NAOMI
I DON’T GET TO SAY GOOD-BYE TO MY FRIENDS OR TEACHERS. I don’t even get the honor of cleaning out my own locker. As soon as the press conference ends, the NASA-appointed guard whisks me and my family away from the auditorium and off school property, citing “crowd concerns.” I glance over at my brother while the guard, Thompson, ushers us toward the elevated train. What will we do without each other? I can barely stomach the thought.
When we were little kids, I used to constantly refer to Sam as “mine,” and I guess I never really shook the feeling. Maybe it’s because I used some of my first words to beg our parents for a sibling, or because they let me pick out his name. Maybe it’s the nights I sat up late at his bedside, studying charts that I swiped from our doctor’s office as I tried to hack the code of his DNA—tried to understand how two kids of the same genetic makeup could be born with desperately different hearts. I promised him I wouldn’t rest until he was better, that we would never be apart. But now I’m breaking my promise. I’m leaving him.
My body turns cold as I imagine what could happen while I’m away. Sam is stable now, but it’s the unpredictability of his heart defect that makes it so terrifying. You never know when his body will reject the current medication, when he’ll need to be rushed to the hospital and put through another invasive, short-term fix to stave off heart failure—
“Hey.” Sam grabs my arm as we approach the train platform. “Remember what you always say: no problem has ever been solved by panicking.”
I smile in spite of myself. My brother has once again read my thoughts.
“You’re going to have enough to think about in the coming days,” he continues. “You can’t be worrying about me, too.”
“I can’t help it. It’s what I do when it comes to you.” My smile fades as I look at Sam, his sweatshirt practically hanging off of him. Even though I’ve been forcing him to take my extra meal portions, he still looks somehow thinner than yesterday. “There is just no way I can go—”
Sam stops me from finishing my sentence, elbowing me in the ribs and nodding at the guard. Thompson is to our right, his head cocked in our direction even as he answers a question of Dad’s.
I know why my brother is being so careful. We’ve all been warned that resisting the draft is the surest way to land in prison. I can’t afford to let anyone involved with NASA think of me as anything other than obedient—even when it’s the last thing I feel.
The train comes rumbling across the tracks toward us, looking eerily empty without the after-school hordes. Sam and I climb in first, heading for our usual spot in the third car, but Thompson insists on us cramming into the front with the conductor, for “security purposes.” It’s a silent and stiff ride home, none of us able to say anything real with a guard listening in. I turn my face to the window, feeling a flash of longing for the days when we had the privacy of our own car. Most countries outlawed all motor vehicles after climate change was declared an international emergency, but by then it was too late. The gas emissions had already played their role, to devastating effect.
As the train rattles forward, I watch the sights go by, drinking in every dreary image—just in case today is the last chance I’ll get to see my city. Then again, it’s not really my city, not anymore. This place is just a sad imposter, only pretending to be Los Angeles.
From Burbank to Los Feliz, the number of families on the streets seems to swell. They huddle together on unpaved roads slick with mud, they cower under downed power lines, as they beg the passersby for something, anything. I want to close my eyes—but every day I force myself to look, to see them.
The train curves around a bend, and now we’re traveling over the Hollywood Hills, where there’s no longer any flashy Hollywood sign to serve as a beacon. Instead, there are houses and buildings covered with thick layers of ash, and deep crevices in the streets marking where the earthquakes hit.
“You’re lucky to be leaving.”
I turn sharply at the sound of Sam’s voice. He is staring out the window alongside me, his expression unreadable. He forces a smile when our eyes meet, and I shake my head, wishing I could reassure him that I don’t see it that way, that I’ll find a way back home. How could I ever abandon him, especially now? But Thompson is listening. Instead, I loop my arm through my brother’s and lean my head on his shoulder. We don’t speak, but we stay close as the train hurtles toward home.
That night, while Thompson holds back the growing crowd of spectators outside our duplex, the four of us pile onto the couch in our combined living room/kitchen, planning to drown out the noise with TV. Dad flicks on the remote, and my stomach lurches at the face filling the screen. It’s me.
“Ho-ly crap!” Sam exclaims.
“Our little girl,” Mom murmurs to Dad, her voice quivering.
It’s the footage from today’s press conference. My skin turns hot as I watch myself onstage beside Dr. Anderson, looking woefully unprepared for my primetime debut in a worn pair of jeans and turquoise hoodie, my dark hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. A close-up reveals the beads of perspiration on my forehead, the panicky expression in my eyes. I have the urge to crawl under the couch cushions and hide, but thankfully, the image on the screen quickly shifts from me to the Newsline desk as anchor Robin Richmond faces the camera.
“There she is, folks: one of our American finalists and a two-time World Science Fair champion, Naomi Ardalan.” Robin’s melodic voice dances across the syllables of my last name, and I shake my head in disbelief. “While she’ll be representing the US, Naomi is actually a second-generation American. Her grandparents emigrated here from Iran, and sources tell me Naomi’s interest in science and technology was spurred on by their stories from home, of the ancient Persians who invented algebra and hydrodynamics.”
“Not to mention al-Sufi, who only discovered the Andromeda Galaxy,” I say to the TV. Despite how weird this all is, I can’t deny the warm glow in my chest at hearing my grandparents mentioned, their influence on my life recognized.
“If they could see you now . . . ,” Mom says softly, and I squeeze her hand.
The graying anchorman Seymour Lewis takes the mic, his deep voice booming through the screen. “From the granddaughter of immigrants, we move on to a finalist whose family has been in the good ol’ USA since just about the Mayflower: Beckett Wolfe, also known as the nephew of the president of the United States.”
The footage flashes to the White House lawn, where a tall, muscular blond boy in a prep school uniform strolls beside President Wolfe. Dad and I exchange a glance. Back on the screen, Robin Richmond arches an eyebrow at her cohost.
“Smells a bit like nepotism, wouldn’t you say?”
“Hold on a second.” Seymour, the anchor known for flying to the president’s defense, sits up straighter. “You know as well as I do that NASA and the Europa Mission leaders had final say in choosing the American finalists. Not POTUS.”
“Right.” Robin gives him a condescending nod. “And it’s safe to say the president made his wishes abundantly clear: to have his own blood on the first Europan settlement. I wouldn’t be surprised if he gave NASA some real incentives to pick Beckett.”
“Oh, for crying out loud!” Seymour sputters, but Robin continues.
“I’ll grant you that Beckett Wolfe had to have met the basic criteria, but let’s be honest here: he is no Naomi Ardalan.”
“Damn, Sis!” Sam yells, thumping my back proudly. “You just showed up the First Nephew on national TV!”
I can’t help laughing, and for one brief moment, the mood among the four of us lightens. But then Robin turns back to the camera, a solemn expression on her face.
“When we return, two former astronauts who oppose the mission will join us to discuss the deadly risks these teenagers will face as they set out into space.”
At those words, all our smiles vanish. Sam and I exchange a grim look. He follows the Space Conspirator just like I do . . . and we can both guess what the astronauts are about to say.
“They always have to interview the naysayers. It doesn’t make them right,” Dad says, aiming for a breezy tone even as the shakiness in his voice gives him away.
“Let’s see what else is on,” I tell him. The last thing we need is to sit here in fear, listening to all the dangers I’m about to encounter.
He changes the channel to Breaking News Tonight just in time for a segment titled “The Twenty-Four: Why They Were Chosen.” Show anchor Sanford Pearce is settled in at his sleek glass desk, hands folded as he addresses the audience.
“From an Olympic medalist to the world’s youngest tech titan, tonight we introduce you to the twenty-four teenagers who are setting out on a galaxy-spanning journey to change all of our lives.”
A montage begins, set to a cinematic score. The strangers from today’s press conference return, but instead of a collection of faces, I now get to see snippets of them in action. A boy with dark skin and black curls leads an interviewer through a garage-turned-office, proudly showing off the app he created to predict incoming earthquakes. A red-haired girl dressed in a white lab coat stands in the center of a formal room, while the man I recognize as King William V of England taps a sword against her left shoulder and then her right in some kind of ceremonial gesture. An Asian boy pilots a plane over the ocean, swerving past another incoming aircraft and calling out instructions to a copilot who looks a good decade his senior. And then someone familiar takes the screen, a tall, tanned boy stepping up to a diving board. It’s the Italian finalist—the one who tried to comfort me.
Just as I’m peering closer, the footage fades, the montage ending on a split-screen image of me and Beckett Wolfe. My cheeks heat up in self-consciousness.
“Like most of you, we on the news team were especially curious about the American finalists, Beckett Wolfe and Naomi Ardalan,” Sanford Pearce says into the camera. “Since their names were revealed this morning, we had a chance to do some research on these two exemplary teens. Take a look.”
The images on the TV scroll back in time, back to the last Wagner World Science Fair. I’m caught off guard by the sight of my fifteen-year-old self. I look different . . . I look happy.
My idol, Dr. Greta Wagner, enters the frame and hands me a gilded trophy. It’s the moment forever memorialized in the framed photo on my desk, reminding me every day to work harder, to think big, like Wagner.
“Last year, Naomi blew us away with her DNA editing solution, an experimental method of hacking into and correcting a patient’s genomes. This year, she brings us another work of true ingenuity: the Ardalan radio telescope model, with its unique antenna and receiver design that would allow us to capture a clearer signal from other planets in our solar system.”
As Dr. Wagner unveils my blueprints on the screen, my parents and Sam cheer in real time, right along with their younger selves in the footage. I smile with them, though my pride is dampened by the fact that the telescope was never built. Same with my DNA editing solution, which I dreamed up for Sam. Once Earth entered the state of climate destruction, there were no more grants or funds left for anything that didn’t relate to our immediate survival.
“In fact,” Dr. Wagner continues in the footage, “this is the kind of invention the folks at SETI would have jumped over themselves to use.”
The great inventor and engineer purses her lips, her eyes darkening, and I know the reason for her soured expression. SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute—was defunded three months before the Wagner Science Fair. The scientific community protested the loss, but there was no way around it: NASA and the government had deemed the search for extraterrestrial life “nonessential” in these desperate times. And that’s precisely why the Final Six will be walking blindly into whatever is waiting on Europa—because unlike every previous space mission, there is no SETI to rule out the possibility of life.
My head snaps up.
I’ve just given myself an idea.
After saying goodnight to our parents, I grab my tablet and cross the hall from my pocket-size bedroom into Sam’s. I find him staring at a screen of his own, his brow furrowed with worry.
“What’s wrong? What are you looking at?”
I pull up a chair beside him at the desk, and he slides his laptop toward me. An article fills the screen, with the headline reading: “Athena Backup Crew Warns of Europa Risks.” At the center of the page is a photo of the surviving astronauts, hugging through their tears at the memorial for the doomed Athena crew five years ago. A chill creeps up my spine, and I quickly close the page.
“I know. I tried asking the NASA rep about it today, and she fed me the company line about how this mission will be completely different . . . but we have even more important things to talk about. Have you been on Space Conspirator today?”
Sam shakes his head and I log on to the site, which has a brand-new landing page since this morning’s announcement. Underneath the Conspirator logo is an artist’s sketch of six shadowy puppets, staring at a faceless creature rising up from the ocean—while a caricature of a man and woman, meant to represent the Europa Mission leaders, pull the puppet strings. As Sam shudders, I click on the website’s News tab and scroll, hunting for a certain article.
“That footage on TV gave me an idea—the part where Dr. Wagner mentioned SETI,” I tell him. “If I could prove it, if I could show the world that the Space Conspirator’s claims aren’t just the ravings of some renegade scientists, but the truth . . . well, that would change everything. It would bring me home.”
My cursor lands on the article I was looking for: “Scientific Probabilities of Life in Europa’s Oceans.” The Conspirator was right when it predicted the outcome of the Athena mission years ago. Why shouldn’t it be right this time, too—especially when science supports the theory? As my brother starts to read, I jump out of my chair, too fired up to sit still.
“I’ll go to Space Training Camp under the pretense of preparing for the Europa Mission—but in reality, I’ll be on a whole other mission of my own. I can use the Johnson Space Center tools at my disposal to finish the job that SETI never got to do. I’ll conduct my own search for extraterrestrial intelligence—focused solely on Europa.”
Sam turns around in his seat, watching me with raised eyebrows.
“If I can prove the theory that there is a high probability of intelligent life waiting for us, that would completely turn public opinion of the mission on its head.” I take a deep breath. “There is just no way world leaders would send us if they believed what I do. Especially when the president’s own nephew is involved.”
A slow smile spreads across my brother’s face.
“So you’re going to sabotage the mission from the inside?”
“I prefer the term ‘enlighten the public.’ But yeah.” I grin. “Certain people might call it sabotage.”
Sam reaches over to give me a fist bump.
“I like this plan. Go get ’em, Sis.”