The Salt on the Screen

The projector was broken, which is why they were the only two still in the workshop at seven o'clock.

"It focuses fine on close things," Soren said. He held his hand up to the lens. "See. Sharp. It's the far things it blurs."

"So don't project far things," Maya said.

"There's nothing close to project." He pointed the lens at the wall, which was the only surface, and it was far. He rummaged in the old drive plugged into the side. "Somebody left a whole folder of space pictures on here."

"Whose is it?"

"Doesn't say. Just says Dawn. Bunch of grays."

He opened one. A round gray world filled the wall, soft at the edges, pocked all over with craters. And in the middle of one crater, two blazing white spots. So white they hummed against the gray like somebody had cut two holes in the picture and let the ceiling light through.

Maya stopped talking. She walked right up to the wall until her nose nearly touched it.

"That's not blur," she said.

"No. The rest is blurry. Those aren't."

"Because they're brighter than everything. Blur can't hide bright." She turned around. "What is that place?"

Soren read the little bar under the picture. "Ceres. It's in the asteroid belt. Biggest thing out there." He scrolled. "The crater's called Occator."

"What are the white bits, does it say?"

"It doesn't say."

Maya pressed her thumbnail against the wall, right on one of the spots, like she could scrape it. "Snow?"

"On a rock in the asteroid belt? It'd be freezing."

"So freezing things stay. Snow would stay." She stepped back. "But snow settles everywhere. This is only in the hole. Only in the crater."

Soren opened the next picture. Closer now. The spots weren't two spots, they were dozens, a scatter of small ones around one big bright patch, all of it inside the crater floor and nowhere else on the whole gray world.

"See," Maya said. "Only the bottom of the dent."

"If it fell from space it wouldn't care about the dent."

"Right. So it didn't fall. It came from the dent." She said it fast, before she knew why she'd said it. Then she stood there working out why.

Soren didn't tell her she was wrong. He asked, "What made you think that?"

"Because things that fall on go everywhere. Things that come up stay where they came up. Like." She looked around the workshop. "Like when the coffee machine leaks. The stain's only under the machine."

"Under the crack in the machine."

"Under the crack. Yes." She pointed at the biggest white patch. "That's a crack. Something came up through a crack."

Soren zoomed the picture in as far as it would go before it fell apart into squares. The big patch had a texture. Not smooth like ice. Grainy. Piled. Like something spread out flat and then dried.

"Came up wet," he said slowly, testing it out loud. "Came up wet and dried and left the white behind."

"Water dries clear," Maya said. "It doesn't leave white."

"Water with stuff in it does." He looked at her. "When Mom's kettle dries out there's a white ring in the bottom."

"That's the minerals. The salt."

"So the water goes and the salt stays." Soren was nodding now, fast. "The wet came up through the crack, spread on the floor of the crater, and then. It's a rock in space. There's almost no air."

"So the water doesn't even puddle," Maya said. "It just goes. Straight to gas. Up and gone."

"And leaves the salt sitting there."

They both looked at the wall. Two of them, small, and the whole bright crater floor of a world neither of them would ever stand on.

Maya's voice went quiet. "There's water under there."

"Under the ice. Under the gray." Soren pulled his notebook onto his knee and drew a circle, and under the circle a second thing, a curved pocket, and a line coming up through the crust to the crater floor. His pen pressed hard on the line. "A whole reservoir. Salty. Down in the dark where it never freezes solid."

"And it doesn't just leak once." Maya was ahead of him again. "Look at all the little spots around the big one. Different sizes. If it leaked once you'd get one stain. Lots of stains means."

"Means it keeps happening." He wrote a word and underlined it twice. "Again and again. It erupts."

"A rock the size of nothing, out past Mars, with an ocean in its belly that spits." Maya laughed, but not because it was funny. "Nobody put that up on the wall for us. It was just sitting in a folder called gray."

Soren checked the little bar again, hunting. "It doesn't say why the water still moves down there. Why it hasn't all frozen." He looked up. "It genuinely doesn't say. I don't think anyone fully knows."

"So nobody knows." Maya said it like she was tasting it. Not scared. Interested. She turned back to the two white blazes burning through the blur. "Somewhere under that, right now, in the dark, there's brine going up a crack. While we're standing in here with a broken projector."

"It doesn't know we're looking," Soren said.

"It doesn't know anything's looking. It's been doing it the whole time."

They stood in the humming light. Soren didn't fix the focus. The far world stayed soft everywhere except the two places where the salt was too bright to blur, where the water had come up and left its mark and gone back to gas into the black.

Maya reached over and nudged the projector a hair sideways. The bright spots slid along the wall and settled over the light switch, so that the salt of Occator sat exactly on top of the thing that turned the whole room on and off.

She left it there. Neither of them moved to fix it.

On the wall the two white spots went on burning, quiet, out of focus, salt from an ocean nobody had ever touched, waiting in a folder somebody forgot to name.