Tundra 37 (31 page)

“How far down?”

He shrugged. “A meter, two meters at most.”

“Then let’s start digging.”

She knelt in the snow and punched the crust until the ice broke. Brentwood found two buckets in the landrover, and they used those to scoop the snow and throw it into a heap beside the landrover. They dug until Gemme’s nose ran and her cheeks numbed. She had to go back to the landrover for breaks to warm her fingers and toes. “Do you think the aliens might still be around?”

Brentwood shrugged and looked around at the barren landscape. “They never came for the orb. Scientists dated it back thousands of years. Seems to me the owners are long gone.”

They were a meter and a half down when she brought her bucket down for the next scoop and hit something hard with a
thunk
.

Brentwood’s gaze shot up. “That’s it.” He jumped next to her and helped her brush snow off the surface. Her heart beat so fast, she felt the heated blood pumping through her veins. A crystal surface shone in the sun’s light, oily swirls dancing across the top. They dug farther, revealing a chest a meter tall, and wide enough to stash all their equipment. Gemme ran her gloves over the smooth surface as Brentwood dug around the base. Symbols of all shapes and sizes were carved into the sides.

She traced the symbol of a cross with an oval on top. “It’s like an ankh, the Egyptian symbol for eternal life.” As her finger traced the symbol, a shiver ran up her spine. The only people she knew that seemed to live forever were the Seers, and their quality of existence always made her cringe. She’d rather die than have people connect her to a machine.

Brentwood pointed to a figure eight on its side, “And here’s the symbol for infinity.”

She pointed to a ring-shaped geometric figure, the area between two concentric circles. “Over here there’s an annulus, the Celtic symbol for eternity.”

“But what are these?” Brentwood pointed to strange etchings of oval faces without eyes, and four-fingered hands holding curved objects.

“I have no idea.” She thought back to all of her history classes, but no references surfaced. “I’ve never seen them before.”

“Neither have I.” Brentwood clapped his gloves together to shed the layer of snow around his fingers. “Can you help me heft it out?”

Gemme crouched down next to the chest. “It looks heavy, but I’ll try.”

She dug her fingers underneath the bottom. Surprisingly, the crystal seemed like it weighed mere ounces.

“This doesn’t make sense. It’s too light.”

“I’m not complaining.” Brentwood smiled. “On the count of three.”

“One.”

“Two.” She joined in, her voice sounding stronger than she felt.

“Three!”

They heaved, raising it over their heads. Once they cleared the top, they pushed the crystal chest onto the snow. Brentwood climbed out of the hole and gave Gemme his hand, helping her up.

Circling it suspiciously, he crossed his arms. “The data suggested living matter. The Seers called it a biological anomaly made up of collagen and protein.”

She shrugged. “We could have used Luna’s help right now.” Both fell silent. Would Luna have enjoyed this? Probably not. She would have stayed in the landrover.

When Gemme touched the symbols, the golden swirls gravitated toward her fingers. Every time she pulled her hand away, the colors dissolved, remerging at the corners of the lid. A sudden urge to see what lay inside came over her. Her entire life lead here, to this chest on the farthest region of Tundra 37.

“The only way we’re going to understand it is if we open it.”

Brentwood nodded reluctantly. “I’ll pry off the lid.” He walked back to the landrover and pulled out one of the tent poles. Jamming the end underneath the lid, he forced his weight down on the pole. His face strained as he pushed. Gemme joined him, placing her weight on top of his.

“Doesn’t look like it’s going to budge.”

Right after he spoke, the pole gave way, and the lid popped off, landing with a gush of air on the snow. White smoke rose from the inside, dissipating into the coldness. Brentwood gave Gemme a questioning glance and she nodded. They approached the chest, her heart beating faster with each second.

A mumbling of voices wafted up from inside. Gemme froze as fear gripped her feet. Something was in there, something alive.

Brentwood put a finger over his lips and Gemme strained her ears to hear the voices. She expected some type of exotic language, but she could make out words like
angle
and
degree
.

“It can’t be,” she whispered, “They’re speaking English.”

She took a step forward and slapped her hand over her mouth as she recognized Ferris’s voice. At first it sounded like he talked gibberish. As she tiptoed closer, his words became clear. “How do you find the sine and cosine when they just give you an angle measurement, like 240 degrees?”

Gemme quickened her steps and leaned over the chest. The bottom seemed endless, stretching out beyond the snow underneath the crystal to an alternate dimension. Inside, she saw Ferris sitting on her family’s plastic couch with his miniscreen in his lap.

“It can’t be.” Gemme leaned in further. “Ferris?” She called his name but he didn’t look up. Instead she heard her own voice echo out, “When the angle is 240 degrees, it falls in the third quadrant, where all the sine and cosine angles in that quadrant are negative—”

“Gemme,” Brentwood spoke beside her, bringing her back to reality. “What do you see?”

She rubbed her eyes and tore herself away to look in his direction. Even as her eyes lost contact, the vision urged her to come back, to see what happened next. Her answer was so ridiculous, yet she couldn’t lie. “My brother, Ferris. He’s talking to me about his math exam, the one I helped him study for seven years ago. I know it’s crazy, but that’s what I see. You don’t see it?”

“No.”

Her spirits dropped as confusion spread through her. Maybe she was losing her mind. Snow blindness, isn’t that what it’s called when you’ve been exposed for too long? But it didn’t cause hallucinations.

Brentwood spoke softly, “I see my mom trying to feed my brother vegetables. I’m talking to him, trying to reassure him there’s going to be a dessert in the end.”

She spoke through her fingers over her mouth. “What are we seeing, then?”

Brentwood shook his head as if he couldn’t believe it. “What the scientists saw: our past.”

“Miles,” Gemme used his name for the first time. “The chest, it’s asking me to touch it, to go inside.”

Brentwood took in a ponderous breath. “I feel it too. I can’t resist it. I need to know, to go inside.”

Suddenly, her mind shot back to the mammoth fight, and Luna lying in the snow. “When Luna was dying, she’d tried to warn me not to let the Seers have it. What should we do?”

“We test it out first. See if there’s anything dangerous in there. If so, we destroy it.”

Gemme stared into his gaze. “I don’t want you to go alone.”

He took her free hand in his and his fingers curled around hers. “We’ll go together.”

Gemme held her breath as they stepped into the chest. A luminous glow of golden swirls enveloped the sky, increasing in intensity until it blinded her, leaving blossoming splotches on the back of her eyelids when she shut her eyes. A fierce current of wind blew around them, roaring in her ears. She clutched Brentwood’s hand tightly. If this was the end, then at least she’d be with him.

The wind gained force, whipping her hair around her face and jerking her coat sleeves until she thought they would rip open. She focused on Brentwood’s hand, his grip firm like a pillar of stability. The wind tapered off into the sky above them, leaving them in silence. She cracked opened her eyes just a sliver, not knowing what to expect.

Snow, snow, and more snow. Endless white. Tundra 37 spread out before them in all its stark bleakness. She licked frost from the corners of her mouth and tasted frigid air on her tongue. Her breath plumed. Disappointed, she searched for the sides of the chest around her feet, but boundless snow stretched out for miles.

“That’s it?”

A tentacled beast crested the snow mound beside them and flung itself down, sliding on the icy surface. When it got to the bottom, it scampered on its many paws toward a crack in the ice ahead. A glinting light reflected off its back and Gemme recognized her miniscreen. Another tentacle clutched the picture of her and Ferris. Anger rose inside her. The stupid beast still had her belongings, but now she’d get them back.

Gemme broke into a sprint, making a beeline for the hide of tentacles. Maybe she could reach it this time before the beast catapulted off the edge. Her fingers brushed the sticky tendrils, but the miniscreen vanished in the jellylike substance deep within the hide. She grabbed a tentacle and held on, feet trailing in the snow, while she thrust the other hand into the gooey mess. Her fingers brushed the sleek surface of the screen before strong arms pulled her back. The beast disappeared, her belongings sinking with it into the chasm of ice water below.

“Whoa! You almost went over again.”

“I nearly had it this time.” Gemme struggled in his arms before her skin prickled with a sense of déjà vu. She turned around to face him. “What’s going on?”

“We’re reliving a memory.” Brentwood scanned the landscape. “We must be, because your things wouldn’t be in such good condition after all this time had passed. And what are the odds that we’d find the exact same beast by the exact same crack.”

Gemme shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I.”

The world blurred around them until the snow grayed to resemble the inside of the
Expedition.
They sat huddled over the air vents. Alarms wailed, and the air sucked at them from behind. Brentwood pointed at a drop to the corridor below.

“We have to get out of here. Give me your hands and I’ll help you down.”

She slipped her hands into his, and she remembered.
We’ve done this before
.

Brentwood gave her a questioning frown.

“Don’t you see, we’re still in the chest.”

“You’ll have to jump.”

“No.”

He stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. “The upper decks are losing pressure. We can’t stay here much longer.”

Gemme cupped his face in both her hands. “This isn’t real.”

His hands wrapped around both of her wrists. “Feels pretty real to me, now let’s go.”

She wouldn’t budge, even as he tugged her hands off his face. “It’s a memory. The ship has already crashed.”

“You must have a concussion. I’ll have a medic examine your head once we get to safety.” Metal crunched above them and the ceiling warped in.

Gemme ignored their surroundings and stared into his eyes. “Miles, listen to me. We’re on Tundra 37, team Alpha Blue, mission Beta Prime.”

“Beta Prime?” He blinked and shook his head. “What am I doing? Where are we?”

Gemme gave him an encouraging smile. “We’re in the chest.”

He blinked. “You’re right. I got caught up in the moment and—”

Before he could continue, sparks flew all around them. The ship crashed while they sat in the air shaft. For a moment she thought
she
was the one who was delusional. Maybe they’d gone back in time, or her mind had concocted the future. Who knew the boundaries of this chest? Now they would both die because of her. She buried her face into his shoulder and his hand cradled the back of her head. The noise of crunched metal filled her ears until she could think of nothing else. Then, silence, as if someone had pressed the pause button on a wallscreen.

“Surprise!”

People shouted at her from all directions, some waving blue streamers and others blowing on noisemakers in her face. She tumbled forward and grabbed a railing to the stairs, feeling real oak underneath her fingertips. Where was she?

“Miles?”

A man with a pear-shaped nose grinned, half-chewed piece of candy sticking out of his mouth. “Mikey’s in the back, waiting for you.”

Gemme stumbled forward, elbowing her way through the crowd. She remembered snow, and her colony ship, but this domestic environment was foreign to her. Following the hallway, she saw pictures of people on the walls; an old couple on a porch, a girl riding a horse, a graduation ceremony. They were all vaguely familiar, but no names came to mind.

A tiered cake rested on a linoleum table in the next room. When she rounded the corner, she saw Brentwood on his knee. “Thank goodness I found you.”

He stared up at her, confused. “I don’t know what I’m doing here, Gemme, but I have this.”

He opened a velvet box. A diamond sparkled like ice under Solaris Prime. She pulled the ring from the velvet liner and placed it on her finger.

“Whatever the question is, I say yes!”

People cheered behind them, but Brentwood rose and turned away, distracted.

“What is it?” Gemme grabbed his arm.

He rubbed his temples. “This is another memory, it must be. It feels so real. I can almost remember buying that ring.”

“But this isn’t even our lives.”

Brentwood’s mouth quirked up in the corner. “Maybe it was.”

Gemme’s head reeled. “Are you suggesting we’ve been together in past lives?”

“Look around you, Gemme. What do you see?”

A banner hung from the doorframe with the phrase Jenny and Mikey forever painted in red. Jenny and Mikey, Gemme and Miles. Maybe the computer hadn’t calculated their pairing at all, maybe fate had chosen long before their parents birthed them on the
Expedition
. She could go crazy thinking about the ramifications.

“I want to go back,” Gemme pleaded, taking his hands. This memory land played with her mind, tantalizing her with just enough to keep her interested, to make her forget their mission and the people she cared about most. If she spent too long in it, she’d lose herself, reliving old memories for all eternity.

“Just a few more minutes.” Brentwood’s eyes shone bright. “I want to know more.”

If she left without him, she’d lose him in the chest. Besides, a part of her wanted to know who she was, where she’d came from, and why Brentwood stood by her side. Gemme wrapped her hands around his and closed her eyes. “Bring it on.”