The first morning on New America, the ocean resembled a smooth grey mirror that reflected nothing. Olivia’s voice chirped, “Wake up! I hope that you slept well.” At least she hadn’t watched me not sleep all night.
“I didn’t,” I said, blearily gazing at the wall. It wasn’t like Olivia had a face I could address. In those first few days, it was a struggle to carry on conversations with a disembodied voice. “Please take me home, or I’ll die from insomnia. I miss my family too much. Isn’t it your job to keep me alive?”
“Time will cure that troublesome homesickness,” she said, still chipper—her tone offended me more than the content of her words. “Eat your breakfast.”
Olivia had left a plate heaped with smoked fish and cherry tomatoes outside my cabin door. The true significance of that discovery didn’t sink in until later. Although it seemed weird that the ship could prepare and deliver a plate of food without any help, I was more concerned with the origin of the food. “Where does this come from?” I asked, wondering if she had to visit land to collect rations.
“A garden without dirt,” she said. “The founders modelled it after space station greenhouses.”
From that day onward, I spent eight hours a day doing two types of work: ship maintenance and gardening in the vast greenhouse of New America. Olivia actually believed that one prisoner could keep an entire city running. With every light fixture I replaced, another three burned out. I guessed the floating city was impressive in its prime. Lit up by wall-to-wall digital screens, powered by hundreds of machines that used the wind, sun, and waves to generate energy. But Olivia had inactivated the screens to conserve energy, since half the generators were busted.
She needed that energy for her eyes, which followed my every movement, and her voice. It was difficult to know when Olivia would speak. Sometimes, I could work for hours without hearing a peep. Other times, she rambled about the drama and lives of the founders.
During my first week tending the greenhouse, as I clipped red romaine leaves from mature lettuce plants, Olivia asked, “Have you gardened before?”
“Yes,” I said. “Why?”
“You have a green thumb.”
I looked at my hands; as expected, neither of my thumbs were green.
“It’s an idiom, Mona Lisa!” she said, laughing, as if I should know some obscure old phrase. “You’re good with plants.”
I didn’t tell her about our grandparents’ endemic garden and the springs and summers we spent weeding, planting, and tending plants under Grandpa’s watchful eye. Remember how he’d lounge in his hammock and holler out questions? “How much water did you use today? More than yesterday? See any thrips? That many? Might need to do something about those leaf suckers!” He said it was important to observe the ways of a garden ’cause although plants might not be able to talk, they show us what they need. In the greenhouse, I counted the number of cherry tomatoes on each vine, noted the carrots, onions, and potatoes that had sprouted, and kept track of every seed I collected or planted.
It became clear that something was wrong.
So I asked Olivia whether I could borrow a notebook and pencils.
“There aren’t any left,” she said. “Once you’ve fixed generator three, I’ll give you a personal tablet.”
I didn’t need all the functions of a tablet. I just wanted written verification that my mind could still keep track of a garden. The numbers weren’t adding up. There’d be twenty tomatoes on one vine in the afternoon and just eighteen tomatoes on the same vine the next morning. But when I asked Olivia, “Are you sure we’re alone?” she just laughed and went, “Don’t be silly. You’re the only girl on New America, Mona Lisa.”
“Food is going missing,” I said. “Somebody else is eating the vegetables at night.”
“No,” she said. “You’re confused. You miscounted. Humans make mistakes.”
“Not this time,” I said. I’d been so careful.
“When you fix generator three,” she promised, “and your tablet is fully charged, I’ll send you all twelve hours of video from last night. Nobody was in the greenhouse. Will that make you feel better, Mona Lisa?”
My sense of reality teetered like a ship on rough waters. “No,” I told her. “Never mind.”
You know how Grandma always says, “Old folks live in their memories”? In that respect, I felt a lot like an old woman at sea. Every night, after Olivia locked me in my cabin, I sat at the window and remembered. Do you remember those board games we always played in the middle of the night, when Mom and Dad thought we were sleeping? We’d hide the wooden checkerboard under my pillow and the bag of stone pieces under yours. Then, after the night went quiet, you’d set up the game. That was always your job, ’cause your hands were steadier than mine, all the better to place twenty-four stone chips on a hard surface without waking the house. I’d provide the light source, holding my book lamp over the board. Half the challenge of midnight checkers was holding still for forty minutes, since quick movements sent tremors through our old spring mattress and scattered the checker pieces.
C, those games were so much fun, but the memories haunt me in the worst way. You always lost gracefully. Just shrugged and said, “Maybe next time.” I’d feign dignity, like a gracious winner, but that was all an act. Did you ever wonder why, right when you started winning anything, my luck went through the roof? It was all too easy to steal or switch game pieces in the dimness, especially since you trusted me. I’m a board game cheater, a self-centred, dishonest cheater, and I deserve to play with rabbit dung instead of game pieces for the rest of my life. Now, all those wonderful memories are poisoned by my dishonesty. I’m so sorry, CC. You deserved those victories and the chance to feel good about yourself. You deserved to celebrate your fourteenth birthday properly. If I make it home, I promise to make amends.
Fortunately, I carry more good than bad memories. Remember how often people mistook us for twins when we were young? We’d pretend to be hero twins every time we did good deeds, like delivering water to an Elder, cataloguing the seeds and vegetables in the garden, or cleaning rubbish off the beach. Then, I had a growth spurt, and people stopped asking, “Are you twins?” Losing that visual shorthand of our tight relationship bothered us so much, we decided to try and build a time machine so I could jump forward two years and let you catch up to my age.
I didn’t used to reminisce this much, since I was occupied with life in real time. But here’s the thing: living ain’t enjoyable without you, our family, and our friends. I even missed the goat-whispering woman who gave us fresh eggs when we fed her chickens. I wanted to go home, and the closest thing I had to home on that city were memories.
Throughout the chores, routines, and chatter, I never stopped thinking about escape, but it wasn’t until week three that my planning became desperate. I guess the salted fish came from a dwindling stock because one morning, after I’d brushed my teeth and dressed in a loose white jumpsuit from the bedroom closet, Olivia said, “You shouldn’t wear white today, Mona Lisa. It’ll get stained. Find something dark. Go on.”
I swapped the white jumpsuit for a long black dress. When she saw my choice, Olivia said, “How apt. A mourning dress.”
She guided me to part of the ship I’d never visited before; it was a metallic octagonal room with silver tables protruding from two of the eight walls. There were hatches and red-stained drains and gutters embedded in the floor. The air smelled like salt and death.
A rack of knives hung to my left. All the blades were sharp and clean.
“We passed a school of tuna earlier,” Olivia said. “I felt them with my sonar. Finally! You can eat the meat fresh! Go. Check the trap under the centre hatch.”
In the middle of the room, a dark chute dove straight into the dark ocean. It resembled a well. I pulled a wire cage from the water. As I wrestled my catch into the light, the cage shuddered from the struggles of two muscular fish. Their glinting bodies drenched my face with seawater.
“Wonder
ful!” Olivia said. “Once they’re tuckered out, I’ll teach you how to bleed them.”
The tuna were gasping. Big gulps that made their gills flare. At that moment, I thought about Grandpa and the night the south burned. I thought about his struggle to breathe, the pain in his lungs, and the people who suffocated in their own homes.
“Please don’t make me kill them,” I said.
Olivia just laughed. “It’s easy. Pretend they’re wiggling squash!”
“No,” I said.
“I insist.”
We went back and forth like that and the more I refused, the louder Olivia’s voice became. At last, she boomed from every speaker in every wall, “You aren’t leaving this room until they’re dead.”
My ears ringing, I took a bleeding knife from the wall. Although the tuna had stopped thrashing, they still gasped for air.
“You’ll thank me during supper,” Olivia said.
One side of the cage could be unfastened and removed. I pinched my finger on a hinge as I opened it. I barely noticed the pain, although the metal cut deep. Olivia started talking, saying something about holding them under the head and belly.
“How much meat is in an average tuna?” I asked. “And how many tuna are in the sea?”
While she was distracted with my questions, I returned the open cage to the water.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Olivia said. “Really.”
“But I did,” I said.
“You did,” she agreed.
Without another word, Olivia locked all the doors in the killing room and turned off the lights. She left me there until I felt like a dying fish, aching for the taste of water.
As I suffered through, I made plans in the darkness.
Eventually, Olivia asked, “Did you learn your lesson, Mona Lisa?” Her voice was subdued, almost meek.
I answered honestly, “Yes.” Then waited in dreadful anticipation for her to force me to kill before I could escape. But instead, there was silence, and I soon wondered whether she’d abandoned me. Would I die in a dark room that smelled of brine and blood? “Olivia?” I asked.
“Are you still there?”
“If survival were easy,” she said, “we wouldn’t be alone in New America.”
The lights flicked on.
“You should be grateful,” she said. “I had nobody to educate me, Mona Lisa. But you have me.”
I could have defied her. Defended all the lessons Grandfather taught me and everything I’d learned from Instructor Lee, our parents, and you, CC. But I didn’t. Because I’d learned my lesson, and things were going to be different.
I don’t know how many days or weeks passed before Olivia trusted me enough to work on the upper deck. A freshwater tank was clogged. “Drain the tank, unscrew the lid, climb inside, check the output, clear the obstruction, and then return below deck,” Olivia said. “Don’t dawdle. There may be pirates.”
“There may be pirates?” I repeated.
“Always!”
She said may be. Which meant she couldn’t see everything.
It was the chance I’d been waiting for.
Inside the city, Olivia delighted in confusing me; she sent me in circles until I didn’t know north from south. That’s why my internal compass complained so often. When I stepped onto the sunny deck, my sense of space returned. I felt like myself again.
The moment my pupils adjusted to daylight, I scanned the deck for a suitable hiding spot, ignoring the large water tank in to my immediate left. Beyond an expanse of metal tables and chairs, there was a shed-shaped structure on the far end of an empty pool. Olivia chirped from the tablet at my hip, “Do you see the cistern?”
I tilted the tablet camera to the ground and pointed at the ocean. “Is it that?”
“Mona Lisa,” she said, “describe that to me. The tank is big and shaped like a ten-foot-tall barrel.”
She really couldn’t see me. Dropping my tablet, I sprinted, leapt over a bent railing and landed with a thunk on top of a metal table.
“What was that?” she asked. “What are you doing?”
None of your business, I thought. As I ran, my antique dress flapped in the breeze for the first time in centuries, no doubt. It was exhilarating.
Then, Olivia’s voice surrounded me, crackling from failing speakers throughout the deck. “You’re being stupid! The pirates will eat you! Where did you go?”
That’s when I heard a loud, electrical cracking, the same sound a stun gun makes. A tendril of light singed the air to my right. I had a vivid flashback to my ex’s fifteenth birthday. You weren’t there, but Morgan hung a rabbit-shaped piñata from the mesquite tree in her yard, grabbed a wooden lacrosse stick, put on a blindfold, spun ’round until she staggered, and then swung wildly at the air, trying to split that rabbit open. I’d been standing to Morgan’s right, near enough to catch her if she fell. The first swing had whooshed past my ear, sending a warning breeze across my cheek. I’d shouted, “Morgan, stop!” but all the other partiers were screeching, drowning out my voice. I dodged a second swing and threw myself to the ground. With a thunk, the papier-mâché head went flying, and the rabbit bled candy onto my face.
I prayed that Olivia would be less lucky than Morgan. My pace lengthened into long bounds. I was afraid that if my feet touched the deck, I’d transform into a lightning rod. With a final leap, I threw myself into the shed and slammed its door shut.
The shed, which contained a variety of cleaning implements, was large enough that I did not feel claustrophobic. I heard a couple more ominous stun gun crackles, but Olivia gave up quickly, likely worried about draining the ship’s power.
After enough silence had passed to ease my anxiety, I cracked the door open and observed the water tank with the binoculars I’d carried from my cabin. There had to be another person on the ship, which meant the obstruction would eventually be cleared.
Night came. Behind me, a light sputtered awake, casting eerie shadows down the deck. Under my watch, a slender, pale figure dressed in white emerged from the hatch. Her shaved head was covered by a wire mesh cap, the kind that connects brain impulses to electronic devices. Although her face—long, smooth, white, and without freckles or pimples—could have belonged to a twenty-year-old woman, other parts of her body hinted at a greater age. Her neck was a stack of lovely horizontal creases, like rings in a tree. Once she had drained all the water and climbed inside the tank, I left my hiding spot, crept through the maze of fallen chairs, climbed the ladder on the side of the tank, and slammed the heavy lid shut over her.
That was a satisfying clang.
“Mona Lisa,” Olivia said. I could barely hear her voice through the metal walls. “Why?”
“Somebody was eating my vegetables. Just had to be sure it was you. Take me home now. Real home.”
Silence. And then she told me, in the smallest, saddest tone, “Before I was born, generations had names, but nobody bothered to name mine. We weren’t expected to survive the hell we were born into. I’ve been alive for two hundred and seventeen years. Do you really think I conquered the apocalypse by luck?”
“There was no apocalypse,” I said.
She opened her mouth, as if to speak. I didn’t let her.
“Set a course to home,” I said, “or I’ll burn your city down, Olivia, and there won’t be enough water in the ocean to save New America.”
I wish you’d heard me, CC. I was terrified, but my voice didn’t quake like it does when I give speeches.
That’s when the city began to hum. I heard the familiar chug of engines and felt a breeze against my face. We were moving.
I still wonder what I would have done if Olivia had refused.
For the past seventy-six hours, I’ve been stuck on deck, guarding my former captor. She isn’t allowed to go into the city. Too risky. We might not have food, but there’s plenty of water, and New America will reach land any moment now.
I hope.
The sky is so beautiful tonight. Do you reme
mber how we’d look at the stars, name our own constellations, and invent their stories? My favourites were dog and stick, one always chasing the other. And the swing made of stars. I said we’d fly up there someday, and I’d give you a big push, and you’d swing across the galaxy. I can see them now. All of them.
There’s a pinprick of light on the horizon. A fire burning on a distant beach. Is it yours, CC?
It must be.
Love,
Your Big Twin Sister
SEED CHILDREN
MARI KURISATO
THE GIRL COLLAPSED AGAINST THE WHITE STONE WALL, sliding to the uneven marble floor in a slick whisper of her own darkened scarlet. She laughed, coughing up hot blood. It slipped from her mouth in rivulets as she spoke.
“It appears,” she said quietly, “that I am dying. I suppose I should take a moment while I bleed out to regale you with how I got here, huh? Someone should know, at least.” She laughed, spat blood, and stared at her audience a moment before beginning.
THOUGH THE STAR CALLED SOL once provided light for life on Earth for over four billion years, it was now a red rose of death, pouring heat and radiation throughout the solar system like a bright boiling blistering eye of disapproving judgment. Intergalactic blue fire spilling from the mysterious Ghost Gate had crashed into the sun, accelerating the sun’s expansion and eventual death, increasing the star’s size while sending its temperature soaring.
Unlike the Saturn Jump Gate, which had been discovered orbiting the planet Titan, no test pilot activated the Ghost Jump Gate that orbited the sun. No one knew where the Ghost Jump Gate even came from in the first place. The blue fire poured into the sun for three years and only ended when the gate itself broke apart, being swallowed by the now much larger sun.
The increased heat of the dying star scorched the earth, boiled the seas, turned vast tracts of farmland into dunes. Dust storms buried cities. Heavy winds brought skyscrapers crashing down. Man-made diseases on the continents struck down millions. Billions more sought to leave the planet before the planet burned, or before the weaponized plagues got them.
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