by Kayla Olson
I hope that’s not it. I hope they’re coasting on sugar and caffeine and adrenaline in an all-out effort to address their technical issues and nothing more. I hope they’re okay.
I hope they’re alive.
It is an incredibly helpless feeling to be this far away and have no idea what’s going on.
And what of our shipment now? Unless the system issue is resolved soon, we’ll have no way of knowing for sure that Shapiro even managed to get it off the ground. If it’s more than just a simple technical failure, their team could be sidelined for weeks dealing with . . . whatever it is that has happened.
Breathe, Lindley. Breathe. Just because everything else has spiraled to catastrophe, it doesn’t necessarily mean things are worst-case scenario down in Nashville. And it doesn’t have to mean things are worst-case scenario here, either, even though it feels that way.
I shut off Control’s overhead spotlight as I head out, back to my place. Natalin seemed to think we could stretch our supplies if we addressed our water shortage—if only water filters were as easy to come by as our light replacement disks, I think. We’ve got drawers full of those, so tiny and flat. Water filters are bulkier, and oddly shaped; we definitely wouldn’t have any spares hidden away somewhere. There has to be a way to get a fresh one, though. As I walk, I keep coming back to the idea of possibly getting what we need from Nautilus instead of from Radix.
The more I think about it, the more it seems like a viable option. It’s risky, yes, for so many reasons—but compared to leaving all of our people to go hungry, it might be a risk worth taking. At most, our mutation could infect fifteen people. Better fifteen than starving our entire station, right?
Not that it feels right. What a terrible choice to have to make, when the best thing doesn’t feel like a good thing.
My buzz screen has been blessedly quiet for a good long while now. I put in a call to Heath once I’m back inside the private walls of my own suite. It can feel like before between us, if I just do my best to forget. I need it to feel like before.
He answers immediately. “Are you okay? Leo said you were upset, that we needed to give you some space—it’s been so hard not to call, Linds. What’s going on?”
Well, that explains the silence. “I’m . . . better than before,” I tell him, though I can’t quite bring myself to add that better doesn’t exactly mean good. “Can you meet me right now? I want to run something by you. If Leo or Zesi are free, bring them along, too.”
“Yeah, of course,” he says. “At . . . at your place? Or where?”
The way he stumbles over it is like a neon arrow pointing to the truth I am reluctant to admit: it will never feel like before. There is no forgetting that kiss, no forgetting all the awkward fumbling that has come after it. It isn’t that Heath and I are wrong for each other. I just never saw it coming.
If I’m honest, I don’t exactly want to forget. But I just can’t do this right now. I can’t be someone to him—to anyone. Not when I have to be someone to everyone. It’s too much pressure.
“Linds?” he says when I’m quiet. “Lindley, you still there?”
I’m making too much out of this. He can come over like he always has. We can be alone together without anything happening to make things even more awkward. Probably.
“Bring Leo and Zesi, okay? If they’re not free, tell them it’s urgent.” Leo and Zesi will make a good buffer, for everyone’s sake. “My place is fine. Just come over as soon as you can.”
My reflection stares back at me as I end the call, but I can’t look her in the eye. The choice I’m about to make—one that risks life to save life—feels like the furthest thing from a victory.
25
THRONE OF CHAINS
NOT TEN MINUTES later, Heath is at my door.
Alone.
“Zesi and Leo didn’t pick up,” he says. “I tried them each twice.” He glances past me, over my shoulder. I’m blocking the door more than I realized.
“Sorry,” I say, shifting out of the way. “Come in.”
I follow him inside. As soon as I’ve stepped out from the jamb, the door slides shut behind me. “Weird that they wouldn’t answer,” I say. Especially with Heath trying them each twice.
Heath sits on the purple love seat, which gives me pause—does he expect me to sit beside him on it? My mother’s chair feels slightly too far away, but it’s the only other chair in this room. The love seat isn’t a terrible option, just cozy, close. I’m worried about encouraging the wrong impression.
I choose my mother’s chair.
“They’re probably just busy,” he says. “You said it was urgent, so I didn’t think I should wait. What’s going on?” He picks up my deck of cards from where it sits on the end table, shuffles twice before putting it back in a neat stack. Maybe it’s just the way the light’s falling on him as he shifts under it, shine and shadow in all the right places, but I’ve never noticed how attractive he is. How have we been so close for this long and I’m only just now seeing it?
“I—” Now that I’m sitting in the chair, Heath really does feel too far away, awkwardly so. I don’t want to have an entire conversation with ten feet between us. “Sorry,” I say, “I feel like I should move closer.”
I move over near the love seat, sit on the cork floor and lean back. I turn, resting my elbow on the purple cushion, so I can see his face.
“Better?” he says, amused.
My cheeks flush. “I just tried calling Shapiro about our shipment,” I start. Better to get right to business. “It . . . didn’t work. The system wouldn’t connect.” I take a deep breath. If there’s anyone I can confess my mistakes to, it’s Heath—he’s never given me a hard time for making a mistake, ever. “I’d told Shapiro earlier we’d be okay waiting a few extra days for a shipment, but after talking to Natalin . . . I . . . needed to tell him ASAP that the delay wasn’t going to work after all.”
I watch as it sinks in, wonder if he’s leaped to the same fears as I have. “So,” he says, “on top of the obviously unsettling system issues—you’re worried he might send the shipment as planned, and it’ll get to us too late?”
“I’m worried about what the system failure itself implies,” I say. “That they might not be able to send a shipment at all.”
He’s quiet for a long moment. I can feel the empathy radiating off him—like he’s with me in this, trying to figure out how to fix it, and not just thinking about how I shouldn’t have made the mistake in the first place.
“I’ve been thinking about the idea you mentioned earlier,” I finally say. “How Nautilus could be an option—the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced they’d be able to spare a water filter. Surely they have a backup, right? I’ve been looking through my mother’s records, and Nashville sent a comprehensive delivery itinerary for this year’s shipments to Nautilus, Radix, and our station—looks like Nautilus received a heavy cargo load just two months ago. With their tiny crew, their current filter should still be going strong. Heavy cargo loads tend to come with backup supplies, right? I’d bet all the stars they received replacement filters.”
Heath is quiet, not nearly as enthusiastic as I expect for someone who came up with the idea. Not nearly as enthusiastic as I’d expect from Heath, period. “So . . . you’re not worried anymore about infecting them?”
“No, I still totally am, but I’ve been weighing the risks.” I take a deep breath, look up into his eyes. “I think we should go to them. I think you should go to them.”
This, this: this wakes him up.
“Lindley—no—I haven’t flown in a year!”
“We’ll tell them to leave supplies in one of their small-craft hangars,” I say, as if he’s just wholeheartedly agreed. “And they can block that one off indefinitely, since they have another hangar, so we could make this work, we could really—”
“Linds. I haven’t flown a bee in a year. And even then, Jaqí was in my ear the whole time telling me all the things I was doing wro
ng.”
“Flying a bee is like riding a bike, right? You never forget how?”
My argument would be much more convincing if either of us had ever actually ridden a bike.
“I crashed last time, okay? I crash-landed, smashed a wing off on my way back into our dock.”
His words hang between us as last year clicks into place.
The scar on his eyebrow, once a thin slice of blood, but nearly undetectable now. He’d opened his medicine cabinet too carelessly, caught a sharp edge to the face. That was the story I knew.
The bruises on his head that he’d said were from a fight—a fight I’d never been able to imagine, because Heath? Fighting? And over what? Yet it still put distance between us, because it seemed like such a primitive way to handle a disagreement.
“Why didn’t you tell me the truth?”
He looks down at his hands. “We weren’t supposed to be out. Jaqí was . . . he and your mom didn’t see eye to eye on the necessity of flight training.”
“What? She never told me she didn’t want you training.”
“Probably because it was me, Linds. Come on, what would you have said if she’d brought it up?”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, seriously. You would have told her I loved it, right? And that I was pretty good at it—how Jaqí always said I was the fastest learner he’d ever trained?”
I think back to those months Heath went out with Jaqí, just the two of them, tiny specks flinging themselves out into the infinite universe. Heath had just turned sixteen, three weeks to the day before my own sixteenth birthday. Jaqí taught me corkscrews today, Heath would report. We did speed runs and death dives and twelve loops in a row! And, and, and.
“Honestly?” I say. “I would have told her you were more flash than substance, that I thought you took too many risks.” I pause, dare to meet his eyes. “And that Jaqí encouraged too many risky things.”
Maybe sending Heath to Nautilus isn’t such a great idea after all. I knew he loved the rush of it, the thrill—I assumed those things came along with basic knowledge of technique and precision. Hearing he crash-landed is not reassuring. Hearing that my mother discouraged his training isn’t reassuring, either.
It does make sense, though. She never talked about flight school, but I know that’s where she and my father first met. She talked about my father almost as little as she talked about flight school.
When I meet Heath’s eyes again, they aren’t full of wounded pride, like I expect—they’re happy, almost. “This right here,” he says. Slowly, thoughtfully. “This is why I like you.”
I can’t help it. I laugh. “I’ll make a mental note to make disparaging remarks about you more often.”
He grins. “I mean, I could do without the disparaging remarks,” he says. “But I like that you’re honest.” He looks me straight in the eye, and I blush.
“Honesty doesn’t always feel like a good thing,” I reply, cheeks on fire. “If people knew how I honestly felt, I don’t know that they’d like me so much.”
I’d rather curl up in bed with a good read than try to figure out how to keep us all from starving or socially imploding, for example. I’d rather be the kind of person who could easily trust other people to untangle all our problems.
I’d rather put up walls between Heath and me, pretend I feel nothing for him, keep telling myself that—keep telling him that—than deal with the very real possibility of letting this, whatever this is, distract me from all the things I have to do. When the truth of it is, if he had kissed me before the virus hit, I can’t say for sure there wouldn’t have been a spark between us. I can’t say for sure there isn’t one now.
Does it make me a horrible person if I don’t admit there could be something between us? If I don’t admit this right after he’s praised me for my honesty?
He slides down from the love seat, sits beside me on the cork floor. “We’re not talking about other people here, right? We’re talking about you and me.” He smooths a hand over my hair. My breath catches, but when I loosen up and let myself feel, it feels . . . rather nice. “You can tell me anything, Lindley. You know that, don’t you?”
For the first time since my mother died, it’s as if I have the freedom to just be in a moment, rather than trying to keep everything from collapsing. As if the entire weight of the universe is off my shoulders, as if someone is taking care of me for a change.
I didn’t realize how badly I needed this. How badly I needed a break from being strong, for however long this moment lasts.
Everyone deserves a break, right?
I shift closer, try to put the station and all our problems out of my mind. Maybe Heath could help me deal with my stress, rather than just being something else to worry about. Maybe he is exactly what I need.
I burrow into him, rest my cheek on his chest. He leans his head against mine, warm and comforting. “You’re sure you want to do this? I’m sorry, Linds, I know you said—”
Before he can finish, I sit up again—lean in—cut his words off with a kiss. He is all softness, all kindness, gentle and easy and careful; I press a little harder, kiss a little deeper, showing him yes, I’m sure without so many words. It’s new and familiar all at once, not as far a leap as I first thought from friendship to . . . this. Not as strange, not as awkward. Not strange or awkward at all.
We lose a long stretch of time, linger in this brand-new thing that is just between us. For once, I’m not counting the minutes.
Until there is a knock at my door, and we break away, his face as flushed as mine feels. I jump up to answer it, smooth my hair and straighten my shirt.
I open it and find Leo on the other side.
“Am . . . I . . . interrupting?” he says, eyeing Heath, eyeing me.
Is it really that obvious?
“Sorry I missed your calls, man,” Leo says mercifully, not forcing us to answer his own question. He turns back to me, and, oh—something isn’t right. Something is very, very wrong. “We’ve . . . got a situation.”
We’ve got a situation.
The words paralyze me, make me feel sick.
Leo has no way of knowing how eerily similar his words are to the ones Dr. Safran spoke, back when the virus claimed its first handful of victims. And yet I have this feeling, I just know even before he says it, it’s happening again.
“Who?” I ask. “How many?”
Heath is at my side now. Both of us look to Leo for answers. I don’t know about Heath, but I’m hoping, hard, that Leo will tell me what I want to hear, not what I fear.
“Two dead,” he says. “Jaako Solano and Kerr Barstow.”
Kerr was one of the most beautiful girls on the station, and also one of the brightest. She and Jaako were like movie stars from back on Earth—how I imagined movie stars to be, anyway: everyone watching their every move, secretly wanting to befriend them, to be them. They were untouchable, especially after they finally started dating a few months ago.
They were untouchable.
“We won’t be able to keep this quiet for long,” Heath says, and it’s like he’s plucked the thought directly from my head.
“We won’t be able to keep it quiet at all.” Leo grimaces. “Zesi and I weren’t the first to find them.”
26
ROCK TO A STORM TO AN OCEAN
“NO, NO, NO—THIS is not good.” I pace the room, borderline panicked. “I should have spent more time in the lab, I should have—”
“You’ve had a lot on your plate,” Leo says. “You’ve done all you could.”
Leo is the rock to my storm, steady and unmoved. Heath is somewhere in between: Heath is the ocean, steady and wild all at once.
And I was kissing Heath while Jaako and Kerr lay dead. While someone discovered them.
“I could have done more,” I say. “I should have run more tests—why didn’t I run more tests?” More death should not come as a surprise, given Mila, given what happened to our parents. And yet. Perhaps I’ve bee
n deluding myself, holding tight to a small bit of hope—that Mila was a fluke. That there was no mutation. That if I could just make sure we’re well-fed, make sure we’re not the target of some asteroid’s collision course, make sure we’re not positioning ourselves to be overtaken by a ruthless slave driver, I could keep us alive.
My best is not enough. My best is not enough, and now I can’t even call Shapiro for help.
“Linds. Lindley.” Leo is face-to-face with me now, his hands on my shoulders. “You could not have stopped this no matter how many tests you ran.”
Look at what happened to our parents, he doesn’t have to say. “So, what, I’m not even supposed to try? This is obviously a mutation—just because we weren’t able to stop the virus the first time around, maybe there’s a way to stop this one. Maybe three deaths will be the end of it.”
Three deaths are already three too many.
And three deaths confirms it: Mila was no fluke. It’s already begun to spread.
“Who found them? Where were they? Tell me everything.”
“Noël found them, technically, but Sawyer and Bram were right there with her,” Leo says. “Noël said she was supposed to go for a run with Kerr, but Kerr never showed. When she went to find her at Jaako’s place, no one answered. She’d been staying there since her parents . . . well. You know.” He clears the tightness from his throat. “So, yeah, Noël decided to try Kerr’s place instead—but on her way, she saw Jaako and Kerr huddled together in one of the mezzanine alcoves. At first she thought they were just, uh . . . making out.”