Chapter Sixteen
FENN
“Gone?” I say. “What the hell do you mean?”
“I mean she’s gone, dammit! I can’t understand—I mean, look,” Gammand shuffles to the side of the very narrow walkway to show us, pushing the gurney aside, too. His brown eyes are wide with astonishment, and his hands are shaking. “She was right here. God, where is she? What happened to her body?”
There’s an indentation where Miki’s body was resting. I touch the matrix, and it’s oddly warm. If someone took her, they can’t have gone far. It’s one thing to kill her; it’s another thing to mess with her remains. My body is hot with fury. I try to run to the far end of the walkway, where there’s a door. It’s hard in the low-g.
“Where are you going?” Hana hollers, but I’m too busy searching to answer.
I look up and down the curved, blue hall, but no one is there. It’s perfectly silent, except for that preternatural hum that is Cyclo’s metabolism churning away. There are closed doors that go to Cyclo’s core, full of more toxic-containing vacuoles, and passageways that go back down to the gamma ring. All along the way, I don’t see any scratch marks or anything that would show that Miki was dragged away. Then again, Cyclo probably self-heals.
I turn around. Gammand is talking aloud into his holofeed, and I see him shake his head and gesticulate with agitated, jabbing motions. He turns off his holofeed and faces me.
“I just confirmed with Portia. She didn’t touch the body.”
“And I was with Hana this whole time, so it wasn’t her.” Another idea comes into my head, one that frightens me utterly. “What if we aren’t the only ones on this ship? We didn’t expect Hana. What if someone else is on board?”
“That can’t be,” Gammand says. “It can’t.”
“That would explain why the biomonitors showed that the murder had nothing to do with the crew.”
“Hana. Can you ask Cyclo if someone took Miki’s body? If Cyclo took her, maybe?”
Hana nods. When she put her hands on the floor, Gammand shakes his head.
“No. No one will know if you’re making up the answers. We have to know what the ship is saying.”
“Can I try to listen in?” I ask Hana. She nods.
“Remember when you were in the matrix? It helps to relax and empty your thoughts, and you can hear her with more clarity.” Hana sinks her hands into the floor, and I put my hands next to hers. “Make sure they touch,” she says, and I let some of my fingers overlap with hers.
I hear Hana’s voice. It sounds like a dream within a dream, feminine and light and very gentle. God, this is weird, having her voice inside my head, transmitted through Cyclo and skin.
“Where is Miki? The girl that died here?” Hana asks. My own fingers and arms tingle.
The Argyrian Miki is deceased. Cyclo’s words are very serene but very flat.
Hana tries again. “But where is her body?”
I do not understand the question.
“I mean, Cyclo, did someone take her body away?”
No.
Hana crinkles her eyebrows together. “Cyclo, did you move Miki’s body?”
No.
“Was someone in this room before we came here?”
Yes.
“Who was it?”
I do not understand the question.
Hana and I exchange worried glances. She speaks aloud to me and Gammand. “I don’t get it. She’s not answering my questions, like she’s missing parts of her memory.”
“Let me try,” I say. I close my eyes, to try to speak without speaking. I guess it’s like talking to yourself in your head. Only other people are listening, too.
“Cyclo,” I say silently. “Hi. It’s Fennec. Can you tell us how many humanoids are on this ship?”
One thousand and one.
Hana sighs. “That’s an old number. There is always a census of one thousand crew members, which includes those being gestated. Plus one, which was me. She’s confused.”
“We have to read data directly from her, then, instead of asking her questions. She’s not reliable, the sicker she gets,” I say.
Gammand snaps his fingers. “Wait. Miki’s biosensor. We can track her body that way.”
“You mean this?” I lean over and pick up a tiny piece of metal. I recognize it—it’s the biosensor we had implanted into our necks when we first boarded the Selkirk so many months ago. It’s a tiny little capsule, only a few millimeters long. “Whoever cut it out of her neck did a quick, clean job.”
We walk back to the bridge. Hana lags behind. I keep looking back to find her gazing at the walls and the ceilings as if she’s reading some message that isn’t there. Finally, after the fifth time of telling her to hurry up, I ask, “What is it, Hana? What are you looking at?”
“Can’t you see it?” she says. She’s still staring at the walls, a medium blue—not as vibrant as before, but not the sickly pale color we’d seen elsewhere. I look around. What is she seeing? She points. “The purple waves. They’re running in stripes and—oh, little swirls. I’ve never seen that before.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Is something wrong with her eyes? Is she delirious?
“I forgot,” Hana says. “You can’t see it. It’s in the ultraviolet spectrum. Mother put the ability in me when she designed me. It’s why I can read Cyclo’s emotions better than a computer or another person can.”
“And this is different?”
“Yes. It’s beautiful, but it’s like…she’s singing, or painting, or something. How odd. I’ve never seen her do this before.”
“Maybe it’s because the damned ship just murdered Miki and is pretty proud of it,” Gammand says. Everyone’s thinking about it, except maybe Hana, who looks shocked at the idea.
“No! She wouldn’t. Why would Miki have strangulation marks on her neck that look like human hands?”
Everyone goes silent for a while. It really doesn’t make sense.
“That’s pretty weird,” I say. “And we have no good weapons on the ship. If a person was going to kill another person, bare hands work.”
“Look. These types of ships don’t kill humanoids. They never have,” Hana adds.
“She’s right,” Gammand says. “Cyclo photosynthesizes for energy. It’s like asking an oak tree to suddenly become a carnivore and gobble up a… What did they call those burned flying things on a stick?”
“Rotisserie chicken,” I say.
“Right. That. The physiology just doesn’t work that way,” Hana says.
“Fine,” Gammand says. “So the ship is vegetarian. We still don’t have an answer, though. And we have no way to scan the ship for other hidden passengers. We have to watch our backs. It’s time to tell Doran what happened.”
I comm Doran, and we explain everything, even showing digitals from the area. It’s hard not to get emotional while explaining what happened. I clear my throat about seven times, it aches so much. Miki is decidedly gone. We did a few radiation readouts of the area, but there was nothing strange.
Doran sighs, which sounds like a wheeze. “We can’t let this slow our schedule. You’re to continue your work today. Since you need to stay with Hana, and she isn’t doing anything, we might as well see if she can do Miki’s readings with the equipment, so you can stay on task.”
“Copy that.” I thought he’d be sadder about this. Or more scared for us. But no matter what, there’s work to do, and now the specter of the harm that’s come to Miki is driving me to work harder. “Come on, Hana. Today’s the day I need to do some in-depth matrix work with Cyclo. Let’s get to it. We’ll go clockwise and start here.” I point to the 3D map that my holofeed is displaying. “It’s close.”
Hana points a slender finger, following the blueprint. Her hands are beautiful and unmarred by hard work. A wall of her black hair slips over her shoulder, and I get a waft of scent in my direction. She smells a little like flowers, a little like a slept-in shirt. I like it.
“How odd to see Cyclo in this way. It’s like we’re seeing all her insides.” To peer closer, she has to bring her cheek closer to mine. I can feel the warmth of her skin. I try to concentrate as she speaks. “Oh. The gestational labs. That’s where my mother did most of her work.”
God, focus, Fenn. Do your job, I tell myself. No time for this. Not enough life left to spend time smelling girls. “Uh.” I clear my throat and shake my head slightly to get my thoughts in order. “My bots can only do so much work before the matrix may make my connection harder, and I can’t take the chance of losing any. Miki wanted me to send my bots to do her readings, so we can do them together.”
She nods. “I can try.” But something in her expression tells me she’s not fully enthusiastic about the idea.
I use my holofeed to navigate the hallways to the gestational labs, and Hana asks Cyclo to show the way, so we can test if her internal spatial recognition is intact. The flashes of light keep trying to get us to go to the alpha ring on the southern quadrant. Right ring, wrong quadrant.
“She’s totally off. We’ll have to let Gammand know,” I say.
Finally, we make it there. The gestational labs are immense. There’s room after room of filtration systems, amniotic fluid synthesis machines, oxygenators, and varying sizes of the gestational chambers ranging from the size of a fist to an old-fashioned bathtub. All are empty. Completely dry, too.
“We’ll start here.” I take my backpack off and find several cards of bots. Using my visor, I program them quickly for the information that both Gammand and Portia had asked for—levels of radioactive tritium and chlorine-16, as well as functional levels of other elements, like oxygen, water, and byproducts that aren’t getting recycled within the matrix properly. Miki’s death has put me behind, but I’m going to make it drive me to work harder and be more careful. “Hana, can you tell Cyclo what I’m doing, so she doesn’t kill my bots?”
“Yes.” She puts her hands on the wall, then pauses. “No, wait. I need you to do something for me, too.”
“Hana, there isn’t time—”
“I know,” she says, cutting me off. Her expression flickers between resolve and insecurity. “That’s why I need you to do this for me. I need your bots to find out if she has any healthy stem cells inside her. Anywhere.”
“Why? None of this will help her, not at this point. You already tried the hormones, and look what happened. She busted open one of her toxin containers.”
“That may not have anything to do with it. Maybe it saved even more vacuoles from failing. Anyway,” Hana says. “I know what you’re thinking. Do you give up this easily about everything?”
“What are you talking about?”
She walks up to me and slips her hand under my throat. I stiffen, ready to shove her hand away, but it’s warm and soft. I freeze, not knowing how to act. She slips her fingers under the collar of my shirt and pulls out the necklace. The pendant is heavy, and when she holds it in her hand, it’s a relief to feel the weight lifted.
“You still haven’t listened to this, have you?”
I snatch it out of her hand and step back. “Don’t. You don’t know…you don’t understand.”
“You’re right. I don’t understand what it is to run away. I’ve been left behind. But I don’t want to be content to be left behind, Fenn. You shouldn’t be, either.”
I sputter, and my face goes hot. But I can’t respond. Because speaking out loud means talking about her, and me, and Callandra, how messed-up I am, and how I got here. I have no one to blame but myself, and I’m sick to death of being blamed for everything—even if it’s my fault. But I also know what got me to think about this again.
Hana.
Hana, and her will to live.
I stare at her, and how resolute she is—how even now, her black eyebrows are lifted as if she’s afraid of being struck down or reprimanded. Even after the horror of seeing Miki dead, after finding out that her mother is gone forever. She’s so used to following orders, and here she is, fighting. And here I am, so willing to eat my own fate with a “thank you, and please can I have another serving of poison so I can die like a good boy.”
I am sick of it all. But what makes me sicker is the idea that Callandra will pay for my sins yet again if I let my own ego get in the way—the ego that says I can survive this ship. That I dare to imagine a future with the girl in front of me.
I can’t help Hana without hurting Callandra.
And while I sit on the brink of telling Hana no, she says, “I’m not asking for you to forfeit your contract, Fenn. I’m just asking…for you to give me a chance to live. Please.”
Just then, my visor beeps. It glows on, and Portia’s face shows up on the screen. Her crude metal spear is still in her hand.
“Is Hana with you?”
“Yes, of course,” I say. I’m looking at Hana through my visor, so Portia’s face and Hana’s face are right next to each other.
“Well, tell her that I ran some preliminary retrievals on Cyclo’s biometrics. It looks like that burst of hormones actually worked. Her deterioration in several different tissues and cell lines has slowed down. Not sure how much time she bought us. An extra day, maybe.”
“What?” I say, flabbergasted. “It worked? But what about the exploding vacuole?”
“That was going to happen, no matter what. Unrelated.” Portia smiles her black gums at the both of us. “Tell her thank you. And Fenn?”
“Yes?”
“Will you please get some sort of weapon on you? I trust Hana, but I don’t trust that there’s not another person on this ship we can’t locate, who may be trying to sabotage our efforts.”
“Yeah. Okay. I’ll find something soon.”
I turn off the comm to find Hana smiling—truly smiling, the first real one since her mother died. She raises her eyebrows at me as Portia’s image winks out and I blink off my holofeed.
I exhale, long and slow, before meeting her eyes.
“Okay, Hana. Tell me what you want me to do.”