Pangus shadow, p.2
Pangu's Shadow, page 2
Cal’s body easily flips. His head lolls 180 degrees, loose curls flopping, and I recoil.
Deep breaths: In, out. In, out.
Kneeling down, I lay my hand over Cal’s heart. No pulse. I pump on his chest, almost pushing it into the floor.
A minute passes this way, according to the digital clock on the wall. He doesn’t move.
Ver clatters over to me, a pastel-colored mess of snot and tears.
“It’s not working,” I whisper. My party makeup has left sparkling green streaks on Cal’s white lab coat.
“We should try adrenaline.” Ver lurches over to the controlled-substances cabinet. She fills a syringe with clear solution, an amount presumably proportional to Cal’s mass, and stumbles back to us. Refusing my offer of help, she uses a desk to lower herself onto the floor. Her hands are trembling more than usual, but she manages to jam the syringe tip into Cal’s neck and push the clear adrenaline solution into his artery.
I’m almost expecting his heart to jump-start beneath my hands. Cal’s always called me too optimistic. It’s nice to want things, Aryl. He’d say it now, if he weren’t unconscious.
Unconscious. He’s got to be. I can’t consider the alternative.
Images flash through my mind: Cal’s droning criticisms of my work, the times I tuned him out by fantasizing about dancing out of lab meeting. Like last month, when he tossed six weeks of my data because I’d failed to control the tissues’ growing conditions before experimenting on them. I can’t say I didn’t snicker into my hand when he nicked himself with a surgical blade during a dissection later that day. But I never wanted Cal dead.
If he dies, what’ll happen to me? This lab’s my escape from my past. It’s my present and future and hope. It reassures my parents that they raised me right. And it lets me access the Institute dance team, which feels more real than my actual apprenticeship.
The empty syringe clatters from Ver’s hand onto the floor. She’s kneeling beside me, weeping. Is the science prodigy really out of ideas?
“Stop crying!” I urge. “Try again. Doesn’t Cal mean anything to you?”
Ver’s black eyes narrow, her glare sharp as a laser-cutter beam. “You will never understand what he means to me.”
I glare back. Frankly, I don’t want to know.
Without breaking eye contact, I take the flexitab off my wrist, unroll the screen, and call the authorities.
Chapter 4
Ver
What is physical pain? Electricity. A current of ions flowing through pore-like channels on our neuronal membranes, long axons like wires conducting the signal up to our brains.
Tonight, it takes only words to shock my body. The Lucent City Police examine Cal and tell us, “He’s gone.”
Gone! I am free-floating through space, without gravity to anchor me to this world or the next.
Still, amid the emptiness, I hope.
Clinical death is the cessation of a heartbeat and respiration, but brain activity may continue until the organ’s oxygen supply runs out. Does Cal know I am here? My palm cradles his cold cheek, and I imagine transferring every oxygen molecule in my blood to him. I would gladly give all I have.
His blue eyes—which often changed unpredictably from sunny to stormy, as if they had their own climate controls—are now blank, staring. A blond eyelash has drifted into his eyeball. I consider grabbing forceps from my bench and fishing it out, to blow it away and make a wish on it.
A stout female officer peels me off the floor and away from Cal. Two male officers hustle Aryl and me into the hallway. They tell us to return to lab—to the scene of the crime—at 9:00 tomorrow morning. And that if we try to run, they will know.
“Young scientists don’t drop dead for no reason,” says the green-haired female officer. “From the unencrypted vitals records on his artificial hand, we know that he didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke. His blood composition is . . . off. After we determine the cause of death, we’ll need you both for questioning.”
Gou! Not only did I lose Cal—they think I may have murdered him! It hurts my heart worse than my disease ever has. Worse than not knowing how I will manage to keep asking the questions I must ask—alone.
The police look at me, at Aryl, as if we are no better than the back-alley killers who plague the rougher neighborhoods of Lucent City. Many lawbreakers are homegrown, but some come from my moon. Others come from Aryl’s. And those are the ones who make the news. With two offworlders in front of them, the police probably will not investigate anyone else. How do I prove that they are only right about one of us?
If Cal was murdered, the killer must be Aryl. She was the only other person in lab tonight. I know little about her, except that she loathes Cal. Most of their conversations devolve into hisses and, in some cases, shouting. Once, when he criticized her faulty methods, she listened with her fists curled at her side, then returned to her experiment and—probably intentionally—heated an untempered glass beaker till it shattered, while Cal was only a benchtop away.
I manage to stay calm—keep face, as Three-ers would say—in the officers’ presence. Even on the fourteen-story elevator ride to ground level.
Aryl leaves without a word, takes off at a sprint toward the second-year dorms. I watch her, burning with envy. She has no idea how lucky she is to feel air rushing past her face, her lungs expanding with effort, the satisfying thud of her feet on the ground.
Cal fell down before Aryl dragged me out of the lab. Maybe he tripped. Maybe not. When Aryl ran back into the lab without me, she had nearly a minute to stop his heart. I am certain that she killed him. That she took Cal away from me.
I must confront her. But not tonight. I will not follow her, and not only because I would never be able to catch her. I need to be alone. My heart is singed and blackened from conducting so much electric pain.
Back home, on G-Moon Three, people I had known for much longer died all the time, of disease or violence or poison. These people fell like meteors. They made impact and buried themselves in the dust, digging their own graves. But Cal is different. He was a One-er. He was not supposed to die young. Or even middle-aged. He had at least a century left, like most other citizens of this moon.
When I met Cal that first day in lab, he was crouched on the floor, trying to fix our microscope.
“Hey, Ver! Can I borrow your stick for a second?” he said to me, blue eyes clear and shining, one side of his mouth lifted in a smirk. “I lost a screw under the scope.”
Blushing at his directness, I handed over my cane. He retrieved the screw, and together we calibrated and rewired the machine. My heart pounded so loud and fast I worried he would hear it.
Since then, the questions we have asked of the universe have nudged my life toward the light, assuring me that it has a purpose. No matter how short it will be.
Now his soul is among the stars. Not here, where I need him.
Wiping my eyes, I walk toward the spires of the first-year dorms, my soft shoes making no noise, my cane tap-tapping on the quartz-paved path. Weeping cherry blossoms and their reflections in the ponds shine snowy white against the black background. The vibrant green dot of G-Moon Two, surrounded by smaller pinpricks of stars, glows in the sky above it all. When I first arrived at the Institute, with its multihued crystalline towers, I wondered how anyone got work done in such a stunning place.
Then I learned that the science bestowed meaning upon the beauty. Geologists know that for several million years after G-Moon One’s formation, its distance from Pangu oscillated from near to far, leading to heating and cooling cycles that enabled the melting, growing, and remelting of gigantic multihued crystals. The architecture here is gemlike because of the sparkling abundance of raw material. Ecologists carefully selected organism combinations from the embryo vault to populate G-Moons One and Two, creating self-sustaining ecosystems: the mangrove lakes and dense maple forests on the other hemisphere of One; the rice paddies and cornfields of Two, serviced by communities of microorganisms living in the soil and pollinating bees buzzing through the air.
Science can explain why things are the way they are, how we arrived here, and what we will accomplish. Or what everyone else will accomplish, without me, if I do not manage to stop the disease that will soon take my life.
Now that Cal is dead, I am alone in that mission.
I am alone.
I crane my neck back to view the beanstalk-shaped Biological Laboratories skyscraper, which we call BioLabs. White quartz corkscrewing up into space. To the right, its neighbor, the spherical sapphire Mathematics Center, glints like a marble. I raise my eyes higher, to the starry night. To verdant G-Moon Two. To yellow, pockmarked G-Moon Three.
Home. How lucky I was to escape. I panicked as primary school graduation neared, fearing I would have to work in the factories like Ma and everyone else in my town. An apprenticeship at the Institute was my only hope of doing the science to save myself, but I had never been in a real laboratory before. I relied on the knowledge I had siphoned out of science articles and three years of pipetting solutions into chipped glassware—the best my school could offer.
I applied to the Institute and sent holographic messages to Cal’s lab. Explaining my health issues, begging for a chance. Finally Jaha, the lab manager, called and said she would support my application. As soon as we heard each other’s accents, we lapsed into our dialect. I could have flown. A fellow Three-er would watch out for me!
At the beginning of my apprenticeship, she brought me snacks, offered encouraging words at every opportunity. But after a few weeks, Jaha could not be in the same room with me. “You seem to have it together,” she would say, excusing herself.
I could not help loving her husband. No one had ever made me feel like I belonged to them before—not even Ma. Especially not Ma. From the start, I was Cal’s. But it did not take me long to learn that no matter what I did, no matter how much ground we broke, he would never belong to me in the same way.
That is the only thing I hated him for.
Chapter 5
Aryl
The first thing I do in the second-year dorm is run to the bathroom and hurl. Gargle water, spit it out. Scrub the hands that touched Cal’s dead body, the hands that couldn’t save him.
I leave the bathroom, stepping into the fluorescent lighting of the corridor. Despite my efforts, it stinks in here. I carry the stench of death inside me now.
Doors up and down the narrow hallway slide open. My fellow apprentices stand on their thresholds to stare. Small hexagonal mirrors on the curved, honeycombed ceiling reflect twisted images of my friends. The scintillating light makes me feel as if I’m tripping on party powder.
“Aryl? What’s happened?”
“Say something, Fielding, is this a joke or what?”
“We heard an investigator died.” As usual, Rhea wields a blunt knife in conversation. Her short silvery hair is damp; she must’ve showered after doing her before-bed mobility and flexibility exercises. Just as I should’ve done, if Cal hadn’t . . .
I’m hit by the memory of when I moved my stretching mat into lab. Cal wasn’t a fan at first—he said it smelled, it took up space. But after I taught Jaha exercises that kept her limber throughout her pregnancy, Cal thanked me profusely.
I press my legs together in first position, hoping the familiar stance will calm me, but it only makes my knees bounce with nervousness. I look into Rhea’s expectant green eyes. They’re so big and shiny that I see my face reflected back at me. There was a time I convinced myself I saw deeper feelings in those eyes. Sometimes I think I still do.
“You know you can talk to us,” Rhea says. She comes toward me, arms stretched out. I let her hug me, but I pull away when I taste death in my mouth, smoky and putrid. I don’t want to contaminate her.
There’s a sob as another person stumbles into the hallway. All our heads turn toward the intruder, and my heart sinks.
Devon Kye is never a welcome sight. Tonight is already vacked enough without adding him to the mix. “Devon, go to bed,” I say, voice flat.
But that only makes him cry harder. Annoyance rises in me, jabbing through the numbness. I’m gassed off at him, but if I were a decent person, I’d pity him instead. Devon’s tiny, only slightly taller than Ver. He’s got shiny, sallow skin and short, greasy black hair that clumps together. His investigator keeps apprentices in a basement lab fifteen hours a day, so sleep’s hard to come by and hygiene’s even more of a stretch. Devon’s also scrap at experiments, though he manages to churn out enough decent theory to keep his investigator off his back.
It’s a shame that Devon’s from the same moon as my parents, because he makes me look bad by association. Out of all the second-years at the Institute, we’re the only Two-ers. He’s from Oryza, a small city near my parents’ home village. So I’ve defended Devon in the past, even stood up for him when the discdisc boys hazed him. But tonight I don’t have the time or energy to deal with him.
“What do you need?” Rhea asks Devon gently, even as she backs away.
Devon’s black eyes don’t leave me, and it’s making me squirm.
“What,” I shoot at him, not even bothering to make it a question. Can’t he tell I want to be left alone? Can’t they all?
“I’m sorry,” Devon whispers in that rhythmic, quick-stepping accent, just like my parents’. “I’m sorry about Cal.”
His words burn on impact. The tears are coming—but I won’t cry in front of these people. I can’t let them see that I’m not invincible.
My flexitab vibrates on my wrist with an incoming call. Dad, says the screen. I duck into my room. Whispers hound me as I close the door.
When I answer the call, two sets of holographic heads and shoulders pop up from the flexitab—a man and a woman with solid builds and round, worried faces. The projections are so opaque and vividly colored, it feels like my parents are sitting in front of me.
“Sweetgum, are you all right?” Mom says. “We heard about . . . a crime at the Institute.”
As far back as I can remember, Mom’s been loud-voiced and quick, rushing around as she cooks and cleans for my parents’ boss. Now she’s quiet and still.
“They . . . they think I killed him,” I say. “Cal Eppi.”
“The Institute called us,” Dad says. Even over holo, my father looks solid and intimidating. He’s been a doorman for years, and that means doubling as a bodyguard. “I’m sorry, sweetgum. We know you didn’t do this.”
I wonder if he means We HOPE you didn’t do this. Dad’s years of experience in security mean that he can’t ignore the evidence against me. But he has to know there’s no chance I killed Cal—that no child of his could do something like that. I need my family’s faith like a seedling needs water. I can’t count on anyone else’s.
“We have to talk about next steps,” says Dad, always the practical one. “Respect the police, do as they say. They’ll find any excuse to put you away, or to send your mother and me back to Two. I’m afraid of what will happen at your trial if we let it get to that point.”
The “objective” computer-run trials on One aren’t kind to people like us. When machines are programmed by humans, they absorb human biases.
“Dad, you’ve told me this a thousand times,” I say. “I’ve done my best to follow the officers’ directions.”
“Did anyone try to hurt you?” There’s a threat in his voice.
I shake my head. Both my parents heave sighs of relief. I look past them, at the familiar mess of our family’s apartment. I calculate the time in Celestine—it’s nearly 5:30 in the morning. My brain jolts with confusion. “Mom, shouldn’t you be at work?”
Senator Titania Mercure eats her breakfast at 6:00 when she’s home, which means Mom has to be up and ready to make it for her. Titania has represented Celestine in the Senate for more than twenty years. She relies on my parents to maintain her mansion; when I was a kid, she told me that even the best-programmed AI can’t match a real, breathing human who’s paid to make your house a home.
My parents look at each other, as if silently debating who should tell me the bad news. Dad’s the one to speak. “Titania has suspended our employment, sweetgum. Without pay.”
“Because of me?” Horror is yanking on all the parts of my face. I’ve always been proud of my low resting heart rate, but now I can feel it pounding at a dangerous speed. I didn’t expect this of Titania. She knows me! Or she used to.
“She’s had her security unit . . .” Mom swallows. “. . . put us under home supervision. Ester”—my younger sister—“can attend school, but they’ll escort her here straight after dismissal. Titania says these precautions are necessary, until things clear up.”
“So you’re basically under house arrest,” I say. “That’s illegal! Titania can’t do that without a hearing—”
“Titania is not just anybody,” Dad says. “The police will back her up if it comes to that.”
Titania is one of the Senate’s biggest supporters of the police force. Every chance she gets, she votes to give them better pay, better weapons, and more power in criminal cases.
“Clear your name, Aryl, and come home when you can,” Mom begs. “If you can. Please.”
The holo of my parents disappears. My fingers go limp, and the flexitab slips through them, landing on the floor.
How are two adults and a thirteen-year-old girl supposed to survive without money, without freedom?
I didn’t commit the crime, but authorities think I did. And that might be my fault.
If I’d been pulling my weight in lab, I wouldn’t have needed to catch up on work tonight. I wouldn’t have planted myself right where Cal was killed.
Mom’s hands are worn raw, with no sensation left in her fingers because of all the times she’s burned herself in the kitchen. Dad’s right eyebrow is split by a scar he got fending off extremists who tried to attack the Mercure mansion. My parents have worn themselves down to give me a future full of possibilities. And this is how I repay them. I’ve cursed them with the kind of life they swore I’d never have.
