A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers #2)(75)

Her knife hit something hard. She wiggled the tip around, trying to get a feel for whatever was beneath. Not metal – too thick. She pried the fungus aside. She blinked. Bone. She’d hit bone.

She used her fingers to pull the fungus away, then grabbed the piece her knife had hit. Jane frowned. A rib, but not a dog rib, and too big to be a— She froze, remembering Owl’s anatomy lessons. No way.

Jane cleared out the mushrooms fast as she could, no longer worrying about nice, kitchen-friendly sizes. She grabbed handfuls, tearing and tearing until the picture became more clear. There was a whole heap of bones, tangled and messy. She reached out a hand, a little afraid, though she didn’t know why. She pulled a skull from the pile – one of two. She sat back, cupping it in her palms. A Human skull, no joke. It was dirty, and had thin scarring lines where the fungus had grown around it. There were other lines in it, too, lines she didn’t have to think too hard about to understand. A dog – or many dogs, who knew – had run its teeth over this skull once. She thought about how it sized up compared to her own head. Not tiny, but smaller than her, for sure. She stared into the eye sockets, empty except for clumps of dirt and stray roots.

The skull had belonged to a little girl.

Jane nearly threw up, but she didn’t want to waste the food. She stared at the bright sky until her eyes burned. She breathed slow and angry. She spat a few times, fighting to keep her stomach down. It listened.

She collected all the pieces she could find. She emptied her bag of scrap onto the wagon – if she lost some of it, fine – and put the bones in instead. It would’ve been more practical to carry it all together, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t put girls in with scrap.

She went home. There was still a lot of day left, but home was the only thing that made sense right then.

Owl didn’t say anything once Jane took the skulls out of the bag. Jane sat cross-legged in the middle of the living room, bag of bones by her side, skulls on the floor in front of her. They were about the same size, those skulls. ‘I bet they were bunkmates,’ she said.

‘Oh, honey,’ Owl said. Her cameras clicked and whirred. ‘What do you want to do with them? What do you think we should do?’

Jane frowned. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, struggling. ‘I don’t know why I brought them back. I just . . . I couldn’t leave them.’

‘Well,’ Owl said with a sigh. ‘Let me see if I have any reference files about funerals.’

Jane knew the word from sims, but she had never really understood the idea. It was a party for dead people, as far as she could tell. ‘Can you explain a funeral?’

‘It’s a gathering to honour the life of someone who’s died. It also serves as a way for a family or a community to share grief.’ Owl made a face and sighed. ‘I don’t have any extensive references on this, but I know some things from memory. I know different Human cultures have different customs. Exodans compost their bodies and use the nutrients to fertilise their oxygen gardens. A lot of colonists do that, too. Launching remains into the sun is popular among Solans, though some practise cremation – burning bodies down to ash. Some of the communities in the Outer Planet orbiters freeze and pulverise remains, then distribute the dust among Saturn’s rings. And then there’s burial, but only grounders and Gaiists do that.’

‘That’s putting a body in the ground, right?’

‘Yes. The body decomposes, and the nutrients go back into the soil. I heard one of the brothers talk about that once. He liked the cyclical nature of it.’

Jane picked up one of the skulls and cradled it in her hands, trying to imagine a little girl’s face looking back at her. What would you have wanted? What would I want? She’d never thought about that before. What did they do with bodies back at the factory? She imagined that whatever it was, there wasn’t any honour or grief involved. Dead girls were just junk, probably, like all the rest of it.

She pressed her palm against where the little girl’s scalp would’ve been. Something heavy and cold formed in her chest. You weren’t junk, she thought, fingers tracing bone, carving white lines through the dirt. You were good and brave and you tried.

‘What do living people do at funerals?’ she asked.

‘I’m not entirely sure what the procedure is. I know they talk about the person who died. They clean up the bodies, too. They make them look as good as they can. There’s music. People share their memories of the person. And there’s food, usually.’

‘Food? For the living people, right?’

‘For both, I think, in some cases. I can’t say for sure, honey, my memory files on this are very limited. This isn’t something I thought I’d need to know off-hand.’

‘Wait, why both? Why would dead people need food?’

‘They don’t. It’s an expression of love, as I understand it.’

‘But the dead person doesn’t know the food’s there.’

‘The living people do. Just because someone goes away doesn’t mean you stop loving them.’

Jane thought about that. ‘I’m not going to waste food,’ she said. ‘But we should do something.’

‘I think that’s a wonderful idea,’ said Owl.

They came up with a good plan together. First, Jane washed the bones, but not in the cargo bay sink. That was where she cleaned dogs, and that didn’t feel right. She washed what was left of the girls in the bathroom, the same place where she cleaned herself.