by Kayla Olson
Instead of neatly tied answers, I’ve dug up a tangle of questions.
Instead of feeling like I’m in control, I’m keenly aware that I’m not.
None of this helps with the fear.
I’ve been mostly unbothered since Zesi and Heath left, miraculously, except for twice-daily food deliveries from Haven or Natalin and the occasional text from Leo. Everything under control, he wrote once. I decided to treat it like an update, not a question, given the lack of punctuation. Excellent, thank you, I wrote back, an answer that would suffice either way.
Otherwise, I’ve kept entirely to myself. Natalin and Haven and Leo still think I’m trying to crack a cure for the virus—that’s the only reason I can come up with for how thoroughly they’ve left me to my work. I’m not about to tell them the truth of what I’ve discovered, though. Not yet.
This morning, my objective is simple: If the blood at the scene wasn’t coughed up by Jaako or Kerr . . . where did it come from? My lab is equipped with the most advanced DNA tech out there—crucial for a space station meant to analyze samples discovered on Radix or any other non-Earth planets we eventually explore. It’s fast, it’s accurate, it’s very straightforward. I’ll run tests on the blood and see what I find.
I place a droplet of blood on the slide, secure it in place by pressing another slide down on top. The slide sandwich fits snugly into the machine, right into a depression of the exact same shape. I power it on and wait.
Thirteen minutes, that’s all it will take—a vast improvement over DNA machines of old. Thirteen minutes for answers.
It seems impossibly far away, especially now. I should have dragged myself out of half sleep at three-morning instead of four. Any other time, really. It’s two minutes past the thirty-six-hour return-from-Nautilus mark, and there’s nothing I can do now but wait. For test results, for their return.
Not even music from the old data pod is comforting. I turn it on, then immediately turn it off—the tone is too light for this moment, the beat too relentless. It only adds to the chaos in my head. I tap around, find a file labeled Nature Sounds, and click into it. A grid of images fills the screen, each matching its label: thunderstorm, ocean breeze, jungle nights, bamboo forest, along with a planet’s worth of others.
At first, I assume this file exists simply because the first generation wanted a reminder of home. Once I select bamboo forest, though, it’s clear that isn’t the only reason. It’s peaceful, steady in a way that doesn’t compete with the noise in my mind—rather, it tames it. I close my eyes, rest my head on the island. For the first time, I feel like maybe I’ve missed out by never having been on Earth. I start to wonder: Does this soundtrack do justice to a real bamboo forest? Did my mother ever visit one? Was it full of fireflies like the one from her childhood? Did my mother miss these sorts of sounds when she traded them for the constant hum of the station?
It simply never occurred to me that Earth would sound so different than the station—that there would be so many different kinds of sounds, on top of that. I’ve always loved life on the Lusca, but for the first time, it makes me wonder if my mother ever questioned her decision to live out her days here. If she ever regretted it.
I wish I could ask her. The hole in my heart cracks around its edges, crumbles. It gets a little wider each day.
I close my eyes, do my best to shake off these feelings. Focus on all the things I can try to fix, not the things that are impossibly broken.
Six minutes and forty-two seconds have passed since I started the test. It’s still a little early to expect Heath and Zesi to return, but not impossible—assuming they coordinated with Nautilus’s team and the supplies were already in the hangar, like they were supposed to be, that seems like a reasonable amount of time to load them up and settle back into the bee.
I take out my buzz screen, type a message to Leo. Any sign of them yet?
Heath and Zesi? he immediately sends back. I resist the urge to ask, well, who else?
It’s ten past 36 hours, I reply. Let me know as soon as they dock?
For sure, he sends back. Sry, of course you meant Heath and Zesi. Just woke up.
Right. Not everyone gets up at four-morning. Thanks. I’m in Portside if you need me.
Things going okay there?
I sit so long trying to come up with the perfect response, the DNA machine startles me when it beeps.
I’ll let you know, I type quickly, but delete it before hitting send. Going like usual, I send instead.
I abandon the buzz screen on the island, hurry over to see the results as they fill the machine’s display panel. The display is a mess of information, more details on it than I could ever hope to decode. That’s the thing about this machine: it may be simple to operate, but it still requires a trained eye to interpret the results. Fortunately, its creator recognized the need for a basic summation of results in addition to results that could be mined for months—that’s what I’m waiting on, for the field that says SEARCHING FOR MATCH to replace itself with something I can use.
I wait. And wait.
Finally, SEARCHING FOR MATCH disappears, leaving a void behind. Two seconds pass, and then: MATCH FOUND—Alexandra Tovar, DOB 09/15/2107.
My heart climbs to my throat.
Alexandra Tovar was Leo’s mother.
39
UNRAVEL
ALEXANDRA TOVAR WAS one of the last to pass.
The days leading up to it were excruciating: Alexandra, watching the others die off, one by one. Watching as I lost my mother, as Heath and Haven lost their parents. As Alexandra herself lost her husband.
Knowing with certainty that she’d be next. If not next, then soon.
Leo was remarkably strong in her final days. He felt he had to be, I think. Seeing Leo devastated would have been worse for her than the dying itself, and if there was one thing left in his power, it was to keep it from being worse.
He practiced so long at tucking himself in—all the wayward anxiety and fear and sorrow—that he’s kept at it ever since. Only once have I seen him unravel, and that didn’t happen until they were all dead, every single one of them. When it hit him—hit us—that we were really, truly, irreversibly without them. Alone.
We sat on the floor near my window, just the two of us, in silence, all night long. Neither of us slept. I was in too much shock to cry, in too much denial. He was shaking, hard, even with the blaze turned on full force, even when I slipped my mother’s favorite blanket off my shoulders and wrapped it around his.
We counted stars.
We laid out the deck of cards, piled it back up again.
We didn’t talk. We didn’t need to.
He might walk around like he’s fine now, might even seem like he’s doing well to anyone who doesn’t know him like I do. I know better, though. I know him better.
And I know, because I do the very same thing.
40
EXCEPTIONS
IT’S FORTY-TWO PAST the thirty-six-hour mark, and I haven’t heard another word from Leo. I’ve spent the entire time with my fingers hovering over the buzz screen, trying to decide what—how—whether—to tell him about his mother’s blood.
On one hand, there’s not a soul I trust more. There’s not anyone I know better than Leo, and I am one thousand percent certain he would never even think to murder someone, let alone actually do it. And the crime itself is worse than just a single straightforward murder—it must have taken extreme planning and calculation to stage these deaths to look like a viral mutation. I don’t think Leo is our liar. The one thing holding me back from telling him everything, though, is that these deaths required extreme resources.
Codes, first and foremost. The samples scraped from all the others who died—Alexandra’s blood included—are stored in a single location: the mini-fridge two feet behind me. In order to access it, the killer would have needed all-access codes to this lab, an awareness of my time spent here, and the knowledge that we kept all those blood samples in the first plac
e. There are only a few people who have all of those things: six, to be exact. Five, if we’re not counting me.
Leo wouldn’t have done something so coldhearted, though. And if he had, surely he wouldn’t have used his own mother’s blood.
Right?
Except that’s exactly the sort of calculated forethought the killer must possess, if they’re hiding right here in plain sight—to think of the person most likely to discover the deaths as murders, if they’re discovered at all. To orchestrate the details in such a way that would rule them out as suspects.
I can’t make any assumptions. I have to work based on facts.
And the fact is, Leo and Zesi collected these samples from Jaako and Kerr in the first place. Leo was the one who called me in the middle of the night when Mila died, too. And he is the one who put Mila’s blood sample in the wrong refrigerator after we found her—could that have been on purpose, to make it unusable? Could he have planned things out to that extent, that even then he was setting himself up to have no apparent knowledge about which mini-fridge we used for sample storage?
My head is spinning; my world has inverted.
I thought I was alone before, but now, now I am truly alone. Because, really, what it comes down to is that someone is very much not who I thought they were. I can’t even trust my own judgment—is there anything more isolating than that?
But then I come back around to the truth, that I usually have very good judgment, that I have sharp instincts. And that I shouldn’t rule out the rest of the station just because I can’t understand how they would have had access to the codes, to my schedule, to the inner workings of how and where we stored the blood samples, or that we stored blood samples at all. It seems just as plausible that someone could have figured out all of those things—more plausible, possibly!—than if Leo had suddenly turned into someone I don’t actually know. The same holds true for Heath, for Zesi, for Haven, for Natalin, differences of opinion aside.
So I sit here, finger hovering over my blank buzz screen.
I don’t want to live in a world where I can’t trust Leo. In that world, I can’t trust anything, not even myself—and how is that going to help? It’s going to take more than just me to figure out what exactly killed our three; I’ll definitely need to run more tests in the lab, but it’s more complicated than just that.
If I trust Leo and I’m wrong, that would be devastating. If he’s kept this much from me, he’s not the person I know, not even a little bit—and what would keep him from killing me? To what lengths would our murderer go to keep their secret? I could end up just another body, sprinkled with the blood of Alexandra Tovar. She spent all that time in the lab, Haven would say, in the obligatory station-wide announcement. Of course she was more susceptible to the mutation.
If I don’t trust Leo, though—if I fumble around in secret for answers instead of asking for help where I need it—someone else might die in the time it takes for me to make all the necessary connections.
I pick up the buzz screen, type in a message. Question: Do you know how to access the security vid-feeds?
As soon as I hit send, I realize: I’m hoping for a no as much as I am a yes. No more than two seconds later, my screen lights up with a new message.
Yeah, Leo writes. Need something?
I let out a long exhale. It doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t have to mean anything except that he’ll be able to help me. I push aside the lingering thoughts that say otherwise. Choose faith.
Meet in Control ASAP, I reply.
For once, I don’t bother to clear my lab island, except for the sensitive materials that require proper storage. I pause briefly to make sure the door is locked behind me, but what good is a coded entry if the code isn’t secret anymore? A broken door would almost be better—then, at least, it would obviously rule out the people I trust most.
The station is still and silent at this early hour. Even Control is empty when I arrive, and dark; I’m alone in a field of backlit panels. Still no new-message alerts on our comm system, I observe on instinct. I look through the wide window into the endless sea of stars, wish I could press pause on this moment without ever having to take a hard look at reality. In reality, the axis of my world has tilted, suddenly and drastically, and everything I thought I knew is in the process of sliding out from under me. I don’t want to know who has it in them to take life. I don’t want to know if my fears have played out against this very backdrop of stars, if Zesi and Heath and their bee exploded into one more ball of flaming fire amid the millions that will outlive us all.
But there is no way to stop time. I would have stopped it a long time ago if there was.
I hear the door slide open behind me, hear the rustle of Leo’s pants as he enters. I don’t turn around, and he doesn’t say anything, and for a long moment it’s like the night we sat by my window, soaking in the truth of all that had happened. He comes to stand by my side. Watches me like I watch the stars.
“We . . . have a problem,” I say finally. I steal a glance at him, see his profile lit up by the glow of the control panels. Once I meet his eyes, I can’t look away: he would not have done this. Not with his own mother’s blood—not at all. In this moment, I choose to believe I can trust him.
What is trust if you know all of the answers?
Hopefully it is not a mistake.
“Did they—did Zesi and Heath—”
“No,” I say quickly. “Not that. Well, not yet—I haven’t seen anything, good or bad.” We’re at thirty-seven hours and counting now. “They should be back any minute.”
They should’ve been back already.
Leo’s concerned, too, and trying to hide it on his face. Not that he’s trying to hide it from me—it’s himself he’s trying to convince. He’s probably not even aware he’s doing it.
“So,” I say, when the silence has drawn on for too long. My voice is crackling and low, barely more than a whisper. “I made a breakthrough today.”
I want to say more, but the words curl up in my throat. I want to protect him, because after I tell him, there will be no going back to the not-knowing. I want to protect myself, in case I’m wrong and this is a huge mistake.
“About the virus? How it spreads—how to end it?”
He sounds so genuinely hopeful. It’s enough to put me at ease, at least a little. How to end it: if only.
I take a deep breath. Whisper, because even I don’t want to hear what I have to say. “It isn’t the virus this time. Someone—somebody—” Tears spring up without warning, and it is such a foreign feeling I’m caught completely off guard. “Someone killed them, Leo. On purpose.”
My words hang between us, heavy and hovering, like they could fall and crush us at any moment. Maybe they will. We are already being picked off by a threat we can’t see; even if spoken word doesn’t have the power to kill our bodies, what about our hope? Words hold more power than people give them credit for, I think.
“But the blood . . . ?” Leo says after a long pause. He’s turning the problem over in his mind like I’ve been, I can tell. Trying to reconcile fear with surface-level fact.
I shake my head. “Your mother’s blood,” I say, staring out into the stars, not at his face, anywhere but his face. “Someone pulled it out of storage and used it to stage the whole thing. They only made it look like the virus.”
He’s still, too still.
It’s the sort of stillness that comes right before an explosion.
But instead of exploding like Leo does—all at once, very rarely, extremely supernova—I feel the full force of his energy surge through me as he takes my hand, as he laces his fingers in mine, as he holds on for dear life.
We’ve not done this before, and now that we have, how have we never?
So often, we sit back-to-back when working through our mutual discomforts. Side by side, if not that.
I turn, face him. His lips find mine, perfectly soft against his days-old stubble, and I don’t pull away, definitely do n
ot pull away. If anything, I pull him closer, my free hand at the back of his neck. I kiss him harder, taste a hint of sweet spearmint on his tongue. In this moment, when everything else in the world feels like it’s slipping away, it is everything to me to have Leo here, now, close and closer than we’ve ever been. Like we can stop tomorrow, if only we commit to keeping this present moment alive.
So we stay in it, keep it alive. Until the radar blips behind him, anyway, blip blip blip blipblipblipblip, and we break ourselves back in two. His eyes are as bright as I feel, because of the radar and . . . everything else.
“They’re back,” I say, one part breathless, one part relieved. It can only be Heath and Zesi, and the radar log confirms it. “They’re back. They made it!”
As far as bad days go, this one could be worse.
41
FROM ENDLESS NIGHT
LEO SQUEEZES MY hand, pulls me in for one more kiss before we head for the hangar. It is quick, much quicker than our first, but with no less power—it is affirmation, it is this was not a mistake.
We are business-as-usual as soon as the Control doors open, we are side-by-side-with-purpose. Anyone paying attention would see the newly charged air between us, but at this hour, no one is around to pay attention. We slip into the hangar deck, safe behind its viewing panel windows, just in time to see the runway light up with the electric-purple grav-force glow. Two seconds later, the bee glides smoothly onto the runway, not a scratch on it. I feel a swell of pride for Heath—he did this! He did it.
As soon as the pride crests, though, guilt rolls in to replace it: Leo.
While Heath was risking his life for the station—for me—I let myself pretend reality away, if only for a few minutes. And the way I did that, with Leo, even if only for a few minutes, will most certainly hurt Heath if he finds out. Not that I’ve made any commitment to Heath—but I absolutely do care about him. I hate that what I’ve done could hurt him, hate that it’s too late to change it.
