by Karen Bao
The stream of memories halts when a round-faced, black-haired girl—taller than she used to be—leaps from the crowd to hug me.
“You made it!” Anka’s skinny arms squeeze all the air out of my lungs, but I’m so grateful to feel them around me again. Every time I return from combat, they tell me that I’m home. Really home.
A second set of arms enfolds us both.
“You’re probably sick of us tackling you,” Umbriel says. “But this whole seeing-you-alive thing? It never gets old.”
He pulls back, careful not to touch me for too long. After I told him about Wes, our friendship has remained steady, but we tiptoe confusedly around certain things.
“You’d quickly get sick of the alternative,” I say.
He snorts at the morbid joke.
“Don’t say that, Phaet,” says a quieter voice. My brother stands two meters away, jostled by the people brushing by. His shoulders are hiked up to his ears, and he doesn’t meet my eyes. I feel rotten for not having noticed him at first, but these days, I have trouble recognizing him. He hunches over like an arthritic man, and without his trademark big, crooked-toothed grin stretching his mouth, his face seems like someone else’s.
I unbuckle my weapons belt and give it to Umbriel before approaching Cygnus. When I hug him—carefully—he curls up tighter around himself.
“S-sorry,” he stammers. “It’s crazy out here. Anka said I could stay in the apartment—”
“I said you should—” my sister says.
“—but I wanted to see you. Took a calculated risk. Anyway, welcome back.”
He cracks a shy but toothy smile, and I rejoice inside like I do whenever something brings his old self to mind.
My family and I walk into the Atrium. The towering wall screens that once displayed flashing propaganda are now blank. We’ve razed the concave security mirrors, which reminded us that our every move was being watched, and done away with the wall cameras. To add color to the bleak dome, Dovetail has hung posters with messages referring to ongoing shortages, like SHOW TROOPS YOU CARE; EAT ONLY YOUR SHARE. Other posters display the silver-and-red dove that Anka designed, now as ubiquitous as the Committee’s six-star emblem used to be.
“Phaet! Phaet, over here!” A tall, thirty-something man in a white lab coat waves, one arm flailing high above people’s heads. His usually slick side-parted hair is ruffled, and the tips of his large ears are reddish from exertion. A mask covers the lower half of his heart-shaped face, leaving only his dark brown eyes visible. Eyes that frantically dart around every few seconds, searching for someone that’s not here. “Have you seen my sister? Is she—”
“Yinha’s safe, Bai,” I say. “She’s reporting inventory in Defense, but she should come out soon.”
Bai Rho expels a breath that I suspect he’s held all day and collapses against a pillar. He looks as exhausted as if he’d been in battle himself, but I know he’s been working on his biodefense project in his Nanoengineering lab. “Yinha’s perfectly capable, but every time she goes on a mission, I lose it.”
“We all do,” Umbriel says, squeezing Bai’s shoulder. His black eyes dart to me, and there’s anger in them—perhaps at the thought that I’ve just gotten back from hurting people. Possibly killing them. He confronted me about it as soon as I joined Militia a year and a half ago, and we haven’t quite resolved the issue.
Bai goes on. “And it’s gotten worse since Ida—” Her name hangs in the air like smog. The skin around Bai’s eyes tightens with pain, and his mind seems to jam. Since the anthrax attack, I think, my heart aching for him. Ida Omega, Bai’s partner, was one of the forty-six who didn’t make it.
Ida. I almost see her, a tall, square-jawed woman in a lab coat, her long brown hair gathered in a messy ponytail. I suspect Bai never takes off his mask because it lets him hold on to her.
Umbriel drops his hand.
“Well, that’s all in the past,” Bai says. “I’m going to find Yinha now. But before I forget—can you, Phaet and Umbriel, meet in the greenhouses tomorrow morning, roundabouts 7:00? Before the base-wide assembly? Asterion and my assistants will be there too.”
“The greenhouses?” Umbriel says.
“I’ve got . . .” He glances at the pulsing crowd. The average Dovetailer won’t know about his project until completion. It’s safer that way. “Something to show all of you. Something promising.”
Umbriel turns to me, and we nod at each other.
“A way to make the plants produce twice as much food?” Anka says. She laughs, but there’s a hungry glint in her eye.
“If only defying mass and energy conservation were my specialty.” Bai turns to me and Umbriel. “But you won’t be disappointed.”
Saying good-bye to us with brisk hugs, Bai shuffles off toward Defense to search for his younger sister. Each step raises his pant leg hem, allowing a peep of plastic prosthetic ankle.
“Guy’s gonna wear himself out,” Anka says, watching Bai go. “Running around all day, inventing stuff all night.”
I glance at our brother, who’s standing in the spot Bai vacated. He leans against the pillar, oblivious to our conversation. Cygnus’s mind frequently leaves his body these days, wandering off to somewhere only he knows.
I look back at my sister, at her piercing but worried eyes. “Bai needs that, Anka.”
Many people do. To avoid the pain until the world lets them feel it in peace.
UMBRIEL’S LONG, THIN FINGERS HAVE NEVER worked more carefully, not while cultivating plants, not even while thieving. The things he was picking then couldn’t kill him on contact. Hands shielded by elbow-length latex gloves, he coaxes scarlet jequirity seeds from brown pods, which hang from vines that crawl all over Greenhouse 17’s floor. The elliptical seeds, each about the size of my pinky toenail, have a black spot at one end that looks like an evil eye.
If we can find a way to use abrin, the poison in the seeds, to target bacteria like anthrax, it could stop another mass killing. Abrin would enter bacterial cells and paralyze the organisms until they die. But the poison doesn’t discriminate. Ingesting three milligrams—or “migs,” as Bai and his assistants say—can kill an adult human. I once napped near a jequirity patch; within a few hours, I was too woozy to realize it could do me in. Asterion Epsilon pulled me away and saved my life.
To prevent contact with or inhalation of the toxin, Umbriel wears a full face mask and bulky insulation suit. Despite the danger, I’d rather see him in this than the Dovetail military getup, which he’ll practically live in after he finishes training next month. Asterion—who works several rows away in his own protective suit—cajoled me into wearing orange nylon coveralls and a face mask that covers my nose and mouth too.
A renowned Chemist before he became a freedom fighter, Asterion is developing ways to synthesize abrin in the lab so that we no longer have to extract it from plants. Bai, an engineer, works on distributing it.
“Sometimes I wonder if harvesting this stuff is worth it, Phaet.” The mask muffles Umbriel’s deep voice. His left hand twitches, as if he wants to cover his handscreen’s audio receptors. That’s unnecessary now. The Committee’s eavesdropping ceased as soon as Dovetail set up a firewall, which requires a full-time team of ex-InfoTech workers to maintain. “What if it gives more people rashes during harvesting than it saves after a bio-attack?”
“We need to defend ourselves,” I say, shuddering. “We can’t have another Omega.”
Umbriel sighs. “Right. If we do, we’ll run out of penicillin.”
Since Dovetail lacked a cure for the mutated anthrax bacterium, we put the victims on the antibiotic and hoped for the best. The forty-six died because our best wasn’t enough.
“The Committee might try another disease next time,” I say.
“Yeah,” Umbriel says. “Did you hear the new report from the Graveyard?”
He means Base
III, the site of the Moon’s major uranium deposits, where many adults work in mines or refineries and die young of radiation sickness. “Came in earlier today. We’ve got to look out for botulinum and drug-resistant E. coli now.”
I wince, picturing the ravages of those diseases from images in my Earthbound Studies textbooks. Drooping eyelids, open sores, lumpy rashes, fevers . . .
The first set of greenhouse doors slide open with a whoosh, and Bai Rho enters the holding cell. He rolls his eyes impatiently as robotic arms zip him into the protective suit that we’re all wearing. When it’s done, he reaches into his pocket, cups his nitrile-gloved hands around something precious, and rushes into the greenhouse. There’s more haste than usual in his limping gait, and his goggles strap has one kink in it, like a Möbius strip. “Thanks so much for coming, everyone. The 3-D printer finally coughed up exact replicas.”
When he’s focused, Bai’s sharp voice carries as much authority as Yinha’s. Umbriel and I share an excited look before wading through the jequirity vines toward him. Asterion’s already there. The eagerness that lights up our leader’s gold-tinged eyes doesn’t disguise the fact that his bronze skin looks sallow and his graying hair has receded. Still, his face hasn’t lost the friendly, fatherly roundness that gained him Dovetail’s trust in the first place.
Five other Harvesters and two more Chemists join our cluster. We all lean over Bai’s outstretched hand, looking through the digital magnifying glass he’s holding. It’s set to one thousand times magnification.
Several dozen tiny objects nest in his palm, each smaller than a dust mote. For a second, I think they’re the bodies of insects, but on second glance I see they’re more streamlined and have a strange reddish-brown tint. Each has two pairs of wings and a long, snout-like tube. They’re made of copper, a metal unaffected by the ceilings’ grav-magnets.
“Each nanodrone carries a small fraction of the three-mig lethal dose of abrin,” Bai rattles off. “They’ll spray it through these tubes. The toxins in one spray will kill a pocket of infectious agents, and nothing bigger, so they can’t harm us. Each drone holds three doses. The design team couldn’t pack in any more without sacrificing aerial buoyancy.”
The Harvesters nod slowly, their foreheads wrinkled in concentration. I’m still acclimating to Bai’s frenetic intellectual energy. He taught me how to operate the machinery in Nanoengineering, so that I could cut up the solar sail and attach the mirrored fragments to my uniform. He coached me and looked over my shoulder as I used the laser knife, keeping one hand on the emergency Off switch in case the tool skidded in my hand.
Back then—before the anthrax attack, before he put on his mask—I remember thinking that he looked young for someone in his mid-thirties, and I couldn’t help but find him attractive in a brainy sort of way. Those thoughts still cross my mind. Then I see Bai’s ever-present mask, remember Ida’s death, and feel guilty about it all.
“Couldn’t you increase the abrin concentration so that one drone would kill off more than three bacteria colonies?” I ask.
Asterion shakes his head. “We can’t increase the concentration, or the abrin starts precipitating as a solid.”
“And we can’t make the drones any bigger, or they might damage equipment and lose accuracy . . .” Bai trails off. “At least we got the batteries working. Miss Phaet, you’re a fan of plants, right? The drone batteries are like tiny photosynthesizers, using light as energy.”
Hearing Bai talk about his work—and relate it to my humble education—reinvigorates my admiration. It makes me want to be him. He became an engineer after an accident that took him out of Militia, and quickly became head of his own research group. Most members stayed with him when he joined Dovetail. Before I dropped out of Primary to enlist in Militia, I’d hoped to do something similar, but in the Bioengineering Department.
I’ve probably gone starry-eyed. Snap out of it, I tell myself.
But Bai’s not paying attention to me. He’s facing Asterion and speaking more quickly than before. Something dark creeps into his voice, and the rest of us lean away, sensing tension in the air.
“The drones are almost ready, Asterion. I mean it this time. We should begin mass production soon. Who knows when the Committee might sneak more diseases onto Dovetail territory?”
“It’s unlikely to happen soon,” Asterion says. “They need to regroup from their losses on the Singularity, and we don’t have enough copper to—”
“We didn’t think an attack was likely the last time either,” Bai says, his eyes narrowing above his mask.
“This base wasn’t verging on starvation last time.” Asterion holds his ground. “I’m sorry, Bai, but Dovetail can only deal with one crisis at a time.”
“They can’t catch us unprepared again. I won’t let them.” Bai closes his eyes, thinking hard, and then speaks in a quiet, threatening voice. “Why am I so much more concerned about biodefense than you? I’ve got less left to lose.”
Asterion seems to choke on whatever he’s about to say and exhales, looking overwhelmed. He raises a gloved hand to rub his temples but remembers that he’s handled jequirity and drops it. “Let’s talk about it later today. After the assembly.”
Dovetail’s leader turns to me. “You and I need to leave for the briefing, Phaet. Andromeda’s already waiting.”
I’m still not used to people asking me to go places instead of receiving summons from the Committee via handscreen.
“Bye for now, Phaet.” Umbriel raises his gloved hand to touch my shoulder, but snatches it away when I shake my head at him. “You’ve been around these killer plants long enough for one day.”
I give him a smile, a bittersweet one. Maybe he wishes I were working next to him in the greenhouses like I used to. I miss those times too, but we can’t erase my new duties as Mira Theta’s heir, as the Girl Sage.
Something has to change. Biodefense drones full of lethal poison? Scrounging for food on other bases? What has Dovetail come to? Have the leaders ruled out all other options for winning this war? Battles, one after the other, have occupied my mind, blotting out the big picture. Despite our small victories, the Committee’s violent acts are draining us of hope.
Dovetail needs a big idea, a new paradigm for fighting the war. And I, the Girl Sage, the one who gave them courage to revolt in the first place, have to give it to them. Picking my way through the rough terrain, I start running possibilities—big, crazy ideas—through my mind.
“See you later, Phaet,” Bai calls, waving. “Asterion, I’ll come by your office this afternoon.” It’s a statement, not a question.
“Apologies in advance if there’s a line,” Asterion says, leading me toward the exit.
I glance once more at Bai, then at Umbriel, as we leave, both of them in white face masks. For a brief, frightening moment, I can’t picture what they look like underneath.
CYGNUS FITS ANOTHER HANDSCREEN TETRIS block into place, seemingly oblivious to the crowd assembling below us on the Atrium’s ground floor. In a few moments, I’ll have to leave him here with Anka and move down one row to sit with the half a dozen Dovetail leaders in the center of the second-floor balcony.
My brother has preferred Tetris to chess ever since we pried him out of the Committee’s clutches. In handscreen chess, when pieces are taken, they disappear from the board with a tiny zap. Not a healthy thing to hear if you still relive the big zaps the Committee gave you. Anka and I live day by day, observing what keeps him tranquil and what makes him withdraw—or worse. Even though we know he hates crowds, we had no choice but to bring him here and hope for the best. We’ve learned not to leave Cygnus alone, with no one to turn to.
I say good-bye by squeezing his shoulder, eliciting a quick shrug and a brisk “See ya.” Then I scoot forward, into my assigned seat in the spotlight.
Once there, I survey the assembly below us, the churning mass of bodies. Only half the c
eiling lights are switched on to conserve solar energy; the Committee’s severed the Free Radical from the Moon-wide power grid, and we’ve yet to hook up our system to the Singularity’s.
Facing the masses, Dovetail’s major players sit all in a row: Asterion, our leader; Andromeda, his second-in-command; Sol Eta, who oversees public relations; Yinha Rho, director of our armed forces; and now Rose from the Singularity, at the end of the leaders’ balcony.
Then there’s me, the teenage Girl Sage. Sometimes, appearing in public with the others makes me feel like I’m filling in for my mother, that small, secretive word-spinner. In my mind, she stands taller than her followers. She started this movement, and we have no choice but to see it through to its conclusion: freedom. Although I’m the youngest by a decade and a half, I will speak out if needed. I’ve done it before.
The other children of the revolution, some older than I, have been placed in less visible locations. Chitra Epsilon, Asterion’s seventeen-year-old daughter and a newly minted soldier, sits behind her father. Looking weary from today’s battle, she has a bronze-skinned face full of angles, hair shaved close to her scalp, and wary amber eyes—so unlike her sister Vinasa, one of my first friends in Militia. If not for the spaceship accident that stole her life, Vinasa would be here now. And Chitra might not look so terrified.
Twenty-year-old Callisto Chi also sits behind her mother. Andromeda had the sense not to place her near my family. The transition from Committee darling to a rebel hated by her peers hasn’t treated Callisto kindly. Over the past year, her brown-blonde ringlets have become a frizzy beehive and her predatory stride has slowed to a shuffle. Even her sneer has vanished, giving way to a dull mask of professionalism; I wonder what she does all day, since Dovetail barred her from military service. Umbriel thinks the restraints on her have broken her mean streak, but I’m not so sure. If Andromeda hadn’t revealed herself to be a Dovetail member, Callisto would still be fighting for the Committee alongside her hulking boyfriend, Jupiter, trying to finish me off at every opportunity.