Toxic Read online

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Is something wrong with her eyes? Is she delirious?

  “I forgot,” Hana says. “You can’t see it. It’s in the ultraviolet spectrum. Mother put the ability in me when she designed me. It’s why I can read Cyclo’s emotions better than a computer or another person can.”

  “And this is different?”

  “Yes. It’s beautiful, but it’s like…she’s singing, or painting, or something. How odd. I’ve never seen her do this before.”

  “Maybe it’s because the damned ship just murdered Miki and is pretty proud of it,” Gammand says. Everyone’s thinking about it, except maybe Hana, who looks shocked at the idea.

  “No! She wouldn’t. Why would Miki have strangulation marks on her neck that look like human hands?”

  Everyone goes silent for a while. It really doesn’t make sense.

  “That’s pretty weird,” I say. “And we have no good weapons on the ship. If a person was going to kill another person, bare hands work.”

  “Look. These types of ships don’t kill humanoids. They never have,” Hana adds.

  “She’s right,” Gammand says. “Cyclo photosynthesizes for energy. It’s like asking an oak tree to suddenly become a carnivore and gobble up a… What did they call those burned flying things on a stick?”

  “Rotisserie chicken,” I say.

  “Right. That. The physiology just doesn’t work that way,” Hana says.

  “Fine,” Gammand says. “So the ship is vegetarian. We still don’t have an answer, though. And we have no way to scan the ship for other hidden passengers. We have to watch our backs. It’s time to tell Doran what happened.”

  I comm Doran, and we explain everything, even showing digitals from the area. It’s hard not to get emotional while explaining what happened. I clear my throat about seven times, it aches so much. Miki is decidedly gone. We did a few radiation readouts of the area, but there was nothing strange.

  Doran sighs, which sounds like a wheeze. “We can’t let this slow our schedule. You’re to continue your work today. Since you need to stay with Hana, and she isn’t doing anything, we might as well see if she can do Miki’s readings with the equipment, so you can stay on task.”

  “Copy that.” I thought he’d be sadder about this. Or more scared for us. But no matter what, there’s work to do, and now the specter of the harm that’s come to Miki is driving me to work harder. “Come on, Hana. Today’s the day I need to do some in-depth matrix work with Cyclo. Let’s get to it. We’ll go clockwise and start here.” I point to the 3D map that my holofeed is displaying. “It’s close.”

  Hana points a slender finger, following the blueprint. Her hands are beautiful and unmarred by hard work. A wall of her black hair slips over her shoulder, and I get a waft of scent in my direction. She smells a little like flowers, a little like a slept-in shirt. I like it.

  “How odd to see Cyclo in this way. It’s like we’re seeing all her insides.” To peer closer, she has to bring her cheek closer to mine. I can feel the warmth of her skin. I try to concentrate as she speaks. “Oh. The gestational labs. That’s where my mother did most of her work.”

  God, focus, Fenn. Do your job, I tell myself. No time for this. Not enough life left to spend time smelling girls. “Uh.” I clear my throat and shake my head slightly to get my thoughts in order. “My bots can only do so much work before the matrix may make my connection harder, and I can’t take the chance of losing any. Miki wanted me to send my bots to do her readings, so we can do them together.”

  She nods. “I can try.” But something in her expression tells me she’s not fully enthusiastic about the idea.

  I use my holofeed to navigate the hallways to the gestational labs, and Hana asks Cyclo to show the way, so we can test if her internal spatial recognition is intact. The flashes of light keep trying to get us to go to the alpha ring on the southern quadrant. Right ring, wrong quadrant.

  “She’s totally off. We’ll have to let Gammand know,” I say.

  Finally, we make it there. The gestational labs are immense. There’s room after room of filtration systems, amniotic fluid synthesis machines, oxygenators, and varying sizes of the gestational chambers ranging from the size of a fist to an old-fashioned bathtub. All are empty. Completely dry, too.

  “We’ll start here.” I take my backpack off and find several cards of bots. Using my visor, I program them quickly for the information that both Gammand and Portia had asked for—levels of radioactive tritium and chlorine-16, as well as functional levels of other elements, like oxygen, water, and byproducts that aren’t getting recycled within the matrix properly. Miki’s death has put me behind, but I’m going to make it drive me to work harder and be more careful. “Hana, can you tell Cyclo what I’m doing, so she doesn’t kill my bots?”

  “Yes.” She puts her hands on the wall, then pauses. “No, wait. I need you to do something for me, too.”

  “Hana, there isn’t time—”

  “I know,” she says, cutting me off. Her expression flickers between resolve and insecurity. “That’s why I need you to do this for me. I need your bots to find out if she has any healthy stem cells inside her. Anywhere.”

  “Why? None of this will help her, not at this point. You already tried the hormones, and look what happened. She busted open one of her toxin containers.”

  “That may not have anything to do with it. Maybe it saved even more vacuoles from failing. Anyway,” Hana says. “I know what you’re thinking. Do you give up this easily about everything?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She walks up to me and slips her hand under my throat. I stiffen, ready to shove her hand away, but it’s warm and soft. I freeze, not knowing how to act. She slips her fingers under the collar of my shirt and pulls out the necklace. The pendant is heavy, and when she holds it in her hand, it’s a relief to feel the weight lifted.

  “You still haven’t listened to this, have you?”

  I snatch it out of her hand and step back. “Don’t. You don’t know…you don’t understand.”

  “You’re right. I don’t understand what it is to run away. I’ve been left behind. But I don’t want to be content to be left behind, Fenn. You shouldn’t be, either.”

  I sputter, and my face goes hot. But I can’t respond. Because speaking out loud means talking about her, and me, and Callandra, how messed-up I am, and how I got here. I have no one to blame but myself, and I’m sick to death of being blamed for everything—even if it’s my fault. But I also know what got me to think about this again.

  Hana.

  Hana, and her will to live.

  I stare at her, and how resolute she is—how even now, her black eyebrows are lifted as if she’s afraid of being struck down or reprimanded. Even after the horror of seeing Miki dead, after finding out that her mother is gone forever. She’s so used to following orders, and here she is, fighting. And here I am, so willing to eat my own fate with a “thank you, and please can I have another serving of poison so I can die like a good boy.”

  I am sick of it all. But what makes me sicker is the idea that Callandra will pay for my sins yet again if I let my own ego get in the way—the ego that says I can survive this ship. That I dare to imagine a future with the girl in front of me.

  I can’t help Hana without hurting Callandra.

  And while I sit on the brink of telling Hana no, she says, “I’m not asking for you to forfeit your contract, Fenn. I’m just asking…for you to give me a chance to live. Please.”

  Just then, my visor beeps. It glows on, and Portia’s face shows up on the screen. Her crude metal spear is still in her hand.

  “Is Hana with you?”

  “Yes, of course,” I say. I’m looking at Hana through my visor, so Portia’s face and Hana’s face are right next to each other.

  “Well, tell her
that I ran some preliminary retrievals on Cyclo’s biometrics. It looks like that burst of hormones actually worked. Her deterioration in several different tissues and cell lines has slowed down. Not sure how much time she bought us. An extra day, maybe.”

  “What?” I say, flabbergasted. “It worked? But what about the exploding vacuole?”

  “That was going to happen, no matter what. Unrelated.” Portia smiles her black gums at the both of us. “Tell her thank you. And Fenn?”

  “Yes?”

  “Will you please get some sort of weapon on you? I trust Hana, but I don’t trust that there’s not another person on this ship we can’t locate, who may be trying to sabotage our efforts.”

  “Yeah. Okay. I’ll find something soon.”

  I turn off the comm to find Hana smiling—truly smiling, the first real one since her mother died. She raises her eyebrows at me as Portia’s image winks out and I blink off my holofeed.

  I exhale, long and slow, before meeting her eyes.

  “Okay, Hana. Tell me what you want me to do.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  HANA

  Fenn stares at me with the strangest expression. It’s something like defeat and relief mixed together.

  Which is a good thing. Because I didn’t know if I could stand up to him or anyone else much longer. My hands are balled in fists at my side from the excitement of learning my first efforts actually worked. I did it. But it’s not enough. Fenn is willing to help, and if I have help, there is hope to save Cyclo. To save all of us.

  “Okay,” I say. “The first thing we need to do is find out if Cyclo has any stem cells. If she does, then maybe we can harvest them. I mean, we have gestational chambers. They’re only human-sized, but if we can grow her cells in one of them, then there’s hope we can repair some parts of the ship.”

  He turns on his holofeed and switches the settings to his drone-driving application. He starts gesticulating on the 3D display bubble in front of him before his own eyes take over. I can see there’s a progress bar on the right of his feed. It’s only one-third green. There’s a tick mark at the middle that shows he ought to be halfway done with his work. Not good. “All right,” Fenn says. “I’m at your command.”

  I grin back. I’ve read and reread about Cyclo’s own birth and creation in the Annals of Astrobiophysics. Since Mother would happily chat away about all the intricacies of how she creates the human embryos for the ship’s crew and matures them to birth, I know how to do it all, in concept. I just don’t know how to work the machines. And judging from the content of her diary, she didn’t document that for my benefit now. But perhaps Fenn and I can figure that out together. Right now, we just need to find stem cells.

  “Okay,” I say. “Stem cells are going to have very specific cellular markers on them that set them apart from other tissues. We need to program the bots to find these markers and tell us where to harvest them.”

  Fenn grins suddenly. “Oh. This is on Portia’s list. It green-lights this as one of our collective objectives if we contribute to other crewmembers’ research.”

  “So this won’t sabotage your work?”

  “No. It’s good!”

  Together, Fenn and I prepare to launch a dozen nanobots. Fenn sends out a cadre of a whole separate dozen set to gather info according to Doran’s schedule for him—measurements of the tritium and chlorine-16, plus other compounds I’m less familiar with. But for me, we’ll zone in on Cyclo’s stem cells. I ask, of course, ahead of time, if Cyclo can simply point them out to us herself. But she garbles the information when she responds.

  “Her communication neural network is one of the first things we have to fix. It will make everything easier,” I say.

  “Noted,” Fenn says, but he’s got that glassy stare again, which tells me he’s flying his bots, concentrating mostly on navigating. “Hey, this is good news. Cyclo hasn’t destroyed a single one yet. She’s cooperating.”

  “Well, we’ll see. She may not cooperate, depending on whether her memory and understanding are okay in different parts of the ship. She doesn’t have a central nervous system—it’s like a sea star’s. It’s distributed throughout her body.”

  “So she may be reasonable in some parts of the ship and more erratic in others?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell by just looking at her?” Fenn asks.

  “Yes.” Looking around, I see a faint shimmer of the ultraviolet color that Fenn said he couldn’t. “In my spectrum of vision, I’ve noticed some differences. She’s…duller in the areas where she communicates poorly with me. Where she doesn’t seem as conscious, I guess.”

  Fenn nods and then goes silent for a while. While he drives the drones, I tinker with Miki’s equipment, reading the info from the drones driving deeper into Cyclo’s matrix. So far, the readings are normal. Interestingly, some areas of Cyclo are showing a burst of normal activity after previously failing. Like Portia said, the hormones seemed to have worked for a little while.

  Throughout our data gathering, I surreptitiously watch Fenn, his fingers and hands moving deftly here and there, orchestrating and conducting moves and turns that I can’t see because I don’t understand how to read his holofeed well. It’s replete with numbers floating around intersecting lines and planes that look so foreign. It makes me a little sad, to see a beautiful creature like Cyclo distilled down to numbers and vectors and graphs. It’s not the Cyclo I know.

  Fenn’s sleeves are rolled up so he can move his arms more freely. The muscles of his forearms are taut and beautiful. I study his face, too, carefully, without staring. His eyes are so large and brown, and his cheekbones have grown very slightly sharper since he first set foot on the ship. He’s gotten thinner and looks older. Wiser.

  Miki’s data is still coming in at a steady clip, so I walk around the gestational lab, studying the different containers and machines. If there is a chance I can save Cyclo, I need to use these. I turn on one of the filtration machines—just to see if the energy source is still good—and the monitor lights up. I turn on one of the incubation chambers, too, a small one. This lights up, too. It looks like the levels of all the nutrients and liquids are still good. I don’t ask Fenn for help here because I’m sure the Selkirk crew never needed to know how to gestate anything as part of their protocol.

  On the wall monitor, I search for tissue culture programs. Everything is for human and humanoid, but under an obscure “other” option that I find after looking at every program, I find a drop-down menu of non-humanoid species. I clap my hands.

  There. Amorfovita potentia, subspecies cyclonica.

  And under the species name, a list of a thousand types of tissue and embryo programs, from larval to polyp stage and even juvenile medusas. I find a mantle tissue program and feel utter relief. Maybe if we can fix her mantle—the outer part of her body that looks like a ballerina skirt twirling around the ship, the part that produces energy from starlight—Cyclo’s immune system will improve because it will have the energy to repair. It’s somewhere to start.

  “Whoop! I found something,” Fenn says suddenly.

  “What is it?” I run to his side.

  “Inside some of the older endoskeleton, near the delta ring, there are some islands of cells that are still dividing. They’re diffusion cells—not stem cells, but as close as we’ll get to stem cells.”

  “Can you harvest them?”

  “Already done. Next two micro drones coming back to us have your samples.” He looks past me through his holofeed. “Don’t get too excited, though. They may not grow, or might die soon, or…”

  “I know. Can’t hurt to try, though, right?”

  He nods. I wait like an expectant auntie for the drones to arrive through the matrix. After some time, I hear a slight popping sound, and two tiny drones the size of ants come buzzing toward me. Fenn lands them beautifully on my outstretched palm
.

  The bots actually look like tiny ants. One of the gestational chambers has a tiny tissue upload chamber, and Fenn helps release the microscopic samples into a blob of liquid, and suddenly a huge feed of numbers and data start spilling onto the screen. It’s overwhelming. But what I’m reading is that the cells have been accepted. Fenn puts his drones on autopilot and calls Portia.

  “Can you come to the gestational labs?” Fenn asks, on a private channel so no one, especially Doran, can hear our request.

  “We have data for you!” I say, popping my face next to Fenn’s.

  Portia rolls her red eyes. “Lucky I’m close by. Be there in a bit.”

  When she arrives, her spear in hand and a shifty look around the corner, she’s shocked but impressed at our enterprise.

  “I’m doing this,” I say. “Not Fenn. Please keep the data off your holofeed. I don’t want anyone else to know. But I need your help. I don’t know the first thing about reverse stem cell engineering, only the theory.”

  Reverse stem cell engineering. I’d never thought this lesson would come in handy, but I remember it from my studies a year ago. You take a cell that’s already destined to be something—a nerve cell, or blood cell, and make it turn back into a cell that’s more immature, and with the potential to be anything. It’s like taking a space pilot and saying, hey, we’re turning you back into a baby so you can start over again and become a farmer instead.

  In this case, we want these cells of Cyclo to turn into mantle cells, so she can make energy again, and with the energy—make part of her systems function again.

  I wait for Portia to say this is not possible, but she doesn’t. Instead, she walks over to the monitor, and her fingers fly over the program so fast, I can hardly understand what she’s doing. Towering over me, she’s silent. After a few minutes, she steps back.

  “Assuming your materials don’t run out and the machines don’t stop working, this will reverse engineer an embryonic stem cell from your diffusion cell, and then forward into a large culture of mantle cells capable of photosynthesis.” She pivots and crosses her arms. “The only reason I’m helping you is that this took only five minutes of my life, and I honestly don’t think it’ll work. Too many problems can happen.”