Chapter Twenty-One
HANA
Human behavior is so very odd.
I should know; I am one of them. But I was created with the precision of an interplanetary missile. Crafted and sewn together like a tailored stuffed plaything built to suit one person—Mother, and what she thought I should be. I am so very unnatural.
But right now, in the tangle of Fenn’s arms, under the delicious pressure of his lips, I can hardly process what I’m feeling and thinking, except to say, Oh Hana. How very human you have become.
Fenn and I can hardly bear to part with each other for a few hours. We are a cliché, we are inevitable, we are wonderful and strange and sad.
We are.
Somewhere in the aftermath of those hours, we doze in each other’s arms, not even content to withdraw into unconsciousness without each other. My eyelids flutter to stillness, and in my sleep, I dream of Fenn leaving, of Fenn falling into space outside of Cyclo. In a panic, I wake up, only to find myself resting my head on his bicep, my body curled against him. It’s a shock, to have dreams that bring worry and mayhem. They are nothing like the dreams that Cyclo gave me, where there was never an inkling of bad feeling—only beauty and discovery. But I’m finding that even the worry in dreams means that something in my heart has changed to make me feel in such a way. To worry, to want. And I like it. There is something extremely dissatisfying about perfection.
Fenn does the same, walking for brief moments of lucidness to touch me, bring me closer. He nuzzles against my neck, and I wonder at some point if Mother engineered my genes to enjoy nuzzling.
Finally, we awaken slowly at the same time, but it’s not the sweetness of Maia’s starlight rising through the window that rouses us.
It’s a shout.
It’s close by. Because Cyclo is not consciously present here in this part of the ship, and thus the door has stayed open all this time, the voice is very apparent. It’s a deep voice, yelling with distress that rises as it gets closer.
It sounds like Portia. Fenn and I lift our heads from the dais we’ve been sleeping on and see a blur of a tall Prinniad whoosh past our door.
“What is she running after?” I say.
“I don’t know, but we better see what the hell is going on.” Fenn pulls on his clothes, and I do the same, but I’m dissatisfied by the end to our night together, how abrupt and bitter reality is. As I head for the door, Fenn catches my hand. He kisses it, the way a man kisses a lady in a storybook from centuries ago, and I love that such a simple gesture is older than anything we’ve ever known. He’s certainly no prince, and I’m no princess, but it pleases me just the same.
“For last night,” he says, shyly.
I want to smile because last night was lovely and anything but perfect, but for me, it was everything. I kiss him gently on the lips.
“For ever,” I say. “Even if we don’t have forever.”
It’s a clumsy way to say what I feel—that there are infinite spaces in every moment we have. Ones that last for the ages.
He smiles, then squeezes my hand. “Let’s go.”
We run down the hallways, and Fenn’s holofeed blinks on, and a voice shouts at him. It’s Portia.
“Something is wrong in the south beta ring. Really wrong. It’s not like the other vacuole breach—this has to do with the hull.” She hesitates. “Part of the ring has evacuated into space, and Cyclo hasn’t done anything to fix it. Built-in plastrix barriers are still holding for now. But they’re not terribly thick, and they can’t possibly hold for long. Meet me and Gammand in northwest alpha. It seems to be the most stable right now.”
“Got it.” Fenn looks at me, but I’m keeping up.
“And there’s something else.” She pauses, and I realize she’s breathing pretty hard. “Someone attacked Gammand last night.”
“WHAT?” Fenn yells. “Who?”
“I don’t know. He couldn’t turn on his visor. The attack came from behind, but his inherited Gragorian nervous system has an electrical defense mechanism—it shocks attackers. Someone grabbed his neck. Hard. And his body reacted and survived.”
“Who was it? Did he see?” Fenn asks.
“No.” She looks at me hard. “Let me see your hands, Hana.”
I raise them so she can see them in Fenn’s holofeed. “Portia, it wasn’t me.”
Portia narrows her eyes, looking hard at my palms. “No. It couldn’t have been you. You’d have burn marks on your hands. Unless they were healed since then.”
“I’ve been with her this whole time,” Fenn says.
“Awake? Or asleep?”
Something in between, I can’t say aloud, but it’s the truth. Fenn blushes, and says, “Asleep, I guess.”
“Then you don’t know it wasn’t her.” She stares at me. “I want you away from Fenn. I’ll keep an eye on you. I can’t imagine a human can take down someone Gammand’s size in hand-to-hand combat, but if I can watch you, then I will.”
“It wasn’t me,” I say. “You have to believe me. I wouldn’t hurt him, Portia!”
“Well, if it wasn’t you, then someone on this ship is trying to hurt us. I can’t get the monitors to do a count of living organisms. If someone is hiding on this ship, we can’t know who it is.”
“It can’t be me or Portia,” Fenn says. “What about someone from the crew of the Calathus. Someone who stayed behind.”
“Why would anyone stay behind? Unless they had something to protect…oh.”
As soon as I say it, my stomach twists. Mother? On board, and hurting people? No. Mother is dead.
“Well, are you sure she never told anyone about you? It’s possible someone else knew. Someone who wanted you to be here with them and the Selkirk crew ruined the party,” Fenn says.
“I wouldn’t know,” I say. It’s all so much to consider.
“Let’s not jump to conclusions. Not yet.” Portia sighs and shakes her head. “Also, there’s more bad news.”
Ugh, as if I can handle more bad news.
“The loss of the quadrant ring just decreased Cyclo’s life-span by at least two days. That part of her nervous system was responsible for recycling oxygen residues.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” Fenn shouts.
“Come on. We need to find Gammand and redistribute our work again.”
Fenn abruptly stops running.
“I can’t take this. Losing more days. More work. I can’t do this,” Fenn says, hyperventilating, his hand resting on his knees as he leans over.
“You have to. We have to,” I say. “Let’s find out what happened. We have to figure out how to protect ourselves.” I sound so confident, I hardly recognize my own voice. But with every bit of bad news pushing at me, this new instinct in me is to shove back. Hard.
Fenn shuts his eyes for a second as if trying to reboot. “Dammit. Okay. Let’s go.”
We take a passageway down to the alpha ring and keep running, with me in front of us so Portia can keep an eye on me from Fenn’s holofeed. They have to believe I’m not responsible for these attacks. I was in Fenn’s arms all night long! It can’t be.
I orient myself as we keep going forward, remembering the hallways we are in. I walked by them sometime in that first day I’d left my room, but didn’t really understand what they were. The side section of the wall has scooped-out, fractured areas, fifteen feet across. Jagged edges have been repaired by Cyclo, but the fragments that show where the evacuation pods broke off are still visible. There had been a large ship, the Hummingbird, that was scheduled to pick up the crew, but in their haste to leave, they used the escape pods. Like Doran said, this was no quiet, organized exodus. It was panic.
“When was the crew originally scheduled to evacuate?” I ask.
Portia checks her own holofeed for a moment. “The crew evacuated a full three weeks before they were scheduled to depart. It’s why they took the escape pods, not the Hummingbird.”
We round a corner, and by the last few empty pod bays, we see Gammand standing there, chest heaving in breathlessness. He must have just gotten there before us.
“God, Gammand! It’s good to see you, man,” Fenn says between gasps. “You scared me.” We quickly come to his side, but he gives me a lethal grimace.
“Get her away from me,” he says.
I hang back, my hands up to show I mean no harm.
Gammand looks at Portia’s image. “I was only fifty feet from that section when part of the alpha ring just blew up and broke off,” he says. His eyes are large and frightened.
“Has anyone spoken to Doran?” Fenn asks.
“We can’t get through to him. It’s so maddening. As soon as Portia told him about the explosion, he cut out. Like he’s making it harder on us to get this work done. I thought he was a good guy, but damn it. They’re all the same. All of them.”
We reconvene at the bridge, but our group feels hopelessly small. Fenn and I can’t stay too close—Portia is watching me carefully. Portia and Gammand look through our equipment, trying to figure out how the smaller experiments they were supposed to launch today can also handle getting all the info that ReCOR wants. Everyone’s expression is closed and stony.
All the while, Portia and Gammand glance behind them, around corners before they walk. As if there’s a ghost onboard, trying to stalk them. And they look at me, too, once in a while, as if some hidden part of me might leap up and tear out their throats.
I don’t say this aloud, but what if I really have hurt people in my sleep? Mother gave me UV spectrum vision. She tried to weave history and culture into me by making me look like her Korean ancestors. But it makes me wonder. Am I only as important as the pieces that Mother mixed into me? If maybe, just maybe, there never has been a Hana. My name means “one,” like the Korean word for the number, but my history isn’t nearly as clear or simple. Maybe all I ever have been is pieces of a whole. And maybe I’m not even aware of the fact that Mother made part of me a killer. A killer so gifted that she keeps secrets even from me.
“I have an idea,” I say. “Miki’s biomonitor. We still have it. I think I should wear it.”
Fenn raises a hand. “Hana, you don’t have to—”
“I want to.”
Gammand rummages around and picks up Miki’s biomonitor. The one that’s broken. “I can make this work as a tracker, but only that. It won’t have anything on her biometrics. I’ll get it cleaned up and reregister the device for her.”
Portia nods, as does Fenn. I’m not thrilled to have this thing in me, but if it gets us some answers, I’m willing. To find the truth.
“After this, we’ll stay grouped,” Portia says. “Hana, you’ll stay with me. Fenn and Gammand will stay together.”
At this announcement, Fenn’s shoulders drop. It means we can no longer be together, alone. Gammand notices; he points to Fenn.
“This trip isn’t about living out your last hopes for romance, Fennec. Deal with it.”
“Shut up. That has nothing to do with anything. Hana isn’t the killer. I know it.”
“And you have evidence how?”
He doesn’t. I know he doesn’t. He looks at me helplessly, but we can’t even speak of us as a unit until we figure out what is going on with the attacks.
“Very well. Right now, we keep Hana on a short leash and use Miki’s old biomonitor as a tracking device.” Portia retrieves something that looks like a small tube and inserts a tiny metal capsule. She reaches out for my shoulder, and I let her, but my hand is clenched in a fist. “It’ll hurt, but only for a moment. And it’s sterilizing right now.”
Fenn gives me a worried look. My fingers tap on my thigh.
--- -.- .. -- --- -.-
Portia presses the metal tube against the side of my neck. “Here goes.”
I feel a slight tingle, but it’s not bad. And then it feels like a painful pinch, as if someone just snipped an inch of skin with a pair of scissors.
“Ow!”
“There may be some lingering soreness,” she warns.
Lingering. That’s what we’re doing, aren’t we? Just lingering. But I don’t want to do that. I want to fight. I want to fight for Cyclo, want her to be the Cyclo I know. I want to find out what happened to Mother. Why everyone left Cyclo so much faster than they had planned.
Gammand, glassy-eyed, is reading the orange and white holofeed in front of his face. He nods. “Reading Hana’s output okay. It’s not perfect, but it’ll do.”
“Thank you. And now, we keep going on with our research. Our hours are going to increase to cover Miki’s work, and the areas near the new blowout. And I’m updating your progress readouts to accommodate the work.” Portia glances at the progress bar on her holo. It goes from 60 percent completed, down to 45, with the addition of Miki’s work. “We need to know what happened there. We’re going on four hours of sleep, max. I’ll have supplements added to your rations to support your extra hours. And Hana stays within eyesight, even with her tracker. No matter what.”
But what about my tissue cultures? How am I going to check on them and see if they’re growing properly? I open my mouth to say something, anything, but if I do, it’ll be more of a lost cause than if I’m quiet. Gammand and Portia will say it’s a waste of precious time, and they might even destroy them. They’ll say it’s futile.
But it’s not futile to me. It’s the only possible way we have to fix Cyclo, and to keep her from being destroyed. Our only chance of saving ourselves.
But I don’t say this out loud because everyone but Fenn stopped listening to me a long, long time ago.