Chapter 34
Ver

Aryl shuffles into the lab. Slouching, distraught. I am lying on the office couch, insulation bags filled with hot water draped over me. I am trying to relax my coiled muscles. The trail of pain down both sides of my legs makes them hypersensitive to the touch. I feel like a fish, using my lateral line to detect mechanical stimuli. Except all the stimuli hurt.

The lab is empty except for us. I decided it would be safer to meet and talk here, away from the home AIs in our dorm rooms. Fond as I am of Charles, he is always listening. So I dragged myself to BioLabs, perhaps for the last time.

“I don’t know what to say to you, Ver,” Aryl says, executing a descending spin that ends with her seated on the floor, head on her knees. Oh, dancers. “You’re hurt.”

I roll onto my other side and raise my head to look at her. “I tripped in Kricket’s room. My fault.”

Aryl slides closer to me. Questions spark in her enormous eyes, which are puffy from crying. Something else is wrong.

“What happened?” I asked her.

She says quietly, “Oh, it’s nothing. They kicked me off dance team. Just now.”

“Aiyo. How unfair.” She must be devastated. Dance defines her body like my RCD has come to define mine. Who am I now without stillness? Who is she without movement? I reach out a hand and she takes it. Closest I can give to a hug.

“What does it matter?” Aryl says, slouching as she sits. The posture looks unnatural on her, and it saddens me. “I won’t be able to dance in the Sandbag, and we’ll be there in two days if we don’t find the killer.” She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “Anyway, Kricket. You were saying?”

“Something he said made me think . . . Cal saved all sorts of files on his hand, the artificial one. He took holos with it too. The police wanted to see something on there. Jaha said they tried to access it, remember? Back at the police station.”

“Do you know the contents of those files?” Aryl asks.

Instead of answering directly, I say, “I think they could have put Cal in danger.”

“Why?”

I can feel my face going red, but she rushes on before I can reply.

“Is it something to do with the portable antichronowave detector Ford and Kricket were racing to build? Cal pitted them against each other, put Kricket’s whole future on the line. Did you know about that?”

“No, but Kricket’s motives matter less to me now than his methods.” Later I will need to ask her what else she knows about this detector. For the moment I try to stay on track. “If Kricket managed to access the files in Cal’s hand, and if we could prove that, we would have something concrete tying him to the murder.”

“Kricket’s too bad with computers to have hacked an artificial limb.”

“Maybe he was working with someone who could,” I say. “Aryl, we need to get access to Cal’s hand.”

I still want to hide everything Cal might have on there about me—from Aryl, from all the Gui moons. But it is looking more likely that, if we are going to walk free, it cannot stay hidden. I can sacrifice my dignity for freedom. But it will require the kind of vulnerability that terrifies me.

“Cal’s hand is in the medical repository,” Aryl reminds me. “Along with the rest of him.”

I refuse to visualize that. “Yes, so we would need to get to it and find a way to extract the files . . .”

“Ver, that’s illegal!” Aryl shakes her head. “And an invasion of privacy, never mind that Cal’s dead. Xenon would have a field day if he caught us.”

I shrug. “Xenon already has a whole spreadsheet of charges against us. One more would not matter. We have forty-nine hours until the trial, Aryl. We need to act.”

Aryl scrutinizes me, eyes narrowed. “This is a scrap idea.”

“We have no better ones. Please, Aryl. We must try.”

Aryl chews on her lip, thinking. “It’s so dangerous, Ver, what you’re proposing.”

“So is this whole situation. If I get tossed in the Sandbag, I will die. If you are there with me, who knows what will happen to your family?” I must turn myself inside out to say those words. But it works. Aryl is nodding, though she still looks troubled.

“If we do this,” she says, “if we can access Cal’s files, we might find out how Kricket and his accomplice coordinated the murder. And maybe Cal took images that night. Of the last thing he saw.”

Yes. But there is more. The documents that concern me. That concern all of us. “So, how are we accessing that hand?” I ask.

Aryl gathers herself, taps her fingertips together and grins mischievously, looking very much like Ford. There is purpose in her again. “I have an idea.”