Chapter Fourteen
FENN
The silence in the room is caustic, ready to scald anyone who dares speak.
I didn’t think that Hana had it in her to hit anyone. I didn’t think her capable of anger, and it makes me realize that Hana isn’t as weak as I’d thought she was. Her blood pulses red and hot, like mine. A lot like mine.
Portia lifts her chin to Hana and then to the door. She’s silently telling me to separate Hana and Miki, while Gammand is lying down, eyes closed, ready to sleep. Drama is not worth losing sleep over, apparently.
I gently push Hana toward the door, and reluctantly, she pulls her glance away from Miki’s own milk-curdling stare. Miki wipes her eyes when she thinks we’re not watching anymore. Before I’m out the door, I make eye contact with Miki and nod at her. Just a nod, to say I get why she’s mad, and I get why she’s scared. Miki shakes her head at me, not wanting to even think about it. She’ll be like an emotionless rock after this, for hours. She’d done this over and over on the Selkirk.
Once we’re in the hallway, I lead Hana away, and she lets me.
“I want to go back to my room,” she says, but I shake my head.
“We can’t. The area is too close to parts of Cyclo that aren’t safe. Maybe tomorrow we could go, after we test the areas, but not now. Not with the chance of being cut off from the rest of the crew.”
“I don’t care about being cut off from the crew.”
“Hana.”
She stops walking, forcing me to look at her.
“I don’t care.” Anguish transforms her face. “God, Fenn. I don’t care.”
She cries.
I don’t know what to say. Hana’s going through what I already have—saying goodbye to my family. Saying goodbye to sunrises on Ipineq, and the smell of red irises blooming at second twilight, and the taste of home-baked sweet crescents. I don’t know what to say, but I know what she feels.
I slip my hand into hers and start pulling her along, and after two tugs, she shuffles morosely behind me because she’s too defeated to resist. Several turns later, we find an abandoned corridor full of smaller rooms with tiny chairs and tables. These must be quarters for the children on Cyclo. Children like we once were, who Hana never met. I feel terrible, for her sake. For the people she’d never met, and the life she hasn’t had.
I want to complain about everything in the few short days left in my life, but God—at least I had a real life to live, in comparison. Granted, I don’t deserve to live it anymore, but still.
Once the door closes, I tell her, “We’ll sleep here.”
“I want to sleep in Cyclo.” She won’t look at me.
“You can’t. You heard what Portia said. It’s not safe.”
She starts wringing her hands, pacing the narrow space between the walls.
I don’t know what to say, so I add, “You should eat something.”
“I’m not hungry.” She finally crumples to the floor and wraps her arms around her knees.
I don’t know what to do. I’m completely unequipped to handle mourning of any kind. Even my own. So I just sit next to her, not quite touching her, not doing anything but rubbing my nose, which has been running ever since Hana heard the news. Like my nose is crying for the both of us, somehow.
Her toes wiggle delicately and stretch a little, digging into the floor. Cyclo’s matrix flits a few colors—gold and yellow—but then goes quiet. It almost seems like Cyclo’s too tired to chat. But I think it’s actually something else—like it doesn’t know what to say to her, either. Hana ends up tucking her feet over her knees, lotus style, so there’s no skin to skin contact with the floor. I guess she didn’t like what she heard from Cyclo, either. We end up sitting half a foot away from each other, aching from our hard run today, stiff with discomfort and the yawning quiet within Cyclo, within space.
I doze off but awaken to hear Hana quietly singing to herself. It’s a song I don’t recognize, something soothing, like a lullaby.
Dal-a, dal-a, balg eun dal a, li tai bai i nol deon dal a
Her eyes are closed, and the soothing singsong actually makes me feel heavier than a lead weight on a 3g planet.
Finally, sometime after midnight, when we’ve both dozed off sitting against the wall, I feel a slight bump. I blink sleepily to see Hana’s head has tipped over in unconsciousness and landed on my shoulder. She rouses herself to raise her head, but sleep overtakes her again in seconds and thump. Her temple lands on my shoulder again.
I put my arm around her, which is what I wanted to do before but was afraid to. I inch her down to the floor where her legs straighten out. She snuggles into the curve of my stomach and hips, and lets me curl my other arm over her hip. For the rest of the night, I wake up every half hour or so—the sleep of a person wholly unaccustomed to sharing bed space with a fellow creature—just to check on her. She has newly dried tracks of tears on her cheeks from when she’s awoken and cried herself back to sleep.
Once, I see it happen—her eyelids flutter, her mouth turns down, fresh tears slide to her temples and spill over onto the floor. The floor receives every drop that falls and then absorbs it so fast, as if to erase its existence, like greedy desert sand.
Finally, around five o’clock in the morning, I can’t sleep anymore. My arm is beyond numb from Hana using it as a pillow, and my legs are cramping. I’d sleep with her longer if I could because, honestly—I’ve never had the pleasure before, and I feel so much less alone.
Plus, I only have days to live. Even crampy spooning is better than being by myself. But then a voice enters my head, the voice that made me sign my contract with ReCOR, the voice that raged when I heard about Callandra’s accident.
You don’t deserve this life.
You don’t deserve these days, no matter how few they are.
And I look at Hana’s sleeping face, frowning in her slumber. I think of our kiss, and how that was a stolen bit of goodness that I didn’t deserve, either.
I gently extricate my arm from under her glossy black and white hair and get up. I stretch a long stretch and leave the room.
The ship is quiet. There’s always a hum in the background of machines running somewhere in the biowalls, but there’s something else that sounds strange. Dripping sounds, and a random, faint hiss of gas escaping. Not soothing at all. I open my holofeed to see whether I can safely enter northeast alpha. I can. It’s time to get to work.
Callandra comes first.
I take out my card of drones and program them for the next set of data retrievals. This one will be for microorganisms. I hope Cyclo lets me send them into her matrix. I launch about two dozen, but before they hit the matrix of the wall, I ask.
“Cyclo—may I send some of my bots into you? I don’t think it will hurt, and they’re just looking for bacteria. They won’t harm you.”
I wait, and a blue color, deeper than the blue I’m used to seeing, flashes in benevolent waves.
Well. I think that’s a yes.
With that, I watch as the wall puckers a dozen times while my drones enter her matrix surface. Visor on, I see them slowly traversing her matrix, some already picking up readings, and others going deeper into her endoplasm near the edge of the alpha ring. Later today, I’ll send a few more in beta, and then gamma. And then I’ll be back on schedule.
I leave Hana behind me and slowly make my way to her room. I want to call it her prison—that’s where she was trapped her whole life, after all—but she doesn’t seem to have the animosity toward it that I would have. After ten minutes of staring out the windows of the alpha ring on my walk, already bored by the sunrise of Maia over the curling mantle of the Calathus, I reach her room.
It’s strange to be here without her. I look at her belongings—the lacquer chest, the cooking utensils laid out neatly for someone to start preparing something. The lack of beds, and the tiny shelf of books. I read the titles—A Beginner’s Guide to Needlecraft; The Autonomous Farmer; Best Short Stories of Yi Kwang-Su—and shake my head. I was not a book reader, ever. Probably why I did so poorly in school. Every time someone told me a story was worthy and good, I acted like it was sour milk, like it might poison me somehow. I wasn’t that type of kid. And look where I am now.
“Why am I here?” I ask myself, forgetting why I’ve come to her room.
Oh, yeah. Food. I decided that maybe Hana wouldn’t eat our prepared food—perfectly healthy, but not what she likes—given the way she reacted to it yesterday. There’s a tiny pot, and the cookstove seems to have some old-fashioned knobs and such. But I’ve never used this kind of equipment.
“What do I do?”
Colors flash around me. Cyclo is functioning here, it seems. Huh. But I don’t know her color language, and the translators don’t work.
“I don’t understand, Cyclo. Can you…talk to me instead? Like you did before?”
There’s a beat, and then a mound forms on the wall. A hole forms in the mound, like a volcano cone collapsing. A bubble of air is drawn into the cone, and the cone edges form a crude mouth.
“What is your purpose?” the disembodied lips wheeze.
“Oh. Hi, there. Uh, my purpose? I want to cook Hana something. But I don’t know how to cook. I don’t know where to get the water…”
“You wish to feed my Hana?”
Her Hana? Who knew a ship could get so proprietary?
“Yes. Hana,” I say. “She seems like she would need some solid food. And you haven’t been well. We don’t know if your ability to give her nutrients is working all right.”
“No, I haven’t been well,” Cyclo wheezes. “Well. Well. Well,” she repeats. What is with her? “I should like to help you help Hana.”
“Thank you. You’ve always taken good care of her.”
“It is my directive,” Cyclo says. “Dr. Um told me to care for her, under any and all circumstances.”
Her words sound oddly like a threat. Without thinking, I tap on my leg:
.-- . .. .-. -..
Weird.
“Weird,” Cyclo says, interpreting my Morse code. “Am I so strange?”
I stiffen. It didn’t occur to me that she’d understand. I decide to ignore this fact. “Well, Cyclo, if you show me how to get some water, we can begin.”
“Allow me…” Cyclo wheezes and reverse burps, inhaling another bubble to speak. “To assist you.”
Step by step, Cyclo shows me how to extract water from the matrix, pouring it into the pot from a drip off the wall. Inside a cupboard are spices and soup-based powders. Some foods are freeze-dried or in precious, never-expiring packages. Nothing here is fresh, of course. I wonder where her mother ordered it from—and how old it all is—but I try to ignore that. Soon, I have a nice little cloudy-white soup bubbling on the stove. Cyclo supplies energy through a wireless cartridge on the back of the unit. There’s a tiny pot of hot, sticky white rice cooking next to the soup.
“Will you feed this to Hana?” Cyclo asks, via a different wall nearer to the stove.
“Yes. Well, she can feed herself, but I’ll makes sure she has some.”
“Thank you, Fennec Actias.”
“You know my name?” I ask, surprised. I thought Cyclo only answered questions in a precise way. She’s saying something she doesn’t have to. Huh.
“I know many things. I know what your name means.”
I pause.
My name. I’ve known that Fennec means fox, but my surname? I thought it had a Greek or Latin origin, but all that ever comes up on a search is some sort of moth. It’s very unexciting. My lineage is so mixed now that I’m not sure which great-great-grandparents it comes from. I’m a little bit Taiwanese, German, Spanish, Japanese, and Senegalese, last time I asked my parents.
“Actias is a genus of Saturniid moths,” Cyclo says. “It’s quite fitting.”
What, that I do my best work at night? I shrug, irritated. This is nothing new. And then it occurs to me—we’re really talking. Like, the way I would with another person. I wonder what it would be like to chat this way with the bacteria living in my gut. My reality shudders for a moment, and I smile at the walls. I like this ship a lot, I realize.
“I know other things. I know I am dying,” Cyclo says abruptly.
Goose bumps rise on my arms. For a long time, I say nothing, until I blurt out, “I know I’m going to die, too.”
I speak very slowly, choosing my words. “I…I can try.”
Cyclo says nothing. Is she worried for Hana? Could she be emotionally attached to a humanoid? I’d never heard of such a thing. And then, without prompting, Cyclo asks, “Fennec. Can you save me?”
I drop the cooking spoon on the stove. There is a plaintive quality to her voice that catches me by surprise. In that split second, I understand exactly what she’s feeling. Life is leaving her, parcel by parcel, just as my own days and minutes are numbered. It’s the desperation of knowing your very ability to see, think, feel, cry, scream—will be winked out without so much as a fireworks send-off or a funerary procession. There will be nothing but the vastness of the space, silence, and that spark of firing neurons in this one body of mine, gone dark after one last heartbeat.
I think she feels sorry for the both of us. Does she feel pain? Is she upset, knowing what’s happening? Is she sad about losing Hana, about Hana’s inevitable death, too? The idea that a ship can feel that—empathy, and fear, and the horror of oblivion—it takes my breath away for a second.
“Fenn?” Hana is standing in the doorway, where a moment ago there was a membrane door. “What are you doing?”
Sleepy-eyed, she watches me with surprise. At her appearance, Cyclo’s disembodied mouth melts back into the wall.
“Cyclo?” I say, but the walls stay silent. Apparently, that conversation was between me and the ship, and not for Hana’s ears. I note this and save it for later, wondering what it means. Hana is still waiting for a response.
“Oh. Hey. You’re awake,” I say, wanting to kick myself for saying the most obvious thing ever.
“I am. But you were gone. I mi—” She clips off the end of her phrase.
Was she going to say she missed me? Something warm blossoms in my chest at the thought, though I shouldn’t jump to conclusions.
“Are you…cooking?”
I smile. “I am. Luckily, I didn’t blow up the ship by accident.” I make a conscious decision not to tell her that Cyclo helped me.
Hana smiles. Her eyes are still sad, and it’s a small smile, but it’s a genuine one. She goes to the cupboard and starts taking out bowls and spoons. She helps me ladle out the food and scoop the rice, so steamy that the sweet scent makes my mouth water. In a minute or two, we’re sitting at the low table and picking up our spoons.
“Wait.” She turns to the lacquer box, but then says, “Never mind.”
“What is it?”
“I never eat breakfast without Mother. She’d always read a page out of her diary.”
“I guess you could still do that,” I say, putting my spoon down.
“It doesn’t feel right. She always read it. Not me. Or you, obviously.”
“Would it make you feel better?” I ask.
She nods and wipes her eyes. I get up and go to the lacquer box and open it. Right on top of a bundle of colorful silk clothes, next to a collection of knitting needles, several photo albums, and old tomes, is a newer journal bound in synthetic leather. I hold it up.
“Is this it?”
“Yes!” Hana’s face brightens.
“What should I read?” I ask, flipping through the pages.
“Something early. From when I was an infant.”
I flip through and find a date from somewhere about fifteen or sixteen years ago. The journal is made of that special paper that’s microns thin but strong as regular paper. The whole thing is as slim as my hand, but with nearly two thousand pages. I find a passage from when Hana was nine months old and start reading.
Look at how confident you are, walking at only nine months! I fear your legs will bow from being such an early walker. Today, Cyclo made an orb for you to run inside, and you’d bounce against the membranes and laugh so hard, you spit up your lunch. Your hair is long enough for two little pigtails. When you woke up today, your face was round like a planetary moon.
Dal a, dal a. My little moon!
Hana smiles at first, but it soon turns into a frown.
“I never realized that the entries are only about me. They never say much about what Mother’s life was like.”
“But you talked about that, right?”
“Yes. But funny how she doesn’t like to talk about her life. Only me.” She shrugs. “Anyway. You must be hungry after all that cooking. Let’s eat.”
We pick up our spoons and dive into the soup and rice.
After a few bites and slurps, she nods appreciatively. “This is pretty great. You’re a good cook.”
“Well, it’s all just reconstituted stuff.”
She sighs. “I know. Like me.”
I laugh, until I realize it’s not a joke. “What do you mean?”
“I’m like this.” She jabs her spoon, pointing at the soup. “I read that the way you’re supposed to make this soup, to cook good seolleongtang, you need to simmer ox bones for hours and hours. I have no idea what the real thing tastes like. Just like I’m not quite the real thing. Mother engineered me, partly from her own DNA so she’d feel like we were biologically related. I have ancestral Korean DNA in me. But like most of the embryos on the ship, she pieced me together to make the best kind of Hana. I’m not really Korean. I’m the living memory of an entire culture.”
I flip my holofeed on, and based on our conversation, a search for Korean culture pops up. Selecting it with a glance, I stare at the pictures. “You look Korean to me,” I say.
She shakes her head. “I feel like a paper doll, trying to be real.” Hana pauses over her bowl, spoon still held aloft with soup-soaked rice. Anger flits across her face.
“Your mom tried to give you a history. Wasn’t perfect, but she tried. And anyway—how you’re made, or who your parents are—it’s part of who you are, but it doesn’t define all of you.”
“Doesn’t it? Mother told me once she made me extra obedient for my own safety.”
I stop chewing. More obedient? That could kill a person in a second in the life I’ve lived, stealing and hustling my goods in the last five years. On Cyclo, hidden, I can see why.
“Obedience isn’t always a good thing,” I say, slowly. “Just because you’re born with a gene for something, it doesn’t have to be your destiny. Your existence isn’t just a legacy of where your DNA came from.”
“I don’t know if that’s true, Fenn.”
Now I’m confused. Am I more than what my parents’ genes gave me? I am, after all, the one who screws up all things. That is not my parents. But maybe it’s my fault I didn’t try hard enough. I’m trying hard now. But even if I succeed, I still don’t win.
“Anyway,” I ask, “don’t you want to make your own decisions? For once? I mean, you have. What you said to us, threatening Doran with wrecking the research if we don’t help you. That wasn’t obedient.”
“Oh. You’re right.” Hana is scraping the last dregs of the soup from her bowl with a long spoon. She doesn’t seem to notice that when Cyclo was busy talking me through the cooking lesson, I slipped some high protein and vitamin micro-packets in there for her health. I know it’s my imagination, but her complexion is already more blooming. It’s probably just rice steaming her face, though. “Oh. I ate it all.”
I smile. “Thanks to my amazing cooking skills, no doubt.”
“I haven’t eaten real food in a while. Mother only ever made me small portions, since Cyclo has always fed me. But now that I can’t immerse myself… I guess it’ll be a lot of regular food for now on.”
“I’ll cook it for you,” I offer.
“You will?”
“Sure,” I say, smiling. “I like making real things. Well,” I add, since it was just reconstituted soup, “mostly real things.”
We bring our bowls to wash them in the water Cyclo drips into the tiny sink, the dregs of which will be reabsorbed into the matrix and recycled. Hana’s elbows bump into mine as we clean. I like it. But Hana is frowning again.
“This morning, I thought it was a dream. That mother died. That we had kissed. Neither seems real.”
I whisper, “It happened. Both things.” I think, Here is where she tells me she regrets the kiss.
“I don’t have any right to be happy about one memory when I’m upset about the other.” She grips the bowl in her hands and shuts her eyes.
“You do. My God, between the two of us, you should revel in any emotion that comes your way. Good and bad. That’s living.”
“Why not you? You said between the two of us.”
“Oh.” I didn’t realize I’d said that, and now it’s too late. “Let’s just say I’ve made mistakes, and that I belong here.”
Hana stares at me. “You deserve to die?”
I nod, unwilling to say anything out loud.
“Do you also not deserve to be happy? To have a single moment of bliss? Because they aren’t the same thing.”
“I don’t know. I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“Kiss me again, Fenn,” Hana says, putting her bowl down and facing me.
“Now?”
“Now.” She adds, “Please. Because everywhere I turn, I see my mother, and I feel despair, and I would like to feel something for a few seconds that isn’t terror.”
I can’t. So when I don’t move, Hana slips her hands to my shoulders, rises on her tiptoes, and kisses my mouth, softly, gently, and despite myself, my hands go to her face. I close my eyes.
After a minute, she breaks the kiss and rests her head against my chest.
“There. I feel a little better. Not much, but a little.”
Somehow, she knew I needed this, too, because I wouldn’t give it to myself of my own free will. She doesn’t ask me how I feel, and she goes back to cleaning the dishes, and for a few more minutes, I forget that I’m not allowed to have anything resembling joy. Hana handed me a little glimpse of it, and there it was. An allowance of happiness. Something I don’t deserve, but which was gifted to me anyway. She gives me one last, quick kiss. I tap against my leg before I realize what I’m doing.
.-- --- .--
Wow.
“What was that?” She looks down at my hand against my leg. She must have felt me tapping away.
“Oh. Habit of mine. I sometimes think out loud in Morse code.”
“Fascinating! Teach me?”
“Well, it’s just… Sure.”
I show her an alphabet on my holo, and sure enough, she starts memorizing it quick as can be.
Soon, she’s tapping out a message to me.
.... .. ..-. . -. -. .. .- -- .... .- -. .-
Hi, Fenn, I am Hana.
“Nice!” I say.
Hana finishes drying the last bowl, and she says, “I guess we should get to work. I have some hormone infusions to wrangle up somewhere.”
Right on time, there is a buzz from my holofeed implant, and a window opens up. Gammand’s face appears, and his voice fills the quiet between us.
“Fenn, is Hana with you?”
“Yes. We just ate breakfast. What’s up?”
“Come to the crew cabins on northwest beta. Immediately. Bring Hana with you. We need her.”
“Why?” Hana asks.
“It’s Miki. Something’s happened to her. I think…I think she may be dead.”