Chapter Four: Amos

His throat ached.

Amos swallowed, trying to force the lump away with a mouthful of saliva, but all that got him was a thick new pain like swallowing sand. The Roci’s med bay had shot him full of all the booster vaccines and bacterial prophylactics three months ago, right on schedule. He didn’t figure he could be sick. But there it was, a spot in the back of his throat that felt like he’d swallowed a golf ball and it got stuck halfway down.

All around him, the citizens and travelers of the Ceres Station Spaceport milled like ants on their hill, their voices making an undifferentiated roar that was just as good as silence. It amused Amos that this metaphor was one that no one on Ceres would actually understand. Himself, he hadn’t seen an ant in close on two decades, but the childhood memories of watching them take down a cockroach or clean the carcass of a rat were vivid and sharp. Like the roaches and the rats, ants had learned to live with their human neighbors without much trouble. When the concrete of human cities spread across the globe and half the animals on Earth were on endangered lists, no one had worried about the ants. They were doing fine, thanks, and spilled fast food was just as plentiful and delicious as dead forest animals had once been.

Adapt or die.

If Amos could be said to have a philosophy, it would be that. The concrete replaces the forest. You get in its way, you get paved over. If you can find a way to live in the cracks, you can thrive anywhere. There were always cracks.

The anthill of Ceres bustled around him. There were people at the top of the food chain buying snacks at the kiosks or tickets for the shuttles and long-flight ships leaving the station. The people in the cracks were there too. A girl no older than ten with long dirty hair and a pink jumpsuit two sizes too small eyed the travelers without staring at them. Waiting for someone to set their luggage or their hand terminal down long enough to be snatched away. She saw Amos looking at her and bolted for a maintenance hatch set low in the wall.

Living in the cracks, but living. Adapting, not dying.

He swallowed again, grimacing at the ache. His hand terminal beeped, and he looked up at the flight board that dominated the station’s public space. Bright yellow letters against black, a font designed for legibility over beauty. His long-haul flight to Luna was confirmed for a launch window in three hours. He tapped on his terminal’s screen to let the automated system know he’d be on board when it left, and walked off looking for something to kill three hours.

There was a bar by the gate. So that was easy.

He didn’t want to get drunk and miss his flight, so he stuck to beer, drinking slowly and methodically and waving at the bartender as he approached the bottom of one glass so that the next was waiting when he finished. He was aiming for fuzzy and relaxed, and he knew exactly how to get there in the shortest possible time.