Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury

YOUNG PILGRIMS Joe Meno

But the outpost colony of that otherwise uninhabited planet was known to be Christian, said to have been settled by members of two devout families. Both of these families had—like other believers before them—crossed inconceivable distances, rebuked the trappings of a civilization gone without God, and marshaled all they could against the ignominy of doubt to begin again, to build the world anew. This was the explanation most often given for the colonists’ insistence on isolation and their curious fortitude: It was thought that no one but a religious settlement would have been able to make anything out of a land so bleak. The unnamed planet on which the colony had been built was inconsiderable, closer in size to Phobos, the Martian moon, its one hemisphere covered in a perpetual half-gray darkness. Other than the silver boundaries of the colony itself, which consisted of three glass domes—used for shelter and various farming developments, surrounded by oddments of tunnels, barracks, and air locks—there was nothing: only the arid patchwork of hundreds of low hills covered in red dust and then, above those, the unappealing immaculacy of outer space.

There it is, up ahead,” Quinn said, pointing to a red rise in the distance. The boy nodded to himself, having almost given up hope a few paces back. But there it was now: the low, pyramidal hill, and beside it the path he had made a week earlier.

With his left hand he took hold of the girl Lana’s heavy silver glove, his breath—coming faster as they climbed along the incline—fogging up the inside of his convex helmet. Lana slipped a little in the dirt, and Quinn had to hold on to her with both hands. Once they stumbled to the peak, they both rested, Quinn leaning over, his breath appearing and then disappearing along the seamless inside of the helmet, Lana sitting down in the dust, holding her heavy helmet up with both hands.

“If I had known it was going to be so far… ,” she said, but did not bother to finish her sentence.

Beneath the rounded helmet, Quinn could see that the girl’s cheeks were flushed. It looked more than lovely. There was an odd strand of blond hair plastered along her forehead, which was dappled by a few nearly indistinguishable dots of sweat. She looked like a child sitting there, pouting a little, her eyes closed as she tried to catch her breath. She was fourteen, one year older than Quinn. Both of them had been born somewhere on the voyage from There to Here, a single point on a starry map no one could trace or be sure of anymore, as everything that was the Past, including the ship used for their passage, had been disposed of, dismantled, or buried a long time ago. There was a joke Quinn’s mother used to tell him when he was younger, as she tucked him into bed, something about being born in space, “her child, created out of the dust of stars,” which he never understood and which he could no longer quite remember. He looked down at Lana, watched her cheeks cool to a softer white, and then asked, “Are you ready?”

Lana nodded slightly but did not move at first. Instead, she looked up at him, staring seriously into his eyes. “If my father ever finds out we’re all the way out here… ,” and again did not finish her sentence, not because she couldn’t but because, this time, there was no need.

Lana’s father, Forrest Blau, was a man of rigid temperament with a wide face and striking gray beard. He had personally funded the Great Journey. On Earth, he had been the owner of a large factory farm. Now, as minister of this meager colony, he led prayer services and, in private, heard Quinn’s confession. His face was the face of God as Quinn could, at the moment, imagine it—harsh, immovable, a little like the gray features of the planet itself. There was also his long white switch—whittled to a sharp point, waxed to a gleaming shine, cut from a branch of the birch tree, the first living thing that had flourished here and which now filled most of Dome Three with its eager, ancient-looking branches. Forrest kept the white switch beside his place at the dining room table. He would sometimes use it during his sermons, pointing from family member to family member asking, “Who here among us is without sin?” and Quinn would always bow his head and look away. More than once the boy had felt the white switch cut across his hands or along his backside as he willed himself not to cry. Forrest, at these times, would seem displeased, deeply distraught, divinely eager for the boy to make amends. It was as though it hurt Forrest more to inflict punishment than it did for the condemned to receive it. Then the switch would fly back again and come down hard against Quinn’s knuckles, and whatever Forrest Blau was feeling would flee from the boy’s mind as the pain erupted along his hands, his knuckles. Then once more the switch would fly back. Then again.

There was also Forrest Blau’s bolt-action rifle—an ancient M1903 Springfield in perfect working order—which hung loaded, above the air lock leading from the colony to the outside world. Quinn had never seen it used before, had never even seen anyone hold it, except once a week, when Forrest would take it down for cleaning. This, too, was a religious act for the minister. There was a sense of sanctity as the gray-bearded man oiled the pins and checked the bore. Once the rifle was reassembled, Forrest would lift his wrinkled face skyward and close his eyes, saying a mysteriously short prayer, looking both penitent and elegantly severe.

Lana Blau was nothing like her father; Quinn often thought of her as a moss rose, the kind that flourished under Dome Two, unpredictable though beautiful, growing a little wilder each year, grappling its way amongst the angles and divides of the planet’s craggy rocks. Or maybe she was like one of those pink cherry trees, growing taller than anyone thought was possible from soil with remarkable levels of carbon dioxide. There was something about the dirt of this place, Quinn’s father, William, often said. William, on Earth, had worked for Forrest Blau’s food-manufacturing firm as a food geneticist. William claimed that there was something about the preponderance of unbreathable carbon dioxide that made everything grow and bloom in ways no one could have guessed. It was the reason the colonists had to wear the tank suits and helmets anywhere outside of the three-domed colony and why hiking so far from the compound was forbidden. Once the air in their air tanks was gone, or God forbid, if there ever was an accident… But nothing like that had ever happened, and this lone excursion, traversing the rises and hills with Lana, was the only way Quinn could devise to be alone with her. And even though he was still a boy and she was still a girl, Quinn had begun to catch himself staring at her forehead, at her neck, at her mouth, wondering what she was thinking. Did she have any idea what he was thinking? What if, on this hike, they should spot something like a long-tailed rodent, or some other animal, some small creature no one else had ever seen, and she was to jump back in fright and Quinn was to catch her? Then would she begin to understand some of the feelings he had been having?

“We better get moving,” Lana said, standing up. “If we want to make it back before prayers.”

Quinn nodded and off they went, scrambling over the loose red rocks again, their long, lithe shadows playing upon each other at the ends of their flat, dusty boots.

There was a beautiful pink tree, made of something like glimmering crystals, that Quinn had discovered while hiking alone a few weeks earlier. This was what he wanted Lana to see; this was what he thought might help begin to approximate the shape and depth of his feelings for her. Or not. Or, more likely, she would look at it and smile, and then shrug, and the two of them would walk back to the colony unspeaking, their breath going faster and faster as they struggled to return to Dome One by curfew, this breathlessness their only meaningful exchange.

But there was nothing else like it on the planet, the pink tree, nothing Mr. Blau or Quinn’s father had ever mentioned, and the way it grew there in sharp angles, glistening like it was covered in white and pink crystals, it was something Lana just had to see for herself. And it was a few more meters, just over the next low hill. Quinn saw Lana struggle as she climbed, and so placed his hand under her arm, helping her over a loose rise of gray gravel, his fingers lingering half a moment too long in the space between her underarm and her side. The girl paused just then, looking down at him suspiciously. She glared at his hand on her underarm, and he nodded, quickly withdrawing it. It was about as intimate a touch as the two had ever shared, and their space suits—with their layers of fabric, Mylar, and padding—did little to occlude the strange electrical charge Quinn felt throbbing in his fingers. His cheeks quickly flamed red. He let Lana walk on ahead, watching her stumble slightly once more, before she recovered her balance. She looked back to see if Quinn had noticed, and then she smiled the smile of someone who did not care whether anyone had noticed or not. It was confusing, and also exciting, to see how one moment Lana could seem like her old self, just like a child, and in another moment there would be some other gesture, the way she tilted her head, the softness in her eyes, that seemed like she was someone new, someone much older. It was hard to know which person the boy had been falling for.

He hurried up the incline, trying to ignore these new thoughts, and as he did, there was a landslide of red-gray gravel from above, and then Quinn was sliding backward, fumbling on his face, tumbling headlong down the rise. It took him longer than he would have thought to get back on his feet, and by that time Lana had disappeared. She was gone. There was only an enormous pile of loose red rocks, tilting and spilling everywhere, rising as high as his feet, and the unforgiving pale blue lights of the colony flashing back at him, somewhere from the hazy distance. Something terrible had happened. Lana was missing.

Quinn had never run as hard in his life, and still the three glass domes seemed so far away. He tripped once, pulling himself up, then again, and this time lay there in the dust, his forehead resting against the cold, inner contours of his glass helmet. What had he done? Where had Lana gone? What would happen when Forrest found out? How, if ever, would he be forgiven?

He had thought he was becoming a man. And here he was something so far from it. He had left Lana, had run off like a frightened child. How would he ever be able to look his mother, his father, Forrest Blau, in the face and tell them what had happened? And what would happen to him once he did?

The boy struggled back to his feet, thinking of Forrest Blau’s stern features, of the white switch lying beside the table, of the well-oiled rifle hanging above the air lock. He turned then, facing the way he had just come, his footprints still directing small cloud after small cloud of fine red dust in the air. He made a decision then, and checking to be sure there was still enough air in the tank, he sprinted back along the trail he had just made. The sound of his nervous heartbeat reverberating in his ears, of his feet clomping through the heavy dust, of his breath as it fogged up the front of his helmet, firmly carried him back up the incline of the rough, red rocks to where Lana had, only moments before, disappeared.

The rock slide had left a slanting hill where Lana had been standing. Besides that, there was nothing, only a set of her footprints, which were surprisingly larger than his. He lifted a small red boulder, then another, then a third, hoping to see a flash of her silver suit, the tread of her black boots, the glassy enclosure of her rounded helmet. But there was only more dust, only more red dirt. He tossed rock after rock aside, and as he did, he began to cry. He pounded on the sides of his helmet. His face—drenched in sweat—twisted itself into a rictus of dismay. With the helmet on he was unable to wipe the salty tears from his eyes, and so it felt as if he was drowning. He doubled over, feeling like he might begin to vomit. And as he leaned there, bile rising up in his throat, he saw something move.

Something.

The smallest of movements.

A light.

A soft pink light, emanating from between the piles of triangular rocks.

Quinn fell to his knees and began to hurl the pieces of stone aside with his heavy gloves, clawing at the upturned angles, digging his fingers into the sediment, until a ray of soft pink light poured out—the light the same color as the mysterious crystal tree he had discovered a few weeks before—and then, as he scuttled more of the gravel aside, the light struck against the curved exterior of his helmet, refracting, pouring against his eyelids, his nose, his mouth. For a moment he thought he was going blind, the light shifting from pink to white, his eyes struggling to make sense of the shape before it. But then, only a few moments later, he saw it was a hole. It was large and light-filled, just about as wide as his shoulders. He lowered his right arm inside, his hand momentarily disappearing into the uncanny brightness. There was a sound rising out of it, something familiar yet oddly affecting, like a swell of singing voices. It was like the music Forrest Blau would sometimes play at the beginning of prayer service, a chorus of vibrant, joyful noise. The boy felt his arm quivering with heat, the white light filling the space between his flesh and joints with a decided ferromagnetism. And then, forsaking all common sense, wisdom, and the world he had always known, Quinn crawled inside, forcing his entire body into the hole. Falling—the feeling of losing the fight with gravity—was all he remembered before the seething whiteness filled his eyes.

For a moment he was certain he was sleeping, or maybe, he began to wonder, he had died. But no; he sat up stiffly, placing his hand against the side of his helmet. He had been lying on his back, and the colors around him now shifted from a pulsing white to a faded pink and then a terminal blue. All around him there were other colors, too, yellows and greens and vibrant reds, and as he got himself up, his back sore from the fall, he saw something moving before him, something he had only ever seen in books, or in the videos in the library: a lean, nimble-footed deer sipping at a brook.

It was not quite a deer but something with a similar shape, the animal wearing a gray-blue coat of fur, and reddish-pink antlers that entangled themselves as the animal snuffled at a stream of clear water. There was water. Somehow there was actual water or something that looked like water down here. Quinn stood now, weak on his feet, dumbstruck. There was water, and there were plants and flowers of all kinds, some with petals as large as his face, growing all around. He had, in fact, landed in a pile of what appeared to be great pink poppies, in a small field full of them.

Quinn looked up, seeing the shape of the place he had fallen into. It was a cave, a cavern, and above, nearly ten meters up, was the opening. He could see the hole he had fallen through hanging there like a false black moon, and through it, the nighttime sky, still reeling. For a moment, all he could do was stare, and then something else, a bird—like a hummingbird, but much bigger, nearly the size of his face—darted past. It disappeared inside the trumpet of an otherworldly flower and then buzzed away. He watched the shape the bird made, amazed by the swift pattern of its thin purple wings, flitting from oversized flower to flower; he had never before seen a bird or anything move through the air under its own volition. The bird wound itself through a grove of waist-high vines and troubled a stand of reddish fruits. Following the bird’s turbulence with his eyes, he saw Lana, her body lying on a hillock of orange flowers. He began to panic again, rushing over to where she lay, on her side; the front of her helmet had been cracked, a slight silver spiderweb running the length of the convex glass. Quinn quickly checked the gauge on her air tank. It was empty, exhausted by the leak in the helmet. For a moment Quinn froze, then he scrambled to get the helmet off Lana’s neck, pulling at the small silver locks until they gave.

She was unconscious, her face looking passive, as peaceful an expression as she’d ever worn. He found the auxiliary mask and hose at the side of his own tank and placed it over Lana’s nose and mouth. Soon she began coughing, and then, her eyes wide and frightened, she tried to pull the apparatus away from her face. He did all he could to hold the mask against her face, but she was stronger than he would have guessed and pushed it away even more forcefully, her face turning red. Quinn shoved it back over her mouth, and finally she began to relax, starting to breathe once again. Moments later the air in his own tank had dwindled to emergency levels, and he could taste the nitrogen inside the helmet as the tank began to hiss, all but empty.

This accident, all of it had been his fault; he could admit that now. He had been led into temptation, and the consequences of his betrayal were going to be fatal for the both of them. He grasped Lana’s hand in his own, hoping to black out first, as he did not want to see the horrid expression Lana would make as she began gagging on the carbon-dioxide-flooded air. He waited, hoping for the world to quickly go dark.

But then nothing happened. Lana held his hand in her own and continued to breathe, looking up at him, first terrified, then confused, then at last—as his air tank ran dry and the emergency tone beeped faintly, warning of imminent failure—her face shifted to a kind of teary-eyed delirium. Somehow she was breathing. Somehow she could breathe. Carefully, uncertainly, she removed the auxiliary mask from her mouth and took a shallow breath from the air inside the cavern. And then—not coughing up blood—she began to smile. It was a smile Quinn had never seen on her face before, and though it only lasted a moment, it was enough to convince the boy to unclasp his own helmet and take in a short breath.

The air, the plants down here—somehow there was enough oxygen for both of them to breathe.

Quinn set the helmet by his feet and took in a gulp of air once more, the striking odors of ripe flowers filling his nostrils with a fragrant, almost corrupted smell. Lana sat up and did the same, the two of them breathing together, looking over at each other, quietly laughing.

It was what the two of them would later come to think of as a miracle. In this deep, forsaken cave, somehow there was enough air to breathe without wearing a helmet, and there were animals and birds and flowers and a world as colorful as it had been described in the first book of the Bible. The children stood then, hand in hand, making their way together along the foliage’s pink, rambling edge.

It was easier falling through the hole than climbing back out of it. And then there was the problem of their empty air tanks and the crack in Lana’s helmet. Quinn solved the question of their egress simply enough by finding a path up along the stony outcroppings of vines and dirt. The empty air tanks required a much more thoughtful solution. Here Lana decided to purge both of their tanks completely, then used a narrow twig to force the valves of both their tanks open again. Her coup de grâce was using the suits’ filters to create a vacuum, drawing in enough air from the cavern itself, before sealing the tanks again. The crack in her helmet held, leaking a little air whenever she took a heavy step, and as they climbed back up and out of the cave, Quinn stared at the fracture dividing the girl’s face, sensing, for the first time, that something for the two of them had begun to change.

Over dinner that evening—it was freeze-dried mashed potatoes and sickles of reddish soybeans, reconstituted to look like some nameless meat—Lana and Quinn stared at each other without speaking. What are you thinking? their wide eyes seemed to say. And then: What we have seen should remain a secret. Silently, without ever saying a word out loud, the two of them came to an agreement. And having never before in their lives had any reason to keep a secret, what followed then was their first lie. Lana, when questioned about the crack in her helmet, announced, without pause, without a single, doubtful blink, that she had cracked it on the sharp teeth of the disposal unit. Forrest Blau nodded, having said more than once that the exterior trash bin was no place for the children to play.

Later that night, as they lay in separate beds, their secret, along with their first, dreadful lie, occupied each of the children’s imaginations. It was as if—trying to coax themselves to sleep—they had already begun to dream of what else might happen, what other commandments they would have to soon outwit or try to evade.

It was seven days before they made their way back to the cave. It took that long for William, Quinn’s father and the colony’s only scientist, to repair Lana’s broken helmet and also for the children to finally accept that their lie had been believed. They took with them—in their gray side packs—a length of rope, a flashlight, and some MREs: things that were small enough to steal without their parents or any of their siblings noticing.

It took less time to find the cave than they had thought it would. Quinn tied the rope around a stack of heavy boulders and then, hand over hand, lowered himself down the hole into the glowing, verdant cave. The descent seemed to go on forever, and when finally his feet struck the grassy bottom, he pulled his helmet off, breathing the fragrant air with an urgent sense of relief. Lana followed, lowering herself with her long legs extended, falling the last few meters. She plucked her helmet from her shoulders, setting it down beside her pack, and then proceeded to unzip the thin outer lining of her silver space suit.

“What are you doing?” Quinn asked, but the girl did not answer. Instead, she stripped down to her yellow-and-white undergarments and then ran, barefoot, to the small pool of cerulean water, before gently climbing in.

“This is all I’ve been thinking about for the last several days,” Lana whispered, her head bobbing above the ripples he had made. “Come on. It’s warm!”

Quinn watched, mouth agape, and then quickly began to unzip his own space suit as well. There was a nervous throb in his chest and his hands. Everything felt like it was new, like they had somehow become some whole other species, some other kind of creatures—spectral animals emerging from centuries-old cocoons.

After they swam, they sat on the bank and shared a packet of partially dehydrated fruit. It was pink, the color of the palms of their hands. A bird as large as their heads landed near their discarded helmets. The children laughed, tossing the food pellets at the bird’s feet. Then they lay back in the grass, seeing the small world of the cave come alive—flowers unfolded, nameless insects whistled past, a lone, pinkish antelope hustled away after drinking at the water pool. Time passed slowly or not at all. There was the feeling within them that their lives—the world of the colony and the three domes in which they had always lived—could somehow be forgotten. Being here meant being adults, people who could think and do as they pleased. The place filled them with a sense of hope, a shadow world of entirely new possibilities, possibilities that the two of them could share, and that never needed to be spoken aloud.

Back at the colony, Lana had begun to answer her father back. At the dinner table that very evening, Forrest Blau asked where she had been; when she answered, whispering, “None of your business,” Forrest swung the white switch up and back and down across Lana’s hands so quickly that Quinn hadn’t had a chance to whisper a warning. Lana put her sore fingers against her chest, asked permission to leave the table, and spent the next few days silently pulling weeds from the rows of biologically modified corn. She would not make eye contact with Quinn no matter how hard he tried; back here, in the colony, outside of the cave, she hardly seemed like herself anymore.

One evening Quinn had a dream that a small bird was trapped inside his chest. He woke up trembling and found he couldn’t get back to sleep. He climbed down from the top bunk, trying not to disturb his two younger sisters as he snuck from their living quarters and out into the dimly lit passageway. For some time he stared out the observation windows at the order of bleak stars twinkling above. And then he heard a sound, something small and high-pitched, like a soft-throated whisper, exactly the kind of sound the bird in his dream had been making. He followed it, down and around Dome One to the intersection near Dome Three, which led to the library. The door to the library was open, and poking his head inside, he saw the shape of a girl—it was Lana, of course—sitting in one of the chairs, rocking back and forth; before her, on the video screen, was some blurry footage of two birds, a gray one and a blue one, mating. Their wings fluttered violently as one of them sang a trilling song. On the opposite screen there was another video—this one of horses, and on a third screen, a pair of leopards, each of them engaged in the act of copulation. Lana’s hair looked darker than it was and hung in her eyes. She seemed to be making a kind of sound, too, something too soft for Quinn to hear. The boy hurried back to his room, his face on fire, hurtling himself into bed as quickly as he could. He lay there awake until the morning lights shuddered on, his thoughts as unsteady as the moons spiraling above.

At the morning meal, Lana’s blond hair hung limply in her face, nearly dangling into her bowl of cereal. She rudely slurped up her food. Later, there was something wild, animalistic about the way she sank her teeth into a runny, ripe grapefruit, something that was both attractive and terrifying.

But surely Forrest Blau suspected something; each time Quinn passed him in one of the passageways, each time the older man gave him an order, each time their two glances happened to meet, it was tinged with a faint tension, a growing uncertainty. Later that morning, once the meal and dishes had been cleared, once the colonists had been assigned their tasks for the day—Quinn’s mother and father once more sent to pick pink apples in Dome Three, and then, as no less a commandment than from the pastor himself, to attempt another round of procreation or, as Forrest Blau put it, “to conjugate on behalf of all our futures”—Quinn knelt among the ripening soybeans, shuddering when Forrest Blau appeared, standing silent over his shoulder, watching the boy’s work with an air of serious interest. His long shadow made the back of Quinn’s neck go cold where it fell, just above his shoulder. The boy tried not to look up and so found himself gazing at the man’s large, gruesome-looking hands. The silence of the moment seemed to last forever, until, clearing his wide throat, Forrest spoke.

“It looks like the beans have finally come in.”

Quinn only nodded, then murmured, “Yes, Mr. Blau.”

Forrest Blau outstretched a wide, hairy hand, running his fingers along the length of a vine. He plucked a single bean, staring at it as if it were harboring some indefensible secret.

“God has a time for all things, my boy. It’s not for us to know or to question when or why.”

Quinn nodded once more and said, “No, Mr. Blau.”

Still the older man did not take his leave. Instead, he leaned in even closer, his gray beard brushing against the side of Quinn’s ear.

“Where were you and Lana the day before last?”

“Me and… Lana?”

The boy’s face went white at the sound of her name in his mouth.

“Yes. Seems to me, I remember you two were supposed to clear out the weeds in Dome Three. And this very morning, what do I see but a whole field still choked with weeds.”

“We did,” he lied. “Only… only, it took longer than we thought. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. There was more… I can finish it up today, if you like.”

“I would,” Forrest Blau said. “I would like it very much, Quinn. A sin of omission, of failure, is still a sin.” The elder man smiled, the smile forced, as tight and frightening as any frown. “That does remind me, though. When was the last time you made your confession?”

Quinn began to panic, searching among the spiny, green leaves for an answer, any answer. In the end, all he could think of was to shake his head and then shrug weakly.

“Surely you’ve got a few things you’d like to confess,” Forrest added, the false smile giving over to an even falser grin.

Quinn nodded, afraid that if he made any noise, he would blurt out everything, the distracted mutter of all the terrible things he had been hiding coming out in one galloping, terrified rush.

“You know, Quinn, if there’s anything you’d like to tell me, anything big, or small”—and here Forrest crushed the bean in his grimy-looking hand—“I am always here for you. I like to think of myself as a kind of father to you. Your spiritual father.”

Quinn nodded again, knowing that if the man stood over him for one more minute, one more second, all would be lost. But he didn’t. Forrest Blau slipped the raw bean into his mouth, crushing it, and then turned, disappeared among the hedgerows of silver leaves. For a long moment afterward, it seemed his shadow remained, drawing gooseflesh along Quinn’s skinny neck.

Without ever agreeing to do so out loud, without ever needing to voice their thoughts, the two children ended up stealing away from their chores in Dome Two once again that afternoon, leaving their rakes and hoes in a row of modified corn, sneaking into their tank suits and through the air lock, back out into the red, shapeless world. Before stepping through the pneumatic door, Quinn glanced up and saw the forbidding shape of Forrest Blau’s bolt-action rifle—its shadow falling against his helmet like a condemnation, an accusation of sorts. He ignored this feeling of doubt, of damnation, and trailed behind Lana’s silver figure as she made her way silently back to the light-filled cave.

Today there was a severity to Lana’s face, in its expressions, in the shape of her mouth as they lowered themselves down the rope. Once among the tall silver and pink stands of flowers, Lana immediately doffed her helmet, setting it down in the dirt as if she intended to never wear it again. Then she unzipped her outer tank suit and removed it. Before Quinn managed to rid himself of his own helmet, she had knelt down before him, dirtying her bare knees in the mud.

“What are you doing?” Quinn asked as she placed her hands inside the turgid confines of his space suit. “What are you doing?” he asked again and again, her mouth, her fingers exploring the innocuous curve of his body, until he was kneeling in the grassy open, too. There was a moment, lying there, his suit unzipped, his helmet still halfway on, that he became afraid that she was going to devour him alive, that her teeth, making themselves known somewhere along the lower hemisphere of his body, would betray them both. But no, all became a lazy, light-washed moment with unfamiliar birds cooing, and the delicious panic of human bodies doing what human bodies had always been meant to do. As they lay together, entangled there, Quinn began to quietly believe that the cave had become a kind of garden of Eden, and that God was somewhere among all this splendor, among these impossible, crystalline leaves.

On their return, the children were once again silent. Treading over the arid red rocks, Quinn reached out to touch Lana’s hand, but she seemed shy, inexplicably embarrassed. Fifty meters from Dome One, he tried once more to say something, to take her fingers in his own, but she pulled away from him, shouting something that he could not hear. It was then that they both caught sight of something glinting among the shadows of zigzagging pylons that marked the border of the colony. First it flashed, then it disappeared for a moment, and then it flashed again. Quinn paused, stepping before Lana, holding up a hand. Before he could decipher the shape picking its way along the silver boundary markers, a shot rang out, then another, then another. The first round glanced hard against the side of Quinn’s helmet, knocking him from his feet. The second kicked up a clod of dirt a half meter from his right leg, and the third seemed to disappear entirely. But before the third report was done ringing in his ears, he turned and caught sight of Lana slumping forward, tilting to her left, and Quinn—getting his footing once again—caught her as she fell to her side. The girl was like a sack of diaphanous dirt, loose-necked, spreading out in strange ways as he tried to set her down. When Quinn glanced up, he could see the glare of Forrest Blau’s glassy helmet, the butt of the bolt-action rifle held up against the crook of his arm. The pastor fired once more, the weapon jerking against his shoulder, the report like a whip, cracking sharply through the heavy, carbon-rich air. The bullet struck the front dome of Quinn’s helmet, bifurcating the shield, lodging itself in the dense, pixilated glass. Slowly the air in the tank suit began to whoosh out in a loud hush. The boy did not fall over, only watched as Forrest Blau began to unzip the utility pocket of his space suit, searching for more ammunition. The boy knew then that he did not have much time—there was the leak in his helmet and Lana looked defenseless lying in the dirt—so he grabbed the girl under her bony arms and began to drag her back up the hill, dodging behind the rocky outcroppings as Forrest Blau fired again, then again.

The pastor’s weapon was loud, somewhat accurate, but a misery to try and reload with the bulky silver gloves.

Quinn watched as the elder man tore off his tank gloves and dug amongst his suit’s pockets again, searching for another handful of bullets. Quinn took a deep breath and, shifting Lana upon his left shoulder, began to scale the uneven trail back up the rise. A report boomed from somewhere behind him, a cloud of dust zipping several meters to his right, then a second, this time the shot arcing even closer, sniping at the heels of his black boots. But he was close to the cave’s opening now—the glowing, light-filled hole—and before a third shot ricocheted off a pile of craggy, red rocks, Quinn had begun to lower Lana inside. Together they slid awkwardly down the rope, and then, giving over to exhaustion, the two of them fell into a mound of blossoming pink and white flowers.

All he could think to do was to hide, and so, dragging Lana through the underbrush, the boy found a patch of brambles where the two of them could wait. He carefully lifted Lana’s helmet off, hoping the air would revive her. Her eyes were closed and her lips had turned white. He had a feeling that what was happening to them was not part of God’s plan. Before him was a large stone, which he grasped in his hands as some sort of weapon. He looked up, watching, breathing sharply through the bullet hole in his helmet. There was the long rope hanging in the air, unmoving, untouched—and then, soon enough, the shape of Forrest Blau’s feet, then his middle, then his glassy helmet appeared, as he lowered himself down, half meter by half meter. The bolt-action rifle was slung over his shoulder as he descended. As the pastor reached the leafy stalks and gilded flowers, there was a faint puzzlement, a bleary confusion that passed over the older man’s face, fitted for a moment, as it was, into something akin to religious ecstasy. Then that particular expression was gone, and all that was left was rage, rage at having been misled, of having been lied to, of having not been the first to discover the miracle of such a place. He yanked the rifle from his shoulder, fit several rounds inside, jerked the bolt back, and then marched cautiously through the waist-high grasses, raising the rifle’s sight up to his eye.

“Now what, dear children?” the pastor murmured. “Dear children? Would you hide from your own father? Would you hide like that villain Cain who cast the first sin against his brother, Abel? Come out now, my dear children, and forget your temptation. Come out now, and I promise you, all will be forgiven.”

The children were huddled only a few meters from where Forrest Blau was now standing, his boots roughly parting the damp foliage. Quinn sobbed a muffled cry where he lay, and began to consider their surrender. Surely, if he confessed now, if they both came clean, the pastor, his father, his mother, the colony, would find a way to forgive them both for what they had done. But then—only a few meters away from where they were huddled—there was the sound of nervous movement rising through the underbrush. Forrest Blau paused, brought the rifle’s sight up to his eye, and fired twice. Something fell and then died in the grass. It was a small, nearly wingless bird. As the pastor saw what he had killed, his face fell into a nettle of confusion. The reddish-purple animal lay split in two before him, its gaunt wings still flapping. Forrest Blau knelt, prodding the creature with his bare finger, as it rasped and twitched.

Quinn watched from where he lay, trembling. There would be no confession, no forgiveness; this much was clear now. Forrest Blau meant to kill them both. His expression, his anger was as terrifying as the God of the Old Testament’s.

Quinn held the heavy rock in his hand, his right fist shaking with fright.

The pastor was now pensively holding the bird in the palm of his hand, muttering, “Behold the fowls of the air, for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather, yet your Heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye any better than they?’” Then answering his own question, Forrest Blau murmured, “Neh, neh, neh.”

Suspecting that this was his only chance, Quinn slowly raised himself up from the ground and, once he was standing, brought the angular rock down hard against the pastor’s helmet once, then again, knocking it off. The pastor roared with pain—like a lion having been cut in two—falling forward to his knees. The boy brought down the rock against the back of Forrest Blau’s head once, twice, then a third time, and the older man fell limply to his side. Taking advantage of the pastor’s pain, the boy pried the rifle loose from the pastor’s grip. Awkwardly, he set the butt of the gun against the inside of his shoulder and took aim, finding it hard to maneuver the finger of his glove along the edge of the trigger. Finally he found it and prepared to fire.

But Forrest Blau lifted his head first, his silver beard glistening with drool and sweat. His bare hands pawed the dirt where he had fallen. He pulled himself achingly to his knees, glancing up at the boy and rifle with a glare that was both dull and unafraid. Quinn shuddered, seized with the sudden recognition that he could not pull the trigger. And then, just as soon as this recognition passed among the boy’s other senses, the pastor collapsed, falling forward into the mud, his body shaking with a violent paroxysm. For many moments the boy held the rifle there, aimed at the pastor’s body, waiting for it to move again. When it did not, when he began to hear Lana coughing alone in the weeds, the boy lowered the rifle and took a step closer to where Forrest Blau lay. The pastor was still trying to breathe, though his body was crippled, stricken. Something was wrong with the left side of his face. Finally his expression became tightened and his eyes went wide, wider still; there was no mistaking the sudden, bared, grimace of death. The pastor looked to be smiling, and for the first time in as long as the boy could remember, the smile seemed somewhat human, the grimace of someone at peace.

In the weeds Lana was alive though disoriented, bleeding from a spot near her right shoulder; she was whispering something again and again, a song or prayer perhaps. He fitted her helmet back in place, set a tourniquet along her upper arm where she had been shot, and tied the long yellow rope around her waist. She did not seem to notice her father lying there, dead, on a pyre of pink and yellow flowers.

Returning to the surface, Quinn hoisted the girl up through the light-filled opening. Once she was close enough to touch, he reached for her, catching her beneath her arms, and gently laid her in the dust. Then he untied the rope, dropping it down into the cavern with an air of finality, before he began to cover the entrance to the hole, dragging loose rocks into place, disguising the opening with dirt and an odd mound of gravel. The girl was still breathing quickly, talking wildly to herself. Finally he realized it was a song. Something from chapel. “Rise up, all you unbelievers,” she whispered, though the way she was singing it sounded hopeful, true. He lifted one of the girl’s arms over his shoulder, while his own arm rested behind her back, gripping her side tightly. Together, like that, moving step by step, they wandered toward the pale glow of the three domes, the world echoless before them. Hand in hand, through the endless dust, they made their way back.