Pangus shadow, p.4
Pangu's Shadow, page 4
“You dropped a sample,” I fire back at Ver. “I saw his face once the emergency lights came on. He looked like he was going to smack you.”
“Cal would never,” Ver says, lifting her chin. But she doesn’t sound sure.
“Perhaps another piece of evidence will help you remember the truth.” Xenon’s voice has a gruffness that wasn’t there before. “Miss Fielding’s DNA was found on Investigator Eppi’s lab coat—”
“Ever heard of CPR?” I interrupt. “I was trying to help Cal. Obviously I failed. If I’d known you’d use that as evidence to frame me, maybe I wouldn’t have bothered.”
“Oh?” Xenon’s bushy eyebrows lift. He sets his drink aside, like he means business now. “Other biology faculty tell me that you and Investigator Eppi had a strained relationship, Miss Fielding. They say that even after all he’s done for you, you couldn’t sit down and respect him.”
Did he just imply that Cal helped me, a dense offworld girl, out of the goodness of his heart?
Xenon taps his stylus against his flexitab. “Miss Fielding, do you deny that you had a difficult relationship with Investigator Eppi?”
“We all did,” I say. “Cal expected giga progress from us, even in experiments where we had no clue what we were doing.”
“He only pushed us because he wanted us to succeed!” Ver says.
“Yeah, sure,” I say. No one asked you. “If he really cared about us, he would’ve—”
Xenon stands up in one swift motion. He moves like a much younger man. I shrink back, my heart pounding.
“For all I know,” he says, “you girls killed Investigator Eppi together, and this whole argument is a farce to ensure that just one of you lands in prison. You were the only ones at the scene when Calyx Eppi died. DNA evidence implicates you both. So does history with the victim.”
“Sir—” Ver says.
He silences her with a glare. “You are both under arrest. Helpers, cuff them and take them to the station.”
The police bots’ yellow eyes light up, and they roll in front of Ver and me. Ver gives no sign of resistance except for a stuck-out lower lip. I force myself to stay still, even though I want to kick the metal chunks away from me and jet out of here.
The cold titanium handcuffs clamp around my wrists. I close my eyes and picture my parents’ faces. I won’t watch myself become a prisoner.
Chapter 10
Ver
All else being equal, the same number of molecules of a lighter gas and a heavier gas will take up the same amount of space.
The Lucent City Police Department loves this law. They keep their prisoners in holding pods suspended by floats full of helium, the second-lightest gas. (Hydrogen, the very lightest, is too flammable for this purpose.) The floats are tethered to the ground level of the hexagonal police station by a narrow, bendable stalk, which contains a miniature elevator that can fit, at most, two people. Back and forth we drift, thirty meters above the city, our motion dictated by the air currents. The swaying stirs up nausea in my belly.
With just one tiny window, this two-person cell would be impossible to escape even if I were as strong as Aryl. She sits on her steel cot, stretching her triceps as if preparing to fight, refusing to look at me. In such a small space, she seems even bigger.
The only other thing to look at is a cracked, blank screen on the door. We have both tried to activate it by touch and by scanning our fingertips and retinas, but it remains dead.
Watching Aryl, I think of how in healthy people like her, micro-damage strengthens muscles. Rip through layers of actin and myosin by stressing the tissue, and the fibers will grow back thicker.
Aryl has put her muscles through countless small traumas. Her legs are solid and strong beneath her black leggings. Her metallic-gold tank top shows her muscular upper back, the skin rippling like a pond struck by a pebble. More than once, I have wanted to touch it, just to know what so much strength feels like. When I first saw her, all I wanted was to move as she did. So easy! Not only when she dances, but when she glides into lab and stands, stork-like, on one leg while pipetting solutions.
Only now do I see the danger in her. She could have killed Cal easily. Cal was tall, but soft and skinny. If she chose to, she could kill me too.
As it stands, though, she is the best hope I have of getting out of here. And I need to get out.
I am getting dizzy. I have not taken my medication since this morning—the police robots confiscated my pillbox. If I spend the night without medication, I will not be able to keep my balance tomorrow.
“We should agree to tell them nothing,” I say. “If neither of us says anything to incriminate the other, we can both go free.”
Aryl’s eyes cut into me. “You expect me to fall for that? So I can cover for you with the police, and meanwhile you’ll tell lies about me to save your own skin? Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Aiyo, have it your way.” I should not have expected that we would be able to work together. We have hardly spoken more than a sentence to each other in lab. “But you will have to work very hard to cast suspicion on me. I have done nothing wrong.”
Aryl sits up and gives me her signature eye-roll. “Why should I believe anything that comes out of your mouth? You were the last person to stand next to Cal. He trusted you, and now he’s dead.”
“So what is my motive?” I hurl at her. “What reason could I possibly have for killing the one person on this moon who trusted me?”
“I don’t care what your reason was. I didn’t do it, so it had to be you. I found Cal flat on his belly, already gone. And I don’t have a motive either. I wasn’t a fan of Cal, but he gave me the opportunity to lift myself and my family’s hopes. I needed him too, Ver.”
I think on this. “Yes. You did. I should have seen it earlier.”
“Yeah. Both of us had too much to lose if he died.”
And both of us have lost. Just look at us! “They are going to question us. One at a time. My proposal stands: We should not tell lies about the other to make her look guilty. It will only reinforce their idea that we murdered Cal together and are now quarreling.” I cannot resist clarifying, “This does not mean I want to collaborate—I will only refrain from trying to implicate you.”
“Fine. Let’s do that.” Aryl is nodding, a good sign, and I hope she follows through. “Besides, if we stick to the simple truth, it might help the police solve a damn murder for once . . .”
A buzzing sound cuts her off. A moment later, Detective Xenon’s voice projects through our tiny pod.
“Ver Yun, come to the interrogation room.”
I rise slowly as our locked cell door slides open, giving me access to the elevator.
“Hey,” Aryl calls. “Good luck in there.”
The words come out fast and hard, like she is cursing me. But I allow myself to think—for my own sake—that she means them.
“Let’s start with the basics,” Xenon says. He has made me sit on a high stool that seems specifically designed to hurt my back. He stands over me as he consults his flexitab. “Name: Ver Yun, or Yun Ver in the Three-er convention. You’re sixteen years old, born in Honey Crater, G-Moon Three. Both your parents are alive and well?”
Breathe. Inhale, exhale. I focus on a small area of mildewed wall tile on the far side of the windowless room and wonder what fungal species are growing in the cracks.
“My mother works in a textile factory,” I say.
“And your father?”
“I do not know where he is. Probably on the other side of G-Moon Three. May we move on?”
“Don’t deflect, Miss Yun,” Xenon says, mispronouncing my surname again. He makes it sound like yum. It should contain the ü sound, but I let non-Craterers get away with yoon. “I need to verify your profile. Your father left you and your mother when you were six years old, correct? Is he still involved with the drug-trafficking rings?”
I hate that when people think of Three, what comes to mind is poverty, cheap clothing, chemical fumes, mass-produced robotics, and drugs. That is typical when your home moon is the manufacturing center of the planetary system and workers smoke, drink, and pop Happy Patches to numb the pain from repetitive-motion injuries. My mother has carpal tunnel in both hands, the most common malady in the clothing factory where she works.
Three does not have a terraformed atmosphere like One and Two, so we live inside residential bubbles, one per municipality. Every time Three-ers ask for terraforming, the Senate tells us we should be grateful for what we have. Factory production has not been automated, so we still have jobs. That shuts people up, because we know that One’s robotics companies could install machines to replace many of the factory workers. I have heard One-ers make similar arguments about Two—machines could do the farming for them. The Senate protects the jobs of the outer moons’ residents as a favor, or so they say.
I tell Xenon, “The police ran my father out of Honey Crater. He is probably still selling homemade liquor to people so desperate for cheap alcohol that they do not care if the methanol blinds them.” My face is flushing—I talk about my parents as little as I can—but I know the humiliation is just beginning.
“Thank you for your honesty, Miss Yun.” Xenon’s voice has softened. Out of pity, perhaps. His eyes dart to my cane. I brace myself for the next question. “Would you mind describing what happened to your legs?”
Exhale. Inhale. Say it. “RCD,” I whisper.
Usually those three letters drop on people like a bomb, halting their questions. But those are Three-ers or scientists, people familiar with the disease. From Xenon’s blank look, it is clear he has no idea what I am talking about.
My voice goes cold. “Rapid Cellular Degeneration. I am breaking down, one molecule at a time.” The ends of my DNA are shortening, so the rest of the strands are not protected. Deletions, insertions, mix-ups. Proteins folding wrong, until they can no longer do their jobs. “My case attacked my musculoskeletal system first, which is why I need a cane. But it affects my vision and hearing now too.”
Ultrafast, unevenly distributed aging. The disease of diseases, capable of flipping any body part’s “off” switch at any time. No one knows why my body decided to rebel like this. RCD occurs frequently on G-Moon Three, striking about one percent of the population. It is rare on G-Moon Two and never intrudes on G-Moon One.
I will not live past thirty, may not even live to be eighteen.
There is no known cure.
“That sounds terrible. I’m sorry.” Xenon looks deep into my eyes. I feel like he almost trusts me now. “Do you have a medical diagnosis I could see to verify your illness?” He holds out my confiscated flexitab. “You can show me now, or we can find it later in our search.”
My hand tightens around my cane. The knuckles bleed white. This has always been difficult. But if it makes my innocence more believable, then I will show my body’s history to anyone who will look. I take the device, scan in, and pull up my copious medical records: full-body scans and prescriptions for drug cocktails that Ma worked overtime to pay for. And still we are in debt.
Xenon glances over the file, nodding. He avoids my eyes, his mouth frowning. “This is . . . this is not an easy life, Miss Yun. Aren’t there more specialized drugs you can try? All I see here are anticoagulants, stabilizers, and painkillers.”
I shrug. “It is what I can afford.” Two years ago, an RCD drug called Telomar hit the market. G-Moon Three welcomed the drug with open arms, but clinical performance has been poor, especially for middle-to-advanced cases like mine. And the drug is too expensive to not work.
“This disease explains your interest in Investigator Eppi’s lab,” remarks Xenon.
“I have always loved science,” I say, a defensive reflex. As a small child, I would peek under rocks and explore the arid gorge outside Honey Crater, looking for dead bugs in the thin blades of desert grass. I took them home and identified their species so I could learn about them. Species so different from us that we can only imagine their experiences.
“Yes, but it seems to me,” Xenon says, “that your illness is a major reason why you work in this specific lab. A lab that’s largely funded by ExSapiens Biotechnologies.”
I suppress my impatience. Everyone has heard of ExSapiens, the company dedicated to eradicating disease and injury across the moons. My anti-inflammatory medicine is an ExSapiens drug—no side effects, no vomiting. As far as I know, Telomar has been their only failure. And they provide most of the money that Cal uses—used—to run his lab.
“I wanted to work at Cal’s lab because of him,” I tell Xenon. “Because he discovered antichronowaves . . .”
Xenon cuts me off. “I’ve heard of chronowaves, but antichronowaves?”
“Yes. They move in reverse from the time continuum. Cal has demonstrated their potential to slow cellular damage and aging.”
When I applied to the Institute, I listed Cal’s lab as my first and only choice. I wanted to learn about my disease. I also wanted to know why so few One-ers get sick in the course of their century-long lives. Above all, I wanted to search for a cure—or at least an effective treatment that could prevent the agony of advanced RCD.
In my worst moments, Cal would take my face in his palms, stare into my eyes, and promise me we would find answers. My panic would trickle away. My heart would slow until I could count the beats again.
Sometimes I loathed that Cal had so much power over me. Sometimes I wished that he was cruel or old or . . . distant, so that everything could be simple between us. But I would not have accomplished so much in so short a time with an investigator who expected less of me. Or even with Jaha, who was overly solicitous, always too eager to help me, until she realized I rejected most of her offers. People clucking over me makes me feel even more self-conscious about being disabled.
“Aryl Fielding told me that you worked with Investigator Eppi late in the evenings,” Xenon says, watching my face. “At any point, did he make inappropriate comments? Or touch you?”
I blink. It takes me several moments to process his words.
“All these cases come across my desk about older men preying on young girls. Did he ever make you feel uncomfortable?”
“No!” My voice shakes. “Cal advised me on my experiments, most often with other people in lab. Sometimes we worked later than the others but he never . . . He stopped me from falling over sometimes. He helped me carry things.”
I do not say that Cal helped me extract my own cells, an intimate act I will never share with anyone else. It’s okay, my girl, he’d say, taking the needle out of my arm. No one had ever called me that before. Not even my mother.
“Everyone I’ve asked says you were his favorite,” Xenon says. “That must’ve meant you enjoyed being in lab.”
“I did,” I say. Tears are blurring my vision again.
“I wonder,” Xenon says, “if perhaps you wanted something from Investigator Eppi that he couldn’t give.” He leans toward me, his hard features growing soft. “I see this case half a dozen times a year. The suspect killing someone because that was the only way to possess them.”
“I got everything I needed from Cal, sir,” I say.
It is a lie.
“I hear you’re . . . a lone star, Ver, at the Institute. A girl on a new moon. It makes sense that you wouldn’t have many friends. But you had Cal. Caring, handsome, brilliant. Someone who spent hours with you every night.”
I hate where this is going. I am dizzy with pain, the kind biology can neither explain nor cure. It is difficult for my mind to pick out words that express what I mean to say.
“Cal was my mentor. Nothing more,” I say, tears falling freely. “He was a good man.”
Xenon sighs, and I hear his frustration seeping out. “That’s what makes this so puzzling, Miss Yun. If he was such a good man, then why didn’t you let him live?”
Chapter 11
Aryl
Ver comes back with her face blotchy and red. My heart wants to comfort the poor girl, though my brain wonders whether she’s stuck to our agreement. I hope her tears are real—hope she didn’t spend the last half hour shoveling suspicion off herself and onto me.
My own interrogation starts calmly enough. I lounge on the stool, thinking that the room is too small to hold me, the robot helpers, the desk, Xenon. From where I’m sitting, I could do a grand-battement and kick any one of them.
“Aryl Fielding,” Detective Xenon says, reading off his flexitab screen. “You’re seventeen years old, born in Celestine, G-Moon One. Correct?”
“Yeah.” Thinking of my jewel of a neighborhood makes me wish I could zip away on a vactrain. When I was growing up, my family’s apartment was the safest place on the three moons to me. The floor was always strewn with my stuff or my sister’s; the air smelled like the coconut milk my parents used to cook our food. Outside, other kids from Two played discdisc with tattered balls and sticks while older migrants cracked sunflower seeds over their chessboards.
“Beautiful city, Celestine, with that blue, blue lake,” Xenon says. “I’d love to retire there, away from this crystal desert. So, both your parents are alive and well?”
“Yeah,” I say, heart palpitating at the mental image of their faces. Alive? Definitely. Well? Nah.
“And you have one sister,” Xenon says. “Ester Fielding.”
“She’s thirteen and smarter than I’ll ever be.”
Xenon’s face breaks into a smile. “My daughter’s thirteen. Tough age. Lots of changes. Thank Pangu they make those new extendable clothes that grow with kids’ bodies.”
No way will Mom and Dad pay hundreds of Feyncoins for smart clothing when Ester can wear my hand-me-downs. But I don’t need to mention that to the detective.
He squints at my profile on his screen. “Your family’s not originally from this moon, correct?”
I’ve never liked that question—it makes me feel like I don’t belong on the only moon I’ve ever known. “My parents are from Broadleaf Falls, G-Moon Two,” I say quietly, like it’s something to be ashamed of.
