Half Way Home by Hugh Howey Page B

groundcover and saw Vincent and Britny casting me confused looks. I waved—partly from embarrassment—as Kelvin pulled my trousers down to inspect the wound. They both waved back, and something in the normalcy of the gesture amused me. We were failed planetary colonists on the run from our own people, out in the middle of an unexplored planet that supposedly teetered between viability and abort. And there we were, waving at one another with sheepish grins, taking stock of who had made the break, who had been fed up with their lives enough to chance throwing them away.
    “Ow,” I hissed, as Kelvin found my wound and probed it with his hand. He brought something up in front of my face.
    “A shard of rock,” he said, holding the bloody stone dart up for me to see. “Barely a scratch.”
    I rolled over and worked my pants back into place. Kelvin helped me up, and it felt like a lot more than a scratch on the back of my leg. I limped over to the others, who shifted in place to include me.
    “Doesn’t feel like a scratch,” I told Kelvin, enjoying the sensation of being half carried and half escorted by him.
    “There might be a little bruising as well,” he admitted. “But trust me, your little legs will be fine.”
    I rolled my eyes.
    “Hello, Porter,” Vincent said as I joined them on the ground.
    I smiled and greeted them both. “So, the disenfranchised among us make themselves known,” I said.
    “Yeah, and I’m sure there’ll be more,” Britny said, frowning.
    I looked to Kelvin. “Speaking of which, we need to find Mica and Peter. I can’t stand the thought of them out here alone.” I looked over my shoulder. “There’s what? Nearly ten of us?”
    “Maybe this will be enough to change the way things are running around base,” Vincent said. “This many people gone—using another half dozen for enforcement—the timetables are gonna go to shit.”
    “Chances are it’ll just make things at camp worse for the rest,” I said.
    “How?” Britny asked.
    “A dozen ways. They could tighten the perimeter now that the farms have been abandoned and the fuel depot has been picked apart. There’s enough fencing there for two smaller nested circuits if they wanted to do that. Or they could pack everyone into a few modules every night and lock them. And if I can think of these things, I’m sure Hickson can come up with even worse.”
    “I don’t know it’s all Hickson,” Vincent said. “I think he’s just Colony’s muscle.”
    Kelvin shook his head.
    “No way,” he said. “Everything went south when Stevens died.”
    “And I’m not convinced Hickson killed Stevens,” Vincent told him.
    “We need to start worrying about ourselves,” Britny said. “The next few weeks are gonna make the last few seem like a night in the vats.”
    “And Colony was predicting rain for tonight. I heard it from Myra.”
    Someone squeezed my shoulder from behind. I turned as Tarsi sat down beside me. She leaned her head against my shoulder and I glanced up in time to see the pained expression on Kelvin’s face, which he quickly wiped away.
    “How did you sleep?” I asked her.
    “Bad dreams, but otherwise . . . okay. How are you?”
    “He’s got a boo-boo on his girly little leg,” Kelvin said, pointing and smiling.
    “Are you hurt?”
    I shrugged. “It’s nothing.”
    “That’s not what you just said,” said Kelvin.
    I glared at him. His smile broadened, but he raised his hands in mock surrender.
    Britny stood and rested her hands on her hips. “When you boys are done fooling around, we need to make some decisions. How far do we go before we start digging in? Everybody seems to have grabbed a thing or two before they left, so how are we dividing these things up? Or are we?”
    Tarsi, Kelvin, and I looked at one another. We hadn’t planned on any of that. The three of us were family, so there was no question on what belonged to whom. As much as we needed and supported everyone else, the idea of