DAY 50, 11:47 P.M.

Aboard Genesis 11

They say pain is weakness leaving the body. If that’s true, each of us is becoming strong enough to carry worlds on our shoulders. The days of competition start merging together. We win and lose in the Rabbit Room, but each race feels like a continuation of the last, like we’ll always be chasing each other through simulated forests.

Virtual mining explosions and pain sensors remind us that one day the consequences of our mistakes will be more than broken pixels. Babel demands perfection because perfection will keep us alive on Eden. There’s such a predictable rhythm to the schedule that I only notice when the lyrics change. The day that I start learning more about my competitors.

On the fifth Sabbath, Bilal invites me to his room to play cards. My first instinct is to turn him down, thank him, then retreat to the safety of my own room. But I realize it’d be nice to kick my feet up and do something mindless. It’s not like Bilal’s an enemy. From day one he’s been open and kind to me. I accept the invitation and follow him upstairs.

“Longwei lives in the other room,” he explains. “But he doesn’t enjoy company.”

Their living space is identical to ours. The only difference is that Bilal’s door stands wide open. A glance inside shows his clothes neatly folded and his possessions organized on the bedside table. I nod in that direction. “Your door broken?”

He shakes his head. “I asked them to rig it that way. I want everyone to feel invited.”

I can’t help smiling at that. He’s such a weird kid. We both take seats at the table and Bilal starts shaking a deck of cards out of one pack. I watch him separate out the jokers and shuffle twice for good measure. He sets the cards neatly aside and looks up at me.

“Now we just have to wait for the others.”

I stare at him. “What’s that?”

“I invited everyone. It will be wonderful to play a big game.”

I bite back my frustration. I should have known. Bilal doesn’t leave people out. He doesn’t spend time counting his enemies like I do. I glance back at the door and feel the awkwardness creeping up my spine. The first knock sounds and Bilal stands. Jazzy waves her way into the room and takes the seat closest to me.

“I’ve been dying to play some cards,” she says.

Kaya’s next, and Katsu arrives shortly after. It starts out like any shared meal or competition. We laugh at a few jokes, but before long the humor fades. Jaime arrives, followed by Isadora and Roathy. The sight of them in a place I wanted to call safe has my stomach knotted. Everyone pulls up chairs or sits on cushions. Azima is the last one to join us, and just like that everyone’s gathered, sitting around the same table, except for Longwei.

And something magical happens.

Bilal explains his favorite game, deals the cards, and performs a spell on us. All the tension eases out of our tight shoulders and nervous hands. We flash full houses and struggle to make our flushes and laugh when Katsu sneaks a queen out of one sleeve. For a time, we aren’t competitors vaulting through the endless dark. We’re kids sitting in the back of a classroom. The teacher has given us free time, and something about it tastes eternal.

We play for hours. Long enough for the lighter conversations to take on weight. Jazzy is the first one in the group brave enough to talk about home, about the world she left behind. I listen and everything in my gut says it’s a mistake—she’s giving us her secrets, making herself vulnerable—but at the same time I find myself spellbound by her honesty.

“My parents always had me competing in ‘beauty and brain’ pageants, but I kept finishing third or fourth. After a while, my family went broke from the travel expenses.” Bilal deals another hand. Everyone glances at their cards, but we’re all waiting to hear the rest of Jazzy’s story. “All that wasted money. We didn’t really miss it until we found out about Mama’s breast cancer.” We watch as she lifts the familiar strand of fading pink-tipped hair. “Is it bad luck if the pink washes completely away?”

No one answers. We all look down at our cards. A minute passes before Katsu lets out a massive belly laugh. Azima tries to quiet him with a stern look, but he ignores her. We all watch as he stumbles toward the door. “Just wait,” Katsu says. “I’ll be right back. No one move!”

Azima scowls before reaching out and squeezing Jazzy’s hand. I’m still dissecting the gravity of the moment. Kaya’s shared her backstory with me, but only because we’re a team. That makes it feel different somehow. We have learned bits and pieces about the other competitors, but I can’t imagine opening up my weaknesses for the others to exploit. We sit in silence until the door opens and Katsu bursts back into the room. He’s holding a delicate box. I can tell he’s almost out of breath. We all watch as he opens the box and slides it to the center of the table. Everyone leans in to get a look.

“Higashi,” Katsu announces. “My last piece. It’s made with real wasanbon.”

I hear Kaya make an appreciative noise. The cookie’s small and delicate. At least, I think it’s a cookie. It’s carved in the shape of a boat and colored mint green. Jazzy raises an eyebrow.

“I’m confused,” she says. “What’s this have to do with me?”

Katsu closes the lid to the box. “Roathy said we’re all poor, didn’t he?”

Eyes swing in that direction. Roathy offers a single shrug in answer.

“He’s right,” Katsu says. “I mean, come on, Babel clearly picked the most ragged bunch of kids they could find. So just consider this another leg of their competition. The saddest story gets my last higashi. Right now, Jazzy’s the leader in the clubhouse.”

He slides the box slightly in her direction before taking a step back. I’m expecting everyone to reject the idea, but Azima leans over the table excitedly.

“I would do anything for sweets.”

She explains she’s part of the first generation of the Rendille people to settle fully in Kenyan cities. Once, she says, there was no greater sin to her people than stillness. They slept under the stars, raced the sun to the horizon, and went wherever the water waited for them. She tells us that even her name, Azima, means “magically charmed into motion.” A name usually reserved for boys, it was given to her because she never stopped moving as a child.

Movement is in her blood, in her bones, but the elders decided that their people’s survival depended on being still, on becoming modern. So she watched as uncles and aunts moved to cities and lost their minds sitting at desks and staring at screens. Her family was reduced to a life of boxes, and eventually to caskets. Each relative buried in cities as foreign to them as any star.

“I’m afraid,” she says. “I know this mission brings me great honor, but what will happen when I go home? What man would dare to ask for my hand now that I have roamed through the stars? My life will never be the same.”

She laughs nervously at the silence that follows her confession. We deal another hand of cards and pretend her fears don’t sound a lot like ours. Instead of sliding the higashi in Azima’s direction, Katsu launches into his own story.

“Dad left when I was three. He lives in America. Mom was never the same after that. I have this permanent image of her just staring out the front windows of our apartment. I lived with my grandmother for a while. I don’t know. Doesn’t feel like there’s much to go back to.”

Jaime nods his understanding. The movement catches the table’s attention. He glances awkwardly from us to the higashi before clearing his throat and starting in.

“My family had a farm,” he says. “Life was good. Living in a mountain town. It was simple, but we had a bad year, and the neighbors hated us. We went bankrupt. Lost everything.”

I fold a hand of low cards and side-eye Jaime. I want to call him out on it, accuse him of lying, but he pulls out a faded photograph. “This is the last picture we took on the farm.”

He passes it around. The edges are so worn that the picture’s shapeless now. His mother’s a beautiful woman. Jaime clearly got his pale eyes and sharp chin from his father. All three of them stand on a farm with cows roaming in the background. I stare at the picture long enough to miss my turn to bet. When I finally look up, Jaime’s watching me. He offers a polite smile, and I realize I’ve been an asshole this whole time. His parents really were farmers. He told the truth. Bilal deals another hand as the shame of it buries me, but I’m too much of a coward to say I’m sorry.

Katsu saves me from embarrassment. He laughs loudly and snatches the photo.

“Major points for using a prop, Jaime,” he says. “But I still give Jazzy the edge. There’s just nothing quite as sad as toddlers in tiaras parading around a stage.”

Jazzy and Jaime share a smile at that. Katsu shoves the box farther in Jazzy’s direction before eyeing the rest of the table. “Who’s next? Who will claim the final higashi? Keep in mind that’s a gift from my grandmother, you clowns. So you better take this seriously. How about you, Bilal? Why’d you invite us all here in the first place?”

I’m not sure Bilal likes the new game we’re playing, but he’s too polite to turn Katsu’s invitation down. He smiles before saying, “Hospitality isn’t optional. It’s the expectation of every honorable man. This is what my parents taught me. It is who my father raised me to be.”

He goes on to describe the hilltop village he’s from in Palestine. Two of his best friends were a pair of sheep. The longer I listen, the more I can feel the distance between us. I don’t understand people like him. His home was burned down twice. His family lived through actual famines. It’s impossible that someone with his story could have ever learned to smile. But that’s all he ever does. There’s a heaven in him no darkness can take.

When Bilal finishes, Jazzy slides the box his way. “I know when I’m beaten.”

My friend traces the lid of the box with idle fingers before looking directly at me.

“What about you, Emmett?” he asks. “Can you take the box from me?”

I shake my head. “Doubt it, man.”

He smiles. “Let us decide.”

I can feel the weight of their gazes. I’ve made a living out of back corners and side streets. There’s never been a stage I felt like I belonged on, but Bilal’s quiet attention convinces me that everything will be all right. The words come trickling off the tongue.

“Moms got sick a few years ago,” I say. “Kidney failure. She’s moving up the list because of Babel, but it’s been a bumpy ride. Pops does his best, you know, but it’s like his bosses are happy to watch him kill himself for each dime. I don’t know, man. I got good people in my corner, but it’s like I’m living in a world where most people would prefer if I sat down in the back row, took what the world gave me, and kept my mouth shut. But that’s just the way life is, right?”

I shrug my shoulders to say that it’s over, that’s it. Bilal nods like he knows exactly how I feel. He starts to pass the higashi my way, but pauses when Roathy rises to his feet. I’m half-expecting him to leave and call all of this a waste of time. Instead, he starts to speak.

He was born in the Triarch Empire. The massive conglomerate of countries bordering China has proven itself an economic power in the past decade, but Roathy tells us he’s one of thousands of kids who’ve grown up homeless on the streets, fighting each other for scraps in trash dumps and alleyways. “The worst fights,” he says, “were always against the dogs.”

As he continues talking, I realize I understand him a lot better than I understand Bilal. Roathy’s not the type to smile at a world that’s forgetting him. I get that, and I get him. The truth makes him dangerous. He left a life that he can’t go back to. When he’s done, Bilal looks between the two of us, unsure of the polite thing to do. I nod in Roathy’s direction.

“I think he wins.”

“Not so fast,” Katsu says. “Kaya and Isadora still have to go.”

There’s a little noise of protest from my left. Kaya’s eyes are dark and forbidding above her mask. I know what she’ll say even as she opens her mouth to answer.

“There are some competitions I don’t want to win.”

Katsu looks annoyed by that but says nothing. The attention of the room shifts Isadora’s way. She stands and crosses the room, accepting the box from Bilal’s gentle hands. A little gasp sounds as she flips the lid, snatches the candy, and plops it in her mouth.

We hear the crunch. Dust powders the air around her lips.

She says, “I don’t have to tell my story to know I would be the winner.”

With that, she leaves. Her departure tolls through our group like midnight in a fairy tale. The magic Bilal created for us starts to slip through every finger. Roathy follows Isadora out. The rest of us stay and play cards, but we’re no longer laughing. Hushed conversation revolves around Isadora. She’s always been the quietest in the group, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t left clues here and there. She apparently told Jazzy once that there’s nothing more important to her than being a mother. And occasionally she and Katsu mourn the fact that they’re missing the approaching World Cup.

It’s only after these facts are fully examined that we turn the conversation to the real mystery about Isadora: her tattoo. Everyone’s seen the crowned eight etched on her neck by now, but it’s clear we’ve each heard very different explanations.

“It’s the number of her favorite soccer player,” Bilal explains.

Azima shakes her head. “She told me it’s the day her mother died.”

“I thought it symbolizes making it into the top eight,” Jazzy offers. “Isn’t that why there’s a crown?”

Katsu laughs at that. “How would she have known about being in the top eight? You think she got the tattoo after boarding the ship?”

“She’s the youngest in a family of eight,” Kaya says firmly. “That’s why she originally got the tattoo. She always felt like she was in last place. That’s what she said.”

When we question Isadora the next day, her eyes narrow playfully. “I would have thought it was obvious. Eight. The number of fools it takes to figure out the meaning of a tattoo.”

One night of playing cards has drawn the colors out of the dark world Babel’s trying to build. We still dig and fight and scrape for each point, but there’s something human beneath every mask now. I know some of their secrets, some of their stories. I know now that I’m not the only one who comes from a broken world and I’m not the only one who’s desperate to fix it.

Only Longwei continues to hold himself apart. As the weeks pass, he never sits down to talk with anyone. He doesn’t play cards on Sabbaths. He doesn’t tell stories about his childhood. His actions still speak volumes. He enters every event like a man possessed. Failure is not an option. Second place is a mark of shame. Even in silence, Longwei is proving Kaya’s theory right. We all are. She said each one of us was broken. She claimed she could see it in us, bright as paint on a canvas. Hearing the truth of that in each of our stories has me wondering how Babel chose us.

I remember getting called out of algebra. The principal took me to a conference room. There were three of them. All in suits. It scared the hell out of me.

When I sat down, they slid the first contract across the table and said I’d been chosen. Wasn’t I lucky? I’d been drawn from a lottery out of thousands of applicants.

Funny thing is, I know I never applied.