A Conspiracy of Stars

by Olivia A. Cole

  “What did you say?” he says quickly.

  “What? When? About my mother telling my father? She would, I know she—”

  “No, about Rasimbukar showing you pictures in your head.”

  “Oh.” It sounds stupid when I hear it said like this. It’s more than pictures in my head: they are feelings, communicated as clearly as if spoken words. I can still call up the sensation of Rasimbukar hailing me, my mind buzzing as I felt her consciousness prick at mine.

  “I thought you said you spoke to her in our language,” Alma says, her frown deepening as she tries to solve this new puzzle.

  “I did. Some of the time. For other parts we—we talked in a different way. Well, she did. That’s how I know her name. She showed it to me.”

  “She showed it to you?” Alma says, her head tilted. She’s not disbelieving—not quite. She’s willing, but she needs more.

  “Yes,” I say. “I know it sounds impossible.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Alma interrupts. “It’s not impossible at all. I mean, your mother already proved it is possible.”

  “My mother?”

  She nods.

  “Animals on Faloiv communicate telepathically,” she says. “It stands to reason that the people of Faloiv probably do too.”

  “But Octavia’s not Faloii,” Rondo says. He’s working it out too. They’re greencoats: this is what we do.

  “No,” Alma says, frowning. “She’s not. I have to think about that. But maybe the Faloii can communicate with any life-form that way. We know hardly anything about our interactions with them since none of the whitecoats want to talk about it.”

  “But it’s not just Rasimbukar,” I say. The pieces are floating around in my head like petals on the surface of water. I’m crunching my brain hard, making ripples that move the petals closer to one another.

  “What do you mean?” Rondo asks. They’re both standing closer to my bed now.

  “The containment room,” I say. “The philax. The tufali. It’s not just Rasimbukar who can . . . you know, reach me. I wondered before, but after meeting her, talking to her, it’s starting to add up. I can hear them. The animals. And they can hear me.”

  There’s silence in my small room; the only sound is the barely audible hum of our ’wam’s power system, churning on scraps of vegetable peels. Rondo and Alma stare at me, both of their minds stirring the same way. Alma’s eyes flicker. She’s quicker than Rondo, she always has been. Quicker than me, if I’m being honest.

  “Can you stand?” she says. She’s gripping the arm without the intravenous needle and glancing down at my body.

  “What?” I say, surprised.

  She tugs on me gently. “Can you?”

  “Yes,” I say. I lean forward and swing my legs slowly over the edge of my bed.

  “Rondo, hand me that,” Alma says, pointing at a skinsuit hanging from the wall by my door.

  “Wait, what?” Rondo demands, not moving. “She’s on bed rest!”

  “We have to do an experiment,” she says, still pointing.

  With my feet on the floor I feel strong. The bed at my back is like a trap, as if the longer I stay in it, the worse I’ll feel. I reach for the bowl of water Rondo had given me before and sip from it on my own.

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “Um, nowhere!” Rondo insists. He stands closer to the door, as if to block it.

  “Rondo, don’t be ridiculous,” Alma says with a long look. “She’s fine. They only put her on bed rest because she was dehydrated and they wanted to check for toxins. Plus the procedure was on her hands, and she doesn’t need her hands to walk.”

  “My hands feel fine,” I offer.

  “And what if she does have toxins?” Rondo says. I can’t help but smile at the expression on his face. Ordinarily I would have felt awkward wearing my nightclothes in front of him, but he’s already seen me in them. That just makes me smile more.

  “If I have toxins, I’ll have them whether I’m in this bed or out of it,” I say, trying to be gentle. But he’s not going to keep me in this room. “Besides, they would have been back with my test results by now if something was wrong with me.”

  He stares at me, saying nothing.

  “Rondo,” I say. “I’m fine. I’m not an eggshell. Now hand me my skinsuit.”

  He glares at both of us a moment longer, then removes the skinsuit from its hook and tosses it at me.

  “Be careful removing your intravenous,” he says, sliding open my bedroom door. Then he pauses. “Do you need help?”

  “Rondo, get out!” Alma says.

  He laughs and disappears.

  “Honestly,” she says, with a small laugh. “You’d think he was in love with you.”

  “Well, not exactly, but . . .”

  Her fingers pause on my intravenous. “Excuse me?” she says, dropping her chin.

  “I have some stuff to tell you.” I grin.

  “What’s new?” She rolls her eyes and helps me take the needle from my arm. “Later.”

  On the path through the commune, I munch the hava Rondo forced into my hand, my arm linked through Alma’s as they tell me about what happened in the jungle.

  “Yaya hasn’t talked much to us since then,” Alma says. “I think what happened to Jaquot really messed her up. I didn’t see him get taken, but Rondo thinks Yaya might have.”

  I glance at Rondo, who nods solemnly.

  “It was really scary,” Alma continues. “Dr. Espada came back to the tree without you and he was frantic. He had cuts all over his face from running through the jungle and he was, well, crying too. It was terrible. He said, ‘Samirah will never forgive me.’”

  “How did they find me?” I say.

  “You found yourself,” Rondo says as we turn a corner. “A search party of finders came back from looking for you in the jungle and found you curled up outside the Mammalian Compound. Somehow you got past the gate without the guards seeing you. You were right by the front door, like you just walked home.”

  “I think Rasimbukar brought me.”

  “Oh,” he says, his forehead crinkled. “I guess that makes sense. You’d think the guards would have seen her for sure.”

  “Her skin changes, remember? Camouflage. Better than anything we’ve seen with the animals.”

  Neither of them reply. I wonder if the talk about Rasimbukar makes them afraid, or if the scientist in each of them is jealous. Maybe a little of both. The sudden quiet makes me notice the absence of hammering and I look for the tower the engineers have been working on. It stands there, unmanned. Rondo sees me looking.

  “It’s kind of been an unofficial rest period the last few days,” he says. “With . . . what happened to Jaquot.”

  I nod. The desire to steer the subject away from his death is so strong it burns.

  “So what’s your experiment?” I say, glancing at Alma.

  “Okay,” she says, motioning with the hand that’s not looped through my arm. “What do you feel right now? Are you thinking anything?”

  “What?”

  She sighs impatiently.

  “Your brain, Octavia. Do you hear anything? The buzzing you’ve been talking about.”

  “Oh. Uh.” I stop talking and pay attention. “No. Nothing.”

  “Okay.” We’re approaching a bridge to cross the stream and she stops us. “Rondo, think something at Octavia.”

  “Do what?”

  “Think something at her!”

  “At her?”

  “Yes, at. Think something that you want her to hear.”

  “Um . . . okay.”

  He looks awkward and then settles his eyes on me and stares hard, his eyebrows raising slightly. I resist the strong urge to laugh.

  “Anything?” Alma says, looking at me for confirmation.

  “No. Nothing. All clear.”

  “Okay.” She nods, and walks toward the bridge, towing me along. “Next step.”

  We stop in the middle of the bridge.
<
br />   “Now.” She pulls me to the rail and leans on it with her elbows. “Look down.”

  “At the water?”

  “At what’s in the water.”

  I gaze down at the flowing plants, the round red rocks that line the bottom of the streambed, the lazy ripples of the water flowing toward the other side of the dome. At first I’m not sure what Alma is asking me to look for, but a moment later I understand. The buzzing rises slowly, remaining soft, but only after a small school of myn swim into view from under the bridge. The buzz is barely noticeable, but it’s there.

  “I hear it,” I whisper.

  Alma squeezes my arm.

  “Okay, okay. Now focus. What do you hear? What do you feel? Are they . . . saying anything?”

  It’s hard to focus on the feeling: the source of it is like a fish itself, small and slippery. But I squeeze a fist in my mind, forcing myself to focus. And among it all I find a feeling, not words, but a shapeless feeling: a need to stay near the bodies swimming around me, a wariness of the shadows looming above me, a darkness over the water before me, which I veer to avoid. The water seems to make calm second nature, but underneath it all, alert vigilance, an ever-present fear so natural it feels like breath.

  But then there’s a flurry of . . . something. The fish all scatter, the line I was listening on rapidly shut off: it’s as if the long tunnel through which I could feel the myn’s consciousness was abruptly snapped shut. In the water, the myn have disappeared, hidden away among rocks and plants. I look away and find Alma’s eyes upon me, bright and eager.

  “Well?” she says.

  “They shut me out, I think. I could feel some of what they were feeling, but then it was like they realized I could hear them and closed the door.”

  “Interesting,” Alma says.

  “Well of course they did,” says Rondo, who’s been watching me intently. “Just because animals can communicate telepathically doesn’t change the predator-prey relationship. Maybe they think you’re a predator. This kind of mental connection between species doesn’t mean animals are suddenly friends. It’s just another kind of listening.”

  “But how am I doing it? And why now?” I feel more exasperation than awe. “Did the philax do something to my brain? Or . . . ?”

  “I don’t know,” Alma says, shaking her head. “We need to learn more.”

  “Yes, we do,” Rondo says, pushing off from the bridge rail abruptly. “And as soon as possible.”

  “He’s right,” Alma says.

  “I’m going to go do some digging,” Rondo says. He goes to walk away, but it’s as if he too can hear my thoughts, how much I want him near me. He reaches for my hand and holds it, considering my palm as if all the answers we need are right there.

  “And by that you mean hacking,” Alma says.

  He rolls his eyes, letting go of my hand finger by finger.

  “Yeah. You two find out what you can from Octavia’s parents. They’ll have us back in the Zoo in the next day or two now that Octavia is out of bed, and we need to have a plan before we go back in.”

  “What should I ask my mom?” I call after him before he gets too far away.

  He turns and walks backward for a few steps, spreading his arms wide with an irresistible smile.

  “I’d start with figuring out what happened to that beautiful brain of yours.”

  CHAPTER 20

  My father is home when Alma and I return to my ’wam. He must have just arrived, because he’s standing in the hallway outside my room. At the sound of the front door sighing open, he turns toward us quickly, looking both relieved and annoyed.

  “Octavia,” he says, taking a few steps forward before stopping. His face carries an expression I haven’t seen in a long time. Softness.

  “Sir.”

  “Where did you go? I thought you were still sleeping and then I came home . . .”

  “I was just getting some air. I woke up feeling much better and Alma helped me walk around. We didn’t go far.”

  “I see,” he says. He moves into the kitchen, going to the water decontamination unit and flipping it on. “You’ll need to drink a lot of water.”

  He glances down at my arm. “You removed your intravenous without issue, I see.” He’s less worried now, the softness leaking out of him. He has questions queuing on his tongue.

  I nod apologetically about the intravenous. It’s a strange feeling, knowing that to animals on Faloiv—and the Faloii too—my brain is an open book, but to N’Terrans, people like Alma and my father, I’m as opaque as a stone.

  “You’re feeling better?” he says. The light on the water decon unit has turned a soft green, indicating that it’s ready to provide clean water. My father goes to it with a cup from one of the wall compartments and the clear liquid gushes out. It reminds me of the rhohedron nectar, Rasimbukar holding the plant over my wilting face. If I feel better now, it’s because of her.

  “Yes,” I say. “But really I was fine. Just thirsty.”

  “Fine? I’m impressed,” he says, turning to me with his eyebrows raised. He sips from the water before he goes on. I thought the cup was for me. “Out in the jungle for almost seven hours and you come back without a scratch on you. Your vitals were impressive too.”

  “How so?” Alma asks.

  “She should have died,” my father says bluntly, watching me. I stare back. “Seven hours without water on Faloiv, in the jungle no less. How she escaped the dirixi is beyond me. She didn’t have her water canteen when she was found outside the compound, but she must have been drinking steadily before then, because she was remarkably hydrated for the period of time she was missing.”

  The fatherly concern from a moment ago has all but disappeared.

  “I climbed another tree,” I lie. “I never really saw the dirixi, though, just heard it.”

  The second part is true, at least.

  “I saw it,” Alma says. “Octavia had a good start on it when it went by our tree.”

  We all pause. If I could get a glimpse into each of their thoughts, I think I would see Jaquot. His name is a scar.

  “I hid in the tree for hours,” I continue. “Until the sun started to get lower. I didn’t want to call for Dr. Espada and the others in case the dirixi came back. I had an idea of where the road was, so I just walked until I found it.”

  “I see,” my father says. He’s still eyeing me. If he had his way, I think, he’d probably have me in the Zoo strapped to a table, running tests on me. My father opens his mouth, ready to continue his interrogation, when my mother enters the ’wam.

  Her arms are full with slides from the lab and, balancing on top, a basket of fruit. She’s focused on keeping everything from toppling over and doesn’t notice us all standing there right away. When she does, her eyebrows pop up and her face breaks into a smile.

  “Octavia,” she says. “Should you be up?”

  “She’s all right, Samirah,” my father says. “What do you have?”

  “Fruit,” she says. “And work. Nothing new.”

  “Anything on the Hima boy?”

  “Jaquot,” she says. “I’m so sorry about your friend, girls.”

  “Thank you, Dr. English. I hope his parents are okay,” Alma says.

  “They’re not,” my mother says, squeezing my arm as she passes me for the kitchen. “But they will be. Time makes these things easier.”

  She slides the basket of fruit from her arms onto the kitchen platform, then places the slides next to them. She sighs, and I know she’s thinking of my grandmother—that time doesn’t make things easier. She turns back to me and Alma.

  “Now that you’re out of bed,” she says, looking at me, “will you be ready to resume your studies? You’ve had a few days to recuperate, but I don’t want to push you.”

  “I’m fine,” I say. I’m eager to get back into the Zoo, for reasons that I hope are obvious only to me. “Really. I think getting back to work will help us, you know, keep our mind off things.”


  “My thoughts exactly,” she says, still looking sad. My father reaches across the platform and rests his hand on her shoulder. I avert my eyes. My father’s coldness is something I’m comfortable with; I don’t understand his warmth. By the look on my mother’s face, it’s strange to her too.

  “Is the finder okay?” I ask. “The one who was bitten.”

  “Oh yes,” my mother says, handling the hava in her basket to find a ripe one to slice. “It was just a little morgantan bite. Finders are used to these things. But they haven’t encountered something like a dirixi for nearly a year. Very”—she pauses, gazing at the fruit—“unfortunate timing.”

  “Your daughter says she escaped the dirixi by climbing a tree,” my father says.

  “Oh?” she says, glancing at me. She’s retrieved the bow knife from the wall and is slicing the hava. “I didn’t know you were much of a climber, Octavia.”

  “I guess I am,” I say. I wonder what they’d say if they knew. If they knew any of it: Rasimbukar, my ability to communicate with her, with the myn. The fact that what my father has done—capturing Rasimbukar’s father—could lead our world to war. I wonder if my father would release him, if I told them the truth. I don’t think he would—I get the feeling that he’s finished obeying the laws of the Faloii. Rasimbukar had mentioned that the star people—my people—had broken agreements in the past. I wish I had thought to ask which agreements. What have we been doing that I know nothing about?

  My mother’s hand floats in front of me, offering me a piece of hava. I wonder how long it’s waited there while I was lost in my thoughts. I take the fruit.

  “Eat some more,” she says. “And then rest. You’ll be back in the labs tomorrow.”

  Much later, after my parents have both gone to bed, Alma and I hang out in my room. We huddle on my bed so that we can whisper.

  “Your dad,” she says. “I don’t think he believes you.”

  “About what?” I already know, but I want to hear it.

  “About what happened in the jungle. He seemed really suspicious. Like he knows something.”

  “I know. I was thinking about my vitals. He said he looked at them. What if the rhohedron nectar showed up in my system?”