On Phobos, she stole an orange.

 

Hidden behind crates, she watched the vendor inflate orange gelatinous sacks into plump balls filled with replicated sticky sweet pulp. She sucked her front teeth and tensed, waiting. When he turned away, she pounced, snatching the prize for her brother. She couldn’t bring him to the holozoo on Deimos for his birthday like their mom had last year, but she could do this.

 

A 13-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy cannot live on rations alone.

 

The vendor shouted, alerting peacekeepers. She darted into an entryway with an access tube and crawled with the orange shoved down her shirt. It fell crushed beneath her knee, bleeding juice everywhere.

 

For nothing. It was all for nothing.

 

She had stolen before and been caught, but since the resource allocation act, satellite colonies had a zero-tolerance crime policy for anyone over the age of 12. If they caught her, they’d make her jump, like they made her mom jump for selling unsanctioned meds. A 150lb adult weighs less than 60 grams outside the g-grid. When a convict jumped, they didn’t land. They just kept floating up, up, up until Mars grabbed them in its gravitational pull and burned them in its atmosphere. But it wasn’t the jump she was afraid of; it was leaving her brother alone.

 

Crawling faster, she made it back to their quarters undetected. The boy looked up, hopeful, then downward when he saw she had nothing. And she knew that she’d try again tomorrow.