Attention: ALL
Subject: Evening Menu
Entrees: Steam rolls, butternut squash burritos, green curry
Sides: Papaya salad, sugar snap peas w/dressing, pommes frites
*Dessert* Fruit tarts
A week or so after my dessert debut, Andrek and I finagled some couple time in his room before my first meeting with Viveca. Our schedules didn’t align often since I was on first shift and he was second, so we had to balance our time between meal breaks, late nights, and the one off-day we got in common. Music swallowed the hum of his projector and the ratcheting noise of my Playbox 6.
I tugged a brush through my copper tangles while he slammed past my high score at Web Warz Risk. “It’s not fair how good you are at this.”
“Fair has nothing to do with my skills.” He blew a lock of hair away as his fingers flew over the controller. “Yes! Sixes! Eat that, Anonbritches_019! And, anyway, you haven’t convinced me about your girlfriend yet.”
“You have to quit with that. Viveca’s not my girlfriend. I don’t rib you about Joule.”
“But you wish she was.”
“Maybe you wish that, so you’d have something to think about while I’m sweating in the kitchen and you’re lounging in bed with Joule.” He could tease about girlfriends all he wanted. I didn’t care. As reluctant as I’d been to get involved with the memorial, this was sister business. No more putting it off.
My parents had finally stopped whispering about me at night, and Mom had commented how I “seemed ready now” last night at dinner. And I was determined not to let some random fangirl decide how Faraday got remembered.
My brush slung to the carpet and smacked the wall in the middle of the projected Risk map. I scrambled after it, but Andrek dived over me and got there first.
“Let me try?” he asked, frowning at my disheveled hair. “It’s only fair after I messed it up.”
We repositioned on the bed, and he pulled me close and began to work on my knots. “But the way she sprang that security petition on me was weird, right?” he mused. “And she’s submitted two more since. She’s obsessed, I swear. She must write petitions in her sleep.”
“I mean, yeah, that’s weird, but not outrageous weird,” I said, confused by my urge to defend her when all I wanted to do was smash her face into things when she was in front of me. “As far as goals go, she could’ve chosen worse. At least she’s trying to do something useful.”
“I don’t like it, Lane. Her interest isn’t natural. Ops may have reduced personnel, but they’ve also got pulse guns and electric net cannons. And if it comes down to it, the whole trust could hunker down for months in the subbasement. It’s like she wants people to stay scared forever.” He sighed, his breath hot and fragrant on my cheek. “You know, if you wanted, I could do the memorial planning with you. I don’t mind making enemies if it means keeping you safe from her personal circus.”
“After you crawl into bed at midnight?” It was cruel how people did that. Convinced you of a problem you were happily ignoring, then offered solutions they knew were unrealistic. Of course I’d rather do the memorial with him, especially if that meant working from bed. But he wasn’t in any position to wrestle the project from her, and my parents certainly wouldn’t lighten his current workload to free up his time.
“I could try to get up earlier. Or, or, I could spy on Viveca to learn her sleep-writing skills, and, so long as you’re in my bed, I could soak up your ideas by osmosis.”
“You’re not going to wake up earlier,” I said. “The rest is silly.”
“I could try!”
I winced as he caught a knot on the back of my head. “Don’t punish my hair for the truth.”
He worked quietly for a few minutes, taking more care. The projector’s screen saver kicked on, flooding the small room with warm desert light, a photograph from some of his travels.
Regret stung the back of my throat, but I couldn’t look away. I should have traveled more while I’d had the chance. Maybe someday I could go back to Earth when the trust worked out travel visas and whatever else it took for a non-planetary citizen to visit. A cramp like hunger stirred in my gut.
“Switch with me?” He handed me the brush and I crawled over the bed to sit behind him.
His hair was doing that impossibly cute messy thing it did after sex, so I hesitated to touch it. “Your hair’s perfect.”
“I figured.” He wiggled his shoulders, and I rolled the brush handle near his neck. “But ditch the brush? Do me like dough.”
I dug my fingers into the knots across his sloped shoulders, avoiding his stress breakout. He let out a moan as my hands moved over the faded scars on his back. They crisscrossed, pink over white, hatched like tic-tac-toe boards all the way down to his waist. Sometimes it was easy to forget they were there.
He pulled free from my fingers and faced me, a worried wrinkle between his eyes. For a long moment, he didn’t speak, but he cupped my chin in his hand and gazed at me intensely. This was his scheming look, but I couldn’t imagine what was behind it.
“Counting freckles?” I asked, breaking the spell.
He released my chin. “I miss you. And I’m worried. I don’t think you can trust that girl. She’s trouble in a pretty suit.”
“Andrek!”
“Fine, a stunning suit. Seriously, Lane, I’ve got a bad feeling. She’s scary smart. What if she starts digging into the RC’s possible connections in the trust? I don’t want to tell you what to do, but… I wish you’d stay away from her.”
I leaned my forehead against his, and we shared a heavy breath of things unsaid.
There were two important things to know about my sweet Andrek, and he was stingy about who got to learn either. First, he was always sweet. Fact. Second, his sweetness had never stopped him from doing whatever he had to do to survive.
He’d been through a lot of whatevers before we met.
He’d grown up roaming the sprawling townships of Incorporated South Africa. His festival musician mom had died when he was really young, like barely talking, and her bandmates never managed to hunt down his soldier dad. So Andrek spent his early years on the streets, until he got conscripted into a gang of thieves. Then another and another.
I gathered he was kind of a hot asset, clever and cute as he was. White as he was. He didn’t like to talk about those years, but he wore the reminders.
At some point, it was hard for him to say when since street kids didn’t generally go about with calendars or have birthday parties, he’d escaped his last handler and found his way into a shelter. It was there he learned to read, then some weekend Samaritan sponsored him for an elite academy in Free London.
After he’d graduated, at maybe fifteen-ish, he got drafted into the local army.
Specifically, the RC.
It wasn’t as if Andrek was loyal to the RC or anything. He hated Brand Masters as much as I did, and he’d confessed this truth to me as soon as we went from dating to being partners. But growing up the way he had, Andrek couldn’t run away from a legally required draft that meant guaranteed food, shelter, and opportunity.
He’d worked for the RC a few years, then he applied for the collective and joined my sister’s campaign as soon as he came of age at nineteen. He left all the RC stuff off his selection paperwork, of course. His transcripts showed him as a ward of Johannesburg, so when the RC started attacking the collective, he’d decided it was best no one else learn about his forced military experience.
I didn’t want to imagine what someone like Viveca would think of Andrek if she knew about his link to the RC. She didn’t seem like she’d ever let that go. I could, because I knew him, his heart, but it was too risky to let others find out. Besides, he wasn’t at fault for the attack that killed my sister and the others. He was with me through the worst of it, and if he hadn’t pulled me out of the rubble afterward, I’d be dead like the rest of my generation.
I’d never tell his secret. Certainly not to Viveca. I knew how to keep silent about what mattered. Somehow I’d have to keep the two of them far away from each other.
“I’ll be careful,” I promised him. “Trust me.”
The Minor Cult, as the incorporated press sometimes called it, or the Hope Movement, according to the free media, hadn’t started with my sister. Mom said humans had always worshipped the young, the savants in short pants, prodigies winning medals and ribbons and peace prizes while still pimpled with pre-adolescence.
After Faraday’s first message went viral, she was compared to the other great children of history—Amadeus Mozart and Bobby Fischer, Amariyanna Copeny and Greta Thunberg—as people played and replayed her later videos on gravitational dynamics, which had also veered into ethics, entropy, and her hope for the “continuation of homo sapiens sapiens as a space-faring species.”
I’d never understand all she said in her videos, nor could I explain the gravdrive invention she presented so cleverly, but I knew the effects of both like I knew sugar was sweet. Her comments section birthed a community of like-minded people sharing information and ideas until it grew far beyond responses to her actual video.
She shook the pre-melt generation from its slumber and made space colonization a tangible possibility, maybe an inevitable certainty. That she did so sporting an oh-so-serious smile and bursts of uncanny wisdom made her easy to adore. But that she’d come onto the scene all Joan of Arc the week cell phone factories stopped production and Yellowstone blew made her warnings impossible to forget.
It wasn’t only that she was charismatic, and she was definitely that, or that she was warm and smart or pretty and palatably white, all of which definitely factored in. It was that her message of hope arrived when people had none, and her invention had reminded people what it meant to look forward to something, to believe. And she’d followed all that up by spitting into the face of power every chance she got, no matter who’d been watching.
The lunar collective, which was an extension of Faraday’s first fan club, loved to keep her front and center, and as it exploded into something that required a board of trustees and a five-floor R&D operation, it found other prodigies flocking to join. Like minds and such, plus their families.
Dad told me I’d also had a short-lived fan club for a while. Autistic families celebrated the brief appearance of me sock-slipping across the kitchen floor to the hall bathroom behind Faraday while I sang the pee pee in the potty song. I was the poster child for the “in their own time” parenting community for a whole two weeks. I was glad I didn’t remember any of that.
As I trudged through the gray hallways of the trust for my first meetup with Viveca, I traced my fingers over the door numbers to make sure I didn’t knock on the wrong hatch. I wondered when exactly in her life Viveca became infatuated with Faraday. If it had been right after the first video, why didn’t she join the collective sooner? She acted so proud about running the fan club, but, like, the fan club post-collective hadn’t been anything special.
I thought. I’d stopped following her fan groups after the collective formed and set up in Masdar, so maybe some of them being special news missed me. Paying attention to boring things would never be part of my skill set.
I noticed the open hatch before I realized it was number 906. Her quarters. My fingers wound round and round the zero, appreciating the symmetry, the rightness of it, as I tried to convince myself to walk inside. Should I knock? I mean, the door was open.
But I heard voices.
Viveca’s made my stomach go squirmy, how it sat in that unexpected place like a sound I didn’t know I wasn’t hearing before. It brought back the softness of her hands and those challenging eyes, and a current of heat rose in my core.
I gulped that nonsense back because it didn’t matter. It was a silly hormonal crush. A nothing. Besides, she was horrible, and she hated me.
I had meant to plan my approach, so when she went all bossy-pants and slammed vocabulary down on me like a gavel, I wouldn’t clam up and choke. For days I’d lain awake, convinced an idea one thousand times better than her Fara-days-of-the-week would strike me before breakfast. Not because I was such a fountain of ideas, but because that idea was so so bad, anything else must be better.
I’d had no ideas at all. Then pudding happened. Then mousse and cookies and pie. Making nice with the ovens had stolen my whole brain, and time had run on ahead of me.
Another hatch opened a few doors further down the hall. Music spilled out, some pre-melt symphonic mix, and out danced a middle-aged couple with their hands lost inside each other’s home clothes. Drapey things, colorful. Fabric for no reason.
I recognized the song playing. “Work It.” It had been on Faraday’s victory playlist.
An idea burped up like an air bubble in bread. Finally.
I stepped over the threshold.
Viveca’s quarters were worlds apart from what I’d been imagining. Maybe it was the way she talked, or how she presented herself as royalty with a capital “R,” I’d assumed she was some rich kid from the heartland of the Incorporated American States. A New2Yorker. A blue blood, born of two continents, with every advantage beauty and intelligence could win.
But instead of old-world treasures, crushed velvet, and family portraits, the back wall was papered with drawings and essays, most of them lauding my sister’s gravdrive and her original dome designs. Faraday’s face was doodled in the margins over and over.
From the story the photographs painted, Viveca and her gaggle of friends—Joule and others I didn’t recognize—had gone to some posh brick and ivy school when they were tweens, but after that she branched off into private studies and travel, where she smiled identical smiles for the camera in brightly-lit apartments, straw huts, and gleaming hotel lobbies.
It was beautiful, in a peculiar way. I’d met superfans before, but this was different somehow. She must have used her entire weight allotment to transport these keepsakes.
That was commitment or something.
The only creation of mine that earned keepsake status had been a macaroni sculpture made during my extended time in the collective’s kindergarten where we had small, tutored courses in the spare rooms of the research department.
My gaze hitched on a photo of Viveca, Joule, and another young Black person, presumably before a formal. They looked magnificent, Joule in a tux and Viveca in a strapless hunter-green gown that swung loose around her forever legs. Their other partner wore a purple suit. They were shorter than Viveca, with round cheeks and a bright smile.
The most recent picture was of Viveca and an older white woman I guessed was her mom, except the pasty woman looked nothing like her statuesque, dark-skinned daughter. Different noses, chins, eyes, hair, figures—nothing in common. I looked for a picture of her dad to round out the image in my head, or anything from her early childhood, but there weren’t any. Not even one.
Maybe her dad was a donor. Or she was adopted. Or maybe he was the greatest guy in the world, and that was who her grief never ended for, so they kept his pictures somewhere else. Seemed weird to me though. I’d die without pictures of Faraday. Even now, my eyes kept flicking to Viveca’s doodles of her.
Voices rose from the bedroom, and I froze, listening.
“Please be serious,” Viveca was saying. “You’re the only one I can talk to about this.”
“Now though?” someone asked, their voice muffled. It couldn’t be Joule. It was too high, and the accent was old Carolina drawl, not European.
“Yes now! I can’t wait around for their next move,” Viveca answered, but not in the snap turtle way she said most things. Huh. “It’s only a matter of time—” there was some ruckus from the mattress that swallowed the rest of her sentence. “I need your help getting an open channel. Your mom’s the only way I can think of.”
“You could lose your residency, V. You’re finally safe. I just—”
“I don’t have a choice! You know what they’re like. I’ve wasted too much time already trying other ways.”
“I hate this so much.”
“Will you help me?” Viveca asked.
The squeal of my boot on the floor brought a sudden silence from the bedroom, while I was still wondering who the mysterious “they” could be. Viveca had said “what they’re like” as though it made her sick. An ex maybe? A rival? Did psychologists even have rivals? I suppose if any did, she probably would.
“Hello?” I called innocently like I’d just arrived. “I guess I’m early. The door was open.”
“One second!” Viveca bellowed back.
I plopped onto the couch and a few moments later she appeared in her doorway. She led me to her bedroom where makeup and other wildly expensive cosmetic products sat neatly on a shelf. It occurred to me that none of these things were supposed to be in her quarters, since the washroom attendants were in charge of stuff like that. But given the pranks involving disappearing lotion that now extended to towels, stocked water tubes, and who-knew-what else, it made sense to keep precious things out of view. Still, I couldn’t reconcile the luxuries with the worshipful wallpaper.
“Lane, this is my girlfriend Halle,” Viveca said.
“Lane freaking Tanner, oh my god!” Halle squealed. She rushed me, wrapping me in a tight hug that stole my breath. “I’m so excited to finally meet you! You’re even cuter in person.”
She was Black and beautiful, and chubby like me, but rounder and softer in all the best ways. Her dark chestnut skin had coral undertones, and she had springy black curls twisted with ocean blue strands that framed her oval face.
It hit me all of a sudden that I recognized her from that formal photo where she’d worn a purple suit. That must have been before she fully transitioned like Chef and Zara.
Before I could respond, Halle pulled back and sprawled on the freshly made bed in her wrinkled uniform. In less than a second, she was playing a game on a tablet and humming happily beneath a headshot of Viveca.
I looked for signs of tension on her face but saw nothing there to prompt me to ask what they’d been talking about. Besides, if I didn’t want Viveca digging too hard through my secrets, I should leave hers alone. At least for now.
“Make room for Lane,” Viveca ordered, and Halle rolled over.
I perched on the edge of the mattress and chewed my lip. Why hadn’t I made her come to my quarters instead? We could have sat in my austere living room and not been bombarded by a lifetime of memories.
Viveca studied me, from my super-brushed hair to my over-sized feet. I wore a clean uniform, but I had the shirt part loosely tied around my waist so only my navy tank top showed. She sighed.
“What?” I fidgeted with my bra strap which had worked its way into view. “What are you thinking?”
She crossed her arms. “You look nothing like her.”
Really, ice queen? All my years of looking into mirrors, and I never realized. “Neither do you.”
Halle giggled but kept her focus on her tab. She was so easy to read it made Viveca seem much more accessible.
Viveca cleared her throat. “But you’re smarter than you act.”
“I hope you have a point.”
“I’m getting there.” She cocked her head, still staring. “Did you know you’re the youngest person here? Out of twelve hundred, you’re the baby.”
“Oh.” I had no idea, but I couldn’t be the youngest by much, months or days at most. There must be other twenty-year-olds. And I’d seen Viveca’s file. She had only just turned twenty-one herself. What a ridiculous thing to hang up on. “Does that matter?”
“It might be useful to mention when we present our final plan.”
“I don’t want special treatment.”
“I’m only exploring options. I don’t—I don’t always come across the best in person. Maybe you noticed. Did you do sports?”
I laughed. “I’m awkward and slow, but I played soccer some.”
“Me too!” Halle chimed in. “They’re building a field in the next dome.”
Viveca shushed her with a finger and asked me, “Were you any good?”
“Hardly.” I wasn’t terrible, but I wasn’t good either. “Better at yard games.” I mimed a frisbee toss.
“At least you had some training. Math, history, or science. Which was your best subject?”
I groaned, disliking this conversation more every second. “None of them, okay? I scraped by at everything.”
“Art?” She was relentless. I could almost see her mental spreadsheet shrinking with each answer I gave.
“I like to look at art.” Was she going to make me list everything I sucked at? All at once? I didn’t need her help for that.
“Favorite music?” she asked.
“Depends on my mood.”
“What did you want to grow up to be when you were eight?”
“A mermaid.”
“Aww, so cute!” Halle cut in, raising her eyes. “Wait, not one of those creepy lake mermaids, right? ‘Cause... ew.”
“Seriously, Lane. What realistic life goal did you have?”
“Look, I never got high marks for anything except cooperation, and I never thought about my future outside of coming to the moon, but my sister was supposed to be—and I was supposed to have more time too. To figure out me. I don’t see what this quiz of yours is supposed to accomplish or what it could possibly have to do with my sister’s memorial.” I was on my feet somehow. “And I don’t have to be a genius to notice you’re picking me apart for fun. What the hell are you on about?”
I waited for her to lose the cool mask and banshee-claw me with her gorgeous fingers. Why hadn’t I taken the lead and suggested a dance right away? At least then we’d be arguing on topic.
Halle frowned at her game.
“I’m trying to get to know you is all, to know who I’m working with. You don’t have a college transcript for me to study, or I’d have just done that. I honestly am not trying to fight with you. This is how I talk!” Viveca’s voice cracked with exasperation and her lower lip trembled.
Just once, but my anger withered.
I couldn’t count the times I’d had to say those same words to my parents and tutors, to strangers and classmates. Even friends. People said I rambled or didn’t make any sense, that I talked too loud or too quiet, too fast or too slow. That I sounded mean or angry when I was trying to be friendly. Rude when I was sure I was being polite.
It’s how I talk.
“I don’t want to fight either,” I said. “This is personal is all.” My gaze wandered to the door. I should leave before this got worse. Try again another day. Another month even.
She sat beside Halle and patted the bed. “Come here.” Her voice was soft but not sugary like it was for Joule. It was amazing to me how she had so much control over her tone while her words seemed to be fighting for control as they came out. “Take a breath.”
I exhaled noisily. It didn’t help. I sat anyway.
“That never helps me either, but it was worth a try. Halle?”
“Tapping in!” Halle bopped my shoulder with a pillow. “So, what do you do for fun?”
I glanced at her game device, a modified mobile tab, abandoned on the bedspread. I wished I had one of my own, but apparently kitchen staff didn’t warrant personal tech assignments.
“The usual stuff,” I said. “I play games, watch movies, read books. I used to cook for fun lots, but now it’s my work. I like baking though.”
Halle lit up. “You game and make pie? V, please don’t scare her away. I love her so, so much.”
“I’m trying not to. Shh.” Viveca settled into a lotus pose. “We should start with some ground rules, because you’re right. This is personal. We’re going to be delving into your sister’s life and legacy. I don’t need a degree to tell me you’ve got some major resistance to collaborating with me on the memorial. Maybe the memorial in general.”
“Sounds about right,” I said.
The more she talked, the harder it was for me to keep up. She was like a speeding train that went all directions at once and anything I said aside from agreeing or not might derail her entirely. Then it would have been on me to pick up the pieces and direct the conversation, but I wasn’t that fast or clear about where I was going, so this whole talking-to-each other experiment would completely explode.
“We’ll meet three times a week,” she said. “Twice after first shift to review your sister’s history, and half the day on Fridays to go over proposals. We’re on the same schedule, so it should be easy to coordinate our time off.”
“Wait.” My brain rattled through reasons that wouldn’t work for me, how I couldn’t. Why I shouldn’t. Pressure built like steam in my chest, and words spilled out of me as “I’m a Little Teapot” played at full volume over my voice. “Couldn’t we just—what if we—I mean, maybe none of that’s necessary. I had an idea on the way here, and we could do that and be done. A dance. We plan a dance. Fara—she loved to dance. We do that and boom boom, no more meetings.”
“Lane…” Viveca sighed again. Halle cringed and buried her face in her game. I’d said it wrong and ruined it.
“What? Really, it’s perfect.”
“No,” Viveca said, quieter but flat as a pancake. “Isaac Newton got a tomb and a gate. Marie Curie has dozens of statues. Moses got a mountain.”
“That’s my vote!” Halle chirped. “Give Faraday a mountain.”
Viveca snorted a laugh, surprising me. “A dance is too small. Too fleeting. Plus, think about the people who it mattered most to your sister to include in the trust, disabled and neurodiverse people. Would a dance memorial work for deaf people or wheelchair users? And that’s only people who are physically here on the moon. What about those still on Earth who want to participate? We have to think about next year and the next. Hundreds of years from now.”
“If you knew any deaf people or wheelchair users, you’d know they like dances too,” I countered, mostly under my breath because I knew it only defused half her argument.
If humans did manage to survive more than another hundred years, they ought to know Faraday’s name. Her story. She’d be the reason we made it that far.
What had I been thinking throwing up a dance? I slumped, deflated.
“It’ll be all right,” she pressed. “We’ll figure it out. And if there’s something we can do to make this all easier for you, tell me.”
Think fast, I told myself. This might be my only chance to make demands she agreed to without a verbal avalanche. Despite my best effort to block out her pillow talk with Halle, it swam to the front of my mind. Whoever they were, they were more important to Viveca than Faraday somehow, more important than staying on the moon even. But Halle was a gamer, so maybe I’d misheard the whole thing. They could have been role playing or something.
I wished I could relay their whole bit to Andrek, because he was a master problem solver and could have set it all straight, but considering how suspicious of Viveca he already was, that could make things worse. He might not want me working with her at all.
I didn’t want that, though I didn’t know why I didn’t want that. Me being involved was a fluke. An accidental collision of my temper with her mouth.
It was just… people like Viveca didn’t usually talk to me. Not nicely. And they certainly didn’t listen to me. We might as well have been different species. She was a Can, and I was a Cannot. Graceful versus awkward. I was cute enough, especially on a good hair day, but I was not “pretty” the way she was.
Plus, she was scary smart, like, it was probably hard for her to talk to people like me. My sister was like that too, and I could tell how difficult it was for her to try to explain things sometimes. But Viveca, for better or worse, was doing what she could to give me a say.
I needed to keep Andrek away from her, and her away from him. And I had to stop thinking about how pretty she was and smelling the aftereffects of her and Halle. It was far too distracting.
“For starters, we should meet somewhere else.” I said. “And three times a week won’t work for me, at least not to start with, but maybe we can build up to it.”
She shrugged one shoulder and gestured to the door. “I only wanted to meet in my quarters this time to get better acquainted. You can pick the next place.”
As I walked out of her bedroom, I added, “And I don’t want you spoon-feeding me your ideas one at a time. I’m not a baby bird. Send your whole petition to me along with all your notes so I can catch up. I might need a month or so to get through it all. And some topics are going to be off-limits.”
We settled onto opposite sides of the couch beneath her memorabilia wall. Halle dragged her feet and flopped onto a chair, still engrossed in her game.
“Fine. Now are you done looking for a way out of this? Because this can’t be some half-assed project.”
I stared at my feet, considering. Goodbye, leisurely naps and after dinner games with Andrek. Goodbye, free time to zone out or date or anything fun. Hello, stopwatch morning quickies and micromanaging my waking hours to the minute. I imagined my too-packed schedule wavering, off-balance.
Don’t let me fall, my sister whispered, and the purple globe, her home of ashes, teetered atop my stack of toy commitments. Of course I couldn’t hear her, but some part of me could and there she was, plain as day, her hand outstretched, reaching.
Then my mom was in my head too, saying how little I could handle, that I didn’t have what it takes. But she was wrong. I would make it work somehow.
I told Viveca, “All in,” and relished the genuine smile that lit her face.
Then a groaning sound filled my ears, and the air rippled strangely.
Halle toppled forward out of her chair with a yelp.
I thought I screamed, but an ear-splitting growl drowned me out. The endless pages overhead fluttered as the wall shivered. Popping noises jolted beneath me, as though assorted sizes of bubble wrap were getting steam rolled.
An alarm blared a raucous, repetitive whine that set my ears ringing in response.
The rational part of my brain relayed that something had happened to the gravdrives. I didn’t know what exactly, but it must have been bad.
Loud and clear as that rational part was, it got swallowed up by the rest of me, that was too busy freaking out and screaming, “DANGER! DANGER!” to listen to reason.
My breath came in rapid spurts, and my skin went ice cold, tense as stretched rubber. Halle was crying and crawling across the floor, but her body kept lifting and dropping, her eyes wide as cereal bowls.
Everything shook and shook. Coal-colored dust spit out of the ceiling’s air recyclers and swirled like smoke clouds. The lights flickered. Emergency power blinked blue across the wall trim, turning day to dusk.
Papers floated through the air.
Viveca shrieked over the din, “Quake! Get to the walls!”