A Conspiracy of Stars

by Olivia A. Cole

  “The hope is that we will be able to find the proteins that give the kunike this ability and imitate them synthetically for our own use,” my father replies. “Just like our skinsuits, the technology of which is a synthetic reproduction of a maigno’s ears.”

  “Do we have their permission?” I can’t stop myself from saying. My father tilts his head sideways to look past Alma, who moves out of the way so he can see me.

  “Do we have the animals’ permission?” he says. It wasn’t what I meant—I had meant the Faloii—but now that he says it, it doesn’t seem stupid at all, the way I know he thinks it does. “No, we haven’t asked the animals’ permission. We will, however, continue to do our duty as scientists of N’Terra and study them for our benefit. We will learn from the kunike’s camouflage, for instance, as we design future skinsuits.”

  “For camouflage,” I say. “What are we hiding from? The Faloii?”

  “Not at this time,” my father says. I don’t think such coldness has ever existed on Faloiv. “The dirixi, for one, is high on my list of things we need to hide from.”

  I almost feel Yaya’s heart clench at the reference to Jaquot’s death. I can assume that’s the part of my father’s statement that got her attention, not the more sinister “not at this time.” “Not at this time” doesn’t mean “never.”

  “I have a procedure in the Avian compound very soon,” he says, addressing the group without taking his eyes off me. “I’ll walk you to the Atrium before I’m off. Remove your lab coats and gather your things.”

  We walk in silence down the long bright hallway. My father isn’t even staring into his slate: he leads us down the hall with his eyes forward.

  He turns to face us as we catch up to him. He ignores me, instead addressing Alma, Rondo, and Yaya.

  “Get something to eat. Afterward someone will find you an empty room to work in.”

  He takes a step away to leave us, and Yaya surprises me by stopping him.

  “Sir, may we continue our work in the Atrium?” she asks.

  “The Atrium?” he says, turning slightly.

  “Yes. It’s . . .” She hesitates, as if realizing she shouldn’t have asked. “The light. The light is better there.”

  “The light.”

  He squints at her, then glances at me, perhaps to see if this is something I put her up to. But I’m as surprised as he is.

  “Yes,” he says, turning back down the hall. “Stay out of the way.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He’s gone, sweeping down the hall with the tails of his lab coat waving behind him. Off to the Beak, I think—off to oversee more horrors.

  “Let’s go in,” Alma says gently, touching my arm.

  I pull away and move toward the door, which opens. Yaya catches my eye, her expression closed and flat. She’s angry with me. Our friendship was really just beginning and now it’s bent and broken. I was harsh with her, but I wonder which of my words had done the damage: implying that she’s stupid or damaging her trust in N’Terra.

  As we make our way across the Atrium, I’m grateful that it’s almost empty—I have to stop myself from glaring at every whitecoat I pass. How could N’Terrans be so stupid? My temples are throbbing, as if everything I have learned is screaming inside my head. I try to relax and breathe deeply through my nose. Doing so, I catch a whiff of the smell of cooking food, the same scent from the first time we visited the Atrium. I know it’s the same smell—full and smoky—but it feels different in my nose. It’s as if I only smelled it on a shallow level before, and now I’m taking in the whole of it. It’s pungent. Inhaling deeply, it’s almost as if the scent takes the shape of something else, knotting in my nostrils and sticking there. I pause, bending slightly, nausea gripping me unexpectedly. What is wrong with you now? I think to myself, irritated. My friends didn’t notice: they continue toward the central tree, eager to see what the men in green skinsuits offer in the way of food today.

  I catch up, drawing even with Rondo. He’s already taken a platter and is piling it with zarum and waji. There are the chunks of brown food that we’d seen before too, the dish I’ve never had a chance to try—zunile, I remember it was called. It’s the source of the pungent aroma. I inhale again, trying to identify the scent. It’s familiar, somehow. An echo. Rondo dips the spoon into the dish of zunile, stirring up the juices and releasing the odor more fully into the air.

  I recoil. It’s as if fire has sprung from the very air and burned me, and I double over, retching involuntarily.

  “Octavia?” Rondo lets the spoon clatter back into the dish and he drops his platter onto the platform. He reaches out for me. “What’s the matter?”

  “The zunile,” I gasp. It’s all I can say before I clamp my mouth shut to keep from vomiting. I bite my lip so hard it bleeds, my hands trembling before I ball them into fists.

  “Zunile? The food?” He glances quickly at the dish, as if expecting to see a slimy creature crawling out of the juices. “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

  Now Alma and Yaya have also noticed. They swing back from the other end of the platform, their eyebrows low and faces squinted in worry. I can’t wait. I turn and run, sweeping past the whitecoats, who look up with only mild interest. I race through the door, out of the warm sunlight and back into the glaring halls of the labs.

  The hall is mercifully empty and I tear down the corridor, its whiteness a blur. Finally I reach the sorting room, unoccupied by both animals and humans. Far down the hall I hear Rondo and the others calling for me as loudly as they dare.

  I pay them no attention, careening through the gap in the sorting room’s door as soon as it opens wide enough. Inside, the piles of eggs wait there impassively. No attendants. I stumble to the corner of the room, sinking down where two walls meet. I breathe deeply, willing the vomit to stay down. Even here, far from the Atrium, I still smell the stink of the zunile. The smoky brown chunks were on the platform as if they too are food, but they’re not. Zunile isn’t food. The smell is of death. Zunile is a dead animal.

  CHAPTER 23

  I sit crouched in the corner of the sorting room for what feels like hours, my body trembling. Eventually workers will be coming in—they have to, it’s been too long. If they find me here there’s no doubt that my father will be summoned. I stumble to my feet, my legs shaking underneath me. I walk quickly to the door, flexing my cramped fingers. I need to get out of here, and I know where I’m going.

  The door whispers open, admitting me into the hall. I look in each direction: no sign of Alma or Rondo. They’ve either returned to the Atrium or have been ushered off to another procedure room. I don’t have time to look for them: right now I need answers, and the person who has them is my mother.

  The trip from the Zoo to the commune is a blur, sounds and colors running together. The gray-suited guards at the entrance to the labs speak to me, but even if I wanted to reply, I think the sound that escaped my throat could only be a roar. My anger is rising: it propels me at a sprint past the ’wams of my neighbors, right up to the yellow cloth hanging from the door of my own. I practically fall into the ’wam, panting.

  My mother, standing in the hallway as if moving toward her study, turns at the sound of my entrance. She looks surprised to see me but pleasantly so.

  “Why . . .” I pant. “Didn’t. You. Tell. Me.”

  She raises an eyebrow, assessing me with her dark eyes.

  “Tell you what, exactly?” she says.

  “Everything!” I explode. I still haven’t caught my breath, and I stand there with my chest heaving, glaring at her.

  “I thought I could wait to tell you until everything was figured out,” she says. “I didn’t think you’d have any contact with actual animals until you were twenty-one, when you were in the labs. The philax was an accident and then the damned internships.”

  She flops her hands to her sides, the hands that look like mine.

  “And the dead animals?” I demand, my anger still large and bright
. “What about that? They’re eating animals in there!”

  My throat convulses at the thought of eating something dead, a body that was once alive and walking around, stripped and lifeless and cooked like zarum.

  “It’s wrong,” my mother says, her jaw setting. “It was never supposed to happen. But it was commonplace before Faloiv—a custom passed down from the Origin Planet—and many of the elders of N’Terra resisted the Faloii’s order when we landed.”

  “The Faloii specifically said we can’t eat animals and we’re doing it anyway?” I’m practically screaming. “We’re barbarians! Why did our ancestors eat animals?”

  My picture of the star people before us has changed from what I’ve always imagined: they look fanged and dead eyed now, crouching in the shadows like beasts.

  “It was called ‘meat,’” she says.

  “That’s meat? But Dad said he’s eaten meat . . .” I’d managed to catch my breath but now it feels ragged again.

  “Yes. I have eaten it too. You must understand: it was customary. People cling to their customs.”

  “Customs?” I demand. “Who cares about customs! You said the Faloii forbid it! Why would we do anything they forbid us to do?”

  My mother sighs, her body leaning as if considering coming toward me for the first time. Her face is a map of sorrow, and I almost feel bad for shouting. But not quite.

  “There are those in the compounds who”—she pauses, anger rippling across her face before she continues—“who don’t agree that we should remove meat from our diet. Among other things. There are people in N’Terra who believe we shouldn’t obey the laws of the Faloii. Who believe we should be making our own laws. This is one area I have fought against for some time now. It appears the Council is making decisions behind my back.”

  “And Grandfather,” I say. “What about him? I know he didn’t die the way you said. I saw the files. He was here. He was on Faloiv.”

  She looks as if she’s taken completely by surprise, her eyes squinting.

  “Your grandfather . . . ,” she says but can’t seem to finish; her eyes lose their steel and turn soft and shiny. “I miss him. But, Afua, there are things that we must do.”

  I shake my head, waving my hands. I don’t want to hear any more. She sounds like my father: “There are things that we must do as scientists” if we want to survive. Obscure things that don’t tell me anything about what happened to my grandfather. Everything I’m hearing sounds as if we’re doing whatever we can to ruin our chances of survival.

  “No!” I shout, staring at her accusingly. “You sound just like him! Things we must do to survive here? Like what? Like killing animals and eating their dead bodies? Like implanting vasana with dirixi teeth? Altering their brains so that they become killers? No wonder we’re so worried about war, we—”

  But she’s rushing over to me from the hallway, the space between us closed in an instant. Her fingers grip my shoulders like talons, her eyes inches from mine.

  “What did you say?” she snaps, all the softness gone from her eyes.

  “Wh-what?”

  She shakes me and I almost hear my brain rattle.

  “What did you say?” she repeats. “About the vasana? What did you say?”

  I shake her off, stumbling backward, fear creeping in to share space with my fury.

  “The vasana!” I shout. “I saw Dr. Albatur with Vasana 11. The dirixi fangs. I saw the procedure. I know what you’re doing back there in the secret parts of the Zoo! Don’t act so—”

  “Dr. Albatur?” she interrupts. “You saw the Head of the Council tampering with the brain of a vasana?”

  I wonder briefly if she’s manipulating me: running an experiment on my strange, colorful brain; an experiment she’s recording with some hidden device.

  “Yes,” I snarl, sizing her up for any discernible reaction. “I snuck into a restricted part of the Zoo. I saw Dr. Albatur. I saw the vasana. I saw everything.”

  At first I think she’s attacking me. She springs forward and I cringe, waiting for I don’t know what: for fists, for a tranq gun she hid somewhere in her lab coat. But instead she’s at the front entrance to the ’wam, standing there in the open door looking back at me with her eyes slanted into piercing slits.

  “Hurry up,” she says, jerking her head at the commune outside.

  “Wh-where are we going?” I’ve already taken a step toward her, but I pause, unsure. Is she taking me to the labs? To find my father and tell him what I’ve done? I feel the way the vasana must have felt; fear and anger erupting in my veins like a serum. If she tells me we’re going to the Zoo, I think, preparing my body for my blooming plan, then I will run. I’ll run and find a way out of the compound, find Rasimbukar. . . .

  “To the Greenhouse,” she says, turning her back on me, forcing me to follow. “We need to find Dr. Espada.”

  CHAPTER 24

  The sun and my fear combine to wring the sweat out of my skin. The softness of my mother’s face has been replaced by stone, a blank wall that fends off every one of my questions as she marches us outside to the chariots.

  “Why are we going to see Dr. Espada? What’s going on between you and Dr. Albatur?”

  She ignores me, backing up the chariot and steering it toward the gates. Only then does she speak, the steel of her face giving way to a warm smile. I realize I was right about the second face she wears in N’Terra, and I shiver in the heat.

  “Hello, Amelie.”

  The guard at the gates steps out of the small white ’wam, her buzzgun slung across her chest. The pleasure at being greeted by name is a ripple that stirs her solemnity. She holds out her slate, my mother’s face already displayed on its screen.

  “Dr. English,” she says, holding out her slate. My mother presses her thumb to the corner of the screen and hands it back, and Amelie makes a few selections before passing it across to me. When I press my thumb to the square alongside the image of my face, I expect the usual nod from the guard before she opens the gates. But this time she squints at the screen.

  “Is there a problem?” my mother says.

  “Well,” the guard says. “Sort of. Some kind of glitch. Miss English’s print registers as Dr. English. Her father.”

  She turns the slate around so my mother can see, and there’s the same image of my father that had appeared on the wall outside Dr. Albatur’s hidden lab.

  “That’s strange,” my mother says, as if it’s not strange at all. “I’ll mention it to Octavius. He has a meeting with Dr. Older this evening anyhow.”

  “Oh . . . ,” the guard begins.

  “Thank you, dear,” my mother says. I’ve never heard her call anyone dear in my life.

  “You’re welcome,” the guard says. She opens her mouth as if to say more, but changes her mind. She opens the gate.

  My mother guides the chariot through the opening and out onto the red road. We say nothing until we are a safe distance from the compound, then I turn my head to look at her.

  “Mom?”

  She glances at me, her eyebrows raised.

  “I told you that you had your father’s hands,” she says.

  “What does that mean?” I say. “Why do the scanners think I’m Dad?”

  “Because I reimprinted your fingers,” she says.

  “You what?”

  “When I had you in my lab after you got lost in the jungle,” she says. “I knew it would be . . . useful.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She ignores me, unfolding her hood from the inside of her skinsuit and latching the mouth guard. She glances at me with a pointed look that tells me to do the same. When I do, she puts the chariot into high gear and we’re buzzing down the road, red dust flying.

  “Why are we going to see Dr. Espada?” I shout over the whir of the chariot and the whine of the wind.

  “Listen!” she shouts back.

  My mind prickles instantly, a rippling in the center of my brain. The mental muscle I use to access the tunn
el feels more solid this time. I locate it without much teeth grinding, and coax the tunnel into spiraling slowly open.

  I find my mother there waiting for me, images from her pushing through the tunnel almost immediately. I try to control their flow, focusing on each feeling and shape rather than letting it all rush past me in a cascade. I see my mother and father as children, becoming friends. He an orphan and she with only one parent, her father gone. I feel their loneliness, my mother’s mother buried in lab work, venturing into the jungle to learn more about our new planet. My parents grow, bond, and live together, have me. I watch fragments of their lives flying through the universe of my mind like comets: my father holding me, my mother’s joy for him as he revels in parenthood. They make promises to each other. My father vows to do whatever it takes to make a future that is safe. My grandmother behind him frowning.

  The chariot whips past a small group of marov, which scatter into the bushes. Their clustered fear slips through the tunnel to mingle with my mother’s thoughts. Above, oscree flap and cry, and a hefty roigo settles on a branch silently: I get the impression of its attention as it focuses on our chariot passing by. My brain is too loud now: too many lives and minds coming from all sides, filling my head with their worries and desires. How does my mother keep them all out? I clamp my mind around the tunnel and force it to shut, the buzz of feelings slowly fading.

  “Where’d you go?” my mother calls as we round the corner to the Greenhouse.

  “I can’t keep everything straight! It’s too much. How do you do it?”

  “We’re a little different,” she says, but I barely hear her over the wind.

  “What?”

  “Just wait. We’re almost there.”

  The Greenhouse is quiet on the outside: all the younger students will have already eaten second meal and are back in the building with Dr. Yang learning the scientific method or basic species differentiators. I’m gripped by a sudden pang of nostalgia, longing for those days when everything was simple: before abnormal brain scans and bloodthirsty dirixi, before secret labs and dead animals disguised as food. My mother brings the chariot to a stop outside the Greenhouse and hops off, walking quickly to the entrance before I’m even fully on the ground.