Page 6 of Eat My Moon Dust
Marcella Bianci, affectionately known asNonna,was Renata’s most prominent figurehead. She’d given the place its name and organized the community area’s construction and integration program with the alien refugees that lived with us. She petitioned for a school pod to be dropped in just a few weeks ago for the kids too and was doggedly determined to get us a full-fledged piazza worthy of Rome. She was a powerhouse of a woman and a little intimidating despite her grandmotherly warmth.
I found her at the edge of the playfield, where the adult humans often sat and watched the children play. She was sitting on a newly installed garden ledge, local flowers popping out of theblack soil behind her in little bright pink and blue sprouts. Beneath her prim hips was a bright blue kitchen towel to keep the pollen off her impeccable palazzo pants.
And she lookedpissed.
Specifically at her holotab, the tech most of us had gotten implanted in our forearms as a comm device. It was one of several bionic upgrades we’d received for free to help us navigate union life. Most of us at this point also had linguitors installed behind our ears for translating speech, and transitors in our optic nerves to translate text.
By the way Marcella was snarling at the holoscreen hovering above her forearm, I suspected she wished she could rip it out and throw it in the jungle.
“Impossible man!” she snapped, throwing her hands up in the air. Imani, the Tanzanian woman in charge of colony security whose convergence with the arms master had given her a short crown of horns around her forehead, golden eyes, and a red tint to her vitiligo-speckled espresso skin, raised a brow, taking a long drag from her water bottle.
“Ferulis?” she asked as I inched closer.
“Yes,”Marcella hissed, standing up to pace. “He’s denied my request for the construction of a piazza…again!”she emphasized, slapping the back of her hand against her palm. “And what do you think his excuse was this time? A permit for construction on protected lands! Protected becausehumanslive on it!”
Marcella threw her hands up and sat with force on her kitchen towel. Imani grinned, closing her notifications. “Sounds to me like you just might need to go rogue, Grandmother.”
“Going rogue, I like it!” I interjected brightly. Being overly cheerful was a nervous tick of mine.
“As much as I’d like to disobey that overgrown cricket, I can’t,” Marcella sighed, crossing her arms. “I want the process to be safe. I may not be an engineer, but I’m not a fool either. Gravity here isn’t quite the same as Earth, and the curvature of the moon is very different. No catastrophic collapses on my watch, thank you. I want seasoned builders from Samridve to fly in.”
Imani shrugged. “And you don’t like Wade.”
Marcella shot the head of security a dagger-like glare, rolling her shoulders back.
“He’s disrespectful.”
“You’re totally right!” I said with a single nod of conviction. “Safety is the best choice.”
Both women looked up at me and I immediately grimaced. Not because they were unwelcoming, but because I was brown-nosing too hard and off-tempo. Ineededapproval to plan a holiday, for my own sake as much as the colony’s. And I’d just walked in on the one person who could give it to me in the middle of an outburst over being denied her own project.
“I’m so sorry,dolce,but I don’t think we’ve met,” Marcella said sweetly. She smiled, clasping her knee, and leaned towards me, waiting.
“Oh!” I cleared my throat and thrust my hand forward. “My name’s Tinsley Adams. I was hoping I could talk to you, Ms Bianci?”
She took my hand and gave it a little squeeze instead of a shake. “Please, call meNonna.How can I help you, Tinsley?”
The elegant white-haired woman was as warm as potpourri made from scratch and simmered in an oven. I breathed in her spicy personality and low, mercurial Italian accent like she was a shot of rum and clutched my comforter and scope with hope. “I noticed that the mountains have snow caps, and I was hoping–”
“Mountains?” Marcella interjected with confusion. “There are mountains?”
“Yes! If you lookwaaayin the distance from on top of the towers, you can see them!”
I held up my scope with a sheepish grin and they blinked at its colorful plas design for “child development 3 and up.” Imani held out her hand and I gave it to her. She looked way more suave than I ever could, cooly searching the treeline on the other side of the playfield through its rudimentary lens.
“The Pahatdhi Mountains,” Imani supplied. “I’ve seen them on maps but didn’t know they were visible from here.”
“Yeah! Very… very visible.” My voice trailed off, and Marcella smiled.
“What were you hoping for, Tinsley?” she prodded.
“Oh! I’d like to organize a holiday. Christmas!” I babbled nervously. Perhaps because it was so personal to me, the fear of rejection prickled the back of my neck like a cold sweat. “We’ve been here for more than an orbit, and holidays are good for tracking the time, keeping traditions alive, and healing the sou–”
Before I could finish defending my idea, Marcella clapped her hands together and laughed wickedly, her chocolate brown eyes sparkling to life.
“A magnificent idea,dolce!Show our friends how humans throw a party.”
“And it has absolutely nothing to do with stepping on Ferulis’s talons. Let’s see how long it takes for him to yell at me over comms,” Imani said with amusement, still playing with my toy scope.
