her birthday rolled around each year. She pointed a finger at him. “We do not send you out until we know for sure what we’re dealing with.”
“Roger that.”
She smiled and turned away again, which meant he was off the hook and free to go.
One down, one to go.
The door to Laramie’s room was closed. Nine times out of ten that meant he was hooked up to the blood machine. After years of use, and with no cheap way of replicating the delicate tubes and gauges that connected him to the unit, he was careful about using them in as safe and sterile a place as possible. The low whine of the machine reached Denver’s ears, along with a rhythmic thunk, thunk, pause, thunk, thunk, pause. Laramie had therapy balls he was supposed to use to keep the strength in his hands and wrists up, but he spent more time bouncing them off the walls than squeezing them. Denver knocked as he let himself in.
Laramie was about Denver’s height, but nowhere near his weight. The ISDD made him thin to the point of emaciation. “Scrappy,” Laramie liked to say, because it sounded better than “scrawny.” His skin had an unhealthy yellow tinge. He lay propped up in bed with a collection of exercise balls in his lap, and another in his right hand. IVs fed into his thin wrists. Another set of tubes snaked from the machine next to him to a port hidden beneath his shirt. His eyes were bright the way they were when the fever was raging, but this time, it wasn’t from fever. It was a mixture of anger and fear.
“You should have let me go.”
Denver sank into the chair next to Laramie’s bed. “Oh good. We haven’t had this argument for a few weeks now. I was beginning to miss it.”
“I’m not helpless.”
No, he wasn’t, but he suffered from Idiopathic Space-Induced Degenerative Disease. Each day on board the ship weakened him. Even a few minutes floating in space could exacerbate his condition. In Laramie’s mind, it was his illness that drove them to this kind of desperation. The way he saw it, he had so little life left to live, he might as well risk it all rather than make Denver do his dirty work.
Denver didn’t buy any of it.
They were identical twins. They’d emerged from the womb thirty-six years earlier, a mere five minutes apart. Laramie had been first, but that was the only advantage he’d ever had over Denver. Denver weighed in at a healthy seven pounds, seven ounces. Laramie had been barely four. Some trick of fate and genetics had given Denver all the sustenance, all the strength, all the things he needed to be healthy, while giving Laramie all the weaknesses. Sometimes Denver wondered if selfishness really was buried in his DNA—if it’d been greed that had made him take everything he needed while his brother struggled to survive.
“Jesus, you’re doing it again,” Laramie said, throwing one of his balls at Denver’s head. Luckily, he missed. “Sitting there, blaming yourself for something that literally happened before we were born.”
Denver forced a laugh, wishing he could deny it. It drove Laramie crazy when Denver went into martyr mode. “How’re you feeling?”
“I’m fine, and you know it. What happened out there?”
“Nothing.”
Laramie threw another ball at Denver’s head. This one found its target.
“Ouch!”
“Stop lying to me. I was listening. There were tracers on your ass. Marit was terrified. I’ve never heard her sound so scared. She thought you were going to die.”
Denver rubbed the spot where the ball had landed. “I thought I was too.”
“So what happened?”
“I’m not sure. They moved on.”
Laramie leaned closer. “Moved on? What do you mean.”
“They found something else.”
“Another heat source?”
Denver shrugged, having no answer to offer. “Apparently.”
“But what? Another life-form?”
“Another life-form is highly improbable,” OPAL said through the speaker in Laramie’s room.
Denver sighed heavily as he looked up at it. Between Laramie in his head and OPAL monitoring the entire ship, it sometimes felt like he never had a moment to himself. “Privacy, OPAL. We’ve talked about this.”
“You said a conversation is only private if the door is closed. You left it open.”
Denver glanced back at the door. “Shit.” He pushed to his feet to close it, but Laramie stopped him.
“Nah, never mind. I’m done here for now.” He set the balls he hadn’t thrown at Denver’s head aside, then flicked a switch on the machine, killing its incessant whine. He removed his IVs, then slid his hand beneath his