A Conspiracy of Stars

by Olivia A. Cole

  “You think he’d know that you met the Faloii?”

  “I don’t know. But if he’s hiding Rasimbukar’s dad, he has to know that the Faloii would eventually come looking for him. Right?”

  “I wish I knew more about our agreement with the Faloii,” Alma says, leaning back against the wall. “I mean, the Council has to know that holding a Faloii person hostage is breaking the rules. I don’t need to know the agreement to know that much.”

  “That’s the thing,” I whisper. “Given everything I’ve been hearing about Albatur, I think he wants to break the agreement.”

  We sit in silence. When I was standing on the bridge with Alma and Rondo, I felt a strange exhilaration: a feeling of looming clarity where things finally seemed to make sense. The buzzing in my head. My reaction to the philax. Somehow I have a connection with the people and animals of Faloiv. But now that I know, I’m just as confused. Why? How? The questions are bigger than ever.

  “We should send Rondo a message,” I say, sitting up. “Maybe he’s found something.”

  “Sure. That’s why you want to message him.”

  “Shut up!”

  “Whatever you’ve gotta tell yourself.”

  I stretch across to the desk platform and pull my slate toward me. It’s like picking up an alien object—after being out in the jungle, everything that was once familiar feels foreign. I wake up the device and tap on the mouth icon. There’s a pause as it loads, and then my messages appear. There are already three from Rondo, waiting to be read.

  “He’s already written me.”

  “I didn’t even hear it,” Alma yawns, reclining backward on the bed. “What did he say?”

  I open the oldest message first. It’s from yesterday.

  I know you’re still sleeping, it says. I’m in your kitchen. I hope you wake up soon. I miss you.

  I smile broadly. Then I open the next message.

  You there? I found something.

  My smile fades. I open the last message.

  Your mom knows something.

  “Alma,” I hiss. “He says my mom knows something.”

  She sits bolt upright.

  “Knows what? That you met Rasimbukar?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I quickly type out a message. Rondo, are you there? What does my mom know?

  He types back immediately. About your brain.

  “About your brain?” Alma echoes. “You mean that you can . . . ?”

  What about my brain? I type.

  I don’t know exactly. But remember those footprints I found in the databases? The ones with an encrypted entry point? I finally hacked a trace on it, and it’s your mom’s device.

  I sit back against the wall. My mom has been poking around in the files, just like Rondo.

  “Give it to me,” Alma says, and takes the slate from my hands.

  Which databases did you say you found her footprints in? she types.

  Everywhere I’ve been looking, Rondo replies. In the files about the Vagantur’s landing, in the personnel files for the original N’Terrans. And today I found traces of her in your brain scans.

  What was she looking at? Alma’s fingers fly across the slate’s face.

  She was more than looking, Rondo types. She was making changes. I can’t see what she deleted, but she deleted something and uploaded a new file.

  “What does that mean?” Alma breathes, leaning against the wall with me.

  I’m sending you an image, Rondo says.

  A moment later a black box appears in the message stream. When Alma taps it, the box’s lid opens, releasing a file.

  It’s an image of a brain scan. We’ve studied brain research for years in the Greenhouse, and although neither of us are experts, Alma and I both know enough to know that this particular brain is unremarkable. No unusual swatches of color, no strange shapes or shadows.

  So what? I take the slate back from Alma. It looks normal to me.

  Exactly. But what did it replace? She encrypted the deletion: no one but me will probably ever notice. But the file you’re looking at replaced something else.

  Alma and I look at each other. Her mind is crunching, trying to come up with a theory. A ping from the slate draws our eyes back to its screen.

  You have to get to her device, Rondo has typed. If you can find the original brain scan, maybe it will tell you something about why you can communicate with the Faloii. And who knows what else you might find?

  I don’t know if I can do that, I respond.

  There’s a long pause. I can’t tell if he’s typing a long response or if he’s just thinking about what to say.

  I don’t like it either, O. But we need answers. I’m going to sleep. See you tomorrow.

  “Well?” Alma says. Her face seems knotted.

  “I can’t,” I say. I’ve already spied on my mother once before—listening at her door, I learned that she wanted to keep me out of the internships. It has bothered me ever since, has changed the way I look at her. That’s the thing about secrets: once you uncover them, sometimes you wish you hadn’t. But we need answers.

  “There has to be another way,” I say eventually. I put my palms over my eyes, pressing them. “I’m not going into her study.”

  Alma stares at me for a long moment, and I wonder if she’s going to argue. But she doesn’t. She sits up away from the wall.

  “Look,” she says frankly. “I told you all I care about is becoming a whitecoat, but I’m involved now. And if I’m gonna be involved, then we need to go all the way. I’m not going to tell you what to do, and we’ll be in a position to learn something in the Zoo tomorrow . . . but we need to learn what we can, where we can.”

  “Yeah . . . ,” I say, not wanting to commit to anything. Never would I have thought that it would be Alma convincing me to push harder to dig up the truth.

  “I’m going to sleep,” she says, and I realize how tired she must be. She’s been looking after me with Rondo while I slept the days away. I nod and she extracts herself from where she’s been sitting on my bed, climbing up to her own ledge, where I can hear her settling in. I stand and press my palm against the light pad, and the room goes dark.

  “Alma,” I whisper when I’m back in my bed.

  “Mhmm.”

  “Thanks for . . . you know. For not telling anyone. And everything.”

  “Of course.”

  I can’t sleep. My body seems to have a surplus of energy and my mind is like a cloud of insects, alive and swarming. In the dark I picture Rasimbukar. I may not know everything—about my people or hers, or even about myself—but I feel it in my bones that Rasimbukar is telling the truth. The compound has done something wrong, and I need to make it right.

  I sit up in the dark. The ’wam is quiet with all the lights off—only the soft murmur of the cooling system. The pale light of the moon filters in through the cracks around my window shade. I have the urge to open the shade and look out at the sleeping commune, but I know the light would wake up Alma. Even with my eyes closed, I can picture it: the compound I was born in, the ’wams lit up like moon rocks at night, the trees sprouting up around us under the transparent dome rising into Faloiv’s sky. My home. Now I picture it all burning, crumbling under the flame of a war started by my people. I remember what Rondo told me, the night we kissed in the dark: Not everything has to make sense. Maybe he was right. But some things I have to figure out.

  I’m standing at my bedroom door before I’ve fully realized what I’m going to do. I slowly slide it open, cautious for any creak or crack. The hallway is even darker than my bedroom. Down the hall, my parents’ door is still. Before I know it, I’m passing it like a shadow, one foot in front of the other. The packed-dirt floor is forgiving of sound, not like the branches and the foliage in the jungle. But even without a dirixi hounding me, my heart pounds in my chest. It’s so loud, I’m certain its rhythm will echo down the hall and into my parents’ room. But I’m outside the study a moment later, my hands reach
ing out in the dark to find the door, sliding it slowly open, only wide enough for me to squeeze through.

  Around me, the study smells like my mother: warm and rich. Technically this study is for both my parents’ use, but my father prefers his den in the Zoo. I think of all the work she’s done in this room, the discoveries she’s made. I wonder how many of those discoveries have been against the wishes of the Faloii, violating agreements that were made before I was born.

  I pick my way through the dark to the desk. I don’t need to see it to know that it’s cluttered with slides, a disorganized mass of research that only my mother knows the order of. I need more light, but I don’t dare turn on the room’s lamp. I fumble over to the window, tripping on a woven runner mat that covers the dirt floor, and inch the window shade open, just a tiny gap to let in some light.

  Moonbeams flow in eagerly, illuminating the desk with their softness. I turn back and take it in, searching for her slate in the chaos of her other research.

  I don’t see it anywhere. I wanted to avoid moving things around—I have no way of knowing what she might notice and what she’d miss—but I don’t have a choice. Gently, as if handling eggs, I move the slides around, shift the projector to free the thick transparent files trapped under its edge. I glance at them in the dim light: charts and recordings, notes on various specimens, illustrations of brains that clearly aren’t human. I set them down and keep up my silent search until my fingers brush the smooth, solid edge of a slate.

  I hold my breath as I ease it out from under a small tower of slides, then sink down to the floor, leaning against the desk and waking up the device.

  The light from the screen blinds me at first after all my creeping around in the dark. When my eyes adjust, I see that the last screen my mother viewed before she switched off the device was her list of files. All of the file names are unremarkable. Tufali 8 Neurological Assessment. Kunike 21 Behavioral Analysis. Dozens and dozens of files, some with attached documents in the hundreds.

  Then I find a folder that is unlabeled. I pause, wondering if I should open it. Anxiety gnaws at me. Once you know something, you can’t unknow it, I tell myself. But I tap the unlabeled folder and watch as its contents fill the screen.

  They’re all images. Thumbnails that, when tapped, expand to their full size. All the images are of animals: even as thumbnails I recognize the wide yellow eyes of the igua, the remarkable ears of the kunike. I tap on a few, admiring them. Most of them were taken in the lab, specimens in containment, but there are a few that must have been taken by finders, the animals surrounded by the dense greenery of Faloiv. Some of the photos’ subjects are blurred, capturing the motion of the specimen as it turned to flee.

  One image catches my eye: a maigno. I tap the thumbnail and it expands to fill the screen. My eyes widen with surprise. The maigno isn’t alone in the image. Beside it stands my grandmother.

  Nana is young, her face unlined and her tight curly hair graying only at her temples—not the all-over eruption of white that I remember from my childhood. Her smile is broad and one hand is swung out to her side, gesturing toward the maigno as if to say Do you see this beauty? I wonder how old my mother was when the photo was taken. My age, perhaps: sulking in the half-built compounds and dreaming about the jungle, imagining what wonders her mother was out seeing. I tap the image again to make it larger and drag the focus to my grandmother’s face to examine her features. So much like my mother, the angled chin and round cheekbones, the bright eyes.

  But there’s something about one of her eyes that isn’t quite right: a pixilation of the image that distorts her pupil. I hadn’t noticed when the image was regularly sized, but with it blown up and zoomed in like this, it catches my attention. I tap on Nana’s face to zoom in even further.

  Her features fill the screen, slightly stretched, the wide, graceful bridge of her nose centered. I drag the image downward to find her eyes, and then I see what the distortion is.

  It’s a box. A black box just like the file that Rondo sent me on my slate a few hours before: small and square with a digital lid. I stare at it, the unknown yawning up at me from my grandmother’s face. I sit there in the dark, the light from the slate glowing like a torch, my finger hovering over the box. I take a deep breath and tap it.

  The box opens and the screen goes blank. At first I think the device has powered off, but then a window appears in the center of the screen, with the word Password blinking above an entry field.

  I hesitate. Password? Rondo may be a hacker but I’m not.

  At first I try Nana’s name: Amara. The file had been hidden in a photo of her, so maybe the password is her as well. But the box turns red and blinks, the entry field flashing. What would my mother use as a password? Guessing, I type in Vagantur.

  Red. Flashing field. No luck. Tries usually come in threes, I think, and I rack my brains for what might be my last shot. I have no ideas, so I start to type in my own name. O-c-t-a-v-i-a, and I pause, my finger stopped above the enter button. I delete the entry and type my middle name instead: A-f-u-a.

  The box turns green and disappears, an instant of blankness before the box’s contents assemble on the screen. Rows of files and images, some of them just repeated images of my grandmother with the maigno. Double encrypted, I think. What I see is mostly data; no species, though I’m fairly certain it’s all human. I scan the files quickly—I’ve already been in the study longer than I wanted to be—searching for something I can use. Blood work. Heart rates. X-rays. And then I see my name.

  I tap on the file, but the only thing I find when it opens is more blood work and vital data. I know there has to be something here—why else would it be in an encrypted file hidden in a photograph? I close the file and keep looking until my eye falls on two images: brain scans. My hands are shaking, the feeling of walking through the dark and knowing something is in the trees, knowing and massive.

  The first file is just like the one Rondo sent me. In fact, I’m almost certain it’s the same image. Normal activity, nothing unusual. I close it to look at the second image.

  Most of the scan is normal: neurons firing as expected, healthy activity. Right in the center, though, knotted between the temporal and parietal lobes, is what looks like an explosion of color: bright tendrils all convening in a maze of twisting illumination, like blood spreading through water but clinging together like slime. My mind is buzzing, looking at the scan, but I barely notice.

  “What is that?” I whisper to myself, holding the slate closer to my face.

  Through the silence comes a whisper, behind me in the dark.

  “It’s your brain.”

  I nearly throw the slate in my shock, too startled to gasp. It’s my mother, halfway across the room, several steps from the door. She didn’t make a sound, slipping into the study like an inky shadow. We stare at each other in the darkness, my mouth slightly open and hers set in a look of almost sadness. We say nothing, each waiting for what the other might say. Suddenly I notice the buzzing: the quivering feeling of an echo happening inside my head. I know that feeling. But I’m in my ’wam: no animals around. No Faloii. Looking at my mother, I slowly tilt my head sideways.

  And the tunnel opens. Quickly. Enough to make me dizzy with the images that are suddenly inundating my consciousness. I’m overwhelmed, trying to understand what’s happening. Images of my grandmother sitting at the very desk I lean against, smiling up at someone walking through the door. The jungle of Faloiv: Dr. Espada walking ahead and then turning back with eyebrows raised, grinning. My father, younger than he is now, in his white coat, weeping. My heart is pounding, my head swimming. I don’t know if I want to cry or vomit.

  And then the tunnel closes, the images retreating and growing dim as the buzzing wanes into nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” my mother whispers, now by my side, crouching and touching my hair. “Even after all these years, I struggle to control it. You’re much better at it, I think.”

  The tears stinging in my eyes are
n’t mine—it’s as if I’ve been injected with the sorrow from the vision and must wait for it to ebb. I struggle against the feeling of powerlessness. This doesn’t make sense! My mother is not of Faloiv. Is she? Is that another lie too, my parents’ lineage?

  My mother takes the slate from my hands and sinks down on the floor next to me. I’m too shocked to move away. We huddle there in the dark. She holds the screen up in front of both of us.

  “This is your brain, Octavia. As you can see, it’s a little . . . different.”

  “B-but why?” I stammer. “What’s wrong with me? How can you . . . ?”

  She closes the file and opens another. It’s an image of a brain scan. The brain she shows me now has the same extraordinarily colored tentacles, snaking out from a mass near the center. The mass is smaller, though, the colors less varied.

  “And this is my brain,” she says. The moonlight has shifted and falls only on our hands, up to the wrist. “And if you were to look at the brains of the Faloii people, they would look very similar. Not identical, but similar.”

  I stare at her. The speed at which my mind has been running seems as if it’s slowed to the crawl of a worm.

  “Are we . . . aliens?” I ask, barely able to get it out of my mouth.

  She laughs softly and touches my cheek.

  “No, Afua. No, we’re not aliens. Well, to the Faloii we are. But we’re human, you and me, even if you were born here.”

  “Then why are our brains like this?” I say, taking the slate from her hand and staring at the tendrils erupting in the image of my mother’s brain. A flurry of incidents rush to the surface of my mind. “What’s wrong with us? I passed out when the philax was tranquilized. My nose bled when a tufali . . .”

  “Nothing. Nothing is wrong with us. Headaches, blood, fainting, your body is adjusting to a gift, Afua. It was triggered when you made eye contact with the philax. We’ve been given a gift.”

  “What kind of gift? From who?”

  “The Faloii. And from Nana.”

  “But—”

  We both freeze at a sound in the hall. It’s my parents’ bedroom door, sliding open.