Kudzu, Chapter 37

Tags

book 5, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 37

 

Michael fretted. He paced. What if Colleen wasn’t coming? What if he’d blown it? What if…?

He tried raising her on the radio, but there was only silence.

Maybe he should go back and look for her.

Or maybe he should just continue on.

Static crackled in his ear.

“Colleen?” he said, too quickly. “Colleen, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. I …”

The voice that replied wasn’t Colleen’s. It was higher pitched than hers, gruff and familiar, and not human.

“Michael! Fuck me, it’s good to hear your voice. I was worried I’d be trapped here with just fucking Ash to keep me company.”

“Slim?”

“In the fur. Damn. Ash and I tried to raise you guys for days. I was worried you might have… Well, it doesn’t matter. You’re alive, we’re alive, it’s like a fuckin’ reunion.”

“Wait,” Michael said. “What about the rest of the crew?”

Slim laughed. “Nice and comfy on the Beagle, I guess. I never made it there. Got lost in space and sucked back into the kudzu. Tried calling the ship, but that was a bust. Something about the electromagnetic fields inside the kudzu leaves. Faraday cage, she calls it. Says it’s a design flaw. Ash says that makes sense. He started talking equations and I tuned him out.”

Michael took a breath, trying to make sense of what Slim was saying.

“Ash was on the ship. If you never got to the ship, how are you with Ash?”

“Oh, yeah, remember how I was lost in space? Ash tried to rescue me.” Slim laughed. “We’re both here, so you can guess how well that worked out.”

“I… What? Ash? Rescued you?” Michael waved his hands pointlessly. The idea was patently absurd.

“Yeah, risked his life for a fucking raccoon. Don’t tell his parents or they’ll disown him. Probably would, too, if they were still alive.” Slim sneezed his contempt: a purely raccoon gesture. “We’ve been talking a lot, me and Ash. Anyway, where are you, so we can come find you?”

“Um. Lost in the middle of a giant kudzu ball? Near a spaceship or station or something. Does that help?”

“Yeah, not really. We’ve only been here a couple days, and haven’t had a lot of chance to go exploring. Maybe it’d be easier if you come to us. I could meet you at the ossuary—”

“How’m I supposed to find a, a what? Ossuary? I don’t even know what an ossuary is, much less how to find it.”

“Maybe if you can tell me a little more about where you are, I can get you directions. Is there anything about the spaceship that seems unique?”

Michael looked at the portal into the station. “I don’t know, I haven’t gone in. I was waiting for Colleen so we could go in together.”

“Aw, that’s so sweet.”

“Fuck you. I’ll look now.”

Michael squeezed through the narrow opening where the kudzu had cracked the shell of the station. It was pretty standard mid-21st century construction — too much crammed too close, a thousand compartments protruding from oppressively thick walls into a cramped, narrow space. The station was too small to have managed any reasonable artificial gravity, so it wasn’t designed with a floor. Which meant Michael had to pick his way over an uneven surface.

Michael relayed this to Slim, but didn’t hold out much hope. There were dozens of space stations like this that had been abandoned, and it was a good guess that many of them had been nudged into the satellite graveyard.

He worked his way to one of the bulky hatches. The wheel turned much more easily than he’d expected, and the door opened smoothly on well-oiled hinges.

Inside was another world.

It had been an observation room, a large, glass sphere about ten meters across. Michael stepped through the hatch and let himself slide down to the bottom of the sphere. Other than some scattered handholds built into the glass, the view was unobstructed.

And what a view!

Michael looked up and saw the kudzu vines and tunnels twisting over him, merging with other spacecraft, eventually converging on a thick, central hub from which all things emanated. In the middle of that was a large spaceship.

That, Michael was sure, was where the kudzu originated, and that’s what supplied the initial spin that allowed them to experience gravity, and kept the fish from flying off into the air.

Below his feet: the Earth in all its blue and green glory.

“Wow,” he said.

“What?” Slim said into his ear.

“There’s a giant glass observatory. That’s where we are.”

“That sounds pretty unique. The cat lady’ll know where that is, for sure. Be back soon.”

The connection dropped.

“Slim? Hello?”

Cat lady?

~

Colleen stopped running as soon as she saw the top of Michael’s head, as he climbed out of a crevice in the kudzu wall, and she pressed herself into the soft leaves, trying to catch her breath. She didn’t want to seem too panicked. Too desperate.

Had he seen her? It didn’t seem so.

Her heart hammered longer than it should. What the hell was wrong with her? She didn’t want to feel relief in seeing him, and she didn’t want him to know what she felt. She took deep breaths, when what she probably needed was a psychiatrist. Or at least the drugs.

When she felt she could move without risking passing out, she stepped away from the wall.

Michael was sitting next to the gap he’d crawled out of, leaning back against the wall. He hadn’t seen her.

Colleen approached, trying to keep her gait casual.

“So you decided to wait, after all,” she said. It wasn’t what she’d meant to say.

Michael looked up, a pained expression on his face.

God, I’m such an asshole.

“I talked to Slim,” Michael said, climbing to his feet. “He’s alive, and he’s somewhere inside the plant.”

A wave of relief washed through Colleen. “Good, I’m glad he’s safe.”

“Yeah, he and Ash are here. They’re going to try to get us directions. So we can meet up.”

Ash. It couldn’t have been Susan or Amelia. Or even Tharp.

“And the others?”

Michael shrugged. Feigning nonchalance, Colleen thought.

“Don’t know. On the Beagle, I guess. Anyway, there’s something I wanted to show you.” He glanced at the opening in the wall. “In here.”

He stood aside and let her crawl through, then followed. The inside was a cramped horror of an early model space station. In the old days, people actually lived in these things for months, even years. Colleen shuddered.

“Good thing I’m not claustrophobic,” she said. Though she was, a little.

“Keep going. There’s a hatch up ahead.”

“An airlock?”

Even with her back to him, Colleen could feel Michael’s jaw clench.

“Just joking,” she said. “I’m sorry, I’m just… I’m not good at this.” Whatever this was. Colleen wasn’t sure that even she knew what she meant.

Michael didn’t reply. She got to the hatch. The wheel turned in her hands, and the door came open.

Colleen crawled through…

…into space.

The observation sphere made up for any claustrophobia she had felt. Above her, the kudzu curled and twisted off into space. Below her… Earth, glowing softly in the moonlight.

It was so beautiful, so alive! Even with whatever had happened, even if humanity had been wiped out, after the desolation of Triton and the emptiness of space, the sight of it warmed her.

She slid down the curved glass until the Earth was under her feet. Michael scrabbled down behind her.

“Thank you,” Colleen said. “Thank you for this.”

Still looking out at the gentle curve of the Earth, she reached out, touched his fingers.

He flinched away from her, and she let her hand drop. Her chin quivered, but she wouldn’t, couldn’t look at him.

Then his fingers found hers.

Kudzu, Chapter 36

Tags

book 5, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 36

 

“Michael?”

Colleen was in the right place. She was sure of it. But Michael was gone, and his gear with him. All that was left was Colleen’s pack and water skins.

“Michael!” She called his name more loudly. Then she screamed it.

The kudzu sucked up the sound.

She hadn’t noticed just how different the acoustics of kudzu tunnels were from the Beagle’s hard metal and plastic corridors. Not until she needed her voice to carry.

She screamed louder.

There was no response.

She dropped the fish and ran.

~

Colleen’s pack was propped up against the wall. Michael had left some junk on top of it: a jumble of wires. He’d written something on side of the pack, big, messy letters smeared in purple berry-juice.

CALL ME SOME TIME

The wires… Colleen examined them more closely. It was, as far as she could tell, about three quarters of a communications set. It was ugly, haphazard work: one earphone rather than two, a microphone spliced to a bit of wire running to a small box. Two more wires ran from the box to the wall. They were jammed into a stem. It should work, she thought, though wiring was really not her strong suit. Now Susan, she’d have the radio working and preparing tea and crumpets at the same time. Still, Michael had taken something she’d noticed and done something with it, and she missed him with a sudden desperation.

The stem glowed softly, the same glow as the stems that fed the lamp-leaves. There were three holes: positive, negative, and ground, Colleen thought.

The thought that had gone into designing this plant had been prodigious. Unimaginable complexity, far in advance of anything they could have accomplished when the Beagle left Earth. It would have taken a genius, because a committee would never have been imaginative enough to come up with something like this. Colleen had been on enough committees to know.

She repressed a sudden stab of envy, and fit the ad hoc radio to her ear.

Static.

“Hello? Michael?”

More static.

“Michael? Are you there?”

“Yeah.” His voice was gruff in her ear.

Colleen let loose the breath she’d been holding. “I thought I’d lost you,” she said.

There was a long pause, like he was considering his response. Colleen bit her lip and waited.

“I went on ahead,” he said. “Took a left at the last fork we

doubled back to, and then left markers from there.”

“Okay. I’m on my way. I’ll see you soon, and—”

—and I caught some fish for lunch, she was going to say, but…

“Do whatever you want,” he said.

Colleen yanked the wires out of the wall, and if there was anything else he was going to say, she didn’t hear it. She didn’t want — was not going to let — him hear her cry.

Half the fish were still flopping and gasping feebly when she retrieved her shirt. She dumped those into one of her waterskins. The others, she knew, wouldn’t keep.

She didn’t have anything to cut and clean the fish. She tried rubbing one of them on the wall, but that just made a mess, and attracted cats. Eventually she just bit into it, tearing through the tough, clammy skin with teeth. Her mouth filled with broken scales and foul juices. Something stringy slithered across her tongue: the fish’s intestines, or worse. Could there be anything worse?

She spit it out, retching.

The cats feasted.

~

The problem was that Michael knew he was being irrational and unfair. Colleen was not Adam, and she’d hit him in fear and panic, not anger, or malice, or to show just how complete her control of him really was.

That was a long time ago, and Adam was long dead. Michael had buried that memory, had buried it all where he’d never have to see it again.

But when Colleen’s fist slammed into his face, all the heart-stopping, paralyzing fear had come back like it had never left, like it had been coiled within him, waiting for a trigger to set it free. And with it, the shame…

Intellectually, he knew it wasn’t really her fault, that she hadn’t meant it. But he could never forgive her.

At least, not now.

He waited for her in the kudzu tunnel that lead into an old space station, or space ship — he wasn’t sure which. The kudzu had torn through the metal skin to create a hatchway down into the vehicle, and even extended viney tendrils that looked suspiciously ladder-like down to the floor.

Michael had poked his head through, but though it looked safe enough, he didn’t want to go on alone.

So he waited, and wondered if Colleen would follow after his stupid, angry outburst.

~

For all his well-justified anger, Michael had left a clear and unambiguous path. As Colleen followed, she gathered up the bits of his gear that he’d left to mark the road.

The kudzu tunnels leveled out as she moved further into it. Now the floors were a flat carpet of leaves. When she lifted them to see what lay beneath, she found a thick thatch of small vines, so tightly bound together as to make a solid surface. The resulting surface would have been a little rough to skate on, but a bicycle, or really anything with reasonably sized wheels, would have no problems.

The tunnel itself had become more regular in general — the walls and ceiling formed a roughly rectangular shape, though the edges were a bit rounded, and the lamp-leaves were evenly spaced.

Increasingly, there were iris doors on either side of the corridor, and Colleen couldn’t resist exploring. She touched the surface of one, and it slid open for her.

As she stepped through the doorway, the lamp-lights within brightened. It was a room, large by space-station standards. Roughly square — again, with rounded edges — with a raised platform against one of the walls. The platform was bed-shaped, and when she pressed on it with her hands, it gave softly and firmly like a mattress.

She sat on it, and bounced. And laughed.

She lay back on the bed, and sank into it, just slightly. Leaves curled against her body.

She wished Michael was there.

Sitting up abruptly, she left the room behind, and followed Michael’s bread-crumb trail, wherever it might lead.

Kudzu, Chapter 35

Tags

book 5, fish!, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 35

 

 

Following the right hand path led, eventually, to another iris-door, and another lake, complete with fish and cats and bees. Or maybe it was the same lake. It was hard to know. The tunnels wound and twisted around so much that it was impossible to keep one’s sense of direction, and the tunnels and chambers had no obvious landmarks. Everything had the same organic lumpiness.

Michael and Colleen replenished their supply of berries, and then backtracked.

They walked until they were exhausted, finding multiple routes back to the lake — or lakes — and then they slept, back to back, wrapped in their silvery blanket for warmth. Touching, but not acknowledging it.

The lamp-leaves dimmed around them.

Colleen woke first. She slipped out from under the covers and tucked them around Michael. As she started moving around, the lights brightened; the plant was clearly responding not only to their presence, but making decisions based on some sort of pattern matching.

She walked down the tunnel a ways to see what the kudzu would do. Around her, the lights remained relatively bright, but they dimmed around Michael’s sleeping form.

“Aren’t you clever?” she said. “What else can you do?”

She had to climb a few feet up a wall to reach one of the lamp-leaves. It was slightly warm to the touch, not hot like an incandescent bulb, but like a florescent tube, and vibrated very lightly, as if it were humming.

She put her ear to it.

Was it? Yes. It hummed softly with a familiar sound — the sound that she’d known all her life, that had been so much a part of the world that she never really heard it. More that she heard its absence on the rare occasions power failed during a storm. Here it was, singing from the depths of the foliage: the infamous 60 cycle hum that plagued musicians since they first learned how to feed electricity into a guitar.

It made sense. The kind of luminescence they’d been seeing needed some sort of power source; simple bioluminescence just wasn’t bright enough, and really couldn’t be, without becoming quickly exhausted. Unless all the leaves within the kudzu were bioluminescent. It would work, but it would be tremendously disconcerting, like living in a film negative.

The silver leaves on the exterior of the kudzu, then, were solar cells, collecting sunlight and converting it to electricity.

Which meant that there was — had to be — some mechanism by which the power was transmitted through the plant and made available to the lamp-leaves. A power grid, of some sort.

Colleen lifted the wide leaf to examine the base. The stem glowed, and it was warm where it connected to the vine. She shifted her weight to get a better look.

There was a soft snap.

There was a flash of light.

Colleen lay on her back on the tunnel floor, gasping for breath. Her fingers tingled, but not bad. Mostly she had knocked the wind out of herself by inhaling just as she hit the uneven floor.

She forced herself onto her hands and knees, and then up onto her heels, as she tried to catch her breath. Michael was sitting up under his silver blanket, watching her.

“I’m fine,” she said, when she could. “Don’t bother getting up.”

She brushed a hand through her short hair, stood, dusted herself off. “Yeah,” she said. “Don’t worry about me. I’m just fucking fine.”

She felt Michael’s eyes on her as she walked away, and she kept walking until she couldn’t feel them anymore.

And then kept walking.

~

It was calm here by the lake, calming, and Colleen sat in the moss and watched the cats fish. The placid waters rippled gently, and the bees buzzed from flower to flower. The loamy scent of the moss mingled with the sweetness of ripe berries.

But really, she’d had her fill of berries.

She had no idea how long they’d wandered, lost within the kudzu, and other than a few handfuls of tough, tasteless kudzu peas, all she’d eaten were berries. How long before she turned purple herself?

One of the cats strolled proudly past her, a fish wriggling in its mouth.

Colleen’s mouth watered, remembering sushi.

She reached toward the cat, slowly, but it bolted. Wrestling a cat for a fish didn’t seem wise, anyway.

She had left her pack back with Michael, but she didn’t think there was much in it that would be of use in catching a fish. She needed a net, or something.

She lay back on the soft moss and looked at the roof of the chamber, and thought.

And then, she got to work.

~

There was something oddly liberating about standing naked in a lake, trawling for fish with one’s shirt. A break from, well, from everything. From civilization. From shame. From inadequacy. From the past.

From everything society ground into a person from the day she was born.

The cats and the fish didn’t care that her tits were too small, or her nose too big, or that she had horrible scars melted into her body. Right here, right now, nobody cared.

Clothes were to protect from the elements. Right now, it was warm. She shoved her panties and bra into her pants pocket, and draped them over her shoulder.

She pulled her shirt, flapping and dripping, out of the lake. It was tied off at the neck and sleeves with kudzu vine twine to make the net, and then again at the other end to keep her catch in. Water streamed through the fabric, until it was just fish.

She headed back to where she had left Michael, who had made something akin to a blade from his space suit’s belt buckle. They’d have a proper meal, and if the fish lived long enough for her to get back to camp, she could put some of them in one of her water skins, to save for later.

And maybe, just maybe, she and Michael could talk. Not about the past, for once. About the future.

~

When she got back to camp, Michael was gone.

Kudzu, Chapter 34

Tags

book 5, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 34

They followed the cats.

The cats spread out across the shoreline, perching on any outcropping branch that gave them access to water deep enough to support the small fish. But when they left, they all headed the same direction.

A Siamese with loose skin on her belly and enlarged teats caught Colleen’s eye. The cat held a fish — relatively large for the shallow pools the cats trolled — still gasping and flapping in its mouth, and walked purposefully down the shoreline.

Colleen nudged Michael, ignoring the way he flinched at her touch, and pointed.

“That one,” she said. “She’s got kittens, so she’ll head straight back to them. No aimless detours.”

“Fine,” Michael said.

It pissed her off. Yes, he was talking now, but it was all fine and sure and if you want.

She tied her waterskins to her belt and stomped off after the cat. Michael followed.

The cat led them to a convoluted section of wall with a narrow opening, easily big enough for a cat to pass through without difficulty, less so for a human. Without her pack, Colleen could have wriggled through, but Michael would have a difficult time. The cat slipped through the opening and disappeared into the foliage.

Colleen poked her head through. The tunnel itself was much wider than the opening. The kudzu obstructing the opening was more of an espalier than a hedge, and she was pretty sure they could break it open easily enough.

“We can widen this,” she said, “enough to get through.” She pulled at the kudzu, which gave, but didn’t break. “A little help would be good.”

She heard the rustling of foliage moving, and looked over her shoulder at Michael to see what he was doing.

He wasn’t doing anything, just standing back with his arms crossed.

“I don’t think you’ll need it,” Michael said.

Colleen felt something moving under her hands, like a snake. She let go and jumped away, tripping over her feet and landing on her ass.

The vines moved across each other, twisting more tightly together. The gap widened like a slow-motion shutter, an iris sliding open to create an aperture through which they could pass.

“Okay,” Michael said. “Now that’s just creepy. Like it’s watching us.”

“Plants respond to their environments,” Colleen said. “Typically what we consider a significant event passes too quickly to be more than a blip to the plant, and a plant’s movement is too slow for us to notice. We’ve already seen this plant exhibit directed growth in response to an external stimulus, when it acted to seal an atmospheric breach. It’s genetically programmed to grow in certain ways under certain circumstances. Why should this be different?”

“It’s still creepy.”

“The bigger question is, why bother putting a door here? We didn’t see door-like structures in any of the other tunnels we’ve been through, so it’s not a default state.”

“I think I can answer that,” Michael said. He pointed at the wall of the chamber. There were faint lines on the leaves and the bark of the vines.

“It’s sediment, not soil, but fish poo and leaf bits, or whatever passes for sediment here. Looks like the lake floods every once in a while, and the door keeps the floodwaters out.”

Michael stepped through the open iris and examined the wall on the other side.

“No sedimentation here,” he said.

Colleen ran her hand over the tightly bound vines that made up the open door.

“Whoever designed this is a genius,” she said.

“Whoever designed this destroyed the world,” Michael said.

“Yeah. But still.”

~

The tunnel wound around enough that, if they hadn’t already been lost, they would have been by the time they found the Siamese with her litter. She sprawled on her side in a small alcove in the tunnel wall, licking her paws. Five kittens fought blindly for their positions at her belly. The fish lay in front of her, half-eaten.

“Well, hello, you,” Colleen said, crouching down in front of the cats. “Aren’t you adorable?”

The Siamese eyed her warily.

“Don’t disturb the feral cats,” Michael said. “Remember, we don’t have any antibiotics to treat an infected scratch. If we end up having to amputate your hand, how will you punch me in the face?”

Colleen spun to face him.

“Look, I’m sorry about that, all right? But you can’t do that to me. You need to respect my boundaries.”

Michael stared at her, then turned away and walked further down the tunnel.

“Jesus.” Colleen chased after him. “Don’t fucking start this again.”

Michael stopped abruptly enough that Colleen collided with his back. He didn’t look at her.

“I was asleep. I woke up because of what you were doing to me. Where the fuck do you get off accusing me of crossing boundaries?”

“I…” Colleen let out her breath. “Fuck.”

She watched Michael as he walked away, until he disappeared around a bend in the tunnel. She sank to the floor and buried her head in her knees.

“Fuck.”

~

He came back for her.

She didn’t know how long it had been, or how far he had gone before he realized she wasn’t following. Or whether he’d stopped and waited, or had kept going.

She didn’t even know he was back until he spoke.

“The tunnel forks up ahead,” he said.

Colleen stopped rocking and looked up at him, framed against the tunnel’s lights.

“I didn’t mean for any of that to happen,” she said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“I’m going to take the right fork.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

“If it forks again, I’ll keep going right.”

“I was sleeping with Bill Williams.”

There was a pause. “If a tunnel ends up being a dead end, I’ll backtrack and take the left fork. If I do that, I’ll leave something as a marker so you know.”

“I didn’t even fucking like Bill. I don’t know why I was sleeping with him. I don’t know why I was cheating on Henry. I wasn’t unhappy. I wasn’t dissatisfied. I wasn’t mistreated, or ignored, or, or anything. I didn’t even like him.”

Michael didn’t say anything. He didn’t move.

“It lasted over three months. We tried to be discrete. I thought we were discrete.”

“You were,” Michael said. “I worked closely with Bill. If anyone would have noticed anything, it would have been me.”

Colleen realized she was rocking again. She tried to stop, but it didn’t work. She couldn’t bring herself to tell the most terrible part. Couldn’t make the words form, couldn’t push them out of her lungs.

“I never kissed Bill,” she said, instead. “It’s the only way I didn’t betray Henry. It’s the only thing left that’s just ours. I can’t kiss you. I can’t kiss anyone, not now. Please tell me you understand.”

Michael was quiet for a long time.

“I understand,” he finally said. He looked away from her, then back, catching her eye and holding it.

“My first husband put me in the hospital,” he said. “Twice. And there were always reasons, and excuses, and apologies. Please tell me you understand.”

“Oh, God.”

“I’m going to take the right fork up ahead. You’re welcome to come with me, if you want, or follow later. Or whatever.”

Colleen watched him walk away and vanish around the bend. Then she grabbed her waterskins and ran to catch up.

Kudzu – Book V – Chapter 33

Tags

book 5, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Book V: Hearts and Bones

Chapter 33

 

Their clothes were still damp when the lights went out.

“Interesting,” Michael said.

“Mmm?” Colleen murmured into his chest. She’d been half-asleep, drowsing in the comforting carpet of his hair. She uncurled from him; the air was cool on her belly and thighs, where she’d been pressed against Michael’s body. “Where’d everything go?”

“Give your eyes a second to adjust,” he said. “There’s still some luminescence from the lamp-leaves.”

It was true; the lamp-leaves were pale ghosts of themselves, a thousand tiny moons scattered like stars around them. They shimmered, reflected in the still, black waters of the lake. The moss was a soft, dark gray against the twisted forest of the walls, and, draped over the vines to dry, their clothes were wraiths, specters hovering in the air.

“Where are the cats?” Colleen asked. The damn things had been adorable at first, gathering around Michael and her, investigating, following them around. Watching as they fucked with something akin to amusement, and disdain. There were plenty of hiding places for them, of course, but they’d shown no inclination to hide before now.

“I don’t know.” Michael rolled to his feet. He checked their clothes. “They’re still wet.”

Colleen rubbed the goose-flesh from her arms. “I’m cold,” she said. “And I’m still wet, too. Get back here and warm me up.”

“We should figure out what happened to the cats.”

“You want to go stumbling around in the cold and dark? Naked? Come here.”

~

It got cold in the night.

Or what passed for night here. Even without any way to tell time, Michael was sure that the darkness had lasted significantly longer than half a rotation of the kudzu ball. It clearly wasn’t influenced by external events, which meant there was no telling how long it might really last.

Colleen shivered in her sleep.

He rose silently and checked their clothes again. Still wet. They wouldn’t dry until tomorrow, whatever that meant.

He rubbed warmth into his arms. It just made the rest of him feel colder. It would be stupid to have survived this long, only to freeze to death.

If they only had a blanket.

~

A soft green light filtered through the covers, playing against Colleen’s eyelids. Henry was curled around her, hand on her breast, semi-hard against the small of her back. She pressed against him, felt him swell.

She reached behind her and guided him in.

He kissed her shoulder, her neck. Her ear. Eyes still closed, she twisted to meet his lips, opened her mouth to his tongue—

No. Wrong.

Not Henry’s lips.

Someone else’s.

She screamed. Kicked and thrashed, fighting her way from the man’s clutches, from the confining blanket, which fell apart around her.

Michael.

Fuck.

He sat, draped in moss, shock and hurt on his face. In her panic, she had struck his face, reopening his wound, but he didn’t seem to notice the blood.

“Don’t ever do that again,” she said.

He had made a blanket of moss, somehow, in the middle of the night. It had been warm in there. Her breath misted in the cold, morning light. There was frost on the moss, under her toes. She shivered, crossed her arms over her breasts.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He covered his lap with a pillow of moss.

Their clothes were still damp, and Colleen couldn’t imagine putting them on. But she also couldn’t imagine standing naked in front of Michael. Or curling up with him for warmth. Not now. She couldn’t even look at him.

An orange tabby strolled past her, brushing briefly against her leg, to the water’s edge. It stared into the water, then slashed down with claws unsheathed. A small fish flopped on the mossy bank. The cat batted at it.

Colleen dipped her fingers into the water. It was warm, at least compared to the air.

“I’m going to wash up,” she said.

She felt Michael’s eyes on her as she waded into the water.

“Water’s perfect,” she said. “Come on in.”

~

It heated up as quickly as it had cooled off, frost turning to dew and dew to a brief fog that condensed and dripped from the ceiling. And then that, too, faded.

Cats fished on the shoreline. Pudgy bees, which Michael hadn’t seen in the room yesterday (yesterday? what did that mean, here? before it got dark, then) lumbered their way through clusters of kudzu flowers.

Michael climbed out of the water. He dried himself with his shirt, then tossed it to Colleen, who had followed.

“Thanks,” she said.

He didn’t answer, just reached for his pants.

“How long are you going to not talk to me?”

He didn’t answer that, either.

~

Michael toyed with the idea of finding a sturdy piece of kudzu to fashion into a rudimentary spear, but quickly abandoned the idea; even if they had something to cut and sharpen it with, they didn’t have a fire on which to cook a fish, or any cooking utensils. That was assuming that he could actually spear one of the things.

And the idea of making a living thing dead made his stomach roil. He didn’t have a problem with meat, per se. It was just the idea of converting something that was alive and moving around into just meat. He’d seen enough bodies after the accident that he didn’t feel he could be part of that process.

Instead, he turned his efforts to their damaged space suits. Useless now for their intended purpose, they still had all sorts of electronics that were worth salvaging. After stripping them, he tore two large swatches out of Colleen’s suit and, using thin kudzu creepers as thread, turned them into packs that they could hang from their belts. He cut the arms of her suit off, and then again at the elbows. Tied off at either end, they became waterskins. His own suit, he cut apart and, adding remnants of Colleen’s suit, converted into a blanket.

“Looks like an astronaut-skin rug,” Colleen said, when she returned with her arms full of berries and seed pods.

“You don’t have to use it if you don’t want,” he said.

Colleen dumped the food on the moss between them, sat.

“At least you’re talking to me again.”

Michael tossed her one of the packs, started filling his own: electronics first, then blanket, then seed pods. Not the berries; they’d crush too easily, releasing their juices over everything.

“Yeah,” he said, popping a handful of berries into his mouth, “at least there’s that.”