Toxic Read online

  “Sorry about this,” I say as she looks at me with an expression of anxiety and confusion. With that, I toss her into the passageway. Gravity pulls her down, and I hear her land below with a soft thud and a squeal.

  Yeah, I just threw a girl down a tunnel. Not my best day. I jump down and follow her as we keep running, looking for another tunnel in the floor that will take us to the alpha ring. Hana’s only a few feet ahead of me, still shuffling slowly and breathing hard.

  “Portia. Is there any way to contain it?” I yell.

  She comms in. “We’re not allowed to interfere with the natural deterioration of the ship, Fenn.”

  The windows are showing a beautiful burst of stars around Caleano, so blue and bright. Stars are ordinary enough, and not something I’d care about, but it occurs to me this may be the last star I ever see.

  Suddenly, Hana throws my hand off her arm. She collapses to her knees, out of breath.

  “I can’t…I can’t…run…anymore…” she whispers between pants.

  “You have to!” I look behind us. The fog has fallen through the corridor from the gamma ring and is now spreading toward us on beta, like an inevitable wave we can’t outrun. Goddammit, and I’m not allowed to do anything but run. I hate this. I hate being here. Why did I not show up that first day of work and destroy my life and Callandra’s? Why did I take that last-minute job to steal electrum? Why did I not realize that maybe, just maybe, coming home empty-handed to Callandra might have been good enough?

  From my feed, Miki is screaming and yelling at Doran. Her voice is filled with panic, a tone I’ve never heard from her. If not for the deepness of her voice, she’d sound almost like a child. “Why can’t we stop it? Just shut the corridor doors? This is suicide, Doran!”

  Doran’s image shows up in a corner of our feeds. “We can’t. We have to let it take its course, even if it kills you,” he responds, calmly but with a tone of utter resignation. Spoken like a man who’s not immediately at risk of dying, the bastard.

  Though, it’s not him, really. It’s ReCOR.

  Who cares. Bastards, all of them.

  “We haven’t even gotten any good data, yet!” Gammand joins the argument. Everyone’s face is in my feed, and they’re all simultaneously yelling at Doran, pleading with him. None of us is ready to die. Not a one.

  “I can stop it,” Hana says, between hard breaths.

  I stare at her. “What did you say?”

  “I said I can stop it. Your rules aren’t my rules.”

  “What?” Oh God. We have a chance. I touch my forehead and turn off the comm completely, so none of what I say goes on record. “Do it, Hana! Talk to Cyclo! Make it stop!”

  Still collapsed onto the floor, she calls out.

  “Cyclo. Cyclo, please. Close off the corridors and keep the gas away.”

  But nothing happens.

  “Maybe she can’t hear you?” I say. “Is there any other way to talk to her?”

  Hana nods. She plants her hands on the blue matrix beneath her and closes her eyes. The fog keeps churning forward, now about thirty feet away. Nothing is happening. “She’s not responding. She’s… Wait.”

  Hana’s eyes scrunch closed, and colors—pulsating shades of yellow—start emanating from her fingers, down the hallway’s floor and walls. A ridge of blue matrix starts to close along the edges of the corridor, fifteen feet away, between us and the cloud of toxic gas. Just before it hits, the matrix forms a full wall, but it’s thin. Even from here, I can tell the gas is burning the matrix, dissolving it. It eats away a hole, and a puff of gray comes out.

  Now it’s only ten feet away. I back away, but Hana still has her hands planted on the floor. This next wave of gases hits another thin, membranous wall Cyclo’s made in anticipation. But this one has had just seconds more time to form. It’s just enough. The gas starts dissolving the inner layer, but this time it’s held by another layer of forming matrix. There’s a push and pull of layers being formed, then eaten away on the far side of the barrier. Hana and I are immobile, watching the war that Cyclo is having with her own dangerous chemical cloud.

  There’s a mighty groan and a cracking noise. White splinters start forming in the gel wall Cyclo is building. They keep growing and growing, until they form a lattice that becomes more opaque and solid by the second. We see them forming in the walls beyond the barrier, too, coloring the blue walls a more milky tone.

  “What is Cyclo doing?” I ask, incredulous.

  “The gas has mostly polar and ionic molecules. She’s making a nonionic barrier from her lipids.” Hana closes her eyes and stretches her fingers out even more taut. “And she’s doing it up in the gamma ring, too.” She opens her eyes after two long, excruciating minutes. “She’s contained it. For now.”

  “For now?”

  Hana stands. “Yes. My communication with her is off, Fenn. It takes so much energy for me to speak to her, and usually I don’t even have to ask. She didn’t respond to me at all in gamma, and here she can’t seem to hear me. Something’s not right.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “Something’s not—”

  “Never mind,” I cut her off. “Come on. Let’s meet the others and see what the damage is. My bots survived,” he says, holding out his card. Around the bend, several bots of different sizes I’d previously launched arrive and land on my hand. I pocket them, and the nano landing card, too. “And they got great data. Let’s go.”

  Hana clutches the tablet to her chest, entwines her fingers in mine, and nods. This need for her to keep holding on to me is strange, and I confess, I love it. I was never a hand-holding kind of guy, even as a kid. But let’s face it, it’s probably because no one ever wanted to hold my hand. Even in my own family.

  And that kissing session, which was really supposed to be some sort of a mercy kiss for a girl who wanted to be kissed before she died, was not just about mercy. Some part of me drowned when we kissed, and we could have stopped after the first millisecond, but we kept going, like we were drunk on each other. I’ve never, ever kissed anyone like that before. And now with her hand in mine, I wonder—do I have a girlfriend? In this last gasp of life, this is where I am?

  It is some kind of fucked-up wonderful, and as long as it doesn’t keep me from saving Callandra, then I’m beyond okay with it. I bring Hana’s hand to my face, kiss the back of it, and she smiles at me—a sad smile.

  “I think I like you, Fennec,” she says. “I wish I had met you fifty years ago.”

  “But we’re only seventeen,” I say, not understanding.

  “Exactly.” She kisses my hand back, and in a bizarre event in synchronicity, I understand what she means. She’s talking fairy tales and bending both reason and physics. God, but it would have been nice if we could have stepped outside our reality and been together.

  We half jog, half walk back to the bridge on alpha. Everyone is there. Miki is nursing a scalding burn on her left leg, and Gammand is attending to it with the first aid kit, covering it with a wound healant that looks like a sheet of diaphanous spider webs. Portia is holding her head, catching her breath.

  “What happened?” I ask once the door is shut.

  Miki’s eyes immediately go to our threaded fingers, and she smirks, but it’s a genuine spark of amusement, rather than an evil smirk. I let go abruptly. Hana puts her hand to her chest as if she just got stung. Miki hobbles to a chair to sit down. “One of the central vacuoles holding liquid waste material broke open. Somehow, it depressurized and turned into poisonous vapor. It spread into the main hallways of the gamma ring.”

  “Well, that’s telling,” Portia says. “The ship’s inner containment mechanisms are failing. They’re supposed to have several safeguards. We knew this would happen, but I didn’t expect the ship to be able to contain it.”

  “Yes. Look.” Gammand points at a 3D projection of Cyclo f
loating near us. “It’s built no fewer than twenty barriers. Mostly solid, waxy material, drawn from the matrix itself. The surfaces of the affected corridors also have thickening layers of protective walls.”

  “The Calathus has given herself a bandage. Though, it took five whole minutes before she acted to do anything at all,” Portia notes.

  “That was me,” Hana says. “I told her to seal off the damage.”

  Miki strides toward her. “And who told you to do that?”

  Oh God. Hana, don’t you dare look at me. I can’t get in trouble for this, I can’t. My face goes so hot it could melt the new waxy walls Cyclo just built, but Hana coolly says, “It was me, and only me. Cyclo and I talk all the time, but in the gamma ring, she couldn’t communicate for some reason. She’s never had to repair herself before, so I had to tell her. That’s why.”

  “That goes directly against our mission!” Miki spits out. Miki does this—goes from peaceful to pissed in a snap. It’s scared me before. “You cannot change the course of this ship’s death, or I’m losing my money.” She limps even closer and raises her blue fist, close enough to hit Hana. “And I refuse to breach my contract.”

  “I already did. I asked her to release some hormones into herself, to see if it would help.” Hana shrinks her shoulders together.

  “What? You may have made things worse!” Miki says.

  “Now wait,” Portia says. “Hana isn’t part of our mission. But I believe she’s trying to help. We have to work with her so we can do our jobs. Doran says we must.”

  “And we have no choice in this?” Miki throws her hands up in the air, and her braids bounce against her shoulders. “Are you kidding me?”

  “You’d probably be dead if it weren’t for me,” Hana says quietly.

  Miki goes quiet. Her face contorts, and pure fear flickers over her features, before settling into a despondency she rarely shows. “I don’t need you,” Miki says, so quiet, so sad, that I’m not sure she even said it.

  “I’m calling Doran,” Gammand says, and it shuts everyone up. But when he turns on his holofeed, Doran’s unable to connect. Portia tries, too—nothing.

  “Look. Hana is part of this ship,” I say. “Hana, you can’t interfere with our mission in a way that speeds up Cyclo’s death or purposely sabotages our work. Right?”

  “Of course, I wouldn’t do that,” she says. Miki is still inches from her face; Hana doesn’t back down, which is impressive. And Miki relaxes when she hears her words.

  “And in return, we try to find out more details on her mother, and how to possibly save the ship and get Hana off,” I say, though the thought of Hana leaving me here while I live out the few days I have left makes me sick. I’m actually nauseated at the idea, though I had nine months to get used to it. Hana isn’t happy with my declaration, either—she nods once, but frowns deeply.

  “This is bull,” Miki mutters. She’s back to being crusty again. “Our job is expressly not to save the ship. How can you guarantee we will get our death benefits?”

  “Death benefit? What is that?” Hana asks.

  “We’re not here voluntarily. We’re getting paid. Or rather, someone gets paid once we die,” I explain.

  “Oh,” Hana says, putting her hand to her mouth. “So there is a number, a price for a person’s life. They always say in the vids that life is priceless.”

  “Not for ReCOR,” Miki says, smirking. “And they lowballed us, but here we are.”

  “Quiet, everyone. Just for one millisecond.” Portia stands up to her full seven feet, her head only just barely below the ceiling. “So, Fenn—you’re saying that if the ship can be salvaged, it’s in Hana’s hands, not ours?”

  “Exactly,” I say. “Look, I’ll go over the contracts again, but I’m pretty sure that if we don’t do anything we’re not supposed to, what Hana does can’t affect us as long as we meet our metrics.”

  “Wait,” Gammand says quietly. “So there’s a chance we could leave this ship alive, so long as the Selkirk crew doesn’t actively make it happen?”

  “I think so. But I have to check with Doran, to be sure.”

  Everyone is quiet. It sounds like a good deal, which is why I’m nervous that Miki is still scowling.

  “I don’t buy it. I read that contract backward and forward. It says we are not to do anything to alter the natural death of this ship. By having her here”—she points rudely at Hana—“and letting her have her way, we forfeit everything!”

  “Miki,” Portia starts, but Miki stomps her muscled self over to her.

  “No. Don’t ‘Miki’ me like you’re some benevolent boss making it all better. You’re not the boss. She will ruin everything. She was never even supposed to exist. She might as well be dead now—it would make everything less complicated. We’d get our job done the way it’s supposed to be done.”

  “Miki!” Portia hollers, so loud that the walls reverberate. The boom of her voice shakes us all, and Miki is silenced for a moment.

  Miki says, “I’m just saying what everyone else is thinking.”

  I hate to admit it, but this is one of the reasons why I like Miki. She is as transparent as they come. There is no bull with her, but it also means she tells you to your face if she hates you. Hasn’t happened to me yet. She’s near enough that I put my hand on her thick shoulder, and Miki glances at me, slightly unsure of herself. I give her a tight-lipped look that says, I understand, but cool it.

  Miki exhales. She looks at the tablet in Hana’s hands. “So, what’s this?”

  Hana hands it over reluctantly, without even a word.

  Gammand says, “Downloaded data from the hard drive. And now, it’s the only data from the ship we have, since those hard drives were all chemically burned in the last fifteen minutes.”

  I watch Miki as she starts scrolling and searching through it. Hana looks over her shoulder as Miki taps here and there.

  “What was her name?” Miki asks. “Your mother?”

  “Um Yoonsil,” Hana says. “But names are rarely used, and I couldn’t find it in a search.”

  “And you don’t know her universal ID? Or ship ID?”

  “No.” Hana looks ashamed by not knowing the basic information that every humanoid knows about each of their family members, as well as they might know their full names or birth dates. How odd that her mother never shared it with her.

  “Well, that I can find.” Gammand reaches over and punches in several things to the holo screen at his workstation in the corner. “Here you go. UY4021.”

  Miki keeps tapping and touching the tablet. Her face has a smirky expression I’m dying to slap away, then it disappears. She frowns and walks directly to Portia, handing her the tablet. Portia’s red eyes study it then look at me. She doesn’t look at Hana.

  “What is it?” Hana wrings her hands together. “You found her? Does it say why she didn’t tell anyone about me? Does she talk about me at all in the records?”

  Portia finally meets Hana’s eyes. She takes a deep breath, so slowly that you can barely tell she’s steeling herself.

  “Hana. Your mother is dead.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  HANA

  Lost.

  Utterly lost.

  This is the only feeling I have after Portia speaks. My mother, dead? Gone? Before, she was simply a lost part of my world, fleeing to a destination that didn’t include me. But now, the warmth I’ve known seeing her every morning—the feeling in my heart has winked out.

  Mother is gone.

  Mother is dead.

  And without her, I am on Cyclo, yes, and I am still a few parsecs away from the star Maia amongst the Pleiades, but none of it matters. We were a binary pair of atoms, Mother and I, rotating our energies within Cyclo. And now that she’s gone—really gone—my trajectory is nowhere.

  This cannot possibly be. This cannot
.

  Fenn comes up behind me. He looks at the information scrolling on the tablet.

  “What happened to her?” he asks quietly. I’m still unable to stir a single muscle. I can’t move. I am here, but I’m not.

  Portia murmurs under her breath as she searches the logs. “It was recent. Within twelve hours of the evacuation. Of course.” She looks over to me, and I can barely see her now because tears have begun to pool on my lower lash line, and they’ll spill soon, and I’m having trouble breathing.

  “Of course? What do you mean?” Fenn asks.

  Portia sighs. “That would explain why Hana didn’t evacuate with the rest of the Calathus crew. Her mother died, and she was the only person who knew of her existence, right?”

  “Well, why didn’t Cyclo say anything?” Fenn’s voice rises in anger.

  I look up to him, and the small movement of my eyes makes the tears fall over my cheeks in two hot rivulets. “She wouldn’t have said anything if no one knew to ask. Cyclo doesn’t volunteer information. It’s not Cyclo’s fault.”

  As soon as the words escape me, I think of it. Fault. Faulty. Fault lines, as in the fissures that breed earthquakes and geological cataclysms. Maybe I am the faulty one. Maybe I waited too long to say something, to demand that I be made known. Maybe I could have done something to save Mother. I sway in place, unmoored. Fenn touches my arm, and his hand is cool. It jolts me out of my thoughts, out of my cataclysm.

  Fenn’s hand doesn’t move. It feels like a tiny bridge to someone, something else. I am beyond desperate that he not move his hand away.

  “Does it say what happened to her?” Fenn asks.

  Portia keeps reading. She shakes her head. “I don’t understand this medical terminology. But it looks like…some sort of heart arrhythmia.” When I give her a quizzical look because I don’t know what that means, she says, “It means her heart stopped beating normally.”

  “But couldn’t they fix that?” I ask, as if asking could possibly change the irrevocable facts.

  This time, Gammand looks at the data, and he scrolls it back and forth. “There’s only so much information here,” he says. “It says she died in the morning, the very early morning, on her work shift. They found her in the lab, collapsed. But there’s very little information here.”