The Firefly Code

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  “I know you think we’re being overprotective—” Dad began.

  “Yes,” I interrupted.

  “But you have a history of catching things. Your nose runs like a faucet every winter, and let’s not forget that stomach flu.”

  I shuddered and Mom rubbed my back.

  Dad continued, “We have this strain pretty well pinned down, and we’re almost done tweaking the new vaccine. Once that’s done and you get it, you’ll be out in the world.”

  So I stayed in the house. I worked on my drawings, trying to perfect one of the wild calla (calla palustris) that dotted the floor of the forest. This was an important one to get right since it’s highly poisonous. It shouldn’t have been so hard, even if I didn’t have one in front of me: it was just a single leaf, and then a white flower with a thick stamen. Still, each sketch I did was worse than the last, and eventually I gave up, diving back into Dr. Varden’s journal, looking at her sketches. Agatha was a much better artist than me. I also noticed that she didn’t just draw the plants close up, but also included landscapes, and showed where each plant could be found. The next time I got out to Oakedge, I decided, I would draw the whole kingdom just like she had.

  On the third morning, Mom told me I could go outside. “A bus is coming to take you all to get a new vaccination.”

  Dad explained that the disease wasn’t exactly the mumps, but a mutation, and our previous vaccination didn’t cover it. “No big deal,” my dad said. Theo had been right. It was a resident of Old Harmonie who had picked it up on a trip outside. Only a handful of people were impacted, but Krita wouldn’t release their villages or where they worked.

  Theo sat next to me on the bus into Center Harmonie, Julia behind us, and Benji and Ilana across the aisle from them. The teenagers sat in the back and DeShawn flicked Theo’s shoulder on his way down the aisle. “Still hanging out in the kiddie pool, huh, Staarsgard?”

  Theo bristled but didn’t say anything.

  “Why don’t you hang out with them?” I asked as the bus began to roll.

  “Trying to get rid of me?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “It’s just that you’ll be in high school with them now, so—”

  “They’re stupid,” he said. “All they do is sit around talking trash. Trash about girls. Trash about their nonexistent athletic prowess. Trash about their parents and this village and everything.”

  Julia covered her ears. “I shall hear no evil about DeShawn.”

  Theo’s face had turned a little pink as he spoke, and I decided to drop it. In the back, the teenagers were throwing rolled-up pieces of paper at one another, so I thought maybe he was right—they were just stupid.

  Julia popped her head over the seat. “I like your shirt,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She rubbed her nose. “Things got a little crazy at your house, and—”

  “I know,” I said. “But my parents said it was okay.”

  “Really?” Her smile filled her face. “I was so worried, I couldn’t even sleep or eat or run or anything. I thought they weren’t letting you out because you were grounded for a hundred million years.”

  “No, it was just them being over-worried. You know how they are.”

  “Sure,” she said. “But I really was afraid we weren’t ever going to see you again, and I wouldn’t be able to tell you I was sorry, and then maybe I would get the mumps and die. Or you would get it, and you would never know how sorry I was.”

  “That was never in a million years going to happen,” Theo said.

  But I said, “Thanks, me too.”

  “So we’ve been thinking about going back to number nine, to see what else we can find,” she said.

  “But we wanted to wait for you,” Benji said.

  “We were going to come and rescue you today if your parents didn’t let you out, and we were all going to go together,” Julia said. “But then this came up. But you can come with us tomorrow, right?”

  “I think so,” I said. My parents were still wary, and a trip to number 9 might be tricky the way they’d been watching me. Which didn’t mean I didn’t want to get back there. “I had a lot of time to read that notebook of Dr. Varden’s. She was really worried about the bees—that’s what she wrote about mostly, anyway. But I got the sense that she was worried about this whole place.”

  “Why?” Benji asked.

  “I don’t know. She said it was changing—that they were changing it. She even mentioned my great-grandmother.”

  “What did she say?” Julia asked.

  “Just that Baba was pushing for more manipulation of the bees, but she—Agatha—she wasn’t so sure.”

  “Do you think that’s why she left?” Julia asked.

  I shrugged. I didn’t feel quite so angry with Agatha anymore. Reading her journal made me feel close to her, and now I was more worried than mad. “Do you think she asked them to keep her house the same because she planned to come back?”

  “I guess it’s possible,” Julia said.

  But Theo said, “Doubtful.”

  “I just want more of that honey,” Benji said. “I think I’m addicted.”

  “You can’t be addicted to honey,” Julia said. “Especially not after only eating it once.”

  “I was speaking metaphorically. My body does not feel like it needs honey to function. It’s more like a craving. Like my body is saying, ‘Yo! Honey! Get in my belly!’ Just like that.”

  “I think you need to get your head examined,” Theo told him.

  The whole time we spoke, Ilana stared out the window. “What’s with her?” I asked.

  Benji shrugged, and Theo said, “The lockdown kind of shook her for some reason. She’s been quiet.”

  “The acquisition of knowledge is our highest calling,” Ilana said.

  Benji looked over his shoulder at her, and Julia giggled.

  “Hmm?” Ilana said.

  “What did you just say?” Julia prompted. “About knowledge?”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Ilana said. She turned to look at us. Her face was flat and smooth, like a doll’s.

  “Sure you did,” Benji said. “You said that the acquisition of knowledge is our highest calling.”

  “I didn’t,” Ilana said, still expressionless.

  “Maybe you were thinking it, but didn’t realize you said it out loud?” I said, trying to make my voice kind.

  “See? Totally weird,” Theo muttered. I elbowed him.

  “Maybe,” Ilana said. “Anyway, I think we’re here.”

  We lined up from youngest to oldest. Julia had to hold her little brother, Caron. He’d never been very good at getting shots. “We can do it at the same time, maybe,” she suggested.

  “Mary,” the first nurse called to the second one. “Take this one.” The first grabbed another syringe before scanning their eyeballs. “Energy a little low?” he asked Julia.

  “I feel fine,” Julia replied.

  “In bed by eight tonight. I’ll message your parents.”

  Julia scowled, but there was nothing she could do about it. The nurses stood on either side of Julia and Caron and pricked them in unison. Julia bit her lip but didn’t complain. Caron started crying immediately.

  The nurses got through the rest of the little ones, and then it was my turn. The nurse scanned my eyeball and made some notes on her tablet. “Please don’t say I have to be in bed by eight o’clock, too,” I joked. “I’ve been cooped up since the lockdown.”

  “It wasn’t a lockdown,” the nurse said. Her hair was pulled up so tightly it yanked the edges of her eyes back. “It was simply a precautionary measure.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Your father should have explained it to you,” she added.

  “He was a little busy.”

  She looked up from her tablet. “Yes, of course, Mori. Now then.” She selected a syringe from a different tray than she had for the others. This one had a blue band around it.

  “Um,�
� I began. “Is that—”

  “What’s the problem, Mori?” she asked.

  “It’s just that it’s different from everyone else’s.”

  The nurse pointed over to Benji, who was about to be pricked by the second nurse. His had a blue band as well. “There are slightly different variations based on individual biology. This is the one you need.” Her voice was clipped and sharp and made it perfectly clear that I was being rude.

  “Sorry.”

  It seemed to me that she took a certain pleasure from driving the syringe deep into my arm, where the pain bloomed like a bruise below my skin. I winced, but I wasn’t about to let her see me cry. “Thank you.”

  Next to me, Benji yelled out, “Holy holy he—”

  “An ice pack is available,” his nurse said, and gestured to a bin.

  “I’m good,” he whispered.

  Next up was Ilana. The nurse scanned her eyeballs and then said, “You’re all up-to-date. Must have done it at Calliope.”

  “Calliope?” Ilana asked. “Back in California?”

  “Yes, of course,” the nurse said.

  “Lucky,” Benji said, still rubbing his arm.

  Ilana looked at the nurse a moment longer, and then at the tray of syringes.

  “This way,” I said, and we walked out of the inoculation room together. My arm ached like I’d been stung one last time by a yellow jacket, but all I could think about was how far away Ilana seemed.

  18

  Some days start out bad, but that’s okay because you have the rest of the day for things to get better. So, sure, we got shots in the morning, but we had the whole afternoon to play and swim and for Ilana and me to check on Oakedge. That’s what I was ready for. But then the grown-ups decided that while we were there we ought to do our yearly fitness test. Julia grinned at this news—she always got the top honor—but I scowled. I hated the fitness test.

  We were ushered into locker rooms and given our uniforms of shorts and T-shirts. “It seems unfair to do this after vaccinations,” I said, rubbing my arm.

  “Ah, buck up,” Julia said, still smiling. “Anyway, the only thing it will really affect is the pull-ups, and you’ve never done one of those anyway.”

  “Gee, thanks. Your support is amazing.”

  Ilana tightened the laces on her sneakers. “I don’t think we had to do this in Calliope.”

  “What do you mean?” Julia asked. “It’s national. They do it at all the Kritopias. I was a top ten finisher last year.”

  They used to do this fitness test all over the country and called it the President’s Challenge. But nothing was standardized. Some kids ran the mile outside, others did loop after loop in a school gym—and even then the measurements were up to the physical education teachers. It’s much fairer now.

  “I guess I’m just forgetting.”

  Julia made a looping motion with her finger next to her head.

  “Has she really been like this all week?” I whispered.

  Julia nodded.

  We filed out of the locker room and met the boys who were waiting there. Theo was talking with the teenage boys from the bus, as if they hadn’t teased him and he hadn’t called them stupid.

  “Whoa,” Julia said. She grabbed my hand.

  The shorts and T-shirts that we were given were tighter than what any of us normally wore, especially the boys. With the teenagers you could see the outlines of the muscles on their chests, stomach, and arms. What was surprising was that Theo, too, had these lines and contours.

  “When did that happen?” Julia murmured.

  I tried to think back. Even when we went swimming, I hadn’t noticed. I felt myself flushing.

  “Like, give me your glasses. I think something is wrong with my retina if I’m actually thinking that Theo is attractive.”

  “Come on,” I said, tugging her into line far away from him. None of this was going to help me succeed on the test.

  Benji was given an inhaler by one of the trainers and took two long puffs through a spacer. “Just some performance-enhancing drugs,” he quipped to us.

  Ilana looked confused. “Should I have some, too?”

  “No.” Benji laughed. “I have asthma. I can’t do the run without it. You, I bet, are just fine.”

  And she was. The girls started on the pull-up bar, where, as predicted, I could not manage even one pull-up. So the trainers timed how long I could hold on. Forty-five seconds. “Better than last year,” one said, her voice dry like fall leaves. I looked into her eyes. Sometimes I really wondered if they were replacing the trainers with androids. She blinked. Human. Just an unfeeling human.

  Julia grunted through seven. “Same as last year,” the trainer said, and marked something on her tablet.

  “I can do more,” Julia said. “Let me try again.”

  But Ilana was already up to the bar. She grabbed it and began doing pull-ups, five right in a row before her pace slowed slightly. Six, seven, eight, nine. She kept her knees bent behind her and stared straight ahead. Ten, eleven, twelve. I suppose it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Some of the boys who were waiting to do the shuttle run turned and looked at her. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Next to me Julia kicked at the padded ground. Nineteen, twenty. The trainer held her stylus above the tablet. Even she looked surprised. Twenty-one, twenty-two. And then she dropped. And everybody clapped.

  And so it went through the shuttle run, a devious test where you have to run back and forth picking up and dropping off blocks. I imagined my dad did tests like this on the animals in his lab. Ilana did it like it was nothing, bending over to pick up and put down the blocks in smooth, simple motions, like a speed skater going around the track.

  The sit-and-reach was my personal strength, probably because Mom and Dad had done yoga with me ever since I was a baby; we named all the poses after animals. But even that, Ilana dominated.

  Julia’s mood got darker and darker. We headed for the treadmills last. They were arranged in rows and columns, like desks in an old-fashioned classroom. I was in the last row, an empty treadmill next to me. Ilana was right in front of me, with Julia next to her. I saw Julia glance over at Ilana and grit her teeth. This was war.

  The trainers started us all at once with a switch on their tablets. Each treadmill measured our stride, heart rate, and more, and also gave updates as to how far we had run.

  I had a strategy that I’d developed over the years: First, look at the screen and only at the screen. A little red dot flashed across it. I pretended it was me, jogging across the field in our village, or through Firefly Lane at night when everyone else was sleeping. When I looked at that dot, I could imagine a whole world around me: where I would go, who I would meet, what we would talk about. It didn’t make me go any faster, but I didn’t get flustered. And anyway, I was never going to be the fastest.

  “That’s your top speed?” Ilana asked Julia. Her poofy ponytail bounced up and down with each stride.

  “Zip it, Ilana,” Julia said back. She huffed a little as she spoke, but I noticed her feet were moving faster. “I’m going to set a new record. Again.”

  “Bring it,” Ilana said.

  At least Ilana was starting to sound like herself again. I couldn’t see her face, but Julia grinned.

  My own pace was slowing. I had to concentrate on my screen.

  I was building up a whole story about jogging over to Julia’s to go for a swim, when, unbidden, my subconscious put Theo next to me. I increased my pace and tried to erase him. “Hey,” mind-Theo said. I shook my head and stumbled a little, but I kept my pace. With effort I put Julia next to me. She walked to keep pace with my jogging, and I imagined her telling me a funny story about her brother. Much better. My pace slowed.

  A sudden tumbling crash broke me from my reverie. In front of me, Ilana was falling forward. She grabbed the side bars of the treadmill, and righted herself, then began running again. A trainer was upon her in a minute. “I’m fine,” Ilana growled. “Jus
t lost concentration.”

  Beside her, I thought I saw Julia smile.

  The trainer made a note on her tablet, but I couldn’t see what it said.

  Julia’s feet started racing faster, and Ilana hurried to keep up. Faster and faster the two girls ran, and I found my own pace quickening as I watched their feet. I checked my progress. Seven-tenths of a mile. They must be nearly done. My heart beat faster, not with the effort, but with anticipation. This was what it felt like to be in a race. It was exhilarating! I pushed my legs harder.

  A trainer came to me. “Watch your pace, Mori,” she said. “Don’t worry about anyone else.” I had never heard a trainer speak so kindly.

  I was pondering this, and what it meant, when there was first one crash, then another, and another. All the girls in the row in front of me were falling, one after the other. It was like someone had come and pulled their feet out from under them. There were screams and grunts, and one trainer even dropped her tablet as they all ran from different points of the room. I heard someone crying.

  “Over here!” a trainer yelled.

  “Someone get some ice!”

  Julia clutched her knee as she sat on the unmoving treadmill, and Ilana rubbed her head. “What—” I began.

  “Keep running,” the trainer nearest to me said, back to business as usual. She dropped down next to Julia.

  My feet kept moving while I tried to make sense of what was happening. I had never seen anything like it. How on earth did they all fall down at the same time? But there they were, the whole row, sitting on the floor or the edges of their treadmills. One girl who’d been in my class at school and who prided herself on being the toughest kid in the village, she held her elbow while she cried without making a sound.

  There was a trainer for every girl in the row. They squatted down in front of the girls, scanned them. They gave them ice and acetaminophen for the pain. And then the trainers helped the girls to their feet and led them from the room while the rest of us thump, thump, thumped along on our treadmills.

  Every girl in that row was taken care of. Every girl except Ilana.