DAY 25, 7:38 P.M.

Aboard Genesis 11

The slightest twist sends fire up my side.

“Careful,” preaches Vandemeer.

He has me move patiently through yoga exercises. Lunges and squats and deep breaths. Without painkillers, it’s a slow process. Far slower than I want it to be. Already six days have passed. Vandemeer refuses to tell me the scores, and the others don’t visit. Not even Kaya. I’m the lonely astronaut from the book.

“Why didn’t you just use nyxia to heal me?” I grunt. Vandemeer has me flat on my back, lifting my legs six inches off the floor. It’s second-level hell.

“Doesn’t work,” he says. “If nyxia causes a wound, we can’t use nyxia to heal it.”

“Seems limited.”

I sit up. He motions for me to spread my hands slowly while dipping my chin.

“It’s the way the substance works,” he says. “Nyxia was purposed to cut through you. If we try to use nyxia to heal the wound, the substance refuses. It’s smart enough to recognize its own work and it won’t undo that work. Make sense?”

“That’s creepy. You understand how creepy that is, don’t you?”

Vandemeer coaches me through a deep breath and a neck roll. “It’s an interactive substance. The matter is far more clever than Babel likes to admit. We don’t quite know how it all works, but we’re learning every day.”

“So the nyxia is all connected?” I ask.

“How do you mean?”

“You said it knows that nyxia was used to cut me open. So doesn’t that mean it knows what the other nyxia did? Like they’re connected somehow?”

“Or the new nyxia recognizes a change in your cells. We don’t really know.”

I shrug my shoulders back.

“Seems stupid to put that much faith in something you don’t understand.”

“Electricity, gasoline, vaccinations. You can’t make progress without taking risks.”

“I guess,” I say. “But are you sure we aren’t all going to get cancer or something?”

“Everything causes cancer,” Vandemeer deadpans. “Except for nyxia. We’ve tested it.”

“On what?”

He steeples his fingers. “Classified.”

I laugh. Then my ribs feel like they’re being kicked by a pair of giants. I collapse to the floor in pain and Vandemeer tosses a towel at me. “Great job today. You’re close.”

“I’m ready.”

He ignores me. “Let’s run a few more diagnostics tomorrow. Your range might still be limited. Fighting in the pit won’t be easy, but most of the other tasks should be fine. Sound good?”

“Yeah, yeah. Sounds good.”

“In the meantime,” Vandemeer says, tapping his data pad, “I have a surprise for you.”

A screen unfolds from a compartment in the wall. It looms over my hospital bed. I give Vandemeer a confused look. “You missed your first scheduled call home. I took the liberty of setting you up for one while you’re down here. The call will patch through in two minutes.”

“Are you serious?”

He smiles. “I’m serious.”

With that, he backs out of the room. I forgot that I’d get to see them. I hadn’t realized how much I missed them. I miss Moms handing me my book bag every morning and pulling me in by the neck to give me a kiss. I miss Pops reclined in his favorite chair, reading out box scores from yesterday’s games. We may have been poor, but at least I knew what I was waking up to every day. The next three years will be an experiment in the unexpected and unpredictable. I stare at myself in the reflection of the black screen. I’m not ready for this, for any of it.

Two minutes of waiting feels more like thirty.

Then light flickers to a steady glow. I didn’t realize I was holding my breath. I try to settle against the too-soft pillows as pixels resolve and my pops fills the screen. I can’t help searching for Moms in the background, but she isn’t there.

A smile splits his face. “There he is. My boy.”

“Hey, Pops,” I say. “I miss you. You and Moms both.”

My face hurts from smiling, from trying not to cry. He apologizes for Moms. He doesn’t have to say why she’s not there, because I understand. It hasn’t been easy for her to travel, and I’d guess Babel’s communication center is a road trip for them. He’s quick to remind me that she loves me, to say the words she’d say if she weren’t so sick and tired and beat down. It guts me to know that just three weeks has put me a few million kilometers away from them. I hate that I can’t smell the factories or his thick-scented soap. Smiling, he rubs a finger and thumb over the edges of his mustache.

“What’s this?” he asks. “You working a little facial hair?”

I run a finger above my own identical lip. The stubble there is thicker now.

“You think I should shave it?” I ask.

“Up to you,” he says. “Just make sure you use shaving cream. Take a close look at which direction the hair is going and shave with the grain. Not against it. Got it?”

I nod. “Thanks, Pops.”

He’s all smiles. “So tell me about everything. How is it?”

“It’s fine,” I say. “It’s hard, but we all started out not knowing anything.”

“So you’re doing well?”

“I was,” I say. “A few bumps since then, but I’m getting into my zone.”

He nods encouragingly. I don’t have the stomach to tell him that I almost died. All it would do is make him lose even more sleep.

“Well, it’s just the first few weeks. A season isn’t won or lost in the first couple games. Remember the Lions’ last run?”

“They started out 0–4,” I answer.

“People overreact. Thought the world was ending in Detroit. They made their run, stuck to their plan, and won it all.”

I’m nodding. He’s right. Even if I’m down a few thousand points, I still have a long way to go. The others are going to get sick, injured. All I have to do is keep steady. Be better than two other people. Do that, and I return to Detroit as a king. Thinking about Detroit just has me thinking about PJ, and my boys, and before long my heart’s hurting even more.

“Who’d they pick up in the draft?”

“This back out of Wisconsin,” he answers. “Great motor on him.”

“How we lookin’?”

He grins. “I think it’s either us or London this year. Should be a hell of a season.”

Hearing about Detroit fills my heart up. I ask for more.

“PJ keeps coming by,” he says. “Asking about you. He’s a good kid when he’s not trying to prove he’s unbreakable. I always think of him as the kid who jumped through our window.”

I grin. Like most of our childhood stories, the window thing was my fault. I pointed out that superheroes are born through trial. How could we know whether or not PJ was superhuman without a few experiments first? I had him run timed sprints, lift my dad’s weights, and jump through a window at full sprint. His parents kept him away as long as they could after that. Which was about a week. We were too close to separate. The memory feels like it happened to somebody else in some other life.

“I miss him.” I think about the fact that none of the other competitors have visited me. I thought of Kaya, Bilal, and Katsu as friends. But they haven’t visited, not once. “I miss all of you.”

“We miss you too. But right now, you have a mission,” he reminds me. “You work hard and keep your head up and we’ll be right here when you get back. All right?”

I nod, but can’t quite meet his eyes. He believes in me more than I could ever believe in myself. “Pops,” I say. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Anything.”

I ask what’s been gnawing away at me. “Am I a bad person?”

The playfulness vanishes from his face. He looks at me like he’s checking for scars.

“Did someone tell you that? These Babel people?”

I shake my head. “No, I just feel it. I get so angry. At the other kids, at myself.”

“Emmett.” He says the name like a reminder of something forgotten. “You’re the best of me and you’re the best of her. Ever since you were little, that’s the way it’s been.”

“I don’t feel that way,” I say.

“You’re off in space fighting a war against nine other people. You can’t expect to always feel like yourself. Just don’t lose who you are. Are you a bad person? Of course not. Does that mean you’ll always do the right thing? Of course not. No one’s perfect.”

“I just want to win. More than anything.”

“Win or lose”—he shrugs, like they’re the same—“I’m proud of you. We all are.”

Would he be proud of me if he knew what I did to Roathy? Or how I provoked Jaime because he was different? I feel the shame bottlenecking in the narrow alleys of my heart.

“Hey, that reminds me,” he says. “Your moms started treatment. These doctors that Babel suggested are amazing. She—”

But the feed gutters out before he can give me a taste of more hope. I stare at my reflection in the blank screen. A lonely astronaut in the pitch. I lie back and snag my player from the bedside table. I scroll through songs for a while.

The one I choose has thick beats that blend at the beginning before smashing against each other in the chorus like titans. All my chaos runs into the music. I play the song three times, louder and louder, until all I can hear is music, the pulse and the beat.