Chapter 43
Aryl

When Ver leaves the apartment building, there are tears in her eyes. I’ve been waiting for her, pacing heel-toe on the side of the road.

“Everything is fine, Aryl,” Ver chokes out. “Ma is flying now. She is happy. She gave us the information we need, I think.”

She wipes her eyes with her sleeve. Building residents are coming home, and they look us up and down, suspicion burning in their eyes. I wonder if they’re staring at me because I’m an offworlder. But even if they’re paying undue attention, it feels less pressing to me than whether Ver’s okay.

I pull her against my chest. She starts shaking, and I feel the wetness of her tears soak through my thin shirt. I’m worried for her body if we set off looking for secrets in the middle of the desert. Her body, her heart.

“I can never do things right,” she says in a small voice. “In her eyes, everything I do is wrong. I am wrong. She talks about the things I can’t change, like the way I walk . . .”

One of my hands combs through her short, smooth hair. It’s unbelievable that Ver’s talking this way about herself, when everything about her that I can see and touch is perfection.

“Her life has been hell, Aryl. Mine was supposed to be ten times better. She devoted her whole existence to giving me every opportunity, and I came out like this. Broken. I might as well be a criminal.”

Each word hurts my soul. I can’t understand what Ver and her mother have experienced, even though I want to. I’m powerless to help. I’m infuriated with my own uselessness and ignorance, and overwhelmed by what Ver deals with every day. How could the universe let this happen—not only to her, but to the thousands of others on this moon whose bodies are breaking down?

“Ver, you’re not—”

“Shh.”

If she doesn’t want to talk, I’ll still try my best to comfort her. Remembering how wonderful it felt, I take her small, cold hand in mine. She squeezes gently back.

My eyes sweep over the desert, and I’m suddenly aware of how alone we are. Before I can say anything else, Ver winds her free arm around me and presses her face into my shoulder. I hold her lightly, cautiously, not wanting to hurt her.

The moment passes. We untangle ourselves and walk back to the ship’s pod. Even though we’re not touching anymore, my body is a lit firework—I’m shaking, wanting so badly to pull her close. Amazing that it took our boss getting killed to take us from scornful lab mates to uneasy allies to—I hope—something more.

“I have to check something,” Ver says. “One last experiment. We can do it on board.”

We fly the pod back to the Mercenary. Once we’ve docked, Ver hurries into the main compartment, where she begins to rummage through drawers and crates, examining Ford’s stashes of instruments.

I glance at Ford’s portable detector. “Hey, the antichronowave reading is really low here. Is that a mistake?”

“I expected that,” Ver calls back. From the rear of the cabin, where the biology tools are stored, she retrieves a kit labeled Dissection. Out come sterilizable fitted gloves, smart forceps, a steady-hand surgical blade, polystyrene petri dishes. I help her arrange them on the workbench at the rear of the cabin. She perches on the tall stool. There’s no second stool, so I hover next to her. Working this way, we’re nearly the same height.

“This is for Cal,” Ver says.

My brain snaps back to our conversation on our way to Three. I don’t like what she’s about to do. But I have to respect that she’s choosing to do it.

“No, Ver,” I say gently. “This is for you.”

Ver nods and breathes deeply. Her muscles relax. “Yes. For me.”

I take my own deep breaths, forcing my mind to treat this task like a typical lab procedure or first aid for a dance injury, both of which can be difficult to stomach.

We take a routine blood sample: disinfect, extract, quick-stain. With the quick-diffusing solution, it takes only a few minutes for the fluorescent probes to penetrate the tissues. Next we turn to the all-res microscope. My hands are sweating as I set the instrument, directing it to give us saturated holographic projections of the slides.

Ver’s blood cells float in the air in front of our eyes.

So many of her red blood cells are elongated, thin, and a distinct maroon color, as opposed to the fat, healthy red discs of normal ones. Some of her platelets lack the fingerlike membrane projections that make them useful in blood clotting.

This is bad. Really bad. I’m speechless.

“And now we will see how well Ford set up electron tunneling mode,” Ver says, fiddling with the magnification. Her voice is flat, as if she’s dealing with a routine sample that has nothing to do with her.

When we zoom in thousands of times closer and play with the focus, we can see single-protein molecules. Hemoglobins are misfolded—instead of the characteristic four-leaf clover, we see blobs. Or the proteins are denatured, floating uselessly, no structure to them at all. No wonder Cal started sobbing when he first observed Ver’s cells. On every scale, there’s something wrong. Something to cause her pain, to threaten her life.

Again and again, I look away, chest heaving with the shock of it all, while Ver calmly takes pictures with the scope’s camera. Microscopic chaos is happening inside the girl in front of me. I wish I could grab the hemoglobins with my hands and twist them back into shape. But they’re so impossibly small, just as a galaxy is impossibly large. I have just as much hope of bending either to my will.

“Good job, Ford,” Ver says sadly. I can hear her throat closing up. We’re both struggling not to cry.

Even without running any numbers on the data, it’s clear how vacked things have gotten inside her body. It’s enough to know that a year in the Sandbag will kill her.

“Worse than the last set I took on One,” Ver says.

And it’s been less than a day since we left. I’m burning to hold her. To try and make it better, even though I know I can’t.

“I am dying faster here on Three,” Ver says. “And the antichronowave concentration here also is much lower, as Ford’s detector shows. This supports our hypothesis. Of course, it still is not clear howthe antichronowaves are connected to my RCD. We have correlation, not causation, and there are still many experiments left to do. But it is the beginning of an answer. With these results, someone else can continue the research even if I cannot.”

Words swirl through my brain, all of them pathetic and useless. Eventually I say, “What can I do, Ver? What do you want me to do?”

Instead of answering, Ver leans her head on my shoulder, nuzzling her nose into my neck. I reach around her, near enough to smell the clean, sweet scent of her hair.

Ver shifts so that her face is level with my collarbone, tilting her head up to look at me. Her breath tickles. She reaches a warm hand around to cradle the nape of my neck.

Somehow, my lips cross the canyon of air between us to kiss her. I freeze there, worried that any more movement might shatter the fragile world we’ve created. What surprises me is how she tastes: sweet and a bit sour, like the kids’ cough medicine I used to drink even when I was healthy because its flavor was so nice.

After a moment our mouths begin to move together like we’ve always been doing this. My heart’s alight, the warmth radiating all the way to my fingertips. Maybe Ver’s been imagining this moment too. Practicing the steps in her mind, just as I have.

Too soon, she ends it. I’m glad she’s the logical one—there’s no time to lose.

“Come on,” Ver says. One of her hands lingers on my cheek. “We have to find what we are looking for.”