Chapter Fifteen
HANA
No, no.
The word “dead” should not, cannot, be used so soon after learning about Mother. Miki dead? I see her so very much alive in my mind’s eye. I blink, and I see her. Her scowl, her sadness when no one seems to notice otherwise. Her seventeen shades of blue that probably only I can see on her beautiful skin.
She can’t be dead.
We run to the northwest side of the ship. Fenn zigzags us this way and that, avoiding the areas that aren’t contained and safe. Cyclo’s walls are changing color. They’re no longer bright, translucent blue; occasionally, we’ll find a whole wall colored orange, or translucent, with a view of her bioskeleton. Sometimes there’s a clear partition full of gummy knots of extruded material from the walls, steaming, it seems, from some gaseous substance emanating from her flesh.
Oh, Cyclo. Are you in pain? Does it hurt?
Last night was the first night I voluntarily slept like a normal human being, outside the confines of her matrix. And I’m shocked to say, I feel pretty well rested. My dreams this time were my own. Such very imperfect dreams, they were. No beautiful fields of lavender, no dragonfly wings or skimming the surfaces of lakes on distant planets.
There were dreams of discomfort, of loss. Of sheer happiness of seeing Mother again, helping me knit something new. Of watching blood ooze with fury from the ground where wheat grows, yellow and red admixed nonsensically. Mother, appearing on the other side of a plastrix window in space, just beyond my reach. She couldn’t touch me as she drifted away. The metaphor was not lost on me.
While we’re running there, Portia careens around a perpendicular corridor from beta and joins us.
“I just heard about Miki,” Portia says, galloping ahead of us with her giraffe legs. We climb two sets of steps upward to the gamma ring. There are no data drives here, just strangely bumpy walls. Portia finds an opening above that must lead to the delta ring. Instead of steps, it only has hand- and footholds as the g-force here is so low. She pulls herself up and disappears, and we follow.
Ahead, we hear yelling and shouts before they go ominously quiet. There’s enough gravity that we can walk, but not nearly enough. If I step too hard, my head nearly hits the ceiling. Portia and Fenn stop outside a large containment unit, holding onto the thin endoskeleton handholds on the wall. I’d only ever seen this on a map—it’s where most of Cyclo’s dangerous waste metabolites are housed.
Fenn reaches the door of the unit. It’s enormous—at this smaller delta level, one unit goes around one quarter of the ship. It’s windowless, with massive, bone-like doors that Cyclo has made of black matrix in a lattice. But the doors are all open.
We push ourselves through the narrow corridor to get in. The walls are very thick, and they look healthy. No spots, no drips of acid. I touch one wall to see if Cyclo knows I’m here, and there’s no response. There are so many places she can’t communicate with me. It feels like a betrayal, somehow, as if she’s been keeping secrets.
The corridor opens to an enormous, curved room. There is one narrow ledge in the middle, but the floors, walls, and ceilings are otherwise studded with what look like oblong eggs, only they’re no eggs that Earth humans have ever seen. They’re nearly fifteen feet tall each, and maybe six feet wide. Passing by, Portia imprints her hand into one, and the entire egg undulates slightly. The contents are liquid.
“Don’t do that,” I say, staying her hand when she tries to touch another. “It’s full of radioactive waste.”
Portia snatches her hand back, holding both fists to her chest, afraid. I’ve never feared Cyclo in any way, but the idea that she has these pockets of toxins is a reminder that her entire being isn’t kind and benign. Just as humanoids leave an ugly trail of trash behind us, so does Cyclo. We walk forward, and ahead of us there is Gammand hovering over Miki, whose lifeless body is splayed, her hands falling over either side of the walkway.
Her eyes are open, bloodshot, and her face has a brownish hue. It’s terrible and strange to see when she’s only ever been blue.
She’s dead. I can’t believe it’s real. I’ve never in my life seen a dead person. All I’ve ever wished for is to meet real people, to live with them, to laugh with them. Even with Mother, there’s a distance to her being gone, because I haven’t witnessed it—but this is real. This is too real.
“Miki,” I whisper, and then my hands go to my face. I start weeping.
Fenn immediately goes to her side and touches her wrist and neck. He looks at Gammand, who looks at Portia, and then me. His face is stricken.
“Miki,” he says. And that’s all he says. He’s a statue for minutes, just holding her lifeless hand. Gammand and Portia, too, are quietly shocked, just staring at her. Perhaps seeing themselves, a future version of themselves.
I had no idea Fenn would be so upset. But his face reminds me of something very familiar. It’s like looking into a kind of mirror. This was me when I heard about Mother. It feels like I’ve known for centuries that Mother died, and yet it was only yesterday. And it brings back a wave of longing so twisting, my throat aches. For Fenn, and for me.
After a long time, Fenn finally says, “I can’t believe it. What happened?”
Gammand turns to give me a brutal look and yells. “Where have you been?”
“I…” His angry words hit me like a punch in the chest. “I’ve been with Fenn. What happened to Miki?”
“She’s dead. Looks like she was strangled. Answer my question. Where the hell have you been?”
I’ve never been spoken to in such a tone. “I’ve been asleep. And then I woke up and had breakfast with Fenn.”
“It’s true,” Fenn says. He gently lays Miki’s hand on her chest before wiping his nose with his sleeve. “Why are you asking her?”
“Because I have a biomonitor in every crew member on this ship. I know where everyone’s been but Hana. And no one else has been around Miki in the last few hours before she left our headquarters and came here to do some readings.” He glares at me. “You were fighting with Miki last night. We all remember!”
“But I was with Fenn!” I look to him to back me up.
“For the whole time? Every minute?” Gammand says.
“Nearly.”
“Nearly?” Gammand says, crossing his arms.
“Well,” Fenn says finally, “I did leave to make breakfast. “But c’mon. It was barely an hour’s time!”
Portia pulls herself up to her full height and she glares at me. “No one saw you right at the time Miki’s biomonitor says she died.” Her red eyes flash and almost pulsate with crimson. “Krshkt! Damn it. Did you kill her?” She takes a huge step forward, fist raised, and I scramble back.
Fenn thrusts his arm to hold Portia back—which he can’t, but it makes her pause.
“Miki is four times her size and weight,” he reasons. “It’s not possible!”
I hold up my hands. “I was sleeping! I wouldn’t hurt her. I wouldn’t even know how!”
Gammand grimaces. “You know this ship better than anyone here. Medicines, poisons, who knows. You hated her last night.” He looks down at Miki. “Maybe you hate us all, too.”
I was so angry last night I almost punched her. And the way Portia and Gammand are looking at me, they remember, too. My words are worthless.
Portia kneels by Miki’s prone body. She loosens the shirt near her neck. Ugly red and purple marks mar the pale skin. “They look like finger marks. Narrow ones, belonging to small hands.” Her eyes look at my hands, and I flip them over. They are pink and clean. They are small, as small as those that wrung the life out of Miki.
“I swear, it wasn’t me!”
“It looks like Miki got caught by surprise. Her equipment fell down here, and there,” Gammand says, pointing to some areas between the storage vacuole eggs. “We’ll have to retrieve it and bring Miki’s body back.” Gammand stands up. “I’ll get a body bag.” He looks at everyone. “You should know, this is all on record. Miki’s own voice and video links show she was attacked from behind. We have no visual on Hana at that time.”
“It wasn’t me!” I repeat, but no one is listening.
Gammand walks us out of the containment unit, but after the third door shuts behind us, he turns abruptly and speaks to Fenn and Portia, pointedly ignoring me.
“Someone has to keep an eye on her, at all times,” he says. “And we should arm ourselves and be on alert. Just in case.”
“Why don’t we just lock her in the Selkirk? If she’s dangerous, it’s better to keep her away from us. And then she can’t interfere with our work,” Portia suggests. My heart, already trilling a bit too fast, starts thudding so hard I can feel it in my neck. I can’t go back to being alone and locked up. Not again, not now.
“But I didn’t do it!” I say again. The way they all turn to look at me, it’s like there’s a filter between me and them, and the filter is all they can see. The one that says, murderer. “Please. If I had fought Miki, you know she would have fought me back. She’s got at least two hundred pounds of Argyrian muscle I don’t have. Do I look like someone who’s just had a battle to the death?” I yank my sleeves up, showing the lack of bruises. I lift my tunic to show my legs—completely unmarred. “No bruises. Because all I did was wake up and eat breakfast!”
Slowly, doubt begins to soften their expressions. Gammand scratches his brown cheek, and even Portia’s eyebrows twitch as she looks over me. Fenn’s lips twitch, and relief warms his eyes.
“Let’s see what Doran says.” She calls up Doran on her holofeed, and he comes through, but it’s all grainy pixels. He’s actually been listening in on Gammand’s feed this whole time.
“Let her stay with you, but no unsupervised moments.” A bout of static interferes, followed by his face popping back. “…be on alert. You have no weapons but that tranquilizer gun, so arm yourselves in any way you can. There might be another person hiding on the ship we are unaware of. You can retrieve Miki’s biomonitor and use it in Hana. That will give everyone some peace of mind.”
I nod, reluctantly. If they want to tag me like a little pet, so be it.
Fenn also nods, and I sigh in relief. Fenn gives me a sharp look at my exhalation, and I try to sober up my expression.
“On to a more important question,” Portia says. “Will Miki get her compensation if she’s been murdered? I’d like to know.”
“Me, too,” Fenn says, a grim expression on his face.
When Doran doesn’t reply immediately, I realize the answer isn’t a good one.
“It depends. We’ll run some more tests on her body later today, but if this wasn’t some sort of…toxic outcome from the ship…then, no. She wouldn’t be compensated. And besides, she only finished one quarter of her research objectives.”
Fenn curses, and Portia claps her hands on her face. Gammand looks like he could stab Doran right in the eye if he wasn’t a hologram.
“That is so fucking unfair, and you know it, Doran,” Fenn hollers. “Miki is dead! This is not why she came here. This is not the death she wanted!”
Doran says, “It’s in the—”
“No. Don’t you dare say ‘contract,’ Doran,” Portia says, taking her hands away from her face. “You talk to ReCOR. You tell them there is an external force at play here, and it is altering our plan.”
“I’ll talk to them,” Doran says, but he sounds anything but convincing. “In the meantime, Miki was our radiation specialist. Everyone will have to share her work now. When Gammand goes to retrieve Miki’s body, you’ll need to do some data collection on her corpse.”
The word “corpse” chills me, and it bothers Fenn, too. He flicks his eyes down to his feet and nods. Portia peels off to a different sector of the ship, and Fenn walks to the outer circle. He seems to be heading for the bridge.
“Where are we going?” I ask, running to keep up.
“Come on,” he says, his face still troubled. “Let’s get the stuff I need, and we’ll go back with Gammand and run a few tests.” Along the way, he starts launching his nanobots and microbots into the air, sending them into the hallways ahead and behind us.
But he sighs incessantly. “God, Miki. I can’t believe… I need to keep working. I’m behind, and now I have to take radiation readings, as well, with Miki’s stuff. God, this sucks.” He takes out a larger card from his jacket, with drones the size of fingernails.
I pause to face the wall. Now we’re back in the alpha ring, where the floors and walls are a healthy medium blue. “Cyclo,” I say. “Fenn needs to send some of his bots to check your health. Into the matrix, not the corridors. Will you let him?”
Cyclo’s colors stay flatly blue around me.
“Oh. I’ve already done this. I asked permission before, and she was okay with it.”
“She was?” I say, incredulous.
“Yes. She spoke to me in your room, you know. She…helped me cook,” Fenn says.
“She did?”
“Yes. She helped me get the water, find everything.” Sadness contorts his eyebrows, only for a second. It makes me wonder if they only talked about cooking.
“Cyclo isn’t responding verbally,” I say, frowning.
“Noted for the record,” Fenn says. I realize that he’s taking down data even as we’ve been walking. It irritates me a little—maybe I want Fenn’s attention all to myself. I bite my lip. Stop it, Hana. It’s not all about you.
“I wonder if she responds to this,” I say.
I kneel on the floor, to maximize the contact of my skin without actually presenting my body to be taken in. I spread my palms down, fingers splayed, and try to let her read my thoughts.
Cyclo. Are you all right? They won’t let me sleep inside you anymore. They say you’re not safe, that you’re getting sicker. Can you feel it? Do you understand what’s happening? What happened to your southeast quadrant with the vacuole leak?
I am experiencing some frailty of my backup safety systems. But I have been relocating my energy sources to keep my core functions operative.
Do you know why…you’re experiencing this frailty?
Certain populations of my cells are becoming senescent.
I stop here. I can’t talk more. I can’t bring myself to tell her, or ask her—Cyclo, do you know you’re dying? How can one ask that of the person who’s cared for you from when you were only one cell big? How?
I pull my hands from the floor matrix, and my imprint on Cyclo flattens out.
“Well? What did she say?”
I tell him, particularly about what she’s doing to try to keep herself functioning. “We should tell the others. It may help us figure out how to help her. We’re still gathering information on that hormone boost, but even if it works, it may not be enough.”
“Yes. Senescence is exactly what’s going on. She can’t contain her toxic metabolites, her cells are dying, and the ones that aren’t dead are malfunctioning.” As we walk back to the bridge, he starts muttering to himself. “On Ipineq, my planet, we were able to slow the aging process. Earth humans do it, too, with stem cell transplantation. Get some nice young DNA and put it in cells that grow to replace whatever’s not working—chondrocytes in the knee joint, immature brain cells after strokes.”
“I wonder if Cyclo still has stem cells,” I say, but Fenn shakes his head.
“Doesn’t matter. We only have the equipment to record information, not do treatments or rehab for an entire two-hundred-thousand-metric-ton ship. I mean, you did that hormone release thing. That was already on the ship.”
I remember Cyclo’s recent exploded vacuole and us running for our lives, and I’m even more sad than before. Maybe it didn’t work at all, or it was just too late.
We enter the bridge. It’s messier than before, as the crew have already settled in and equipment is being used constantly. Portia is already leaving. She now has a long, thin piece of metal broken off from one of the supply containers. A short, crude spear. She says something to Gammand about doing some analyses of the borders between the contained, toxic areas of Cyclo and the normal ones. Gammand makes sure his tranquilizer gun is secure at his thigh. He sees us and hands me a bag with a strap. I take it, putting it over my shoulder.
“It’s one of Miki’s radiation tech packs. She had the settings all done, but I guess someone will have to do the analyses post—”
He stops before saying “post-mortem.”
Fenn picks up a lumpy backpack full of what must be more drones. Gammand walks over to an equipment container and pulls out a body bag. A hover gurney has already been set up, and he gently pushes it to the door with two fingertips. He looks at me, and then Fenn.
“Don’t you want some sort of weapon, Fenn?”
“No. I’m good.”
“That’s rather unwise.” He gives Fenn a helpless look, like he’s asking to be murdered. “Fine. Let’s go get Miki.”
He and Fenn hardly talk. At first, I think they’re really unfriendly to each other, until I try to draw closer and Fenn holds a warning hand out. Gammand stares coldly at me, and when he sees Fenn’s gesture, he looks relieved.
That’s when I realize Fenn and Gammand know each other in a way that doesn’t require words. Gammand is upset, and Fenn knows this, and also knows Gammand needs quiet and space. Especially from me.
I’m jealous of this thing they have, the crew. The banter between Portia and Fenn; how they always give Gammand the room for the silence he needs, for hours at a time; how they grieved for Miki and could see beyond her sour moments, which I could not. They are so different, but they had something to share—nine months of experiences I won’t have with anyone else in the universe.
I follow them, and all the way there I keep thinking of Miki and her open eyes, the purple marks around her throat. And weirdly, I think of my hands on her throat, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. About when one would stop squeezing, and how hard, and how to keep holding on if that person was fighting you. I don’t understand why such intrusive thoughts enter my head. I’ve never considered the concept of hurting another human, but it makes me sick to my stomach. My days, all of them, had been spent reading about Earth history and knitting and singing and climbing the walls. Learning everything I could about Cyclo. Dreaming of milking cows, gathering warm chicken eggs, or pounding sweet rice flour to make injeolmi, my favorite sweet tteok covered in roasted soybean powder. I have never dreamt of such a thing, nor has Cyclo ever put that dream into me.
Or could she have? Could Cyclo be capable of telling my subconscious to do something like this?
I’ve stopped walking, and I’m staring at my hands, making a clawing gesture, as if choking a ghost in front of me. Fenn is watching me with startled eyes.
“Oh. Nothing.” I put my hands quickly behind my back.
“Well, we’re here. Come on. I can’t leave you out here. Doran says we have to stay together.”
“Of course.”
We’re outside the delta containment unit. Miki’s in there. Gammand has already gone ahead of us with the body bag over his shoulder and the hover gurney somewhere in front of him. Being heavier, he has less problem with the low-g here.
“We have to take some radiation measurements on her,” Fenn says grimly. I nod and follow him into the cavernous containment area, already better at using the handholds to maneuver near the egg-shaped vacuoles. As we approach the bend of the corridor where Miki is, Gammand hollers. He’s about twenty feet ahead of us, and his voice echoes weirdly from the bulbous walls.
Fenn and I look at each other.
“What is it?” Fenn hollers back.
“It’s Miki.” Gammand turns around and drops the body bag, which slowly drifts to the floor. “She’s gone.”