I hear her take in a breath and hum. “How. How do I get my trinket back? R and U are letters. You ask strange questions.”
Uh. Okay. “I can’t see you. Where are you?”
“South of the sun, and north of the Earth’s core, that’s what I know.”
“There’s no such thing as ‘north’ in space,” I say, trying to play her game.
“I use my own compass. Don’t you?”
“Yes. We all do, don’t we?”
Oh my god. I’ve really fallen into the rabbit hole this time. But I don’t want to leave. Not yet.
“Can I see you?” I ask.
“Do you have my trinket?” she whispers.
“No. I don’t think so.” What trinket? A jewel, or charm?
“Pity.” A rustle sounds from the corner, where her messy bed quivers with movement. A spindly white arm emerges from the mess of blankets, like a sped-up video of a bleached, growing seedling. The arm grasps the mound of blankets and pushes. A dark head with enormous blue eyes peeks out over the heap of covers. Her nut-brown hair is long, lank, and messy from lying down.
“Hi,” I say. I don’t venture forward. My instinct says not to move at all, the same instinct that doesn’t approach a songbird ready to take flight.
“You’re Zelia.”
I hear her, but her lips don’t move. How does she do that? Ana blinks. More of the blanket falls from her face. Deep shadows hang under her eyes, and her mouth is a perfect little bow of pale pink.
“How . . . how do you do that, exactly? Talk without . . . talking?” I ask. Her next words enter my mind with the clarity of the most perfect holo transmission, but without the holo.
“How do you remember to live, every minute?”
“You mean my breathing? I make myself do it. It’s not easy.”
“I don’t have to try.” Her mouth stays taut, curls into a smile. “It is what it is.”
“Can you read my thoughts too?”
“I am a one-way street.”
I take her cryptic answer as a no. I even test her, asking her in my head if she likes apples, which I know she does from the pile of apple cores, but she stares blandly back at me, clearly not hearing my mental query. Ana proceeds to study me with her great, water-blue eyes until I lose the staring match. My eyes fall to a broken novel on the floor.
“Why do you read books, when you can use a holo?”
“I like things. Real things.” She reaches for a nearby book and presses it into her chest. Brittle bits of paper snow onto her lap. Something terrible lurks behind the blue eyes that watch me, almost clinging to me as I take a step back. My impulse to flee is gathering strength in my veins.
“No,” her voice whimpers in my head.
“I’ll come back sometime.” Oh, words. I offer them as a consolation prize, because I don’t know if I’m brave enough to back them up with the truth.
“No. No one comes back.” She wipes her nose clumsily, the way a little child might. The same way Dyl did as a kid. This time, my words will mean what they say. I undo my retreating steps and come close enough to touch her hand.
“I will. I promise. I’ll come by very soon.”
Ana clasps my hand, as if she’s captured a butterfly. “I like real things,” she says, and opens her cupped hands, freeing me. I know what pain it is for her to let go. She closes her eyes and burrows under the waves of blankets.
“Real is good,” I say, though I’m not sure what her flavor of real is.
I keep my hand on the wall as I walk back to my room. I feel off center, desperate to regain my balance. After that trip to Ana’s, I’m not quite sure that my north is north anymore.
CHAPTER 15
IN THE LAB THE NEXT DAY, I turn Dyl’s holo on to keep me company, but switch it to voice only. I can’t look at her face anymore. I know what she really looks like now. It’s the same reason I’ve always hated cut flowers. They’re impending death in a pretty vase, and it hurts too much to think that way about Dyl’s sweet image.
I hold my breath at the table, where two microID sheets have finished developing. Dyl’s sheet is marked with a large D in the corner; mine is C, for control. Both are covered in thousands of choppy lines, and I squint at them, trying to find differences.
Cy enters the lab. We haven’t spoken since the fight, but this morning I found yet another mug of coffee at my workstation. A peace offering. It’s the fifth one he’s left for me in the last two days. He’s either being nice, or trying to kill me with caffeine.
“Do you have a fragment reader here?” I ask, testing the waters.
“No,” he says. There’s peace in his tone. “But we have a comparator. It’s makeshift, but it’ll work.”
My stiffness around him melts, and Cy seems calmer too. I guess talking shop is easier than everything else we’ve been avoiding.
At another table, we feed the microID sheets into a steel box. The machine digitally subtracts one image from the other, leaving behind the fuzzy lines found only on Dyl’s sheet.
Cy leans in to stare at them, his neck and arms inked with maroon skeletons today. His face is close to mine, a hair closer than the boundaries of friendliness allow. I’m afraid I might bump into him, so I finally step away to really concentrate.
I adjust the contrast, and a bunch of black lines comes into focus. There are at least a hundred.
“Those lines are from Dyl’s sheet. She has extra genes buried in those sequences,” I say, trying hard to suppress my excitement, but failing. I’m grinning like an idiot. Finally! Something to show for my work. Here is the answer. Dyl’s entire worth, according to Aureus, is in those scattered lines that she’s got and I don’t.
“Good job,” Cy says. His tone isn’t entirely congratulatory; he’s holding something back, but I go on.
“Those sequences code for her trait. I’ll run it through one of those old gene libraries in the public archives.”
“Well, that’s a start.” His optimism is as overwhelming as soggy bread.
“What are you not telling me?”
“Nothing.”
“Bull.”
Cy falls into his chair and rubs his eyes with his fists. When his eyes open again to engage me, they’re tired. It’s not the kind of tired from lack of sleep; it’s an existential exhaustion, from lack of hope.
“You think this is going to be easy, just figuring this out and saving Dylia?”
“Well, maybe not so easy, but yes, that’s the plan.”
“Have you considered the possibility that the plan isn’t going to work?”
“I see. You’re one of those ‘glass half empty’ kinds of guys.” I’m prepared for this. Optimism is going to be my drug of choice.
“No, it’s not that. It’s not about the glass being half empty or half full of water. I’m saying, well . . . what if there never was a glass of water to begin with?”
“I can’t . . .” I turn away, stopping the conversation. Everything he’s trying to tell me is summed up in two words. Give up. I won’t allow them in my vocabulary right now. I put the microID sheets away on my worktable and walk out the door. I never was a running away kind of girl, but this discussion can’t happen.
“Zelia—”
Cy hooks my arm, preventing my escape. The touch of his hand on my arm shocks me, but not like Micah’s tingly touch. It’s soft and strong and asks me to stay.
“I can’t.” I pull toward the door, and Cy releases me into the frustration I need to run with. The door closes unsympathetically behind me, dividing the space between us.
I’m so tired of fighting. I wish I could hand my troubles over and let someone else deal with them for a while.