Chapter 11
Aryl

Ver comes back with her face blotchy and red. My heart wants to comfort the poor girl, though my brain wonders whether she’s stuck to our agreement. I hope her tears are real—hope she didn’t spend the last half hour shoveling suspicion off herself and onto me.

My own interrogation starts calmly enough. I lounge on the stool, thinking that the room is too small to hold me, the robot helpers, the desk, Xenon. From where I’m sitting, I could do a grand-battement and kick any one of them.

“Aryl Fielding,” Detective Xenon says, reading off his flexitab screen. “You’re seventeen years old, born in Celestine, G-Moon One. Correct?”

“Yeah.” Thinking of my jewel of a neighborhood makes me wish I could zip away on a vactrain. When I was growing up, my family’s apartment was the safest place on the three moons to me. The floor was always strewn with my stuff or my sister’s; the air smelled like the coconut milk my parents used to cook our food. Outside, other kids from Two played discdisc with tattered balls and sticks while older migrants cracked sunflower seeds over their chessboards.

“Beautiful city, Celestine, with that blue, blue lake,” Xenon says. “I’d love to retire there, away from this crystal desert. So, both your parents are alive and well?”

“Yeah,” I say, heart palpitating at the mental image of their faces. Alive? Definitely. Well? Nah.

“And you have one sister,” Xenon says. “Ester Fielding.”

“She’s thirteen and smarter than I’ll ever be.”

Xenon’s face breaks into a smile. “My daughter’s thirteen. Tough age. Lots of changes. Thank Pangu they make those new extendable clothes that grow with kids’ bodies.”

No way will Mom and Dad pay hundreds of Feyncoins for smart clothing when Ester can wear my hand-me-downs. But I don’t need to mention that to the detective.

He squints at my profile on his screen. “Your family’s not originally from this moon, correct?”

I’ve never liked that question—it makes me feel like I don’t belong on the only moon I’ve ever known. “My parents are from Broadleaf Falls, G-Moon Two,” I say quietly, like it’s something to be ashamed of.

Mom played chess, Two’s moonwide pastime, for money. The bets went higher and higher, giving Dad anxiety spells, until she finally won enough games in a row to afford spaceliner tickets to One. Even now, when I watch Mom play against her friends, she makes her pieces dance across the board—hunting, surrounding, and gobbling up her opponents’ pieces.

“Have you ever gone back to Two?” Xenon asks.

I hate this question too—for the opposite reason. It makes me feel like I’m not a real Two-er either, even though I grew up eating the food and celebrating the holidays and being embarrassed by my parents’ offworld habits, like haggling with robot cashiers.

“No,” I say. “Spacefare isn’t cheap.”

“How did you come to work in Calyx Eppi’s lab?” Xenon says.

“Coincidence, mostly.”

The detective waits for me to say more, but I don’t. It’s satisfying to withhold the things people want. During the early stages of my friendship with Rhea, a bit of mystery made me feel powerful. It kept her coming back to me.

“Some information my partner and I have gathered might help you elaborate,” Xenon says. “Senator Titania Mercure’s son, Ford, is a fourth-year apprentice in the same lab. Your parents have been members of the Mercures’ household staff since you were two years old.”

“That’s true,” I say, my stomach turning. As a kid, I couldn’t have pictured Titania hurting my family. Or my friendship with Ford unraveling the way it did.

“Oh, I’m sorry—how could I be so insensitive?” Xenon smacks his forehead. “We also learned that Senator Mercure has terminated your parents’ employment and put them in home confinement.”

He’s trying to provoke me. I straighten my neck and spine. One wrong move, and Xenon will take it as aggression.

Picture the person who matters most to you in all the moons, Rori used to say during our dance lessons, straightening my shoulders, my spine. They’re balanced, right now, on the top of your head. Don’t let them fall.

“Please, sir,” I say, playing the helpless victim. “If you could help my family—they won’t survive long, shut up in the apartment like that . . .”

“Senator Mercure’s household is her domain, not mine,” Xenon says. “Can’t you contact her yourself? You have easy access, it seems.”

He has to know that I can’t just ask Titania to release my parents. “Excuse me?” I say, frowning.

“She liked you enough to help you secure a place at the Institute, no?”

I’ve kept my cool so far, but now my jaw clenches and my teeth grind. Sure, I had a connection, but I still studied hard to earn my place at the Institute. Took exam after exam, squirming, electrodes wired to my brain to track my neural activity. Faced test administrators who pushed me to do impossible calculations and proofs, some of which had no answers, just to see when I’d break. I went through the same process all my lab mates endured: Ver, Kricket, and even Ford. Titania’s own son had to do it; obviously her employees’ kid wasn’t exempt.

Xenon smiles, obviously pleased that he’s angered me. But I won’t let him win.

“Senator Mercure knows my family well,” I say calmly. “She knows we’re all hard workers. When I applied for my apprenticeship, Senator Mercure put in a word. I’m grateful for her high opinion of me.”

Titania Mercure was in a good mood the day she called the Institute on my behalf. She might be the most unpredictable person I’ve ever met. As if to retaliate for my parents practically raising her son, she would alternately spoil and discipline Ester and me. I didn’t know whether I’d get an expensive gift or harsh words—a synthetic silk scarf with a moving jellyfish print, or a tirade for playing with Ford in the wrong neighborhood and “endangering” him.

Xenon leans in closer. Can he see the tangled feelings under my skin? “You and Ford must be close, then. What was his involvement in Calyx Eppi’s murder?”

I wait a beat to make sure he’s serious. When I can tell he is, I let out a laugh. “First of all—Ford and me, close? Not a chance. Secondly, what makes you think he was involved?”

“I can’t discuss that.” Xenon’s face gives nothing away.

My guts twist. Ford, what did you do?

He was with Rhea last night, but I don’t volunteer that information to Xenon. Instead I say, “Ford and I haven’t been on good terms for years. Since before he entered the Institute.”

Like stars jetting away from each other after the Big Bang, we’ve only grown more distant since childhood. His mom has corralled the G-Moon One senators into voting for tighter inter-moon migration laws, for protection of G-Moon One’s natural landscapes, and for a tiered education system that lets neurologically better-developed kids go to better-funded schools. That last law made Mom wring her hands: I was never the smartest kid, but I knew how to grind. My family worried I’d have to go to some scrap school that never sent anyone to the Institute.

“How are you and Ford as lab mates?” Xenon asks.

“We . . . tolerate each other,” I say. I won’t play Xenon’s game. I won’t mention that I think Ford’s become a total stalactite—a One-er whose ego is as fragile as calcified stone-drippings. Or that I think Cal Eppi was one too. He got himself a lab half full of offworld girls. He married a Three-er woman and made her his lab manager. I’ve overheard several men at the Institute say obedient Three-ers make the best wives. It made me cringe on Jaha’s behalf.

“What about the fourth lab member?” Xenon says. “Krick Kepler. How were your interactions with him?”

I shrug. The boy we call Kricket is a sixth-year. He’s the oldest in our lab, but we don’t give him the respect that seniority usually inspires. “I don’t know him well,” I say.

“We have his pranks on record,” Xenon says. “Adding stinking aldehydes to his roommate’s face lotion, et cetera. We’ll look into his involvement in this case. Moving on . . . You and Calyx Eppi had a tense relationship, as we’ve discussed.”

“We had our moments,” I say evenly. “But he always looked out for me. He even bought me dinner once or twice.”

I neglect to mention that before Cal dragged me to his favorite Two-er restaurant he’d withheld a week’s pay because I’d been performing with the dance team and skipping lab. That night, he set a trap. Knowing I was always hungry and out of money, he bought me all the food I wanted, and as I ate, he moaned about how he was losing patience with me. Then he walked me back to lab and hovered over my shoulder, nitpicking my pipetting technique. Maybe he’d bought me food so that I’d feel I owed him extra labor. I didn’t.

“But science is not your only skill,” says Xenon. “Your Institute profile says that you’re an accomplished dancer on the Institute team. Impressive.”

I know he’s sweetening me up to get information out of me, but I feel a smile coming on anyway. I can’t help it. When I jump and glide and turn, the moment is mine, whether there’s music or not. I’m at my most powerful, making everyone in the room feel as I feel. I don’t belong on One—people have made that clear. I wouldn’t fit in on Two either. So I’ve made the stage my home, training to defy gravity. I’ve paid the price: callused and bloody feet, pulled hamstrings, a shoulder with a painful click. And time. Thousands of hours of time.

“You’re capable of lifting up to sixty kilograms—the weight of a fellow dancer—above your head,” Xenon says. “You would make a formidable opponent, Miss Fielding. Especially for a man who’s spent the past fifteen years in a lab.”

Before I can react, he reaches out and clenches a hand around my bicep, smiling. “Built strong, aren’t you? Your parents must be proud.”

The fact that he’s touching me makes me want to vomit on his uniform. Once people learn that Mom and Dad came from Two, they spew all kinds of nonsense about the agricultural collectives; they want to know if my family worked the fields or packaged the crops for shipping offworld, as if those were the only two options. Or they bemoan the pickers’ harsh conditions and low pay, and oh, how they wish they could do something to help!

I yank my arm out of Xenon’s grip. “I couldn’t have beaten up Cal. Didn’t you check? There were no bruises on his body.”

“Oh, but there were, on his chest,” the detective says, the intensity in his voice growing. That was from the CPR! “Tell the truth, Miss Fielding. You subdued Investigator Eppi and held him down by the chest while your collaborator, Ver Yun, administered the lethal injection. She used her intimacy with the victim, and you used your strength. DNA evidence proves it.”

I’m shaking my head, but Xenon isn’t finished.

“Miss Yun was uncooperative, so she didn’t get this opportunity, but I’ll make a deal with you. Tell me everything about her role in Eppi’s death, as well as your own, and when you’re both convicted, your sentence will be half what Miss Yun gets. Confess now, and you’ll still have a life ahead of you when you leave that jail cell.”

It’s tempting. Ver and I have no alibi, no money, no defense. The judicial computer cluster will definitely convict us of killing Cal. I could tell this officer what he already believes and leave with the hope of a future.

But admitting guilt—even if it could get me a shorter sentence—means giving up. I’m not someone who does that.

“Explain something to me, detective.” I keep my voice low but taut as any braced muscle. “Why would Cal’s own apprentices kill him? Even if we thought we could get away with it? Without him, we’d have no place in this world and no promise of anything better. I’d be a service worker like my parents, and Ver would rot on Three. Tell me why we’d vack our only hope of making something of ourselves.”

I curl my cuffed hands into strong farmworker fists and enjoy watching Xenon flinch.

Instead of answering my question, he signals for the bots to take me back to my cell. “Miss Fielding, this interview is over. I can read your crimes in your eyes.”