Now they carry an uncomfortable truth.
If people ever find out what’s down there, I don’t know where I’ll be.
I might even lose this land no matter what I do, but this place could take it away a lot faster.
I don’t think they let you keep your ranch when it’s been seized by the police as a crime scene, all assets forfeited when your father gets posthumously convicted.
Maybe it can’t happen.
Maybe it can.
With the way my life is spiraling nose down right now, I’d believe just about anything.
But I’m going to find a way to save this place, one way or another.
I’ll make sure of it.
I’ve always made sure of it.
Everything’s going to be okay.
I swear.
* * *
Months Ago
I can’t believe it’s gonna end like this.
Dad’s the smartest man I know.
He’s the kinda smart that finds new planets and can tell you what atmosphere they have from thousands of light years away. All by tiny flickers in light on photographs that aren’t much more than grainy spots of black and white taken with a high-powered telescope.
That’s what NASA used to pay him to do.
Find new stars and planets.
Reach out across the universe and touch galaxies that might not even be there anymore, full of all those beautiful lights we see up in the sky every night.
But now it’s like there’s nothing left of that amazing brain that used to be full of so much life.
Just riding with him was like being in school.
He’d tell me about how all the mountains here are full of metal that came from stars, carried by asteroids that crashed into the Earth eons ago.
He’d tell me about navigating by constellations.
He’d tell me what the names of the constellations meant, everything from my own Aries to Ares—the God of War, ruled by Mars—to the much-ignored Ophiuchus that kind of got kicked out as the bastard child of the zodiac.
He’d tell me about moons where it rained titanium and shores of liquid helium oceans made of crushed black diamonds. I’d look up at the shining night sky and wonder how he could learn all that just from the color and brightness of those twinkling lights.
Now? He can’t even talk.
He’s almost a vegetable, his body wasted away, his tendons ropy and his mouth hanging slack, a bit of drool building in the corner. His eyes are glazed, empty.
He never told me about the cancer, either.
He’s always been like that, holding back bad news.
And the thing with cancer is, it can go slow for the longest time, and no one can tell.
But when it decides it means business, it doesn’t mess around.
I didn’t want to put him in hospice. It wouldn’t have made things any easier for him when the doctors already gave us an in-home morphine drip.
I don’t want it to be even harder with him surrounded by impersonal caretakers instead of the people who love him.
Not that Sierra’s here for this, here to change his feeding tube and wash him down every day, here to sit by his bedside and hold his hand and try not to squeeze it tight enough to hurt him while I struggle not to sob until I’m just a dried-out, mindless husk of who I used to be, too.
Like father, like daughter.
But I know it won’t be long.
It started in his pancreas, but now it’s in his lungs, his liver, even in his brain.
Eating him alive.
No one wanted to say it when the doctors sent him home.
We all knew they were sending him home to die.
And I’m here wondering who my father really was, after what I saw this morning.
But he’s not here to tell me anymore.
His heart may be beating, his hand may twitch feebly in mine as I clutch it softly at his bedside, looking down at him with his white hair spilled across the sweat-soaked pillow.
There’s nothing in those eyes.
Until they abruptly snap open.
I suck in a sharp breath, my eyes widening. I almost recoil from him as a stark, wide blue stare locks on me for dear life.
His hand tightens on mine like a vise. The sticks of his fingers are so thin they dig in with surprising strength, and I let out a little hiss of pain, but I don’t let go.
“D-Dad?”
He stares at me. Suddenly everything I know as Dad flashes in those eyes like he’s an empty vessel and was poured back into himself.
He works his dry, gummy lips, his voice a hollow rasp in the back of his throat before he coughs, his thin body shaking, his nostrils flaring around the breathing tubes.
“Libby. Y-you…you have t-to…”
I lean in close. His voice is weak and thready, so hard to hear, but I’m trying, listening with everything, holding fast to his shaking hand.
“L-Libby, you have to f-find it. I can’t…I c-can’t take back. What I did, I…y-you. The rock! You need…”