by Erika Swyler
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
“I’m sure there’s an explanation. Just calm down, breathe, and try again.”
There was an explanation. Her dad said Crucible organized things, slowing down the progression of chaos, of decay. That it could speed things up too. See also: Time, Arrow of. She hadn’t told him about Denny’s hair, the patch he’d pulled out. The way he’d screamed. Denny wouldn’t want her to tell anyone that.
She grabbed her father’s hand and squeezed as hard as she could, knowing it would hurt. She wanted it to hurt as bad as Denny was hurting. When he swore she tugged harder, pulling him to the lab door.
He twisted free, doubled over, and cradled his hand, swearing. His eyes were red and glassy. He glared like he didn’t recognize her. “What are you doing? Why would you do that?”
“You have to come with me,” she begged. “Please, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, but you have to believe me. I’ll show you. Okay? I’ll take you to him. I’ll show you. Please, you have to come.”
“I’m calling your mother.”
She’d never thrown something. People who threw things or shot spitballs were too stupid to know how to express themselves, too dumb to figure out what they wanted, or that there were ways to get what you wanted without having to ask anyone. But the voltmeter felt good in her hand, its big red readout bright, like something from Back to the Future. The way it smashed when it hit the wall let her know just how much of it was cheap plastic. Then the needle-nose pliers. Then a pen. A pair of heavy gloves.
He’d done this. “You have to fix it.”
He was shouting, but she didn’t care. If he didn’t listen, why should she? Everything on the lab table flew across the room, at Crucible and its legs, the thing that had done it. She threw hard, fast, but nothing seemed to hit.
“Nedda, stop. Calm down.” Then his hands were on her shoulders, shaking her. She knew the instant the pain shot through him—his face whitened with it.
“Fine,” she shouted. “I’ll fix it.”
She ran. He called her name, but she ignored it. He’d made the thing that had hurt Denny. She felt like she was sliding, sliding down the surface of something she couldn’t see, disappearing into the dark. She grabbed her bike and rode away—from the machine, the lab, his voice, his happiness—from whatever it was that was about to burst.
Two days before she’d been on the hood of her father’s car, lying about a comet she couldn’t see, lying to please him. And now he wouldn’t help. He didn’t believe her.
She biked hard, away from him, toward the palmetto forest. She remembered him sweating in the kitchen, steam rising from pans of salt water boiling on the range, fogging his glasses and suffocating the room. It was last winter when they’d done the salt water experiment.
The project began with a question like an itch. “Dad, how much salt is in the ocean?” Sick in bed with the chicken pox, she talked to him. When she could move again they’d tried to measure how much salt was in the Atlantic, the Indian River, and all the bays and marshes nearby—Salt Lake, Fox Lake, South Lake, St. Johns River—because things near the Atlantic tended toward brackish. Their instruments were simple: a mason jar duct taped to a broomstick, disposable pie tins, the electric stove.
Getting samples meant wading into the water in the middle of winter, seafoam blowing across sand like cotton candy. Her father’s blue New Balance sneakers got soaked in the salt water and took on the stench of something rotting. Water splashed her hands, forcing the blood from them, leaving her fingers waxy, white, and trembling. Like now.
Brush scraped her forehead but she kept pedaling, gasping.
They’d driven his Chevette when getting samples. She’d tucked her shadow into his as they’d walked to the water, vanishing into the space he cut from the world.
They’d boiled pie tins on the range until the water evaporated, leaving salt behind, clouding the kitchen with all the bodies of water she’d ever touched. A tin weighed 4.25 grams and held sixteen fluid ounces. They weighed the tins before and after boiling with the balance her mother used for measuring flour and sugar. He’d slid the weights and she’d stared at his fingernails, pitted and chalky, as if made of salt. She’d asked if they hurt.
“Always a little, but not much most days. Some days, an awful lot.”
“Can’t you do anything for it?”
“There’s not much for psoriatic arthritis.”
Today she’d hurt him. Squeezed his hands. On purpose.
They’d kept data with blue Erasermate pens, multiplying salt and water out to the gallon. With pint jars he’d taught her to put her arms around oceans.
With one machine, he was killing Denny.
She couldn’t go back to the grove until she had a solution. If she went to school she’d have to pretend like nothing had happened. She’d have to forget Denny screaming, his rolling eyes, the sick light. She could go to Mr. Pete’s yard—there were things there that might help, things in his house, in his garage, in his space museum. Things even she didn’t understand.
How did you make a thing sharp enough to burst a bubble you couldn’t touch? If you managed to pop it, would it hurt whatever was inside? See also: Time, Arrow of. She needed her encyclopedia. She needed home.
Her legs were numb when she passed Haverstone House, and when she let her bike go, she fell under it, a moment of suspension followed by a hard hit on the pavement, the crush of the bike, then crying soundlessly, ragged, painful. The sky was orange-yellow, hardly moving, the clouds still. Wrong. They were up there, the seven. Light, and heat, and carbon—gas and what?
“Nedda.”
She tried to shut the voice out, to make it disappear. She needed to organize, to start. To think of something sharp enough.
“Nedda.”
A hand. Held out, fingers curled just so.
“Come on, now. Get up.”
She rose and fell into her mother, into her coat and blouse, and all the carefulness slid away. Lips pressed against Nedda’s forehead. Her mother was cold. Betheen’s magnolia and sugar smell was there, but over it was the pricking bite of hairspray, strong, almost sour. Nedda wished she could disappear into it.
“I went to the grove with Denny,” she said. The rest was easier to say than it had been the first time; she’d run through the words, flattening them down like a deer path. “Dad doesn’t believe me, but I’m not lying, Mom. Denny’s hurting really bad, and I left him.”
“You’re okay, Nedda,” Betheen said once she’d finished.
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. You’re scared, but you’re fine, you’re going to be fine. But we need to do a few things, okay? We need to think.” Betheen moved her to the house, arm around her shoulder. It was strange, leaning on her mother this way, but she couldn’t stop herself.
“Mom, where’s the car?”
“There was an accident. A man was hurt very badly, and the car has to be towed. But I’m fine, don’t worry. Come on, Little Twitch. Let’s get inside.”
The nickname sounded funny coming from her mother, but that didn’t matter. “Someone was hurt?”
“Yes. But I’m fine, and you are too. That’s what matters right now. Do you think you can write down what you saw? Everything that happened to you and Denny.”
“You believe me?” There were muffins on the kitchen table. Three. Corn muffins—not too sweet, the only kind Nedda liked. The stand mixer was on the counter, its cord cut, ragged as though severed by a knife.
“Of course I believe you.”
“Why?”
“Because I know you.”
At any other time, Nedda would have disagreed; instead, she picked the paper away from a muffin. It hadn’t been cake batter pancakes, but something she’d liked. A thoughtful thing. But Nedda couldn’t eat it. “He did it. Dad’s machine is doing it.”
“We don’t know that yet. And even if we did, it’s not for you to worry about.” She leaned into Nedda as if to hug, instead p
ressing their arms together. “Can you write it down?”
“Okay.”
“Good. I want you to do that. And I need you to stay here for a little while. Someone has to let Denny’s mother know. And I need to speak to your father.”
Betheen wore the same expression as when she piped Australian lace, hours and hours of sugar lattice. She looked determined. Fierce. Did she even like cakes at all?
“Mom,” Nedda said; all other words had gone away.
“We’ll figure it out,” Betheen said. “We’ll find a way and we’ll figure it out.”
Nedda wanted to cling to her longer. She wanted to run back through the tiki head with her mother, so that it would spit them out backward, taking everything back. “Okay.”
“No biking. Stay inside and off the roads. Something’s wrong with them. I’ll be back soon. I promise.”
“Okay.”
The door closed behind Betheen. Nedda took out her notebook.
Hot and cold. Fast then slow. Glass. Light. Bubble. Like a shampoo bubble, soap sliding down the side. Pop. How to pop a bubble. Nails. Needle. Pressure. What happens inside a bubble when you pop it? Sprinklers. Green light. Trees forward and backward. Steaming pond. Cold. Weird cold. Dad made something bad, terrible.
Her pen stopped. It was too hard to describe the way her skin had felt, how she’d lost her vision when Denny was enveloped by the light, the way the air wriggled around him. The rusting pruner. Denny would be safe if she hadn’t let him go. But if she hadn’t gone with him, she might not have known for days what had happened. Days from now he’d be dead or an old man and might not remember her.
She picked at a muffin. The inside was still a little warm.
Betheen believed her.
Aboard Chawla
“Spinal tap,” Marcanta said, floating in through the doorway on her back.
“Good morning to you as well,” Evgeni said.
Nedda swallowed down her peanut butter toast. It scratched the film that sleep weeks left behind. “Please tell me you don’t dream about spinal procedures.”
“Better than dreaming about our life support conking out halfway between star systems. This, I can do something about.” Marcanta grabbed a coffee bag from the pantry and jammed a straw in it. “Think. The eye problem. Some of it’s cerebrospinal fluid, right? A spinal tap would temporarily decrease CSF volume. We’d have to do weekly taps to keep on top of fluid regeneration, but it makes sense: less volume, less pressure. Bingo—the optic nerve gets a vacation.”
“Ah. Good. And we get headaches like nuclear bombs,” Evgeni said. He munched on something that smelled suspiciously like rehydrated sardines. Nedda brought the peanut butter to her nose; it did little to help.
“Aw, big tough Russian can’t handle a tiny headache?” Marcanta looked like she had too many teeth when she smiled.
More crunching, more fish smell. “There is a headache, then there is you poking holes in my spine because you’re bored and can’t fix the life support system.”
“Do it on me,” Nedda said.
“Not a chance. You’re precious cargo. Trust me, I see your bloodwork every week. Someone at the NIH probably frames the data.”
Marcanta knew more about Nedda’s health than she did. “What’s wrong with getting data on the effect of spinal taps on people like me? I’ll do it.”
“Not happening, Papas. Also, you aren’t—you’re not good data for the rest of us.”
“Singh, then,” Evgeni said. “You like him. You won’t dig around so much in his back.”
“You know he’s a baby. He’ll want a week in bed with foot rubs.” Marcanta tugged her hair into a knot that floated above her head—round-faced and jumpsuited, she resembled a garden gnome.
Evgeni poked her with his finger. “You’re afraid you’ll hit something, leave him a vegetable, and then who will do the math to fix the drive?”
“I will,” Nedda said. “You could try it on Singh before his next sleep cycle. Having the goggles on might amplify the effect.” She drained a coffee packet. It tasted almost like the drink she remembered, but thinner, with a mealy feel. It was harder and harder to remember the real stuff, to remember exactly what the plants looked like.
“It’s likely wasted effort. The fluid doesn’t take long to regenerate; he’d sleep off most of the benefit before I could test him.”
“So do it during a regular sleep night.”
“Ask him first,” Evgeni said. “You’re always lurking with needles.”
Marcanta grabbed a block of cheese, flipped Evgeni off, and floated to her lab.
“She just wants to help. She’s the only one of us who doesn’t know Chawla’s systems.”
“She’s intent on stabbing me,” Evgeni said.
“Because she likes you.”
Evgeni’s expression made her think of a pug, both put-upon and shocked.
“What?” Nedda said. “When I was a kid, people said if a boy pulled your hair or dropped paper clips down the back of your shirt, it meant he liked you.”
His laugh was a snort. “Ah, yes. Nedda time, where the future is the present, and any action means its opposite. If Louisa wants to stab me, it’s because she wants to stab me.”
“Maybe. But when a doctor wants to stab you, it’s usually to help.” She finished the rest of her toast and vacuumed the crumbs.
“I never pulled a girl’s hair,” he said.
“I know,” she said. Denny had never pulled her hair or thrown spitballs at her, and he’d liked her just fine. Every boy who’d ever called her throwback, made her drop her books, or snapped her bra strap, any boy who’d whispered, “You’re sexy for a smart girl,” had hated her. Paper clips down the back of her shirt were just that—metal against skin.
Evgeni smiled. “Now I know to ask what your intentions are when you pull my hair.”
“I won’t,” she said.
“Pity for us both.”
He squinted and rubbed his eyes. There was something more beautiful about them now that they were becoming purely decorative. “After morning call, we should look at Amadeus, yes? You need a break from hydroponics and I’d like to hide from Marcanta’s needles.”
“Singh is going to want in on it first,” she said.
“And yet we’re going to figure it out before he does. ‘Thank you, Evgeni. You are excellent,’ you should say. ‘Thank you for recognizing that I am smarter than a sleeping Singh.’ ”
“Thank you, Evgeni, for recognizing that you’re hopeless without me.”
“That as well.”
There was data to collect in the hydro lab. Then there was the physical work of maintaining root pressure systems, the water cache, adjusting light for growth. She didn’t like to leave it for too long; she didn’t like to leave it at all, but none of it would matter without life support. Plants didn’t keep the lights on, wouldn’t keep them warm or clean, and couldn’t recycle enough air to sustain them. The things that would sustain them long term were utterly useless in the short term.
“You should let Marcanta stick you. When we fix the drive, it’s going to be a bitch if you’re blind and don’t see planetfall.”
“I will,” he said. “But you’ll forgive me if I’d like to put off discovering there is no cure.”
“It isn’t only about you. You have to let her help, Genya.” She used the soft diminutive, and the name made his shoulders round. His mother must have called him that. His sisters, maybe Marcanta when they were alone. “She needs to help in whatever way she can.”
Nedda stayed beside him when the morning call came in and watched his eyes when he removed the pressure goggles and massaged the deep rings they left. Before the call buzzed in, Nedda wound her fingers in the small knot of hair at the back of Evgeni’s head. Light, scratchy—a warm steel-wool pad, but soft. She gave it a gentle tug.
“See? I like you fine.”
When Mission Control appeared on-screen, Evgeni was laughing.
They said nothing a
bout blindness. Nothing about energy spikes or which government made the swap from plutonium to strontium. The space between Earth and Chawla filled with all the things that could not be said.
They worked in the hydro lab so she could keep an eye on the plants. Evgeni insisted he couldn’t think without eating, so he munched on an empty tortilla. Nedda couldn’t work without coffee. Marcanta thought they were both too particular and showed up with only a tablet.
“Look here,” Evgeni said. “Strontium decays too quickly for Amadeus. The energy output is making it spin too fast. Centrifugal force pulls this rod to the side, like a switch. That’s when the power spikes.”
“So the rod winds up here.” Marcanta pointed at one part of the diagram on the tablet’s screen.
“Once it’s pulled over, it exceeds the heat threshold for its design.” Evgeni made a sound with his teeth. Ffft.
“Right. Friction from the scraping produces the heat,” Nedda finished. The diagram felt familiar, bringing back hundreds of hours spent studying schematics that would have been wasted if all had gone well. She clicked the tablet and watched a three-dimensional rendering spin. Inexplicably, Amadeus was colored an almost pearly pink. Its external structure reminded her of a container she’d built for an egg-drop project, a central chamber with supports around it, built to withstand impact. She clicked back to the interior view. “Once heat builds up, the metal in that middle section expands, pushes on the rod, and pops it back to its original position. That’s when the power spike drops.”
“Sounds right.” Marcanta hooked herself to the wall by Evgeni, looking at his tablet. Had there been gravity, she would be leaning on him, chin on shoulder, Nedda imagined. Space took away the comfort of a lean. Gravity made touch better. If they reached planet, there would be weeks when their skin burned as it learned how to hold their bodies together again. Small touches would be painful.
“So is this as much fun as jabbing us with needles?” Nedda asked.
