Breathless, I bend over, hands on my knees, shoulders heaving. A drop of sweat tickles my back as it rolls beneath my shirt. Man, it feels good! Sprinting always makes me feel powerful, invincible, and perfectly free, like if I plant my foot just so, jump up and kick off, I could take off up into the air and fly. I could go anywhere, leave everything and everyone and find somewhere new. Somewhere untouched and unspoiled by decay and loss. By betrayal.
“Great shot,” Jahnu says as he runs up behind me and throws the ball at my head. “Were you aiming for our goal or Soren’s?” It bounces off my skull as I plop down on the ground. I grab the ball and lay back in the grass. The city around us is a ruin, and the once-great metropolis is full of crumbling and collapsed buildings overgrown by weeds, native grasses, scrubby bushes, and trees as far as the eye can see. During the last of the Religious Wars, a series of dirty bombs was detonated in the city center. People in the exurbs survived, but many of them fled or died out during the Famine Years. So now we’ve got the place pretty much to ourselves. Besides those of us at the Resistance base, there are only a few clusters of brave souls hanging on here and there. They’re loners and scavengers, people who refused allegiance to the Sector and couldn’t find a place among the Outsiders.
“Sad to say, but I think your foot has better aim than your arm,” Jahnu says. I ignore him. The sky above me is a brilliant blue dome that seeps into black at the edges, and I close my eyes and shiver as the sun seeps into my skin.
“Yeah,” Soren says. “It’s a good idea to at least try to aim for the end of the field, you know, where the goal is. But as long as you’re on the other team, I can’t say I mind.” We had to make up the rules to our game, and sometimes we forget them and just make up new ones as we go. It makes for an interesting system.
I open my eyes to see Soren standing over me. “I’m directionally challenged. Sue me.”
“Good thing that doesn’t apply to your skills with a Bolt. Otherwise we’d all be dead,” Jahnu quips.
“Remind me why we’re friends.” I throw my leg out and try to trip Jahnu who jumps over it easily.
“Who said we were friends?”
“So who won?” I ask.
“Oh, were we keeping score?” Soren smiles. He’s still taunting me, but it’s one of his rare friendly smiles, and I find myself smiling back. “Hey, Eli?” Soren calls out. “Who won?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Eli and Kenzie walking towards us from down field.
“It was a close game, but Soren’s team won.” Eli kicks off his beat-up cleats, peels off his sweat-soaked socks, and wiggles his toes in the rough grass. “Eleven to nine. Of course, my team was at a distinct disadvantage. I had Remy.”
“I can still run faster than you, old man,” I kick his shoes out of reach. “One of these days I’m going to shoot the sweetest goal you’ve ever seen.”
“If you ever score a goal, it will be the sweetest one any of us have seen,” Kenzie says.
“Traitor!” I exclaim. Kenzie is the only girl around my age at main base. A natural athlete, she’s a full head taller than I am and at least twenty kilos heavier, all of it muscle. Her pale skin is a kaleidoscope of freckles, and she has short ringlets that fly away from her head like little birds. Depending on her mood, they make her look either adorable or ferocious. Kenzie is one of the nicest people I’ve ever known—except when her competitive drive kicks in.
We barely knew each other back at the Academy, but we’ve grown close since we ended up bunking together after her family arrived. Her mom is a former Sector Dietician and her dad is one of the engineers in charge of keeping the lights on and the air and water clean in our underground home. Kenzie inherited her mom’s interest in chemistry and her dad’s ability to take things apart and put them back together again. She’s always trying to explain to me exactly what her dad does. I insist I don’t need to understand the intricacies of water purification systems, fluid dynamics, or nuclear engineering to appreciate his job, but she keeps trying. I still don’t understand, but I always say a word of thanks each night that he’s at work and that the lights will be on when I wake up.
“Speaking of sweet things,” Eli says, “I’d say it’s time for your official graduation feast.”
“Yeah, I’m starving,” Soren agrees.
“We don’t have much,” Kenzie says. “Jahnu and I scavenged what we could from the kitchen without being seen by old man Rhinehouse.”
“That man guards his pantry like it holds the secrets of the universe,” Jahnu says.
“Maybe it does.” Soren plucks a thick blade of grass and splits it to make a whistle. He whets his lips, puts it to his mouth, and blows. Being outside has calmed Soren down since watching the graduation ceremony. “He’s actually a pretty interesting guy. And he plays a mean game of chess.”
“He’s whipped my ass more than a few times,” Eli says.
“Yeah,” Soren adds, “he sees more moves with that one eye than most people will ever see with two.”
“Does he ever talk about his past?” I ask, suddenly intrigued by the fact that Soren is apparently buddies with Rhinehouse. “Where he came from, how he lost his eye?” These are questions I’ve been wondering about since Rhinehouse showed up out of the blue and became the de facto cook for the outpost. The Director and all of the senior members obviously knew him because they took him in without a word despite the fact he was covered in blood and babbling in some language none of us could understand.
“He talks about it sometimes,” Soren says.
“Well?” I press.
“It’s not for me to say.”
“How’d you worm your way into the old man’s heart?” Eli asks. “My time with Rhinehouse is spent either scrubbing pans or trying desperately to save my king from capture. Although my charming demeanor usually wins over everyone, he is strangely immune.”
“Imagine that,” Soren laughs. “I’ll tell him you’re pining away for his attention.” I notice that Soren didn’t answer Eli’s question.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Eli says. “He’s not really my type.”
“Do you know what language he was speaking when he showed up here?” I ask, determined to pull something out of Soren.
Soren turns and looks at me. His smile is gone. “If you’re so interested in his life history, why don’t you try talking to him? Try being a friend instead of a gossip.”
I glare at him from the grass but I don’t respond. Soren turns his attention back to his grass whistle as if nothing happened.
“Look at this bountiful feast Kenzie and I have stolen for you,” Jahnu says, drawing everyone’s attention back to the real celebrity here: the food. “A barley loaf and pumpkin butter. Cherries, chokeberries, walnuts, hazelnuts, cheese, and some of Rhinehouse’s famous Mystery Jerky.”
“I wonder what the jerky’s made out of this time?” Eli says.
“I just hope it’s not opossum. I don’t know why, but they creep me out.” Kenzie shudders.
Jahnu picks up his dented standard-issue water bottle and holds it up in the air like it’s a wine glass. “I’d like to make a toast,” he says.
Jahnu’s pretty quiet around most people, but in the past few months, I’ve noticed him coming out of his shell, and I think that change is largely due to Kenzie. She says sometimes when they’re hanging out, he’ll hardly shut up, as if he’s saved up everything he wanted to say until he could say it to her. But talking’s as far as he’s gotten, and Kenzie’s been wondering if she’s reading him all wrong.
We grab our bottles and hold them up to toast.
“I know we had different reasons for leaving the Sector behind, for joining the Resistance. It was hard today watching what could have been if we were still there with our old friends and family. I’m not embarrassed to say it tore me up. But I’m proud of what we’ve done here and I’m proud of what we’re fighting for. So, congratulations to us. We were the best and the brightest. Now, we’re the best, the brightest—and the most wanted.”
“To us!” we all cheer.
Kenzie kneels, taps her water bottle against Jahnu’s, leans in, and to everyone’s surprise—especially Jahnu’s—she kisses him right on the lips. “Happy graduation, Jahnu Nair,” she says with a challenging grin.
A broad smile spreads across his face as if a new, wondrous idea is slowly dawning on him.
“Sometimes a girl has to do everything,” Kenzie laughs and shakes her head.
“To Kenzie and Jahnu,” Eli declares.
“Finally,” I add.
With that, we dig in. Jahnu is the first one to go for the food—he’s always hungry—and the rest of us follow suit. Only Eli holds back, and after a few minutes, I notice he’s staring off into space with that same faraway, thoughtful look in his eyes, just like he was when we found him in the comm center. I’m starting to worry he’s descending into another bout of darkness. My protective instinct kicks in.
“Eli? Not hungry?” I ask, through a mouthful of bread. “You okay?” Just like before, he starts, as if abruptly jerked away from a different world.
“Yeah, starving,” he says, but he still doesn’t touch the food.
“What’s up?” I demand.
“Just thinking. Did any of you get a weird feeling from Vale’s speech today?”
“Just reading between the lines here, but it sounds like he’s preparing to hunt us into oblivion. Is that what you’re talking about?” Soren asks sarcastically.
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean. But why and why now? Think about it. We’re not a real threat. We’ve never killed a Sector citizen. We’ve never bombed a seed bank or blown anything up. So what’s the real motivation for the Seed Bank Protection Project?”
We sit in silence, munching on our bread, thinking. He’s got a point. Even though it seems obvious from our perspective that we’re a threat to the Okarian Sector—we are, after all, trying to build a movement that will take down the OAC—we really haven’t done any serious harm. So why does it sound like Vale’s coming after us with guns blazing?
“What’s in a name?” Soren asks in his meandering, philosophical way, as though he’s talking to himself. Soren has three modes of existence: very angry, very sarcastic, and very chill. There’s really no in between.
“What does that even mean, Soren?” Jahnu demands, his dark face creasing up in curiosity.
“Just wondering if there’s anything in the title he gave his placement. The ‘Seed Bank Protection Project.’”
“My thought exactly,” Eli nods. “They’re going on the offense. That’s what his ‘We must protect our future from the mistakes of our past’ bullshit was all about. So why call it the ‘Seed Bank Protection Project’? That makes it sound defensive.”
We all ponder that for a few more minutes, and I sit in awe of Eli’s ability to quote Vale’s speech by the word. Then it hits me.
“You were listening to the speech again when we walked in on you in the comm center, weren’t you? You recorded it.”
“Smart girl,” he says, patting me on the head. “Yeah. It got me thinking. Listen up: I need to tell you something.”
Suddenly we’ve all forgotten about the food—which Eli still hasn’t touched.
“Three years ago, that day in the lab, when Professor Hawthorne and Tai were…” he pauses, swallows, and I know it’s all he can do to shove those memories back down into the deep. “I think there was something else going on. A few months before that, Hawthorne abruptly changed the focus of my research. He gave me a genome sequence and told me it was some form of DNA that didn’t map to any organismal chromosome, or even to any biological traits. Basically,” he says, translating for my benefit, since I really, really do not understand science the way my friends do, “the DNA didn’t mean anything from a biological standpoint and could never have existed in a living organism. Hawthorne said he wanted me to help him crack the code and figure out what the DNA represented.
“But here’s the key: he told me I couldn’t tell anyone about it, that it was top secret, because—”
“Wait,” Soren interrupts. “Where did he get the DNA in the first place?”
“I don’t know. When I asked him, he said he was studying some old frozen cyanobacteria samples he found in one of the lab’s storage units, but now I’m not so sure. Anyway, he said he looked at their chromosomes and realized they didn’t look anything like cyanobacteria chromosomes. In fact, they were perfectly ordered and well-structured. The crazy thing is, they looked like sunflowers.”
“What?” I sputter. “What do you mean, ‘they looked like sunflowers’?”
“The chromosomes had been somehow manufactured and arranged so that the strings of DNA took on the pattern of a sketch of a sunflower, when viewed in their entirety. We’d never seen anything like it. Some chromosomes wind themselves up into intricate supercoiled structures, like when you twist and keep twisting a rope, although most just look like tangled knots of spaghetti. This one, though, was so perfect, so elegant. It might as well have been a 3D model of a sunflower. When Hawthorne studied them, he realized every single cell contained non-functioning DNA—even though those cells could never have existed as living organisms with that DNA.”
“What does that mean?” I demand.
“It means that someone removed the bacteria’s real DNA and inserted artificially coded DNA,” Eli says. I can always count on him to put scientific information in easy little packages for me. “Then they froze the cyanobacteria, ensuring that the DNA would be perfectly stored.”
“And perfectly hidden,” Soren breathes.
“Every cell had the same DNA. Hundreds of copies of this non-functioning genome in hundreds of cyanobacteria—they were clones.”
“But why—and who?” Jahnu asks. “Why would someone do that? What was in that DNA that was so important to hide and preserve?”
“I don’t know. That’s what Hawthorne wanted me to help him figure out.”
“Get back to the point,” Kenzie says. “What does this have to do with … with the massacre?”
Eli’s brow furrows, and he peers into the distance for a moment, as if trying to see the molecules vibrating in the air itself. “I don’t know.” He turns back to Kenzie. “Maybe nothing, but a couple of weeks before he died, Hawthorne told me he’d made a breakthrough. That’s when he got all excited about using synthesized DNA as a method of data storage. We were scheduled to meet in his lab after class the day of the, you know. But, and this is key: he also told me he was going to tell Corine Orleán about it.”
“Did he tell her?” My parents never bought the story about the terrorist attack by an Outsider, and ever since the sham investigation and Sector cover-up, they’ve been convinced Corine was involved somehow. But there was never any way to prove it.
“If he did, he never told me. But right before the attacker shot himself, he said something about Corine.” I’ve heard this part of the story before, but from the surprised looks on the others’ faces, I can tell I’m the only one who has.
Eli pauses, and I fight the urge to tell him to go on. He has to tell the story on his terms. After a moment, he turns and looks at me.
“He said: ‘A word to the wise: never get on Madam Orleán’s bad side.’”
The silence is so thick it almost pulsates with every breath we take. The wind rustles through the tall grasses around us and flies buzz near my ear. The smell of autumn leaves and chill air presses in around me.
“Shit,” Jahnu whispers.
“Do you think Corine ordered the attack?” Kenzie asks in a hushed voice.
“I’ve wondered about that every day since,” Eli replies.
“Okay, let me get this straight. You’re thinking my sister was murdered because of this DNA and that this same DNA may be what Vale’s supposed Seed Bank Protection Project is all about.” If this is why Tai died, could it also be the key to avenging her death?
“I don’t know, Remy, but something in my gut tells me it’s all related.”
“Why is it so important? What is it?”
“That’s the thing. I still have no idea what’s on it. I’ve gone back and looked at the code again and again—”
“Wait,” Soren interrupts again. “Didn’t you say this was top secret? How have you looked at it again since then?”
“I downloaded it onto my computer, genius,” Eli scoffs. “You think I let Hawthorne dictate my work hours? Nine to five, in the lab with him looking over my shoulder? No way. I worked when I felt like it. So I copied it to my plasma. When I fled with the Alexanders, I copied the sequence onto a spare drive. I can reconstruct the whole sequence for you on Remy’s new plasma.”
As usual when Eli’s announcing his law-breaking habits, I am immensely proud to call him my surrogate older brother.
“Do you think she knows?” Jahnu asks. “Do you think Corine suspects you still have this information? Maybe that’s what Vale’s ‘Seed Bank Protection Project’ is all about. It’s not the Resistance they care about—it’s you.”
Eli shrugs in response. “It’s been three years. Why now?” he says warily. “None of it really makes sense, but….”
“One thing’s for sure, though,” I say, feeling as though my life has been given singular purpose. I cut a huge chunk of cheese for myself, suddenly starving again. “We need to find out what’s in that DNA.”