When summer on Mindoir came January 2168, 13-year-old Emily's pack contained five solar powered data pads loaded with texts and audio files from her Harvard Xenolinguistics course. They were unceremoniously stuffed into her pack between medkits, emergency rations, water, camp gear, wash kit and a change of clothes. When they set off, she wore tough, water resistant cargo trousers with a camo print, a matching jacket tied around her waist, a green t-shirt that her Mum realised at that moment was too small on her, a tough pair of boots, and a brimmed waterproof hat pushed slightly too far forward because Sophia had done her pony tail too high. Strapped to her right hip and leg was a holster for her sidearm and its ammo. Her hunting knife was in a sheath on one of her shoulder straps, and a machete was tied to the side of her pack. A hunting rifle hung across her chest by a sling about her neck. She had a happy, dangerous look – as the saying goes; "fire in her eyes". She was almost as tall as Elijah; around five foot ten.
They were away longer than planned that year. Elijah got sick from something small that got into the tent and bit him. The jungle was too thick for an airlift or even a supply drop. Emily had to tend him, protect him and half carry him through twenty miles of jungle to the river, where evac waited. It was slow going.
A pack of cat-like creatures caught scent of the sickness. All night every night the pack tested Emily's defences. On the third evening, they were finally bold enough to attack. They destroyed the tent and almost killed Elijah. Emily killed several of them, but that only enraged them, and the spare ammo was lost at the camp. The sun came up dim through the canopy in that region. The forest floor was dark until well after sunrise. Around an hour after, Emily realised she couldn't last that long. There was a wide area of marsh a couple of miles ahead. If she could reach that they could spend the night in the bog where these tree-hoppers wouldn't be able to track them.
For every tree they past one of the creatures slashed or leapt out at them from somewhere, but somehow they weren't dead when Emily spied a small hollow under the roots of a tree. They squeezed in, and for a precious few minutes the pack was quiet.
Emily shivered and fought off a wave of panic.
Elijah squeezed her shoulder. "Survive," he told her. "Breathe, that's all. Every breath is a victory, use it, fight for it. Nothing else matters, not me, not thirst, not pain, nothing. Just breathe. Whatever it takes, you hear me? Look at me, Em! While you breathe, you can still fight, and you can always win – understood?" A clawed foot broke through near a gap in the roots. "They're here. Look at me. You got this. Breathe!"
Emily broke out with a roar that momentarily cowed the pack. She hoisted Elijah up to support him with one arm, brandished her machete in the other, and ran. The cats pursued them all the way but they made it to the bog in one piece, with several nasty cuts and bites. The cats weren't so lucky. Half the pack was dead or badly wounded, and when Emily used her last three bullets to kill the one that braved open ground, they gave up.
Neither Emily nor Elijah was strong enough for a repeat the next day. So they rested and did what they could for their wounds. Emily foraged in the treeline, and they set up an improvised camp on the marsh. On the second day, Elijah watched Emily start a fire to boil what she'd gathered. The hat was gone, lost in the rush. Her arms were scratched up and bandaged with material from her T-shirt. She was barely decent anymore, thanks to how much of her shirt was wrapped around their various wounds. There was another bandage around her calf, and there were two long, close, parallel cuts that would likely scar down the right side of her face. Her long hair was gone after it caught in a branch on the final hour of the chase. She had immediately hacked it off with her machete in one cut, and never looked back; a moment that made Elijah proud as well as sorry for her. Her face was cleaner than the rest of her. She finally got the fire going and sat back next to Elijah against a fallen tree analogue with a huff.
"Hey, brighten up Em," he told her. "You're kicking ass."
She put her head on his shoulder and replied, "Well we're still breathing, anyway."
Elijah put his arm around her and held her.
After a while Emily told him, "You're wrong, by the way."
"Oh yeah?"
"About breathing. It's pointless without someone else to do it with."
Elijah squeezed her and kissed her matted hair. "I love you too, kiddo." He chuckled, and added, "Even if you do always overdo the veg."
Emily leapt forward as the food began to boil over the rim of the bowl she'd made from half the shell from a large fruit. They ate the vegetables and joked about cooking; how neither of them ever could, or ever minded, and how Sophia always fussed about her food.
The next morning, Elijah woke up free from fever. By the afternoon, he felt fine. They decided not to go home. Sophia was livid, and insistent over the coms. She threatened all kinds of punishments if they didn't get their butts to extraction.
Elijah told her Emily had found a spot in the marsh where they could receive a supply drop. "Listen," he told them "We survived a running fight with more than thirty predators while I had a high fever and Em had to keep one arm for me and nothing but a machete to fend them off. Most of the cuts are skin deep, they'll heal with medigel and bandages. I'm recovered now, Em's fine…"
"Are you though?"
"Yes."
"How do I know you don't have an unknown toxin still in your system? It wouldn't be the only toxin with temporary, repeat temporary, improvement after the initial symptoms."
"I heard you the first fifteen times, Soph, but I'm not a novice at this either. Send a blood scanner in the drop. I'll come straight to you if it flags anything, and I'll send you scan results every few hours."
"Mom, he's ok," Emily said. "I did all the checks you told me and he's fine. We didn't come all this way to get kicked out by the locals in a couple of weeks."
Elijah grinned and winked at her. "Damn straight. Since when did I take a risk I couldn't follow through?" he asked the com device. "Em is my girl too, Soph. She wouldn't be here if I didn't know I could get her home safe."
"You take her on more dangerous hunts every year. I told you something like this would happen. Come home, both of you."
"Hey, I know my girl, ok? I reckoned we could handle it out here, and I was right. She's f***ing scary with a machete."
Emily giggled silently and whispered, "You're mean. She's really worried."
He smiled back and interrupted Sophia's angry reply with, "I love you too, Soph. Em says I'm being mean, so, serious talk now, we'll be fine. We'll have fresh supplies from the drop tomorrow morning, and I have a lovely machete wielding daughter who I'd like to spend a few more quality weeks with."
"Shut up Elijah. Emily, listen to me," Sophia said. "I have no doubt you'll stay alive. You're wired that way, just like your dad, and he's taught you enough. But there's more to living than surviving, ok? Take it from your neurosurgeon mom, that blood scanner might miss something, and even if your wounds do heal properly, which they might not out there, trauma like that isn't something anyone just brushes off, no matter how much dad pretends he can."
"Mom, if dad was sick I'd march him back on the point of my knife, you know I would. He'd do the same to me if my cuts or the bite were bad. It was scary as hell, but – I don't know - I don't want to brush it off, mom. We lived through it together, and that's – significant. We want to finish it together. That's all."
They got back in the first week of march. Both of them were covered head to toe in dark black mud. They'd been hiding from a monstrous creature in another bog the night before. Emily's eyes sparkled, and her grin couldn't have been wider when she saw her Mum was on the shuttle. Emily ran to hug her heedless of her protests.
Emily spent the whole trip leaning out of the open shuttle door with her arm hooked through a cargo strap. She gazed at the beautiful swathes of green, the wide blue-grey band of the rippling river rushing underneath them, smelt the forest on the wind that ripped through her hair and tugged at her open mud caked jacket, revelled in the cloud of mist over the grand falls that soaked her as they flew through it, and took in the first sight of the sprawling colony around its hill as they came down off the plateau to the delta below. Her chest felt tight, but she was entirely happy and relaxed. She didn't understand it, until she found she felt how frail and fleeting the world was, and somehow every breath she took in it was all the more beautiful.