Chapter 32
Ver

The musculoskeletal system requires constant tending, especially if a person is sedentary like me. Muscle fibers are meant to slide and stretch—not freeze, swell, and form lesions.

Two years ago, when I started having pains, my school nurse sent me an exercise and acupressure guide meant to relieve the symptoms of muscle spasm and nerve impingement. “Ten minutes twice a day will double the time you’ll remain mobile,” he said. “That could mean years of walking instead of sitting in a hoverchair.”

I memorized the guide. By following the directions, I could make myself feel slightly better.

Tonight, though, I do not want to stretch or massage. All I want is to crawl into bed, which I know will make the spasms worse. I do it anyway. Why should I not give up? I cannot prove Kricket guilty; I cannot figure out whom he is working with; I still do not know how someone managed to inject Cal with TTX. Nothing makes sense and everything hurts.

Out of all the things Kricket said, one juts out in my mind, cutting me again and again. If your legs don’t work anymore, you can get new ones.

I wish I had told him how simplistic that thinking was, made him feel enough to bring him to his knees. RCD will not stop with my legs. Organ by organ, it will shut down my body. I have seen people as young as twenty on Three, paralyzed from the pain. Living in sheet-metal shanties, unable to work. Unable to think, as the disease invades their brains. I always turned away from those haunting images of my future—a future that is already encroaching on the present.

Kricket does not know how it feels to have your body betray you. But Cal did.

Cal first told me about his injury one night when we were taking microscope images, high on the novelty of our progress and delirious from sleep deprivation. He told me how he had fallen during a difficult ropeless climb up a crystal rock face. Aiyo, the things fifteen-year-olds dare each other to do!

“The moment I got my replacement hand, I knew I would become a scientist,” Cal said, adjusting the controls. “I was no longer restricted by what I was born with. I could become faster, work harder, and improve other people’s lives in the same way.”

Maybe that was why he never cared about anyone’s natural limitations when it came to lab work. Including mine. After capturing my heart, he knew my brain and hands would do whatever it took to accomplish our goals. If he had kept me at arm’s length instead of pulling me in, I would not have given everything I had to the work. To him.

Now, I do not regret working so hard, but I do regret the reason why.

That night, though, all I could do was continue to listen to him, mesmerized. Cal told me that, despite some initial ghost pains, he got used to his new hand. It could take his vital measurements from inside his body, as I learned when he ran to lab late and sweated so much his electrolytes were depleted. The high-speed computing functions let him sort through three-thousand-row spreadsheets of data without touching another device. I never saw him wear a flexitab. Why would he, when he had a processor in his hand powered by his heartbeat?

I remember Jaha asking Cal to delete financial documents and experiment records from his hand’s hard drive, to save them on the secure lab computer instead. “Someone will fish information out of that hand,” she cautioned him once. “Just walk by you with their little hooking device and scoop it up.”

It was a paranoid Three-er thing to say, and Cal just laughed. “Someone could break into the lab or hack the server. The only place secrets are safe is inside our heads,” he said. He tapped Jaha’s temple, and she groaned.

If I had been murdered instead of Cal, the people investigating would be dense not to take my disease into account. It is my most obvious vulnerability. So why have Aryl and I not talked about Cal’s hand?

Because she will learn more about me than I am ready for. Things that Cal found out slowly over the six months of our secret experiments. Things I have always wanted to hide.

Charles’s voice pulls me away from my calculations. “Thinking hard, are you?”

“I cannot move much else besides my brain,” I say, gesturing to my prickling, burning legs.

“My computing abilities may be of assistance. Or my six free petabytes of memory.”

“Not necessary, Charles, but thank you. Just . . . please make sure I stay warm.”

“That’s easy,” Charles says and increases the temperature in the room by two degrees Celsius. “You do know, Ver, that AI processors may be better suited to solving murders than your own brain.”

I offer no reply. Not that Charles would know what my silence means. AIs manage information better than any human, but how well do they know people? How well can they understand the tensions, the jealousy, the love among six individuals who worked in the same lab day and night?

I wish computers could tell me who took Cal from us. From me. But they cannot.

Besides—Cal would say that if anyone could solve his murder, it would be me.