by Pintip Dunn
Her skin no longer looks stretched like a straining cloth over a pot. Her face actually has hues and depth, instead of that eerie, one-dimensional hue. She’s even sitting up, with the help of some pillows and Denver’s hand on her shoulder.
Every doubt I had about my participation in the Fittest Trials melts away. It’s worth every bit of anguish to see Astana looking so well.
“I’ve had better compliments in my life.” She laughs, and her hand creeps up to touch Denver’s, as though to make sure he’s still there. She’s known him almost as long as I have, but I’ve never seen them look quite so…comfortable.
I glance at Carr to gauge his reaction, but he’s got the frozen smile and dilated pupils of the shell-shocked. I’m not sure he even sees Denver, much less notices that his old friend’s hand is entangled with his sister’s.
“Why didn’t you tell me Astana was here?” I demand.
“Sorry, cuz.” His wide grin matches the one growing on my face. “The council didn’t want me to say anything. It about killed me to keep the secret inside, but I knew you would be seeing her beautiful face soon. Do you forgive me?”
“I forgive you,” I murmur, taking Astana’s other hand.
“I’m sure you have a lot to talk about,” he says. “I’ll leave.”
I should protest, but I don’t. I love my cousin, but at this moment, I kind of want my best friend—and her brother—all to myself.
Denver leans over and murmurs something in Astana’s ear. His lips brush her earlobe, and she giggles like he’s the stand-up comedian of Dion.
He straightens and slaps Carr on the back. “Good to see you, old friend. We’ll catch up another time.”
Carr doesn’t respond. In fact, he hasn’t said a word since we entered the room. We watch Denver leave, and then Astana grabs her brother’s hand with her now free one and draws him to us. “I’m so happy to see you.”
Still, he doesn’t say anything.
My throat closes up. I can’t see Carr’s face, but his expression is reflected in the softening of Astana’s lips, in the tender creases at the side of her eyes. So similar, the Silver siblings. They look like they could even be twins, despite the two years separating them. In some ways, they may even be closer than twins, as they’re each the only family the other’s got.
“My brother doesn’t talk when there’s something important to say.” Her smooth delivery hitches on a few syllables, the way a flowing river hiccups around a surprise boulder. “I guess that’s when you know he really loves you. If he’s at a loss for words.”
My heart twinges, and the pressure builds behind my eyes. It doesn’t even matter that Carr’s emotions don’t include me. I’m connected to him through Astana, through the circle of our hands, and at the moment, that’s enough.
“Did they make you an Aegis?” I ask.
“Not quite,” a familiar voice says behind me.
Too familiar.
I turn, and Blanca walks into the room, followed by a girl about our age with a riot of curls tied into a ponytail. They’re both wearing the long gray jacket of the medics.
I gape. She doesn’t even like Astana. Why is she visiting her?
Not for the first time, either. Blanca leans against the glass wall, relaxed, casual, as if she’s been here many times before. The girl mimics her pose, as though she is Blanca’s clone…or an assistant. But why would Blanca need an assistant? What on orb is going on?
“You knew, didn’t you?” The words twist on the way out of my throat, coming out garbled and betrayed. “You knew the entire time that Astana was here.”
Blanca pushes herself off the glass with so much force I’m surprised the window pane doesn’t pop out. “Well, of course I knew. Astana is my task, after all.”
Chapter
Thirteen
“Astana is your task?” My voice echoes too loudly in the small room. “How can she be your task? She’s a person.”
“Yes, and there are others like her. Others who have developed an intolerance to the nutrition pills. Others whose futures I must determine.” Blanca glances at her curly-haired shadow, and she looks less sure, less in control. Less like the Blanca who’s a shoo-in for Successor. “The medics couldn’t figure out why their pills didn’t work. Until your Testimony.”
“You mean, all the others like Astana have also eaten food?” Carr asks, his first words in this room.
“In every single case.”
I frown. “But none of us ate food regularly until we took the Aegis Oath at fifteen. Why didn’t we end up like Astana?”
She nods toward her companion. “This is Hanoi. She’s one of the patients like Astana, and I’ve hired her as my assistant for this task. Hanoi? Do you want to take this question?”
Clearing her throat, Hanoi fishes a handheld out of her pocket while Blanca drifts to the wall, where a solar blanket lies on a recharging rack. “The intolerance doesn’t affect everyone,” Hanoi says in a voice as clear as bells as she consults her handheld. “Just the people with a predisposition for it. The medics believe that the intolerance slowly builds over time, with each subsequent exposure to food, until the patient can no longer absorb nutrition from their pills. That’s why Astana and I are only showing symptoms now, in our teens, while we’ve got a two-year-old girl in our pool already sick. Her parents must’ve been sneaking her food every day.”
Blanca nods, like a teacher proud of her student. I’m still puzzled about their relationship, but I can’t focus on that right now.
A sick toddler. Other patients like Astana, weakening because they’re unable to absorb nutrition the regular way. There’s one main difference, however. She’s getting food. And Hanoi and the others are not.
The room spins, and I grab the object closest to me, a metal pole on a stand, like a coat rack but slimmer. Two cylindrical bags hang from the top of the pole, and a clear liquid drips into a tube that attaches to Astana’s wrist. Another denser formula flows through a tube attached to her belly.
Carr looks at the bags. “Tube feeding.”
“A stop-gap measure,” Blanca says softly. “Astana’s body can only partially absorb the formula, but at least it’s better than the pills. Back on Earth, our ancestors were able to keep people alive through tube feeding for years. But those patients couldn’t absorb food. Astana has the opposite problem, since she has difficulty absorbing nutrition through supplements. She needs the real thing, so I’m not sure how long we’ll be able to keep her alive with tube feeding alone. The others—” She cuts off, glancing at her assistant like she doesn’t want to say too much. “The others don’t look nearly as good, since they haven’t been supplementing with real food. Hanoi here is the healthiest of the bunch.”
Glancing at Blanca’s assistant, I notice for the first time what her curls distracted me from earlier. The sallowness of her skin. The way she sways slightly on her feet.
“I had no idea there were others. Others even worse off than you.” I grab my head, trying to stop the images that flit through my mind. A little girl, unable to get out of bed. Her tiny eyelids veined with blue. A rack of ribs as flimsy as matches. “Hanoi, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Otherwise, I would’ve asked the council to give you food, too.”
Hanoi presses her lips together, as though she would like to agree, but Blanca strides to the center of the room.
“That’s not your responsibility.” My sister might as well drill the warning across my forehead. Her tone says it all: don’t interfere. “In fact, that’s my Successor task. Proposing a blanket policy that will determine what to do with the colonists who can no longer sustain themselves via a pill.”
My knees turn to IV liquid. I’m not sure I can rely on Blanca to braid my hair. How can I trust her with my best friend’s life?
“How are you going to decide?” Carr asks, his voice raw and trembling.
Again, Blanca looks at her assistant. Again, she shrinks into herself. She’s been running scenarios for the King for years, and
she likes her numbers stark and precise. And confined to the data screen. The only uncertainty she’s willing to tolerate is in the wild thought experiments she indulges in with Master Somjing, such as time travel or extraterrestrial life. She doesn’t like unknowns sitting in front of her, with pesky questions and even peskier emotions.
“I… I…” She clamps her mouth shut. A look of horror crosses her face, and she runs from the room.
My mouth drops open. I’ve seen Blanca’s departing back many times. Flouncing off, with her caftan sailing behind her. Stalking away, when she knows she’s won an argument. But never, ever because she doesn’t have the words.
“Be right back,” I mutter to Hanoi and the Silver siblings and dash after her.
My sister stumbles down the corridor and latches onto an empty stretcher. She’s not sobbing—Blanca doesn’t cry, it makes the eyes red and the lids puffy—but buries her face into the mattress on the stretcher.
Hesitantly, I reach out my hand, and it hovers in the air above her shoulder. As if sensing my presence, she jerks up, her nose drawing in air with quick, halting snorts.
“This isn’t easy, you know,” she says. “It wouldn’t be much of a task if I came up with the answer on the first day, would it? There are a ton of considerations. If we carve out a regular exception to the First Maxim, it will prompt even more colonists to try to fit into that exception. People with other diseases will argue that they, too, should be allowed to eat. It could be a slippery slope to utter chaos.”
“Then make Astana and the others into Aegis,” I say. “The genetic modification might cut short their lives, but ten more years is better than one.”
She shakes her head. “I’ve already thought of that. They’re too weak. The medics don’t know if the modification will take. And the council doesn’t want to create a class of inefficient Aegis. It’s not entirely my decision, anyway.”
I want to be sympathetic. I do. But it takes all my strength not to wrap my hands around her neck and tell her to forget the council. “Why not?”
“My task is the same as yours.” She swipes a finger under each eye. “Collect the data and propose policies for evaluation. But CORA makes the ultimate decision.”
“You have veto power.”
She pauses a beat and then nods. “Yes. But I’ll only use it as a last resort.”
“Does Hanoi know that?”
Blanca clamps her lips together and turns away. My sister’s thrown up so many walls between us, I can recognize one that she’s erecting with the very first brick. She doesn’t want to talk about her assistant. That much is clear. But I’m just as unwilling to let the subject go.
“Why on orb did you hire her?” I ask. “Her presence clearly makes you uncomfortable. You’re hesitant to talk about your task in front of her, and you’ve never needed—or wanted—help from anyone.” Least of all me, I continue silently. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I don’t need her.” Blanca whips her head back around. “But she required the pills, okay!”
I blink, as much from my sister’s outburst as from what she’s telling me.
She takes a step back, breathing hard. Her eyes shutter down, and another row of bricks settle on the wall between us. She continues backing away—the bricks continue piling up—but I reach across the space and touch her elbow. “Blanca, please. There’s so much I don’t know, about your task, about mine. The confusion’s about to split my head apart. Help me understand something.”
I’m barely touching her, just two fingers on the bone of her elbow, but she stares at the contact as if it’s a physical message from Earth. “Hanoi lost her job as a shrimp farmer when she was too sick to go to work,” she mumbles. “She’s just a kid, like us, but her mom took off when she was young, and her dad was injured on an expedition to the outside planet. She’s got four siblings who rely on her to bring home pills…and I had to do something.”
I stare into her symmetrical eyes. Her cheekbones slash across her face, and her lips are full and lush. She’s so beautiful, lack of curves notwithstanding. I wonder, sometimes, if she would be as lovely if she weren’t my sister—or even more so.
Blanca offered Hanoi a job, when she didn’t need the help. I have to believe there’s goodness in her. I have to believe all that beauty is more than just a mask.
“Blanca. You will do the right thing for Astana and the others, won’t you?”
“You’re such a child.” Shrugging off my touch, she shoves the stretcher, and it rolls a few feet down the hall. “One of these days you’re going to learn ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are dynamic concepts, changing with every day. Every minute.”
She stalks away, caftan whipping the air. Showing me her shoulder blades.
Clearly, Blanca’s recovered from whatever it was that shook her. Too bad. I never thought I’d miss any version of Blanca. But the more vulnerable one, the one who gave Hanoi a job? With time, I might’ve actually grown to like her.
…
When I return to the room, Hanoi is gone—probably trailing after her boss’s vibrating caftan—and Astana is showing Carr her gifts from Denver. Her eyes shine brighter than the moons of Dion. The moons can only reflect light from an external source, after all, while her glow radiates from within.
“And then yesterday, it was honey-scented perfume, made from his bees—” She stops when she sees me. “Well? What did Blanca say?”
I pick up the glass bottle from the table and smell the stopper. Yum. Honey toast and ice cream, my dad’s favorite snack. I wonder if Denver’s been talking to York. “She wouldn’t tell me anything. I have no idea if she’s going to make you an Aegis or not.”
“I should’ve been nicer to her when we were kids.” Astana sighs. Taking the bottle from me, she dabs the scent on my wrist. “At least Hanoi seems nice. Maybe she can convince Blanca to go easy on us.”
“My sister was the one who was too good to play with us. The one above mud puddles and dragonflies.” My stomach growls. Great. Is it time to eat again?
I press a hand over my caftan to muffle the noise. An Aegis would’ve ignored the rumbling. But Astana and Carr stare at my torso like it’s an artifact from Earth.
“You’ve got to hear this, Carr,” she says. “It’s the wildest thing.”
I move my hand. “He doesn’t want to listen to my stomach.”
“Of course he does. Our tummies grumble, too, but not like yours.” She pushes Carr toward me. “Go on. She doesn’t mind, I promise.”
He takes a few steps toward me, his eyes soft around the edges. “May I?” he asks.
“Um, sure. Go ahead. I mean, if you want to.” The heat hikes up my cheeks, and I glare at Astana. Her smile back is moonlight innocent.
But then Carr kneels in front of me, fitting his ear to my stomach like a jigsaw puzzle, and my embarrassment is crowded out by other sensations. His breath pushing against my caftan. The brush of his thick hair. A live, humming spark where our bodies touch.
The air is suddenly more liquid than oxygen, and my heart sprints like it’s running a race. Just an ear. Just a stomach. Just a boy.
And yet, I know, from the soles of my feet to the top of my heart, Carr Silver has never been just anything.
A few seconds later, a few hours too soon, he stands and walks around the bed. “Thank you. That was…an experience.”
An experience. Good or bad? Weird or nice? But I can’t possibly ask without revealing to Astana how her brother’s touch affected me. My moment with Carr on the lawn, and now this, have caused all sorts of emotions to swirl inside me. I don’t quite understand them yet—and I’m certainly not ready to share them.
Instead, I turn to my best friend and try to remember how to breathe. “Don’t worry. Between the two of us, Blanca and me, we’ll figure out a way to make you better.”
“The three of us,” Carr says, his eyes drilling holes through me. “You know I’ll do anything to save you, sis. If I have to, I’ll even kill.”
I laugh, but it comes out as brittle as cracked glass. “That’s hardly necessary.”
“We’ll see.”
We stare at each other over the rumpled bed sheets. Those warm, swirly emotions that I associated with Carr? The coldness of his tone, the distance of his words have doused my feelings with liquid nitrogen, so that they freeze right where they had been dancing. I don’t know how he can listen to my stomach one moment and be my adversary the next. But then Astana grabs our hands, tugging us close and breaking the tension.
“I’m so lucky to have you both in my life.” She beams like she might power an entire grid.
Beams? That’s a little extreme. We haven’t found an answer yet. We’re not even close. I’ve only seen her this happy once, and that was when she was bot-mindedly in love with Jacksonville Kim.
She couldn’t be…? Oh my goodness.
Pulling my hand away, I flick my fingers against the intravenous bag. The medication drips, drips, drips into her veins. “You must have happy potion in here. Is this because of Denver?”
I expect her to laugh or roll her eyes. Instead, she blushes. Honest-to-Zeus red flushes her cheeks. From the girl who can stand naked in front of me without flinching. “Oh, V. You know me so well.”
“Denver.” I just saw them together, and I’m still having trouble processing the relationship. “The same boy who smeared mud in your hair. The one you swore you would never kiss if he was the last boy in the colony.”
“He didn’t even care that I looked a nightmare today,” she says, her mind light-years away. “My hair wasn’t brushed, my face hasn’t been primed. But he called me beautiful. That’s never happened unless I was fully accessorized.”
“Because you never leave the living unit otherwise,” Carr says.
“No. This is different. He makes me feel special. Me. Not my face or my body. But who I am when everything else is taken away.” She looks at her arm, which is still more bone than anything else. “As it has been these last few months.”
My hands clench on the intravenous tube, and the hollowness inside my stomach spreads, up my core and down my legs, until it fills every nook and cranny of my body.