A Conspiracy of Stars

by Olivia A. Cole

  “I wonder if everybody gets an internship,” she says under her breath. “You know good and well some of these fools aren’t ready to be around specimens.”

  Dr. Espada has begun to lecture, and again I’m grateful for the interruption, because if I’d had to answer right then, I might have choked. Alma’s words stir a fear that hunkered low in my belly and send it fleeing into the sky. What if I can’t go into the labs?

  Another message from Rondo pops up on my slate.

  What’s the matter?

  I swallow. Is he psychic like the damn myn?

  What makes you think something is?

  I pay attention.

  For some reason reading these three words makes my eyes prickle. So simple, the idea of being seen. Rondo might be one of the only people on this planet who actually sees me. The thought is so sharp, like a bite, that I’m responding before I can even stop myself:

  Maybe you should pay attention to Espada’s lecture instead.

  I regret it instantly. I want to look back at him, to feel the comfort of his brown eyes like a salve on whatever wound I’ve exposed in my own skin. But I force myself to keep my eyes on the screen.

  He sends back one word—Okay—and that hurts even more.

  Later, when we break for our midday meal, Alma and I are the first outside. Even the heat can’t crush her excitement.

  “Internships. Incredible,” she gushes. We had two hours of lecture after the councilwoman dropped the news of internships on us, but it’s still the first thing out of everyone’s mouths when we’re released for break. “Can you believe it? Incredible. Absolutely incredible.”

  “You just said incredible three times,” I say.

  “Because it is! Octavia, we have to be in the same compound. We have to. It’s going to be incredible.”

  “Four.”

  “Okay, okay. But seriously! We could discover something amazing together! Like your mom.” She sighs. “Oh, stars, your mom is brilliant. Did she tell you anything about how she discovered the telepathic thing?”

  I slowly chew the bite of food I’ve just taken, wondering how to tell her that I hadn’t a clue, that my mother cares more about protecting her secrets than sharing the truth with her daughter. Alma presses on without waiting for my answer.

  “I have to be in the Paw. I want to learn everything there is to know from her. Your dad too, of course. But you know . . . your mom. She’s a legend now.”

  “You’d really want to be in the Paw?” I ask. She’s finally settling down and eating. “Not the Newt?”

  Alma nods, one of her cheeks huge from the bite she finally took.

  “Of course,” she says. “Mammals have always been my favorite—you know that. Besides, if I end up working in the Newt, I’m going to have to live around my parents forever. And nothing against them but, um . . . no thanks.”

  We both laugh. At one point I would have welcomed working alongside my mother and father. But lately . . .

  “Weird that they’re letting us in now,” I say.

  “And ten-year-olds doing hands-on work?” she says. “Did you catch that bit? The old Council Head spent so much time building the pathway to working with actual specimens. Now Albatur wants to let kids do it.”

  “They trust kids a lot more than I do,” I say. “Can you imagine Jaquot when he was ten? I wouldn’t want that terror in the labs.”

  “The Council likes to switch things up. Like this,” she says, gesturing around us. “They never used to let us come outside. And now look: we’re out here for mid-meal every day.”

  “Yeah, with the company of a bunch of buzzguns,” I say, glancing around at the gray-suited guards that roam the Greenhouse perimeter.

  “Hey, I don’t mind the company, as long as I’m out here.” She squints at the sky, hoping to catch sight of something, anything. “The buzzguns are weird though.”

  “So many since Albatur got elected. They’re everywhere now.”

  “Surprised Dr. Espada doesn’t carry one while he teaches.”

  I laugh at that.

  “Oh shut up. I guess they have them out here in case something dangerous happens to come by. A dirixi or something.”

  “Don’t even say that—”

  “Or to protect us from the bloodthirsty Faloii!” yells Jaquot, leaping out of the long grass behind us. We jump and he laughs.

  “Don’t be a fearmonger. The Faloii aren’t bloodthirsty,” Alma says, bopping him with her water canteen.

  “Can you prove that?” He laughs, doing his best whitecoat impression. I chuckle in spite of myself. He does sound like my father.

  “No,” says Alma, “but if they wanted to kill us, they wouldn’t have let us onto Faloiv in the first place.”

  “Still. The Faloii think we’re their prisoners. We can’t do anything without their permission.”

  “That doesn’t disprove what I just said,” Alma says. “They want a say on what happens on Faloiv—so? That’s not bloodthirsty. It’s their planet, after all. They let us build the compounds and they leave us alone and let us study their world.”

  “But never them,” says Rondo, emerging out of the tall grasses behind Jaquot. My smile fades and I’m very aware of the blood in my veins. I wonder if he’s mad after what I said. In any case, my blood feels happy to see him, even as nervousness pools in my stomach. Illogical, I tell myself, annoyed by my contradictory reactions to his presence, and I find myself examining my fingers. Is attraction quantifiable? My heartbeat is empirical, but what does it actually mean?

  “Go on,” says Alma, sounding like Dr. Espada. I focus on looking at her instead of Rondo.

  “We know so much about the animals here, but we know almost nothing about the Faloii,” he says, his voice even. He stands above us with Jaquot. I wipe my hands and stand up. Alma follows suit.

  “Why does it matter?” says Alma. “They let us study the life on their planet. It’s not a big deal if we don’t study them specifically.”

  “I’m not saying it against them,” he says. “I’m saying it against us.”

  “Why against us?” I ask. I try not to sound combative, but I do. Here I go again. It makes talking to him easier. If I don’t make my voice hard, it will inevitably be too soft. “From what I understand, we haven’t seen the Faloii since the landing. They laid out the rules and then went back to wherever they live. It’s not really our fault if they don’t want to be studied. Can you blame them, really?”

  “I’m not saying we should study them. But it would make sense to have communication with them. Right now the only discussion I ever hear about the Faloii is when someone is angry. What they won’t let us do. What they’re keeping us from building. It’s all pretty . . . hostile.”

  “Exhibit A: the drivers,” Jaquot throws in. “Rondo told me about Draco. The driver for the Beak is the same way—an old guy. He knows the deal. They’re always complaining about the Faloii.”

  “Really?” I raise my eyebrow.

  Jaquot nods, still laughing.

  “Always. ‘The Faloii think they’re benevolent rulers.’ Blah, blah, blah. ‘If we had our way, N’Terra would be twice the size.’ Blah, blah. ‘When freedom is kept under lock and key, the captive will break the lock!’ On and on. I don’t know what lock Draco thinks he’s going to break. He’s like a hundred years old.”

  “Freedom? We have freedom,” I say, confused.

  He shrugs, looking uncomfortable. I imagine the topic rising up between us like a crag in the riverbed, splitting the water’s flow.

  “I don’t know. I guess he wants more. My dad wants to expand the compound too. Lots of people do.”

  I look at Alma—I always look to her when I want to know if something makes sense or not. I can generally trust my own logic, but hers is infallible. Her eyes squint the way they do when she’s studying research—she’s considering all the variables, weighing the arguments of everyone present.

  “You don’t think it’s weird to live on a planet an
d not have any communication with its people?” Rondo adds when no one says anything.

  “They probably don’t speak any of our languages, my friend,” jokes Jaquot. I don’t know how I never noticed it before, but I’m starting to see strategy in some of his comedy. Tension diffusion. He’s been a clown since we were children. I’m suddenly curious about what his parents are like, if there’s a chasm in his ’wam too that he’s had to build a bridge across.

  “Yaya’s at it again,” Alma says, and nods toward the Greenhouse.

  We all look. Dr. Espada’s standing at the doorway, the rounded figure of Yaya beside him, her slate in her hands in note-taking position.

  “There she goes.” I sigh.

  “Has she still not spoken to you since you disproved her theory on dunikai migration?” Alma says, chuckling.

  “Nope.” I can’t help but smirk at the memory. Yaya isn’t exactly a rival since she’s always preferred talking to Dr. Espada more than greencoats, but the dunikai debate was one of the few head to heads we’ve actually had. Since then—two years ago—she’s seemed even more determined to interact solely with whitecoats. Some days I think she doesn’t consider herself a greencoat at all; not a student but a colleague of Dr. Espada who just happens to sit in the audience.

  “Still on her quest to the top!” Alma says, shaking her head.

  “Gotta love a girl with goals,” Jaquot says, and I turn my eyes on him in surprise. With Alma packing her things for class and Rondo standing off to the side in his own world, I’m the only one who hears it. Jaquot shoots me a bashful smile.

  Ahead, Dr. Espada is turning to go back into the Greenhouse, when he almost bumps into the councilwoman, who doesn’t make way in the entrance. He steps aside for her and she strides toward her waiting chariot. I watch my teacher watching her before my gaze wanders again to the scattering of gray-suited guards, their heads turning this way and that as they scan the trees. As my group moves toward the Greenhouse, Jaquot telling jokes and Alma gesticulating, I think of my grandmother. Since she died, I’ve imagined filling the void she left with my own scientific discoveries; my parents’ sadness soothed by the advances I would make in turning Faloiv into a place where they can be happy. But Rondo has planted a seed in my mind that sprouts into a flower I avert my eyes from. Maybe he’s onto something, and it bothers me that it’s not a theory I considered before. I turn to him, not quite ready to let the subject of the Faloii drop.

  “Maybe they’re starting internships to begin studying the Faloii,” I say. “There has to be a reason they’d let us in the labs all of a sudden.”

  Rondo looks past me at the guards, gripping their buzzguns with both hands.

  “‘Shifting priorities,’” he says. “That’s what she said. Maybe you’re right. But I’m interested in where they’re shifting.”

  CHAPTER 4

  I don’t see my father for four days.

  “He’s working on a new project,” my mother tells me when we eat alone in the evenings. “It’s taking up a lot of his time.”

  A lot is an understatement, I think.

  It’s also been four days since the councilwoman announced the internships. I haven’t broached the topic with my mother, afraid of what she’ll say. It floats between us now at our kitchen platform like a bubble, invisible but present.

  “How is Alma?” she asks me when we’ve been silent for a while. She has taken her fruit and arranged it on top of the flatbread that I made in our oven of clay bricks. She takes a bite and chews with her eyes on me.

  “She’s good. She wants to do her internship at the Paw,” I say, and pretend to focus on breaking off a piece of the bread.

  My mother stops chewing, pausing and looking at me intently. When I look back into her face, she has already resumed, as if the pause never happened.

  “Well,” she says, “I hope she gets what she wants. From what I understand, Dr. Espada will be asking for student input, but placing students himself based on aptitude.”

  “Oh. Well, she’s obsessed with mammals,” I say. “So I bet her aptitude will get her in.”

  “Most likely,” she says. She’s swallowed her bite and doesn’t take another. “Where do you want to be placed?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Probably the Beak.”

  “The Beak,” she repeats. “What about your focus on functional nutrition? I didn’t know that you’d done any of your research on avian species.”

  She’s called my bluff. She knows what all my projects have been on—I’ve asked her input as a mammalian expert on almost all of them.

  “Well, I haven’t. But, you know, birds are interesting. Reptiles too, so maybe I’ll ask about the slither.”

  She smiles at me, a small amused smile, and I feel foolish, transparent. I stand abruptly.

  “I’m going to go see some friends,” I say.

  She looks surprised but nods.

  “All right,” she says. “Have a good time. Don’t worry about your food: I’ll finish it.”

  I leave without replying.

  Out in the commune, I inhale deeply. When did it become so hard to breathe at home? I wander. I was as surprised as my mother to hear me say that I was going to see friends: we both know I don’t really have any in the Paw. But it’s not so bad being alone: wandering in the Paw is a lot like being outside if you don’t look up and see the curving ceiling of the dome. Sometimes the walls make me claustrophobic; like they’re part of a cage keeping me from the rest of the world. I look at my feet, at the grass and stones and soil, and imagine that I’m outside the compound, in the jungle and on my own. I wonder if anyone else ever feels this way: the urge to escape and see Faloiv for themselves, beyond the slides that Dr. Espada shows in class, the quick snatches of the world I see on the Worm, or on my rare trips with my father. The soil is soft under my narrow white shoes. If I were a marov, I think, I could just burrow right under the dome walls. I smile at the idea and turn to start across one of the bridges that cross the stream.

  “What are you smiling about?”

  It’s Rondo. I’m not surprised, as if I knew that by wandering long enough he’d show up.

  “I was just thinking about being a marov,” I blurt.

  “A marov . . . ?”

  He looks confused, and I seize on his puzzlement to distract from my embarrassment.

  “A marov,” I say, daring him to mock me. “It’s a mammal. You might want to look it up: it’ll be on an exam sometime.”

  He looks away, his fingers tapping out a rhythm on the bridge, gazing out at the commune. I realize now I’ve embarrassed him.

  “It’s just a furry, fat thing.” I shrug. “Ground dwelling. Eats tubers and leaves . . .”

  He returns his eyes to my face, his fingers still drumming, and says, “Honestly, I don’t give a damn about mammals.”

  This surprises me. I can’t tell if he’s angry with me or not. He doesn’t seem angry: his face, mostly smooth aside from a little bumpy area on one cheekbone from acne, is lineless.

  “No?” It’s all I can think to say.

  “Nope. Not at all.”

  “What do you give a damn about, then?” I say, and take a few steps toward the other side of the bridge. He’s just come from this way, I’m guessing, but I’m not finished with my walk. I wonder if he’ll come with me, and my stomach stirs, a lone winged insect trapped in its cavern.

  “People,” he says, and follows. Inside me, one insect becomes two. “I’m interested in people.”

  “Well, there’s no human compound.” It’s a joke, but he doesn’t smile.

  “No, there’s not.”

  He says it as if this is something he’s already considered and found to be a problem.

  “So what would you study if you had to choose? Since people aren’t an option.”

  He pauses.

  “Music.”

  “Music?” I scoff, trying too late to take the judgment out of my voice. I throw a sideways look at him to see if he notic
ed. He did, but he doesn’t look offended. “I hate to break it to you, but there’s no musical compound either.”

  “Mmm.”

  “You can’t choose something more . . . logical?”

  “There’s more to the world than logic,” he says.

  “Not in N’Terra.”

  “Yes, I know.” Then finally, as if giving in, he adds, “I guess I’d study birds if I had to choose. If forced.”

  “Do you miss the Beak that much?”

  “What’s to miss? Everything I need is right here.”

  He doesn’t look at me, but his sly smile lets me know the pleasure that blooms in my chest was planted there intentionally.

  “I was there last week,” I say.

  “I know.” He nods.

  “You know?”

  “Yes, I heard. A whitecoat was observing a newly hatched oscree in the main dome while you were there. He mentioned to my dad that he saw you.”

  He “saw” me. I can hear the philax in his voice: he knows what happened. I wish I was a marov more than ever, and imagine diving into the safety of a burrow, made invisible by soil.

  “He saw me,” I repeat, refusing to look at him. We enter a cluster of shops, many of which are closing for the day. The light coming through the transparent ceiling is softer than an hour ago, sunset approaching.

  “Yeah, saw you. He said you fainted. I didn’t really see you as the fainting type.”

  I grit my teeth. I want to snap that I’m not the fainting type, but then I’d have to admit what actually happened. If I haven’t told Alma, then I’m not telling Rondo.

  “So are you just going to stay silent, Octavia?”

  The sound of my name in his mouth takes on a special sound—like a rare specimen whose name requires magic to pronounce. I don’t let this magic creep into my reply.

  “I can. It would be my prerogative.”

  “Damn, O, what happened at the Beak?” he insists.

  I groan and he looks briefly surprised before laughing.

  “Do you really not want to talk about it?” he says. “We don’t have to if you don’t want to.”