Chapter 4
Ver

What is physical pain? Electricity. A current of ions flowing through pore-like channels on our neuronal membranes, long axons like wires conducting the signal up to our brains.

Tonight, it takes only words to shock my body. The Lucent City Police examine Cal and tell us, “He’s gone.”

Gone! I am free-floating through space, without gravity to anchor me to this world or the next.

Still, amid the emptiness, I hope.

Clinical death is the cessation of a heartbeat and respiration, but brain activity may continue until the organ’s oxygen supply runs out. Does Cal know I am here? My palm cradles his cold cheek, and I imagine transferring every oxygen molecule in my blood to him. I would gladly give all I have.

His blue eyes—which often changed unpredictably from sunny to stormy, as if they had their own climate controls—are now blank, staring. A blond eyelash has drifted into his eyeball. I consider grabbing forceps from my bench and fishing it out, to blow it away and make a wish on it.

A stout female officer peels me off the floor and away from Cal. Two male officers hustle Aryl and me into the hallway. They tell us to return to lab—to the scene of the crime—at 9:00 tomorrow morning. And that if we try to run, they will know.

“Young scientists don’t drop dead for no reason,” says the green-haired female officer. “From the unencrypted vitals records on his artificial hand, we know that he didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke. His blood composition is . . . off. After we determine the cause of death, we’ll need you both for questioning.”

Gou! Not only did I lose Cal—they think I may have murdered him! It hurts my heart worse than my disease ever has. Worse than not knowing how I will manage to keep asking the questions I must ask—alone.

The police look at me, at Aryl, as if we are no better than the back-alley killers who plague the rougher neighborhoods of Lucent City. Many lawbreakers are homegrown, but some come from my moon. Others come from Aryl’s. And those are the ones who make the news. With two offworlders in front of them, the police probably will not investigate anyone else. How do I prove that they are only right about one of us?

If Cal was murdered, the killer must be Aryl. She was the only other person in lab tonight. I know little about her, except that she loathes Cal. Most of their conversations devolve into hisses and, in some cases, shouting. Once, when he criticized her faulty methods, she listened with her fists curled at her side, then returned to her experiment and—probably intentionally—heated an untempered glass beaker till it shattered, while Cal was only a benchtop away.

I manage to stay calm—keep face, as Three-ers would say—in the officers’ presence. Even on the fourteen-story elevator ride to ground level.

Aryl leaves without a word, takes off at a sprint toward the second-year dorms. I watch her, burning with envy. She has no idea how lucky she is to feel air rushing past her face, her lungs expanding with effort, the satisfying thud of her feet on the ground.

Cal fell down before Aryl dragged me out of the lab. Maybe he tripped. Maybe not. When Aryl ran back into the lab without me, she had nearly a minute to stop his heart. I am certain that she killed him. That she took Cal away from me.

I must confront her. But not tonight. I will not follow her, and not only because I would never be able to catch her. I need to be alone. My heart is singed and blackened from conducting so much electric pain.

Back home, on G-Moon Three, people I had known for much longer died all the time, of disease or violence or poison. These people fell like meteors. They made impact and buried themselves in the dust, digging their own graves. But Cal is different. He was a One-er. He was not supposed to die young. Or even middle-aged. He had at least a century left, like most other citizens of this moon.

When I met Cal that first day in lab, he was crouched on the floor, trying to fix our microscope.

“Hey, Ver! Can I borrow your stick for a second?” he said to me, blue eyes clear and shining, one side of his mouth lifted in a smirk. “I lost a screw under the scope.”

Blushing at his directness, I handed over my cane. He retrieved the screw, and together we calibrated and rewired the machine. My heart pounded so loud and fast I worried he would hear it.

Since then, the questions we have asked of the universe have nudged my life toward the light, assuring me that it has a purpose. No matter how short it will be.

Now his soul is among the stars. Not here, where I need him.

Wiping my eyes, I walk toward the spires of the first-year dorms, my soft shoes making no noise, my cane tap-tapping on the quartz-paved path. Weeping cherry blossoms and their reflections in the ponds shine snowy white against the black background. The vibrant green dot of G-Moon Two, surrounded by smaller pinpricks of stars, glows in the sky above it all. When I first arrived at the Institute, with its multihued crystalline towers, I wondered how anyone got work done in such a stunning place.

Then I learned that the science bestowed meaning upon the beauty. Geologists know that for several million years after G-Moon One’s formation, its distance from Pangu oscillated from near to far, leading to heating and cooling cycles that enabled the melting, growing, and remelting of gigantic multihued crystals. The architecture here is gemlike because of the sparkling abundance of raw material. Ecologists carefully selected organism combinations from the embryo vault to populate G-Moons One and Two, creating self-sustaining ecosystems: the mangrove lakes and dense maple forests on the other hemisphere of One; the rice paddies and cornfields of Two, serviced by communities of microorganisms living in the soil and pollinating bees buzzing through the air.

Science can explain why things are the way they are, how we arrived here, and what we will accomplish. Or what everyone else will accomplish, without me, if I do not manage to stop the disease that will soon take my life.

Now that Cal is dead, I am alone in that mission.

I am alone.

I crane my neck back to view the beanstalk-shaped Biological Laboratories skyscraper, which we call BioLabs. White quartz corkscrewing up into space. To the right, its neighbor, the spherical sapphire Mathematics Center, glints like a marble. I raise my eyes higher, to the starry night. To verdant G-Moon Two. To yellow, pockmarked G-Moon Three.

Home. How lucky I was to escape. I panicked as primary school graduation neared, fearing I would have to work in the factories like Ma and everyone else in my town. An apprenticeship at the Institute was my only hope of doing the science to save myself, but I had never been in a real laboratory before. I relied on the knowledge I had siphoned out of science articles and three years of pipetting solutions into chipped glassware—the best my school could offer.

I applied to the Institute and sent holographic messages to Cal’s lab. Explaining my health issues, begging for a chance. Finally Jaha, the lab manager, called and said she would support my application. As soon as we heard each other’s accents, we lapsed into our dialect. I could have flown. A fellow Three-er would watch out for me!

At the beginning of my apprenticeship, she brought me snacks, offered encouraging words at every opportunity. But after a few weeks, Jaha could not be in the same room with me. “You seem to have it together,” she would say, excusing herself.

I could not help loving her husband. No one had ever made me feel like I belonged to them before—not even Ma. Especially not Ma. From the start, I was Cal’s. But it did not take me long to learn that no matter what I did, no matter how much ground we broke, he would never belong to me in the same way.

That is the only thing I hated him for.