Attention: West Gym Users
Subject: Urgent Notice
Towels will no longer be provided on site due to some users’ refusal to return them properly to the bins. We apologize for the inconvenience.
—Sanitation
We trudged silently through the hallways with Halle’s mom, my parents, and a knot of guards trailing after us. The guards let us collect the most portable of our belongings from our half-demolished living room, but then we were left trying to figure out where to take it all. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or furious or scared, so I tried to feel nothing. And all the while, my parents’ disappointed and confused stares followed my every move.
Finally Dr. Fromme convinced them to walk with her to Medical, and I could take a full breath without them dissecting me.
We stayed quiet for a very long time. Joule and Andrek left wordlessly to return to work, their guards splitting off from ours, and we stayed quiet as we lugged Andrek’s things to his old room and dumped them unceremoniously on his bed. We stayed quiet even as we sat awkwardly on the couch in my quarters, Faraday’s urn shining on the shelf behind us.
The quiet became comforting, like a heavy blanket over sore muscles. Inside it we could stretch and at least pretend to relax. Every once in a while, we heard our posted guards outside the door, though we couldn’t hear what they said.
Not so thin as the walls, those doors.
“What do we do now?” Halle whispered, breaking the silence and, apparently, V’s intense concentration on the wall comm.
V put a finger over her lips, then led us into my bedroom. “I don’t think they can hear us, but… Best to be certain.”
“Then what do we do?” Halle asked again, sounding desperate. She was still a bit green.
“I’m processing,” V said. “I don’t know what to make of it yet.”
“Other than ‘everything is bad’?” I flopped onto my bed as Halle groaned and curled up beside me, tucking herself under my arm. “Someone stashed a bunch of stolen supplies right next to us then tried to frame us for it, and now we’ve got guards watching us for who-knows-how-long while we’re—”
“I don’t need you to replay details, Lane. I need to think.” V wrung her hands and set into pacing in a tiny circle at the end of my bed. Her stims grew bigger as she walked.
I wanted to snap at her, because I needed to process too, except I had to do it out loud, but she looked so ruffled. I decided this wasn’t the best time to argue about whose sensory accommodations got met first. “In the meantime, we’ve got to find another place to work from, because it can’t be here or either of your quarters. And Joule’s is too crowded. I could ask Chef if we could use one of her extra offices, I guess?”
“That might work for the memorial, but what about after?” Halle asked. “We can’t talk freely about Brand with Chef and a bunch of guards right there, can we?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” I said, wishing there were something, anything, I could do or say to make any of us feel better. “I want to go backwards and—”
Halle placed a warm hand on my cheek. “V.” Halle went to her, careful not to cross into her circle. “V, you’re crying.”
“Am I?” Tears streamed silently down her lovely face, soaking her tank top. V didn’t notice, or, if she did, she didn’t react.
“Yeah, baby.” Halle reached for me, and together we helped V to bed.
V wiped at her face, looking surprised when her hands came away wet. Her tears continued to fall steadily like rain.
I missed the rain. And I missed knowing what to do, though I didn’t know if I ever had.
Halle held V as I sat by, helpless. “Is it the guards? Because I’ll go right back to Han and tell her you can’t have—”
“No, no, I mean, yes, maybe, but…” V grabbed my hand and squeezed, sending a shock wave through my chest. I squeezed back with my whole heart. “It’s all too much. The surprise of it, then the guards, the questioning. The still not knowing who. Or why. It’s got to be the spy—who else? But that means they’re onto us. Which either means we were getting too close to them or—or my father is ready to make his move.”
“What can I do?” Worry left lumps in my throat because I knew anything she needed would be more than I could give her. “Do you want me to get Joule?”
V’s tears multiplied. Became a monsoon. She collapsed onto Halle’s chest as if her bones were liquified too. Halle smoothed her hair, but that didn’t slow the storm.
I ducked out of the bedroom to message Joule. He read it right away but didn’t answer as fast. I watched the screen, not wanting to interrupt the cryfest without something helpful to say. Anyway, it was Halle and Joule she needed now.
A guard knocked on the door. I was sure it was a guard because no one else tap-tap-tapped that loud and insistently.
I palmed the latch, expecting Joule on the other side, but instead it was Commander Han. She drove inside with an air of importance and parked, not by the couch, but in front of my sister’s urn on the shelf.
One guard blocked the hatch like he expected me to try to run, and three more streamed around him. They opened every door and brought Halle and V to the living room couch before taking positions way too closely behind each of us.
I recognized Danny at once this time, but she looked straight through me, her mouth fixed in a blank expression. I couldn’t get mad at her, not really. She was treating us exactly how I’d hope our enemies would be treated.
“We need to talk,” Han said, staring intensely at Faraday’s urn. She waited for Halle and V, still sniffling, to sit, then she drove around the couch to face us all, including what remained of my sister and the hovering guards. “It seems your group has been much busier than you let on.”
I froze, but it was too late. My face had confirmed whatever Han thought she knew.
The energy in the room shifted like someone turned on a heat lamp.
“We can explain,” V said, her masks fighting to fold into place but not quite fitting. Her mascara smeared messily over her cheeks. “It’s all a—”
Han lifted a calloused finger and the guards moved in unison, clasping hands behind their backs. It wasn’t an especially threatening movement, but it felt menacing nonetheless. “You’ve been accessing personnel records by some ungodly means I haven’t figured out.”
V said nothing this time, and neither did I, not even with my face. My breath had gone hot in my mouth, hot and so thick it was basically chewy. Halle stared resolutely at the floor.
“You’ve also been using similar illicit means to break the communication blockade, sending encoded messages to both our allies and enemies on Earth.” Han used precise diction, spitting words like spears.
I felt our hopes crashing through the floor, all the way into the cold white rock deep below. We were exposed, found out, over. There was no hiding anymore.
I tried again to get Danny to look back at me, to give some indication that we were okay, because we were still friends, right? She couldn’t believe this was the whole story. All those hours we’d spent together grieving—she had to know how much the trust mattered to me, for my sister’s legacy if nothing else.
Danny’s stare, cold and gleaming, didn’t shift from her commander. I guessed that meant her loyalty to the trust ranked well above our friendship. And wasn’t that just as it ought to be?
“From what I can tell, this has been happening since the day we arrived,” Han continued.
V tensed, stirring herself straighter but still not managing to hide the fear in her eyes. “No, that’s not—”
“Don’t lie!” Han shook her head, her voice a terrible, hissed whisper. “I did not come here to be lied to. I came to make sure I pieced things together correctly, and I see that I have. And one other thing…”
My heart twisted. This was it, the end.
All our plans, our hopes, my sister’s dreams...
Here was where they died.
“I take full responsibility, Commander,” V started again.
Brave V, dear V. So noble too, to try to spare me and Halle.
“Whatever punishment due is mine alone to take,” V said.
“Punishment, ah. I was getting there.”
“You’ve got it all upside down. It’s not what you think at all!” I couldn’t hold the words in; they were too heavy, too true. I had to make her understand before she delivered consequences. “We’re trying to save the trust! That’s all any of us have ever done!”
“Oh, poor misguided youth.” Han frowned grimly, pinning me with her rock-hard stare as Danny grabbed me by the shoulders and forced me back into my seat before I even realized I’d tried to stand.
“Hold your excuses for when they might matter,” Han said. “At your trials. Until that time, you’ll not be permitted to speak to each other outside of memorial planning, for which I will set the schedule and select supervisors for. That holiday may be the only thing keeping the trust together at this point, or I’d pull you from that too. Whatever else you three have been plotting on your own, whatever your motives, it ends now.”
“Lane? You awake?”
I snapped to alertness at Andrek’s voice, but my meds made it impossible for my body to respond with the same speed. My eyelids weighed as much as bags of flour, and I blinked blearily into the dark of my room.
Two welcome blurry figures took form, framed by a skinny line of light shining from the doorway.
Andrek and Joule.
I tried and failed to push myself off my pillow, mumbling weakly. “How?”
In a beat, they crossed the room and Joule lifted me into his arms, and the three of us huddled together on my bed. Andrek held my hands and pressed them to his heart.
“We only have a minute,” Andrek whispered. “The guards are in the hallway waiting, but they let us come in to get some things.”
“V,” I managed, clawing uselessly at my foggy brain and mushy mouth.
“She’s all right,” Joule said, then lowered his voice when Andrek hushed him. “I rigged her home comm a while back so we could talk privately. She’s worried, of course.”
“I’m not,” Andrek put in. “Han’s a hard case, but she’s a genius. There’s no way she blames you for conspiring against the trust. She knows your family too well to believe that.”
“But she said—” I choked on the words, and Joule held me tighter.
“We’ll figure this out.”
“One way or another,” Andrek agreed, kissing and returning my hands. “Get some rest if you can, and try not to stress too much. I’m going to bunk with Joule for now, but I’ll find you tomorrow. I love you.”
“Love you,” I repeated.
“Good night.” Joule tucked me back into bed and the two of them vanished into the sliver of light.
Sleep claimed me before I could think through anything the guys had said, then I floated through dreams full of memories.
I was in a stroller, and my parents were nearby, locked by a chain to a door and surrounded by handwritten posters. They were facing off with some enemy of theirs.
Mom’s chest heaved as she glowered at men in black suits. My dad looked twice the size he should have been. My parents and their friends—the last holdouts against the Royal Corps. The district government had already fallen, turning over control to the RC, but the university where my parents worked wouldn’t surrender without a fight.
This was their final stand.
I remembered being hungry, wanting my lunch and a cuddle-nap with my stuffed cat. Faraday hummed some cartoon theme song I loved at the time, keeping me as calm as she could, but I was inconsolable, banging a sippy cup against the tray on my chair.
The suits were surrounded too by local police and private guards whose guns pointed at my parents’ knees. This was before Faraday invented the gravdrive.
Mom’s arm extended, beckoning me, and I fell forward several years.
My lungs cramped like I’d run for too long uphill. I pumped my arms against damp mountain air, racing to the porch where my parents waved and cameras blinked like out-of-season fireflies.
This was the first day news vans rolled up our drive. A train of them, winding like a lazy snake over the hills. My sister’s sudden stardom, which launched a movement and thrust my parents into the scientific spotlight, was actually going to change the world. Her ideas were going to become reality.
We were leaving the wet, wild Pacific Northwest for a sandy corporate republic off the Persian Gulf, and then for Masdar City. As far as the moon for a six-year-old.
I followed her over tidy sidewalks that hugged graceful clay-colored buildings, through science departments, round and round her project boards and the kitchen island. I never left her side unless forced to for tutoring or sleep.
She was my North Star, the free world’s champion but my own personal big sister.
I walked the tile hallways of the top floor of the collective with a tote bag bumping into my side. It was my sixteenth birthday, and I had just returned from a weekend working in the diner. Zara’s spicy chicken wraps competed with the dusty scent of hopeful applicants who queued outside the doorways. I saw a boy with the bluest eyes, as blue as the seas used to be.
The door behind me opened and closed. Clipped voices bounced raucously through the heavy air and nervous racket of stretched packing tape and rolling wheels.
Everything moved but me.
I was in Faraday’s room, gripping loose pages from the bottom of her filing cabinet. Sketched in careful blue ink over smudged crayon doodles.
Memory overlapped with memory. These were my doodles, my shaking forms. Atop them or beneath them, Faraday had brainstormed her first design for her “dream station.”
I wasn’t ready to leave.
Not without my sister.