Isabella worked at clearing weeds in the field, a hat on her head and a pitchfork in her hands. Benjamin sat weakly in the shade, sorting seeds with great care to help his younger sister along.
He raised his eyes to the arid, cracked ground all around him, then to the thorny weeds spreading wider by the day, and something like despair moved through them. Those thorny weeds were parasites. Clear them out today and they would be back at full height by tomorrow. Biological herbicides could not touch them.
They had sucked the soil dry of its nutrients until it grew more barren by the day. This was precisely why the Martinez family had decided to abandon this planet all those years ago.
While the two of them worked, the roar of an engine suddenly came down from overhead.
Isabella and Benjamin froze, the expressions dropping off their faces. Could it be that the government hadn’t waited for the year to run out and had already sent someone to seize the land?
A cargo ship circled once in the air, settled on a landing spot, and came slowly down. This was an abandoned planet; there was naturally no landing pad to speak of.
From the air, Liam had already studied the situation below and concluded that the place was far too barren. Once his feet were on the ground, he realized he had still been overestimating it. This wasteland of rock and gravel would have made a desert concede defeat.
Liam paid a little extra to have the delivery staff haul the supplies right up to the door of the Martinez siblings’ residence. Isabella and Benjamin watched blankly as cartload after cartload was wheeled over and stacked in front of their house, and glanced at one another without the faintest idea what was going on.
Once both parties had settled the payment properly, the cargo ship lifted off and left.
Only then did Liam, wearing a complicated expression, walk over to this nominal older brother and sister of his. The moment the two of them saw him they were struck speechless with shock, because he looked seventy percent like their dead Papa, and what was left of his features resembled the two siblings themselves.
Benjamin got out a nervous greeting. "Hello. Hello there. May I ask who you are...?"
Liam smiled at them both and scratched his cheek. "Hello, brother Benjamin. Hello, sister Isabella. My name is Liam. I’m your biological younger brother."
The two Martinez siblings sat in their chairs, blank-faced, and for a long time could not pull themselves back together.
Liam told them only that he and Elijah had been switched by mistake as infants, and that since the Hall family had found their real son, he had left that place to come back to them. About how Elijah had smeared the Martinez family and framed him over the past year, Liam did not breathe a word.
To these two, he was still a stranger. Blood relation or not, they would not hand over their trust so easily. Set beside him, they would still lean toward Elijah, the child they had loved dearly for more than a decade.
It was a long while before Benjamin got hold of himself. He looked at Liam with a complicated gaze, then stood up, fetched a photo album from a drawer in his bedroom, and handed it over. Benjamin spoke slowly.
"I do believe you’re our biological younger brother, because you look so much like Papa. And there’s something of me and Isabella in your face too. Besides, we’ve nothing left now but a ruined planet about to be confiscated. I can’t see any reason you’d bother deceiving us."
Liam took the album and turned the pages carefully, one by one. It was very thick, and looked to have been handed down through several generations.
Liam’s gaze came to rest on a photograph of a woman and stayed there. Seeing how fixedly he was looking at it, Isabella spoke up to explain.
"That’s our grandmother on Papa’s side. She passed away very young. Now that I look at it properly, you take after her far more than you do Papa."
If Liam looked seventy percent like their Papa, then set against the grandmother’s photograph he looked ninety. Liam’s fingers brushed across the woman’s face, and his nose prickled. Because the woman in the photograph was the very image of Susan, the mother he had never once met.
Liam thought to himself that he really had no fate at all with his parents. He went through the whole album, then asked out of curiosity, "Is there nobody left on Papa’s side of the family?"
Benjamin’s and Isabella’s expressions turned distinctly unnatural. Benjamin rubbed his nose.
"Back then our grandfather on Papa’s side was against our two fathers being together, so Papa cut ties with the family. In the early years our uncles on Papa’s side still helped out now and then, but after Papa died they came once and that was the end of it."
Liam was surprised. "From the way you tell it, that side of the family isn’t heartless toward us at all. So why is it that with the two of you in straits like this, they haven’t put out a hand? Could there be some misunderstanding?"
The two Martinez siblings went stiff and dropped their eyes awkwardly, hands worrying at their clothes. For reasons neither of them could have explained, sitting across from this biological younger brother they had only just met, they both felt as if they were facing an elder of the family. Their nerves were pulled taut, and neither quite dared look at Liam directly.
Watching the two of them move like a copy and paste of each other, Liam suddenly understood. "Is this because of Elijah?"
Isabella’s face flushed red and she mumbled, "That year, Elijah said our youngest uncle on Papa’s side had made indecent advances on him, so... so brother Benjamin made an enormous scene about it, and our youngest uncle lost face in front of a great many people..."
Benjamin picked up from there. "Afterward Elijah took it back and said he’d only been joking. But by that point it had already turned so ugly that we hadn’t the face to see any of them again."
Liam had nothing to say to that. They had a perfectly good family standing behind them, and these two had backed themselves into a dead end regardless. Then, pretending to know nothing about the money Elijah had stolen, he said casually:
"Let’s say that’s how it went. Even so, I don’t see how the two of you should have ended up like this. Sirius may not have been the finest planet, but it could still grow agricultural produce, and agricultural goods are permanently in short supply on the market. By rights you should never have been destitute enough to sell an entire planet. What actually happened?"
Liam tapped the alloy tabletop twice, his expression rather stern. The two Martinez siblings had the distinct sense that the person sitting opposite them was not their younger brother at all but that eldest uncle of theirs on Papa’s side, forever so dignified and imposing. Isabella gripped the legs of her trousers tightly and licked her dry lips.
"The money... all the money in the house was stolen..."
Liam frowned. "Stolen? Was the home security system really that poor? Have the two of you reported it to the police?"
The two Martinez siblings bowed their heads deeply and did not say a word. Liam narrowed his eyes and stared at the crowns of their heads. Judging that he had applied enough pressure, he let them off the hook and said offhandedly:
"All right. I can more or less guess the shape of it. You two needn’t say it out loud."
He stood, walked over to the heap of supplies, and said:
"Don’t just sit there. I bought a small mobile home. Come and help me set it up, quickly. Good thing I planned ahead, or I wouldn’t have anywhere to sleep tonight."