Chapter 26
Ver

Light detector cells in human eyes mostly correspond to three primary colors: blue, green, and red. Every other hue is an amalgamation of these—a fact that astonished me when I first learned it. Now, when I return to campus, it seems as if my eyes’ blue and green photoreceptors are broken. I see only red, everywhere around me, as Pangu sets over the Institute.

The slanting crimson light makes the pond, the crystal sculptures, and the trees look as if they are burning. Fire, fire, devouring this whole place. So strange that of all the colors on the light spectrum, red carries the least energy.

A throng of people stands outside the BioLabs tower. At its center is Jaha, wearing a red blouse and skirt, her face the scarlet of burning lithium. She is surrounded by senior investigators.

I need to see what is happening, but I dare not risk getting injured by the crush of people. I approach the edge of the crowd, searching for a face I recognize. The one I find belongs to an old bear of a man whose lab invented an electron microscope with inconceivably precise sub-angstrom resolution. I would often see him chatting with Cal, offering advice.

“Investigator Faraday,” I say, “what is happening?”

“The faculty combed through Ms. Linaya’s communications,” he says, his breath smelling of the onions he must have had with his dinner. “Accessed her private accounts through the Neb. Listen.”

At the front of the crowd, Investigator Lark, who recently celebrated her one-hundred-and-twenty-fourth birthday, is holding court. She has a sonorous voice for someone with snowy hair, a hunched back, and skin like crinkled paper. “You wrote to your child’s caretaker, ‘My garbage husband won’t clean the ****ing lab fridge, so you need to watch Dimmi an extra hour while I do it. Someday, I swear, I’ll throw the whole man away.’ ”

Cal does not deserve such slander! He was never lazy and surely would have done what Jaha asked if it was needed.

Jaha smirks at Investigator Lark. “If you’ve never insulted a man, Stephania, then you haven’t spent enough time around them.”

The jab slides off. “To your sister,” Investigator Lark continues, “you wrote, ‘He barely knows how to run a lab! He flails, with slow progress and unhappy apprentices. If I’d been born a man on this moon, he would be answering to me.’”

Jaha blanches and goes silent. Her reaction can only mean she really wrote these things. The onlookers—investigators, and apprentices alike—begin to whisper.

Lark goes on. “You thought you deserved Cal’s job, Jaha. So you got rid of him. And from the looks of things, you involved his apprentices.”

Hearing this accusation should make me happier than it does. At least public opinion has found someone with whom Aryl and I can share the blame.

But something feels wrong about this. If Jaha had wanted to kill Cal, she probably could have done so in a way that looked more convincingly like an accident or a natural cause. Why this way, at this time?

Her words are harsh, even shocking—but if Cal were still alive, they would sound like expressions of frustration or signs of strain in her relationship, not serious threats. Besides, if Jaha did plot Cal’s death, she would have been careful not to say or write anything that could later draw suspicion. Without other evidence, I cannot connect those words with Cal’s murder.

“Now that the employees of BioLabs have heard our findings, all investigators will hold a vote about Ms. Linaya’s future at the Institute.” Lark’s words come out colder than dead space. “It is not our place to decide if Ms. Linaya is a criminal—only if she is to remain an employee.”

Fifty or so investigators troop into the BioLabs building to cast votes in the conference room. Investigator Faraday gives me a nod before following his colleagues. The apprentices linger outside, waiting for the outcome, as Pangu casts lengthening shadows over us all.

Jaha walks toward me. My throat goes dry. I was not expecting to interact with her.

“Are you all right, Ver?” she asks quietly. “You left so suddenly last night.”

I manage to nod. Casting about for something to say, I ask, “How is Dimmi?”

“Staying with my mother in Phoenix Port for the moment. At least until I find out if I get to keep my Institute housing. But listen, Ver. There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you. This isn’t the ideal setting, but I might not get another chance.”

I stare at her, unsure what to expect.

“I’m sorry I’ve been . . . distant from you the last few months. I envied your talent, your drive, the fact that I didn’t have such an opportunity at your age.”

I struggle to formulate a response. Thankfully, Jaha keeps talking so none is needed.

“I panicked shortly after you arrived, Ver. I thought there was room for just one hardheaded, cold-blooded science prodigy from Three. The longer you worked with Cal, the more you would accomplish. Soon you’d be the first Three-er woman to do this or that. I wanted it to be me.”

Confusion scrambles my brain. “I thought you were jealous of me for . . . a different reason.”

Jaha sighs and shakes her head. “Oh, Ver-hai, you are so many things, but you were never a threat to my marriage. My husband wanted all the data he could get out of you—nothing else.”

She speaks so calmly, without hesitation. I cannot doubt her honesty.

I do not know how to feel. Juvenile and silly. Angry at Cal for using me like so much lab equipment. Shocked that Jaha put my real relationship with him into so few words.

But I also feel . . . respected? Jaha saw me as more than a silly girl chasing her man. She feared I would catch her dreams in a net before she did. Because she recognized me as her equal.

“It took Cal’s death for me to see that holding you back is bad for science, bad for the future of our moons,” Jaha says. “I need to make space for you and other offworld girls instead of walling you out. We have enough enemies on G-Moon One as it is. So let’s keep you and me and Aryl out of prison, if that’s all right with you.”

Jaha’s words slot into my mind. Her treatment of me in lab makes more sense now. So does her bail money—part of this new solidarity. But I hold on to a wisp of doubt. She did resent Cal, and me, yet now she wants to be my ally?

“Do you have any ideas for how to prove our innocence?” I ask her.

Jaha grunts. “About as many as you do.” Not encouraging.

At last the investigators reconvene outdoors. Jaha pats my shoulder somewhat parentally and moves back to the center of the crowd.

Lark announces, “Nearly unanimously, with only two dissenting votes, we have voted to terminate Jaha Linaya’s employment.”

Jaha is trembling, her face spasming with emotion. I can see it from here.

“Ms. Linaya, you are not welcome here,” says Lark. “Take your blood funding from ExSapiens. Take your apprentices, if they’ll still have you. Take what’s left of your humanity and go somewhere else—at least until the police put you back where you belong.”

She means Three. The Sandbag. I flinch.

Jaha draws herself up to her full height, her eyes flashing like emergency lights. “How dare you judge me? You people, who have no idea what it’s like, or how hard I worked to be here. This dream was so far away, it might as well have been across the galaxy. I started in a medical factory on Three, on an assembly line—can you imagine what that’s like? Then I made so much of myself, with all the qualifications to be an investigator. But despite everything, all you see is where I come from.”

Unexpected tears spring to my eyes. I know the home she left behind. I understand the astronomical escape velocity needed to break free.

“What if I had been murdered? You would’ve spared Cal this treatment.”

Silence from the investigators. No one denies it.

“You think I trapped Cal into marriage so I could climb the ladder,” Jaha says. “But you will never know the love I felt. I still feel it.” She pounds her fist over her heart. “Everything I’ve accomplished, I could’ve done with or without my husband. He just made the journey more worthwhile.”

My tears run down my cheeks and neck and soak into my collar. I cannot look away from her, cannot stop listening. Her words reverberate in my chest as only the truth can.

Jaha’s voice is low. “There will come a day when I am recognized as innocent. A day when you will want me back. But I will never forgive you for grinding my name into the sand.”

Her angry eyes scan the crowd, moving from face to face until they happen to land on mine. They are pleading, yearning for me to believe her.

I incline my chin ever so slightly.

Jaha nods back. Without sparing a look for anyone else, she marches off into the shadows.