Riya’s right. The Empire will back them because they’re working on a secret and important project. Stealth tech is the holy grail of military research. So she and my father can get away with anything.
And—stupid me—I finally realize that my father has no feelings for me at all. He never has. The clinging I remember is just him pulling me free of the Room, leaving my mother—my poor mother—behind.
I can’t even guarantee that we weren’t part of some early experiment on the same project. While my father was telling my mother’s parents to care for me while he tried to recover her, he might have been simply trying to recoup his losses from that trip, experimenting with people and markers and things that survive in the strangest of interdimensional fields.
After we leave my father and Riya on the outpost, we have a memorial service for Karl. I talk the longest because I knew him the best, and I don’t cry until we send him out into the darkness, still in his suit with his knife and breathers.
He would have wanted those. He would have appreciated the caution, even though it was caution—in the end—that got him killed.
As we head back to Longbow Station, I realize that I have to stop them— my father, the Empire, all those naive scientists like Squishy once was. I have to take the functioning stealth tech away from them.
I have to make sure they never fully understand this technology.
I have to make sure they never ever win.
PART THREE
THE HEART OF THE MACHINE
TWENTY-SEVEN
My task isn’t as hard as it sounds. It’s much easier to destroy something than it is to understand it or to re-create it or even to find it.
But before I start my mission, I need some questions answered.
I need to find Squishy.
Squishy lives in Vallevu, a pretty little town high in the mountains of Naha. She calls herself Rosealma now, and she works as a doctor in a small clinic specializing in family practice.
I am surprised by all of it—by the fact that she has chosen a quiet life, by the fact that she lives in gravity, by the fact that she never dives. When I arrive at her home, I am surprised by one more thing.
The children.
The house is full of children.
It’s warm here, and the air is thin. We’re five thousand meters above sea level. The house is built on the crest of this part of the mountain and appears to have 360-degree views. Mostly, from my vantage, I can see only clouds and sunlight and bluish purple sky, but even that is enough.
It’s stunning here. It almost seems like this point is floating, as if it’s traveling through this thin air to somewhere else, like a skyship.
The area offers the illusion of freedom and travel.
Until you look at the house itself.
The house is big and square, with many windows. It dominates the landscape. There are five stories, each smaller than the other, until the fifth is little more than a balcony with a tower in the center.
The house has a wide, rock- and grass-covered yard, with trees and bushes and plenty of places to sit. Paths thread through flowers and foliage. A front porch rises out of the plants like it has grown from them and attached itself to the house.
An elderly woman sits on the porch, watching the children play hide-and-seek in the yard.
I can’t count how many children there are—maybe ten, maybe more— but they are all of different ages, and they all seem very comfortable in front of Squishy’s house.
The woman watches them as she sips on a glass of brown liquid. She doesn’t move as I come up the main path, but I sense that her gaze has switched from the children’s games to me.
“Hello,” I say in my friendliest tone. “I’m looking for Rosealma. The people at her clinic say I can find her here.”
The woman doesn’t respond. She sips from that glass
“I’m an old colleague,” I say. “I just need to talk to her for a few minutes.”
The children have stopped playing. Several more pop their heads out of the bushes and watch me. It feels eerie, as if they’re not quite human. But they are human. I can smell the child sweat mingling with the minty sweetness of the plants and see the impish grins that pass from face to face when they think I’m not looking.
None of these children have been raised in space. They all have the strong bones and thick musculature of children who have grown up in normal gravity.
They make me nervous.
“Please,” I say, “if I can just talk to her …”
The woman doesn’t answer, but one of the older children—a girl, I think, but I can’t really tell—ducks under the porch and disappears.
My stomach clenches. I can dive abandoned ships all by myself in the vastness of space, but I’m afraid to cross that last bit of path. I don’t want to walk through that crowd of staring children, and I don’t want to step onto that porch with the silent woman.
All of this—heat, children, plants—is so far from my everyday life that it stops me from doing anything at all.
Even though no one speaks, it’s not quiet up here. The air buzzes faintly—insect noise, I suppose—and far away, something chirps at irregular intervals. If I were on the Business, I’d check out that chirp, see if it was an equipment malfunction.
But here, I suppose, it’s something alive, something that makes such a noise for reasons I can’t understand.
Or maybe there are machines here as well, machines I can’t see.
I lick my lips. “Ma’am,” I say—
And then the main door on the porch bangs open. The child who disappeared under the porch comes out first. It is a girl, reedy and strong, the lines of her face just beginning to slide into adolescence.
Another woman stands behind her, and it takes me a moment to realize that the new woman is Squishy.
She’s not thin anymore. She’s rounded, softer, her cheeks chubby and red-tinged. Only her eyes remain the same, flat and distant and frightening.
“What do you want?” she asks.
I’ve practiced this moment a million times, and I’ve come up with a million answers. What do I want? To reverse time, Squishy. To go back to the original discovery of the Dignity Vessel and that very first meeting, with you and Karl and Turtle and Jypé and Junior. I want to tell you all what I think we’ve found, and I want you to tell us how dangerous it is and I want all of us to vote on whether or not we go inside, and then when we do vote …
I’ll go in anyway.
I shake my head just a little. I don’t say any of that, just like I don’t say the countless other things I could say. Like: I found more stealth tech. Like: Karl’s dead. Like: I need your help.
Instead, I say, “I owe you an apology.”
The girl stands in front of Squishy like a shield. I can’t see Squishy’s face. The woman on the porch acts like nothing is going on.
The children watch. They know something is happening here, but they clearly don’t know what that something is.
“Yeah, you do owe me an apology.” Squishy hasn’t moved. The girl looks over her shoulder at Squishy, and that’s when I see the resemblance. The girl looks like a younger version of the Squishy I met. A younger, gravity-bound version.
I’d never thought of Squishy as someone with a family. I’d always thought of her as someone like me, someone who abandoned her family when she realized they never really cared about her.