Chapter 36
Ver

Cuttlefish change the pigment and iridescence of their skin to seamlessly blend into their external environment. I remember learning this in my primary school biology class and feeling jealous of such a versatile creature. It is a pity that Aryl did not have this ability to disappear when we sorely needed it.

While I wait in the abandoned lab, I have been using my burner flexitab to watch news stories about the Lucent City Medical Repository break-in. Holo footage from the building’s security cameras is all over the Neb already, showing a girl with straight blond hair getting pushed into a wall—bang! Clutching her head, she stomps on a scientist’s foot and runs out of the facility.

How long before the authorities trace the intrusion back to Aryl and me?

Aryl stumbles in. She has washed the platinum blond out of her hair. The strands are forming curlicues once again. Her face is bruised, and her eyes are full of stories. Frightening ones.

I get to my feet, even though it hurts, and edge toward her. “What happened?”

“It . . . it . . .” Her eyes fill with tears.

I dig in my bag until I find half a loaf of sweet green tea bread, squashed but still soft inside its wrapper. “Here,” I say, holding it out.

“You’re amazing,” she says and tears in. There is a blip in my heartbeat, a catch in my breath.

After several deep breaths, she is ready to talk. “Cal. His hand. He was dead—his face was like stone—but his hand, it punched me.” She points to the bruise on her chin, a mottled purple and green. As I reach out to touch her skin, she shrinks away, curls up into a ball. “It was still alive, somehow.”

“What?” I stare at her. Did seeing Cal’s dead body disturb her so much that she hallucinated?

“It grabbed my fingers and twisted my arm around and punched me in the face.”

Barely able to process this, I reach out a trembling hand and touch her elbow. “So . . . you were not able to search for any files stored in the hand.”

“No, but I did capture a 3D image of the hand itself. I’m not that bad a scientist.” She shoves the rest of the bread into her mouth, unrolls her burner flexitab, and projects a holographic image of Cal’s bionic hand.

It is the same, down to the metal facets on the knuckles and the slender titanium bones beneath the translucent skin. That hand was such an important part of Cal, just as my disobedient legs are a part of me. Even though it was not his dominant hand when he was born, it was perfectly steady, so he always used it to write, pipette, and dissect.

An image of the hand leaping up and attacking Aryl comes to my mind, but it makes me imagine the rest of Cal waking up too. His eyes twinkling at me before he asks how my experiments are going and if I want to talk to him about anything . . .

Stop! I order myself. I focus on Aryl: “Why would that hand still move, when its power source—Cal’s heartbeat—was gone?”

“Maybe, after Cal died, the hand activated some kind of defense mode so no one would tamper with it,” Aryl says.

“Unlikely.” Using my burner flexitab, I search the Neb for the keywords malfunctioning artificial limb. Old news articles appear, from fifty-some years ago, when smart limbs sometimes betrayed their owners. But manufacturers corrected the problem by replacing artificial intelligence algorithms with lab-grown neurons genetically identical to the wearer’s. These were wired into the brain, the implanted cells communicating seamlessly with the preexisting ones. Cells turned out to be more trustworthy than code. Problem solved.

By the time Cal got his hand, mistakes had stopped happening. Which means . . .

I drop my head in my hands, fingers forming into fists. “We have to consider the possibility that someone tampered with Cal’s hand. Before he died.”

A moment of quiet passes between us. Aryl claps a hand over her mouth and whispers, “The angle of the injection, to the left side of his neck. It was his own hand, the artificial one!”

Her face is a mixture of horror and elation. I cannot believe we failed to think of this earlier. And how horrible Cal’s last moments must have been! His body betrayed him.

“Kricket,” Aryl says. “Could he have hacked into the hand and reprogrammed it?”

“Maybe,” I say. “But only the manufacturer would know how someone might do this. Which company made the hand?”

Aryl looks at me, confused. “Cal didn’t tell you?”

“I could not just ask our boss where he buys his body parts.”

Aryl shrugs. “Out of everyone in our lab, you’d look the least weird if you did.”

I glare at her.

“Sorry. I just meant . . . you were closest to him.”

I sigh. “I thought I was.” Staring again at the holo of Cal’s hand, I tell Aryl, “Zoom closer.”

Aryl increases the magnification and resolution. As the image glides over the artificial hand, I am struck by how different it is. Hairless. Smooth as the skin of a polished apple. Not human, with human imperfections.

“What is that on the inner wrist?” I point to a fold of translucent bioplastic at the joint, scrawled with what look like black squiggles. It is still blurry. Aryl zooms in more and I see a line of ten letters and digits. A serial number.

“Search for that,” Aryl says.

I squint to see the characters. Carefully, I copy down the sequence on the burner flexitab and scour the Neb. Results pop up immediately.

“Hoverbikes,” I say, disappointed. “Worker IDs. What are the chances . . . ?”

Throughout history, many numbers have been assigned to many people and things. There is always a chance of duplication.

Aryl leans over my shoulder. “There,” she says, pointing to a serial number listed under a company called Paion Prostheses. “That one sounds like an artificial limb manufacturer.”

I tap the company name. Images pop up on the screen: arms that resemble flower stems, tree-like legs, a calf and foot shaped like a lightning bolt. The limbs meld seamlessly with their human models, artifice flowing into flesh. Aiyo, how pretty! I try to imagine myself with a pair of long, flowing flower-legs, but something about it feels wrong.

“This could definitely be the company that made Cal’s hand,” Aryl says. “Though their style’s gotten, uh, louder since Cal’s day.” She sucks in a breath through her teeth. “And these prices are astronomical. Who can afford parts like this? Half a million Feyncoins for a hand! And we heard so much about Cal’s humble beginnings in the mountains.”

The bitterness in her voice when she talks about Cal makes me uncomfortable. “He never lied,” I say. “He told me his whole town pooled money to pay for his hand after the accident.”

“He really made you feel like his confidante, didn’t he?” Aryl says.

I sit back, looking at her. Perhaps she wanted Cal to like her. Over the past few days, I have doubted how much he liked me. He seemed to share so much of himself with me, but he did it with only one goal in mind. If my devotion to his science had wavered for a second, how would he have treated me?

Returning to the search results for “Paion Prostheses,” I find body parts for sale from dozens of vendors. They range from steady fingers for dissection-weary scientists to super-muscular or super-slender legs for athletes or models. Top quality; buy brand-new, secondhand, in bulk. If your body parts are not to your liking, replace them. Just as you would a hovercar or a spaceship part.

But some crucial information is missing. There seems to be no homepage for the company itself. All their products are being sold through other distributors. I visit the Gui Moons Market page, where people with money buy and sell stocks. Paion Prostheses, I type in. Nothing. I search through the healthcare sector, where the company is sure to be listed. Still nothing! I look at the robotics sector. No results there either.

“Did a supermassive star eat this company? Why is there so little information about it?”

A crease forms between Aryl’s eyebrows. A dent in molten bronze. “Yeah. It’s weird.”

I go back to our initial search results. One image catches my eye: a shining factory in what has to be the desert of G-Moon Three. The sunset-colored sands and the faint shimmer of the habitat dome in the background give it away. Better than what you were born with! is displayed in block letters above the pair of semicircular yellow doors on the large cubic building. Pipes protrude from the cube’s sides, and a ring of metal towers surrounds it like the spikes of a crown.

The rock formations reflected in the towers’ windows look vaguely familiar, like an image in a dream. But then again, so much of the desert landscape on Three looks the same. And the data associated with the image says nothing about location.

“Where is Paion based?”

Aryl drags her finger up and down to scroll through the search results but has no answer for me.

“Who is their executive?” I go on. “Why can I not buy their products directly from the manufacturer? If I search Paion Prostheses factory”—and I do—“why are there no results?”

Aryl sighs. “Does it matter? Ver, it’s been twenty years since Cal got that hand. The company might’ve shut down or changed its name—who knows? Besides, how much could they tell us about the flaws of a bionic hand from decades ago?”

I look up at Aryl’s exhausted face. “We have no other leads, and there is something odd about this company. How did it disappear?”

I return to the image of the factory, the mountains reflected in the shiny window, and project it in holographic mode from the flexitab, gradually increasing the resolution.

I see a tram stop in the distance, rusting and steely, just like the ones back home. Could it be? Honey Crater and its surrounding towns had those same pyramidal structures sprinkled along the tram routes!

“I am not sure, but . . . I think that is G-Moon Three.” I remember something Jaha said after she was fired. “Jaha used to work in a medical factory on Three. There could be a connection.”

Aryl chews on this information. “Well, too bad we don’t know where Jaha is now, or how to get in touch with her in case she knows anything useful.”

“If Paion had a factory on Three, then people there would remember it. I know how to talk to those people.” I swallow the word Ma. In spite of myself, I want to see my mother again before I get locked up. I surely will not see her after.

I get to my feet and hold out a hand for Aryl, because I need courage for what must come next. She takes it. “We need to find that factory, or what is left of it.”

Aryl stands, still holding my hand, without resting any of her weight on me. “Are you sure about this?”

“Yes. When I came here, I swore I would never go back. But I will, Aryl. For Cal’s sake. And for our sake.” I will breathe that dust into my lungs if it means erasing the black mark on our names.

Aryl nods. “Then I’m coming with you.”