The Glint

It happened every day in the hour before dusk layered the world in darkness. Tamsin never missed it, watching from the observatory perch of Station 06, forehead pressed against the thick glass, her breath turning to fog.

It was enchanting gold, glinting like a star on the horizon. The dying sunlight caught it for only the stretch of an hour, making it shine like a prince’s coin. She didn’t know exactly what it was, no one at the science station on Earth did, and they all had more important things to occupy their time with, like re-terraforming the toxic planet. But the gossamer, reflective light beckoned her religiously.

Her curiosity was ravenous, growing every day as she watched the Glint with wide, unblinking eyes. She’d been cooped up within plasteel walls cramped with advanced terraforming gear and equipment for twenty months now. There was little space for peace with a crew of ten scientists and their children. Tamsin assisted her mother with planetary agriculture, testing and growing produce in an air-controlled greenhouse. Jasper, the only other teenager on the land that had once been England, helped his father with engineering.

Today was different for Tamsin, though. She wouldn’t be waiting for the Glint to make its regularly scheduled performance. She wouldn’t be watching with a bright, fascinated heart in the observatory perch. No, today she was going to find the Glint.

“Come on,” she baited him, “aren’t you curious?” They were both the children of scientists, of course, Jasper was curious. Curiosity flowed in his veins right beside the blood.

They were gathered in the airlock, afternoon swallowing the station slowly. Beyond the wall of gear and ready-and-waiting biosuits—used for only emergencies or with permission—was what was left of Earth. The transparent, armoured door displayed a ruined world. Earth had been diminished to a shade of itself, left inhabitable by poisoned air and land blanketed by a grim combination of snow and ash.

“I already have plans for my evening,” he replied, swiping a hand through his dark, wayward curls as he searched the lonesome outside world.

Tamsin scoffed. “Jerking off alone in your bunk doesn’t qualify as plans.”

“I deeply disagree.” His eyes left the dead world to land on an overzealous Tamsin. Hair escaped from her ponytail and there was a wildness swirling around her pale eyes like the sour vitamin-infused blue juice Jasper always tipped down the drain at breakfast. “Though, I’m open for some company.”

“I have a boyfriend.”

“A boyfriend studying on Mars,” he amended flippantly. “How’s that going by the way? He hasn’t picked up any of your cyber-calls this week,” he went on roguishly and all too knowingly. Restricted rations and limited shower-time weren’t the only downfalls of living in one of the few stations sprinkled across the world, privacy was a lost luxury, too. The close quarters meant everyone was in everyone’s business, and secrets were dug up quickly, just like the vines of tomatoes that had disappeared from the greenhouse last week, roots and all just gone without an explanation. Tamsin’s mother suspected they’d been stolen, but she hadn’t figured out the culprit.

“I hate you,” she said, twisting around to search through the line of hanging biosuits, all just hollow ghosts. ‘I hate you’ was a casual conversation phase between them now, like ‘hey’ or ‘you still awake?’ and it wasn’t far from a term of endearment. Though neither would openly admit that.

“Venturing outside the station is—”

“Forbidden. Prohibited. Dangerous,” she listed monotonously, mimicking that of the Chief Scientist of Station 06. Jasper was bemused with her dreadful imitation, eyes sparkling as he leaned against the wall of the airlock. “Shall I go on?” she wondered, eyebrows disappearing under her fringe.

“Oh, please do,” he drawled, smirking rascally. Tamsin was already stepping into one of the smaller biosuits, lugging the flexible but durable material over her body. The biosuits were bright red—an unmissable colour against the ghastly washed-out world—and caught somewhere between a jumpsuit and the archaic astronaut spacesuits from the 20th century.

She gave him an impressive double eye-roll. “Shut up and zip me,” she snapped, turning to give him access to the gap at her back. Jasper obliged studiously, even skirted around to her front to strap the helmet into place.

Tamsin glared at Jasper through the visor, silently challenging him, silently daring him. Her set lips and notched chin asked one question: Are you coming?

“This better not take long,” he muttered, conceding to the curious girl. He hurried into his biocuit, knowing that going to find the mysteriously beautiful Glint was awfully stupid, probably the stupidest thing he’s ever done. However, Jasper wasn’t about to let Tamsin go alone—that would be even stupider.

“Your eagerness to moan over ancient skin mags is duly noted,” she said around a self-satisfied smile, gloved hands already fiddling with the airlock's system to open the door.

Air hissed viciously around them before the door opened with a treacherous click, bolts and hinges freeing. They hadn’t left the haven of the station since making landfall, and both teenagers were buzzing with trepidation. But they still the offspring of scientists, so they stepped out into contaminated air littered with particles—like pollen—that wanted to eat their skin like acid. Their boots instantly sunk into crude snow and ash. All just more poison, pretty poison that masked the rocks and debris on the ground. They headed north in the direction of the Glint, the sun sinking to cradle the planet.

They trekked along a landscape that had once been moorland; it was far from that now, resembling Antarctica but more desolate. It was deadly cold but the biosuits held the frigid, clawing air at bay. The Earth’s silence that enveloped the pair was eerie, it was just as quiet out there than it was in deep space.

“It’s the green light at the end of a dock,” she said wistfully, thinking of the Glint. “The promise of everything.” They were two slashes of blood against dirty snow, two smears of red ink across clean sketch paper.

Jasper searched the horizon, confusion pulling his brows together behind his visor. “I don’t see a green light anywhere.” There was just white and grey, a wasteland. They walked further and further into it, the station now a speck behind them.

“No, it’s a metaphor for hope,” she explained. “Didn’t you read The Great Gatsby?”

“Read suggests that I finished it,” he said nonchalantly, keeping slow to match Tamsin’s shorter, determined strides. “Which I did not.”

“The green light is in the first chapter,” she prompted. “You should know about the green light.”

He looked skyward as if that would polish his memory; the sunlight was transforming, decaying as dusk stirred from sleep. “Huh, I must be thinking of another book,” he decided with a shrug.

She jeered, “Another book you didn’t finish?”

“I finish books all the time,” he argued.

“Sketchbooks filled with doodles of robots don’t count.”

He pantomimed a fatal blow to the chest, faking a stubble for maximum effect, kicking up a flurry of ashen snow. “Oh, how your words wound this robotics prodigy!”

“Avery reads classic literature,” she teased.

His grin was wider than the empty and vast horizon. “I hate you and your well-read boyfriend.”

They were well into the golden hour and Tamsin anxiously scanned the world for her precious Glint. Behind her, Jasper tripped on something unseen, landing heavily on the ground.

Tamsin turned at Jasper’s echoing grunt. “You good?” she asked, kneeling beside him, knees sinking into snow and ash. The sky above them was a riot of colour.

He nodded, twisting around to drag his boots from the icy, grim blanket. A beam—thinner than a laser—of gold light sliced across the plastic of Tamsin’s visor.

Jasper’s breathing was heavy and capricious while Tamsin’s heart soared with wings. She untangled a golden chain from his bootlaces, half of the length hidden under soft grime.

“It’s a necklace,” she expressed, brushing a finger across the tarnished heart-shaped locket, the gold faded but still brilliant in the afternoon light.

And it wasn’t the only thing glinting around them now. Stars of golden light glittered and winked around the pair. A cornucopia of gold surrounded them, shimmering in the low light of the afternoon, dusk curling at the edges.

Both teenagers gaped at the pieces of gold jewellery and old trinkets—forks and spoons and goblets—scattered through the snow and ash like discarded treasure from a lost civilisation.

“It looks like it was left here almost deliberately,” he uttered. Tamsin shuffled around in awe, but Jasper was a statue, one side of his mouth crinkling with a frown.

The gold was distributed by putrid red and mottled black, and Tamsin leaned forward curiously, studying the shapes in the snow-ash. Even though the red skin was spilt well beyond ripeness and corroded with burns, the shapes were still familiar, sickeningly familiar.

“These are tomatoes,” she announced, fear melting away her glinting awe instantly. The collection of tarnished gold left to sparkle and the stolen rotting tomatoes sat like acid in her stomach. She dropped the necklace hastily.

“The ones stolen from the greenhouse?” he speculated, strenuously pulling himself up but there was some resistance. Tamsin blinked against the glinting world. She knew then it wasn’t a cornucopia of gold, but a graveyard.

Her nod was feeble and dire. “I think this is a… trap,” she whispered, realisation smacking her across the forehead. Her green light—tinted gold—wasn’t hope, it was doom. “We need to get back to the station.”

“Tamsin…” Jasper wheezed, breath misting his visor. “We have another problem.” He wrenched around with a grimace, showing her his exposed thigh. There was a tear in his biosuit and his pants—it looked like they’d been snagged on a rock or a piece of debris when he’d fallen. The skin was already festering and blistering in the air dotted with death.

Panic surged up her throat. “Shit. Shit. Shit!”

“That about covers it,” he grunted, trying to manage a smile for Tamsin. Even though he was smiling, fear had camouflaged his eyes.

Urgency screamed at Tamsin, and she covered the hole with trembling, gloved hands, trying to smother the corrosive air attacking naked flesh. “You’re gonna be okay, okay?” They were miles from the station and help and night was coming like a predator of shadows. “Just keep breathing,” she stressed, mind racking for a solution, for a way to get back to the station with a hole in a biosuit.

Particles swirled around them like a storm, wanting to land on skin. Tamsin searched their surrounding desperately. Half of her brain had surrendered to the panic, the other half—the part descended from a scientist—worked towards an answer. If she could just fashion a bandage or covering for the hole, even if Jasper had to hold it in place, they could stumble back to the station, hopefully before whatever had stolen the tomatoes found them.

Jasper was starting to shiver, coldness seeping in through the gaps of Tamsin’s hands. “I hate you,” he said through clenched teeth, biting back a whimper as the meat of his thigh sizzled under her gloves.

“I know,” she said, reluctant to remove one hand to dig around in the snow and ash around them for a sufficient piece of gold, like a bowl or a serving tray or even chunky chains she could weave together. But she needed to if she was going to get them home. “But that’s okay because you’re going to tell me that you hate me tomorrow.”

She pivoted one hand to cover the hole as best she could and sifted through the snow and ash around her frantically, tears stinging as her fingers touched something big.

Dusk had finally come to claim the world, the glinting of the golden heart-shaped locket dying.