by Kayla Olson
I find what I’m looking for in the third drawer, beside a trio of microscopes: a tablet so thin it could be paper, so inflexible it obviously isn’t. I handle it carefully, dust it for fingerprints before I do anything else—
It’s clean. Because of course it is.
I pinch the lower right corner and its dark screen blooms to light. My limited options are clearly marked: Storage Index, Compendium of Botanical Specimens, Calculator, Notepad, and Settings. I tap into the compendium, do a search for belladonna. As I suspected, it’s in our system. The entry reads:
Belladonna (Atropa belladonna):
Plantae > Angiosperms > Eudicots > Asterids > Solanales >
Solanaceae > Atropa > A. belladonna
Belladonna has a tortured history; while its value is primarily medicinal, it is most notorious for its toxic qualities. Primary medical benefits: sedative; remedy for bronchial spasms; common ointment for skin, leg, or joint pain; treatment for excessive sweating. Use with caution, use reliable measuring devices for exact dosages, use only if no better alternative is available.
WARNING: When ingested in heedless proportions, belladonna becomes a deadly poison.
Storage Index: F23
I tap F23, which takes me from the compendium directly to belladonna’s entry in the storage index app. Now that I know for sure the belladonna originated here in SSL, the index itself isn’t as helpful as a map would be. While I can tell enough from this list that Section F is devoted entirely to medicinal plants, it isn’t as easy to figure out how the pillars themselves are arranged in this physical room. There are no signs, just row after row after endless row.
In poking around the index, trying to find a map, I stumble on an answer I hadn’t even begun to search for yet—by tapping into F23’s index entry, I’ve accidentally pulled up a request form. Its entry fields prompt me to select a quantity, then manually enter an access code. Instead of filling out the form, however, I tap a small, gray link off to the side: Activity Log.
There’s only one item in the log. Who knew two tiny words, a timestamp, and an access code could be so chilling? Six leaves, it says, and is timestamped four hours prior to Mila’s death.
The access code is exactly the same as the only one I know, the one that grants entry to this place.
And suddenly, my hopes flip—whereas just a few days ago, I had hoped Yuki and Grace were the only ones who knew the access code outside our core six, now I hope for the opposite. I hope this knowledge is pervasive, a secret everyone knows but no one talks about.
Otherwise, our list of potential killers officially just took a drastic hit.
Otherwise, our list of potential killers now looks like: Yuki, Grace, and the five people I thought I could trust more than anyone in the entire galaxy.
I hope beyond all hope there is something here I’m missing.
Belladonna’s pillar is tucked away in the far recesses of the lab. A few more minutes of tapping around pulled up a map, so now I’m leaning against the window full of stars and staring at the bright pillar, as if it will divulge the secrets I want to know.
It could still be anyone. Yuki and Grace had secret intel, and I had no idea, so who’s to say there aren’t more people wandering around the station with restricted access codes?
This reasoning brings me no comfort, though. No matter how emphatically I try to preach it to myself, my counter-thoughts are louder and more convincing.
Because, by now, we would have found more people in places they shouldn’t be: more people trying to access medicinal herbs for their own stress relief or recreation, more activity in the log than two isolated incidents of belladonna and witch hazel retrievals.
Because Akello Regulus would have used the code to access the lab at Portside that early morning. He wouldn’t have been yelling at me through the glass door if he could’ve slipped inside it instead.
There’s always the possibility, of course, that someone I’d never suspect has the code and is simply being extremely careful. If they’re thinking enough steps ahead to commit murder with such calculation, it makes sense that they’d be smart enough to cover their tracks.
My head hurts.
As much as I’d rather not think about the most likely suspects, it’s time.
I know of eight people who have the access code. Leo and Heath and Haven, Zesi and Natalin. Yuki and Grace. Me.
Unless I have deep repressive issues and have somehow blocked out the planning and execution of three murders, I’m ruling myself out.
Yuki and Grace are natural suspects, since they have obvious knowledge of how to get into SSL, and more suspiciously, knowledge of how to retrieve botanical matter from the pillars. They were also missing in the hours after Mila’s death—but what about the hours leading up to it? When, precisely, did they leave Mikko’s party? Was anyone paying close enough attention to know how long they stayed, and when they left? Even if so, I can’t think of a way anyone could provide substantial proof of that information. It would also be good to know what time they arrived at the party—if they were there by 9:13 that night, they couldn’t have been retrieving belladonna from SSL at the same time.
Next up: Natalin. Natalin has been overly combative with me lately, but that seems to spring from her intense desire to keep people alive. That’s not exactly her entire motivation, though—she also has an intense desire to not be at fault, to shove all responsibility on me. It’s possible she’s so deeply afraid of how the station will look at her if we run out of food that she resorted to creating a diversion: something even more terrible, something even more out of our control, than our supply shortage. And cutting down on the number of people who need food while she’s at it? Kind of brilliant. Twisted, yes, but this could be killing two birds with one stone at its finest—exactly the sort of calculation needed to pull these murders off.
As for Zesi—he and Leo were the first to find Jaako and Kerr, after the tip-off from Noël. He was the one to bring me their (potentially tampered-with?) samples, and also the one who discovered Mila in the middle of the night. Even if he didn’t have a direct hand in their deaths, he’s consistently been the first to uncover the news: I can’t think of a more brilliant way to position oneself as blameless than to shine a light on the deaths, to be the first swallowed up by grief and shock. On top of all this, he has intimate knowledge of our tech—he could have tampered with our security vid-feeds, or evaded detection altogether.
Haven, Heath, and Leo: it’s most difficult for me to wrap my head around any one of them committing these murders. It’s difficult to imagine how—like vines grown from the same soil, under the same sun and the same rain—any one of us could have sprouted, not to mention hidden, such a homicidal streak.
It’s like slicing off a piece of my own heart to set aside my trust in them, even for this single moment. If I’m honest with myself, though, I will reluctantly admit my trust cracked more than a little when Leo shared with Zesi the things I’d confided in him—and when Heath confessed the truth of his bee crash, a secret he’d hidden for well over a year—and it fractures a little more every time Haven pokes and prods at me about how I’m holding up. Those aren’t murder-level trust issues, though. Right? Those are we’re supposed to be able to share everything with each other issues. They’re how can I possibly feel supported by you, Haven, when you constantly make me feel like I’m never enough? issues.
And yet. I must consider them.
No matter how small the break, I can’t say with absolute certainty that I know every shade—every shadow—of their hearts. We’re all changing, each and every one of us. Every minute since the last of our parents died, every minute we’ve been stranded up here alone. We are as constant as starlight, yet every bit as unreliable: by the time it’s obvious a star has died, it’s much too late to prepare yourself for the darkness.
48
FEED AND FIRE
THE SUBTLE VIBRATION of my buzz screen pulls me out of a deep sleep. I’m disoriented at first
to find myself on SSL’s cold, hard floor, in shadows except for the sliver of light where my skin is kissed by the bright white glow of the nearest pillar.
“Hello?” My voice echoes in this cave of a room.
“Zesi figured it out,” Leo says. “He figured out some way to adapt the connection, and it’s genius, Linds—he fixed it, and it works!” His words fly past, light-years per minute.
“Leo—Leo. Slow down.” Finally, he falls silent on the other end. “What’s it?”
“The filter,” he says. “He successfully installed it and we won’t have to ration like we thought we would! Not as much, anyway.”
Now I’m awake. “Wait, seriously?” I’m sitting straight up now. “This is huge.”
“Right? He turned the mech room upside down, ended up finding some spare odds and ends in one of the drawers.” Leo’s energy is palpable, contagious. I’m on my feet in an instant, pacing the length of the panoramic window full of stars.
It’s almost unbelievable, to have a crisis just be . . . solved. Nothing else has gone the way it should, so this news is an enormous relief. Not just for the station, what this means for us, but for the state of my own parched hope—we are not terrifyingly low on clean water, and we may not have to reach out for Vonn’s help after all! Things have spiraled for so long now it’s like I started believing wrong was the only way things could go.
“This is . . . this is incredible.”
“Yeah, at least that’s one thing we don’t have to worry about,” he says.
“My thoughts, too.” And just like that, my joy deflates. One crisis averted, a thousand other things still spinning out of control. “Did you have any luck searching the vid-feeds?”
Leo is dead silent on the other end of the line.
“Leo? You still there?”
“I’m still here,” he says, his voice heavy, a complete one-eighty from just two seconds ago. “Trying to figure out how to tell you there’s absolutely nothing we can use on the feeds, and in fact, there are a few very significant and suspicious gaps in the footage.”
I stop pacing. I am a still shadow against infinite starlight. “I’m sorry, what did you just say?”
He’s speaking again now, but all I hear in my head is a blur of panic—he said there’s nothing we can use on the feeds, but he’s wrong. The fact that there are gaps in the footage is something we can use.
But it is the exact opposite of what I wanted to hear.
It is what I’ve dreaded most, what I didn’t want to believe was possible: it’s simply too much of a stretch to believe that Yuki or Grace would have been able to sneak into Control without any of us noticing, too much of a stretch that they’d know how to access the vid-feeds in the first place, let alone alter them.
The killer was one of us.
The killer
is
one of us.
“I, um—I need a minute, okay, Leo? I’ll talk to you later.” I cut the call short before he can get a single word in.
To his credit, he gives me the space I need. And I do need it—this changes everything. There are only two people who could have altered the feeds in plain sight, and I was just on a call with one of them. Surely Leo wouldn’t—couldn’t have—
Right?
I trusted him to go through the feeds, checking for anything suspicious—but what if he spent all this time cutting himself out of the footage so we wouldn’t have any incriminating evidence? He was alone up there, too, since Zesi apparently spent the last stretch of time working on fixing our filter.
And speaking of Zesi: this drastically shifts my perspective on his miraculous water filter fix. What if the filter was never a poor fit at all, but he made it look like a problem just so he could come in and save the day by “fixing” it? He could have altered the vid-feeds at any time prior to now. I do think he would’ve been more careful about it, though—he’s usually pretty precise at everything he does—but perhaps there’s just no elegant way to avoid an obvious splice when removing bits of timestamped footage. Add to that, whoever did it was probably in a hurry.
This isn’t to say it could only be Zesi or Leo—all of us have had a primer on the vid-feeds, and all of us are decent with the tech in general, thanks to an involved tour of Control Zesi gave us when we first stepped up to lead. Again, though, that points me back to Zesi: Could he have been preparing, even then, to murder our people? Could he have been laying groundwork that early to cover his tracks, so it wouldn’t be a giant neon arrow over his head when we began to investigate? And—and—if he had it in him to poison three of our population, what’s to say he wouldn’t eventually move on to a much larger scale: we’ve entrusted him with our water supply, but what if this “fix” was also an excuse to tamper with the water itself? What if our station-wide water supply is laced with belladonna now—what then?
I feel like I’m losing my mind. Like there is no gravity, no sun, no oxygen—like I can’t trust my own judgment, or my own memories.
Hope and fear can only coexist as equals for so long before one devours the other.
I only pray the fear will starve when it runs out of crumbs.
49
CATWALK, TIGHTROPE
HOW DO YOU hide, forever, in a place like this?
Where the walls feel like they’re closing in—
Where beyond the walls is a suffocating void: from the safe side of the windows, the glittering starlit space is more majesty than instant death—but the safe side of the windows has become every bit as risky.
How do I hide?
If I hide, I’ll starve or get trapped in my head, running blind on an endless dark loop. If I hide, I die anyway.
These are my three options: venture beyond Lusca’s walls out into the void of space; simply continue on as I always have; never leave my unit again. Two of these hold certain death—are those preferable to the one that comes with betrayal? Secrecy? Manipulation? Death after death after death, all illogical and completely avoidable?
Unfortunately, the option that terrifies me most is the only one that holds a chance at survival.
The water might be perfectly fine, I tell myself.
The water might be perfectly fine.
I can test it in the lab, prove it’s safe to drink. But how long do I have before we stumble upon another dead body? Or a lot of dead bodies, if the entire supply has been tainted?
I rummage around the drawers in SSL and grab an empty test tube, along with a cork I hope will fit—we’ve had issues with these tubes in the past, so delicate they crack when corked. Carefully, I fill the tube with water from the lab’s tap, then ease the cork into place. The glass holds.
Halfway to Portside, I decide to take a detour down to the hydro chamber. A series of panels near the filter console gives a constant read on the mineral levels in our water supply—they wouldn’t necessarily inform me of the presence of belladonna there, but if the levels show any abnormalities, that could be a clue. Aside from that, I simply want to make sure the sample I pulled from the tap is water from the filter Zesi installed, not the little bit left over from before. Each orb self-sanitizes before refilling with water, so it should be fairly easy to tell if my sample came from the dregs of Orb 5 or from full-to-the-brim Orb 1; if there’s any water left at all in Orb 5, my lab test will be useless until I can get some that’s been through the filter Zesi installed.
I tap in my code, and the door zips open—but I’m stopped dead in my tracks when I hear a pair of hushed voices, sandpaper voices that rub roughly against each other.
The argument cuts off abruptly; their echoes take longer to die. My paranoia crescendos to worst-case scenario in a heartbeat. Anyone outside our core group should be in their cabins on lockdown right now.
“Hello?” I call.
No use pretending I haven’t interrupted. They know I’m here—well, they know someone is here. I can’t see them from where I stand, but that doesn’t mean they can’t see me. And if they can see me, that’s an adva
ntage I’d like to take away. If I’ve stumbled onto something—if they think I’ve overheard things I shouldn’t—
Now does not seem like the time to place myself in anyone’s crosshairs.
“Lindley?”
A wave of relief washes over me. “Heath?”
It’s only Heath . . . and . . . who? My relief is quickly chased by a wave of suspicion. What is Heath doing in the hydro chamber? And since when does he get into heated arguments with people?
“Yeah, over here,” he says.
I follow the catwalk around toward his voice, find him sitting like Haven and I did earlier, beside . . . Natalin?
My eyes dart back and forth between them. Heath and Natalin? Heath . . . and Natalin. I can’t think of a single time I’ve ever seen them pair off on their own.
Maybe it’s because they only pair off in secret. Sort of like now.
I could sit here all day trying to read between the lines, or I could attack the question head-on. What would my mother do?
My mother wouldn’t waste her own time or anyone else’s.
“Am I interrupting something?”
They exchange a glance, like they’re each waiting for the other to start talking. The silence stretches on. Heath rips at his thumbnail with his teeth.
“Seriously, guys.” I sharpen my glare, though neither will look at me. “What’s going on?”
Every second they don’t speak, my suspicion ticks up a notch. Every second they don’t speak, I wonder if they—