SHAW HAD AN announcement for us at the end of class on Monday.
“Congratulations on the end of your second week as candidates,” he said, smiling through his beard. He looked worn out and wrinkled around the edges, but his smile was genuine. “Phase Two of your training starts tomorrow. Somebody is going to come collect you immediately after breakfast every morning for a little outside-the-classroom training.”
“The Vomit Comet?” asked Sarnai, number fifteen, a ruddy-cheeked girl from Mongolia.
Shaw only smiled. “I’m not sure. They don’t tell me any more than they tell you. But this is probably our last class, at least for this week. Whoever comes to get you will hand out your new schedules. Good luck, and Godspeed.”
Shaw stood beside the door as we left. I stopped, and he smiled and held out his hand. I shook it. Emilio did, too, but went a step further and embraced him.
“Keep up the good work,” Shaw said, and then his eyes shifted over, as if he meant that for me, too.
“That’s wild,” Emilio said as we walked together to the cafeteria. “No more class. We’re really about to get out there and do actual astronaut stuff.”
“Yeah,” I said, but I was hardly listening. Blood was rushing loud in my ears. I had only myself to blame for my poor ranking. Before, I had always been number one. I wasn’t working hard enough. The weekend had been a prime studying opportunity, and now I’d wasted it relaxing outside with my friends.
Time to cut out distractions.
Mitsuko appeared on my other side. “Did you hear?”
I let Emilio and Mitsuko talk to each other across me. Suddenly I felt like Hanna, and I realized: she’d been pulling away from us for days. Maybe this whole time. She’d been distant, and I hadn’t understood that she had obviously come here with more resolve than I had.
Making friends, making allies—it was a waste of time. Her rank proved it.
But then, Emilio was higher than all of us, and it seemed like he was friends with every single person here. He knew everyone’s first name, not just their rank, and he waved to everyone we passed in the halls.
Two completely opposite strategies.
Which was the correct path?
Someone tapped on the side of my head. “Earth to Cass. Are you going to actually pick something for lunch or just stare at it?” It was Mitsuko.
I snapped back to life and realized that we had made it to the cafeteria and I was holding up the buffet line. I threw some sandwiches on my plate and slopped some kind of side dish next to them and quickly caught up with Mitsuko.
Our usual table was taken, so we sat with three candidates who were lower ranked than us.
Emilio looked at me strangely. “You gonna eat those?”
“You’re already poaching my food? You haven’t even eaten yours yet.”
He looked confused. “No, I mean—I thought you were veggie, that’s all.”
I looked down at the sandwiches. Ham. I groaned and plunked them onto Emilio’s plate before heading back over to the buffet.
Earth to Cass. Wake up, Cass.
Six thirty in the morning. All of us candidates—the eighteen that were left—stood around an Olympic-size swimming pool. Waiting.
We were all wearing the black, skintight Space Activity Suits, or SASs, that we’d studied in class. I’d had to strip down to nothing in the bathroom, and it took me about twenty minutes and, eventually, the help of two aides to squeeze myself into the thing. They were like wet suits, except the material was different: it was at least half an inch thick, and incredibly flexible, with a minuscule honeycomb pattern only barely visible in the shifting light. It was constrictive, necessarily so in order to maintain pressurization in a vacuum.
I examined my hands: the material there was fantastic. Thinner, but just as strong, with whorls that mimicked my own natural fingerprints. I ran my fingertips up and down my arms, expecting to feel nothing but the distant plasticky sensation I was used to from wearing gloves in biology lab. But it wasn’t like that at all. The rubber ridges on the suit’s fingertips translated sensation to my skin.
“This is wicked cool,” Emilio whispered in my ear, his voice full of reverence. I had to agree.
No one dared speak louder than a whisper. Nervous anticipation seemed to put people deep into their own heads.
A loud, metallic echo made every head turn, but it was only a door opening. The colonel and Ms. Krieger marched in with a few techs in blue flight suits. Behind them trailed two people in scuba gear.
“Welcome to the Neutral Buoyancy Lab,” Ms. Krieger said as the last click of her heels on the cement echoed around us. The safety divers slipped into the pool wordlessly, shattering the calm surface and sending ripples licking at the pool’s edge. “Today will be your first simulated experience of weightlessness. Though there are no planned space walks for this mission, you need to be prepared for anything. I assume most of you have been in a pool before. This is more of an introduction to the new generation of space suit technology and orienting yourself in four dimensions.” She paused. “You were given a series of tasks to memorize last night. Today you will complete those tasks, as well as a few that are unfamiliar to you, in our underwater sim lab. You will be ranked by the times it takes you to finish and accuracy of tasks completed.”
We all peered down into the water. I saw something under the shimmering surface. Something very large and white, sitting at the bottom of the pool. Fifteen, maybe twenty feet under.
“You’ll each be tested individually. Do I have any volunteers to go first?”
My hand shot up before my brain even realized what was happening. Luka’s arm was a millisecond too late.
Ms. Krieger focused on me, followed by everyone else. My heart was suddenly banging the inside of my rib cage. “Good. Come here, and we’ll get you suited up.”
I stepped forward. I felt Luka’s side-eye as I passed him, and hid the smug smile that I felt. Ha! Finally, something you didn’t win.
Colonel Pierce went to a rack on the wall and came back with a large helmet for me. One of the techs slipped straps over my shoulders, and then I felt the weight of an air tank on my back. I methodically repeated the pattern of tasks I’d memorized last night, mouthing the instructions from the text.
The colonel looked me dead in the eye. I’d never stood so close to him. He was taller up close. I could see the crinkles around his eyes and the white scruff of a day-old beard, and smell his faintly old-man smell . . . and the air of a man who had seen Earth as nothing more than a distant pale dot in an alien sky. “If you breathe normally, you have an hour and a half of nitrox, but it shouldn’t take that long,” he said. “Check this gauge to see how much is left. Come back when you have ten minutes left, finished or not. I know how you overachievers are. Just remember, if you drown, you’re not going into space.”
I smiled, feeling both cocky and nervous. “Duly noted.”
The colonel huffed and slid the helmet over my head, and suddenly everything went very quiet and fish-tank-like. There were a few minutes of tugging as they adjusted everything. After a second, I heard the whoosh of the air pump kick in, and my helmet filled with the metallic smell of room-temperature nitrox.
The colonel tapped his wrist, reminding me of the time limit. Then I was helped down the ladder and into the water.
I expected it to be cold. But of course, I felt nothing. This suit was insulated for space. Maybe now I knew what a molting snake felt like, covered in a layer of skin that was no longer really part of myself.
As soon as I reached the objective, I was over the novelty of it and completely focused. Now I could see that the strange white object was like a massive, elongated igloo, with a tunnel opening at opposite ends of the sphere. The weight on my back was only enough to keep me underwater, not bear me to the floor, so I pushed off the wall with my toes and swam into the entrance of the tunnel.
It was a tight fit inside, and darker than I’d imagined. Unbelievably eerie, to float in a world of silence and darkness, closed in all around. Dim lights and buttons glowed, interspersed in the arch above my head. My elbows hit the walls. I could barely see. I had no flashlight.
Focus.
The tasks were simple, almost babyish. Turn four red knobs 180 degrees. I found them. That unlocked two yellow levers; pull the right first, then the left. I became a robot, methodical and mindless. When I finished the tasks in the mouth of the igloo, I floated down farther into the dome. The space opened up wide.
Here it became more complicated. My sense of up and down was obliterated. They’d purposely mirrored the floor beneath me so I instantly became disoriented. Lights above my head, or beneath my feet? Which was real? No, I thought. Don’t look down. Don’t think, just do.
Now everything was a puzzle. They hadn’t prepared us for this section. What combination of colored buttons would open the smooth metal door that led to the next set of tests? I hit them in rainbow order, then reverse, then alphabetically—and it opened. Next.
They were simple patterns, but they required a clear head and a logical progression of thought. They were probably counting on disorientation and fear to delay us. But I’d pushed the fear away until it was nothing more than fog pressing against a glass door, too weak to get inside.
I’d been scuba diving more than once on family vacations to the Gulf; there were divers in the water in case I had a problem; there was nothing to be afraid of. I just needed to stay calm and concentrate.
I finished the last puzzle, releasing the door that led to freedom. A rush of pleasure warmed me. I’d done it perfectly. And according to the oxygen readout, in plenty of time.
I swam out the other end of the igloo and surfaced near the wall. Two assistants helped lug me up; the tank on my back was a lot heavier than I remembered it being.
They took off my helmet and it was as though I was suddenly alive again, as if I’d waken abruptly from a dream, and sights and sounds were too bright and loud to handle. I blinked stupidly a few times.
Emilio caught my eye and gave me a half grin. Other candidates watched me anxiously. Luka had apparently volunteered as the next one up. He stood beside the pool, looking down at the sphere, and didn’t acknowledge me as I passed.
Water slopped from my suit onto the cement floor as I readjusted to the feeling of sound waves hitting my eardrums again.
“Not bad to lead us off,” Ms. Krieger said, looking at a stopwatch. “Fifteen minutes.”
That was all? It’d felt like an hour.
One of the assistants led me off to get changed back into normal clothes. The woman had to literally peel the suit off me.
As soon as it was gone I felt like a turtle with its shell missing, cold and vulnerable and my body too light. It wasn’t until I put my clothes back on that I realized my heart rate was back to normal. And it was a letdown. Like the feeling you’d get after riding a roller coaster—all I wanted was the chance to do it again, to feel that exhilaration.
The assistant let me go back and sit with the other candidates who were waiting for their turn. “As long as you don’t talk about the test.”
“Of course not.”
I sat down next to Emilio, who nodded at me and tried to smile, but didn’t talk. His knee was bouncing like he’d just ingested a gallon of sugar water. Hanna was on the far side of him. She stared straight ahead, still as stone.
There was a brief intermission while the divers in the water reset the simulation. I watched Luka surreptitiously, already suited up with everything but his helmet. He sat alone at the other end of the bench, elbows on knees, hands clasped together. His eyes watched the water intently. A muscle in his jaw jumped.
Was he nervous?
When the divers signaled the okay, the colonel helped Luka fit his helmet over his face and Luka slipped into the water with barely a ripple. I counted the minutes.
“Twelve minutes, seven seconds,” Colonel Pierce announced as Luka’s head broke the surface again.
Damn that guy.
The next two were slower, but Mitsuko nearly beat me, coming within two seconds of my time. When she came back from changing clothes, she whispered to me, “Just luck. My head was spinning in that dome so bad I actually swam into the floor twice.”
Emilio did slightly worse, and so did the next few after him. They were averaging about twenty minutes. I was trying hard to hide the grin that was fighting its way out. This is the beginning of my rise to first place.
Hanna’s turn. She looked pale and sick as the colonel slipped the helmet over her head, and then I couldn’t see her face anymore. She climbed down the ladder, slipped beneath the surface of the water, and was gone.
And she was gone a long time. Twenty, maybe thirty minutes.
“Something’s wrong,” Emilio whispered to me.
“No way,” I mouthed. But I was worried. I nudged Mitsuko. She shook her head and shrugged, apparently not concerned.
Maybe ten more minutes went by, until she was officially in last place. The colonel and Ms. Krieger whispered to each other. Pierce looked at a small device in his hands that I realized must’ve been a remote sensor—maybe checking her air levels, her vitals, maybe even a video feed. I caught the words “almost out” and didn’t know if that meant she was almost finished, or about to run out of nitrox. His grave demeanor indicated the latter.
Finally, the colonel nodded at the two safety divers in scuba suits who hung on to the pool wall. “Go get her.”
The divers slipped beneath the water, two black, wavering forms beneath the blue. Emilio stood and moved to the edge of the pool, and I followed as if drawn by a magnet.
Nothing bad had happened. Not to Hanna. She was a machine. This was so simple! Hanna wouldn’t have screwed it up. She couldn’t.
Suddenly I realized I was holding Emilio’s hand. I don’t know who reached out first. Mitsuko grabbed my other hand and clutched it tight. We were like a chain, holding on to one another as if hope could make Hanna be okay. Even Luka, though stone-faced as usual, was peering over the edge of the pool with the rest of us, a line of concern etched in his brow.
It seemed like forever before the shimmering black shapes came back into view. I peered hard into the water, trying to count them.
Somehow I felt it—all three of our bodies releasing a breath as Hanna surfaced, braced by the two divers on either side.
The colonel helped pull her over the side of the pool, and with his help, Hanna ripped her helmet off. She collapsed on the concrete in a puddle of water, gasping.
“What happened?” Colonel Pierce demanded.
Hanna just shook her head, her breath coming in wheezes.
“Get her up,” the colonel said to the two assistants. “Walk her to the clinic. Next volunteer!”
The assistants picked Hanna up by her arms and half led, half dragged her away. Her watering blue eyes flitted toward me for a millisecond, and then she dropped her head and looked away. It was enough time for me to see the dejection in her face and the bloodless pale of her lips.
In the quiet after the door shut behind them, I realized awkwardly that I was still holding Emilio’s hand, and let go. He didn’t seem to notice. His face was still filled with concern, eyes watching the door where Hanna had gone.
When the last candidate came up for air, I was ranked third in the times. Luka and the Russian guy Boris had beaten me.
We were sent back to our rooms. No evening classes. Instead, we were doing psych evals. Mitsuko had hers right after lunch, so I was alone in my room when Emilio knocked.
“Hey,” he said, and for some reason he hugged me when I opened the door. He pulled away, hands still holding my elbows. “Let’s go see Hanna.”
“I think this is it,” he said, rounding the corner and pushing through an unmarked door. The door swung behind us and softly clicked shut, and I felt the air rush out of the room.
A girl sat alone on a narrow hospital bed. One who looked nothing like the Hanna I knew.
She wore white scrubs—probably the nurses’ spare—that hung like a tent from her narrow frame. Her blond hair was wet at the ends, scraggly, hanging on both sides of her face in limp, loose waves. Her skin was nearly the color of the scrubs. The only color was in the red rims around her eyes and the blue tint of the veins beneath her skin. She sat hunched over. She didn’t move a muscle, even when we came in.
I didn’t know what to do. She looked ghostly and somehow dangerous, like a wounded predator.
Emilio left my side and approached the bed. “Hey. How are you?”
He sat beside her. Hanna shifted a little but otherwise didn’t move.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, coming closer. I might have guessed what the matter was, but a screwup on a test shouldn’t have freaked her out this bad. There must be something else. I tried putting a hand on her shoulder and she flinched away from me.
“We were really worried about you,” Emilio said, his voice mingling both sincerity and annoyance.
Hanna’s face became an ugly expression of disgust, intense as a solar flare. Then it was gone.
Emilio stood up, his voice angry. “Hey, don’t take your anger at yourself out on us. We’re your friends. We just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
Hanna scoffed. “We’re not friends. We’re competitors. And I just lost, okay? I don’t need you coming in here to gloat. It’s kind of humiliating. So just get away from me.”
I stepped away. We weren’t friends? Fine. Anyone who could reject a friendship like Emilio’s—sincere and freely given—was certainly not worth mine.
Emilio apparently didn’t feel that way. “Shut up,” he said. “I don’t deserve that, and neither does Cassie. We’ve never been anything but supportive to you. So what, you flub one test. You burn your bridges so you can wallow in self-loathing? That’s really how you’re choosing to deal with this?”
“Who cares about your score?” I said, trying halfheartedly to follow Emilio’s lead. “You finished it, didn’t you?” Awkwardly, I reached out but then changed my mind, my hand hovering in midair before retreating behind my back.
She shot me a withering stare and then snapped at Emilio. “Don’t you get it? I’m out. That test was not about solving puzzles or pushing buttons, it was to see how we react under pressure. And I just showed them how completely, utterly shitty I am at it. I panicked. I couldn’t even find my way out of that damn igloo. There’s no way they’re going to put me in a rocket after this.”
“Are they kicking you out?” I asked quietly.
She shrugged and looked away, her anger suddenly gone, leaving her almost visibly deflated. “No one has told me anything. But what does it matter? I might as well go home. I’ll definitely be in the bottom now, anyway.”
“Do you want to stay?” Emilio’s voice had gone quiet and low. I hadn’t realized how deep his serious voice was.
Hanna stared at the tile a long time. I was about to grab Emilio and get the hell out of there when she finally answered, her voice a ghost. “Yeah.”
Emilio crossed his arms. “Then act like it.”
He turned around and left the room.
I hurried to catch up with Emilio out in the hall. “Why do you even bother with her?”
He didn’t look at me. In fact, he seemed deflated, his hands limp at his sides, all the fire from a second ago extinguished. He stopped walking and stared at me until I shifted uncomfortably. “Why do I bother with her? Why do I bother with you, Cass? Or anyone here?”
It was like whiplash. I went stiff, my heart leaping into my throat.
Emilio’s brown eyes continued to evaluate me, and I didn’t like the person he was seeing. He spoke like I’d never heard him speak before. “Do you ever think about what other people are going through? You and Hanna, you’re like the same person. Not a lot of differences there. Same ruthless, win-all-or-die-trying attitude. Except she just found out something about herself that might mean the end of her dream. Forever. Maybe try some empathy.”
I was stunned, silenced, embarrassed. “You didn’t exactly mince your words back there.”
“Sometimes it’s necessary.”
“Well, why is it your job to motivate her? Why do you care if she leaves?”
A muscle in his jaw jumped, as if there were words he was biting back. His eyes shot down the hall and returned to me. “Maybe, Cass, you should ask yourself why you don’t care.”
And he walked away.