4First dusk has long since fallen by the time I emerge from a tangle of trees curling around the tiled path to find the gap in the enviro-shield nearby. With Avelaine, our dominant sun, gone to bed, only Evelaine’s distant pallidity lingers to hold the approaching night at bay. I peer through the deepening gloom. The shield is invisible now that the rain’s stopped. Luckily, I’m able to use the hum of the shield to find the hole I entered through again.
Flushed with exertion, I pause just outside the gap. Though I’ve spent the better part of the day trying to get out of the jungle, now that I’ve found the exit, I feel strangely reluctant to leave. Maybe it’s just the remnants of adrenaline coursing through my veins or the natural high that comes from exercise, but now that I’m here, the thought of returning—to this town, to this school, to this life—is almost too much to bear. It’s as though the Rainforest, in her surfeit of color, infused me with her radiance, allowing me to live in borrowed brilliance for this one afternoon, and with my return to the world outside, so, too, returns my black-and-white existence.
A lump forms in my throat at the realization. Then, bowing to the inevitable, I step through the gap.
The hum of the shield pitches up just the slightest bit at my passage. Stepping out on the other side, I glance around, half expecting to see a group of worried students sitting around waiting for me to come back, but no one’s here. Not one person. I laugh as I suddenly realize the truth:
Nobody even noticed I was gone.
Not Vida, who wouldn’t have cared even if she’d seen me go, or Jovan, who’s too into himself to notice anyone else. Not gentle Mario, who lives more of her life in books than in the real world. Not Trey, or Djen, or any of the others, apparently.
“I should’ve taken the laser-disc with me,” I mutter. “Then they would’ve noticed.”
But the words sound weak even to me, a token complaint merely for show rather than true indignation—not that there’s anyone to show out here in the middle of this empty field. Turning around, I stare back through the gap into the Rainforest one last time, visions of Shar and the bunker still burned into my mind. Then, with a shake of my head, I trudge back to the dorms.
By some miracle, I manage to sneak back in without running into anyone—the last thing I need is to have to explain my mud-streaked, blood-caked, jungle-worn appearance. Even my roommate is out. Tossing my muddy sandals into the corner, I grab a quick shower and change into my sweats. I’m about to shove my dirty clothes into the hamper when I remember the gray square of cloth from the forest. I pull it out of my pocket and turn it over in my hands, considering. I should just toss it—what the hell am I going to do with a piece of Shar’s grimy jumpsuit?—but instead I find myself reaching for a worn backpack hidden away in my closet.
It started out as an emergency pack, just a bag to carry a few necessities during our hasty evac from New Sol, but rather than decommissioning it when I got to the refugee colony on Zaia, I expanded it, never wanting to be caught unprepared again. I began with basic survival supplies—food, water, clothes, a thermal blanket, and a coil of lightweight utility cord, along with a knife, a multi-tool, and a med-kit—and eventually moved on to war tech. Now it also holds a ghoul light, a sniffer, and a box containing an injector along with five doses of Spec 1280—also known as the Spectre Detector—a solution that, when mixed with someone’s blood, with tell you if they’re infected with a squatter. It’s my most recent and expensive addition to my collection, bought off the net from the spouse of a soldier who was killed in action.
Bypassing the main compartment of the bag, I open up the small pocket in front. Inside is my sniffer, a small metal nosepiece that allows the wearer to smell ghouls from up to five hundred meters away. Figuring this is as good a place to stash it as any, I stuff the cloth inside. Pause, then pull it out again to examine the gray folds once more, and frown. Though I’m literally holding the proof of Shar’s presence in my hands, I still can’t believe she’s here. It can’t be a coincidence that of all the planets in the Expanse, she’s on mine.
Or can it?
I consider the possibility for a moment. Then, sticking the cloth back in the front pocket, I close up the compartment and shove the pack back in the closet. With a surreptitious glance around the empty room, I go to the door and lock it. Moving to the digitizer on the far wall, I hit the reset control, watching as the wallpaper, mirror, and myriad images of Divya’s latest celebrity crush dissolve away, leaving only bare walls in their place. Only then do I scan my chit, upload my program, and hit run.
In an instant, the entire Spectre War is laid out before my eyes, every planet, colony, and space station in the Celestial Expanse highlighted against a starry black background along the walls, ceiling, and even the floor. Safe planets glow silver, while those under various states of invasion and evacuation are haloed in red, yellow, and orange, their hues changing with each official status update until at last the vivid blue net of quarantine descends to mark them as enemy territory. Sparkling gold jump gates swirl between the planets, their frothing maws connected by dotted lines that represent the paths between worlds. Every spare centimeter not taken up by colonies is jammed with bits of data, from distances to population densities to basic infection and relocation stats, all programmed to update automatically with every change in the official Infected, Killed, and Relocated lists. Only a small space beside my desk is exempt from the map, its black surface instead covered with equations, each constantly calculating and recalculating the odds of the Spectres’ next possible moves as they continue their deadly sweep across the Expanse.
I glance at the top equation with its current solution—eight hundred and fifty thousand to one—and my mouth quirks. I wasn’t kidding when I quoted the odds of the enemy striking Iolanthe earlier today, whatever Vida may have thought. No, I’ve been following the enemy for nearly two years now, expanding the model I built from scratch with every new move they make, trying to understand an enemy that seems at times as simple as a handful of sand and at others as complicated as a universe full of stars. The fact is, since Lia died, this war has been everything to me: the obsession of my days and the stuff of my dreams, my salvation, and my curse.
Walking to my desk, I hit the wall twice to enable touch and stylus modes, then set about creating an equation to determine the odds of Shar coming to Iolanthe. It doesn’t take long—the raw data is already here—but the ridiculously low probability that results only has me shaking my head. It’s hard to see how Shar could have ended up here by chance, and yet it’s equally hard to see how she could have followed me from the refugee colony where I was sent after New Sol blew—not when she was long gone before I ever got there.
My eyes narrow in thought as I stare at the equation. As Shar’s only stated reason for leaving was to get away and save herself, I’ve used only the simplest of variables to make my computations—number of places she could go, distance from New Sol, ease of access. But perhaps there was something more to her flight, some other factor influencing where she went.
“What th . . . ? Why’s th . . . do . . . ocked?”
The muffled exclamation through the door, followed by the chime of the control pad, breaks my train of thought. My heads whips toward the entrance. Slag! Divya’s back!
I run for the digitizer, slapping the controls to shut my program down and return the walls to their original state. The planets and colonies immediately fade away, evanescing once more into oblivion, while wallpaper and holo celebs begin materializing in their place. The last image is just appearing when the door opens and my roommate walks in.
“Why was the door locked?” she whines, mincing past me to her dresser without waiting for an answer.
I shrug blithely in my best how should I know? sort of way, watching as she tosses her bag on her desk and kicks off her shoes. When she grabs her toothbrush and pj’s, I glance at the time. Twenty minutes until lights out. I didn’t realize it was so late. With a sigh, I reach for my own toothbrush. Clearly, my model will have to wait.
Half an hour later, the lights are out and we’re both in bed, but though Divya was asleep the minute her head hit the pillow, I remain awake, staring up at the darkened ceiling. Shar’s eyes blaze in my mind, their haunted depths an image I cannot banish, and even when I open my own, I can still see them, hovering like dark ghosts across my mind’s eye. Equations flit through my brain, flickering and bright, and hanging over it all is the image of that bunker. Its ruined state is almost as big an enigma as Shar herself, and the possibility that she was there only makes it more confounding. And yet, no matter how I try, I can make no more sense of it all now than I could then. After an hour of tossing and turning, I can’t take it anymore. Throwing back my covers, I climb out of bed, tiptoe to the door, and slip quietly from the room.
Outside the hall is dark, all overhead lights extinguished for the night, leaving only the pale yellow glow of the capsule lights to guide me. I pad down the corridor in my bare feet, the tile strangely cool beneath my skin. The air around me is downright frigid, and in the silent emptiness, I can hear the quiet hum of the air conditioning, still fighting its endless battle against the humid world just beyond these walls.
At the end of the hall, the student lounge waits, a shadowy labyrinth of dark corners and silvery moonlight. With a surreptitious glance around, I slip inside, scanning the room twice to make sure it’s empty before locking both doors. Safe inside, I go to the digitizer and upload my program. In seconds, the Expanse appears before me once again, materializing across the walls in a panoply of stars and planets. My equations reappear in one corner, just as I left them, an array of questions waiting to be answered. As soon as I see them, my mind calms. Everything extraneous falls away, leaving only concrete numbers and mathematical symbols in their place. Grabbing my stylus, I get to work.
The first pale rays of Avelaine are filtering through the windows when I finally return to reality. I glance around the room, brow furrowing in faint surprise as I take in the night’s work. Notes and equations are scrawled across three walls, seeping across my previous notations like smears of blood across the blackened background. I eye the barely legible scrawl and slowly shake my head. It just doesn’t add up. No matter how many variables I changed or constants I reevaluated, no matter how many ways I ran the numbers, I know nothing more than when I began—only that Shar’s presence seems an omen both ominous and uncertain beyond comprehension.
My legs are cramped from crouching in front of my equations all night long, and it’s only now, in the faint rays of dawn, that I realize how exhausted I am. Stumbling to my feet, I sink into a chair by the window, shifting in my seat to let the weak flickers of sunlight pour over my sore legs and aching shoulders. I snap open my hand and pull up the images I took yesterday. The skin around my chit is swollen and blotchy, and I can see welts already starting to form. My other palm looks the same. Clearly, I touched something I shouldn’t have in my trek through the forest. Giving my hands a good scratch, I tune out the discomfort and focus on the pics of Shar pooling over my hand.
She has her back or side to me in most of them, just an anonymous figure in a gray jumpsuit, but I managed to catch her dead-on in the first one. There’s no question it’s Shar. She looks exactly the way she did when I last saw her two years ago: tall and scowling, sturdy but just a touch underfed, and clad in the same refugee garb she wore on New Sol. No one would ever describe her as pretty—not in the traditional sense, anyway—but for all that, there’s something arresting about her. A sort of hard-bitten strength you only achieve through experience and pain. Though what sorts of pain and experience, I have no idea. She was central to our plan, and yet I don’t think any of us really knew much about her. Is it any wonder that in the end, she held no more loyalty for us than we held for her?
I shake my head at the image. You don’t belong here. Not on Iolanthe any more than you did on New Sol. So why have you come to plague me? What do you seek in the forest just beyond my door?
Zooming in, I stare at her face, searching for the answer I failed to find in the depths of the forest. But no matter how long and hard I stare, the answers never come, but remain, hidden away within her haunted eyes.