I stepped away. We weren’t friends? Fine. Anyone who could reject a friendship like Emilio’s—sincere and freely given—was certainly not worth mine.
Emilio apparently didn’t feel that way. “Shut up,” he said. “I don’t deserve that, and neither does Cassie. We’ve never been anything but supportive to you. So what, you flub one test. You burn your bridges so you can wallow in self-loathing? That’s really how you’re choosing to deal with this?”
“Who cares about your score?” I said, trying halfheartedly to follow Emilio’s lead. “You finished it, didn’t you?” Awkwardly, I reached out but then changed my mind, my hand hovering in midair before retreating behind my back.
She shot me a withering stare and then snapped at Emilio. “Don’t you get it? I’m out. That test was not about solving puzzles or pushing buttons, it was to see how we react under pressure. And I just showed them how completely, utterly shitty I am at it. I panicked. I couldn’t even find my way out of that damn igloo. There’s no way they’re going to put me in a rocket after this.”
“Are they kicking you out?” I asked quietly.
She shrugged and looked away, her anger suddenly gone, leaving her almost visibly deflated. “No one has told me anything. But what does it matter? I might as well go home. I’ll definitely be in the bottom now, anyway.”
“Do you want to stay?” Emilio’s voice had gone quiet and low. I hadn’t realized how deep his serious voice was.
Hanna stared at the tile a long time. I was about to grab Emilio and get the hell out of there when she finally answered, her voice a ghost. “Yeah.”
Emilio crossed his arms. “Then act like it.”
He turned around and left the room.
I hurried to catch up with Emilio out in the hall. “Why do you even bother with her?”
He didn’t look at me. In fact, he seemed deflated, his hands limp at his sides, all the fire from a second ago extinguished. He stopped walking and stared at me until I shifted uncomfortably. “Why do I bother with her? Why do I bother with you, Cass? Or anyone here?”
It was like whiplash. I went stiff, my heart leaping into my throat.
Emilio’s brown eyes continued to evaluate me, and I didn’t like the person he was seeing. He spoke like I’d never heard him speak before. “Do you ever think about what other people are going through? You and Hanna, you’re like the same person. Not a lot of differences there. Same ruthless, win-all-or-die-trying attitude. Except she just found out something about herself that might mean the end of her dream. Forever. Maybe try some empathy.”
I was stunned, silenced, embarrassed. “You didn’t exactly mince your words back there.”
“Sometimes it’s necessary.”
“Well, why is it your job to motivate her? Why do you care if she leaves?”
A muscle in his jaw jumped, as if there were words he was biting back. His eyes shot down the hall and returned to me. “Maybe, Cass, you should ask yourself why you don’t care.”
And he walked away.
NINE
I MET MITSUKO in the hall after her psych eval and filled her in on Hanna.
She scoffed. “If she’s not getting kicked out, I hope she leaves.”
“Why?” I was still reeling from Emilio’s words. Ask yourself why you don’t care. That kept running circles around my head. He’d made me feel like a terrible human being, absent of empathy.
No, I corrected myself; he hadn’t made me feel that way. My actions had.
“‘If they can’t handle it, they shouldn’t be here,’” she quoted in a mimicry of Hanna’s voice. “Remember? And it seems like someone can’t handle it.” We headed to our room to change into running clothes.
She didn’t get to finish whatever admonishment she was preparing, because Hanna was standing in the middle of our room.
“Pissed off at me?” Hanna asked. She was back in her own clothes: jeans, a vaguely pink tank top and cotton jacket, her face scrubbed clean of makeup. She looked smaller than normal, like a child playing dress-up.
“Only returning the favor.” Mitsuko breezed past Hanna to plop herself down on her bed. “Are you here to say good-bye?”
“No.” Hanna crossed her arms over her chest. She’d pulled her hair back into a low ponytail and her face was impassive. “I’m going to go talk to them now. I was just changing.”
“Well, good-bye,” Mitsuko said. She went into the bathroom and closed the door. Hard.
Hanna stared at the door for a few seconds. Her fists balled up and then relaxed. Her eyes fell on me.
I didn’t have any clue what to say. So I shrugged.
Without a word, Hanna walked past me and out the door.
“Hey, hotties!”
Emilio slipped out of the classroom door at precisely the moment Mitsuko and I walked by, on our way back from the track. He wriggled his way around a handful of other classmates and butted in between us.
He put his arms around each of our shoulders and I cringed away. “Sweaty,” I said by way of explanation. “We’ve been running.”
“Oh, is that why you’re wearing running shoes? Funny how I didn’t notice.” He jerked his head toward Mitsuko. “Is she all caught up on the gossip?”
“I am,” Mitsuko said haughtily. Emilio still had his arm around her. Funny—she never seemed to get sweaty. Why couldn’t my parents, when picking the genetic traits they wanted in their future daughter, have thought, “Oh, and let’s have her sweat slightly less than normal, too”? But no.
And now I was thinking about my parents again. I mentally shoved those thoughts away.
“Hey, Cass? You coming?” Mitsuko and Emilio were poised at the door to the cafeteria, waiting.
“Uh, no. I need to go take a shower real quick, I think. But I’ll meet you later.”
Mitsuko shrugged and they headed in to dinner.
Once alone in the hall, I surreptitiously tried to figure out if I smelled as bad as I looked. Mitsuko popped her head back out and I jumped.
“Sorry.” She looked like she knew what I had been doing and was trying to keep from laughing about it. “But I thought you would want to see the leaderboard, like, immediately.”
My heart leaped. I followed her through the door into the cafeteria and craned my neck above the buffet line. And I stared.
Cassandra Gupta. Number four.
Luka was still ahead of me. But four. From ten.
“And that’s not all,” Mitsuko said drily.
My eyes slid down the boards, noting Mitsuko’s name now resting comfortably at nine.
And Hanna, at rock bottom.
Oh man. I hope she did go home. If she sees this, we’ll have to have her committed.
Some names had disappeared completely. So if Hanna was still there, that meant they thought she actually had a chance. Guess Emilio was right—it wasn’t time to discount Hanna just yet.
I stood there in shock, drinking in the pleasure at seeing my name so high, until I felt a tug on my sleeve.
“Lola, just come eat with us. You don’t smell that bad.”
I smacked his shoulder pretty hard, but he only rubbed it and grinned. “Fine,” I said, getting in the buffet line with them. “I was really just trying to be polite, but whatever.”
After dinner, Hanna was coming out of the door to our room just as Mitsuko reached for the doorknob. All three of us froze.
Mitsuko broke the standoff by walking right past Hanna and slamming the door. I stayed.
Hanna turned her eyes to me as if dreading my reaction. “Do you hate me now, too?” She sounded tired.
“No,” I said automatically. Emilio’s words still bounced around my ears like echoes. “Not your biggest fan at the moment, but I don’t hate you.”
The corner of Hanna’s mouth twitched downward. She’d never looked so unlike herself.
“What’d they say?” I asked. “The NASA people.”
She shrugged. “I’m not kicked out. Not that it matters. I know I’m in the b
ottom now.”
I couldn’t seem to find the anger I’d had earlier. She just looked so defeated. “Some people have already gone home over this. If they didn’t think you could make it, you’d be gone, too. You still have a shot. You have to fight for it.”
“Yeah.” She didn’t seem convinced.
“I’m not sure why Suko was so mad. When you were in the pool for so long, we were all really worried about you. That was probably . . .” My hand, unsure of what to do with itself, found the edge of the door frame. “Probably really scary.”
The whites of her eyes were almost pale blue; they seemed to swallow her irises. Her throat worked, up and down.
This awkward encounter stretched on a little too long. “Well, I’m glad you are okay and all.” I moved to pass her.
“Hey, Cassie.” She caught my wrist. “Thanks.”
TEN
IN THE MORNING, we were down to ten.
It didn’t make sense, the way they made the cuts. Hanna had been ranked at the bottom, and she was still here, eating cornflakes at a table by herself, chewing mechanically and staring into space. Marisol, who had done fine yesterday, was gone.
From our viewpoint, they seemed to have cut at random, not based on yesterday’s test.
Luka was number one. Kendra was number two. I was number three. After that, it was Mitsuko, Emilio, Anton, Giorgia, Pratima, Boris, and finally Hanna, at the bottom. But they weren’t finished with surprises yet—they were only getting started.
After breakfast, we were loaded onto a bus and driven out to an airstrip. Turned out we were going to ride the Vomit Comet after all.
I’d spent the night trying to do what Emilio had said: imagining switching places with Hanna. Imagining having some fatal flaw that threatened everything I’d ever wanted.
The feeling was not a good one.
After a night of claustrophobic nightmares, I made a little pact with myself: be kinder to Hanna.
Seated behind her on the bus, I watched the back of her blond head and wondered what was going on in there. She was still here—she hadn’t given up. She must know that staying meant facing her fears again and again, and maybe all for naught.
I had to respect that. And I wanted to be more like Emilio, who had a passion for life and who had genuine affection for just about everyone.
As we were getting strapped in to the specially outfitted little plane, I gave silent thanks to whatever it was that made me eat nothing but hash browns and apple juice that morning. The forty-minute parabolic flight alternating between free fall and double-g resulted in three of the ten candidates losing their breakfasts. Egg, ham, bacon, and—worst of all—cereal and globs of sour stomach-acid milk occasionally escaped the puke bags and floated into the cabin.
For the forty seconds or so that we were weightless, we were like kids on a playground, chasing one another around the padded open cabin of the plane, laughing and joyful. For forty seconds at a time, we weren’t competitors, but a bunch of kids fulfilling a dream.
Hanna looked a little green, but she managed to keep her stomach contents to herself. She hadn’t spoken to any of us since the night before. Hanna had separated from our group in a clean break, like an amputation.
I didn’t feel nauseous until the very last parabola, but by then I was having too much fun to worry about it. I didn’t think it was due to the motion sickness, but seeing other people vomit for a couple of hours eventually got to me.
Now that we were back on Earth, my nausea had faded, replaced instead by an electric energy that made sitting still incredibly difficult. I had felt zero-g. I’d seen my braid floating over my shoulder as if by magic. I’d somersaulted in midair. I’d zoomed around inside the padded cabin as easily as a fish swims through water. It was an unbelievable feeling. I felt alive. And I wanted more.
The euphoria lasted all the way until we got off the bus and headed back into the squat metal compound that was home. I had some lingering vertigo, a watery-legged feeling like you’d get coming back onto solid ground after spending hours at sea, so I plopped onto my bed to rest while Mitsuko took over the bathroom and turned on the shower. Hanna must’ve gone on to lunch without us; at least, I hadn’t seen her since getting off the bus.
I got about two minutes of shut-eye before a knock came at the door. It was a woman, blond hair pulled back into a sleek businesslike bun, wearing a blue flight suit and a stony expression, which immediately made my heart skip a beat. “Cassandra Gupta,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “Please follow me.”
Numb, and still a little wobbly, I followed her out and down the hall, hesitating only briefly to glance at the bathroom door. Mitsuko would wonder where I was when she emerged from the shower and the room was empty.
But her robotic pace didn’t slow, so I jogged to catch up.
She led me out a door I’d never seen used before and into the hot afternoon sunlight. I shaded my eyes and blinked. There was a black van parked on the curb with the side door open.
“Get in,” she said.
This was off script. I didn’t know who this woman was. But she was wearing a flight suit with the JSC logo, and I wasn’t in any position to question orders. I slid inside.
“Give me your left hand.” She slapped something like a plastic medical bracelet around my wrist, sealed it like a handcuff, and closed the door.
The inside of the van was air-conditioned and smelled like leather seats. There was a dark partition behind the driver, so all I saw was a shadowy figure in the seat in front of me. The outside windows were tinted, too, so dark they might have been curtains. Pretty sure that wasn’t legal.
I twisted the bracelet around and around my wrist, but there were no clues as to its purpose, no words or identifying marks. It was light as plastic, but stronger. Some kind of material I’d never seen before. It was translucent gray, with what appeared to be a tiny gold microchip embedded in the plastic. I couldn’t slip it off if I tried, and I had a feeling that scissors wouldn’t do me any good.
They hadn’t told me to pack my things. That was the good thing.
Why had I been tagged? And how long was I supposed to wait in this van before someone told me what the hell this was all about?
Apparently not long. The door slid open again, this time revealing Luka—looking as perplexed as I felt. I slid over to accommodate him, and the door was closed again. And we were moving.
“What’s going on?” I whispered, hurriedly clicking my seat belt into place.
He just shook his head, lips pressed tight together, and buckled up.
The driver kept going. With the windows tinted, I couldn’t tell trees from streetlights, couldn’t even hear if we passed other cars. I could hardly tell if the sun was still shining.
“Can you see anything?” I asked.
Luka shook his head, but continued to watch the windows.
“Theories?” I muttered. “I’ll take anything but silence.”
“Another test,” Luka said. “It seems we’ve been paired together.”
He had on a bracelet, too. We’d compared ours, and they seemed identical: thin, gray, nondescript but for the gold chip.
Just when I was beginning to get drowsy from the constant drone of the engine, we seemed to slow.
“How long do you think it’s been?” Luka asked quietly.
“Going by my stomach, not much more than two hours,” I said.
He gave me a quizzical look.
“If it was lunchtime, I’d be hungry.”
“Is that an accurate way to tell time?”
“In the absence of anything else? I’d say yeah. My biological hunger clock is pretty consistent.”
The van eventually came to a stop. We waited only a heartbeat or two before the door flew open, the muted sunshine hurting my eyes.
“Out,” barked the stone-faced woman. Luka and I tumbled out into the humidity. The woman shoved a pack in my arms, closed the door, got back into the van, and peeled out down a dirt road.
The two of us stood, dumbfounded, in the middle of nowhere. A chorus of cicadas and frogs filled the air, as thick as the humidity, but there was a heavy quiet underneath the noise—a blanket of silence that meant we were far from any cars, roads, or civilization. The sun was on its way toward full strength, but I was already sweating, my hair and shirt sticking to my skin.
“What’d she give you?” Luka asked, redirecting my focus.
I looked down at the backpack. It was bright orange, and not nearly as heavy as I felt like it should be. I was pretty sure now what kind of test this was going to be.
Together, we knelt on the dry ruts of the dirt road and emptied the bag. Contents: two solar blankets, a length of rope, compass, iodine tablets, a serrated knife, a first-aid kit, flint and steel, two fishing hooks and line, one large metal canteen (empty), a can of bug spray, a flashlight, two MREs shrink-wrapped in foil (pasta and vegetable flavor), two packs of crackers with peanut butter, a narrow tube of SPF 45, and a flare gun with two shots.
There was also a three-by-five laminated orange index card. I read aloud: “‘Your reentry capsule has veered off course and crash-landed outside of your intended landing zone. You recovered only your standard-issue wilderness survival kit from the capsule. It will take twenty-four hours for rescue workers to reach your location. In order to pass this trial, you must use the tools from your wilderness survival kit and make it to the rendezvous point in time to be rescued.’” I flipped the card over to see a crudely photocopied hiking map. “The rendezvous point is fifteen miles north of here.”
We shared a long look.
Luka squared his jaw. “Then we’d better start walking.”
We hiked in silence.
They must’ve dropped us in some kind of wildlife preserve, because it was pristine—for what looked like a swamp better suited to Louisiana. The dirt road we’d been dropped off on led away from the rendezvous point, so we had to hike through mushy underbrush pockmarked with mud that suctioned with every step.
After weeks of being stuck inside, seeing the outside world only through a barbed-wire-topped fence, the fresh air was intoxicating. Even the heat and the mosquitoes and the rough terrain couldn’t dampen my spirits at finally being somewhere else, being free.
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