Toxic Page 14

  I think she feels sorry for the both of us. Does she feel pain? Is she upset, knowing what’s happening? Is she sad about losing Hana, about Hana’s inevitable death, too? The idea that a ship can feel that—empathy, and fear, and the horror of oblivion—it takes my breath away for a second.

  “Fenn?” Hana is standing in the doorway, where a moment ago there was a membrane door. “What are you doing?”

  Sleepy-eyed, she watches me with surprise. At her appearance, Cyclo’s disembodied mouth melts back into the wall.

  “Cyclo?” I say, but the walls stay silent. Apparently, that conversation was between me and the ship, and not for Hana’s ears. I note this and save it for later, wondering what it means. Hana is still waiting for a response.

  “Oh. Hey. You’re awake,” I say, wanting to kick myself for saying the most obvious thing ever.

  “I am. But you were gone. I mi—” She clips off the end of her phrase.

  Was she going to say she missed me? Something warm blossoms in my chest at the thought, though I shouldn’t jump to conclusions.

  “Are you…cooking?”

  I smile. “I am. Luckily, I didn’t blow up the ship by accident.” I make a conscious decision not to tell her that Cyclo helped me.

  Hana smiles. Her eyes are still sad, and it’s a small smile, but it’s a genuine one. She goes to the cupboard and starts taking out bowls and spoons. She helps me ladle out the food and scoop the rice, so steamy that the sweet scent makes my mouth water. In a minute or two, we’re sitting at the low table and picking up our spoons.

  “Wait.” She turns to the lacquer box, but then says, “Never mind.”

  “What is it?”

  “I never eat breakfast without Mother. She’d always read a page out of her diary.”

  “I guess you could still do that,” I say, putting my spoon down.

  “It doesn’t feel right. She always read it. Not me. Or you, obviously.”

  “Would it make you feel better?” I ask.

  She nods and wipes her eyes. I get up and go to the lacquer box and open it. Right on top of a bundle of colorful silk clothes, next to a collection of knitting needles, several photo albums, and old tomes, is a newer journal bound in synthetic leather. I hold it up.

  “Is this it?”

  “Yes!” Hana’s face brightens.

  “What should I read?” I ask, flipping through the pages.

  “Something early. From when I was an infant.”

  I flip through and find a date from somewhere about fifteen or sixteen years ago. The journal is made of that special paper that’s microns thin but strong as regular paper. The whole thing is as slim as my hand, but with nearly two thousand pages. I find a passage from when Hana was nine months old and start reading.

  Look at how confident you are, walking at only nine months! I fear your legs will bow from being such an early walker. Today, Cyclo made an orb for you to run inside, and you’d bounce against the membranes and laugh so hard, you spit up your lunch. Your hair is long enough for two little pigtails. When you woke up today, your face was round like a planetary moon.

  Dal a, dal a. My little moon!

  Hana smiles at first, but it soon turns into a frown.

  “I never realized that the entries are only about me. They never say much about what Mother’s life was like.”

  “But you talked about that, right?”

  “Yes. But funny how she doesn’t like to talk about her life. Only me.” She shrugs. “Anyway. You must be hungry after all that cooking. Let’s eat.”

  We pick up our spoons and dive into the soup and rice.

  After a few bites and slurps, she nods appreciatively. “This is pretty great. You’re a good cook.”

  “Well, it’s all just reconstituted stuff.”

  She sighs. “I know. Like me.”

  I laugh, until I realize it’s not a joke. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m like this.” She jabs her spoon, pointing at the soup. “I read that the way you’re supposed to make this soup, to cook good seolleongtang, you need to simmer ox bones for hours and hours. I have no idea what the real thing tastes like. Just like I’m not quite the real thing. Mother engineered me, partly from her own DNA so she’d feel like we were biologically related. I have ancestral Korean DNA in me. But like most of the embryos on the ship, she pieced me together to make the best kind of Hana. I’m not really Korean. I’m the living memory of an entire culture.”

  I flip my holofeed on, and based on our conversation, a search for Korean culture pops up. Selecting it with a glance, I stare at the pictures. “You look Korean to me,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “I feel like a paper doll, trying to be real.” Hana pauses over her bowl, spoon still held aloft with soup-soaked rice. Anger flits across her face.

  “Your mom tried to give you a history. Wasn’t perfect, but she tried. And anyway—how you’re made, or who your parents are—it’s part of who you are, but it doesn’t define all of you.”

  “Doesn’t it? Mother told me once she made me extra obedient for my own safety.”

  I stop chewing. More obedient? That could kill a person in a second in the life I’ve lived, stealing and hustling my goods in the last five years. On Cyclo, hidden, I can see why.

  “Obedience isn’t always a good thing,” I say, slowly. “Just because you’re born with a gene for something, it doesn’t have to be your destiny. Your existence isn’t just a legacy of where your DNA came from.”

  “I don’t know if that’s true, Fenn.”

  Now I’m confused. Am I more than what my parents’ genes gave me? I am, after all, the one who screws up all things. That is not my parents. But maybe it’s my fault I didn’t try hard enough. I’m trying hard now. But even if I succeed, I still don’t win.

  “Anyway,” I ask, “don’t you want to make your own decisions? For once? I mean, you have. What you said to us, threatening Doran with wrecking the research if we don’t help you. That wasn’t obedient.”

  “Oh. You’re right.” Hana is scraping the last dregs of the soup from her bowl with a long spoon. She doesn’t seem to notice that when Cyclo was busy talking me through the cooking lesson, I slipped some high protein and vitamin micro-packets in there for her health. I know it’s my imagination, but her complexion is already more blooming. It’s probably just rice steaming her face, though. “Oh. I ate it all.”

  I smile. “Thanks to my amazing cooking skills, no doubt.”

  “I haven’t eaten real food in a while. Mother only ever made me small portions, since Cyclo has always fed me. But now that I can’t immerse myself… I guess it’ll be a lot of regular food for now on.”

  “I’ll cook it for you,” I offer.

  “You will?”

  “Sure,” I say, smiling. “I like making real things. Well,” I add, since it was just reconstituted soup, “mostly real things.”

  We bring our bowls to wash them in the water Cyclo drips into the tiny sink, the dregs of which will be reabsorbed into the matrix and recycled. Hana’s elbows bump into mine as we clean. I like it. But Hana is frowning again.

  “This morning, I thought it was a dream. That mother died. That we had kissed. Neither seems real.”

  I whisper, “It happened. Both things.” I think, Here is where she tells me she regrets the kiss.

  “I don’t have any right to be happy about one memory when I’m upset about the other.” She grips the bowl in her hands and shuts her eyes.

  “You do. My God, between the two of us, you should revel in any emotion that comes your way. Good and bad. That’s living.”

  “Why not you? You said between the two of us.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t realize I’d said that, and now it’s too late. “Let’s just say I’ve made mistakes, and that I belong here.”

  Hana stares at
me. “You deserve to die?”

  I nod, unwilling to say anything out loud.

  “Do you also not deserve to be happy? To have a single moment of bliss? Because they aren’t the same thing.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t really want to talk about it.”

  “Kiss me again, Fenn,” Hana says, putting her bowl down and facing me.

  “Now?”

  “Now.” She adds, “Please. Because everywhere I turn, I see my mother, and I feel despair, and I would like to feel something for a few seconds that isn’t terror.”

  I can’t. So when I don’t move, Hana slips her hands to my shoulders, rises on her tiptoes, and kisses my mouth, softly, gently, and despite myself, my hands go to her face. I close my eyes.

  After a minute, she breaks the kiss and rests her head against my chest.

  “There. I feel a little better. Not much, but a little.”

  Somehow, she knew I needed this, too, because I wouldn’t give it to myself of my own free will. She doesn’t ask me how I feel, and she goes back to cleaning the dishes, and for a few more minutes, I forget that I’m not allowed to have anything resembling joy. Hana handed me a little glimpse of it, and there it was. An allowance of happiness. Something I don’t deserve, but which was gifted to me anyway. She gives me one last, quick kiss. I tap against my leg before I realize what I’m doing.

  .-- --- .--

  Wow.

  “What was that?” She looks down at my hand against my leg. She must have felt me tapping away.

  “Oh. Habit of mine. I sometimes think out loud in Morse code.”

  “Fascinating! Teach me?”

  “Well, it’s just… Sure.”

  I show her an alphabet on my holo, and sure enough, she starts memorizing it quick as can be.

  Soon, she’s tapping out a message to me.

  .... .. ..-. . -. -. .. .- -- .... .- -. .-

  Hi, Fenn, I am Hana.

  “Nice!” I say.

  Hana finishes drying the last bowl, and she says, “I guess we should get to work. I have some hormone infusions to wrangle up somewhere.”

  Right on time, there is a buzz from my holofeed implant, and a window opens up. Gammand’s face appears, and his voice fills the quiet between us.

  “Fenn, is Hana with you?”

  “Yes. We just ate breakfast. What’s up?”

  “Come to the crew cabins on northwest beta. Immediately. Bring Hana with you. We need her.”

  “Why?” Hana asks.

  “It’s Miki. Something’s happened to her. I think…I think she may be dead.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  HANA

  No, no.

  The word “dead” should not, cannot, be used so soon after learning about Mother. Miki dead? I see her so very much alive in my mind’s eye. I blink, and I see her. Her scowl, her sadness when no one seems to notice otherwise. Her seventeen shades of blue that probably only I can see on her beautiful skin.

  She can’t be dead.

  We run to the northwest side of the ship. Fenn zigzags us this way and that, avoiding the areas that aren’t contained and safe. Cyclo’s walls are changing color. They’re no longer bright, translucent blue; occasionally, we’ll find a whole wall colored orange, or translucent, with a view of her bioskeleton. Sometimes there’s a clear partition full of gummy knots of extruded material from the walls, steaming, it seems, from some gaseous substance emanating from her flesh.

  Oh, Cyclo. Are you in pain? Does it hurt?

  Last night was the first night I voluntarily slept like a normal human being, outside the confines of her matrix. And I’m shocked to say, I feel pretty well rested. My dreams this time were my own. Such very imperfect dreams, they were. No beautiful fields of lavender, no dragonfly wings or skimming the surfaces of lakes on distant planets.

  There were dreams of discomfort, of loss. Of sheer happiness of seeing Mother again, helping me knit something new. Of watching blood ooze with fury from the ground where wheat grows, yellow and red admixed nonsensically. Mother, appearing on the other side of a plastrix window in space, just beyond my reach. She couldn’t touch me as she drifted away. The metaphor was not lost on me.

  While we’re running there, Portia careens around a perpendicular corridor from beta and joins us.

  “I just heard about Miki,” Portia says, galloping ahead of us with her giraffe legs. We climb two sets of steps upward to the gamma ring. There are no data drives here, just strangely bumpy walls. Portia finds an opening above that must lead to the delta ring. Instead of steps, it only has hand- and footholds as the g-force here is so low. She pulls herself up and disappears, and we follow.

  Ahead, we hear yelling and shouts before they go ominously quiet. There’s enough gravity that we can walk, but not nearly enough. If I step too hard, my head nearly hits the ceiling. Portia and Fenn stop outside a large containment unit, holding onto the thin endoskeleton handholds on the wall. I’d only ever seen this on a map—it’s where most of Cyclo’s dangerous waste metabolites are housed.

  Fenn reaches the door of the unit. It’s enormous—at this smaller delta level, one unit goes around one quarter of the ship. It’s windowless, with massive, bone-like doors that Cyclo has made of black matrix in a lattice. But the doors are all open.

  We push ourselves through the narrow corridor to get in. The walls are very thick, and they look healthy. No spots, no drips of acid. I touch one wall to see if Cyclo knows I’m here, and there’s no response. There are so many places she can’t communicate with me. It feels like a betrayal, somehow, as if she’s been keeping secrets.

  The corridor opens to an enormous, curved room. There is one narrow ledge in the middle, but the floors, walls, and ceilings are otherwise studded with what look like oblong eggs, only they’re no eggs that Earth humans have ever seen. They’re nearly fifteen feet tall each, and maybe six feet wide. Passing by, Portia imprints her hand into one, and the entire egg undulates slightly. The contents are liquid.

  “Don’t do that,” I say, staying her hand when she tries to touch another. “It’s full of radioactive waste.”

  Portia snatches her hand back, holding both fists to her chest, afraid. I’ve never feared Cyclo in any way, but the idea that she has these pockets of toxins is a reminder that her entire being isn’t kind and benign. Just as humanoids leave an ugly trail of trash behind us, so does Cyclo. We walk forward, and ahead of us there is Gammand hovering over Miki, whose lifeless body is splayed, her hands falling over either side of the walkway.

  Her eyes are open, bloodshot, and her face has a brownish hue. It’s terrible and strange to see when she’s only ever been blue.

  She’s dead. I can’t believe it’s real. I’ve never in my life seen a dead person. All I’ve ever wished for is to meet real people, to live with them, to laugh with them. Even with Mother, there’s a distance to her being gone, because I haven’t witnessed it—but this is real. This is too real.

  “Miki,” I whisper, and then my hands go to my face. I start weeping.

  Fenn immediately goes to her side and touches her wrist and neck. He looks at Gammand, who looks at Portia, and then me. His face is stricken.

  “Miki,” he says. And that’s all he says. He’s a statue for minutes, just holding her lifeless hand. Gammand and Portia, too, are quietly shocked, just staring at her. Perhaps seeing themselves, a future version of themselves.

  I had no idea Fenn would be so upset. But his face reminds me of something very familiar. It’s like looking into a kind of mirror. This was me when I heard about Mother. It feels like I’ve known for centuries that Mother died, and yet it was only yesterday. And it brings back a wave of longing so twisting, my throat aches. For Fenn, and for me.

  After a long time, Fenn finally says, “I can’t believe it. What happened?”

  Gammand turns to give me a brutal
look and yells. “Where have you been?”

  “I…” His angry words hit me like a punch in the chest. “I’ve been with Fenn. What happened to Miki?”

  “She’s dead. Looks like she was strangled. Answer my question. Where the hell have you been?”

  I’ve never been spoken to in such a tone. “I’ve been asleep. And then I woke up and had breakfast with Fenn.”

  “It’s true,” Fenn says. He gently lays Miki’s hand on her chest before wiping his nose with his sleeve. “Why are you asking her?”

  “Because I have a biomonitor in every crew member on this ship. I know where everyone’s been but Hana. And no one else has been around Miki in the last few hours before she left our headquarters and came here to do some readings.” He glares at me. “You were fighting with Miki last night. We all remember!”

  “But I was with Fenn!” I look to him to back me up.

  “For the whole time? Every minute?” Gammand says.

  “Nearly.”

  “Nearly?” Gammand says, crossing his arms.

  “Well,” Fenn says finally, “I did leave to make breakfast. “But c’mon. It was barely an hour’s time!”

  Portia pulls herself up to her full height and she glares at me. “No one saw you right at the time Miki’s biomonitor says she died.” Her red eyes flash and almost pulsate with crimson. “Krshkt! Damn it. Did you kill her?” She takes a huge step forward, fist raised, and I scramble back.

  Fenn thrusts his arm to hold Portia back—which he can’t, but it makes her pause.

  “Miki is four times her size and weight,” he reasons. “It’s not possible!”

  I hold up my hands. “I was sleeping! I wouldn’t hurt her. I wouldn’t even know how!”