Emilio and Mitsuko followed us out into the hall.
“I mean, I know they all have genius IQs, but how stupid do you have to be?” Mitsuko grumbled. “Acting like animals. Honestly.”
“Some people can’t handle discomfort,” Emilio said. “Even for a few minutes.”
“Then they don’t need to go to space,” I said.
Hanna nodded firmly. “Agreed.”
I flung open the door to our room and marched inside, my stomach grumbling. Hanna went straight to the bathroom, and a few minutes later I heard the shower turn on. Nice, I thought. I’m covered in sweat, but she doesn’t even ask if I want to go first.
Mitsuko knelt by her footlocker while I sat on the edge of my bed to take off my shoes.
Emilio plopped down on his back on Giselle’s old bed. “So this is what a girls’ room looks like. Not bad.” He laced his fingers behind his head and surveyed the room approvingly.
“You’ve never been in a girl’s room before?” I made a derisive snort.
He made an attempt at earnest puppy-dog eyes and traced his index finger over his chest. “Cross my heart.”
“I don’t even believe that a little bit. What about all those girlfriends you were talking about last night?”
He sighed. “You caught me, Lola. I am a geek of the highest caliber. It may surprise and sadden you to hear that back in Denver, I was not considered the ladies’ man I am here.”
I rolled my eyes, not able to keep from laughing. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh so loud. And Denver, really? You don’t look like a mountains-and-snow guy to me.”
Emilio sat up and spun around, his cheeks flushed red. “What, just cuz I’m kinda Mexican? You should see me snowboard. I haven’t even told you my last name. I could be Polish, for all you know.”
“I thought Esteban was your last name,” Mitsuko said from the foot of her bed.
He shook his head with a mischievous gleam in his eyes.
“So, what? Your name is Emilio Esteban Kowalski?”
He grinned. “No, actually it’s Campbell. Took my stepdad’s name. Looks can be deceiving, Lola, that’s all I’m saying.” He propped his chin in his hand. “Anyway, where are you guys from? I grew up in Denver and California.”
“San Antonio by way of San Francisco,” Mitsuko chirped. “But I went to school in Japan. That’s where I met Michael, actually. He was stationed there at the same time.”
I shook my head, kicking my shoes under the bed. I hated telling people I was from Alabama. My background was so boring compared to everyone else here, their lives so cosmopolitan. “My dad works at Marshall.”
“Where’s that?”
“You’re smart. You’ll figure it out.”
Emilio groaned and fell back onto the bed. “Man, I miss my phone. I keep getting the urge to Google stuff.”
Mitsuko looked at him askance. “You seriously don’t know where Marshall Space Flight Center is? What kind of wannabe astronaut are you?”
“Here I am, starving to death, and you’re being mean to me.” He held his hands to his stomach. “I feel like I’m dying. I mean, not just regular dying. I mean like how a star dies, imploding in on itself until it tears a hole in space-time and starts consuming light itself. That’s how hungry I am.”
Mitsuko tossed her hair over her shoulder and stood up. “You ate, like, three cheesesteaks last night. How are you starving?”
“I’m a growing boy!”
Mitsuko came over and dropped something small on Emilio’s stomach. He grunted and popped up.
“What is this thing?” he asked, holding up a shiny rectangular object.
Mitsuko smiled and handed me one, too. It was a peanut butter granola bar in a foil wrapper. “Breakfast, my darlings. You’re welcome.”
I felt a deep, overwhelming surge of affection for Mitsuko just then. It was either affection, or maybe stomach acid. “Thanks, Mom.”
“Dude, Suko, you’re awesome. Muchas gracias.” Emilio tore into the foil wrapping, took a bite, and spoke with his mouth full. “I knew I made the right choice hanging out with you guys.”
Mitsuko sat next to me and we unwrapped our breakfast together. “I always like to be prepared,” she said. “I’m sure this is temporary. NASA has no vested interest in starving us to death.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure,” Emilio said. “Those guys have some secrets.”
“What do you mean?” I asked a little too quickly. “What do you know?”
“Nothing,” he said. “That’s precisely the point. Didn’t you wonder at all how the government is getting the money to fund this thing? And why, for God’s sake, they’re recruiting from high schools? Lola, you’re, like, what? Eighteen?”
I felt a sting. “Barely, yeah.”
He swung his arms for emphasis. Granola bits flew. “See? Who does that? There’s gotta be a reason, that’s all I’m saying. Not that I’m not grateful for the opportunity, obviously.” He directed that last bit, loudly, to an empty corner of the ceiling. “Just in case you all are listening. I AM VERY GRATEFUL TO NASA.”
Mitsuko laughed and chucked a pillow at his head, but I didn’t smile. The chill on my skin wasn’t from the air-conditioning anymore. “No, you’re right. It’s all off. Since the beginning. I mean, I’d never heard about this mission, and out of the blue, my boss just up and asks me if I want to go. I didn’t apply or anything.”
I was surprised by their sudden, rapt attention.
“Me too,” Emilio said quietly. “I was working in a lab in Denver when I got an invite.”
“Working for NASA?” I asked.
“Indirectly, yeah.”
“Same with me,” Mitsuko said. “Robotics testing facility in Austin.”
“Weird,” I said. “I was an intern. I never did anything important. And I’d started only a few months ago.”
“That is weird,” Mitsuko agreed, her eyebrows creasing in worry. But they smoothed out again quickly, almost as if she forced it away. “Well, hey, God’s supposed to work in mysterious ways.”
“You think God’s responsible?” Emilio asked, shaking his head. “It’s not God, Suko, it’s the government. We all got picked, somehow. And that’s great and all. But why us?”
This conversation had grown way too serious for me all of a sudden. But some switch had been tripped in my mind, and I couldn’t stop it now. “You guys . . . you don’t happen to be geneered?”
Mitsuko nodded. “Yeah, actually. You too?”
But Emilio was shaking his head. “Not me. Conceived naturally, baby.”
“There goes my hypothesis,” I sighed, sitting back against the wall.
“What, you think they’re picking kids with enhanced DNA? Okay, that’d be a good reason for all the under-twenty-five-year-olds. But geneering is a lot more common these days. So maybe it’s just a coincidence,” Mitsuko said.
“Yeah. Like I said, just a thought.”
Emilio leaned across the space between the beds and patted me on the back. “Good idea, though.”
The sound of running water in the bathroom had stopped.
“Emilio, if you’re still here, get out!” Hanna’s voice, muffled yet somehow still shrill, came through the bathroom door.
Emilio’s face shifted into his usual mischievous smile. “Oh, it’s okay, you can come out in a towel. I won’t be offended.”
“LEAVE!”
Emilio looked to us, eyebrows raised. Mitsuko jerked her thumb in the direction of the door and I shrugged.
He left and closed the door behind him. Almost immediately, he poked his head back in and mimicked a high-pitched girly voice. “Okay, he’s gone, you can come out now!”
A pillow flew toward his head but hit a closed door. Hanna darted out of the bathroom in a towel, tapped the door shut, and locked it, just to be sure.
Shaw apologized for the breakfast mix-up, promised it wouldn’t happen again, and started us talking about ways we could circumvent conventional logic about f
aster-than-light travel. We started out fairly routine, but as he kept encouraging more outside-the-box thinking, the ideas flying around the room became more absurd. Using nuclear explosions and antimatter to distort space-time. Somehow creating micro black holes inside a reactor to power engines. It was wild but fun, and diverting enough that the two hours flew by.
Stomach growling with a vengeance now, I headed cautiously toward the cafeteria. It was as if the hiccup this morning hadn’t even happened. Food had magically reappeared in even greater quantities than usual. I got in line and loaded my plate with chickpea salad and tropical fruit.
Emilio was waving me over to his table frantically, where Hector, Anton, and Hanna were already sitting. But I looked past them.
I craned my neck over the sea of talking heads to the leaderboards. And blinked.
There were no longer twenty-five candidates.
Cliff and his cafeteria followers from this morning, including Trina and a few others, had been eliminated.
Gone, just like that. As if they’d never existed.
My name had moved up to tenth place.
I sat down with a white-hot glow in my chest and reveled in it. Smug superiority. Triumph. Victory.
Emilio had stacked three sloppy joes on his plate along with fistfuls of fries and some Mediterranean roasted vegetables. “Hey, ’Ola,” he said, showing a mouth full of ground beef. “Oh my God, I forgot how good food tastes.”
I’d broken into the top ten. Mitsuko’s name was right above mine. Hanna, though, was above both of us, at number seven. Emilio, number eight.
Luka the Boy Wonder was still number one. Numbers two through five were a grab bag of kids: Kendra, the British engineering student and triathlete; Rachel, a white valedictorian and volleyball player not much older than me; and Boris, the Russian kid built like an ox. The only other Indian girl left, Pratima, was number five, and Nasrin number six.
I turned back around. “I guess they frown on rulebreakers after all.”
Everyone else was relaxed and smiling, having survived the latest round. But inside I was quietly smoldering. All of my “friends” were ranked higher than me. Hanna, Emilio, Mitsuko, me.
Every name above mine made my skin feel hot and antsy, as if everyone knew I wasn’t good enough. Why was I last? What were they doing that I wasn’t? What invisible rubric were they using to grade our performance?
“I’m going to the gym tonight,” I announced.
Emilio’s eyebrows perked up. “Hey, I’ll join you. I have to go get my head shrunk first, but I can meet you there.”
I hadn’t exactly asked for volunteers, but of any of them, I minded Emilio’s company least. He might even be helpful as a spotter.
Hanna shook her head. “I don’t do weights. It’s mostly guys in there.”
“So?” I asked. “You lose muscle tone and bone density in space. Especially women. We need to be as prepared as possible.”
She shrugged and didn’t look at me.
“Just you and me, then, Lola,” Emilio said, raising his arm to wipe sloppy joe from his chin. I grimaced and shoved a napkin into his chest.
After Copeland’s class, where she tested us verbally about the cryogenic capsule blueprint and made us brainstorm all the ways it could fail—and outline plans to prevent those failures—I stopped by my room to change. Emilio told me he planned to be finished with Felix around nine thirty, so I had a little time to kill.
Nasrin, Pratima, and Kendra were chatting outside one of the rooms, clustered tight together but not trying to keep their voices down. I slowed my pace out of curiosity.
“—bring in contestants from all over the world. The best and the brightest. But who’s always leading the board?” Pratima was saying. “The blond, blue-eyed white guy.”
“He’s supposed to be the son of a foreign diplomat. Maybe his dad bought him a few favors,” Nasrin said.
Kendra had her arms crossed over her chest. “Either way, I don’t like it.”
The thought made me bristle as I passed by, unable to stay and hear the rest of their conversation without being obvious. I had come here expecting a fair shake, an honest competition. But if it was useless from the start because they’d already picked their chosen one, then what was the point? I flashed back to meeting Luka at Marshall. He’d been there talking to my boss. Why? What had they really been doing? Had Mr. Finley given him a recommendation, too?
Maybe I was naïve. The space program definitely did not have an unblemished record when it came to equal rights; I knew that. But I’d thought—hoped—it wasn’t like that anymore.
Maybe Luka’s being here was political in some way, some kind of favor. But they wouldn’t go through this whole charade, spend all this money recruiting, training, and ranking us if they’d already chosen their candidate. Maybe Luka did have an unfair advantage. Either way, my goal was unchanged. I’d just have to make it obvious to everyone that I was the best.
When I got in the room, Mitsuko was lounging on her bed reading something from her NASA-issued tablet. “You’ve got mail.” She jerked her head toward my pillow, where a thin envelope was resting.
It was a single sheet of paper, folded twice and sealed. I tore it open, to immediate disappointment. Only two lines of text. The emptiness of the rest of the page made my heart sink.
It was an email message from my mother, printed and delivered by the staff. Our email was outgoing only, so all messages came to us on paper after approval by the censors or whoever.
I read those two lines four times and sank onto the edge of my bed.
“What’s it say?” Mitsuko asked. She laid her tablet on the pillow and perched up on her elbows.
I’d already memorized it. “‘Our dear Cassie. Your father and I are so very proud of you. I hope you are eating well and making friends. Best of luck. Love, Mom, Dad, Uncle Gauresh, and Dadi.’”
Mitsuko made a derisive snort. “Are your parents robots?”
“That’s just how they talk. They’re scientists.” But inside, I was thinking, That’s it? Papa didn’t even bother to write me himself? I mean, he wasn’t good at the face-to-face stuff, but usually he spoke pretty well through a computer. There wasn’t a single personal touch, despite it being from my mom.
“No big. They probably censor out a lot of stuff. For whatever reason.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
I stuffed the paper under my pillow and bent down to unlace my shoes. “Haven’t you gotten any mail?”
“Sure. Michael’s sent me a few little notes here and there. Nothing much. ‘Love you, baby, don’t do anybody I wouldn’t do’ is pretty much the gist of it. But that’s just him. Not a shred of outside news.”
“Seriously.” No phones, no internet. It was like living in a cave in the Dark Ages. “It’s kind of making me a little crazy, not knowing what’s going on out there.”
Mitsuko’s eyes went suddenly wide and she shook her head fiercely. I clapped a hand over my mouth.
Rule number one: You never say the c-word when you’re trying to get permission to be launched into space in a tiny metal tube with a handful of other humans and billions of dollars’ worth of technology.
If they really were listening—and I was paranoid enough not to rule out that possibility . . .
“But on the other hand, I have plenty to keep me busy here,” I said quickly. “And it’s easier to focus without all the distractions and technology.”
“Yeah, I totally know what you mean,” Mitsuko said, projecting her voice unusually loud. She smiled and winked. “So, anyway,” she began in her normal voice, coming over to sit opposite me on the unoccupied bed. “I hear you’re working out with Emilio tonight.”
“Yeah, in a little while. Want to come?”
She shook her head, her hair falling in glossy black sheets over her shoulder. “No. I just thought we could gossip about that for a while.”
I rolled my eyes and started to change into workout clothes. “What’s to gossip about?�
��
“You. A cute boy with a penchant for flirting. Alone in a room. Sweating. Grunting. You see where I’m going?”
“We won’t be alone, Suko. It’s a public place.” I pulled a fresh shirt over my head and secured my hair with an elastic. “And unlike some people, this is not just a giant dating pool for me. Stop being ridiculous.”
She scooted closer. “It isn’t ridiculous. Look, they’re sending one of us into space for a long time. Maybe even two of us. Surely you’ve read studies about the astronauts who lived in the space station, all the tensions that came up about the first few tries. There are going to be mixed-gender groups locked away together for a long, long time. NASA might be looking for people who are okay with being . . . you know, confined in a small space with people they’re attracted to.”
I stopped and stared at her. “You’re serious.”
“Deadly. Look, they’ve done studies. Mixed-gender groups worked best. Bonded-pair groups worked even better. Remember, we talked about it in Copeland’s class the other day. It’s just human nature.”
“So you’re saying I should sleep with Emilio.” I didn’t hide the derision in my voice.
“Maybe not now. But if it was just you and him for the next five years . . .”
I had to resist putting my hands over my ears. “I am not listening to this. Emilio’s just a boy. I’m not attracted to him. He’s like . . . like my little brother or something.”
“Cassie, he’s nineteen,” Mitsuko said gently.
I gave her a look. “He doesn’t act like it.”
She scooted closer to me, her eyebrows knitting. “Cass, have you never had a boyfriend before?”
Mitsuko had such a big-sister vibe, such an earnest, caring face, that I was tempted to confide in her. That I wasn’t interested in him because I’d never been interested in anybody. And I didn’t foresee that changing.
This is a competition. She is playing you.
I bent down to tie my shoes to escape, trying to ignore the burning in my cheeks. “All the boys at my school are idiots.”
Her hand wave was impatient, like swatting away a fly. “Goes without saying. But look, you’re a grown-up now, and this is a grown-up situation. I’m just trying to prepare you.”
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