Chapter 9
Aryl

I straighten my back and stare down my lab mate.

In lab last night, there were three people: Ver, Cal, and me. I didn’t kill Cal, so it had to have been Ver. I need to convince Detective Xenon of that. If I don’t, my family will stay locked up in a tiny apartment they soon won’t be able to afford. And that’s if we’re lucky.

“Did you really inject Cal with adrenaline?” I hiss at Ver. “Or did you draw TTX into that syringe by accident?”

Ver is opening and shutting her mouth like a fish gasping for water. “Please-ah, sir,” she says to Xenon. Her accent thickens in her panic. “I was trying to revive him. I injected adrenaline on the ventral side of the neck.”

“Ah, yes.” Xenon takes another sip of his lychee juice. “We found your injection site in Eppi’s skin and checked the syringe. It’s clean. And the TTX was injected on the dorsal side of the neck, to the left of the midline.”

Ver exhales, but Xenon’s not finished.

“Then the killer apparently threw the syringe across the lab—we found it near the clean room entrance, almost five meters from the body. With genetic fingerprinting of that syringe, we found both Eppi’s and Miss Yun’s DNA.”

Ver shoots to her feet, though I can tell she instantly regrets it, leaning on the arm of the chair and rubbing her lumbar spine. I didn’t know she was capable of moving that fast. Or of getting this angry. “I found Cal dead, huddled on the floor, after Aryl had already been back in the lab for thirty seconds. Forty. Long enough to put on gloves, smear a syringe in a culture of my bone marrow cells, and stick Cal.”

So we’re going at it now, huh? “First of all,” I snap, “why are you growing your own bone marrow cells on petri dishes, anyway? Did the Institute approve the protocol for that?”

“That is none of your business!”

Detective Xenon observes us, eyes narrowed.

“Secondly,” I say, “if I killed Cal, why would I have jabbed him in the left side of his neck? I’m right-handed. And you were the only one with him when the alarm first went off.”

Ver pounces on this question, ignoring the earlier one. “Aiyo, do I look strong enough to wrestle down a healthy man? Or tall enough to hit him, boom, in the back of the neck?”

The angry little girl has a point. She barely comes up to my shoulder. I’m the same height as Cal but much stronger. The better nutrition on One likely helped me grow big enough to look like a plausible killer. Thanks for all the fish, Mom.

“You dropped a sample,” I fire back at Ver. “I saw his face once the emergency lights came on. He looked like he was going to smack you.”

“Cal would never,” Ver says, lifting her chin. But she doesn’t sound sure.

“Perhaps another piece of evidence will help you remember the truth.” Xenon’s voice has a gruffness that wasn’t there before. “Miss Fielding’s DNA was found on Investigator Eppi’s lab coat—”

“Ever heard of CPR?” I interrupt. “I was trying to help Cal. Obviously I failed. If I’d known you’d use that as evidence to frame me, maybe I wouldn’t have bothered.”

“Oh?” Xenon’s bushy eyebrows lift. He sets his drink aside, like he means business now. “Other biology faculty tell me that you and Investigator Eppi had a strained relationship, Miss Fielding. They say that even after all he’s done for you, you couldn’t sit down and respect him.”

Did he just imply that Cal helped me, a dense offworld girl, out of the goodness of his heart?

Xenon taps his stylus against his flexitab. “Miss Fielding, do you deny that you had a difficult relationship with Investigator Eppi?”

“We all did,” I say. “Cal expected giga progress from us, even in experiments where we had no clue what we were doing.”

“He only pushed us because he wanted us to succeed!” Ver says.

“Yeah, sure,” I say. No one asked you. “If he really cared about us, he would’ve—”

Xenon stands up in one swift motion. He moves like a much younger man. I shrink back, my heart pounding.

“For all I know,” he says, “you girls killed Investigator Eppi together, and this whole argument is a farce to ensure that just one of you lands in prison. You were the only ones at the scene when Calyx Eppi died. DNA evidence implicates you both. So does history with the victim.”

“Sir—” Ver says.

He silences her with a glare. “You are both under arrest. Helpers, cuff them and take them to the station.”

The police bots’ yellow eyes light up, and they roll in front of Ver and me. Ver gives no sign of resistance except for a stuck-out lower lip. I force myself to stay still, even though I want to kick the metal chunks away from me and jet out of here.

The cold titanium handcuffs clamp around my wrists. I close my eyes and picture my parents’ faces. I won’t watch myself become a prisoner.