Chapter 1
Aryl

I expected to be alone in lab tonight. Everyone says the place is creepy in the dark, when the supercomputers cluck and purr as if they’re talking to one another, but I don’t mind. Machines are only as scary as the people using them.

“Good to see you, Aryl,” my boss calls over his shoulder, his transparent bioplastic arm twisting behind his back to wave at me. “I was worrying you forgot you worked here.”

Cal’s voice is softer than usual. Threatening, like the faraway white streak in the sky before a meteor impact. My delts and traps contract as I brace for a lecture.

“You should’ve started taking data for your project last week,” Cal says, “but I guess 0:30 at night is as good a time as any. Since you’re finally here, you’re welcome to wipe the benches clean when you’re done.”

I roll my eyes at Cal’s back, knowing that his hand can see me. A literal third eye, the camera lens is wired to his brain’s visual cortex via a series of long, branching neurons grown from his own stem cells. He got into an accident as a teenager, and instead of opting for surgery that could’ve fixed the damaged muscles, bones, and nerves, he replaced his whole hand with a machine.

I straighten my neck so that the bones are stacked like building blocks and tilt up my chin. “Didn’t know the custodians needed help,” I say, referring to the wheeled bots that tidy up the lab space in the early hours of the morning. Cal knows they’ll do the cleaning for us. He’s ordering me around as punishment, like giving a time-out to a five-year-old.

To be fair, he has a right to lecture me. I haven’t put in a full day’s work all week, and I don’t regret it. My schedule’s been packed with dance team practice, parties, and afternoon naps when our star, Pangu, burns hottest in the sky. You know, fun stuff. But tonight, Dad messaged. How’re experiments, sweetgum? Can we send you some taro buns?A sudden rush of responsibility made me tell my friends I was hungover and come into lab. I can’t keep coasting, knowing that my parents are cheering me on from afar, so proud that I’ve won this place as a research apprentice at the Institute for Natural Exploration.

Maybe I should be working more. Though I wonder: How much is enough? We research apprentices may be among the nerdiest kids on the three Gui Moons, but like anyone else, we need to let off steam. Most investigators at the Institute encourage their apprentices to play sports and have hobbies so they don’t lose themselves to the work. Not Investigator Cal Eppi, though. Cal is the work, and the work is Cal.

“I’ll leave you alone,” he tells me now. “But only if you stay at that bench. I’ll be watching.” Smirking, he flashes the back of his hand again to make sure I get the message. The lens catches a stray beam of light from a computer, seeming to wink at me. Eugh.

I toss my bag down in the entryway and gown up, keeping one eye on Cal. He’s hunched over the thrumming DNA sequencer, his nose nearly brushing the readout screen. The experiment he’s obsessing over at this time of night? A complete mystery.

When I applied to the Institute more than two years ago, I ranked Cal’s lab as my first choice among the biology labs. And when my application got accepted, I was thrilled to land a spot as his apprentice.

At first I thought he was a harmless nerd. Young for an investigator, and cute, with his stubbled round face, messy yellow hair, and overlapping front teeth. He dresses in baggy black clothes, a casual look that belies his intensity. My friends on dance team tease me about working for him. Their bosses are over half a century old, with hands that can barely work a pipette. But the teasing’s all in good fun. They know Cal’s not my type.

They also know I can’t stand him now.

Within weeks of starting work, I learned that Cal spends every day and night in lab, breathing down his apprentices’ necks. When I called my mom to complain, she said my description of him reminded her of the overseers at the farm collective where she once worked on G-Moon Two—the place she and my father escaped before I was born.

If I don’t succeed here, I won’t just be a disappointment. I’ll have wasted my parents’ lives. If I were a better person, I’d ask myself more often: How do I make their sacrifices worth it?

Well, not by quitting my job.

Not even to audition for every dance company on this moon?

Nope, even though I think about it every other night. I could sustain a career-ending injury in a few months or years and have nothing to fall back on. Then I’d depend on my parents instead of being the one to lift them up.

As I enter the cluttered lab space, the inner door to the clean room swings open and Ver Yun emerges. Great, my other favorite person. My new lab mate’s been backstage this whole time—probably spying—waiting to make her entrance.

One of Ver’s mint-green pant legs is rolled up, and her pink carbonglass cane taps on the spotless floor, marking a steady beat. If we weren’t in lab, I’d give in to my dancing instinct, unfold my arms and extend my legs.

“Hey, Ver,” I mumble, slumping into my seat. If she’s here working late, then I have no excuse for not getting scrap done.

“Hello, Aryl,” she says to a spot on the wall behind my head, her voice breathy and high-pitched. In her offworld accent, my name comes out sounding like “arrow.” Ver’s sixteen, one year younger than me, but her small body and floaty white shirt make her look about twelve. Her black hair is hacked at irregular angles, like she cut it herself, and her skin is olive with gray undertones, probably from living indoors on her home moon.

She joins Cal at the sequencer and deposits a tube in the machine. They’ll get a genomic readout immediately. I watch them for a moment, the girl with the cane and the man with the transparent hand, their heads almost touching.

Ver’s never told us what happened to her—unlike Cal, who’s described his rock-climbing accident in gory detail and gushes over his replacement hand, with its constant software updates, as if it’s a cool toy. Maybe Ver had a rough childhood, like giga numbers of other people from G-Moon Three, but you couldn’t pay me to pry. During her first week here, I absentmindedly asked her to grab me a heavy tube-shaker on a bottom shelf. Ver was silent for five seconds or so, then rapped her cane on the floor and said, “I wouldn’t follow your orders even if I could.”

Her reaction made me feel like such an awful, ableist human errorcode that I was too embarrassed to even speak to her again until the next lab meeting. Now I watch what I say to her. I can’t afford to gas off Cal’s new favorite even more.

Keeping one eye on Ver, I sit at the microtome and slice fifty-nanometer-thick mouse brain tissue sections. Later, I’ll blast the tissues with gravitational waves, electromagnetic waves, and chronowaves on the dinky wave generator. Then I’ll watch how the cells age with a diffraction device. It’s mind-numbingly repetitive, but the results will tell us something new about the way the universe works. Supposedly.

As I work, my flexitab lights up green with messages from my friends. The device is as thin as a layer of skin, and the rectangular screen is the size of my hand. I can stick it onto most surfaces, though usually I wear it as a bracelet. If you slap the flat surface on your wrist, it’ll curl around and show the moving colors or designs you’ve programmed as your resting screen. Mine’s shimmering gold, eye-catching but classy.

We’re climbing the poles, Rhea’s typed. You’d crush everybody here.

People are full of ethanol already. I should be there, joining in the drunken good time. I can shimmy up the metal struts that support the Institute gym higher and faster than anyone, but I also get in the most trouble with security.

Cal raises his arm and waggles the fingers of his bionic hand at me. Scrap, he’s watching. I turn off my flexitab. But I’m still distracted by Cal and Ver, hunched together over the sequencer. Ver’s babbling about something she sees, and Cal’s head bobs up and down.

They work symbiotically during normal hours too. Jaha, our lab manager and Cal’s wife, raises an eyebrow at them from time to time, but she’s never said anything. Even the two older research apprentices have noticed how Ver’s sucked our boss into her orbit. She’s the only one who seems to escape his criticism.

“What are you two doing?” I say, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice.

“A side project,” Ver says flatly, keeping her eyes on her work.

“One of her many side projects,” Cal adds. As if one wasn’t enough.

I can’t suppress another eye-roll. Thankfully, Cal’s bionic hand is busy, so the camera on the back can’t see. He can record from it at will, like he did during my latest fumbling presentation at lab meeting.

Ever since Ver started here six months ago, nothing I do has been enough for Cal. She’s better than me. Even though I made it to this lab against all odds, her journey dwarfs mine. I haven’t had an easy life, but I didn’t cross two moons and battle some awful health problem. Nor did I get immaculate data within weeks.

There’s nothing left to do but try. Again. I place the sliced tissue in the path of the wave generator. Squat down to observe, my lab notebook at the ready. I try a chronowave—a wave that moves through the time dimension, intersecting with the space continuum. The machine lets out a squeal as it boots up—

The squeal dies.

Everything goes silent and dark.

So dark I can’t see my hand in front of my face. Not even Lucent City’s glittering lights can filter in through the blackout shades covering the windows.

Before any of us can speak, an alarm rips through the air.