Chapter 27
Aryl

Ford’s always been a good multitasker. As his family’s spaceliner zips between G-Moons One and Two, he’s drinking fizzy kiwi juice while monitoring our flight path and deflecting messages from Rhea demanding he return to campus. I’m strapped into one of the seats across from him, a chair covered in lab-grown snakeskin, waiting to hear from Ver.

My parents begged me to stay at home longer, but I hugged them goodbye and swore them to secrecy about where I was going. I think they were pleased that I’m finally visiting their homeland—even though we all wish the circumstances were different.

Inside the Mercenary, it feels like nothing can go wrong. The tastefully subdued beige walls and quartz cabinets contrast with the corner Ford’s turned into a machine shop. There’s a workbench, mounted high because he’s tall, a computer with a wraparound monitor, a sleek soldering gun, and labeled drawers filled with wires, nuts, bolts, and hand tools. Ford somehow squeezed an all-resolution microscope into one corner—a towering machine capable of imaging sheets of cells down to single protein molecules.

“Nice setup,” I say.

“Thanks,” Ford says. “Did you see the portable wave detector? I’m almost finished with it. Only have a few tweaks left.” He points at an unfamiliar piece of equipment. Wires hang off the contraption, and complicated-looking lenses surround a silicon core where I’m sure giga precious elements are housed.

“I bet Kricket’s way behind in building his detector,” Ford says. “Not that it matters now.”

“What?” I say, confused.

Ford explains, “A few months ago, Cal assigned Kricket and me the same project—building a portable antichronowave detector. It was a race. First person to finish would complete the research apprenticeship.”

I grimace at Cal’s casual cruelty. “But wouldn’t the loser have to start a new project from scratch? Like a first-year.” Wasting half a decade of apprenticeship.

Ford nods.

“That’s pretty vacked of Cal.”

“It is, but he’s the boss.”

“Ford, why didn’t you mention this competition earlier?” I say. Kricket never said anything about it either—probably out of embarrassment. He’s already been an apprentice for so long. Most people who aren’t on track to publish original research by their fifth year leave the Institute, whether by choice, by loss of their lab position, or by suicide.

“It’s not relevant to Cal’s death.” Ford’s nonchalance is so complete, I can’t help but groan.

“A portable antichronowave detector would be a huge breakthrough,” I note, as if he somehow might be unaware of that. It’d mean that we could measure these mysterious, time-defying waves as we travel across planets, not just in our specialized lab. Worth killing over? Possibly. “Does it work?”

“Only when I least expect it to,” Ford says. “Sometimes I get seemingly valid measurements in the weirdest places, like right over mountains, but—”

“Hold on,” I say as my burner flexitab lights up with a message.

They sacked Jaha, Ver’s written.

What?! I write back.

The investigators voted her out, comes the reply. They found horrible things she wrote about Cal. But I do not think she killed him. If she had, she would have covered her tracks better—left no evidence of any problems between her and Cal.

That’s the Jaha I know. Used to living her life under a microscope. Too smart to commit a crime that could backfire on her. She had too much to lose.

So who did it? All I can picture is a faceless shadow, slipping out from behind a lab cabinet and sticking Cal with a TTX-filled syringe.

I clap a hand over my mouth and rock back and forth in the snakeskin seat. Only the strap across my lap keeps me tethered in the zero-gravity environment.

My hands remember the feel of Cal’s still-warm chest. Of his heart, refusing to beat.

I’m hyperventilating. The panic is coming on strong, and I can’t stop it—

“Aryl, calm down,” Ford says. He’s unbuckled himself and is floating next to me, shaking my arm. “You’ll use up all my oxygen!”

The touch of his solid, warm hand brings me back to the moment. Breathe. Look around you.

I stare into Ford’s brown eyes, past the layer of cool indifference, and see concern. It makes me remember the way he massaged my back and my sore feet before my earliest dance auditions and shows, even though he was eleven and didn’t know what he was doing.

“Ford, when did we become strangers?”

He looks away—at Gui, a swirling blue mass coasting by outside the window, and says, “We were always meant to be strangers, Aryl. When we were young, we just didn’t know it yet.”

The words sting, but they’re the truest ones he’s spoken in a long time. The children of senators and farmworkers aren’t supposed to cross paths, let alone walk the same one.

“When we were little, you barely knew the difference between me and your other friends,” I say. “You let me play with your spaceship sims and ride the water slide . . .”

“Until I got different friends. Friends who made fun of me for being around you. I tried not to let you hear.”

“I heard,” I say, thinking of the time his discdisc teammate yanked me back by my hair and said, Stay away from Ford, Hoehands.

Ford winces. “I wanted to make it up to you when you followed me to the Institute. After I started hanging out with Rhea, I thought I’d see more of you.” His voice sounds tentative. “I can’t count how many parties I spent standing next to her, waiting for you to challenge me to climb the poles. But you never did.”

“Why should I have?” I say. Seeing him at those parties, with her, only reminded me I wasn’t in their league. “Friendships don’t get repaired by osmosis. The guilty party has to at least apologize first. In our case, that was you.”

Ford stares out the window, hiding his face. “Yeah. It’s just . . . other people. I wanted them to like me, and being close to you would’ve made them ask questions. Even thinking about that made me so ashamed, I couldn’t look you in the eye. Sometimes I still can’t.”

There’s regret in his voice, and my first instinct is to tell him that we can pick up our friendship where we left off. But I’m also holding in resentment. It’s bubbled in me for so long that I’m like a pipe about to burst.

“Is that why you’re helping Ver and me?” I ask. “For absolution?”

“It’s because I know you’re innocent.” There’s an edge to Ford’s voice. “You’re not the person the police think you are. You’re better than whatever demon lives in their heads.”

I take his warm words and let them curl up next to my heart like a small furry animal. I’ve missed Ford so much. But I’m gassed off that it took a murder trial for him to come back to me.

As we approach Oryza, the Mercenary slows and dips, bringing me eye-to-eye with my parents’ homeland. The place that runs through my veins.

Like every settlement on G-Moon Two, the city is surrounded by farmland—sprawling green fields of tropical crops, the jungle-like squares forming a chessboard, bordered by irrigation canals. Cassava, taro, plantain, coconut. Rice paddies, stepping up the low hills to the west of the city, as far as I can see. The fields are dotted with workers wearing wide-brimmed hats made of a thin bluish film to protect them from Pangu’s UV rays.

Unlike the pastel crystalline surface of One, Two has a flat, smooth landscape, aside from the humanmade rice paddies and the black mountains of igneous rock rising to the east. The terraforming is simple, with sanitized square plots for farms, lakes, and residential communities. This moon knows it needs to feed the others and doesn’t hide its purpose.

The Mercenary lands on the airfield about three kilometers from the city center. Two is windy, Dad has told me, because of the moon’s high axial rotation velocity—one day is only twelve standard hours, so people are used to two sunrises in a twenty-four-hour period. That fast rotation makes it possible for crops in many locations to pollinate each other with or without bees and bats, which are in short supply. Mom’s chess pieces were all weighted so that they wouldn’t blow away.

I came from here, I tell myself.

Even after a lifetime of hearing my parents’ stories, I’m still stunned. Everything on Two is foreign, from the rows of pineapple and coconut palms to the small cubic dwellings of the workers. The purple-blue slice of Gui on the horizon looks too small, since Two’s orbit is farther out than One’s.

My parents are probably worrying about me. I brush my fingers against my burner flexitab, wishing I could message them, tell them I’m all right. But I can’t contact them with this device.

I’m so sorry. I look back at One, hoping that somehow they’ll hear me.

Ford and I exit the ship into the warm, humid air. Sweat beads on my forehead and the back of my neck, but a moment later the wind blows it away, keeping me cool.

Leaving the Mercenary’s AI to park the ship in a garage, Ford unrolls his flexitab and calls a cab to take us to a neighborhood on the other side of Oryza. My eyes bug out at the thirty-Feyncoin fare that appears on Ford’s screen.

Ford shrugs. “We don’t have time for two train transfers and a hoverbus.”

The orange and black hovercab floats downward. It has wings and a tripod to land on, like some tropical beetle. After Ford and I board, it pushes off into the air, following lanes marked by yellow lights, joining hoverbikes and buses.

My nose is glued to the window, my eyes taking in the chaos of Oryza’s morning bustle. The only consistent feature is color—saturated reds, greens, and sapphire blues. On One, people wouldn’t just call you an errorcode if you painted an apartment building sunflower yellow; they’d knock it down to replace the exterior with crystal.

Here, the buildings are of all different shapes and sizes, and because it’s so crowded, the structures are layered over and under one another like a 3D puzzle. People walk along the paths or bundle into auto-rickshaws pedaled by bots. Unlike hovercabs, these can’t fly and are exposed to the elements.

Opening the window to get a whiff of the street food stalls below, I’m hit by a smell that’s pleasant and awful and everything in between. Urine, smoke, fragrant herbs, hot oil, chilies, roasted meat. Compared to the richer neighborhoods of G-Moon One cities, where everyone stays indoors, Oryza’s streets are arteries pulsing with people. It’s like Meteor Valley—home—but amplified. And I love it. I wish I could hop down and explore.

But I need to stay focused. Devon Kye. The benzoyl peroxide. With three days until the trial, I need to prove without a doubt that I didn’t kill Cal. Jaha hasn’t been arrested, even though she’s been sacked. Which means the police still need someone to blame for the crime. And I need to make sure it’s not me. Or Ver.

The cab swishes onward. West of downtown is an assortment of prefabricated houses: flimsy cubes of plastic and carbonglass that can be towed from place to place. Each set of six units is clustered around a common area with a garden, rain tarp, and table—Mom told me that neighbors on Two share most meals and all gossip. Every house is painted in a feast of colors—orange, turquoise, lime. The work is done haphazardly, one glowing hue layered over another.

After flying past whole conglomerations of box houses, we touch down, raising dust from the ground, which the wind whips into the air. Two old ladies strolling the neighborhood look up at the cab with interest but keep walking. There’s no one else around; at this time of the day, all the kids are at school and all the adults at work.

Ford and I walk to Plot 7, the address we found on the Neb. Devon Kye’s cube is a deep, regal blue—probably the quietest color on his block—with one window on either side of the front door.

I’m squeezing my fists so hard that my fingernails carve out crescents in my palms. I rap on the door once. Twice. I kick it and hear a tumbling noise from inside, a small body tripping and falling. I go up on tiptoe, peek into the right-hand window, and see a human form curled up on the floor, hands clasped over its head. Devon.

A pair of dark eyes meets mine.

“Open up,” I mouth through the window.

Fearfully, the boy inside nods.