complicated language and tendency to overheat. The car's computer is sleek, black, touchscreen, and it talks; Lan gives it the destination and it immediately begins calculating the best route. We are stopped occasionally at security checkpoints with armed guards. Each time Lan passes the uniform our documents, referring to me with a wink as his future wife. The soldiers make jokes about me when they think I don't understand them. They think I'm being trafficked. Worse, they totally support it.

The launchpad is located on an army base in the middle of the desert. A guard stamps our passports without looking at my face; another drives us out to Lan's shuttle. I make everyone wait while I check on the bees in their clusters before the cargo container is loaded onto the shuttle. If they can’t make it halfway across the country how could I possibly expect them to make it to Mars? Up close, the shuttle is alarmingly huge, but most of it is a foldable spread of armatures, each lined with super-high-efficiency solar panels. It is far more cramped inside. There is a cockpit, with seats for two; a kitchen and recreation area; a pair tiny, windowless quarters. We have to climb through the living space like a ladder; everything is oriented vertically for launch. The equipment state of the art - life support, waste recycling, his patented solar ion engine. Xiao Lan doesn't skimp on his shuttle.

My fitted flight suit attaches seamlessly with the helmet, the seats are roomy and secure, but I feel claustrophobic and I think of the bees in that tiny box below. The impending launch is filling me with anxiety, so I focus on Lan, the buttons he presses, the checks and confirmations and readings. I've always admired bees for their flight; I used to imagine I was flying among them, seeing the world through their eyes, their antenna. This is nothing the same, barreling away from Earth in a tin can that probably has a thousand reasons to explode. There is a countdown, vibration that is sure to affect the bees, and so much noise I can't think. Lan has the controls; he expertly presses the right sequence of buttons, pulls the right levers and suddenly I am pressed against the seat as the shuttle violently shoots upward. The pressure makes my vision swim, then I feel dizzy and nauseated. Everything seems to be moving slowly, even though I know we are accelerating at a supernatural rate.

The sky changes from blue to grey when we pass through clouds; they are wet, not fluffy, and they tower thousands of feet high above the Earth. There is an excruciating pressure in my ears that builds and builds as we ascend; then a wet, squelching explosion, resonating in my head, and the pain drops to a dull hum. We are still accelerating, and my heart is racing, and I am breathing quickly. Too quickly. I roll my head over to Xiao Lan, who is focused intently on the controls. I need to say something, but my vision swims; then everything is black.

I'm not the first person to pass out during launch, and Xiao Lan looks utterly unconcerned when I regain consciousness a few minutes later, a brutal headache forming behind my eyes. "The helmet is providing oxygen, just relax and enjoy the ride," he shouts. The cacophony gradually subsides and Lan's shoulders relax as he switches from manual controls to autopilot. I try to mimic his movements in unbuckling the complicated copilot's seat, but my arms feel leaden, clumsy, and I sit helplessly as he unbuckles me. His practiced grace makes functioning in the low gravity environment look infinitely easier than it is, and when my stomach churns I think about the bees, how they will deal with the collective nausea of this trip.

Lan half leads, half carries me to the rec room; it is quieter here than in the cockpit, less chaotic. He lifts my helmet, and I am disappointed not to feel a fresh breeze; just more of the stale, recycling air. Sounds are hollow and my ear feels wet; my fingers come back bloody when I touch it. The absurdity of everything hits me: I’m on a spaceship with half a dozen beehives and Xiao Lan, son of one of the richest men in Shanghai, who happens to be deathly allergic to bee stings. We’re travelling faster than any natural creature should ever be able to move to get to a planet that has been dead for billions of years, occupied for only a couple decades. I giggle, which turns into a laugh, manic and exhausting; Lan looks at me as though I’ve gone mad, which I almost certainly have.

When I can breathe again, Lan offers a more in-depth tour of his shuttle. He shows me how to move without gravity; the straps and handles and footholds that he navigates smoothly and effortlessly. He demonstrates the rec room: a complicated looking exercise machine, resistance bands, a large interactive screen. The kitchen is a single countertop with some sort of oven; the meals are premade, tightly packed into the cabinets below. The bathroom is cramped, and I watch awkwardly as Lan demonstrates how the toilet and sonic shower work.

Finally, I carefully worm my body through a hatch to the cargo bay, which is taken up almost entirely by the refrigerated container. The walls are tight and I have to squeeze through the doorway, which is tricky in zero-g. Inside it is cold enough that I can see my breath. I would be a fool to open the hives, but I rest my hands on top of each of them in turn, feel their buzzing and their warmth. My skin prickles underneath the strange fabric of the space suit as I try to picture the creatures inside, crowding their bodies around their queen, buzzing their wings to keep her warm. I stay until I have made sure each hive is still alive and they have survived the chaos of the launch, then longer; until my entire body is shivering, my hands stiff and clumsy.

Chapter 27

The first week everything is new enough to be interesting, but as we drift further away from Earth, the time left before we arrive to Mars seems to stretch infinitely in front of us. Some days I retreat to the cockpit, where I can turn off the lights; only the faintest red and green glows from various buttons whose functions I've slowly begun to commit to memory. I meditate in the near darkness, golden stars like drops of honey in the inky black sky.

Absolutely nothing about living on a space shuttle resembles my old life. Xiao Lan makes it all look so easy, so routine, but I still can't properly strap myself into the sleep sack that keeps me from floating away in my sleep. Lan has to tuck me in for bed, which is as humiliating as it sounds. I am permanently exhausted; you don't realize how much you use gravity in your sleep until there is none there to hold you down.

The dehydrated meals have to be rehydrated and warmed before eating; it takes about half an hour, during which time the entire shuttle fills with the heavy aroma of foods I've never tried, spices I've never even heard of before. We eat out of pouches, carefully maneuvering each bite to ensure no crumbs escape. There is no running water; I wear a water pouch on my back, sucking rubber tasting water through the long tube, but still my lips crack from dehydration. We each exercise on the overly complicated machine for two hours every day. The entertainment system offers virtual reality and I use it to take tours of great cities around the world. Often they are cities that Lan has travelled in the past. In the evenings, he has begun introducing me to movies I missed out on, growing up in the cabin. The only time I'd ever watched television before was at the hospital, so many years ago; the cartoons I recalled were ancient even then, by Lan's standards. Comparing our vastly different childhoods becomes the ship pastime. While he went to school, I was milking goats and collecting eggs; he went to the mall and ate fast food with his friends while I labored with mom in the stuffy kitchen, canning vegetables we'd grown ourselves. When I told him about Chalk, the dusty little stray Pink brought home, Lan confessed that he's never had a pet before.

Lan is only a few years older than me, and he was old enough to remember the chemical attack. Although it was barely a blip in the news in China, his mother, Zhao Lei, was in the United States at the time. Dr. Zhao was the entomologist who first discovered the fungus that turned the honey bees into zombies. She was tracking the spread of the fungus when the devastating attack occurred; Lan has not heard from her since, and she is presumed dead. All of his eagerness to help, to buy out entire neighborhoods and give the houses away, to smuggle a girl who doesn’t exist and her bees to the red planet, is to protect them. To honor his mother. I feel bad for feeling suspicious, for distrusting his motives after his strange demands. Apparently he needed to see the bees to confirm they were not contaminated with the cordyceps fungus that has obliterated most of the honey bee population around the world.

I visit the hives each week, squeezing through the cramped cargo space to feel the vibrations of each hive, the warmth emanating from their clusters. Occasionally, a few bees will buzz angrily at the netting I've stapled over the boxes; if they are persistent, I fear they will manage an escape. They are not hibernating as well as I hoped, and the knowledge of their entrapment is stressing them, and me. I turn down the temperatures to dissuade escape. Other hives grow tired, lethargic; I feed them sugar water, extra energy for the cold, but they don't respond. Bee bodies crumble into dust that chokes the dry cargo bay air. If one tried to fly, she would probably tumble chaotically through the air; I wonder if they would ever adapt to zero gravity flight. How much they will have to adapt to Mars, less than half the gravitational force of Earth. To keep up muscle mass I will have to wear weights around my ankles and wrists for the rest of my life on Mars, but the bees will have to find some other way to adapt.

As we approach the red planet, an anxious buzzing fills my chest, persistent and demanding. I feel cold all the time now; the chill has worked its ways into my bones, and nothing in the shuttle is warm enough to thaw it. As a treat, when I was young, mom would let me take a warm shower, straining our well and solar power for my luxury. There are no showers in space; maybe that will be the first thing I do when I land.

This will be Lan’s third time landing on the red planet, and he claims that, like the flight trajectory, it is almost entirely automatic. There are manual controls should something go wrong, but for the most part he is content letting the computers do the work with their rapid calculations and algorithms. He grew up around the computers and he trusts them, but I do not. The only computer I ever saw as a kid was the ancient one at the observatory, and I definitely would not trust it with my life given its propensity to overheat and shut down if you ask too much of it. Cut off from the rest of the world, cut off from power and communication lines, cut off from the continuous advancements in technology in the rest of the world, the survivors of the attack in the United States slid backwards in time, resorting to ancient agricultural practices to survive. Even those on the military bases stagnated; they had more technology than I did, but nothing close to what Lan grew up with. The gap between the haves and the have-nots in the United States is a chasm; between the US and other countries it is a fathomless abyss.

At some point there is a small shift; instead of accelerating, we are decelerating; we are closer to Mars than to Earth. Lan explains the math to me, which I barely grasp; mom taught me math, but I was a busy and distractible learner. Mom was a physicist before everything, but though she was excellent at explaining the abstractions behind equations I could never get through all the numbers and letters. There are curves and orbits and gravitational pulls to consider, the relative span between moving bodies. Early launches to Mars, the unmanned supply shuttles, relied on slingshotting around the moon, using its gravity to accelerate without using too much fuel. Lan’s solar ion engine meant it could continue its slow, methodical acceleration until we reached just over halfway, then reverse thrusters, slowing us down just in time to reach Mars without crashing into the red planet. Because of the slight acceleration, we are not truly weightless, and the change in direction of our drift changes, disorienting and dizzying at first.

My identity was never questioned by the government that authorized our launch, my flight from Earth. As far as I know, no one is looking for mom or Pink, who are fully settled into their lives on the coast. They send emails regularly; sometimes they even get the bandwidth to send a photograph. Selfies, sunsets, the cat they picked up off the streets. There is little to share of the shuttle, but I treasure the photos they send. They carry me through the cold, dark expanse of space.

The final weeks creep up on us, then hit all at once, like an explosion. I saw fireworks one summer at the marketplace in what was once Denver, during the bubble when the government pretended they were doing all they could to help us, while devoting a disproportionate amount of resources to assisting the rich in their flight to safer havens. They were excessive in every way: too bright, too loud, too many. I would never grow accustomed to the bustling chaos of my mother and Pink’s world. At the time, I cried; I was still getting used to that blinding blue brightness after the solar shield was dissolved and the night sky was also a shock, overwhelming numbers of stars skittering around in a fathomless inky black. After the Mars colonists unanimously pressured the remainder of the Mars-5 nations to intervene with US affairs, a magical cure to the chemical used in the attack was introduced. The solar shield was dissolved; it rained ash over the gardens, and we worried it was toxic. Some areas in the midwest are still inhospitable, the chemical still active under the desertificated sun. It is a wasteland, the new Badlands; Pink was probably the last person to explore those lands before the shield dissolved. Even she never got to the other side, never could reach the eastern shores.

Chapter 28

We are mere weeks away from Mars when disaster strikes in the form of an actual explosion. I am in the exercise machine when it happens, the complicated straps and smart reactive joints saving me from feeling the full jolt of it, the muddled shuttering as it reverberated through the hull. I scramble to release myself from the machine. Xaio Lan has hit his head on something, and a large gash over his eyebrow is bleeding heavily. The fire suppression system has gone off in the cargo hold, but the air is still tinged with a toxic smoke smell. I fear for my bees, their acute sensitivity to toxins, but before I can go down there I have to help Lan. He is conscious but dazed, watching fat red globules of blood float around his head. I use a tube of bitter smelling glue from the first aid kit to close the gash, white butterfly stitches over that, gauze and tape over that. Lan is stoic while I work, not flinching when the needle pierces his skin again and again. The fog gradually clears from his eyes.

Everything in the cargo hold is covered by a thin, powdery film from the fire suppression system that was automatically activated after detecting smoke from an electrical fire. The motor driving the refrigeration unit was apparently unbalanced, just slightly. The off kilter momentum increased, slowly at first then escalating, overheating as it pulled itself apart. An explosion; something caught fire, and wires melted, the controls fried. The refrigeration is dead. The insulation of the container may be enough to keep my bees cool, but if I open it even once the heat from the shuttle will rush in, ruining any chance of getting them to Mars. I have no way of knowing how the explosion, or the pungent smoke that followed, affected the bees. I place my hands on the outside panels of the cargo container, but the only vibrations come from the ship itself.

We lower the temperature control for the entire ship to slow the loss. We shiver in the small space, tools floating around us, as Lan tries to fix this. My heart is pounding. The bees are still in their clusters, their container supposedly escape proof, but it would only take one intrepid guard to ruin everything.

"When did you find out you were allergic to bees?" I ask. Of all the stories from Lan's childhood, I've never thought to bring this up.

“I was only three,” he says, voice filled with nostalgia. “My mother had an apiary in the backyard, and I would watch her through the enormous glass door in the kitchen. Like you, she did not use gloves. When you showed me your apiary, it was like I was watching her. That is how I knew you belonged on Mars. You cared about them.” That particular day, his mother came into their home with a bee still clinging to her silky hair, and when she bent down to hug Lan, to pick him up and kiss him, the trapped bee panicked and lashed out with her only weapon. The pain was instant and he cried out; within minutes his immune system was attacking his own body, face red and swelling, throat closing shut. “I remember saying, ‘There are spiders in my throat,’” he chuckles, actually smiling. I try to smile back, though the metaphor fazes me. I try to forget the vivid image of bees crawling down my throat that now haunts me.

Baby Lan was fine, obviously. An ambulance reached his house within five minutes; medics shot epinephrine in his thigh, pressed a plastic mask to his face. The plasticky flow of oxygen creaking through his swollen glands kept him alive.

When he is finished, I regale the story of my own medical emergency: the feverish days at home, indistinctly aware of mom feeding me sugar water, as though I was a dying hive. The panicked calls of “May day, May day!” into the radio in the other room. I was unconscious by the time the military ambulance arrived; I would likely have died within a day if that trace of a call hadn’t made it through. Or if mom’s credit as an astronaut’s daughter had not earned me state of the art medical treatment at a military hospital. Xiao Lan has never had the flu, or even a cold; he grew up with universal vaccines, available to every citizen. I remember the occasional vaccine clinic as a child: long lines, impatient nurses, sharp, careless jabs. Too often there were shortages, not announced until we had been standing under the crimson sun for hours.

There is little even Lan can do to repair the refrigerator, and there is little even I can do about the bees, so we resign ourselves to failure and retreat back to the only marginally warmer living spaces. The disappointment weighs on me heavily; I picture landing on Mars, my only cargo some wooden boxes full of dead bees. Everything for nothing.

“For all we know, these are the only bees safe from that fungus now,” I say.

Xiao Lan is not disturbed. “If this fails, we will go back. I believe the Queen of the Bees would be able to find more hives.” I am warmed by his suggestion. I don’t tell him that I would never endure this trip again; the cold, endless expanse, the cramped spaces, the awkward complexity of what should be the most basic tasks - eating, washing, sleeping in zero gravity. This is just another long winter; when we finally make it to the warm, humid bio-domes on Mars, we will never have to suffer through a winter again.

Although my feelings have warmed towards the ship from the dark cockpit; the warm red lighting, the constant hum of life support fans, the dry stuffiness all feel like a hive, a warm cluster surrounding me. Each day I spend hours there, hidden in a meditative silence. As we get nearer to our destination, Lan spends more time in there with me, watching the numbers flashing across the screens, analyzing our flight path. Perhaps he does not trust his computer as much as I thought. He works in respectful silence if I am there, meditating under the stars. Sometimes he lets out a tiny, almost imperceptible “hmph,” but whether it is concern or triumph, I don’t know. Outside, the red planet appears and grows; eventually we can make out the clouds that plague the colonists with their storms of red dust. If such a storm is near the landing sight in a few days, we will have to spend some time in orbit, delaying the landing and further delaying my access to the bees.

I sleep fitfully the night before we are scheduled to land. I dream of a cell, or a dungeon, shadowy and cold, but it is not a dungeon at all. It is a hive, abandoned, empty frames towering over me in the dark. There is a humming coming from somewhere above and I want to climb up between the narrow frames and investigate, but my feet are glued to the bottom board with honey and propolis. The hive entrance is behind me, letting in a streak of honey colored light. Shadows flicker on the frames, but I cannot see what is creating them. I awake too early and spend the rest of the night thinking about mom, the trauma of my existence, the circumstances of our escape. The bees in the cargo hold below, slowly thawing, waking from a fitful hibernation, are descendents of the same bees that facilitated our escape.

Now I am removing them from their home, their planet, millions of miles away. The average foraging range of a hive is only a couple miles; I wonder how far each individual bee travels in her lifetime. Probably no more than a dozen or so miles. Nothing close to the hundreds of millions we are traveling now. A honey bee's life is nasty, brutish, and short. If a predator doesn't get them, sheer exhaustion inevitably will. Worker bees rarely live longer than a month after pupation; after they leave the hive, the survival rate drops down to zero. Most die of exhaustion or predation, but some die guarding the hive. For a bee to sting is a major sacrifice; as she flies away, her barbed stinger will remain in her victim's flesh, and her venom sac will be ripped out of her body. She will die slowly, organs exposed, purposeless and forgotten. Workers will never mate, they never reproduce; instead they work vigilantly to ensure their queen survives, thrives, and continues to produce healthy, strong sisters. If the queen is sick or old, they will replace her with one of their sisters. Males, the drones, live only to mate, after which they immediately die; if they don't, they are dragged out of the hive to freeze to death in the fall.

I want to believe that the bees will adapt to their new planet, but it is going to be a dramatic change. The gravity is too low, less than ⅓ Earth's gravity, and there is a chance they may never learn to fly. The biodomes on Mars are infinitesimal compared to the vast forests that surrounded our cabin, but they are warm and humid year-round. I hope that the endless foraging season will compensate for the limited space. Not everything is agricultural; the bulk of the terraforming project has been a replica wilderness, wildflowers and trees and even a faux creek through the middle. It remains to be seen if that tiny devotion will be enough for my bees.

Chapter 29

Grandpa is concerned about a sandstorm; it is only a few miles from our landing site, but it appears to be moving away, not towards, and we eventually decide to proceed with the landing. His voice comes over the radio, live after so many years of halting, stilted conversations. It is muffled through the noise of landing preparations, the rushing hiss of oxygen in my helmet, the pounding of my heart in my ears. Theoretically we won’t need the helmets, but Lan takes no risks; life support failure during a landing would be fatal if the pilot lost consciousness. We should be in the cockpit, strapped into our seats, but I'm frozen in place in the living space. There is a honey bee crawling around the cargo bay hatch below me; as I watch, another crawls out, squeezing through what should have been a sealed door. They are buzzing their wings angrily, but they would not be able to control flight in zero gravity. Lan is at the other end of the room, safe from their stings. For now.

"I need to go down there," I tell Lan.

He nods warily, but then frowns, then winces. His eyebrow is still swollen, purple bruising evident behind the white taped gauze. "We are landing soon. There is no time."

More bees are squeezing through the hatch, and I'm beginning to suspect one of the hives is swarming. Or trying to, at any rate, but they can't fly and instead are crawling over each other on the cool, slick walls of the shuttle. "I can go down there and keep them away from you. You can't land the ship if you're in anaphylaxis."

"You will have to strap yourself down for landing. Anything in there could crush you."

The only option besides the cockpit is a small seat with a five point harness in my quarters. "If I can find the queen," I explain, "I can carry her. The rest of the swarm won't leave her, or me." It is how I used to recapture swarms from my hives, after tracking them through the forest for hours. Often they would fly so far I would have to stalk them from Eeyore’s back, bribing him with chunks of honeycomb. Swarming bees are typically calm; they only have a queen to protect. They will wait on a branch, a dripping mass, while scouts fly in widening circles, searching for abundant fields and cozy crevices to build a new hive. They will dance the locations for the swarm, and the best dance will win the approval of the hive mind. As long as I control the queen, I can keep the bees safe and away from Lan. I am confident it would work, but it is his life that is on the line.

"I have epinephrine. The flight suit might protect me from stings," he says cheerily, "but I won't need them. The Queen of the Bees will keep me safe." I roll my eyes as he retreats into the cockpit.

Navigating with the bulky helmet and attached oxygen tanks is awkward, even in zero gravity, and I'm glad that the flight suit is form fitting, my hands bare so I can feel the queen’s pulse. I open the hatch slowly as Lan straps himself into the pilot's seat, preparing for landing. The swarm clings to the door, huge and amorphous. If I accidentally kill one, she will release a pheromone that will put the rest of the swarm on edge; attack mode. I dig through the swarm one handed, gently moving the clinging masses of bees aside to find the queen. The other tightly holds a hard candy; the sugar dissolves, mixing with my sweat. The queen is at the very center, her huge, golden abdomen twitching irritably. I gently brush her into hand, watching as she waves her antennae over the candy. When she is calm, I curl my fingers loosely around her. The workers climb over my hand, surrounding her in their protective warmth.

When all of the bees have joined the swarm on my arm, I awkwardly pull myself towards the back of the shuttle, my quarters on the right. I move carefully, not wanting to accidentally brush the bees against the wall and disturb their rhythmic peace. It is difficult to squeeze into the straps and buckle one-handed, especially with the helmet obscuring half my vision. As soon as I am buckled the ship begins to rattle, and Lan's voice comes in over a speaker. "It appears the storm has changed course," he announces, "It is going to be a rough landing."

That is an understatement, but I've grown accustomed to Lan's cheery optimism. I close my eyes. The ship is rocking violently, and the bees cling tightly to each other, to my hand, curled around the queen. She is irritated, poking around at my fingers and trying to squeeze out. I breathe deeply and the helmet fills with fog. I try to keep my hand still as the ship jerks my body violently around. There is a familiar pressure in my ears, and I have to remind myself not to clench my hands as a piercing pain drives itself through my eardrum.

"The winds are very strong," Lan's voice announces. "I have taken manual controls. Sensors are offline, visibility nil." His casual tone does nothing to reassure me. The ship jolts, and the lights flicker; Lan’s voice is coming through the intercom in staticky bursts, but I can’t catch enough to know what’s going on. Something I failed to secure crashes into my helmet as the ship jerks around, my neck straining with the inertia. I keep my eyes closed and focus on the collective breathing of the bees that are encompassing my hand. We’ll end up on the dusty red surface of Mars one way or another. We breathe as one: my rapid pulse and quick breaths, their gentle vibrations, their prickling warmth, their soft, fuzzy bodies.

All at once we level out, and the sudden stillness is jarring. It feels like time has frozen; we are in limbo. Then a great crash, straining at my harness, bone shaking vibrations running through the shuttle as we touch Mars’ surface, rapid deceleration, rocking and settling, then stillness once more. My quarters are dark, lit only by an emergency light near the hatch, and there is a peculiar absence in my ears, as though I am in a vacuum of sound.

I want to jump out of my seat, see the planet I have been dreaming of with my own eyes, but the warm prickly glove on my hand keeps me grounded. I am lighter here than on Earth, but after three months of zero gravity the pull is strange. Red and white lights flash in the corner of the room and I assume an alarm is blaring, but I cannot hear it; my eardrums have ruptured once again. I struggle through the restraints with my free hand and rise unsteadily to my feet. The orientation of the ship is confusing, and the ship seems to be tilted at an awkward angle, the unfamiliar force of gravity pulling me towards a corner of the room. In the darkness I slip on a book, probably what hit me in the head, and I reflexively reach out to catch myself, realizing, too late, that I’d used the wrong hand, the one carrying a precious cargo. I try to roll to the side but I’m lighter than I think, and instead I am thrown into a wall. I land on my shoulder, holding my arm out, the swarm dangling precariously over my head. The queen is safe, cradled in my hand.

I roll to stand and immediately regret it. I can feel the bees trapped under me through the flight suit, the soft crunch of an exoskeleton, then - a sting. It starts with a pinch, then a slow, rising pain, burning and growing like fire. My muscles tense; the swarm is agitated. If I could breathe their air I would smell bananas, the scent of their attack pheromone. There is another sting, and another. The skin around my lips feels tight, swollen; my face itches, and soon I am wheezing. If my throat wasn’t closing up I would laugh; I went through so much trouble protecting Lan from his allergy. I never would’ve predicted I would be allergic too.

In the darkness, in the muffled silence of my torn eardrums, I can't tell if I pass out or not. I do not notice the hatchway opening or hear Lan's concerned calling and approach. I only feel a pinch on my thigh as he stabs me with his own epinephrine pen. Adrenaline courses through my body and instantly my throat opens, allowing a few gasping breaths of recycled, oxygenated air from my helmet. My chest aches, but it is no longer pressing, and the swelling subsides.

Lan is shouting something, I can see him gesturing but the reflections of emergency lights on his helmet conceal his face. I am still struggling to catch my breath as I struggle to stand, but I recoil when he steps over to help me up, the bees on my arm still agitated. He ignores them, gently grasping my other elbow and helping me to my feet, guiding me towards the hatch. I stumble after him, my feet tingling oddly in my boots. My skin feels tender and bruised where I'd been stung, and even the gentle fabric of my spacesuit scratches like sandpaper.

I follow him blindly down the hatch to the cargo bay, where I see the shadowed outline of the box containing my bees. I wonder how they did, but Lan does not allow me to stop; he pulls me towards an airlock, into a strange, bubble-like vehicle with enormous wheels. I sit in the passenger seat, bees tucked between my arm and the door, my body between them and Lan. The airlock door to outside begins to open, letting in a growing stream of red light that burns my retinas before my pupils have a chance to adjust. I gasp, my throat still sore and scratchy, as I catch my first glimpse of the Red Planet.

The landscape is astoundingly foreign: the sky a sickly yellow from dust kicked up by the storm, lit by a much smaller sun than I am accustomed to; the barren, red landscape and cracked, dry soil kicking up in puffs around the wheels. Nothing like the mountains I grew up in; nothing even like the vast deserts I drove through almost a year ago during my road trip. Even those were spotted with life: dried out brush, skittering insects chased by minute brown lizards, rodents burrowing underground to hide from the scorching sun. But my travels took me to the west; towards the east, supposedly, was a much different story. The midwest back on Earth was a toxic ruin akin to the one before me now. Pink once tried to cross the wasteland, but she had barely made it across the border to Kansas before the foul air drove her back. It was never populated enough to bother reinforcing the solar shield, and everything living eventually charred to ash. The landscape before my eyes is exactly what 5 year old me had pictured when Pink returned and described the devastation, but in strange new colors.

We’ve landed over 50 kilometers from our intended site, blown off course by a massive sandstorm that blinded the sensors. The enormous storm is retreating behind us, a towering wall of red sand as we drive slowly over rough terrain towards the colonies. The built-in air recycling in the vehicle, which Lan fondly refers to as “the mule,” means we don’t have to wear our helmets, but even without it I have to read his lips to understand what he is saying. We will return to the ship tomorrow; I worry about what we’ll find inside.

As the adrenaline subsides, both from the epinephrine and the chaotic landing, I feel ill. The dull emptiness in my ears has thrown me permanently off balance, and every bump makes my stomach tighten. My throat hurts, and my head throbs along with my pulse. I close my eyes and swallow drily, willing myself not to puke. My hand feels cramped around the queen; she is quiet, still, her abdomen swelling and deflating in time with her breaths. I match my breathing with hers, the hive’s, and concentrate on each individual honey bee’s prickling legs.

When I open my eyes, it is nearly dark and the colony is a vast beacon looming in front of us, foggy glass walls reflecting a scant sunset. It is a monumental feat of humanity, the result of decades of collaboration between nations. Individual biodomes differentiate as we grow nearer; each is over an acre, entire buildings glowing from within each space. The gardens, where the bees will make their new life, are an engineering miracle: an enormous translucent bubble spanning nearly a mile in diameter.

As we approach, the slightly glowing domes tower over us, and I become nauseous with vertigo. The arrogance of it all, to think we should deserve to colonize an entire planet. In the history of humanity we have destroyed everything we have touched; we have greedily stolen from the earth, poisoning the air and ourselves. We have driven an unprecedented mass extinction; exterminated our own kind for land and money; destruction for profit. Maybe Mars is exactly what we need: there is no claim to ownership. We are not taking the land or resources from any other living thing. There is no atmosphere to pollute, and everything runs sustainably. Even their waste is recycled, every drop of water recovered and the rest composted for the gardens. The Great Circle of Life: I remember that from one of the movies on the strange plastic tapes at the hospital.

I don’t know how much of the narrative running out of my head was spoken out loud; Lan keeps alternately glancing at me and darting his eyes back to the landscape. I cannot hear my own voice to talk. I feel woozy, my head is spinning, and I am quite certain I need medical attention. The epi-pen saved my life, but it could still kill me if I do not regain some semblance of homeostasis again. I need IV fluids, a banana bag, a week of sleep. I pass out before we make it to an airlock.

Chapter 30

There are three surviving hives, for now; the one I carried across the red planet on my arm, queen cradled in my hand, and two others that survived the crash and the long, cold Martian night that followed. I missed the bees’ arrival, their transference to a new home, their first few days of confused terror on the new planet. Grandpa gently pried the queen from my hand as I lay unconscious in the medical ward, then returned to the landing (or is it crashing?) site to inspect the damage and retrieve the survivors. He placed the wooden boxes in a row at the center of the garden biodome, supplemented their meagre supplies with honey frames scavenged from dead hives. Just three hives, but back at home mom started with only one. Three should be more than enough, especially since they are all daughters of that first hive. They adapt, mom said. We will too. She learned beekeeping from grandpa, and I learned it from her; a tradition spanning generations and planets.

I allow myself to be stuck in the infirmary for less than 24 hours before I excuse myself, saving Dr. Singh the trouble of a lengthy discharge by removing the IV from my hand myself. My legs are shaky in reduced gravity, but I manage to walk through the tunnels and find the garden by scent. In that short time, the bees have built up a depressing little graveyard of their dead, the piles of empty exoskeletons worryingly large. The survivors buzz confusedly around their hives. The lesser gravity throws off their flight, and they frequently crash into the translucent dome walls as they attempt to navigate this strange new world. The foggy white panels are made of an ultra-light transparent aerogel, designed to trap heat and filter out the harmful UV rays that Earth’s ozone layer usually takes care of.

The first night, Grandpa tries to convince me to come home as the sun sets. He means my new home: a small room in his minimalist quarters off a tunnel adjacent to the gardens. Instead I lay in the grass near the hives and listen to their restless sleep. At some point, a dark figure approaches and drapes a surprisingly heavy, warm blanket over me; it centers me, reorients me in this new gravity. My throat sticks as I try to thank them. I don’t know if it is grandpa, or Lan, or someone else. I gaze at the sky; I can’t see the stars through the dome walls, and it is like I am a child again. I sleep well at night, dreaming of home: the warm meadows, filled with wildflowers; the soft, astringent scent of pine sap; the soft toxicity during the harsh, hot summer days. If it got too bad, we could not leave the house at all without a respirator. The air remained toxic even after the chemical was deactivated and the solar shield dissolved, but there was nothing to do for that. It was the product of centuries of dumping poisonous chemicals into Earth’s atmosphere without regard to the health of the environment. The air in the biodomes is clean, unpolluted; we are free to dump the products of our wasteful existence on the rest of the planet with no regard to anything but our future.

I spend my days with the bees in the gardens. The air is heavy with the odor of iron in the soil, so much like blood in the humid heat; there is also a warm blanket of floral scents, tree sap, and rich, earthy compost. Like my greenhouse at home. The garden biodome rests at the center of everything, branching out in tunnels to the other stations: comms, mines, manufacturing, research, agriculture. It is a popular spot for leisure, and I meet nearly every resident of the colony within my first few days on the planet. I am anxious and restless; my ears still have not recovered from the landing, and I have to focus so hard on reading their lips that I forget to remember their names. Their faces blur in my mind, and I am exhausted.

Lan arrives at sunrise each morning with mugs of warm, sweet coffee. The days are slightly off here, an additional 37 minutes to Earth’s 24 hour-cycle. We sit together and watch the bees take-off and land. I excitedly point out one bee who has returned to the hive entrance with bright balls of pollen stuck to her legs. They are not so graceful, and often crash into each other; but they are learning. Adapting. Activity is important in the colony; sitting still is deadly when a body is adapted to a certain weight, a certain gravitational pull. We wear weights on our arms and ankles, and that slows our movements somewhat; sometimes I feel as though I am swimming through thick sludge. I tend to the small vegetable and herb garden in the central biodome; that and the small grove of fruit trees are the only plants in the garden we cultivate. The rest is grown hydroponically in the agriculture substation; their only difference from the ones I kept on Earth is scale. There is always a surplus, and extra vegetable manner is used as fodder for the insect farms that provide most of the protein in the colonists’ diet.

It is several long days before I can bring myself to open the hives, examine the frames for signs of hope: neat rows of tiny white eggs gently laid into each hexagon. In three days the eggs will hatch. The tiny, wriggling larvae will grow fat on honey and pollen for nearly a week before pupating. Nurse bees seal their wax cell to keep them safe as they grow new limbs: legs, wings, mandibles. Two compound eyes, three occelli. Antennae finely tuned to pick out the richest nectar. When they have fully developed they will chew through the wax seal that closes them in and emerge in a new body entirely, hopefully one prepared to take on this strange new world. The foragers have grown accustomed to the foreign environment, and I watch them bounce around among the rainbow of flowers. There are no seasons on Mars under these temperature-regulating domes; the bees will be able to forage year-round.

A year on Mars is 687 Earth days. Grandpa still has Earth’s solstice schedule in the comms station, stuck to the wall with a magnet. Mom and Pink have internet at their home on the west coast, and email almost daily, but the reminder warms me. I always looked forward to our solstice discussions, those lengthy monologues punctuated by seemingly endless stretches of time waiting for the signal to the cross vast expanse of space between us. I always dominated the conversations, while Pink never spoke; often one or both of my parents would disappear and I would be alone with my own voice, counting breaths until Grandpa’s voice echoed through the room again.

It is only after the new pupae emerge, 21 days after the first eggs hatched, that I leave to visit my new home. My room in Grandpa’s apartment is even smaller than my quarters on Lan’s ship. The bed folds into the wall; extended, it touches a desk at the other end of the room. The air is thick with the scent of Grandpa’s cooking. I am starved for good food. The dehydrated meals on the shuttle were like vaguely flavored paste, and in the gardens I ate little besides the fruit and vegetables ready for harvest. I devour the meal Grandpa has prepared, ignoring the prickling way the cricket legs stick in my throat and the knowledge that the pasta flour was mixed with ground beetle larvae for added protein. Insects are the only non-plant source of protein in the colonies; the founders voted at the start that arthropods would be the only livestock produced on the planet, at least for now. Insects are a good source of protein. It is the larvae that draws bears to honey bee hives; the protein rich, sugar-coated treats are worth the temporary irritation of a few bee stings. Allergies must not be very common in the ursine family.

We sit outside together after supper, watching the dull martian sunset, filtered to a blur through triangular panels. I grew up knowing grandpa's face through a handful of photographs from before he left Earth; most are of him and my mother, and only one of him and his wife, a grandmother I could never know. He has aged significantly on Mars; deep wrinkles line his face, and his hands are wiry and shaky as he writes. We pass a notebook back and forth; it is easier to write than try to read lips. I miss hearing his voice; the smooth, cool tones that crossed millions of miles of empty space on radio signals. The pressure of the silence around me is suffocating at times.

The man in front of me is a stranger and I like the way his eyes crinkle while he deciphers my still childish scrawl. I have written about the photographs: that I memorized them, recreated them in painstaking detail in my encyclopedia. The only photograph of my existence is a polaroid shot of the three of us and Chalk, squinting in the red sun outside the observatory. Working cameras were rare, and not much use without a way to print them. When Pink found the polaroid, she carried it everywhere she went. Waiting for the perfect moment, she'd said. Grandpa chuckles and shakes his head; standing, he hands me the notebook and retreats inside. A few minutes later he is back, carrying a thin, sleek metallic box and a framed photograph. It is a scan of the polaroid; mom sent it during one of the rare times the military base chose to cooperate with us after the solar shield dissolved. I don't recognize the box entirely until he turns it on and a small circular lens pops out. A camera. He thrusts both at me, trading for the notebook.

"Before you were born," he writes, his letters long and elegant, "everyone had a camera in their pocket. We could print the pictures but mostly we just shared them online."

The back of the camera is a screen, a tiny version of what's right in front of me. My finger finds the shutter, but I struggle to find a way to comfortably hold it; it is too light, too thin, and my long fingers drift over the lens as a fuzzy pink blob in the image. Finally, I manage a shot, then another, and another. Grandpa, his door, the sparse grass poking up through red martian dirt. It is a human miracle that he was able to bring life to this dead planet. There is so much to soil on Earth: the right proportions of bacteria and minerals, the right density and drainage, the lifeforms that recycle nutrients.

I am engrossed in taking pictures, and I do not notice Lan's approach until he is right next to me. A flash of movement in my periphery startles me; my yelp rings through my ears. The only sound I can hear anymore are those that come from within. Dr. Singh thinks that the damage to my eardrums may be permanent, but the fact that I hear my own voice is promising. There are wires dangling from Lan’s hand and my heart skips a beat. He has been working on bone conducting amplifiers that may allow me to hear again, and this is his first prototype. It hooks around my ears and rests on the joint behind my jaw. He turns it on and I look to grandpa, his warm smile, and he speaks; I feel it more than hear it, but it is the same voice that used to comfort me across millions of miles of space. The cackling and confusion in the hearing aid add to the nostalgia of the ancient radio we once used to communicate. The noise of a short conversation overwhelms me after such a long period of silence with the bees, and eventually I remove the device and thank Lan. It is perfect; I can remove it whenever I want.