Page 59 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH ATTACK!

I reached out in panic for the space beside me. I’d given up Nadia a month ago.

There was a sound, the beating of drums, and the thin white walls of the hab lit up. I threw off my blanket.

“Headlights,” called Allison through the wall.

Then, louder, “All crew, awake and downstairs! ALL CREW!”

Two quick steps to the door. I crossed my arms over my chest and looked over the railing from the half-moon landing, the doors of all six crew quarters shut behind me.

Adisu was already downstairs. He was fully dressed in his uniform, green scrubs and white sneakers, looking out the porthole above his desk. I hurried to join him.

“It’s bad,” he said.

“What happened?”

“Nothing and something. We’re surrounded by these cars, seven that I can see, and they have their brights on. It doesn’t feel safe.”

Allison, Jed, Aziz, and Nadia stomped down the stairs. We crowded around a porthole and looked out.

These people weren’t dangerous. I recognized them, and their numbers were down dramatically.

There was the camp medic from Honolulu, and a woman from Hilo who taught hula.

There was Diana, Felicia’s teacher and Kayla’s new best friend.

Felicia said Diana was constantly interrupted at the school by people giving spontaneous lessons on the history of Hawaiian resistance and sustainable gardening and—once, weirdly, by a visiting academic from the mainland—the Navajo language.

On my walks I sometimes saw Diana with a parade of children, pointing at birds and squatting before volcanic rocks.

I often left crystals for them. I laid them at the edge of camp, in places I knew they’d be found.

The protesters circled our hab, the women holding children on their hips and the children holding tiny, closed fists in the air.

They should have let them sleep, I thought.

The adults wore jean jackets and scarves, bandanas knotted in upside-down triangles over noses and mouths.

Did they really think we’d gas them? Their banner, faded now, flapped in the wind, folding and concealing the words painted across it.

My crewmates looked like they were caged in, surrounded by predators.

Nadia was so practiced at avoiding me at this point, with barely a glance in my direction. Now, my heart beat a little faster at her proximity. She wore a long black linen robe over her pajamas, and a black silk scarf knotted over her hair. She wore a single gold bracelet, even to sleep.

When Nadia had caught my absence from the hab, I’d panicked.

The stakes were too high. I imagined her reporting it.

I imagined an investigation into me, which would lead to the relationship with Nadia that I’d documented in my hab log for the good of science, which would lead to the suspicion that she had been part of the camp.

That she had at least known about my role in it?

I imagined the impossible, me losing space. I imagined Nadia losing it, too.

“We need to send a message to mission control,” Nadia said, not to me. “They should have been monitoring this for us.”

“We’ve been around these people for nine months,” I said. “Their protest is on its last legs. If they were interested in harming some research subjects, they would have.”

We heard a noise then, a rhythmic scraping.

“Well, shit,” said Allison.

“What,” said Jed.

“Jed, check the faucet.”

Outside, they were singing. They were always singing.

“Ten-four. What am I looking for?”

Allison pushed past him. The flip of the faucet, a spit of water, a drip, and then nothing. “The mother fuckers !”

The scraping sound had been a saw on PVC pipe. They’d cut off our water. We were still a week off from the scheduled resupply, and our remaining allotment poured out into the ground. The motherfuckers.

“Look,” said Jed. “I say we go out there. Confront them ourselves. I know you’re thinking we should alert mission control about the water, and we will.

But if we were in trouble on Mars, we couldn’t expect police.

If we really want to test group cohesion under the stresses of Mars life, we need to respond in a way that would be feasible for that crew. ”

“So in this scenario,” I said, “the future Mars crew is encircled by aliens?”

Adisu shook his head. “I oversee the health and safety of this crew, not the future Mars crew. This crew cannot leave the hab. We have one doctor for the five of you, and mobs have a history of targeting medics.”

“Wait,” I said. “Now they’re a mob?”

“ Steph ,” Nadia said. She gave me a meaningful look, her first in weeks. A warning?

“We have to assume that they’re armed,” Aziz said.

“Be serious,” I said.

Allison threw up a hand. “I haven’t come to a decision yet.” She glared at Adisu, then Aziz, then me. “As your commander, I will be the one to decide.”

Outside the hab, a woman stepped toward the porthole. She was backlit by a headlight, her features eclipsed in her silhouette.

She lifted a megaphone to her mouth. “Steph,” she said. “It’s me. Kayla.”

A pull in my stomach. She was outing me. She had made herself their spokesperson.

“I stand on Hawaiian lands,” Kayla said, “with representatives of many Indigenous nations. All we ask is that you listen.”

“Did she say Steph ?” Adisu said.

Kayla said, again, “Steph.”

Allison looked up at the ceiling, gathering herself.

“How do you know her?” Nadia said. She leaned against the wall, arms crossed tightly over her chest.

“I understand more than anyone,” Kayla said, “what kind of pressure you’re under. But our movement is about protecting this planet and ensuring a sustained Indigenous presence on Earth. Yours is about giving up on this planet, and colonizing somewhere we can’t even breathe.”

Aziz groaned. “Whoever this woman is to you,” he said, “you’ve done a shit job explaining our work to her.”

Kayla continued. “Who do you think will make it to your new world? We understand settler colonialism better than anyone. First, it’ll be the necessary people, the scientists and engineers.

Then the adventurers, the millionaires, the one percent.

If you turn your back on Earth, and you let it burn—you understand our people will be abandoned in its ashes. ”

“What is even happening right now?” said Jed.

Kayla said, “As you cower in your hab, we stand here as witnesses to your inaction.”

Kayla handed the megaphone off to a Hawaiian woman, a cook I’d once met named Anna, who shouted out orders to the small crowd. Slowly, singing a song I strained to recognize, they started back toward their cars.

I turned around. My crewmates stared at me.

“Right,” I said, “I do know her.”

Silence.

“The woman with the megaphone is my little sister,” I said. “Kayla Palakiko.”

Silence. The fluorescent lights buzzed at the top of the dome. Outside the door, the plastic sheet of the air lock snapped against itself in the wind.

Nadia said, “Thatindigenousmama?”

“Yes?” I swayed a little, squeezing my hands together behind my back.

“Your sister is thatindigenousmama ?”

I nodded. Nadia made a face, like she didn’t believe me or couldn’t believe I hadn’t told her.

I had known that Nadia followed Kayla before the mission.

Once, assuming I’d be interested because Kayla was Cherokee, Nadia had talked about her as a content creator who was doing some cool things. I’d pretended to be unfamiliar.

But I’d only been following Kayla’s lead! When I was accepted into NASA and Kayla was nearly canceled for congratulating me, she’d deleted every trace of me from her Instagram account. Years of photos with captions about #sisters #family #gratitude—gone.

Jed paced full circles around the hab, trapped in its thirty-six square feet of diameter. He’d disappear behind the bathroom and the staircase before reappearing, hands folded over his forehead. “No fucking way,” he muttered, “no fucking way.”

In the kitchen he stopped. Briefly, he closed his eyes.

“So she’s your sister?” he said. “You mean to say that our entire year, the outcome of this scientists-in-prison experiment is riding on whether your sister convinces you to sabotage the mission?”

“I’m afraid that maybe she already has,” said Adisu.

I felt sick. I wanted to run for my quarters, or better yet, the air lock.

“I think that, for some time now, Steph has been—” said Adisu.

“Adisu,” said Nadia. She looked at him hard, hard like, Stop . Like, Who do you think this would help?

It occurred to me that Nadia had been guarding my secret.

Why hadn’t I been normal about it when she’d asked?

I could have said I’d been sick in the bathroom that night, even sick just outside the walls of the hab.

If I’d stayed cool I could have brushed it away.

It was in my not telling, my sudden and total destruction of what we’d had, that Nadia must have guessed where I’d gone.

Adisu sat on the foot of the stairs. He pressed his hands to his forehead. Allison sat beside him.

“Steph,” Adisu said, “tell them.”

I shrugged, like I didn’t know what he meant. I thought immediately of Jess from college, how she’d lost her dream job with the FBI by answering truthfully that she’d shared a joint in the last year. I wanted more than a high-security clearance. I wanted space. I shook my head at Adisu, pleadingly.

He sighed. “I think Steph goes on walks at night, maybe to visit the camp. I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t sure.

A false accusation would be bad for group cohesion.

For the last few weeks I’ve done nightly checks for her suit on its hook, with the plan to report it if my theory was confirmed. ”

He pulled a folded piece of paper from his breast pocket and waved it in the air before putting it back. What was even on it? Tallies of each time he hadn’t caught me?

“Her contact with people outside the crew,” Adisu said. “It invalidates the study.”

Allison opened her mouth and closed it. I moved to speak, and she glared at me.

“ Not a word of this ,” she hissed. “Not a fucking word to anybody. Go to bed, all of you, and for God’s sakes, don’t write about this in your hab logs.”

No one moved.

“Dismissed!”

We stared at her. She remembered her position and lowered her voice. “We’ll do a late breakfast, at eight hundred hours. Go. Get some sleep, people.”

Jed walked heavy-footed up the stairs. The others followed.

I ran up the stairs behind Nadia, last in line. I touched her wrist. She looked pointedly at my hand on her body like she couldn’t believe it was there again, that I’d even dare.

I let go. “You’re an engineer,” I whispered. “A scientist! You have to hold tonight’s findings against months of observed behavior, to acknowledge that those camp visits are an outlier.”

“No,” she snapped. She stepped back and steadied her hand on the railing. “Scientists are just people , Steph. That’s all we are.”

I backed against the wall, and Nadia rushed up the stairs. One by one, my crewmates closed their doors.

I wondered how close my sister was now. Had the protesters made it back to camp yet?

If Kayla turned back from the crowd, could she see any part of me in the pinprick light of the porthole?

We hadn’t hugged in months—only the one time she’d crushed my suit around me.

I’d held back since then, my own compromise toward the isolation I owed to the crew.

Alone, halfway up the thin metal staircase, I felt so far from the wind just outside. From the sharp smell of the woods behind my mother’s house, of trees and fire and wild onions in mud. The world was getting away from me.