Toxic

by Lydia Kang

  Finally, we reach her room, where she had changed before. A blue door flashes brighter blue, before disintegrating its membrane into nothingness.

  “Here we are.” She finally lets go of my hand. It feels rather empty now, and I hold it in my other hand, as if it’s injured. Hana motions for me to enter and turns around to face me, almost like a dance partner.

  I look around. It’s really small. There’s a tiny replica kitchenette, complete with small oven, burner top, and little shelves full of bottles of spices and cooking utensils. A pair of tongs adorns the prep top. A black lacquer chest sits against the rounded, opposite wall, inlaid with mother-of-pearl in the shape of mountains, hazy clouds, and beautiful cranes. There is no bed. One tiny ebony table sits low to the ground—I guess you’re supposed to sit on the floor to eat there. There is an area where a vid screen should be, but it’s shut off. That’s it.

  Wow. Even my jail cell was less bleak than this. I had vid screens (with limited input, of course—mostly movies heavy on the morality lessons); I had pictures of my family up (actually, that was the jail’s addition, not mine—they liked to psychologically manipulate me into maximum guilt). They even let me have my watch repair station, with the sharp tools getting sucked into the wall at lights-out, or any moment my physiology sensors showed I wasn’t safe to use them.

  I want to look through the lacquer box. But she sees me staring at it, and she steps in front of it.

  “So, you sleep—”

  “In there,” she says, pointing to the opposite wall. “Will you let Cyclo take you, too?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “To sleep. It is the only way we sleep on this ship. Surely you knew that.”

  I run my hand through my hair. “That’s not how I sleep, and I don’t plan on it. I’m here to observe you, not be the guinea pig myself.”

  “Pig?” Her eyebrows raise. “I’m not a—”

  “It’s an expression. Never mind.” I reach into the pocket of my vest and take out a card. It looks like a regular plastrix card that might hold all sorts of data, but this is where my smallest drones are parked. I have a few medium-size micro and centimeter drones in my pockets, and the larger ones are still parked on the bridge with all our equipment.

  I love my nanos, though. These are invisible to a human’s normal vision, and electrostatically sealed to the card for safekeeping. I blink twice, and the driver program on my holofeed chip turns on. A translucent green screen pops up in a half-bubble around my face. On it, I can see one of fifty nanobots all charged and ready to deploy. Some are ready for aeronautic driving, some for aquatic, some for drilling down into solid tissue. I start mentally planning how I can drive one into her ear or nose. I could even drill one into her skin, stuck there gathering limited amounts of information. A second, if all goes well. Then I can drive one into her vascular system and park it in a capillary inside her brain.

  I start by flying about ten into the nearby blue wall itself. And about ten seconds later, they all immediately register as nonfunctional on my holofeed. Damn. This ship just pinched my bots into oblivion.

  Hana looks at the card with curiosity, not realizing what I just did, and not seeing the streaks of red lighting up behind her—I guess the ship might be cussing at me or something. Her eyes go from my card to the bubble of information between us, like the rest of the story is hidden in there somewhere.

  “Okay. So, here’s the thing. I have these nanobot drones, and I’d like to drive one to hang out in your body to record your information before you go to sleep.”

  “What about the story? The girl with the butterfly wings?” she asks, backing away.

  I step back, giving her space. “I’ll tell you later. I promise.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Actually, she’s my sister.”

  “And you haven’t listened to her message? Why not? I would do anything to hear a message from my mother.”

  “Well, that’s not the same thing. Never mind,” I say, irritated. “But first, I have these drones—”

  “No.” Her fingers spread out, reaching for the wall behind her. She shakes her head no, no, no.

  I thought she’d be fine with this, which is ridiculous. If I met someone and they wanted to shove bots into me, I’d freak out, too.

  “You know, it doesn’t even tickle. I’ve done this a million times. It won’t cause any harm.” I’m still holding the card up in my hand, wondering if my hesitation means that I already just voided my contract. I can wheedle and lie and get these drones into any organism I’ve ever wanted, but I don’t want to do that.

  But Callandra.

  Isn’t she more important than what Hana wants?

  “No,” Hana repeats. She takes another step back to the wall, even though I’ve already moved backward myself. Cyclo’s walls are starting to flash two colors—white, which I’m coming to realize means a warning of sorts—and green. Though, turning my head, the green is only in a place she can see, not me.

  Disappointment pulls my shoulders down. No means no, and it also means I’m going to fail the promises I’ve made to my sister.

  “Damn it,” I mutter, and look down at my card, which had a bot ready to deploy. But with a flick of my eyes, I shut it down. “Damn. Okay. I won’t.”

  Colors flash in the periphery of my vision. Something wet smacks against my right shoulder and back, hard, and I stumble forward.

  “Cyclo! No!” Hana yells, her hand reaching out for me.

  I look to see what’s hit me, and it’s a giant red wave of Cyclo’s matrix that’s risen up, thick like an amorphous limb, and attached to my arm and upper back. I holler, jumping forward to escape it when something hot and caustic burns my skin.

  It’s dissolved through my jacket, and searing pain encases my shoulder.

  I roar with pain.

  “Cyclo, stop it! He wasn’t going to hurt me!” Hana yells and pleads, and somehow I’ve fallen to my knees, clawing at the thing attached to my body, trying to push it away. But you can’t push away something that’s amorphous and half liquid. My hand gets stuck, and the acid-burn sensation encases my hand.

  I hear Hana yelling more, until she stops. The agony is so bad I can’t even scream anymore. Her voice comes through the white-hot pain blotting out my thoughts. It is calm, low, commanding.

  “Stop. This. NOW.”

  And then Cyclo’s reaching arm retreats from against my body. There is still pain, but it’s the pain of air touching raw nerve endings, thousands of them, like someone has plucked every nerve with a knife, over and over again.

  I’m still kneeling on the floor when Hana rushes to me.

  “Oh no. She’s burned right through your skin. I didn’t know she could do that. She must have thought you were hurting me.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” I gasp. “You said no. You said no,” I repeat, over and over again, as if remembering will somehow make the pain go away. “Oh God. How am I going to do my work?” My body is shaking from the pain and shock. Tears pour from my eyes, saliva from my mouth because my body is going haywire. I look over to my right and see the raw, glistening, bloody flesh of my arm and shoulder. The skin is gone. It’s been burned completely away.

  “She can help. I can help. Let me…”

  Hana starts tugging at the remnants of my jacket and shirt, in tatters from being eaten away by the ship. I let her. I’m in no position to refuse her help. The cool air hits my torso, and normally it might feel good, but when part of your skin’s been flayed off, it doesn’t much matter. When she heads for my pants, I gasp.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “We have to go inside Cyclo, to heal your skin. She’ll be able to rebuild your collagen—”

  “No!” I yell. “It just tried to kill me—I’m not going inside it!”

  Hana puts her hand on my good shoulder, and her
other one touches my cheek. “She was trying to help. She was. She didn’t understand—I promise we can fix it. I know we can.”

  “This ship is falling apart. I can’t go in there,” I say, panting because I’m so short of breath for probably terrible reasons.

  “I’ll go with you. I’ll be with you. She won’t hurt you if I’m protecting you. It was a mistake, I promise. Look, she’s so apologetic.”

  My eyes look left, and the color of her room is flashing in peaches and pinks. Soothing colors. If a color could mean regret, I suppose that would be it. I take another look at my shoulder—and I can’t even see what’s happening on my upper back but half of it is screaming in pain. The medical equipment we brought with the Selkirk isn’t anything that can handle this severe a burn. We have no regenerative medicines because we’re supposed to die here, after all. But I can’t die without finishing my work.

  My sister.

  “Okay,” I say. My entire body is shaking so hard now, and I’m shivering like I’ve never shivered, not when we depressurized on a smuggling trip to Vega, or when I was mining ragnium on one of its distant, three-hundred-degrees-below-zero moons. “You promise”—my teeth are chattering so hard I can barely talk—“that it’s not going to kill me in there?”

  “What is it they say? ‘Over my dead body.’ No, I will not let Cyclo harm you. We communicate even better inside her matrix. Almost instantly. It’s probably why she reacted so—our verbal skills aren’t as good as our chemical communication.”

  I’m too tired and dizzy and in pain to even respond now, aside from a weak nod. Vaguely, I notice she is shedding her clothes until she’s bare and naked. It speaks to how absolutely wretched I feel that I’m not even remotely happy that a naked girl is next to me, yanking off the rest of my clothes. She pulls me, gently, toward a wall that is clear as blue ice—no curving endoskeleton marring the inside of the matrix as I’ve seen on other parts of the ship.

  Hana goes behind me, wraps her right hand around my waist, and threads her fingers into my left hand.

  “I’ll be with you. You’ll be all right, I promise.”

  Everything happens very quickly. My legs go numb, fixed in place. I look down to see the blue goo of Cyclo quickly climbing up my legs. Hana, with her arms around me and her warm body against my back, has begun to sink rapidly into the wall, as if she had fallen horizontally into a soft bed of glassy water. With me in her arms, careful so she’s not touching my wounds, we start to fall into the blue, too, sending my chest into a riot of fast, furious breaths I can’t control.

  “Hana,” I say, but when I turn my head, just over my shoulder I see that her face has already fallen beneath the surface and the blue has begun to take me as well. She closes her eyes in complete and utter surrender. The edges of blue come over her face until they reunite as liquid mercury does when it touches itself on a table—reconnecting, becoming one united mass again.

  My bots and the card are lying on the floor in front of me, unlaunched.

  I can feel Cyclo’s matrix oozing around my upper torso and neck, and my skin has gone numb. It’s covering my shoulder and the pain is already receding. Now, it’s climbing around my waist—skin temperature, which is even more freaky than if it were cold. Like I’m being eaten by a blood-warm tide.

  “Wait. Wait,” I say, but I don’t know who I’m saying it to, because Hana has been mostly pulled into the matrix behind me, and I’m halfway in, too. In a moment of panic, I reflexively slap at it where it’s encased my waist.

  Mistake. The goo holds on to my hand fast, stickier than anything I’ve ever touched. It doesn’t feel like it’s surrounding me—it feels like it’s incorporating me. My skin tingles in an almost narcotic way. My body is being forced under a wave of Cyclo’s matrix toward the wall where the girl has been sucked in. The goo is rising up to my neck now, touching my lower lip. In seconds, I won’t be able to breathe. I won’t be able to yell for help.

  Hana’s arms are still around me, and they squeeze, perhaps to comfort me, but the squeezing only makes me realize I only have a few more breaths before I can’t breathe anymore.

  My visor is still working, but the matrix will soon ooze over my forehead holofeed unit. Quickly, before I can even think, I flit my pupils up, right, right, blinking rapidly. On the card, a light blinks, activating a single nano drone. Using my visual-only command, I fly it straight into my open mouth—I can’t scream if I tried—and down past my epiglottis, trachea, past my right mainstem bronchus. It goes left, right, left, until it finds a globular alveolus. There, it’ll bore straight through the membrane between cells and settle into the flow of my bloodstream.

  If this ship kills me, at least I’ll die knowing this: even in death, this data will help repay the wrongs I’ve done.

  As the blue matrix flows down my throat, fills my nostrils and ears, and blackens my already numbed consciousness, it’s not my last thought, though. Only one regret plays over and over in my mind:

  I never listened to the goodbye message on my pendant.

  But now, it’s too late even for regrets.

  Chapter Nine

  HANA

  He struggles. So very much.

  If he knew better, he would know that Cyclo is here to help. Here to make him relax, to nourish him, and bring him to a sense of equilibrium and peace.

  Of course, Cyclo did attack him, and for that, Cyclo and I need to have a talk.

  A serious talk.

  And then—and then—I have to find a way to survive. To help Cyclo survive. To find Mother. The idea of death coming to snatch me before I’m ready makes me so utterly sad, but it also makes something glow like a fireplace ember within me.

  I cannot die here. Not when I’ve only just hatched out of my room after seventeen years.

  But first, I remind myself, Cyclo must help Fenn.

  Cyclo has pulled us deep into her matrix, well beyond the wall of my room where I am usually stored during my sleep. Fenn has writhed about so much that my arms no longer encase his body. Some distance away, she is pulling him along. Fenn struggles within Cyclo’s unseen grasp. Within the blue, glass-like thickness between us, he is kicking and punching. At what? Cyclo has no face that can be struck. She has no heart that can be broken. And she will keep him down for as long as is necessary to subdue him.

  I want to go to him, to tell him to be calm, but I’m also terrified to touch him again. Pulling him in the matrix was one thing—he was agitated and sick, and this was the only way to get help. But now I am nervous. I have never been so shy about being so bare. And he is, too, and I’m almost afraid to set my eyes on him.

  But Fenn is struggling. He doesn’t understand. He needs me.

  So I swallow my nervousness and tell Cyclo to draw me closer to him. My body is gently pushed forward. Technically, I don’t need garments here, but I wish I had them now. Relaxation is buffed into my skin, making my anxiousness wane. My oxygen levels are being kept high and normal. A sound not unlike a gurgle transmits through the gel. I open my eyes again and blink, willing my eyes to adjust to the refractive properties of the matrix.

  Fenn is closer, eyes open and frantic, limbs still struggling and flailing. The raw and flayed skin on his shoulder and arm ooze blood, pink clouds diffusing into Cyclo’s matrix. They disappear in seconds, as she absorbs them. Fenn doesn’t understand that Cyclo is helping. What she communicates isn’t a planetary language. More a chemical trail that just…makes sense.

  He sees me, and in his flailing panic he reaches forward and grasps my wrist. That’s when I realize why he’s struggling so—he’s not getting enough oxygen from her matrix into his skin, or down into his lungs, because of his panic.

  And now, Fenn is drowning.

  I have to tell her what to do. She’s fighting him, too, and her efforts to sedate him chemically aren’t working. I can feel the sedatives seeping closer to me, making my
own skin numbed here and there, because they’re stirring away from the small hurricane of movement around Fenn.

  You need to calm him, I say.

  It’s not working. He’s resisting.

  He needs more oxygen!

  My ability to concentrate oxygen is slower than before. I can do it, but he’s consuming too much oxygen in his excited state. Hana—he’ll die if we can’t calm him.

  Next time, don’t attack him, Cyclo. He meant no harm.

  I read harm in his movements. Perhaps I read them wrong.

  Perhaps, I think. That is troublesome, and worrisome, but not for us to unpack now.

  He needs oxygen now. Right now, he must be calmed.

  I let his hands find mine, and he squeezes them frantically. He struggles, eyes open and wild, and I pull myself closer so he can focus on my face. I stare at him through the glassy blue between us, trying to tell him as best as I can, without speaking.

  Fenn. Stop struggling. Relax. Please.

  Fenn sees me, but he shakes his head and opens his mouth. A few bubbles issue into the gel, trapped there. A cry caught in time, as a mosquito might be captured in tree sap, only to turn into a fossil, then a jewel—beauty in death.

  I can’t let him die. His eyes are rolled up in his head. His mouth is still silent, open.

  Cyclo. Help him. Help him breathe.

  Should I?

  I pause. What kind of question is that? Doesn’t Cyclo’s entire existence revolve around the care and keeping of her crew? But then, Fenn and his group aren’t her crew. What is her responsibility to them? To Fenn? Which is when I realize—I have no allegiance to anyone or anything but Mother and Cyclo. And now Cyclo is all I have, and soon she will no longer be. What I need is not what this blowfly cloud of a crew wants—they have come to settle on the carcass that Cyclo is becoming, according to what they’ve told me.

  I can make my own decision, can’t I? My own demands?

  Hana. This boy. What shall I do? Cyclo reminds me there are other tasks at hand. Fenn’s life hangs in the balance, and for the first time, Cyclo tells me I am in charge of someone outside of myself. I think of something that Mother once told me: