White Crystal Butterflies | Wattys 2021 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Eight

We're not going to make it anywhere today in the remaining daylight and twilight hours, which is just as well. I lie on my bed with my pillow over my face, and for the longest time just let my thoughts take me wherever they please. The hundreds of times I said yes to things like the interns' request in the Philippines still haunt me. Hundreds of times something could have gone wrong, until the one time it finally did.

In rare cases, the risks we took paid off, and luck would grant us water or shelter or a trail, or whatever else we were looking for. In the best cases, nothing happened but no harm was done. Everyone returned alive and well, no equipment was damaged, no time was lost. Yahvi and I would use the opportunity to teach younger members of our team how to screen a river or slope for safety, how to identify a rip current at a beach, or any number of other nuggets of wisdom we had accumulated over the years and could pass along.

I pull the pillow down harder and roll over. Was any of that actually worth it? We had so many close calls: with alligators, snakes, hypothermia, dehydration, currents, rockfalls, insect swarms, falling through ice; even snapping turtles and quicksand. Everything your average Aventurero learned to live with over the years. We watched young people under us go on to take charge of their own teams. Ours had the highest production rate of new leaders of any team in the organization. "You train them well," people at the top would say, echoing the trainees themselves.

Am I giving that up? Liu is still finding her footing in the field, but nothing accelerates that faster than carefully controlled experience. And Krüger has been through this before. Of all the people in the Pod, he's had the closest to my level of field time: dozens of planets with hostile environments, thousands of hours of fieldwork. At his age, I'd already been leading teams with Yahvi for more than a decade.

If this were the Aventureros, Krüger would be in leadership training. I can't trust him with that. Not yet. Not here. Not when Liu's safety might rest on it; this moon is already so hostile, I don't know if I'd have time to fix a different leader's mistakes before they turned lethal, and I'm not willing to take that risk. But Krüger could be a valuable asset if trained.

I roll over. "Yahvi, what would you do?"

The ceiling doesn't reply. I sit up and lean over to pull open the small, topmost drawer of the many making up the half-dresser, half-bed beneath my mattress. I set aside the folded-up jungle poster and pull out a simple, stainless steel box. Watertight, even airtight, it served a long life as a survival kit before I quit and took it with me.

I pop the latches. The lid opens with a suction sound, almost releasing the packed wad of paper stored inside. Each is a news headline. They're all printed out on lined or dotted paper: sheets torn from some field notebook or other, the only paper I could get my hands on in the digital halls of moving spacecraft or high-tech planetary cities. I separate the first one. Letters and words crawl like ants on the paper, but I've read these all enough times to have memorized their contents.

Yahvi Sanghera gives exclusive interview on The Nebula, talks exploration, planetary consciousness.

It dates back to just over a year ago. I might have listened in just to hear her voice, but I missed the broadcast by two weeks. You can't get any information streams on a moving F-300.

Another groundbreaking paper from the Neelambar Research Group.

Science or Science Fiction? Sanghera says science. Now others are starting to agree.

Yahvi Sanghera and Erez Abramovich debate live on Interstellar.

I page back through time, carefully building an upside-down stack of papers on my bed. Yahvi always had a knack for the media: she was the outward face of our team, giving interviews when we couldn't avoid them, while I heckled off other reporters and kept people out of her way. I almost smile. I was notoriously hard to get on television. Yahvi would intercept the cameras and talk them around so eloquently, they left in a daze. We'd be gone by the time they remembered there was another half to the all-star team.