‘I don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation,’ said Tallow, who was standing on the ceiling.
Mantle clambered in over the doorframe. A climbing tether coiled out of her harness and up to where it was hooked to the floor of the old mansion’s atrium. ‘Yeah, very funny,’ she said, looking scared. ‘Get down from there.’
‘Get up, you mean!’
‘Yeah, that’s, yeah. I mean, that’s very funny. What if it caves out, man? Come on.’
Where Tallow was standing was beside a crumpled chandelier bunched up against its fitting. The ceiling, a tan affair, had a sizable dent in it where the chandelier had slammed into it. Over in the corner a bookcase had uprooted, smashed itself to pieces, and spilt books across the air conditioning vents.
‘Dude,’ Tallow was saying. ‘Dude, though. When else have you seen a ruin like this? A whole one? They musta made this ceiling out of, I don’t know, granite or something.’ Tallow jumped up and down. The ceiling creaked. He froze. For a moment neither of them breathed. Eventually, when it seemed that nothing was going to happen, Tallow exhaled a slow sigh of relief and grinned sheepishly at Mantle.
The ceiling gave way with a groaning snap. Tallow gasped, flailed, dropped; his hands slapped against the splintering wood and he vanished, his tether snaking out after him. Mantle yelped and grabbed it with both hands. The friction of the wire buzzed against the gloves of her exosuit and she had to brace her legs against the doorframe to keep from being yanked along with it. The line went taut.
Sem was inching one of the solar arrays back into alignment with a surgical application of her spanner when one of the nearby remote drones crackled static. She stopped whacking the panel so when the operator’s voice came through she could hear it over the rattling of her helmet.
‘Wha-at-at-at what’s ssssss—‘
Sem tutted. ‘Check your connection. You’re not …’
‘—ssssssss—‘
Helpfully, the drone raised one of its upside-down forklift limbs and joltingly pointed it at something down past the habitat entrance. With clanking, sucking footsteps Sem adjusted her position on the magnetised ground plating and tried to follow the drone’s gaze.
The metal jaws of the habitat were open for the moment: a crew of salvagers were heading out on an expedition, and had left the magnetised section to start the slow process of scrabbling their way across the ground with the climbing hooks embedded in their exosuit’s gloves, laying down tether clips every few metres. From Sem’s upright position they looked like a pack of spacesuited Freddy Kruegers handstanding their way across the moon.
Sem remembered the moon. Before it had rocketed away from them along with the atmosphere, the oceans, and most of the topsoil. Before the sun had puffed out like cotton candy and flung Earth, still busy maiming itself under the strain of its own reversed weight, out of the solar system.
It had begun with greater masses. She wondered nights how long before their own bodies, their own atoms would start to fly apart.
‘—sssss—ing this? Sem? Em-em-em—hello?’
‘What the hell about them?’ she snapped.
The drone jiggled its limb. ‘Look,’ it said. She squinted through her night vision, scanning the area where the drone was pointing. When she saw it, she swore.
Above that little improbable mansion on the hill, debris was tumbling skyward. Sem could just barely make out a little exosuit flailing like a flag against the backdrop of stars.
‘It’s those fucking kids again,’ she spat, clipping her spanner back on her belt. She smacked the drone on its back as she clunked past. ‘Get someone else out to fix the panels while the habitat’s still open. I’ve had about as much of them as I can stomach for today anyhow. See you at lights out.’
‘See-e-e-e—‘
With an exasperated grunt she cut her feed to the drone and, fuming over the interruption, over the children’s stupidity, but also over how long it would take her to reach them in her mags, Sem trudged down the track toward the last house on Earth that had not yet fallen into the sky.
