Chapter Thirty-Eight
FENN
One hour.
I have one hour before I can take over the ship and fly back to Hana, if there is any Hana left to recover.
Dr. Um is nearly unconscious from the pain of Cyclo’s dying tissues in her arm. I manage to make an upper arm tourniquet from a cord off one of the suits. It’s so tight, I know we’ve completely cut off the circulation in her arm, but it seems to work. The black discoloration of dying tissues stops an inch from the tourniquet.
It’s a save and a loss. Dr. Um will lose her arm, no question. She might lose her life if we can’t get her medical care soon. I find a kit on board and dig up some useful things—an immune booster, energy supplement, and dermal pain-relieving med. After I touch the pain medicine to her good arm, she sighs audibly and rouses herself.
“Where’s Hana?” she asks.
“She left the ship. To save us.”
Dr. Um sits up with a groan and covers her face with her one good hand. She weeps for a while, and I have nothing to say. I’m too empty to give anything to anyone, and Dr. Um doesn’t want my superficial sentiments, no matter what they are. For a while, we just lie there in our own separate miseries.
I stand up and stare out the portside window. Cyclo is far away now, only a speck in the distance that would easily be missed in a blink, but I know it’s there. It’s still glowing a dull red, and somewhere in there is Hana, if her body is there at all. Everything I had, everything I wanted to be, everything I wasn’t, was Hana’s.
I touch my pendant, flipping it over and over in my hand. A useless poison on one side, a message on the other.
I feel a presence beside me and find that Dr. Um is standing near me.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too. For a lot of things.”
She stares out the cockpit window, looking utterly lost. After a long time, she notices the pendant in my palm. “What’s that?” she asks. I explain to her how it’s a recording from the person who’s to receive my death benefit. A final goodbye. The whole trip, I hadn’t opened it.
“It’s from my sister. I haven’t had the guts to listen to it.” I stare at it. After losing Hana, I have a sudden, overwhelming need to hear Callandra’s voice. Even if it’s yelling at me—anything to remind me that there is a person I love still alive in the universe—it’ll be worth it.
Dr. Um looks so utterly despondent, like she’d rather hear anything but what’s in her own head right now, too. So I detach the pendant and pop the cover open. A holographic transmitter sits in the center, only a few millimeters big.
A fuzzy image of a face shows up.
It’s Callandra. She looks so much older now, and seeing her face as a teenager catches me off guard. I haven’t seen her in years, and she’s changed so much. Her hair is pulled back, instead of in messy pigtails, and her eyes are big, serene, and serious. One of her eyes is silver—she’s replaced it with an expensive implant that most ace pilots have. She has a scar on her chin, too, probably from her aerial training. But I can see that she’s attached to machines, and her arms have metallic implants to help them move better. The rounder, childlike face is gone, replaced with an oval face with high cheekbones. The last time I saw her, she was ten years old. Now she’s fifteen. It’s jarring.
“Fenn,” she says. “If you’re watching this, then you don’t have much time. I tried to send you messages. Why didn’t you answer? If you did, you’d know that I never wanted this. I never asked for you to save me, or repay me, or punish yourself. This mining job—I offered it to you, but the truth was, I wanted it for myself all along. I was so glad you didn’t take it. I only wanted to be a pilot because that’s what Mom and Dad wanted. I mean—I was the only person in the family that didn’t want to fly things, but I was afraid to say so. I was even afraid to tell you. Everyone wanted so much for me to succeed…I was afraid to fail.
“You remember all those stones and crystals you’d bring me back on your trips? All those times I explored the caves around our house? That’s what I love. I want to be an intergalactic geologist, not a pilot. I botched my academy scholarship on purpose. And after the mining accident, I finally had the bravery to tell Mom and Dad the truth. The accident was no one’s fault, least of all yours.
“I don’t want your money, or this sacrifice. What you’re doing is…brave, and unselfish, and utterly unnecessary. And I want you to come home, but it’s probably too late for that now.” Callandra starts crying. “I miss you. But you’re there, and you’ve signed a contract, and…” She smears the tears on her face away. “If this is what you needed to do to find peace, then I understand. But you should know, I don’t forgive you for messing up whatever you think you’ve messed up. Because there was never anything to forgive.”
That’s it. I close the pendant shut.
Dr. Um is quiet for a long time.
“Why didn’t you answer her messages?” Dr. Um says quietly.
“I don’t know.”
“What happened?”
“She had an accident. Major spinal damage. I wanted to use the money from my contract to pay for her treatments. My family can’t afford them, and they’re in major debt already.”
“It was an accident.”
“No, not really,” I say levelly.
She puts a hand on my shoulder. “But—”
“It’s okay. I’m okay,” I say. I take the pendant back and put it back on. “I know I didn’t steer that mining drover into a gully. It’s not really my fault, but I played a part.” I straighten my shoulders and shrug away from Dr. Um’s warm hand. “Callandra will be okay, and the money will help her, whether she wants to admit it or not. And Hana reminded me that I have a life to live. She gave me permission to live again.”
Dr. Um turns, and I’m thinking she’s distancing herself from my simplistic revelation when she suddenly embraces me. I’m stiff as a board at first, but I soften after she doesn’t let go. It feels really nice to hug a mother, even if she isn’t mine.
“You’re very brave,” she whispers, as she hugs me harder. “But you are so full of bullshit.”
And with that, I cry into her shoulder.
…
After the sixty minutes are up, the medicines have worked enough to keep Dr. Um’s pain under control, and Cyclo’s dying cells aren’t causing problems in the rest of her body. She’s physically stable enough to take command of Sannu, and Sannu makes a perfect parabolic turn in space and goes right back to the wreck of the Calathus.
I don’t talk to Dr. Um again about my parents, or about Callandra. Some things need more time in my brain to simmer. I’m not at peace, really. I don’t want to say that one talk and one hug from a stand-in mom has lifted an enormous, overly dramatic burden from my metaphorical shoulders.
Geez. I’m not that simple. But I did, finally, crack open that damned holograph pendant. I listened and didn’t run away.
You’ve got to start somewhere.
As we get closer to the wreck, Sannu turns on a radiation shield in preparation. It takes a full hour to get there and decelerate so we can find Hana. For all we know, she was pulled back into the wreckage of the ship, or she ended up inside that tiny blob of Cyclo and is frozen and drifting off somewhere.
Dr. Um tries to be levelheaded about searching for Hana, but we both know we’re looking for a body now, and her voice shakes with every order.
“Sannu, set your…scanner for any biological carbon-based tissue, alive or…” Dr. Um pauses to swallow and put her good hand over her eyes. “Or dead.”
“The Calathus is deceased. All the complex organic material has combusted on the ship. I am not picking up any readings. But I am sensing organic material in the six parsecs out from Maia, vector negative nine.”
I grip the chair I’m sitting in. “That must be Hana’s body.” I can’t believe I’m doing this. I can’t believe she’s gone. My heart is hammering at seeing her lifeless.
“Sannu,” Dr. Um says, “please redirect to the area and keep scanning as we go.”
I keep my eyes on the front cockpit window, searching the brilliant spray of stars in front of us for anything that looks like it could be Hana’s body, or the piece of Cyclo that took her.
“There.” Dr. Um points off to the right, and Sannu gently arcs in that direction. On the monitor before us, a green dot lights up. Complex organic material confirmed.
And then I see it. It’s a tiny black orb that blots out the stars behind it as it floats along. The dark material of the ball is speckled with white ice crystals, and it’s translucent. Inside, there is the faint outline of a human body.
It’s not moving. I have a feeling that my heart might break all over again, seeing Hana like this, but my thoughts are swept away when Dr. Um angles the ship closer.
“Sannu, see if you can bring that orb on board. Only if you think it’s safe.”
“Acknowledged.”
We get so close that I can see Hana’s profile. Her eyes are closed and limbs akimbo as if she’d fallen from a sky to the earth and never really landed. Like she’s still suspended in someone else’s dream.
We lose sight of the orb as Sannu sidles up to Hana, forms a pocket of matrix around the sphere, and brings it to the rear hatch where there’s an opening in Sannu’s endoskeleton. Dr. Um and I turn and watch as the ship’s matrix bubbles toward us, encasing the sphere. Sannu moves it onto the floor and thins himself out until there is nothing but a black sphere, Hana, and the tendrils of silky white matrix reincorporating into the ship’s walls.
The orb is large. It’s nearly six feet in diameter, and Hana’s waist is bent a little in the middle like she’s curled over to sleep. Dr. Um touches the orb and withdraws her hand.
“Oh, God. It’s ice cold.”
“We can’t leave her like this!” My hands are shaking. “What do we do?”
“I want her out of that matrix. I can put her body in cryo on the ship until we can bury her properly on Earth.” Her voice is steady and resolute, but her eyes glisten with moisture.
Dr. Um approaches the sphere. It looks like obsidian—volcanic black glass that I saw once from an Earth ore dealer. I touch the sphere, too. After living on Cyclo for almost two weeks, it’s so strange to see a piece of her look like this—so inert, so past its life. I expect it will feel like glass, too—hard, cold. As soon as my fingertips touch it, the hard surface pulses under my fingertip.
“What was that?”
The orb trembles, as if a tiny earthquake is racking it from the inside out. Deep within it, Hana’s eyes open.
“Oh, God! She’s alive!” her mother yells. “Quick, Fenn! Get it open!”
“Hana!” I yell so loud I hurt my own ears.
Those eyes, searching, looking. Looking at me, at Dr. Um.
Hana, my one Hana, is alive.
I think my heart just learned how to beat again.
We take what we can—a metal rod from a grappling hook, and I grip it tightly in my hands. Hana’s mouth opens now, her eyes seeing us both. The center of the sphere appears to be liquid—it’s only solid on the surface. I swing the rod back behind me, and Dr. Um turns slightly to shield her face, and I swing as hard as I can. The rod bounces off the surface of the orb, and the strike rebounds as pain flares up my arms. I swing again and again. Hana looks panicked and tries to move her hands and legs. She’s mouthing words.
HELP.
HURRY.
Sweat pouring down my face, I wind up for another strike. When the rod hits the sphere, everything explodes.
Black water and chunks of black gel pour everywhere. The shards of the sphere spread out, sharp as knives and slicing through my pants and cutting my upper arms. Hana is sodden, collapsed in the middle of this mess, and her arms cradle something to her chest.
Dr. Um and I wade through the broken shell and the gooey, black mess and grasp Hana. She’s crying and laughing, but mostly crying. In a heap, we’re hugging each other and asking questions and answering them, and everything is a hurricane of words and relief and pain.
Hana is alive.
I am alive.
For the first time, I feel like I’m home.