Sister’s Keeper
by Esker Park
The last thing I see before the cottagepod airlock hisses shut is the desperate smile glued to our father’s face.
“Love you, Dad,” I whisper as he disappears from view.
Out in the powder of Octavia II, my twin and I pause to adjust to external gravity. A faint throbbing roar reaches us, a distant crowd cheering, probably the bustle of the transit station where we’re headed.
I look down the kilometer-long stretch of crimson foam-rock. Light bounces off the raised surface, hard and fierce. It’s an artery, pumping us graduates away for the colony’s survival. Because it’s Dispatch Day, the walkway’s been cleared of glittery baby slinkers with their sharp fangs, but it’s also empty of people. We must be late.
One half of our baggage sled is piled high with Asha’s orange-tagged gear: shovels and chisels, toxin tests and bandages, boots and windsuits and heavy-duty breathers. As a Hand, she’ll need all this and more for terraforming. The rest will be provided. It’s the least they can do for her. My small purple duffle hunches next to her gear like a lonely plum. All I’ll need are jeans and tees—no boots or breathers necessary at Orbital University.
There’s no reason anything has to change between me and Asha just because she’ll be in the powder and I’ll be orbiting in the dark. We can vid every night if we want to.
A few cottagepods ahead, Jerzy Patriquin appears with his own orange-tagged sled. He’ll be in Asha’s cohort of Hands, which I bet he isn’t thrilled about. In third grade he stole my sketchscreen of slinker drawings. Asha pinched his ear so hard it drew blood. He had run, but turned back to yell, “Just you wait until I get stronger!”
It wasn’t just Jerzy. In fifth grade when I became a target for every wedgie-loving, spitball-launching peckerhead at Bradbury Elementary, Asha pummeled them one-by-one until they quit. Unlike me, she was big and strong, quick and vicious.
Jerzy glances back at us and Asha tugs her ear, eyebrows raised. He picks up his pace and Asha issues an outsize guffaw. She activates the boost and I give the sled an ill-placed nudge that careens it to the edge of the walkway. She catches it with one-handed grace and intercepts a couple of boxes threatening to slip into the slinker-infested powder. Her athleticism is something I take for granted, something I’ve always relied on. Yet another thing I’ll miss.
She smirks at me. “Watch your stuff, Jaeda.” In the thin atmosphere, her voice squeaks, but it still rankles.
I do what siblings do; I shove my duffle at her. Grinning, she kicks it back into place without even looking. I try to smile but fail.
Asha may have had my back on the playground with its hierarchies of fists and blood, but I had hers in the classroom pressure cooker of homework and grades. When Asha’s face would go blank in trigonometry, eyes glassy with fear, I’d do her homework for her. When she wasn’t passing her exams, I invented a sign language to give her the answers. We’ve always been a team.
There’ll be no more teamwork for us. When the algorithm spat out our assignments, she was given the same one our mom once had: Hand, the assignment that devours people like candy, like toes down a baby slinker’s throat. We’ve been motherless since we were two years old.
Nobody talks about whatever’s out there chewing up our Hands. They talk instead about the grit it takes to pull Octavia II’s future out of the powder. They talk about the bravery and strength of our terraforming Hands. Next month, they’ll talk about Asha’s cohort building the elevator to the space station and the giant solar arrays to capture energy; they’ll talk about the fearless Hands who drive melters at the polar ice caps or wrestle the finicky methane engines to thicken the atmosphere.
Nobody will ever talk about me. I’m taking the shuttle up to Orbital U to be with other geeks in sterile libraries and labs. I’ll be absorbing physics and chemistry and biology, everything Guides need in order to keep our delicate, evolving ecosystem in balance, in order to tell the Hands what needs doing.
When I look ahead down the walkway, Jerzy has disappeared. He must have run.
“Hurry up!” I reach around Asha to tap the thrust on the sled.
Asha taps it back down. “Calm down.” Her grin is still there, only now there’s an edge to it.
“C’mon. Not today. I’ll miss orientation if I don’t catch my shuttle.” They only leave once a day, as Asha well knows.
She slaps my fingers away from the sled controls, but winks at me over her breather.
At the transit station, only a few people remain on the platform. Asha tosses her gear into the train’s storage compartment on top of Jerzy Patriquin’s. Then she’s holding my shoulder and looking serious and I’m searching for the perfect words to sum up everything she means to me when an enormous orange-clad man comes from nowhere to thump her on her back.
The Hand is truly huge, with jet black eyes and a stout belly and he stinks like a carcass. I’m not convinced he’s completely human.
“Good to have you aboard, lass,” he says, then notices me. “Who’s this? Family?” He sticks his hand out for a hearty shake but drops it when he catches sight of my purple scholar’s badge.
“Jaeda’s my twin.” There’s a trace of pride in Asha’s tone and I smile. We’ve always cheered for each other. When I was assigned Guide, she crowed and danced me around the school cafeteria in front of everybody.
The Hand’s face hardens. “Twins, huh? Always been together, right? Let me guess, baby Hand, you’ve been protecting her clever-ass self your whole life, right?”
The creepy thing about bullying on Octavia II is that with sound waves dampened and delayed, threats which are meant to be loud and in-your-face come out like assassin’s whispers.
Asha says nothing.
A shudder coalesces at the edge of the walkway. Without my glasses, I can’t quite make it out, but I suspect a baby slinker is twisting out of the powder to make for my ankles.
I jump away, but at the last second, it disappears.
The jerk is still looking at my badge. “And your soft twin is heading up to the dark while you’re for the powder. Except we all know that she’ll come home.”
He leaves it unsaid that only a few make it through their stint as a Hand.
“Ignore him,” I sign in our secret language.
The jerk lifts his breather to spit a gob at my feet. “Guide,” he taunts like it’s some kind of swear.
Asha’s face is blank. I know that face better than I know my own; behind the blankness is confusion. And when Asha is confused, she hits. One of her fists is clenched.
“Ignore him,” I sign again.
Asha swings fast but the Hand is faster, snatching Asha’s arm out of the air. Asha yanks, but the Hand has her locked.
He snorts. “Got something you want to say to me, Baby Hand?”
Complex emotions cross my twin’s face. Shock, of course. Nobody’s ever stopped Asha’s punches before. Shame that she can’t pull away. Astonishingly, there’s also a dawning admiration for this bloated dickwad. For what? His strength? His arrogance?
Asha’s fist uncurls and she won’t meet my eyes. Grief grabs hold of my lungs so tight I can’t breathe.
The Hand turns to me. “Hey, baby Guide, your sister has a past and a future, short and glorious though it may be. Guess which one you’re in?” He tosses Asha’s arm aside, slaps the baggage car’s airlock shut and the passenger car’s open. He makes a sweeping bow. “After you, Hand.”
Asha’s face wrenches. For a beat, then two, she doesn’t move. When she finally steps through the airlock, she looks away. She says nothing to me at all. My thoughts snarl and coil, then go incredibly still. The door swishes shut; the click of its lock arriving a microsecond later.
There may be no daily vids in our future. The pain keeps me glued to the spot.
Then the door snicks open again and Asha’s head pokes out. She glances behind her and says, “He’s gone. What a prick. I’ll get him for you, don’t worry. Might take me a while, just ’til I get stronger.” She winks one last wink at me then the door is shut.
“Love you, too, Asha,” I say into the thin air. “And I’ll find a way to get you home, sister. Just might take me a while. Just til I get smarter.”
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Esker Park writes speculative fiction, with short stories published in Plott Hound and Soul Jar: Thirty-one Fantastical Tales by Disabled Authors. She is an alumna of the WriteMentor program and Futurescapes and is an active participant in Write Magic. She lives in Maine where she is busy revising her debut novel, A Planet for Reluctant Revolutionaries, due out in the spring of 2027 by Shiraki Press.