“I grew up on a farm,” I begin. “You knew that, though… I grew up on a hydroponic soy farm, in the part of town they call Shatterblock these days. Back then it didn’t have a name, wasn’t really part of the city yet. It was just farms. Just farms like ours and some homes.” I picture it as it was back then, poorly organized and dirty and few of the buildings up to code. It’s a manufacturing center now, an out of the way place on the south side of town. “My parents were immigrants from Earth. Millionaires, well educated. Like a lot of colonists, they felt like their lives weren’t adding up to anything, that no one would remember their names, that their accomplishments wouldn’t matter after they were gone. That’s why they spent so much money leaving, starting a small soy farm here on Brink. It was still the outside edge of space at that point, I guess they saw themselves as an important part of Humankind’s March Inward.”
“It’s a noble thought,” Brady says, his voice quiet. “Out at the perimeter, living and surviving is an important accomplishment.”
I chuckle, bitter. “I always wondered why. What the point of it all is. Just making more and more of us to suffer from the same old problems.”
“Life is better than the alternative.”
“I know, I know. I’ve heard all the arguments. I get it. And obviously Earth was an unsustainable proposition, the way it was run.” Realizing I’m getting sidetracked, I go back to my story. “Anyway, my parents took on more than they could handle, didn’t account for a few things, rising costs of water being the biggest one, and for all their financial skill and training, they got deep into debt.”
“Oh,” says Brady, knowing the implications.
“Yeah. Times got bad. We cut our calcium doses to one tenth. My mom got really worried that I had stopped growing. It stressed my parents’ marriage. They would fight every other day. They would stop talking to each other for days at a time. And what kind of childhood could I have? I was ashamed of who I was and where I came from, and I had no time for anything but work. Every day I’d take six hours of online elementary school class, and then work eight hours or more in the racks. I’d come back into the house exhausted, my hands sore and dirty, the skin on my fingers cracked and dry. I’d sit at the dinner table in silence, feeling guilty that my dad was eating half what my mom and I were and not taking even the one-tenth calcium dose we were taking. We turned out decent crops year-round, but it just wasn’t enough. It became obvious we were going to lose the farm, and if that happened we would have no means of support.” I turn away from Brady, feeling unwelcome tears forming in my eyes. I can kill a man and not blink, but I just cannot divorce myself emotionally from these events that happened two decades ago. I want to stop, but I’m this far into the story, and Brady is listening, and somehow it feels like a relief to tell it. Almost at the end, I push on. “One day, my parents had a fight in the morning, right when I was starting my shift on the farm floor. I couldn’t tell what they were saying, or why they were mad, but my dad stormed off, and my mom just sat on the floor between two rows of soy plants, crying into her hands for what must have been three hours. I didn’t know what to do. My life was stress from morning until night, every day, and this was just one more thing to deal with. So I kept working, like I always did. My mother eventually stood up and started working with me, and I didn’t ask what was wrong. I don’t think we said a word to each other that entire day. And at the end of the shift, I… ”
Suddenly it’s too much, and tears are welling on my eyelids and streaking down my cheeks. I clench my fists, doing my best to resist this childish vulnerability. Stop being such a fool, Taryn. What’s done is done.
Brady puts a hand on my back, as though to comfort me, but I shrug it off, staring out the window at the bustle of the city as the lights come on, one by random one. “At the end of my shift, I left the floor and went to the other building, the one we lived in, like I did every day. I opened that thin, faded yellow aluminum front door like I did every day, had to pull hard on it because it was sitting slightly crooked on its hinges at that point and needed to be fixed. And… ” I can picture it, clear as ever, in my mind. “And inside the door was a little cardboard box, maybe ten centimeters on each side, with a folded paper note on top. And I went to it and I opened the note and I read it, and it took me a minute to realize, but when it hit me… ” The fast pace of my words suddenly halts, and I’m on the verge of breaking down again.
“Your father,” Brady says, hushed.
“Yes,” I answer. “The note was an apology, a plea for understanding. He wanted me to know that he did it because he wanted to. My mother threw it away when she saw it. Took me years to forgive her.”
“How much?” Brady asks.
“I opened the box,” I answer. “Pulled the lid off, set it aside. Inside was four thousand units in twenties. I remember sitting there, staring at all that money, still not getting it, or maybe just refusing to believe it. And then a minute later my mother came in and she instantly started crying. She snatched the note up and went back outside, hysterical and in tears, and that was when I realized what happened. He went to a black market buyer, sold his own corpse before it was even dead.”
“I’m… I’m sorry,” Brady mumbles.
“It saved us. We were able to get out of debt and stock up on fertilizer. The farm became profitable. Barely. But it stayed in the black. And… for years I couldn’t look at cash without wanting to cry out of guilt and frustration. I even stopped taking my doses for a while, until I got some purple-red spots at my elbows and knees and my mother screamed at me about it.”
Brady puts his hands on my shoulders and turns me to face him. “He made a choice,” he says, “and you have no reason to feel guilty about it.”
I let him pull me close, his arms folding around my back in an embrace. The tears have stopped. Brady pulls away slightly, looking me in the eye again, his yellow-brown irises narrow around wide, deep pupils. Our breaths both seem to stop as he leans back in, his lips searching for mine.
I shove him away. He stumbles back a couple of steps, eye contact broken.
After a long moment of silence, he says, “I’m not going to apologize for that.”
“Neither am I.”
He nods, disappointed, unsure what to do with himself. After a few more frustrated seconds, he turns and walks silently away but stops in the hallway and turns around.
“You know,” he says, “of course it’s a lonely world when you won’t let anyone in.”
He goes into his bedroom, leaving me in silence, staring out at the sprawling city below and the mountains in the distance that draw the final border between so-called civilization and the rocky, windswept wilderness beyond. Brink is no longer the frontier of humanity’s presence in the galaxy and hasn’t been for nearly a hundred years, but this city of ten million still feels like a frontier town, dangerous and foolishly hopeful and not yet fully tamed by law. Maybe I do fit in here, and maybe I don’t like that about myself. Maybe I should have kissed Brady.
His words are still under my skin. They were trite, but there was truth in them, and that’s digging at me. Of course I can’t let anyone in. This world is too big a part of me already.
11
A rush of harsh light startles me awake. Momentarily blinded, instinct kicks in and I roll off the couch, sweeping my hand across the coffee table, catching my sidearm by the trigger guard and pulling it free from its holster. Something moves through my field of vision and I fix my aim on it, but before I can even shout out a warning, my sight has come back to me.