by Pintip Dunn
My stomach rolls, and the action has nothing to do with the food I haven’t eaten. “I’m sure she’s fine. But we need to find her. Right away.”
…
Her bed is neatly made. Creased sheet corners, a plump, fluffed-up pillow, folded solar blanket. But no Astana.
We stare at the empty bed and then look at each other.
“Where is she?” Carr croaks.
“I don’t know.” My voice is faint and reedy. “This is her room.”
“So where is she?” He looks behind the wheelchair and the metal stand, as if she’s small enough to hide behind either. “I’ll check the cleansing room,” he says when there’s nothing left to inspect.
He leaves the unit, and my stomach lets out a large roar. I shove my fist into my mid-section. Not now! I need to think!
“Here.” Denver pulls some pills from his eating caftan and hands them to me. “I just came from the Transfer Room.”
“Thanks.” I take them gratefully and fling them into my mouth. That’s when I see Astana’s surveillance bot against the wall, powered off the way mine was.
I sink to my knees in front of the bot. It is still and silent and strangely devoid of personality. It may have witnessed exactly what happened to Astana. But without a camera, and the human eyes behind it, this bot is as useless as the C-trunk in the corner. If I reactivate it, will it tell me who shut it down?
“That was me,” Denver says, as if reading my thoughts. “We, uh, wanted privacy last night. I talked one of the security guys into giving me an override, and I guess I forgot to turn the bot back on.”
I stand, pushing down my disappointment. The royal override is normally reserved for the King and his daughters, but I suppose he is part of the family. Besides, I can’t begrudge him for wanting privacy when I did the same thing.
“Why don’t you ask? They’ll tell you. You’re the Princess.” He gestures to the call button on the bedrail.
“Good idea.” I press the button that will connect me to the facility operator. When she answers, I explain as calmly as possible that Astana’s not where she’s supposed to be.
There’s a pause, and I hear fingers tapping on the holo-desk. “She’s been moved, Princess,” the operator says. “Her condition worsened, and she was transferred to the TCU last night.”
My heart stops. The Terminal Care Unit. But Astana’s condition’s not terminal! Last time I saw her, she was talking about spending the next thirteen years with Denver. She can’t be in the TCU. She can’t.
Carr rushes back into the room, thrusting a handheld at me. “I found this in the cleansing room. You have to read it.”
The handheld appears to be Blanca’s, and the document open is a report to the council. One I don’t have security clearance to read. Ordinarily, I would never look at the report without her permission. But this situation’s anything but ordinary.
I hold up the handheld and skim the report. My eyes snag on a few key words: “unrest,” “precedent,” and “collapse.”
My heart sinking, I start at the beginning and read more carefully:
It is my recommendation that we do not allow Astana Silver to become a permanent Aegis, no matter what privileges her brother has earned. This course of action may have been feasible had none of the other patients been given food. But now that they are all used to eating, CORA predicts unrest among the patients when their food is taken away. If Astana is shown preferential treatment, the unrest may slide into rebellion.
Unfortunately, we do not have the resources to make all the patients Aegis. The food shortage in our colony is very real, and we cannot set a dangerous precedent. More and more colonists will steal food, in the hopes that they will enter the patient pool and be elevated to Aegis status. We would be risking the collapse of our entire colony.
I respect we must honor the privileges of the Fittest, but we cannot jeopardize our colony’s future. I suggest we find a work-around. We may even have to consider termination of the patient, as distasteful as this option may be.
At the bottom of the report is Blanca’s fingerprint, certifying she is the author.
Carr reads the final paragraph out loud, his voice wobbling like a tuning fork. “Termination of the patient? What does that mean?”
My words come out garbled, as if every third syllable gets stuck in my throat and has to be left behind. I take a deep breath and try again. “It means we have to hurry.”
…
We run. I don’t think I’ve ever run so fast, not even when I was competing in the Aegis Trials. Not even when I was trying to break my father’s fall from the stage.
The scream greets us as soon as we round the corner to the TCU, long and loud and shrill. I’ve only heard that sound one other time: when Denver tackled Astana at the Bee Park, preventing her from unlatching a cage full of bees.
I run even faster.
We reached the glassed-in room of the TCU, and I see Astana through the window. My knees buckle, and I sway once, twice. On the third swing, Carr catches me and props me next to him on the window ledge. We stare.
Tubes come out of every surface of Astana’s body. Her scalp, neck, temples, arms. She looks like a mutant octopus, one who doesn’t know when to stop regenerating legs. Her features are open and dilated. Bulging eyes, flaring nostrils, gaping mouth.
Medical personnel wearing scrubs move around her. Blanca’s also there, conjuring diagrams and images at the holo-desk. Hanoi’s not present, but that’s to be expected. Blanca wouldn’t want her assistant to witness such a sick patient, especially one with the same disease as herself.
As I watch, my sister’s lips move, barking orders at the team. But I can’t hear her words, not above Astana’s screams. Not through the glass wall keeping us out of the room.
“Hey.” I rap my fist against the window. “HEY!”
One of the medics looks up. It’s Mistress Barnett’s apprentice. He says something to my sister. Blanca turns. For a moment, I read fear in her eyes, and then she shuts down the emotion, locking it behind the cold neutrality of her regular expression.
She barks an order, and a medic grabs Astana’s pale stick of an arm. He finds a vein on the inside of Astana’s elbow and produces a syringe the size of a ruler. I reach my hand out, only to hit glass. My hand falls back. The needle goes in.
The screaming stops.
Except it doesn’t.
Astana’s contorted body gyrates back and forth, her mouth stretches wide open. She’s still screaming, but no sound comes out.
“What did you do to her?” I clench my hands into fists and drum the beat into the glass. “What. Did. You. Do?”
Rage boils inside me. How dare they silence her? How dare they hide her pain, as if it won’t exist if they can’t hear it?
Carr joins his fists with mine. Together, we produce a drumming so loud it must vibrate across the entire bubble. My fists are not enough, so I add my voice to the noise. Carr follows suit. The sound is ugly and discordant, but it should be. Astana can’t scream so we’re doing it for her.
Finally, Blanca comes out of the TCU. She grabs me by the collar, Carr by the arm, and we both stumble. “Stop it, both of you,” she says. “Just stop.”
That’s when I notice for the first time that Denver’s no longer with us. I glance around the corridor, and he’s nowhere to be seen.
I look at Blanca, into the face so similar to my own. She’s been my sister for seventeen years. We’ve shared everything, from rag dolls to my father’s love to memories of an incinerator. Is it possible I never knew her at all?
“Blanca, how could you?” I whisper. “How could you do this to Astana?”
Her head snaps back. “What are you talking about? I didn’t do anything to her.”
“The report, Blanca. We read your report to the council.”
As I say the words, a wisp of hope rises in me. Maybe Blanca didn’t write the report. Maybe Astana got sick on her own, and the medics are trying to fix her. Maybe this has all been a horri
ble, terrible mistake.
“You didn’t really write those words, did you, Blankie?” My tone is pleading now. I’m a little kid again, begging for a turn on the swings. “You couldn’t have. Something faked your fingerprint. Someone forged the report. Isn’t that right, Blankie?”
She flinches. Her eyes travel to Carr, and she looks away quickly, as if she can’t bear to face what she’s done. “Sorry, kid.” Her voice is heavy with an emotion I can’t identify. Regret? Guilt? Or something else? “That report was all mine.”
Her words are like a sledgehammer to my knees. I stumble forward, trying to regain my balance.
And then, Denver charges down the corridor with royal guards in tow. A split second later, Carr shouts, “Look!”
His palms are spread against the window, his face plastered to the glass. Astana sits straight up in bed, and she looks directly at him. Her lips curve in a gentle smile, and she mouths the words, “I love you, Carr.”
No sooner are the words out of her mouth than she seizes up. Her body contorts in odd, grotesque angles, and she’s gasping, gasping, gasping for breath. The machines emit loud, insistent beeps for help, and medics rush to her bedside. One trips over a wire in his haste. His feet fly out from under him and he slams onto the ground.
The entire time, Astana’s eyes never leave her brother’s face.
I know the moment the life leaves her body. I know it before the machines flatline. I know it before her body goes limp. I know it because her mouth moves again. And she says the word I dread most.
Goodbye.
Chapter
Thirty-Six
Pandemonium erupts. People run everywhere, yelling at each other, pulling tubes out of Astana’s chest and plunging syringes into her arm. A medic presses defibrillator paddles over her heart. Her body bucks. One time, two times, three.
But she doesn’t come back to life.
“Arrest her!” Denver half bellows, half moans, pointing a finger at Blanca’s cowering figure. His face is twisted into something unrecognizable. “You saw the report. She did this! She killed Astana!”
The royal guards advance on my sister, and Denver falls to his knees, sobbing uncontrollably.
So that’s where he was, I think dully. Summoning the guards. He’s one step ahead of me. He predicted this would happen, and he held himself together long enough to direct justice in the right direction.
“I didn’t do it.” Blanca’s shrill voice pierces the air. “Tell them, Vela. Tell them it wasn’t me. You know I would never do that. You know it!”
The guards hesitate, looking to me for the final verdict. The machines have stopped beeping. The medics have pulled a white sheet over Astana’s face. All eyes are watching me. Waiting.
“I…”
I can sway them. With a word, I can postpone her arrest. I can prevent my sister from being red-celled.
But all I can see is Astana’s mouth, saying the word “goodbye.” All I can hear is my sister’s heavy voice and those cold, cold words. That report was all mine. All mine. All mine.
I couldn’t save Astana. So I’m not about to save her murderer. I don’t care whose sister she is.
“Take her away,” I say thickly. “Get her out of here.”
“Vela, please.” Blanca claws the air, trying to reach me, but the guards grab her, wrenching her arms behind her back. “You have to help me. Please. You’re my sister. I’m begging you—”
But I’m not listening anymore, and the cries get fainter and fainter as the guards drag her away. I crawl toward a heap collapsed on the ground, one that hasn’t moved since the machines went wild.
Carr.
I should say something. Touch his shoulder. But my entire body is numb. My hands, my feet. My face is frozen in the last expression it held. I’d have to look in a mirror to see what that contortion is. I’m afraid if I touch him, if I speak to him, the numbness will flow from me to him, freezing us both.
He jerks up. Meets my eyes for an infinitesimal moment, a fraction of a second I will never forget as long as I live. And then he tears himself away. Stumbles to his feet and races, races down the corridor.
Taking all my numbness with him.
…
For the next two days, I focus all of my efforts on eating. I swallow roasted cicadas and sweet potatoes; I digest cranberry sauce and dragonfly mash. I give myself entirely to my duty. To my colony. If I can’t save Astana, I have to do some good for somebody, somewhere.
In the entire history of the Aegis, I don’t think there’s ever been an appetite like mine. I don’t just surpass the daily records. I smash them.
Carefully, thoroughly, I work through the royal cook’s entire repertoire.
I eat lemongrass crickets and papaya salad, sticky rice and mango.
Vermicelli noodles and fresh spring rolls, caramelized fish in clay-mud pots.
Steamed beetle buns. Congee with ginger and fried dough. An entire grilled eel.
I have kimchi stew and barbecued spider. Stone pot rice with sizzling fish eggs.
Sushi. So much sushi. Raw shrimp, raw salmon, raw tuna, raw yellowtail. With vinegar rice, wrapped with seaweed. Red pepper flakes, sprinkled with sesame oil.
This is where I stumble. I hold up a hand roll filled with deep fried salmon skin, trying to convince myself to put it into my mouth. Refusing to think of the way Astana used to admire the bright colors. The moss green of the wasabi next to the bright orange of the fish roe, layered with pale pink tuna and deep black seaweed. I cannot remember the clay model she built in her art class, the hours she spent studying the holograms to get the details exactly right.
The tears build behind my eyes. “Eat,” I whisper to myself. “Do your duty.”
Quickly, before the tears can spill out, I put some ikura in my mouth. The orange fish eggs explode on my tongue, bursting with salt. It makes me feel like I am swallowing tears. I spoon more and more ikura in my mouth, because so long as I eat these tears, my own will not, cannot, fall.
I move on to hummus and falafel and anchovy salad with olives and onions.
Squid ink paella and cod fish omelet. Fresh honeycomb with fig preserves.
I eat bee larvae and sauerkraut, cabbage-wrapped dumplings. Empanadas and corn tamales. Ceviche and fried plantains. Grasshopper au poivre, salt-encrusted grasshopper, grasshopper sautéed in a wine-shallot reduction.
This is what Astana wanted, more than anything in the world. She wanted to experience every sensation, every adventure, and the thought that her sense of taste was never to be used killed her, literally killed her.
I gave her the first bite. None of this would’ve happened if I had refrained from that childhood temptation. When you come right down to it, this is my fault.
I killed Astana.
And so I continue to perform my duty. Because in a world where Astana is gone, a world that must be lit by something other than her voltage-shock personality, there’s nothing left.
…
On the third day After Astana, as I’ve come to think about that day, I leave the Banquet Hall in search of Carr. I find him, of all places, in the Bee Park, sitting on the grass before a free-standing cage of bees. Not just any cage, either, but the cage. The one for whose latch Astana reached. The place where she would’ve taken her own life, a week ago.
I power off my surveillance bot. Surprisingly, the manual override still works. I guess security hasn’t had time to disable the command. Or maybe the council thought Astana’s death was punishment enough.
I sink onto the grass next to Carr. Without a word, he places his head in my lap. I tangle my fingers in his black hair and wish life could be as simple as this. The two of us, lounging under a sun lamp, a swarm of bees buzzing over our heads.
“She forgave me before she died,” I say. “That afternoon, before we went to the caves. She called me her best friend again. I’m glad for that, at least. And…” The words get stuck behind my tongue. It seems a betrayal to Astana, to find anything even rem
otely positive in her death. But I have to voice my thought, because it’s the only thing that’s pulled me from one moment to the next. The one thing that’s allowed me to pick up the next morsel and put it in my mouth. “Now you no longer have to be the Fittest.”
He goes perfectly still. Even his hair seems to stiffen under my fingers. I pull my hands away. I’ve said something wrong. I know what. But I’m not sure why.
Slowly, as if he’s a bot set on lag-motion, Carr retreats from my lap. “I made a commitment,” he says, so quietly I have to lean forward to hear him above the drone of bees. “Your father crowned me in front of the entire colony. I would expect the council to keep their word, whether or not the transplant is successful. Why would you think I would back down because my end of the deal didn’t turn out the way I wanted?”
My heart sinks to the level of my feet. From the time I chose not to exercise the veto, I knew Carr and Astana were a package deal. If I failed to save him, she would be dead to me, as well.
But I didn’t know the reverse was also true. I didn’t know Astana’s death would mean I would also lose them both.
“This isn’t about your honor, Carr. This is your life.”
“You know that’s not true. Out of all people, I would expect you to understand. For the very same reasons you didn’t use your veto, I can’t step down now.”
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. Because he’s right. I do understand. And deep down, I probably knew all along how he would react.
My insides turn. I want to grab one of the bees and shove it into my mouth. If it stings me on the way down, so much the better.
Why, oh why, can’t he be a little less worthy? Why did I have to go and fall in love with someone so good?
“Let’s not talk about this anymore.” His voice is as miserable as my heart.
“Okay.”
He puts his head back in my lap, and we stay there, not talking, until my stomach begins to growl. I activate my bot and excuse myself to go back to the Banquet Hall.
I take my usual spot at the dining table. Ramekins of cricket pot pie are stacked before me. Carrots and celery swim with crunchy insect legs in a thick gravy, baked inside a golden crust, and the smells of onion and rosemary waft in the air.