by Kayla Olson
“Wait,” I say as an idea hits me. “What did you do with Mila’s reader? Last night, when we cleaned up?” I remember him sealing it in an airtight bag, bloodbubbles and all.
“Brilliant,” he says. “It should still be back at Medical. I only grabbed her blood sample out of the cooler before we left for the lab.”
I’ll believe it when I see it. The official sample should be here, but it isn’t. Samples don’t just walk away.
“Good, good.” I’m not thrilled, but this will work. If it’s there.
“You’re worried.”
“Do you blame me?”
I hear Zesi in the background, then Leo’s muffled voice. “No, I can’t blame you,” he says when he comes back. “I’m coming down there.”
For as long as I can remember, it’s been my dream to follow in my mother’s footsteps. Medical training first, station duties next—and, eventually, assuming her role completely when the time came for her to pass down the torch.
Eventually was never supposed to happen this soon.
None of this was official yet, of course. Try medicine for a while, my mother said. You might find you don’t enjoy it—you might want something different.
But I’ve always known. I’ve never been like Heath, constantly taking in the possibilities, equally tempted to pursue them all. I’ve never been like Haven, or the handful of others on the station who dream of living life on Earth—as if lakes and sky and forests and mountains could ever hold a candle to the glorious field of stars outside our every window. I would never trade the station, and not just because of the view—in all the universe, the station is the only place my mother and I ever coexisted, where every memory I ever made was born. It’s home.
Now tomorrow is darkness.
Tomorrow is me starting a fire with my bare hands, not the passing of a torch.
Tomorrow is slippery for us all now—and today is for staying alive.
Mila’s reader is in Medical’s cooler, exactly as it should be. I tuck it inside my satchel—my mother’s old satchel, with an insulated pocket—and head back to the lab. Already, it’s past noon. I’ve let too much time slip away.
Leo should be waiting for me by now. He has codes to everything; all six of us do. We keep them to ourselves.
Which is why, I think as I walk back, it’s so very odd that the blood went missing. Leo’s sharp and he’s trustworthy. Haven and Natalin went to bed, Heath and Zesi were at the crematory. The doors lock automatically, so no one could have broken in. And even if they could have broken in . . . why would anyone want to?
When I enter the lab, Leo’s seated on one of the tall stools, at the never-used island right beside the scope station that’s started to feel like home. His back is toward me, and he doesn’t budge. It isn’t like him.
“You didn’t mean this fridge, did you.”
The station where he sits is meant to support exoplanet research missions, but ever since the Nautilus got an equipment upgrade a few years ago, they haven’t needed our lab except to run extremely specialized sample diagnoses. We always have advance notice to prep on our end, so at the moment, none of those appliances are even operational—we unplug them at stations that aren’t used often in order to conserve energy. The mini-fridge is right next to the one I checked so thoroughly.
Oh, no.
Now that I’m closer, and not behind him, I see why he’s staring: Mila’s blood sample sits, lonely, on the island. I don’t even have to ask to know it’s ruined.
“The other refrigerator was just so full . . .”
He meant well, he meant well. Still, it’s frustrating. “It’s full for a reason.” Leo is usually so on top of things. He runs systems and tech with Zesi, and works with Heath to keep the peace. “Did it not tip you off that there wasn’t anything else in that fridge? Did you not think it felt a little warm?” I close my eyes, breathe. Bite back my disappointment before it slams him in the face.
“It did, but—you know how last night was, Linds.” His voice is low, crackling. Too little sleep, too much stress. “It was late, and everything with Mila was just too much. And I was worried about you.”
“I get it.” I do.
Our mistakes might be understandable, but it doesn’t mean they don’t matter.
“It’s too much,” I say, settling onto the stool opposite him. We lean on our elbows, head in hands. Mirror images. “We shouldn’t have to deal with this.”
“I feel like I’m losing it.” He stares, unblinking, straight through Mila’s blood and into something only he can see. “Losing my footing, you know? Trying to do everything, all at once. Failing miserably.”
This is why we go so well together, why we’re closer with each other than we are with Heath, or Haven, or even our own parents before they . . . well, before. We feel the same things in the same way, fracture under pressure the same way, crack and break and try to hold ourselves together in the same way. We’re both reluctant to accept the reality that we’re capable of breaking at all.
I train my eyes on him, wait quietly until he meets them. “You really worried about me?”
“Every hour, Linds. Every hour.”
This room is so white, so clean, so vast, so empty. No place for his words to hide.
“How about this?” I say. “If you ever lose yourself, I’ll come find you. Bring you back.”
I wouldn’t have a choice. If I lose him, I lose parts of myself. Then again, we’re too tangled together for either of us to go far.
“You’re in luck,” he says with a small grin. “Deal works both ways.”
9
SOLAR FLARE
ONE DAY WHEN we were young, maybe seven or eight years old, the entire station flipped from chill and predictable, from rhythm and routine, to a blazing-hot panic. It took less than a minute for the station to turn to chaos.
Lieutenant Black, stationed in Control, had detected a powerful solar flare on the radar—the last one of similar severity had given astronauts a mere fifteen-minute window to take shelter before the burst of radiation passed through. It could have been worse: the engineers could have left the magnetized flare shield off Lusca’s exterior entirely, could have failed to consider it at all. But it also could have been better: the flare shield takes a full eleven minutes to settle into place, like a shell around the station. We were not rich in time.
Leo, Heath, Haven, and I were sent directly to the safe room at the station’s core, along with everyone else who wasn’t critical to handling or monitoring the situation. We were to wait it out there, in that dull gray box of a room right at Lusca’s center; it had been primarily designed to shield us from rogue asteroids, not solar flares, but it must have made our parents feel better to do something. When I asked my mother why she couldn’t stay with me, she only replied, I’m the heart.
Haven chattered away nervously the entire time we spent huddled together. Heath picked at her words—as Heath still does, to this day—calling out her exaggerations, her half-truths, her flat-out lies. Leo and I sat back-to-back, silent. I hugged my knees and thought about my mother’s words. What did it mean to be the heart? It was obvious why the hands had to stay on duty, because the hands do the work. I would have understood why the head had to be there, too, all strategy and solution—honestly, I was surprised my mother hadn’t chosen that one for herself.
But the heart? The more I thought about it, the more I understood. The heart works all the time. The heart keeps pumping because that’s what a heart does, because that’s how it keeps everything from grinding to a halt. And the heart is more than just a muscle: it’s a mystery, too. It has its own electrical supply, Leo told me once, and will continue to beat even when separated from the body. Like my mother: she was never truly able to leave her mind at work when she came home. And in reverse, she was never truly able to leave me out of her mind when we were apart.
Leo, Heath, Haven, and I—along with everyone else—stayed in the safe room for much longer than the eleven minutes
it took to activate the flare shield. We stayed for at least two hours, until they were sure it had passed, sure we were well out of radiation danger. Sitting together that long, just the four of us in our dark little corner, was the first time I noticed how different Leo and I were from Heath and Haven, how different Heath and Haven were from each other. And how, much like my mother was part of a body, I was, too. Despite our differences, though, I had a harder time labeling our little group.
We all felt like the heart.
10
CRACKING OPEN THE UNIVERSE
I SCRAPE MILA’S blood from her reader, careful not to waste a single drop. Half goes onto a plate for the electron microscope; the other half will go under the microsphere nanoscope. I’m going to crack this virus open inside and out.
I prepare a concentrated stain so I won’t have to wait as long, immerse the plate in it. It’ll have to sit for ten minutes at least before I can take a look. Growing up on a station full of scientists has certainly come with its advantages—I could run tests like these with my eyes closed. Which is good, since it’s been so hard to keep them open lately.
Leo left a while ago—River, who’s eight, locked himself out of his cabin. Again. There are only a few under-tens, and they have their good days and their very bad days. The girls, Evi and Elise, moved in with Natalin; River stays with Leo now. Evi cries a lot at night, Natalin says, only when she thinks no one can hear. Elise is the opposite. She talks nonstop and hasn’t shed a single tear. Neither will discuss anything real.
And River forgets everything, always.
I put in a call to Heath. Take a deep breath, hope the awkwardness I feel over what happened between us doesn’t find its way into my voice. “Find the girls yet?” I ask when he picks up.
“Negative,” he says. He sounds totally normal, like he always has—like he never kissed me at all—and it’s a colossal relief. “Talked to Mikko and the guys, but they say they haven’t seen them since around three-morning.”
About half an hour before we found Mila.
“At Mikko’s, or where?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Dash said they all crashed out around then in Mikko’s main room, except for Grace and Mikko, who were . . .”
“Right.”
“When Siena and the boys woke up, Grace and Yuki were gone. Mikko slept on the couch, alone.”
I glance at the clock, at my stained sample—not done yet. In just under two hours, I’m supposed to meet Natalin, and she’ll kill me if I’m late. Multitasking has never been my thing, but lately, I’ve had to embrace it.
I let out a long breath. “Okay, here’s what I think,” I say. “Tell Haven to put out a station-wide call for a mandatory check-in on the mezzanine, and tell her not to say why. I can be there in twenty minutes.” We’ve done too many of these lately. I’ve been trying to avoid them as much as possible, for my sake and everyone else’s. If I call too many meetings, people will stop taking them seriously. The check-ins eat time on top of that. And people ask too many questions.
“You got it.” He pauses, and the silence starts to gape. It’s not like him to be at a loss for words, especially around me. Right as I start to fear the worst—the conversation I’d really rather avoid until we absolutely have to deal with it—he adds: “If we find them before then, I’ll have Haven cancel the check-in.”
“Sounds good.” My timer is about to go off, a conveniently true excuse for me to cut this call short. “Got to rush the labs if I want to make it on time—I’ll see you in a bit.”
“Want Haven to tell them thirty or forty-five minutes instead?”
I do, but that would push my meeting with Natalin. “No,” I say. “I’ll be there. Don’t start without me.”
Haven’s announcement echoes over the speakers just as my timer beeps. Mezzanine in fifteen, everyone! Anyone who doesn’t show will be put under curfew for the next two days.
Even though my timer’s gone off, the plate isn’t quite ready. I have to wait another minute before sliding it under the electron microscope. When I do, vivid purples and pinks light my sample into something otherworldly, beautiful and bright. I focus with the knobs, try to get a better look.
I’m positive my process is correct; it’s my analysis I’m less sure about. Things don’t look like I remember. Almost like the sample is too old to give clear results, but that can’t be right—we pulled it just this morning, and it was definitely in the cooler that whole time. Maybe I messed up the concentration of the stain somehow, tried too hard to rush it. Maybe I should have asked more questions when Dr. Safran was alive to answer them.
Before the virus hit, he mostly spent our time teaching me how to heal the living, not how to study the dead.
After a few more minutes of fumbling with the microscope, I give up. If the mutation kills as quickly as the original strain did, it won’t be long before we have more blood to test. And if it doesn’t, it’s possible we have a different virus on our hands entirely. One that isn’t so contagious, maybe.
I clean the station, get it ready for next time.
I’m fairly certain next time will come soon.
11
HEARTBEATEN
IT’S GOOD THE balcony has a railing.
Meetings in the mezzanine were never this empty when my mother stood over them, in this very spot. It feels ridiculous to continue with the formalities from before, to put ourselves in this high place like we know everything about everything. As a population, we’re less than half what we once were, in number and in age, in nerve and in hopes. We’re all in this together.
But Haven was persuasive. Formalities will help, she said, when our six first joined forces. If we want them to listen to us, we need to act like we’re worth listening to.
So, here we stand, behind our railing.
From below, seventy-eight sets of eyes stare up at us, a full spectrum: patient to compliant to desperately irritated. Seventy-eight, assuming Yuki and Grace are among them. I scan the room, don’t see either girl, but that doesn’t mean too much. I’m commander now, but I’m not infallible. Quite the opposite.
“Thank you for your patience,” I begin. I was late. “We won’t keep you long.”
My amplified voice echoes over the clean, curved walls of the mezzanine. Silver and steel, backlit in varying shades of blue, this deck has always been one of my favorites. The station’s architects added sleek touches, designed it to feel light despite its hard heaviness. This room was never meant for mandatory check-ins—it was a place where we assembled to hear of the latest victories in the terraforming efforts on Radix, and of the samples Nautilus brought back from the fringes of the universe for the team here to examine. It was a place to celebrate being alive, and the hope of future life. Now we simply number our people who are not yet dead.
“In just a few minutes,” I continue, “Leo and Zesi will come around with tab-screens—you know the drill.” Line up, thumbprint, leave. “Please arrange yourselves by residential wing and wait quietly until you’ve checked in. After that, you’re free to go.”
I bow my head deeply, hold it for two seconds—my mother’s closing gesture. The commotion begins, everyone shifting into their check-in groups. I turn, eager to leave the balcony. Eager to escape.
“Where’s Mila Harper?” a voice rings out.
Akello Regulus. Extremely tall, extremely dark, extremely kind.
He loved Mila like a sister. She loved him, too.
I knew we wouldn’t be able to keep her absence quiet for long, but I’d hoped it wouldn’t be quite this public when the news broke. Our excuse that she’s helping out in the lab won’t work, not at a mandatory check-in like this—she’d be obligated to show up, just like everyone else. Lesson learned: be more proactive next time. Tell the people who will notice so they won’t make a scene.
I hate that I have to think about a next time.
Haven steps up to the microphone. She knows how sick I’m getting of all the questions. “Mila Harper isn’t fee
ling well at the moment,” she says. “We were in contact with her in the early hours of this morning, and she’s been excused from this mandatory meeting.”
I sigh, brace myself. This is why I hate lies. Haven worded it carefully, but saying Mila isn’t feeling well—in the wake of a viral crisis? No.
Silence turns to whispers, whispers turn to a low hum, and then, all at once, the questions erupt. “What do you mean, she isn’t feeling well?” and “Is she going to die?” and “Is her sickness airborne?” and “You told us we were immune; why did you tell us we were immune?” It’s lava, and I can’t run. I can never run.
Haven’s cool voice cuts through the noise. “No,” she says. “I should have worded that more thoughtfully, my apologies. Mila came down with a migraine last night, a bad one—I’ll spare you the messy details of her nausea, but in short, we feel it’s in her best interest to rest in her room, where it’s quiet.”
“So we shouldn’t worry?” asks Kerr Barstow, a girl who lives a few doors down from where Mila lived. I’d see them together sometimes, at the rec center track, several years ago before Kerr shifted cliques and left Mila to her books. “It isn’t contagious?”
“The only thing contagious here is paranoia,” Haven says. “So take care of yourselves, and try not to worry.”
They seem to accept this, mostly. No one else questions Mila’s absence, or anything else we’ve told them—not loudly enough for us to hear, anyway. They line up by residential wing, leave their thumbprints on Leo’s and Zesi’s screens.
But I feel a pit forming in my stomach. Yes, it was my call to keep the truth from them, and Haven’s doing a pitch-perfect job of stopping the fear spiral before it gains traction—it’s just not a thing I enjoy.
“Crisis narrowly averted,” Haven says under her breath, just to me.
“For now,” I say. I scan the lines, try to find Yuki or Grace in the crowd. No sign of either girl in Leo’s line, and I don’t see them in Zesi’s—
