This Splintered Silence

by Kayla Olson

  Then again, I’ve made a bed of my mother’s chair. Perhaps Katri swims laps every day to remember.

  “Okay,” I say. “Okay, let me think.” Leo’s quiet on the other end—this is why I never ignore him. He gives me the space I need when I ask for it, and even when I don’t.

  I make my way over to the floor-to-ceiling window, look out into the infinite star-studded blackness. My mother always stood in this exact spot when she wasn’t sure what to do, said it gave her inspiration to see how far we’ve come—how much humanity has learned, how much there still is that we don’t know. It always made her feel better to remember she didn’t have to know every answer to every problem.

  “Tell Heath to search their rooms again, and all the places that don’t require a print-scan for access. They could’ve slipped out of the natatorium while everyone else was at the check-in,” I say, trying not to jump to conclusions. “If the blood you found was from the virus, if they were far enough along to cough up bloodbubbles, there would’ve been more of it, I think, even if only one of the girls is sick.” The image of my mother’s blood on the cold, dark observatory-deck floor slips into my memory, broken free from the cage where I put it.

  “Got it,” he says, at the same time that there’s a knock at my door.

  No one ever knocks at my door. Mostly because I’m only ever home in the middle of the night, but that’s beside the point. “Someone’s here,” I say. “Check back in soon, okay?”

  He agrees, and then he’s out. The knocking starts up again, a little louder this time—

  It’s Heath.

  “Sorry to bother you,” he says, in lieu of a greeting. “You didn’t answer when I called earlier, and this, it’s kind of urgent, I—”

  “I just talked to Leo,” I cut in. Heath’s definition of urgent doesn’t always line up with mine. “He told me about Grace, and the natatorium, and the blood—that’s probably him calling you right now.”

  He checks his buzz screen, and I can see I’m right. He ignores the call.

  “You probably shouldn’t ignore that,” I say.

  “Like you ignored my call, but took Leo’s?” His words are playful, but not without a bit of sting.

  Our kiss, his lips on mine—suddenly they’re all I see when I look at him. Yet another stretch of uncharted territory I haven’t learned to navigate. “Look,” I tell him, “I just needed a break, I didn’t mean anything by it, okay? It’s been a long day.”

  “Sure, I get that,” he says, sheepish. “You deserve a break—I was just giving you a hard time. Sorry.”

  “So, Grace and Yuki?”

  “Oh, no,” he says. “That’s actually not what I was trying to get in touch about. I mean, that was a big part of it, yeah, but the most pressing thing is that Zesi’s having a separate issue in Control and wants to get your input—told him I’d relay the message while he works on it.”

  This definitely qualifies as urgent, and I feel a twinge of guilt over cutting him off earlier. I close my eyes, take a deep breath. If things keep spiraling at this rate, the station is basically doomed. Heath grasps my shoulders, his hands soft but firm. I open my eyes again, only to meet his. They’re the color of shining steel, a burst of gray that turns dark at the edges. Haven kept all the colors for herself, apparently, all the green and gold and blue; the precise shade of her hazel irises shifts with the light.

  “One thing at a time, Lindley, okay?” Heath’s smile is small but steady. “You’re not alone in this. You’re not.”

  He sounds so sure. I nod, let his words sink in. Try to feel them.

  He’s right, in a way. The six of us are in this together. They’re not going to let me break.

  So why do I feel like everything is on me, when it comes down to it?

  Maybe because I’m the most visibly in charge. Commander, like my mother was, no matter how hard I try to separate myself from the title. Maybe because I get all the questions, and tend to have the most answers.

  That’s the problem. I only have most of the answers.

  Heath squeezes my shoulders. “I’m here for you however you need me to be, all right? If that means you need to ignore my next hundred calls, I get it. Okay?” He searches for my eyes until I meet them. “Just call me back within a quarter hour, though, if you do that. Might be urgent.”

  I grin, and his smile cracks into a laugh. “I think I can manage that,” I say. “Speaking of urgent, I think you should go find Leo instead of coming with me to Control.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “You’re probably right.”

  “And Heath?”

  He looks up from his buzz screen. “Yeah, Linds?”

  He’s never called me that, and it throws me off for a split second. I decide to let it slide—I’m not sure I like him using Leo’s name for me, but I’m also not sure I don’t.

  “Thanks,” I say. “I needed this.”

  His mouth turns up at one corner. “See you in a bit.”

  15

  BLINK TO BLACK

  HAVEN AND LEO are already in Control, waiting with Zesi, when I arrive.

  “Is Natalin coming?” I ask, noting her absence.

  “Oh,” Zesi says, messing with a section of the control panel, not taking his eyes off it. “No, she said you told her to work on some sort of food plan—should I have told her to ditch that for this?”

  “No, no,” I say. “That’s exactly what I would’ve told her, just wanted to make sure she wasn’t on her way. What’s going on? Heath said it was urgent?”

  Zesi, on his rolling stool, spins around to face us. “Okay,” he says. “Don’t kill me.”

  “Not the most promising way to begin,” I say, crossing my arms. “What?”

  “So—okay—okay.” He’s nervous, fidgety. I’ve never seen Zesi like this before, and it’s unsettling. “This whole time, I’ve been looking in the wrong place for incoming messages, right? I thought I’d get an alert here, where it says message alerts. I mean, seems logical enough.”

  I look where he’s pointing, at the same dark stretch of unlit panels I used for my failed attempt at contact with Earth earlier.

  “I thought it was weird we hadn’t heard from anyone in a while, from down below, but at the same time, I never really paid attention to how much of our communication before . . . before everyone, um . . . before I was alone up here . . . was initiated by us, not them. Looking back, I think we initiated most of the calls. Also, I’ve been busy lately, distracted—”

  “Is there a point to this?” Haven asks.

  Zesi sighs. “I tried to use this message system, tested it to make sure it’s working, and you know what I found? It’s our internal messaging channel, not the one we use between the station and Earth. This”—he rolls to the far end of the board, where a smallish red light blinks angrily—“is the channel we need. I only noticed it because it used to be steady and green. I didn’t think much of it when it turned yellow, but the red was sort of hard to overlook.”

  “So we have a message,” Leo says. “What’s the problem with that? What’d they say?”

  “Well,” Zesi says with a nervous laugh, “that is the problem. I can’t get into that particular system just yet. And red could mean anything from this message is ten days old to ALERT, ALERT, TAKE ASTEROID PRECAUTIONS, right?”

  Asteroid.

  As if we don’t have enough problems.

  I stare at the angry red light, as if it’s showing me our bleak future: I imagine an unwieldy space rock, hurtling toward us—ripping through us—ending us.

  “Find a way to break in to the system, find a way to unlock the message,” I order. “Stay up all night if you have to. If there’s an asteroid headed for us, we won’t have much time to shift position.” Not that we’re equipped to make a significant shift—our sheer size renders us mostly inert. We weren’t designed for travel, only self-defense in emergencies. “Are we even equipped to do a scan for that sort of thing? We’d have to be, right?” I’ve been so consumed with dea
ling with disasters inside the ship, I hadn’t yet considered the potential disasters from outside. Excellent.

  “We are, but I can’t keep a close eye on the radar and try to break in to the message system at the same time,” he says. “I can tell you what to do for the scan, though; I can walk you through it—any of you up for taking lead on that?”

  Our eyes collectively land on Leo. He’s the best with tech, other than Zesi himself. Nice to not be the expert for once.

  “Yeah,” Leo says. “I’ll help.”

  “I can help, too,” Haven says. “I mean, if that would actually be helpful? Not too many hands on deck? And that way, we can rotate out if any of us needs to focus on something else for a bit?”

  “The more minds, the better,” Zesi says, and it almost makes me feel bad for being the only one to not volunteer. Almost.

  “Let me know when you break through,” I say. “I want to be with you when you listen to the message, even if it’s in the middle of the night.”

  It’s very possible I’ll regret these words, but what I’d regret even more? An asteroid slamming through our station. Blinking out to blackness. If that’s even a remote possibility, we need to take immediate precautions.

  “Get some rest, Linds, okay?” Leo says. “You deserve it.”

  I smile, nod. Keep my mouth shut, because he means well.

  We all deserve rest, and I should tell them to make sure they get some, too. More than deserve, we all need it. But we can’t afford to rest, not really. So I stay quiet.

  It isn’t like I’ll be stealing any more time for myself, though, not tonight. It isn’t like I’m a hypocrite.

  I leave them all in Control and head for the lab. I’ve got work to do.

  16

  TO SHATTER, TO SPLATTER

  OF ALL THE long days I’ve had lately, today takes the prize. It’s only five-evening, according to the lab’s analog clock, but a week’s worth of problems have crept in and wedged themselves between minute marks. The hours are bursting at the seams.

  I take a seat on my old, familiar stool. Lean my elbows on the crisp white Formica countertop. Think. It helps to have this empty surface in front of me—it’s calming, like an alternate universe where nothing is wrong or out of place or broken, where nothing is shattered, or splattered with blood. Like I have endless possibility in front of me, the good sort.

  It isn’t easy to clear my head. I came down here to focus on Mila, to see if there’s anything else I can learn from the hazy results of the lab work I did this afternoon, but my mind is slippery. Every few minutes, I find myself steeped in thought over the problems I’ve assigned everyone else. And not only those—unofficial ones, too. Like the thing Haven said today after the mandatory check-in: they’re going to hate us. Or Natalin’s fear that a station-wide food crisis will fall on her shoulders. And then there’s this new Heath situation, whatever’s changing between us—it definitely rubbed him the wrong way that I picked up Leo’s call and ignored his, but it isn’t like I did it to hurt him.

  I feel like I’m walking on glass, carrying armfuls of glass, in a glass world that’s tipped off its axis.

  At twenty after, I hear the lab door slide open. It’s Heath.

  “Linds?” Again with the nickname. “I don’t mean to interrupt . . . whatever it is you’re doing?” He eyes my still-clean table. “Thought you might want to take a look at this.”

  He slides a petite plastic bag to me, zip-sealed to contain the tiniest bit of blood inside. I look up and find him staring at me, not the bag.

  “From the tile near the pool?” I ask.

  He nods. “Scraped as much as I could. Still looking for the girls themselves—thought I’d stop by here before I head to the far wings so you could get to work.”

  It isn’t what I came down here to do, but then again, it’s not like I’m actually doing what I came down here to do. And if Yuki or Grace coughed up this blood, it could certainly be another route to answers about the mutation.

  “Thanks, Heath,” I say. “That was really thoughtful, thank you.”

  He looks like he wants to say more, but no words actually make it out of his mouth. Things are definitely shifting between us—he’s never measured his words with me.

  “Look,” I say, then pause. How do I call attention to the awkwardness without making it even more awkward? “I just want to make sure everything’s okay. With us, I mean. I’m sorry about this afternoon, about not answering your call—”

  “And I’m sorry about this morning,” he says.

  “I told you not to apologize, remember?” I smile, trying for playful.

  His smile is small and heavy, barely a smile at all. “No, seriously, Lindley,” he says, “I should have thought more about the timing. I don’t want you to have to worry about me on top of all the other things you have going on right now. I just thought”—he looks away, runs a hand through his hair—“I don’t know what I thought. I think you’re amazing, and I’m crazy impressed at how well you’re holding up under all the pressure.”

  I half laugh, ready to protest, but his words keep coming. “It’s true,” he says, brightening. “Things would be falling apart here if you hadn’t stepped up and pulled us all together, is what I’m trying to say.” He glances down at his hands. “Last thing I want to do is stand in the way of that. Be a distraction, you know?”

  Things are falling apart, despite my best efforts, but I don’t say that. He’d just pile on more praise I don’t deserve. “I don’t want you to disappear on me, either, though,” I say. “Like, because you’re afraid of distracting me? I want you . . . I want things to be like they always have been.”

  I think I want that? I don’t know. Until he kissed me this morning, I’d never considered that things with Heath could be any different than they’ve always been.

  But it looks like I’ve said something wrong. His lips are a tight line now, and his eyes aren’t as bright. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, sure.” He glances at the clock, backs toward the door. “Should probably keep looking for the girls now. I’ll let you know if I find anything, okay? Good luck with the blood sample, hope it’s helpful—I’ll buzz you if there’s any more to test, or maybe have Haven buzz you, whatever.”

  The door slides closed behind him, cutting off the end of his sentence.

  “Um, goodbye?” I say to the door.

  Add any more glass to the pile in my arms, I’ll be a bloody mess within days.

  I adjust the pins in my hair, make sure everything is smooth and tight. It’s a lucky ritual of sorts, one I picked up from my mother years ago. Whereas hers was an unconscious habit, mine was born out of fascination, admiration. I loved her hairpins, for one. More than that, I wanted to be exactly like her.

  Ironic, that it took losing her for me to follow in her steps.

  I can almost hear her: LeeLee, she would say, if she were here, you’ve got a job to do. She was always going on about jobs, how they weren’t going to take care of themselves. Nothing holds the power to crush you unless you hand over that power.

  So I take a deep breath. It’s just me and the microscopes, alone together in this pristine, empty room. I prepare another slide, the Grace/Yuki blood barely sufficient. And then I get to work.

  17

  HAZE AND FUZZ

  WHEN THE RESULTS are in, the first thing I notice is the sample’s crisp clarity: this slide bears no resemblance to the haze and fuzz of Mila’s sample from this morning. I must have sleepwalked through that procedure, screwed something up along the way. This one is perfection.

  Speaking of perfection, the second thing I notice: there’s no trace of an active virus at all. It’s reassuring, for sure, but not conclusive—just because Grace or Yuki haven’t contracted the mutation yet, it doesn’t mean they won’t.

  My buzz screen lights up, not with a call this time, only a message from Leo: Heath found them. A second later, another message edges out the first: Alive.

  It’s the first thing to go
well all day, and the relief is physical. My eyes flutter closed, trapping tears that’ve sprung up out of nowhere. Heath found the girls. I want to know everything.

  My finger hovers over the screen. I could call Heath directly for the details, would, on any other day. We’ve never had a day like today, though, so I find myself buzzing Leo instead.

  “He found them?” I say. “Tell me everything.”

  It isn’t lost on me that Heath didn’t call me, either.

  “Yeah, hang on a sec,” Leo says, but then there’s a long pause, Haven’s voice in the background. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m in the middle of something”—a series of beeps tramples over his voice—“can I call you back in a few? Or just buzz Heath, it might be a while before I finish.”

  “Sure, yeah.” I want to ask about their progress in Control, too, but now is obviously not a good time for that. “Talk to you in a bit.”

  I busy myself with cleaning the lab station, calm myself with the familiar rhythm of clearing the table of scopes and trays, wiping it down with disinfectant until it sparkles. The whole process takes less than two minutes, but it’s two minutes well spent. My head feels clear again, too.

  I buzz Heath before I have time to talk myself out of it.

  “Hey,” he says, picking up immediately. “Find something?” He’s so different from his sister in that way, and I’m grateful for it—when Haven and I have our tense stretches, she freezes me out.

  “Where are you?” I say, nudging my stool into its hiding spot under the table. “Leo says you found the girls?”

  “Yeah, I’m with them now. Starboard-side lab.”

  “What? What were they doing in there?” There’s hardly ever a good reason for me to go into SSL, let alone two fourteen-year-olds who have nothing to do with cold storage. “Never mind, don’t answer that, I’m going to ask them myself. Stay where you are and don’t let them leave.”

  He doesn’t protest, but then, he never does. Heath genuinely loves being on the receiving end of orders like this—he’s said so on a couple of occasions. He takes a lot of joy in following well, on following through. I guess he’s had a lot of practice, having Haven for a twin. She’s just the opposite.