1: Dione

The sky over Huygens Landing is on fire. 

At first, Dione thinks one of the chemical plants has gone up. The light that pulses through her window is sickly and red, and her eyes pick up the difference before she’s even sat up. She pushes to her elbow, fear battering against the inside of her ribs as her brain is ripped from sleep. 

She pushes open the small window of her room, bracing for her nose to fill with the acrid smell of smoke, but nothing reaches her. The sky is a bleeding shade of red, the clouds so thick they almost seem to beat like a heart. 

Debris from something is falling on them, something big. The atmosphere is making quick work of turning it to dust, but there’s enough of it that it’s poisoning the atmosphere above them. She’d seen it once before, when a project at the Gekko station had been demolished.

“Remember that?” she almost says aloud to her brother, who should be in the bed across from her. “Remember when they just dumped their trash on us and thought no one would notice?”

He’d loved to talk about Gekko. He liked to pretend it was a single entity with a mind and will, like an annoying local at the bar he could badmouth. But he couldn’t answer now. 

Dione rams the window back in place, taking a few tries to get it all the way down. When she turns back around, the room is hazy with a fine mist of airborne dust, and she growls quietly. 

She marches through the cloud to the closet alcove, sifting through the hanging drawers until she comes out with the least crusty shirt. 

Her mothers are both jammed in the small breakfast nook downstairs, their legs tangled together beneath the table. It would be romantic had Dione not just heard them arguing the night before, meaning it’s less of a game of footsie and more a silent turf war. 

“Did you see the starfall?” she asks, grabbing a bottled coffee from the fridge. “I think something big is coming down.” 

Mama Beck makes a half-interested grunt as she chews, nodding. Mama Rie’s radiant blue eyes flick over Dione curiously, as if she’s trying to work out a hidden meaning. Dione can’t blame her; she’s been feeling particularly prickly these days, starting fights whenever she sees the opportunity. 

Her long hair catches in the fridge door as she closes it, further stoking the fire in her belly as she pulls it free.

“You’re going to get that stuck in a wheel one day,” Mama Buck says, raising an eyebrow at her. “Take your scalp clean off.”

“I like her hair,” Mama Rie tosses back without looking at either of them. “Makes her stand out.”

Dione fights an eyeroll, wishing again that she could look across the kitchen to exchange mutual exasperation with her brother. Their parents would bicker all day long if they could— it made for more passionate make ups. Dione can’t decide which she hates more. 

There’s a thump against the opaque window over their sink, making her jump. 

She sets down her bottle, walking sharply to the glass to see if she can catch a silhouette of the culprit. “Is there a riot?” 

“I think I heard the anti-Earth people were in a fuss over something yesterday in the plants,” Mama Buck grumbles, leveling her gaze at her partners as if trying to tease out a response. Mama Rie doesn’t disappoint. 

“Anti-subligation,” she pouts.

“It’s ‘subjugation,’ Mama,” Dione says wearily. Her mother’s heart is in the right place, even if she’s borderline illiterate. 

“Who’s being subjugated?” Mama Buck pushes. Clearly her morning caffeine is late kicking in, leaving her in just a foul-enough mood to want to goad Dione. “I don’t see anyone in this room without food, a job, or a roof over their head. There’s a hefty few on Earth that would kill for that.” 

“I would argue they subjugated you when they kicked you off for petty crime,” Dione drawls, pivoting to face the table. “But that’s just me.”

“Nobody got kicked off of anything,” Mama Buck says, her deep eyes unblinking. “You’re starting to sound like the Colony of Criminals guy.” 

Dione inhales deeply, preparing to launch into yet another lecture, but a pulsing gleam of light on the wall stops her in her tracks. She surges toward the home screen next to their kitchen table, leaning over Mama Buck as she goes and getting a scoff of annoyance. 

“You didn’t tell me we got a message!” she barks, fingers jabbing the screen until it comes up. 

“Dione, it’s nothing,” Mama Rie says, her voice pained. 

Ignoring her, Dione scans the top line, feeling her heartbeat in the base of her throat. “It’s from Community Authority.”

Before she’s even reading properly, her eyes are searching out any mention of the name she so desperately wants to see and landing on nothing. It’s not a response. It’s merely a Community announcement that a shipment of new clothes will be arriving later that day. 

Disappointment threads through her like lead in her veins, weighing every part of her down. She steps back, determined not to cry from frustration. 

“I told you…” Mama Rie says gently. Even without looking, Dione can feel the charged blue of her mother’s eyes on her face. 

In the moment when she’s expecting fury to flood through her, to be saved by the distraction of her own acidic rage, the only thing inside her is a cold stone of loneliness between her ribs. The vacancy her brother left is a constant presence, even now in this kitchen -- in the space on the counter he’d usually occupy, in the balance of power between her mother and her, in the mesh of their voices that bounces off the walls. The emptiness is so vicious that she has to force herself to move rather than be swallowed whole by it, and she whips across the room to where her Mode is resting on the counter.  

“Tell them I’m sick,” she says over her shoulder to her mothers. “I’m going to the Consulate.”

Behind her, Mama Rie makes a sharp, pained sigh.

“Dione, let it go.”

Dione rounds on them, graciously letting the fury take the place of her sadness as it rises inside her. 

“You can give up, that’s fine,” she snarls at Mama Rie, who wilts a bit, but Mama Beck has perfected the ability to act like she doesn’t hear things she doesn’t like. “You can say he was a lost cause because that makes you feel better. I know you can’t look at yourself and admit that all he needed was a hug and instead you gave him a knife.”

“Your brother was sick, and he needed help we couldn’t give him,” Mama Rie tries, her musical voice dampened with guilt. “It was better for him to not be here.”

“Better for you,” Dione spits, wrestling her stiff canvas jacket off the back of the chair. “Easier to pretend like you couldn’t help him when you didn’t even try.”

Mama Beck snaps finally, pushing back from the table. “Di, quit.”

“Nope, won’t do that,” Dione says, lifting her chin as she shrugs on her uniform jacket. She’s going to look ridiculous where she’s going, but she can’t help being a Lander, and she will not be brushed off this time. “I will get him back though. I will bring Zeke home.”