Some Fine Day Read Free Page A

nineteenth. Fair skies above, a perfect window for an excursion to Gallia Archipelago.
    Ninety-three adults, thirty-two children.
    The tremors started about halfway up, the mole equivalent of turbulence on an airplane. Ice rattling in glasses, maybe a bag or two toppling from the overhead bins. No one’s too alarmed at first. But then they get stronger.
    Subterranean quake, six point six in magnitude. The epicenter was two hundred miles away, so the moles weren’t just crushed like the glorified tin cans they are. What happened was worse.
    They got trapped.
    For thirty-seven days.
    The military tried to send in diggers, a smaller, more maneuverable version of moles, to reach the stranded passengers, but the rock was too unstable to get close. Their com uplink still worked, although after a couple of weeks, people stopped talking.
    Rescuers got in eventually. They’re probably still in therapy.
    I sip my soda and stare at Jake until he looks at me.
    “That was totally different,” he says.
    I don’t bother to answer.
    There were seventeen survivors. It doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out how they managed that.
    A few more minutes go by, and someone emits a low sob. My father gets out of his seat.
    “I’m going up front,” he says.
    But before he can turn around, the drunk guy pushes past him and starts heading for the forward cabin. He has thinning brown hair, and the back of his neck is red and splotchy. My father grabs his arm.
    “Get your goddamn hands off me,” the guy hisses, swinging one fist around in a wide arc that catches my father in the side of the face. It shatters his glasses, and a thin line of blood runs into the crease of his nose.
    My body is moving before my brain even tells it to. High sweeping kick to the chin, followed by a gut punch on the way down. The guy drops like a sack of potatoes.
    I feel hands on me, Jake’s, and the guy’s wife or girlfriend screaming. And then the hum of the engines starts up again.
    The attendant comes rushing through the door, takes in the scene, and stops in her tracks.
    “Everyone back in their seats,” she says.
    I comply, ducking my head to avoid the stares of the other passengers. Jake and my father carry the unconscious guy to the rear of the mole and lay him out on the carpet. No one says anything.
    The rest of the trip is pretty uneventful.

Chapter Three
    The earliest years of the colonies, later known as prefectures, were marked by deprivation and psychological trauma to a degree not anticipated by the architects. But the human species adapts; we are curiously, even ruthlessly proficient at it.

    Everyone has to put in special contact lenses before we exit the mole. Apparently, it takes a couple of days for our eyes to adjust to the glare. Of course there’s plenty of light underground. Everything runs on geothermal now, which is a practically inexhaustible energy source. But it’s not the sun.
    We line up in the aisle. The guy I kicked is awake, bruised but not broken. If I’d wanted to hurt him permanently, I would have. We studiously avoid looking at each other. Once he sobered up, he approached my dad and apologized. They shook hands. No hard feelings. My dad has a little cut on his eyebrow, but my mother remembered to bring his spare reading glasses so he’s not too upset.
    “Thanks for choosing Topside Travel,” the attendant says, smiling, and I can tell she’s glad to be rid of us.
    She opens the hatch and light spills into the cabin, not the light I’m used to, this stuff is different, brighter and stronger and hotter , and it is followed by a warm breeze that smells like nothing I’ve ever smelled before. Equal bits salt and earth and decay; I don’t mean rotten or spoiled, just living matter breaking down into its component parts. We shuffle forward, suddenly uncertain, Jake grinning like a madman ahead of me. There’s a short flight of steps leading down, and then we’re standing on hot, coarse sand, with the sea