There are scientists outside, and they are celebrating. Lucas stares out across the field where his family’s cows are grazing, watching the scientists and their metal tower through the tree line. They’ve been making what his Pappy calls a ruckus. Pappy, of course, hates that the scientists are here, has ever since they knocked on their door one day, asking about the sign his mom had put up saying, Property for cheap!

Mom and dad hadn’t told Pappy that they were selling portions of the woods. Lucas and Jane had been told not to tell him. 

Jane stormed out of the room when she was told that. She always liked Pappy, and turned her nose up at the scientists when they came over. “Meddling in country affairs,” Pappy would mutter, and Jane would nod ferociously in agreement. 

They’re doing something big in the woods. Lucas gathered as much when he read the paper the other day: “Planet’s core being drilled into for energy.” As monumental as this was to the rest of the world, his mom and dad had just wanted to sell the land for extra money. Things had been bad these past few years, but they wouldn’t tell Lucas or Jane that. No, they just whispered about the economy and how farmers were being left in the dust and bought him and his sister less birthday presents.

He was eleven-going-on-twelve, and Jane was fourteen. They agreed on few things, but the fact that they needed to know what was going on in the world was one of them.

A scientist catches him looking and waves him over. “Hey!” they call, and he goes closer, careful. The field is full of pockets of dirt, little mounds of cow poo, and dry grass. 

He doesn’t cross the tree line. It’s not their property anymore, despite him and Jane growing up in that forest, pretending they were wolves, or some other silly, childish thing. The scientist waves him closer. “Do you want to see something?”

He does.

Lucas crosses the tree line, creeping closer. The scientist grins at him, real wide and excited, and Lucas very suddenly does not want to go. What if Jane finds out?

The scientist doesn’t seem to notice his apprehension, instead guiding him closer to the middle of the camp. Their walk is longer than Lucas would’ve expected. All around him are toppled trees, crooked branches, white tents as a new feature. While Lucas mourns the forest scenery, the scientist talks excitedly, something about drills and magnitudes and rocks.

They stop in the middle of the camp. The metal tower looms large above them, metal creaking. It has a lengthy oval structure around its base, dark glass concealing whatever’s inside. 

“That’s-” the scientist spreads his hands out “where we’re drilling into the center of the Earth. The Pit, we call her.”

Lucas doesn’t say anything, just leans in closer to the glass. He can’t see inside, but his breath makes a fog on the reflective surface. 

The scientist continues to jabber on. “We made a breakthrough today. We’re almost through the crust.”

Lucas doesn’t know what that means, but he doesn’t want to ask. Instead, he just stares, gaze traveling upwards; the tall, metal structure that he’d seen towering above the tree line, up close. It heaves, tilting ever so slightly back and forth. 

“Is it supposed to be moving?” he asks, and the scientist launches straight into another explanation, something about their drill and the metal and pressure.

Lucas doesn’t say anything. He’s out of his depth. He knows how to help birth a calf, he knows how to repair the dairy machines in the barn, and he knows how to annoy Jane. He even knows how to drive a tractor. His mom didn’t teach him about crusts and drills. 

He almost wishes he could be like the scientists, and then he thinks about Jane hating him, and he feels sick to his stomach.

It’s too late to be up. If his mom discovers him awake, she’ll be grumpy in the morning. So, he’s quiet, reading a paper under the covers with a flashlight.

Lucas has been visiting the scientists sometimes between chores–-which is almost a chore of its own. It’s summertime, so they’ve been shuttling cows to fairs, keeping a constant eye on their corn, and selling old farming equipment. Jane’s birthday is on the 8th. He still doesn’t really get why no one has drilled past the crust of the Earth before. But he knows the layers, now. He also knows that they’re trying to get to the core, but the other parts of the Earth might require different drill heads. 

He’s also been in the metal tower. There’s a walkway, and a long, long way to fall. It made him dizzy, so he didn’t stay long. But it was cool. Awesomely cool.

They gave him a paper to read, and he doesn’t really understand most of it, but it’s about tectonic plates, which are cool. It felt like a secret, so he stuffed it under his bed and only reads it at night. That’s why he’s awake when the world lights up.

It’s silent and dark, save for the crickets and fireflies. Then, from the dark, from the song of the bugs, something shifts. A scream rings out.

It’s not human.

Instead, it’s a shifting, multi-tonal thing– each scream layered over each other, like horses screaming as they break their legs, deep and guttural and high and reedy at the same time. It almost reminds Lucas of their neighbor’s wheat fields, like a flock of crows settling in the trees. It’s impossibly loud, and he thinks the whole world must have heard.

It falls silent. A light goes on in the hallway, streaming from underneath his door, and Lucas shoves the paper and flashlight underneath his pillow. 

It’s only calm for a few more seconds, before the world goes bright. A flash from outside his window blinds him, and he closes his eyes instinctively. Then, he realizes that it’s coming from the tree line. 

There’s movement from outside his door. Lucas cracks open his eyes, and he sees the metal structure, torn to shreds. In its place is a beam of white-pink light. He stares, open mouthed. 

Was that light from the mantle?

A knock on his door. He gets up from his bed and opens it. His mom is chewing on her lip. 

“We’re going outside to see what’s going on,” she says, and disappears down the hallway. Lucas hurries behind her, almost falling down the stairs. He’s gotten to know everyone at the dig site pretty well, and his stomach turns strangely at the thought of any of them getting hurt.

Pappy stands outside, glaring at the tree line. “Looks like they messed with something they shouldn’t have messed with,” he grumbles, and Jane nods, head bobbing up and down, arms crossed. “What were they even doing? Digging to the core? Should’a known.”

Lucas keeps his mouth shut.

Someone hobbles out from the tree line, and waves. Lucas wants to go over, but Jane’s glare stops him. 

“What do you think you’re doing, waking us up like this?” she yells, and Lucas watches his dad move to put his hands on her shoulders, whispering something in her ear.

The scientist doubles over in a coughing fit, then yells back: “Don’t come over– everything will be fine. Go back to sleep.”

Pappy begins to yell, but Lucas’s mom is already shuffling him and Jane back into the house. He can hear snippets of Pappy’s yelling from behind the walls, as his mom pushes gently on his back to get him to move back to his room.

“Go back to bed. We’ll talk in the morning,” she whispers.

They didn’t talk in the morning, because none of the scientists came over. The woods were coated in the pinkish-white light, and there was no movement.

In the afternoon, armored trucks came. They surrounded the woods with barricades, told Lucas’s family to go into the house, told them to stay there. His Pappy paced, and his mom and dad ignored them, but Jane and Lucas watched from the windows of the upstairs bathroom, clustered between the toilet and the sink. Together, they peered out from the windows. 

A body bag. Another body bag. People in hazmat suits. Body bag number three, four, five, six. Lucas turns away from the window and runs. Jane doesn’t comment as he leaves.

It was fall, and the woods were supposed to be dropping leaves. Instead, they were full of petrified wood. No one could get close. Lucas and his family had watched as the light slowly crept from the destroyed skeleton of the metal tower until it reached the tree line, covering the brown wood until it peeled away, an off-gray with pink veins.

They’re warned to stay inside. “Just until the petrification stops,” an official said a few weeks back. Every day, it gets quieter and quieter, only broken by shouts and mechanical gasps. There were no fruit flies, no ants, no bugs at all. They seemed to have left with the scientists, in their black body bags.

Even now, Lucas doesn’t like to think about it.

Instead, he reads the paper about tectonic plates. Jane catches him one day.

“Where’d you get that?” she asks, and he hums. The non-answer isn’t enough for her. She’d just turned fifteen in August and was tired of being cooped up in the house.

“Dude, seriously. Where?”

Lucas shrugs. “Library? Before we got stuck here?” he offers, and he can tell that she knows he’s lying, but she doesn’t call him out on it.

“I know you went to see the scientists before the woods got petrified,” she says, and he finally looks up. “Did you get it from them?”

“Maybe.”

Jane sighs. “I’m not going to yell at you, Lucas.” She doesn’t elaborate, but goes and sits down next to him, peering over his shoulder at his paper. “Tectonic plates? Like, geography stuff?”

“Yeah,” he mumbles, “they were digging past the crust of the Earth. Into the mantle. I guess into the core, too. But they didn’t get very far. They weren’t past the crust when I went there last. I don’t– I didn’t get most of it, so they gave this to me to read.”

Jane nods and wraps her arms around her legs as he explains about the drill, and the tower, and the way it swayed.

Winter passes slowly. The new government guys promise to feed and milk the cows, twice a day, on routine. Pappy swears up and down they’ll do it wrong, but they still can’t go outside to check. Jane stares out the window, listening to the cows cry. She’s restless, and she confides in Lucas sometimes– telling him that she misses working on the farm, misses their old life, hates the scientists and everything they stand for. 

Lucas can’t bear to hate the guys in the body bags, but he does have a distaste for the new government guys. They think they know everything, but they don’t. They know nothing about farms or cows or corn.

They do know about pushing people around, though. They yell at Jane when she opens the windows despite the house not being near the white circle of petrification, which has spread out from the woods and is taking on the barn.

Lucas doesn’t know why she pushes back, but he knows she’s tired of being in the house.

On the first day of March, Lucas wakes up to yelling.

“That’s my daughter, and you’ll give her back!” his mom yells, and Lucas scrambles out of bed, running down the hall to see what’s wrong. He takes the stairs three at a time.

His mom is standing in the doorway, talking to a man in a hazmat suit. “Ma’am–” he says, and she reaches out to shove him but he steps aside. “If you touch me, you’ll have to be taken in too. This entire area is contaminated. We should’ve moved you out a long time ago.”

“Mom?” Lucas says, waiting for a response. His mom starts to cry. “What happened?”

The hazmat suit clears his throat. “Your sister was irresponsible. She went outside. We found her in the barn. Now, we’ll have to quarantine her. This petrification isn’t just... petrification. It’s a disease. PI-D-02.”

Lucas stands there, not entirely aware of what that means. But he knew that Jane had heard the cows crying last night, just like he had.

“She was just worried about the cows,” he chokes out.

“She’ll be dead within months!” The hazmat suit snaps back. “The scientists at the dig site were found with an advanced stage of the disease, and they were already in critical condition. Your sister is in the early stages. Going outside without a suit will kill you. It’d be best to forget her.”

“You can find a cure, can’t you?” His mom begs, still weeping.

“We’d be lucky.”

Lucas feels his stomach start to twist. His head feels strange, hot. “This is your fault.”

“I’m–”

“This is your fault!” He screams. “This is all your fault! You should have told us! She’s not irresponsible! She would have listened!”

The hazmat suit closes the door. Lucas runs up to it, but his mom holds him back. She’s crying silent tears, but she hushes him while he screams.

They’re told to leave two days after. The family is piled into trucks, hazmat suits on. Lucas’s is too big for him. He can hear the cows crying as he leaves, staring out the window at the pink trees, the white grass, the silent spring. His family is silent, too. They’ve barely talked since Jane was taken.

Pappy was right. Scientists only meddle in places they don’t understand. 

By the summer after next, Lucas is fourteen-going-on-fifteen. The government has built tall, tall cities with metal walls. His family is shuffled into what used to be farmland in Ohio. People crowd around, telling tales of how fast PI-D spread, how they have no idea what’ll happen to the world, how grateful they are that the government was able to build something like this so quickly.

Construction, in truth, is still ongoing. What matters is the walls; completely metal, dug deep underground and circling underneath the city. This, scientists say, cannot be punctured by PI-D. Most organic things are at risk of infection; but metal, now, that’s what kept PI-D at bay before they dug into the Earth.

Lucas has garnered trust with scientists. He’s accepted into their pack, he knows, as collateral damage; they feel sorry for him and his family. They were ground zero. 

Jane, he knows, is being held at the site of infection.

He’s been planning something for her birthday. Every week, shipments go out from the city to the site. They’re studying the grass, the air, the light; the birds, dead on the ground. And they need fresh suits constantly, fresh food from the metal gardens and shut-up-tight barns, fresh people from the ever-changing roster of scientists “on call”. 

The night before Lucas leaves, he burns the paper about tectonic plates with a lighter Pappy got him for his birthday and writes a note to his mom.

He tells her that he’s very sorry, but he has to see Jane again.

Lucas wakes up early. He dresses in a hazmat suit he stole from the lab; they have dark hoods, and he just went through a growth spurt. He walks onto the site and receives comments about how he doesn’t need the suit yet, but they allow him in anyway. 

It shouldn’t be this easy.

It is.

He picks a truck and gets in the back when no one is looking. He nestles himself between the shipment of suits and food, and he waits. Waits to be discovered.

In truth, he doesn’t expect to see Jane again. But the car starts up with a rumble, and he feels something twist in his belly that he recognizes as fear.

When he’s sure they’re out of the city, he peeks out the back window, which is almost completely covered, but not quite. The city looms behind them. The world is white, bathed in pink. There is something in the air that shines. The car kicks up white glitter-dust.

The outside is beautiful, and he wants to throw up. Where is the dirt, the mud? The trees they pass have no leaves and shake like a building in an earthquake as they go by. The wheat fields are a frozen light pink.

The world is beautiful, but wrong. So, so wrong. 

He continues staring, though, until the city is far in the distance, a black speck on pink sand. Then he leans back, and cries.

When they get there, he waits until the door is opened. No one comes to unload, not right away; they’re in a metal room full of metal boxes, like the ones in the truck. He folds himself around the boxes and begins to move out of the truck, entirely waiting for someone to spot him.

Someone does.

“Hey, why are you back there?” someone says as he steps out of the truck. 

He starts to run. 

“Hey!” the hazmat suit yells. 

The door is still open from where the truck came in. He tumbles through the opening, gloves scratching at the grass. Shoot. Shoot shoot shoot. 

He runs. The trees are no longer there; it’s just metal buildings with labels. Someone is yelling, then another person, then another. There’s running behind him. An alarm starts up. He stumbles again.

He continues to run, scanning the labels.

Holding building seven.

Shipment building four.

Research lab: elements.

Research lab: hominoids.

That one. That one right there. 

He bursts into it, destroys what could be a cleaning station, and runs down the hallway. His boots go clunk, clunk, on the metal floor. There’s no one behind him. Not even footsteps, anymore. He locks himself in a room, breathing heavily. 

Finally, he looks around. 

The room is mostly dark, aside from the deep pink glow behind him. It almost reminds him of the pink glow from the blast. The walls are all metal, silent and cold. He turns and sees the bed. 

Sees Jane.

She’s hooked up to what looks like ten million machines, pink veins prominent in her face, her arms glowing from beneath the thin blanket covering her legs. A heart monitor is beeping in the corner. There’s a patient booklet on the wall. Lucas kicks it, not daring to look at what they’d done to his sister. What tests they ran. It skitters across the room, hitting the wall and falling to the floor. 

Lucas takes a breath in, and then releases it.

He knows he’s not getting back home. Not without consequences. His family had only gotten a house because of compensation. The rest of his family’s friends had gone, scattered across the country or been left for dead. He could start over, could pretend he was never a farmer, could pretend that the dirt looked better when it was mud and that time felt better when slung over his shoulders as a fourteen-year-old.

He doesn’t want to.

He creeps over to Jane’s bedside. Her eyes are closed, and she’s hooked up to a breathing machine. A part of him wants to reach out, touch her; but that would be stupid.

Then he remembers he’s not going home, and it feels less stupid and more right.

Lucas takes off his hazmat suit helmet, dropping it on the floor. When he breathes in, he coughs, kneeling beside Jane. 

His gloves follow, then the suit itself. Finally, he’s standing beside Jane, wearing his pajamas. It’s cold. He isn’t wearing any socks, and the room is freezing.

He takes her hand. It’s warm.

“Jane, I missed you,” he whispers. Jane doesn’t respond. She’s barely even breathing.

“I got into a lot of trouble coming to see you,” he says, his voice stronger. “I’m not getting out of this, I don’t think. But I wanted to see you before you reached critical condition, whatever that meant.”

Jane doesn’t respond.

“Your birthday is tomorrow,” he offers. “August 8th. We’ll celebrate together.”

The heart monitor starts beeping faster. He turns to it, watching as it starts to move in impossible jumps and swings. He grips her hand tighter. It grips him back.

Is it just him, or is the room brighter? He turns to his sister, and watches as her pink veins light up. They reflect off the metal walls, like lightning crackling on grey sky.

So, not just him.

His grip on her hand is almost too warm now, too tight. He doesn’t let go. Instead, he leans down to embrace her. He’s sitting, pressing his head underneath her chin, leaning against her. The room is warm, now, and getting warmer. He hears a crack.

He closes his eyes. The pink in front of him lights up from behind thin eyelids, the darkness slowly enveloping in warmth.

It feels like home. Dirt, and mud, and cows. He thinks back to the field with the electric fence. That summer he spent watching the thunderstorms. Crickets and ants and mosquitoes. His sister, laughing.

The breathing apparatus falls off, bouncing off his head, and whatever he’s holding claws at his hand, his sister’s form shifting underneath him. It doesn’t feel like a human anymore. There’s even more cracks. It feels like his Earth is splitting open.

It takes a breath. Lucas holds his.

“I love you, Jane,” he says, and opens his eyes.