Toxic Page 13

  I see her in my mind, in the lab that I now know, the one I walked through the first time I stepped outside of my room. The incubators and liquid wombs here and there, empty. Maybe then, they weren’t empty, and the babies waiting to be born heard her cries and could do nothing on the other side of their plastrix gestational chambers.

  Early in the morning, Gammand had said. That means it was only a few hours before she was to come to my room and meet me for breakfast. Before she’d order Cyclo to awaken me. Before the evacuation, when she’d tell the rest of the crew that I, too, existed and needed to be saved. That’s why I slept for almost a whole week before I finally awoke. Because mother hadn’t left me behind or forgotten me. She herself had become nothing but inanimate carbon molecules.

  Mother didn’t intend to leave me behind.

  At least there is this tiny, tender mercy.

  “She was probably going to tell someone that week about me. So I could leave with her. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t.” My voice begins to escalate and then break. “She’s gone. She’s gone, and I’ll never see her again.” I start to cry in earnest, and I cover my face because I can’t stop sobbing.

  Oh God, she’s gone.

  Hands clasp my shoulders.

  “Come on, Hana. Come. Let’s take you somewhere quiet.” It’s Fenn’s voice, gentle and urgent.

  Meanwhile, Cyclo hasn’t tried once to soothe me by clinging to my feet and ankles, inviting me to dissolve in her watery embrace. It’s not like Cyclo to be so distant when I’m in such distress.

  “I need Cy—Cyclo. I should like to—to—sleep,” I say, hyperventilating.

  Fenn nods, but Portia steps up to us. “No. She cannot sleep within the ship’s matrix any longer.”

  “Why?” Fenn says.

  “My data says the matrix has been changing rapidly. Her ability to host humanoids isn’t stable right now. You’ve noticed, haven’t you?” Portia asks me, not unkindly. Her eyes may be a startling red, but her wire-thin eyebrows show concern, human concern. “The ship has been less communicative with you, hasn’t it?”

  I nod.

  “I’ve picked up some changes in her neural patterns. Normally, Cyclo can hear, taste, touch, smell, even see. There are these beautiful photoreceptors on her surface, but they’ve been dying, cell by cell.”

  But all I have is Cyclo. “I need her,” I say, not knowing how else to explain it.

  “Yes, but if you went into a rest period, there is a chance you might not be able to emerge,” Portia explains. “You might hit a pocket of toxins, or she might infuse the wrong combination of electrolytes. A little too much potassium and your heart would stop. Cyclo may not oxygenate you enough, and you could suffocate. There are too many possibilities that could go bad. I know we’re supposed to let Cyclo run her natural course, but we cannot let you die if it’s an obvious danger. I’m sorry, Hana.”

  “The gamma and beta southeast quadrants aren’t safe right now,” Gammand says. “She can sleep in one of the west quarters safely. For now.”

  Fenn doesn’t wait for an answer from me. And I seem to no longer be able to speak. Mother is in my thoughts, consuming them and leaving only the yawning emptiness of her absence. Fenn’s hand presses gently in the center of my back as we head toward the door, and the aperture opens to accept us into the hallway. Miki is crouched near the door, counting through a box full of wafer-thin data tablets. She stands as we exit, noting the tears pouring down my face, leaving streaks on my tunic.

  “Don’t feel bad. She’s a selfish bitch for not telling anyone you were here all this time.”

  It happens before I even know what I’m doing. My hand whips up and slaps Miki across the face, leaving a smear where my hand was wet from my tear drips. Miki is so strong that she hardly moves from the impact. The sting of it makes my palm go numb for a few seconds, the strike is so hard. Miki turns to me, baring her teeth like she’s going to swallow me whole. I don’t apologize.

  “Really nice, Miki,” Fenn says. “Way to go, insulting the dead. She just lost her mother, for God’s sake.”

  “I already lost my whole family,” Miki says, touching her cheek. She doesn’t back away but doesn’t appear willing to strike me back. “Half of them left me, like Hana’s mother. And the other half? I just left them. We don’t have time for weeping and shit. No. Fucking. Time.” Her eyes are shiny with moisture, as if her own body can’t bear her words.

  And yet, I stare back, unblinking, and a new sensation crawls under my skin.

  I have never felt this way before—the satisfaction of feeling the sting of my hand hitting flesh, the comfort of avenging my mother in even the smallest way. Miki’s cruelty stings worse than anything. It’s a much larger, much more cancerous feeling. It’s the color red invading my bruised heart and mind, so overwhelming that it eclipses my sadness.

  I feel murderous.

  Chapter Fourteen

  FENN

  The silence in the room is caustic, ready to scald anyone who dares speak.

  I didn’t think that Hana had it in her to hit anyone. I didn’t think her capable of anger, and it makes me realize that Hana isn’t as weak as I’d thought she was. Her blood pulses red and hot, like mine. A lot like mine.

  Portia lifts her chin to Hana and then to the door. She’s silently telling me to separate Hana and Miki, while Gammand is lying down, eyes closed, ready to sleep. Drama is not worth losing sleep over, apparently.

  I gently push Hana toward the door, and reluctantly, she pulls her glance away from Miki’s own milk-curdling stare. Miki wipes her eyes when she thinks we’re not watching anymore. Before I’m out the door, I make eye contact with Miki and nod at her. Just a nod, to say I get why she’s mad, and I get why she’s scared. Miki shakes her head at me, not wanting to even think about it. She’ll be like an emotionless rock after this, for hours. She’d done this over and over on the Selkirk.

  Once we’re in the hallway, I lead Hana away, and she lets me.

  “I want to go back to my room,” she says, but I shake my head.

  “We can’t. The area is too close to parts of Cyclo that aren’t safe. Maybe tomorrow we could go, after we test the areas, but not now. Not with the chance of being cut off from the rest of the crew.”

  “I don’t care about being cut off from the crew.”

  “Hana.”

  She stops walking, forcing me to look at her.

  “I don’t care.” Anguish transforms her face. “God, Fenn. I don’t care.”

  She cries.

  I don’t know what to say. Hana’s going through what I already have—saying goodbye to my family. Saying goodbye to sunrises on Ipineq, and the smell of red irises blooming at second twilight, and the taste of home-baked sweet crescents. I don’t know what to say, but I know what she feels.

  I slip my hand into hers and start pulling her along, and after two tugs, she shuffles morosely behind me because she’s too defeated to resist. Several turns later, we find an abandoned corridor full of smaller rooms with tiny chairs and tables. These must be quarters for the children on Cyclo. Children like we once were, who Hana never met. I feel terrible, for her sake. For the people she’d never met, and the life she hasn’t had.

  I want to complain about everything in the few short days left in my life, but God—at least I had a real life to live, in comparison. Granted, I don’t deserve to live it anymore, but still.

  Once the door closes, I tell her, “We’ll sleep here.”

  “I want to sleep in Cyclo.” She won’t look at me.

  “You can’t. You heard what Portia said. It’s not safe.”

  She starts wringing her hands, pacing the narrow space between the walls.

  I don’t know what to say, so I add, “You should eat something.”

  “I’m not hungry.” She finally crumples to the floor and wraps her arms arou
nd her knees.

  I don’t know what to do. I’m completely unequipped to handle mourning of any kind. Even my own. So I just sit next to her, not quite touching her, not doing anything but rubbing my nose, which has been running ever since Hana heard the news. Like my nose is crying for the both of us, somehow.

  Her toes wiggle delicately and stretch a little, digging into the floor. Cyclo’s matrix flits a few colors—gold and yellow—but then goes quiet. It almost seems like Cyclo’s too tired to chat. But I think it’s actually something else—like it doesn’t know what to say to her, either. Hana ends up tucking her feet over her knees, lotus style, so there’s no skin to skin contact with the floor. I guess she didn’t like what she heard from Cyclo, either. We end up sitting half a foot away from each other, aching from our hard run today, stiff with discomfort and the yawning quiet within Cyclo, within space.

  I doze off but awaken to hear Hana quietly singing to herself. It’s a song I don’t recognize, something soothing, like a lullaby.

  Dal-a, dal-a, balg eun dal a, li tai bai i nol deon dal a

  Her eyes are closed, and the soothing singsong actually makes me feel heavier than a lead weight on a 3g planet.

  Finally, sometime after midnight, when we’ve both dozed off sitting against the wall, I feel a slight bump. I blink sleepily to see Hana’s head has tipped over in unconsciousness and landed on my shoulder. She rouses herself to raise her head, but sleep overtakes her again in seconds and thump. Her temple lands on my shoulder again.

  I put my arm around her, which is what I wanted to do before but was afraid to. I inch her down to the floor where her legs straighten out. She snuggles into the curve of my stomach and hips, and lets me curl my other arm over her hip. For the rest of the night, I wake up every half hour or so—the sleep of a person wholly unaccustomed to sharing bed space with a fellow creature—just to check on her. She has newly dried tracks of tears on her cheeks from when she’s awoken and cried herself back to sleep.

  Once, I see it happen—her eyelids flutter, her mouth turns down, fresh tears slide to her temples and spill over onto the floor. The floor receives every drop that falls and then absorbs it so fast, as if to erase its existence, like greedy desert sand.

  Finally, around five o’clock in the morning, I can’t sleep anymore. My arm is beyond numb from Hana using it as a pillow, and my legs are cramping. I’d sleep with her longer if I could because, honestly—I’ve never had the pleasure before, and I feel so much less alone.

  Plus, I only have days to live. Even crampy spooning is better than being by myself. But then a voice enters my head, the voice that made me sign my contract with ReCOR, the voice that raged when I heard about Callandra’s accident.

  You don’t deserve this life.

  You don’t deserve these days, no matter how few they are.

  And I look at Hana’s sleeping face, frowning in her slumber. I think of our kiss, and how that was a stolen bit of goodness that I didn’t deserve, either.

  I gently extricate my arm from under her glossy black and white hair and get up. I stretch a long stretch and leave the room.

  The ship is quiet. There’s always a hum in the background of machines running somewhere in the biowalls, but there’s something else that sounds strange. Dripping sounds, and a random, faint hiss of gas escaping. Not soothing at all. I open my holofeed to see whether I can safely enter northeast alpha. I can. It’s time to get to work.

  Callandra comes first.

  I take out my card of drones and program them for the next set of data retrievals. This one will be for microorganisms. I hope Cyclo lets me send them into her matrix. I launch about two dozen, but before they hit the matrix of the wall, I ask.

  “Cyclo—may I send some of my bots into you? I don’t think it will hurt, and they’re just looking for bacteria. They won’t harm you.”

  I wait, and a blue color, deeper than the blue I’m used to seeing, flashes in benevolent waves.

  Well. I think that’s a yes.

  With that, I watch as the wall puckers a dozen times while my drones enter her matrix surface. Visor on, I see them slowly traversing her matrix, some already picking up readings, and others going deeper into her endoplasm near the edge of the alpha ring. Later today, I’ll send a few more in beta, and then gamma. And then I’ll be back on schedule.

  I leave Hana behind me and slowly make my way to her room. I want to call it her prison—that’s where she was trapped her whole life, after all—but she doesn’t seem to have the animosity toward it that I would have. After ten minutes of staring out the windows of the alpha ring on my walk, already bored by the sunrise of Maia over the curling mantle of the Calathus, I reach her room.

  It’s strange to be here without her. I look at her belongings—the lacquer chest, the cooking utensils laid out neatly for someone to start preparing something. The lack of beds, and the tiny shelf of books. I read the titles—A Beginner’s Guide to Needlecraft; The Autonomous Farmer; Best Short Stories of Yi Kwang-Su—and shake my head. I was not a book reader, ever. Probably why I did so poorly in school. Every time someone told me a story was worthy and good, I acted like it was sour milk, like it might poison me somehow. I wasn’t that type of kid. And look where I am now.

  “Why am I here?” I ask myself, forgetting why I’ve come to her room.

  Oh, yeah. Food. I decided that maybe Hana wouldn’t eat our prepared food—perfectly healthy, but not what she likes—given the way she reacted to it yesterday. There’s a tiny pot, and the cookstove seems to have some old-fashioned knobs and such. But I’ve never used this kind of equipment.

  “What do I do?”

  Colors flash around me. Cyclo is functioning here, it seems. Huh. But I don’t know her color language, and the translators don’t work.

  “I don’t understand, Cyclo. Can you…talk to me instead? Like you did before?”

  There’s a beat, and then a mound forms on the wall. A hole forms in the mound, like a volcano cone collapsing. A bubble of air is drawn into the cone, and the cone edges form a crude mouth.

  “What is your purpose?” the disembodied lips wheeze.

  “Oh. Hi, there. Uh, my purpose? I want to cook Hana something. But I don’t know how to cook. I don’t know where to get the water…”

  “You wish to feed my Hana?”

  Her Hana? Who knew a ship could get so proprietary?

  “Yes. Hana,” I say. “She seems like she would need some solid food. And you haven’t been well. We don’t know if your ability to give her nutrients is working all right.”

  “No, I haven’t been well,” Cyclo wheezes. “Well. Well. Well,” she repeats. What is with her? “I should like to help you help Hana.”

  “Thank you. You’ve always taken good care of her.”

  “It is my directive,” Cyclo says. “Dr. Um told me to care for her, under any and all circumstances.”

  Her words sound oddly like a threat. Without thinking, I tap on my leg:

  .-- . .. .-. -..

  Weird.

  “Weird,” Cyclo says, interpreting my Morse code. “Am I so strange?”

  I stiffen. It didn’t occur to me that she’d understand. I decide to ignore this fact. “Well, Cyclo, if you show me how to get some water, we can begin.”

  “Allow me…” Cyclo wheezes and reverse burps, inhaling another bubble to speak. “To assist you.”

  Step by step, Cyclo shows me how to extract water from the matrix, pouring it into the pot from a drip off the wall. Inside a cupboard are spices and soup-based powders. Some foods are freeze-dried or in precious, never-expiring packages. Nothing here is fresh, of course. I wonder where her mother ordered it from—and how old it all is—but I try to ignore that. Soon, I have a nice little cloudy-white soup bubbling on the stove. Cyclo supplies energy through a wireless cartridge on the back of the unit. There’s a tiny pot of hot, st
icky white rice cooking next to the soup.

  “Will you feed this to Hana?” Cyclo asks, via a different wall nearer to the stove.

  “Yes. Well, she can feed herself, but I’ll makes sure she has some.”

  “Thank you, Fennec Actias.”

  “You know my name?” I ask, surprised. I thought Cyclo only answered questions in a precise way. She’s saying something she doesn’t have to. Huh.

  “I know many things. I know what your name means.”

  I pause.

  My name. I’ve known that Fennec means fox, but my surname? I thought it had a Greek or Latin origin, but all that ever comes up on a search is some sort of moth. It’s very unexciting. My lineage is so mixed now that I’m not sure which great-great-grandparents it comes from. I’m a little bit Taiwanese, German, Spanish, Japanese, and Senegalese, last time I asked my parents.

  “Actias is a genus of Saturniid moths,” Cyclo says. “It’s quite fitting.”

  What, that I do my best work at night? I shrug, irritated. This is nothing new. And then it occurs to me—we’re really talking. Like, the way I would with another person. I wonder what it would be like to chat this way with the bacteria living in my gut. My reality shudders for a moment, and I smile at the walls. I like this ship a lot, I realize.

  “I know other things. I know I am dying,” Cyclo says abruptly.

  Goose bumps rise on my arms. For a long time, I say nothing, until I blurt out, “I know I’m going to die, too.”

  “Fennec. Can you save Hana?”

  I speak very slowly, choosing my words. “I…I can try.”

  Cyclo says nothing. Is she worried for Hana? Could she be emotionally attached to a humanoid? I’d never heard of such a thing. And then, without prompting, Cyclo asks, “Fennec. Can you save me?”

  I drop the cooking spoon on the stove. There is a plaintive quality to her voice that catches me by surprise. In that split second, I understand exactly what she’s feeling. Life is leaving her, parcel by parcel, just as my own days and minutes are numbered. It’s the desperation of knowing your very ability to see, think, feel, cry, scream—will be winked out without so much as a fireworks send-off or a funerary procession. There will be nothing but the vastness of the space, silence, and that spark of firing neurons in this one body of mine, gone dark after one last heartbeat.