“Tilt your head,” she says, opening her sketchbook, the paper inside silver. “Stay still.”
“I am,” I say, fidgeting with my hands.
“No, you’re not,” she scolds. “Stay really still.”
She pulls a pen from her hair. Her eyes flit over my face. Her hand moves across the paper in long, even strokes.
“Done,” she says after a few minutes, holding the paper out to me. “Here, look.”
She’s captured everything—the dark curve of my eyebrows, the freckles high on my cheekbones, the slight crookedness of my nose from when I broke it during training so many years ago.
The false gills on my neck.
“You’re really good,” I tell her, and I know by the smile on her lips I’ve made her happy. I look at her, studying her face as she studied mine. She looks so much like our father it startles me. They have the same willowy fingers, the same shadows underneath their eyes. I know that it’s not easy for her, being my sister. She lives her life in hiding, too.
“Thanks,” she says, tucking the drawing back inside the sketchbook. “I need to practice more, but…”
“It’s late,” I say. “You should get to bed.”
“What about you?” she asks. “You should sleep before the exam.”
“I’ll be up soon.” I don’t tell her that I have to study all night. It will only make her worry.
“Okay.” She yawns. “See you tomorrow.”
I wait until I know she’s asleep, then go into my father’s study. The walls are covered in framed displays of butterfly wings and beetles, creatures my father studied while trying to find a way to protect the more fragile lives from extinction. The shelves are lined with tangles of seaweed, jagged-edged mussels, the lonely shells and spindly legs of horseshoe crabs. They’re nothing more than empty husks, but they once pulsed with primordial life, reminding me of a world I was never a part of. I reach past them to the thin-spined books, pulling down the ones I’ll need for the night. I open a book on ecological conservation. The screen glows in the darkness. I scan one page after another, the whole way through. I start in on another book, and then another after that.
By the time I look up, it’s almost dawn. My eyelids are heavy. Soon the sun will rise. I want to lay my head on the desk and fall asleep, but I have so much more material to study. I read the same sentence over and over, its meaning lost on me. I’m buried so deep within the words that I don’t hear my father slip through the door.
“Hey,” he says. “What are you doing up?”
I tell him the truth, at least in part. “Review was really hard. I needed to study more.”
He sits down beside me and pulls the book toward him.
“Okay,” he says. “Let’s see what we have here.”
He bites his lip as he reads, just as I do, and I am reminded suddenly and fiercely that I, too, am his daughter. I, too, share my life with him.
“I’m sorry about yesterday. I shouldn’t be so hard on you.” He gives me a small smile, and a wave of guilt washes over me. I shouldn’t have gone to the cliffs. I put us all at risk.
“Now, this isn’t too difficult,” he goes on, turning back to the screen of the book. “Stellar nucleosynthesis is just transmutation. It occurs when the natural abundance of elements within stars varies.”
He outlines all the elements in the universe, going over all the different versions of those elements a star can have.
“What’s next?” he asks.
I open another book, scanning through the first page, my heart sinking in my chest.
“The chemistry of the bomb,” I say.
We go over the formulas. It’s there in the math—we find the same truth every time. The bomb was designed to kill all humans on Earth, and it almost did just that.
“Do you get it now?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, then pause. My brain is finding it hard to process all this information without sleep. But it wouldn’t matter how many nights I’d slept for, this is something that will never make sense to me. “No. No, I don’t get it.”
“Let’s go over it one more time,” he says, scanning the book back to the beginning.
“I get how the equations work,” I say, lacing my fingers together tightly. “I just don’t get why everything happened this way. I don’t get why there was a bomb at all.”
My father sits back in his chair. Silence hangs heavily between us.
“Neither do I, Li,” he says softly. “That’s why I saved you.”
“But I’m the only one you saved,” I say.
He looks off into the distance, as though he’s remembering everything that happened when he first came here.
“I did everything I could,” he says. “I wasn’t able save everyone, but believe me, I tried.”
“What do you mean?”
Day has begun to break, filling the windows with light.
“I believed in saving the human race,” he says slowly. “I believed in integration. I begged the Agency to implement it, but they considered humans unworthy of life on this planet. Humans had inhabited Earth for thousands of years and brought it to the brink of disaster. They’d had so many chances. The Agency didn’t think they deserved another. Then, after the bombing, there was only so much I could do.”
There were humans who lived through the bombing, somehow surviving the attack. Their bodies were ravaged, the radiation seeping quickly into their bones, but for a matter of weeks, they were still breathing, still alive. Their corpses were found deep in the forest, already turning to ash. Only one woman survived longer, making it all the way to the border of the Bay before she was caught. She was placed in a medical facility, where scientists studied her genetic code and harvested her blood to develop immunizations for earthborn diseases. She was a living experiment, proof that there are some things in this world worse than death.
In the images they show us at school, her eyes are closed. Her bones poke through her pallid skin. Tubes run the length of her arms, and her blood is collected in glass vials. Her head is shaved, her neck revealed. The skin behind her ears is unmarked, smooth. Her name is written at the end of the bed she’s bound to: Ava.
The first time I saw her, I was young. I remember my heart clenching, like someone had reached into my chest and wrapped their fingers around it. I remember thinking that this could have happened to me if my father hadn’t saved me, hadn’t taken me off the planet before the bomb exploded. I searched those images for some semblance of familiarity, a way to recognize myself in Ava’s body, and found none. Eventually she died, too, captured and alone.
I listen to the pull of the waves on the shore, the strange hiss of the wind through the stalks of seagrass. I’ve never heard my father talk about the past like this before.
“Thank you for trying,” I say, my voice small.
We stare out the window at the sunrise. Neither of us says anything more. We sit like this for a long time, the quiet of dawn settling around us.
“You should sleep,” he says finally.
“Yeah,” I say, but I know that I won’t. I rest my head in my hands. There are only a few hours until the exam, until my future is mapped out in front of me.
“Li,” my father says, and I raise my eyes to his. “No matter what anyone says, I want you to know that you always have a choice. You can choose to do the right thing.” He pauses. “Sometimes doing the right thing isn’t doing what you’re told.”
He stands and walks to the door, talking to me over his shoulder.
“If I had done as I was told, you wouldn’t be here with me.” He hesitates, as if he’s not sure what he should say. “I’ve always worried about how you’re going to survive. But I’m beginning to see that you have to do more than survive. You have to live.”
With that, he closes the door behind him, leaving me alone to think about what he really means.
“Li! Wait up!” Mirabae calls as I navigate the hallway at school. She slips through the crowd and comes up beside m
e.
“Hey,” she says. She’s wearing a low-cut shirt and very short shorts. Her hair is in loose braids. I know she’s reveling in dressing how she wants to. Once we’re in the Forces we’ll be wearing the regulation uniform.
“Hey,” I say back. “You ready?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”
I shrug.
“I’m not too worried about it,” she says. “It’s just our history and legacy and everything else we’ve been taught over and over for the past eight years.”
I laugh, and for a moment I forget how nervous I am.
She studies me, raising an eyebrow. “You look a little rough.”
“Yeah.” I’m wearing pants that rest low on my hips and an old, worn shirt that I borrowed from Zo. I reach up to my hair and try to work through the tangles. “I didn’t really sleep last night.”
“Too busy thinking about kissing Ryn?” she teases, an excited glint in her eye. “Tell me everything.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mir,” I say, making my way into the amphitheater.
“I saw you with him in the water, Li. You looked like you were getting along well.” Her lips curl into a smile. “Don’t leave anything out. I want every last detail.”
“I don’t know….We didn’t really talk.”
She laughs. “Oh, I like the sound of this.”
“It’s not like that,” I say, heat rising to my cheeks as I remember the feeling of his body against mine. I wish I could tell her what actually happened, how I almost drowned, how worried I am that Ryn knows there’s something different about me. A new current of fear runs through me now.
Mirabae rolls her eyes as she takes a seat, and all of a sudden we remember what’s coming next. “Good luck, Li,” she tells me, squeezing my hand.
“You too, Mir,” I say, and slip into an empty row near the front. Above each seat is a hologram, situated as though it’s a desk. I lower my hand over it, its surface smooth against my skin, like I’m pressing my palm against water.
Welcome, Li. The hologram glows.
I close my eyes, running through the information in my head one last time. I’m ready for this, I think. I have to be.
The seat next to me shifts as someone settles into it. I open my eyes and there he is.
Ryn.
There are so many empty seats in the classroom. There’s no reason for him to sit right next to me. I feel like the butterflies from my father’s study have burst from behind the glass and into my chest, their wings flapping.
Begin examination, the hologram flashes.
I lean forward and swipe across the hologram. As I do, Ryn moves toward me. His knee brushes mine. It’s nothing more than the slightest whisper, but it sweeps up my spine. The feeling sparkles, spreading under my skin. I turn to look at him. He stares straight ahead, then leans down, swipes the surface of his hologram, and begins moving through each question quickly.
I breathe in and start the test. My hands shake.
The first part is multiple choice. The answers come to me easily, and I barely think as I scan each question. An hour passes, then one more. I move through math and chemistry, physics and astronomy. Each question is harder than the last. At the end of the astronomy section, I feel myself begin to falter. I read the words in front of me over and over.
List the twenty major characteristics of a pulsar, the last question reads.
I write down ten; then my mind goes blank. There’s more, I think. I know there’s more. I read through what I have so far, the words repeating in my head.
Small size. High density. Strong magnetic field. Slowing rotation as they age.
My answer is incomplete, but if I don’t keep going, I won’t finish in time. I move on to the essay, the section of the test with the most impact on the score. I swipe forward and read the question, flinching as I do.
Explain the necessity of Abdolorean intervention on Earth.
My hand hovers over the hologram. We’ve been taught for all our lives that humans would have destroyed Earth completely if they had been allowed to live, that they hadn’t deserved to exist here any longer. My life has been structured around this idea, bent to fit its shape. I know better than to question it, to do anything that could give me away, but my shoulders tense with anger as I write.
Human mistreatment of Earth caused mass environmental devastation, including drastic climate change and the extinction of the majority of the planet’s wildlife. With our superior intelligence and advanced technology comes a responsibility to intervene on other planets when necessary. Abdoloreans saved Earth from the destruction caused by a primitive, less evolved species.
I write on and on, scribbling my last sentence just as the holograms fade to black. I lean back in my seat and take a deep breath. They’re just words, I tell myself. It’s not like writing all that down makes it true.
The hologram lights up, my results flashing across it.
Ninety-five percent.
Relief floods over me; lightness courses through my veins. I did it. I made top five. I stand up and glance at the seat next to me. It’s empty. Ryn is already gone.
* * *
—
On the counter in the kitchen is a bowl full of clementines. I take one and peel it, the skin slipping off in one long spiral. I eat one clementine, then another, balancing the rinds on the counter like the rings of a distant planet. I passed the exam. I made top five. If I can keep up during Assessment, I’ll have a good chance at making officer. But all I can think about is my jump into the water. All I see is Ryn.
I walk to the window and look out at the water below, replaying yesterday in my head, trying to untangle everything. My memory is hazy, like it all happened to someone else and I was just watching from far away. I see myself making the reckless decision to climb, to jump. I see my breakable human body hitting the water.
Ryn didn’t say anything, but that doesn’t mean I’m safe. Maybe he realized right away that there was something off about me. Maybe he realized it later that night, thinking about the strange girl whose gills didn’t work. Maybe he realized it today, sitting beside me. He could turn me in at any moment. He could be telling the Agency now.
My stomach feels hollow. The quiet of the house unsettles me, my thoughts echoing in the silence. Zo is at school, her classes continuing on their normal schedule. My father is at work. Assessment doesn’t start until the end of the week. The day stretches out before me, the hours empty, unbound. I don’t know what to do with myself, with the restless energy rushing through me.
I walk through the garden picking mulberries. I lie in the branches of a cherry blossom tree, pressing petals between the palms of my hands. I wander through the house, picking out books from my father’s study, reading one after the other lying on the floor of my room. The whole time, a weight presses on my chest, reminding me of the mistake I made.
At one point I look up from my book to see the door holo flashing. My body goes cold. I clench my hands together to stop them from shaking. All I can think is that it’s someone from the Agency, coming to take me away. My fear feels entirely rational and irrational all at once.
I stand in the doorway of my room, trying to decide what to do next. The holo flashes again. I walk downstairs, my heart pounding in my chest. I go through the kitchen and stand in front of the door, holding my breath. I press my hand to the glass. The door slides open. I blink in the sunlight.
Ryn stands in front of me, as though I conjured him.
“Ryn,” I say, confused. “What are you doing here?”
I look past him to the garden, to the trees surrounding the yard, but there’s no one here but him.
“I wanted to see you again,” he says, smiling at me. “I waited outside after the exam, but I couldn’t find you. I wanted to say hi.”
“That’s all?” I ask. My pulse flutters. Maybe this happens all the time, boys just showing up at girls’ houses for no reason, but it’s never happened to me.
“Well, hi,” I say nervously, wanting to reach up and touch my gills. Instead I cross my arms over my chest.
“Hi.” He runs his hands through his silver-blond hair. He looks up to the sun, then back to me, his green eyes clear.
“I’m on my way to the city,” he says. “Come with me.”
I study his face. I can’t read him at all. Maybe he’s here for the reasons he said, or maybe he’s just as suspicious of me as I am of him.
When I hesitate, he shifts from one foot to the other. “I mean, if you’re not interested, or you’re with someone—”
I laugh. I can’t help it. “It’s not that,” I promise him.
He smiles, and I can’t help smiling back. Before I can overthink anything, I take a deep breath and step through the doorway. There’s only one way for me to find out what he knows.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s go.”
We walk away from the house and into the forest. Sunlight flickers through the branches of the trees, falling across Ryn’s face and hands.
“Yesterday was so amazing,” he says as we walk. “I haven’t been by an ocean in so long.”
I glance at him, wondering where he’s going with this. If it has anything to do with me.
“My family just moved to Earth,” he explains. “I’ve been living on Tularu for the past few years. My dad’s a commander in the Forces, so I grew up all around the galaxy. We came here so I could get my placement.”
A wave of relief floods over me. If Ryn hasn’t been on Earth before, he might not know much about humans. He might not know that we can’t breathe underwater.
We reach the landing below the station and step up to the chutes rising to the platform. When we get there, Ryn leans against the station wall, looking at the awnings above us.
“What’s Tularu like?” I ask, curious. “Aside from not having an ocean.”
“The sky is always yellow,” he says. “And there are mountains everywhere.”
I lean against the wall next to him. “Do you miss it?”
The Last Girl on Earth Page 4
