This Splintered Silence

by Kayla Olson

  I swallow the lump that’s formed in my throat. I don’t know how to voice what I’m thinking—that Akello looks like he wants to strangle an apology right out of me? That I don’t even blame him?

  “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, thanks. Careful, though, Akello looks . . . upset.” He’s intimidatingly tall, but his height has never felt quite so threatening. Usually, he’s calm, thoughtful. Steady. Warm.

  What do we even do to keep this from escalating further? Akello has several inches on Leo, and it isn’t like Leo’s equipped with anything that could give him an advantage. If Akello turns on Leo, if something happens—I don’t even know what I’d do. Heath and Leo together could hold their own, but Heath isn’t here. Heath is more than halfway to Nautilus by now.

  And what if more people join up with him outside my door? What if it’s Leo and Haven and Natalin and me against all the rest? The only way Leo will have the upper hand here is if Akello never sees him coming.

  “Bring some zip ties, just in case,” I tell Leo. “There’s a whole drawer full of them in Medical.” Assuming he’s coming from Control, where he stayed on duty all night, Medical will be an easy detour.

  “Got it,” he says. “Keep him distracted. I’ll be there soon.”

  “I just want to talk!” Akello yells, still pounding the glass.

  I slide off my stool, walk slowly to face him. Now that he has my attention, he’s quiet again, though anger still simmers in his eyes. I’m putting a lot of faith in the thin pane that separates us, that it is stronger than it looks.

  Our height difference is incredible—he towers over me. I straighten my shoulders, hold my head high. I may not have his height, but I can match him for presence.

  “You want to talk?” I tilt my head, narrow my eyes. “So talk.”

  “You’ve made a big mistake.” I can feel his intensity even from this side of the glass. “You lied about Mila, and no one trusts you.”

  I give a little half laugh. “You think I don’t know that?”

  “I’m just telling you,” he says. “People are starting to talk. People are saying things, wondering what else you and the others are hiding.”

  “I don’t see anyone else trying to break down my door. All I see is you.”

  “If you had nothing to hide, you wouldn’t be holing up in here. You’d answer our questions instead of leaving us to come up with answers on our own.” The way he says answers sends a chill down my spine.

  “Well, if this is your answer—coming to my door and blatantly accusing me of making the wrong call, without stopping to consider that there was no good alternative? Your answer is no solution.”

  “Tell us, then,” he says. “Tell us—”

  But his words die out as Leo catches him by surprise. Before Akello even realizes what’s happening, Leo has swiftly bound his wrists behind him with the zip ties. Tears spring up in my eyes at the sight of it. It’s only for a minute, I tell myself. It’s only temporary.

  “She’ll give answers when we have them,” Leo says. “And unfortunately, we don’t have them just yet.”

  Akello’s usual gentle nature is overwhelmingly apparent in the way he doesn’t fight back against Leo—his passion, his desire that things be right, are tempered now by an even-keeled calm. Perhaps he was only trying to get my attention; perhaps he was no threat at all. Are we justified in temporarily binding him simply because I felt threatened? Have I really become so ruled by my own fear?

  “Come with me,” Leo says. “Lindley’s got work to do. You can yell at me all you want, all right?”

  Akello nods, eyes sparkling under the recessed spotlights just outside my door. This one heartbreaking look: it says more than any of his words ever could.

  He’s lost everything, like every one of us.

  He couldn’t stand by and do nothing.

  He had to do something.

  I know the feeling.

  Leo glances over his shoulder at me as he leads Akello away. Thank you, I mouth.

  Always, he replies.

  I spend a full ten minutes pacing the lab, walking off the emotion that’s left me shaking and a little dizzy. Too much pressure, too little sleep, and now this—I’m doing everything I possibly can, and I get yelled at in return? It’s not that I blame him for his frustration, or for demanding answers. I just wish I had answers to give.

  I try to put it out of my mind for now. Do what I can. Dwelling on it will only lead to your best is never enough, Lindley. To the reality that people are starting to break—that we have been breaking for weeks.

  Eventually, I manage to pull it together. Focus does not come easily, to say the least.

  For the better part of the next hour, I mull over the conundrum of my hazy lab results. One failed sample was disappointing, but three failed samples—failed in identical ways, for no obvious reason?

  It’s suspicious. It isn’t right.

  Where did I go wrong? I pace circles around my island, go back over the test procedures in my head. I didn’t miss anything. My measurements, my timers: all precise. The samples were fresh and handled properly, at least where Kerr and Jaako were concerned.

  So what happened?

  All I can think to do now is run the labs on the saliva and hair samples. Saliva first, I decide—I’m much more familiar with that process than I am with hair’s. Zesi sealed two swabs each into small plastic bags. I prepare two vials of reagent solution, and am just about to settle the swabs into position when I notice something odd.

  They’re clean.

  They’re too clean, for two people whose final breaths were laced with bloodbubbles. As if they never coughed blood up at all.

  Holy—the implications here, everything this could mean—

  Suddenly I can’t move fast enough.

  If there is no trace of blood in the saliva, that changes everything.

  Everything.

  33

  SHADE AND SHADOW

  THE WAY I see it, of the two possibilities at play here, one of them is impossible.

  Either Zesi and Leo collected falsified samples—swabs taken from somewhere else, anywhere but from Jaako and Kerr—or these deaths were not due to a mutated virus at all.

  If these strange saliva samples were the only odd things that had happened, that would be one thing, but they’re not. Three tests in a row have failed, 100 percent of the tests I’ve run on this new wave of death. None of my tests failed in the first wave, so I’m relatively certain it’s not simply that I’m doing it wrong. And then there’s the erratic way the virus seems to have spread: the victims had so little in common—Mila, who never spent time with Jaako and Kerr—while the six of us who’ve actually handled the dead remain untouched, living and breathing like always.

  The only logical explanation is that the virus is not to blame.

  I trust Zesi and Leo, would trust them with my life.

  I trust them. They wouldn’t lie to me.

  Right?

  The alternative is equally unnerving:

  Someone on this station is lying. Someone on this station is a murderer.

  34

  ZOMBIE STARS

  WHEN I WAS younger, maybe eight or nine, I liked to spend time in the sky lounge, sipping hot chocolate and staring out into the infinite star-spotted expanse. Leo would come and find me every now and then, sit beside me on the floor and talk my ear off for hours. He was very into space facts at the time, particularly the more terrifying ones.

  I can still remember, vividly, the day I learned of zombie stars.

  Of white dwarfs that have died, essentially, but end up coming back to life by creating an immense supernova that feeds off their neighboring stars.

  I remember wondering if they knew, somehow, what they were doing: if they did it on purpose, taking and taking and taking just so they could survive, even if it meant draining the life out of the stars they’d seen every other day of their eternal star lives. Or if that was just their nature, some sort of self-preservation me
thod that kicked in on instinct.

  We’ve all suffered a death here, in a way. We still live, we still breathe, we still walk and talk and try to keep on going in the hope that one day we won’t feel so broken. But on the inside? Parents who will never again be more than memories—the shattered illusions of safety and security, tiny shards lodged in our hearts, reminding us every day that we are fragile—

  Someone here is trying to bring themselves back to life, trying to feel again in the midst of all that is numb.

  And they are very good at hiding.

  35

  SECRET SECRETS

  WHOEVER DID THIS is extremely clever. Whoever did this is extremely calculating.

  Mila. Jaako. Kerr.

  After all we’ve suffered, loss after loss after loss, I cannot fathom the level of delusion it would take to decide that this—this, the theft of life and breath and future—is the answer. I cannot fathom the numbness of heart required to break another heart, to take it and smash it and see if the shards are sharp enough to make its killer bleed, or feel. The bitterness required to spread bile into the world, just to avoid being alone in it.

  Yet here we are.

  It isn’t like we live down on Earth, where there are innumerable places for a murderer to flee. There are no far-flung continents up here, no mountains or forests, no caves or islands or anywhere else someone might go to run from the past. Here, someone is hiding in plain sight. It could be anyone. It’s unnerving.

  Worse, it’s simply hard to imagine anyone on the station who would do a thing like this. We all have our moments—we all clash sometimes, and things have certainly been escalating as of late—but we’ve lasted this long without resorting to murdering each other. It is world-shifting to realize that the reality we live in is not what I thought it was.

  I thought we were better than this.

  I dig my fingers into my temples, stare into the pristine white lab island until it is a blinding blur. This is an entirely new dimension of things required of me: not even my mother had to deal with a serial killer. A serial killer, holy . . . that’s what this is, and it’s possibly more frightening than a virus. That it likely won’t end at three deaths. That there’s no predicting who might be next.

  That there’s motive behind it.

  With a mutation, it might have been hopeless—we might have all been wiped out—but at least I would have died knowing I tried my very best, that there might not have been a cure at all no matter how long I worked for one. Knowing what I now know, though—that these deaths are absolutely preventable, that I have every reason to believe they’ll continue unless I find the killer and put a stop to this madness—it’s a heavier sort of pressure, one that’s closing in on me from all sides. Should I call for some sort of lockdown? Or would that only make for a smarter killer amid a sea of emotional instability? The killer could creep around in secret and take our people out one by one without anyone noticing, thanks to all the isolation. Still, my gut says a lockdown could minimize our losses if done well. We just need to go about it the right way.

  My finger hovers over my buzz screen, and I’m ready to have Haven make the call—but I can’t bring myself to actually do it. Not yet. Before I stir up panic prematurely, I should probably have more to back up my theory than just a simple this is off, this doesn’t feel right. I should probably have something concrete.

  Deep breaths. Calm, calm.

  I need to do quick work, and I need it to be the best work of my life.

  When I first stepped up as commander, I cracked open my mother’s slim silver laptop and familiarized myself with file after file until my eyes gave out for the night. I spent a large percentage of my time in the manifest records of all who remained: I was familiar enough with most of their names, but not things like birth dates, or their parents’ names and specific roles aboard the station, or other details I wouldn’t have known simply by surviving seventeen years of station life together. Before it became my priority to know each and every resident, I mostly grew roots with Leo and Heath and Haven. I was friendly with the others, sure. But being friendly isn’t exactly the same as being friends.

  I slip out of the lab and head home, straight to my mother’s bedside table. She always kept the laptop in its top drawer; I keep it there, too. A thought nags at me: Don’t waste time going through the manifests, it says. Better to run more tests in the lab.

  But the tests can wait. As far as the deaths go, I’m more concerned with who did the killing than how. For the moment, anyway. Finding links and patterns among the victims could lead to their killer, which could put an end to this swiftly.

  I pull up the manifest’s master list, filter it by year of birth so I won’t have to see the names of all our parents who died. A heaviness settles in my chest: they are nothing more than names on a screen now. Bits and bytes and memory.

  Eighty-five names remain after the filter does its work, because of course the computer has no way of knowing what’s happened since I last opened it. I click Mila’s name, but it turns out I’m not prepared for her photo—how odd it is to have her bright brown eyes looking out, so very alive, as I switch her status to deceased. I do the same for Jaako. For Kerr.

  Now we are eighty-two.

  It doesn’t look like a lot, but I know better. Just as our parents were more than just their names, so are we all. I wish it were as easy as sifting through the photos until I found one that obviously didn’t belong, one that glowed red with anger, perhaps, or possibly even remorse. If only. So . . . what am I looking for?

  Perspective, I decide.

  A bird’s-eye view of those of us who are left. Any connections I can draw between the victims, any telling details that might help me rule out—or take a closer look at—potential suspects.

  This . . . could take a while.

  36

  BREAK

  I’VE BEEN SAVING my mother’s brick of chocolate, sealed up in its foil like some sort of shrine.

  I tear into it.

  Break off one small piece.

  Things are not okay, not even a little bit.

  37

  UNSETTLE, UPROOT

  IT ISN’T EASY to forget everything I know, but tonight, it is necessary. It’s imperative that I use wide-open eyes to take a good, hard look at the familiar—that I dislodge my biases, approach each file as if it belongs to the killer.

  The familiar has become strange.

  Yuki and Grace, for example: no longer are they merely two girls who went missing, or girls with porcelain bones who are more likely to be broken than to break. Now they are girls who had access codes to SSL, girls who broke in without permission, girls who stole witch hazel from Pillar 97. Girls who might break other rules to preserve their own good.

  And Akello—how he looked like he wanted to strangle the truth out of me, how he looked like he might have tried if not for the glass between us—his eyes on me during the mandatory check-in said he knew about Mila before we’d even announced it. I assumed it was because they were inseparable as friends, but it isn’t like I knew the inner workings of their relationship; maybe it was an enemies-closer situation, how he always hung around her. Maybe he twisted and snapped. He’s certainly imposing enough to overpower a victim or three.

  It isn’t such a stretch to connect some people to the deaths. Like Mikko, ready to attack Cameron for stealing his father’s razor blades. The fact that he had razor blades at all—and the fact that Cameron stole them.

  On and on, I sift through the files. I consider each one, jotting notes as I go, mapping connections between them, until I’m left with just six.

  Five, if we’re not counting me.

  These are the most difficult biases to set aside. Sometimes, biases are there for a reason: because there are people who are implicitly trustworthy, people you’ve grown close to because they’re worthy of closeness, people you know—know—would never do the unspeakable things in question. Could never, because you’ve seen straight down to their so
uls, shadows and all. That even their shadows aren’t so dark as to hide murder, murder, murder.

  Heath. Haven. Natalin. Leo. Zesi.

  They’ve been working tirelessly alongside me, tending to the station just like I’ve been doing. I trust them, every single one.

  Though, if I’m honest, Natalin doesn’t completely seem to trust me.

  And I’m learning new things by the day about Heath, when I thought I knew all there was to know—how he feels about me, for one. How he never told me about his crash landing last year.

  We all know every turn of the station.

  Every security camera.

  Every single code for every single room.

  I thought it would make me feel better to go through the manifests, but instead of ruling people out, all I’m left with is a mess of notes and the pervasive feeling that it could be anyone.

  The only people I can absolutely trust are dead.

  38

  GIRL AGAINST TIME

  IT’S FOUR-MORNING, AND I’ve now had three pieces of chocolate, a full fifth of the entire bar. Even at this early hour, I take great care in spreading my supplies out in perfect order on the laboratory island.

  I’m running on three hours of broken sleep. Aside from obvious concerns—the who and how of these murders—we’re coming up on the thirty-six-hour mark from when Zesi and Heath set off for Nautilus. I know well enough not to expect them to return at exactly thirty-six hours, since they will have had to dock and load up the fresh batch of supplies, but I find myself waiting on the edge of my stool regardless. In my limited, broken sleep, I kept dreaming of explosions: a perfect burst of fire from the heart of the bee, complete destruction in the span of a single second, all of it silent in the void of space.

  I’ve been trying not to dwell on the things that make me afraid. Trying to find answers instead, fumbling around for something solid and within my control, rather than tying myself into anxious knots over things so far out of it. The mystery of the deaths has been a more than sufficient distraction thus far—but not a satisfying one.