Chapter 3
Aryl

Cal’s lying face down, completely still.

When I stop screaming long enough to catch my breath, I lift his head off the floor. My hands are shaking. My chest is heaving. I can barely see.

Blood dribbles out of a gash on his forehead. He’s gone limp, reminding me of the lab mice I’ve sacked. I slip my arms under his side. Bending my knees at a right angle, I suck air into my belly, dig my heels into the floor, and heave to roll him over. Proper hip-hinging, just like Dad taught me.

Cal’s body easily flips. His head lolls 180 degrees, loose curls flopping, and I recoil.

Deep breaths: In, out. In, out.

Kneeling down, I lay my hand over Cal’s heart. No pulse. I pump on his chest, almost pushing it into the floor.

A minute passes this way, according to the digital clock on the wall. He doesn’t move.

Ver clatters over to me, a pastel-colored mess of snot and tears.

“It’s not working,” I whisper. My party makeup has left sparkling green streaks on Cal’s white lab coat.

“We should try adrenaline.” Ver lurches over to the controlled-substances cabinet. She fills a syringe with clear solution, an amount presumably proportional to Cal’s mass, and stumbles back to us. Refusing my offer of help, she uses a desk to lower herself onto the floor. Her hands are trembling more than usual, but she manages to jam the syringe tip into Cal’s neck and push the clear adrenaline solution into his artery.

I’m almost expecting his heart to jump-start beneath my hands. Cal’s always called me too optimistic. It’s nice to want things, Aryl. He’d say it now, if he weren’t unconscious.

Unconscious. He’s got to be. I can’t consider the alternative.

Images flash through my mind: Cal’s droning criticisms of my work, the times I tuned him out by fantasizing about dancing out of lab meeting. Like last month, when he tossed six weeks of my data because I’d failed to control the tissues’ growing conditions before experimenting on them. I can’t say I didn’t snicker into my hand when he nicked himself with a surgical blade during a dissection later that day. But I never wanted Cal dead.

If he dies, what’ll happen to me? This lab’s my escape from my past. It’s my present and future and hope. It reassures my parents that they raised me right. And it lets me access the Institute dance team, which feels more real than my actual apprenticeship.

The empty syringe clatters from Ver’s hand onto the floor. She’s kneeling beside me, weeping. Is the science prodigy really out of ideas?

“Stop crying!” I urge. “Try again. Doesn’t Cal mean anything to you?”

Ver’s black eyes narrow, her glare sharp as a laser-cutter beam. “You will never understand what he means to me.”

I glare back. Frankly, I don’t want to know.

Without breaking eye contact, I take the flexitab off my wrist, unroll the screen, and call the authorities.