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  “Ben is very fun, I’ll give you that. He didn’t spend all morning telling you war stories about your mom, did he?”

  “Maybe a couple. Did you really save his life?”

  “Well, we kind of saved each other’s lives a few times over there,” Caitlin replied. “It was a little crazy. But if he wants to tell you that, sure. I saved his life. Hey, did you get the package I sent?”

  Emily’s eyes went wide. “Oh yeah, I almost forgot!”

  Caitlin was relieved when Emily held up the small wrapped parcel in her hands. With the travel ban in full effect, sending anything back to Earth from the Moon was a near-impossible task, doubly so if you were a lowly resident of the Hive. Luckily, Caitlin’s vet status had earned her a few black market connections who were able to smuggle items off-Moon for her from time to time. Those connections weren’t durable enough to get her home, but she could at least send an occasional gift to Emily.

  Emily eagerly tore the wrapping off the package and turned it excitedly over in her hands.

  “A book!” she said, and Caitlin took a moment to silently thank herself for getting her daughter interested in actual physical books as opposed to the electronic titles her friends read on their tablets, assuming any of them read at all, what with Failvids vying for their attention.

  Looking at the cover, Emily read the title. “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Thank you! Will you read it with me?”

  “Of course I will!” Caitlin said. Although Emily loved reading on her own, one of her and her mother’s favorite pastimes before Caitlin had ended up on the Moon had been “pass-reading,” where one of them read a chapter out loud and then passed the book to the other to read the next one. They’d managed to get through The Hobbit and The Phantom Tollbooth that way and had been starting on A Wrinkle in Time when everything had gone wrong.

  “That’s why I got it for you. I think you’ll enjoy it,” Caitlin said. “It’s about a little girl who goes on a big adventure, just like you’re going to.”

  “I know!” said Emily excitedly. “Just three more days.”

  “Just three days, kiddo.” Caitlin nodded. “Then it’s you and me.”

  “And you promised you’re going to take me to Lake Armstrong, right?”

  “Of course! Are you kidding? You think I’d break that promise? No way! I’d sooner die!”

  Emily giggled slightly at her mother’s remark, and in that instant Caitlin felt the distance between them shrink ever so slightly.

  “Caitlin,” Ava broke in, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but your shift at the mine is due to begin in just a few minutes.”

  “Yeah, yeah, thank you, Ava. Listen, I gotta get to work, kiddo,” said Caitlin, even though the words were like broken glass in her mouth. “But I hope you have a great day, OK? And pretty soon, you’re gonna fly up here, and it’ll be like your birthday and Christmas all wrapped up together.”

  “I can’t wait!” she said, and her smile grew wide, almost playful. “Mom?”

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “I love you to the Moon and back!”

  “Well, I love you from the Moon and back, so there!”

  For a few moments more, they chuckled and joked and blew kisses across the stars. Then the connection was gone and Caitlin was alone again. Just in time too, she thought.

  She didn’t want her daughter to see her crying.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Back when the Moon was first colonized, life on the lunar surface was sold to the public as a glamorous, exotic experience. Something out of a movie or an Arthur C. Clarke novel, with glorious luxury liners majestically plying the stars and ferrying interstellar travelers from Earth to an orbiting landscape. Some of the posters advertising just that in their loud art deco style still hung, yellowing and faded, around the Hive. And maybe for those first pioneers, that was exactly what the journey was.

  Caitlin had no clue, and frankly, she didn’t care. For people currently living on Earth’s closest neighbor, life was one thing: dirty. Moon dust got into everything. Every surface in Caitlin’s unit was covered with a permanent gray film. The dust was smeared on the walls, coated the screens, got into her clothes, and if she wanted to take a drink of water, she had to rinse the glass beforehand or she’d have problems after the first swallow. This dust wasn’t the harmless, innocuous matter that floated in the air on Earth, made up predominately of dirt, pollen, and dead skin. Lunar dust was hard and abrasive, scratching every surface it touched. Much of the Moon’s regolith was made of silicon dioxide glass, the result of billions of years of meteoroid impacts, producing dust dangerous enough to shred lung tissue and scratch corneas. Most long-term Hive residents had what the locals called “Moon Lung,” a persistent cough caused by silica particles being trapped in their airways. Air scrubbers in the Hive took care of most of the more dangerous fragments, but sooner or later, everyone breathed in something they couldn’t breathe back out.

  Caitlin hoped she could get out of the Hive and off the Moon before that day came for her.

  But, even if it were scoured every night by hand, the Hive would still make for a less than ideal place to live. Caitlin often thought how much she’d love to have sat down with the people who designed the place and asked them what their real calling in life was because they clearly had no concept of architecture. A series of geodesic domes spread out across the surface in no discernible order or pattern, the Hive dotted the Moon’s face like ugly moles. They had been built in the middle of the century, with the domes inflated by robotic drones and covered with 3-D printed materials mined from the lunar surface itself. What had begun as a few small habitats to shelter the first mining pioneers had grown to more than a hundred domes connected by passageways and tunnels above and below the surface. The original builders had probably not imagined that the colony would last so long, which is why things were perpetually breaking down. Everything from water pipes to electricity went out with a fair amount of regularity. Thankfully, the oxygen suppliers had still never malfunctioned, but everyone living in the Hive shared the common belief it was only a matter of time before that particular calamity came to fruition.

  There were no windows in the Hive because, really, what was there to see? In the early days there had been 3-D screens on some of the walls showing everything from interstellar vistas to lush images of Earth, including fish swimming lazily beneath an azure sunlit sea. However, all the screens had eventually shorted out, and no one had bothered to repair them. So they sat, dark and unused. Some of them still flickered aimlessly as if trying to will themselves back to life, but most just hung there, lonely, broken.

  With no real or artificial sunlight inside the Hive, the entire complex was lit by dull, yellow-tinged fluorescents that made everything and everybody look jaundiced. Inside each dome, packed together in nondescript, anodyne rows, were the apartment units themselves. Utilitarian and basic, the spaces offered only the most austere of amenities. Caitlin had seen college dorms that were better appointed than the accommodations in the Hive. You had a few rudimentary pieces of furniture, an entertainment setup that was probably state of the art in the first days of colonization, and an AI unit to run everything. That was it, that was all. Thanks for playing, kids.

  The Hive was also a noisy place, overstuffed with people from various walks of life. Some were immigrants looking to make a new life off-planet. Others were Moonborn but couldn’t afford the high cost of living in Aldrin City. Then there were people like Caitlin Taggart, there because they had no other choice. Victims of hard luck or circumstance, they had all been thrown together into the Hive like animals in a strange, alien zoo and were now forced to coexist together.

  This meant that the place had, over time, become a cauldron of conflicting cultures, ideologies, and daily rituals. Muezzin calls blended with Baptist hymns. Arguing couples were drowned out by crying babies, or vice versa. English, Chinese, Arabic, and Yiddish voices all tried to outshout each other, swirling together into a cacophony of soun
d rivaling the Tower of Babel. After a while, the outpouring became like white noise, or the dull roar of a seashell pressed against the ear. After a year of living in such perpetual dissonance, Caitlin, who had grown up in the countryside, sometimes wondered how she would ever be able to successfully return to the quiet of her old life.

  Although she had spent the majority of her years on Earth, long enough to get married, have a daughter, and go off to serve her country in the Last Campaign, Caitlin Taggart had been born on the Moon, the daughter of a pair of would-be helium-3 miners. This was back in the gold rush days when everyone who had the capital and daring could stake a He-3 claim and try to strike it rich. Her father had mortgaged everything they had to be among the first to conquer the new lunar frontier. During this boom period of expansion, promise, and fortune-seeking, Caitlin had been born.

  After the Taggarts’ He-3 dreams had vanished in a fog of inexperience and poor decisions, they’d returned to Earth to start over again. For her parents, the homecoming bore the sting of defeat; for Caitlin, it came with the fear and apprehension of an alien setting foot on a strange, unwelcoming world. For years after arriving on Earth, Caitlin had faced a slew of anti-Moon prejudice. People seemed to think that anyone born on the Moon should stay there. Kids regarded her as a freak. Even though she was just as human as they were, she was still, for all intents and purposes, an extraterrestrial. And as such, she was by definition “different,” prone to being peppered with questions like, “Is it true your bones break like glass?” And when questions ran out, children replaced them with insults.

  The parents weren’t much better, regarding her with suspicion and mistrust. Part of this was her general status as an off-worlder, which immediately put her in the “outsider” slot on everyone’s scorecard, but there was also a general dislike of people who came from the Moon. If Earth wasn’t a good enough place to be born, then why should it suddenly be a good place to live? Weren’t Moon people happy where they were?

  Many Terrans had a certain hysterical paranoia about Moonborns and their intentions for migrating to Earth. Even groups that had experienced oppression over the years had begun to pile on, grateful that, for the first time in centuries, the heat was off of them. In many ways, the arrival of Moonborns put an end to much of the racism and classism that had plagued the planet for generations. At last, everyone on Earth could unite against a common foe.

  This hostility was made crystal clear to Caitlin when she overheard the mother of Jennie Thompson—the first and only real friend she’d made after arriving—chastising her daughter in the living room. “I don’t want you bringing that Moon girl around anymore,” she had said. The contempt she used when saying “Moon girl” was palpable and thick. “You know they’re the reason your father lost his job, don’t you?”

  The hatred and uncertainty over the presence of lunar immigrants on Earth soil really took hold when America’s most recent president was elected on the campaign slogan of “Earth for Terrans.” The day he won, Caitlin felt like the writing was on the wall. Although she had long since shed her identity as “Moon girl,” her passport and birth certificate still carried the truth about where she hailed from.

  As the president continued to throw wood on the fire of the country’s paranoia, people in the streets were already gleefully talking about mass deportation. However, for all the campaign bluster, no one believed such a deportation would happen, although there were many (including Jennie Thompson’s mother, whose age had dulled her wits but not her all-consuming fear of Moon girls) who wanted it to happen, and fast. The president’s rhetoric was met with resistance and didn’t seem positioned to gain serious traction. The majority of the press and the public expected any bill proposing deportation to be stamped out by Congress. Of course, even if that happened, it was pretty much a given that life as a lunar immigrant would likely be unpleasant under the rule of the new administration. Because of this, Caitlin kept the truth about where she’d been born a closely guarded secret.

  She might have succeeded in keeping her secret too, had, on the day of the new commander in chief’s inauguration, some representatives of a radical pro-Moonborn group called Nightside not decided to set off a He-3 bomb at an American embassy in Senegal, citing the president’s new policies. Luckily, the bomb wasn’t a big one, but it was more than enough to cause a sizable death toll. Once the images made their way across the news platforms, that was all it took. While he couldn’t get every Moonborn deported, the bombing was enough to enable the president to enact a travel ban barring anyone with a lunar passport from traveling to Earth. And, unfortunately for Caitlin, she happened to be on the Moon right when everything went bad. She had taken a brief trip to sort out her mother’s affairs after her death and was just about to board a transport for home when she discovered that her passport had been frozen, along with all her travel privileges. And just like that, Emily had been left with a father who barely remembered that they lived in the same house and Caitlin was stuck on the Moon. She had tried working through legal channels, but the red tape was almost impossible to navigate.

  “Just sit tight,” her lawyer had told her. “With your veteran status, there’s a good chance we can get you some kind of travel pass to get you back home. We’re talking three, maybe six months, here.”

  “And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?” Caitlin had asked.

  “Well,” her lawyer said, “you could always get a job.”

  As crazy as that idea sounded, Caitlin decided that was exactly what she was going to do. She had never been one to sit around helplessly, preferring to be proactive and always moving forward.

  Thanks to her parents’ line of work, Caitlin still had a few contacts she could rely on enough to land a job hauling He-3 for Guanghang Mining. Sadly, her family, such as it was, had long since passed on. Emily was the only family she had left. Well, Emily and Caitlin’s crew.

  After struggling into her work clothes and zipping up her jumpsuit, Caitlin made her way out the door of her unit and into the dingy, cluttered hallway of the Hive’s main complex. A few early-rising children streaked past, caught up in a raucous game, giggling and shrieking wildly as they ran. Caitlin shook her head, watching them dash up the corridor.

  “Be careful!” she called as she made her way to the exit. But they were already gone.

  “Cutter Taggart is here, ladies and gentlemen! Now the day can begin!”

  A round of exaggerated applause filled the Doghouse as Caitlin walked in. “Cutter” was her nickname at the mine, bestowed upon her by the old crew chief, Trigger, who became like a second father after she started at the mining company a year ago. He had worked with her dad on his failed bid at He-3 mining and, when the Taggarts had left for Earth, had stayed behind and made mining his life. He remembered Caitlin from when she was a baby and had immediately taken her under his wing. “No one cuts through rego the way you do, kid,” he’d say in his gravelly voice at the end of a long day’s work. Either that, or his other favorite compliment: “You’ve got the hot hand.”

  Much to Caitlin’s shock, Trigger had passed away suddenly, just eight months after she’d come on board. Those who chose to live on the Moon generally didn’t live as long as those on Earth, but Trigger had beaten the odds, making sixty-eight revolutions around the Sun before his heart gave out. While many people his age on the unforgiving lunar tundra would have retired long ago, Trigger remained a scraper right to the end. Mining rego was what he was born to do, he’d said, so Caitlin supposed it was only fitting that he had died doing it as well. But before he died, Trigger had taken care of two key pieces of business: he had given Caitlin her nickname and appointed her his successor as crew chief. Because of this, no one ever called Caitlin by her real name at the Doghouse, addressing her as “boss,” “chief,” or “Cutter.”

  She wasn’t sure if any of the people she worked with outside of her crew even knew what her name was.

  Miners congregated before and after their shifts at th
e Doghouse, which was as dirty, noisy, and crowded as the Hive, without the air of desperation. It was a lively, rowdy place where the crews bickered over who would harvest the most rego, commiserated about people they left behind on the world, and competed against each other in a one-sixth-gravity version of basketball someone had coined “g-ball.” In the Doghouse, people were just as likely to break into a fight as they were into song. Music was always playing on a continuous loop, booming from a source deep within the Doghouse’s bowels. As Caitlin made her entrance, she heard Joe Walsh’s “Turn to Stone.”

  “Stow it, Diaz,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of rego to move today.”

  “Where we headed, Boss?” asked Tony as he leaned casually against the lockers, his thick arms folded over his broad chest. Tony Parker was a mountain of a man, just muscle, sinew, and stoic intimidation. But Caitlin knew him well enough to know that it was all a front. Underneath, softhearted mush. She had watched him cry looking at an Earthrise, although she was sworn to secrecy.

  “Bear Crater,” Caitlin told him.

  “Taurus-Littrow again?” asked Vee, another member of the crew, Tony’s wife, and the closest thing to a sister Caitlin had ever had. And yet, she still didn’t know her first name. Vee stood for something, but whether it was Violet, Veronica, or Victrola, Caitlin had no clue. She was just Vee, and she didn’t like being asked about it.

  “That’s where the money is,” Caitlin said. “The company thinks we can get a few more passes before we have to move southwest out to Fra Mauro. And that’s not going to be a stroll in the park. So I’ll take the easy money while we can still get it.”

  “You’re the boss, Cutter,” said Diaz, though his grin suggested teasing rather than deference. Caitlin shook her head. Freddy Diaz may have been a wiseass, but he was a good miner and a loyal crew member. Tall and wiry with thick black hair and brown eyes that were always in motion, he was born on the Moon and had never set foot on Earth or anywhere else. And chances were he probably never would. After more than a quarter century on the lunar surface, his body probably couldn’t take the strain of Terran gravity. Not that it was much of an issue anyway these days. Thank you, Mr. President, Caitlin thought angrily.