Chapter 41
Aryl
Ver’s frozen up in front of her mother. So I jump to her aid, bringing out a crystal-cut One-er accent, because it’s clear what Ver’s mother thinks of people who look like me.
“The dumplings are delicious, Auntie,” I say. They’re too bland and fibrous for my taste, but I’m showing I can be polite.
“They’re for my daughter.” She’s not pretending to like me.
“Listen,” I say, pushing the plate away from me and toward Ver. “We don’t need much from you. Just information. And then we’ll—I’ll—leave.”
Ver’s mother looks taken aback. Maybe she wasn’t expecting me to be so articulate, or so calm. “Go on.”
I say, “Do you know anything about the Paion Prostheses factory?”
“The what factory?” asks Ms. Yun.
“We thought you might have heard of it, Ma,” Ver says.
“It’s critical to proving our innocence,” I say, and Ver nods.
Ms. Yun rests her chin on her hands. “What does it look like?”
Ver unrolls her burner flexitab and shows her mother the image we found. A building carved out of rock. The trapezoidal yellow plateaus Ver says she recognizes. Stormy, gaseous Gui and placid G-Moon One floating in the black sky above.
As Ms. Yun leans forward to take Ver’s device, I notice that she smells of menthol. Mint-flavored patches is my guess. The sickly scent makes me hurt for Ver. She had a poor childhood, like me, but with a parent whom she could never rely on. For my parents, nothing came before Ester and me. It’s hard to admit, but we’re just as lucky as they’re always telling us. My parents had options, like playing chess and finding a rich senator to hire them. Ver’s mom? Staying out of the fray on this moon was the best she could’ve hoped for.
Ver’s mother squints at the image. “Can you put this in 3D mode? I don’t know how, with these newer models.”
Ver nods, and a projection of the image materializes. With her fingers, she expands the edges so that the factory and plateaus take up the whole kitchen table. Ms. Yun switches off the light with a swipe of her finger. In the dark, the bright spots in the sand and stars of the holograph light up Ver’s face. Her eyes, wide and full of hope, watch her mother.
Ms. Yun rises and walks around the edges of the holograph. I can almost picture her mind working, like her daughter’s: image-sorting computer script, toggling around until she finds something she recognizes.
“They tore it down,” she says.
My heart falls ten stories.
“If I remember correctly, this building was in the sixth ward, if you took the yellow tram line and walked westward from the Terralectric factory, perhaps half a kilometer . . . It’s gone now, but when I was a child, we climbed over that fence. I remember the tightly woven links. We had magnetic shoes; we made them in sewing class. I don’t know what we were looking for, but someone chased us out, called the authorities.” There’s a smile in her eyes. “One of our exciting days.”
Ver shuts her eyes. “I cannot imagine you as a child, Ma.” She gathers herself and adds, “Are you sure the factory was destroyed? Did they move operations to another location?”
“Ver-xin, it’s gone. And listen to me: searching for it will end badly.”
The tears spill out over Ver’s cheeks. “How much worse of an ending is possible for us at this point?”
“So many things are gone,” Ver whispers, so quietly that only I can hear. I put an arm around her, but when Ms. Yun’s eyes flash at me, I drop it.
Awkwardness overwhelms me. I shouldn’t have come here, shouldn’t be witnessing this strained reunion between mother and daughter. “I’ll go take a look outside, see if I can spot this rock formation,” I say, standing up.
They barely notice I’ve moved. They’re absorbed in each other as I hurry toward the door.
“I made many mistakes, Ver-xin,” Ms. Yun is saying. Ver’s head is bowed toward her clenched hands, and her mother is leaning close to her to speak. “I didn’t want you to make the same ones. But now it looks like you may not even have the chance.”