Excerpt: Apples (working title)

“Little apples will grow again”.
“Will you stop saying that?! That is the most aggravating tripe!”
“well, I feel like I need to say something helpful. What ideas do you have?”
“None, yet. When I do think of something to say, I’ll make sure it’s useful!”
“Well. There’s no point getting cranky. That’s fair enough, right?”
“Hmm yeah whatever.”
They were crawling backwards through the interminable tunnel Kelda had dropped her bag in somewhere in the last 15 minutes. Their fluid-cleaning tablets, datapad and rations were in it.
Her clone-twin Jana was running out of patience.
Kelda took a deep breath. “We’re getting practice at crawling backwards.”
“Heh. You need to practice hanging onto stuff and doing more than one thing at a time.”
Kelda’s foot brushed plastic fabric. “Aha!”
“Finally… now we can get some work done.” Jana muttered.
They resumed their slow shuffling crawl forward to the cave’s opening. The asteroid that was their second home was riddled with tubes and bubbles left by once-active tectonics, the largest of several such planetoids caused by an ancient lava-ball planet’s collision with a large moon.
The edge of a foreign sun-system was their home. They’d never been on Earth; their home-base was the space station Azure.
Their current home was this asteroid cluster their tribe had found in the belt. Several were larger than Pluto in Sol's system.