by Pintip Dunn
But I don’t want to eat. Because if I take a single bite, I might get pulled under for another two days, and when I resurface, it will be the day of Carr’s transplant.
I can’t lose these final days.
For the first time since Astana’s heart stopped beating, something other than hunger stirs in the pit of my stomach. Something hard and resolved and determined. I’ve already lost one Silver sibling. I’m not going to lose another.
I jump from my seat. The food preppers look curiously at my untouched ramekins, but I don’t care. I’ve eaten enough over the past two days to fulfill my quota for a week. The time for mourning is over. I’ve got a boy to save.
I think Astana would approve.
Chapter
Thirty-Seven
“You think Astana was poisoned?” My foot falls with a thud. Mistress Barnett continues gliding down the corridor of the medical facility. After a few steps, I scurry to catch up. “Why?”
“Before her body went into shock, she exhibited the same symptoms as your father,” Mistress Barnett says. She wears the medic’s stone-gray jacket, and since it is early afternoon, her lips are still a uniform hue. No doubt she will have chewed off the color by the evening meal. “Vomiting, dizziness, muscular weakness. The cases occurred a week apart. We can’t discount the similarities.”
“But that would imply the two cases are related.”
“Correct.” She stops in front of a patient’s unit, flipping her silver hair behind her. A computer is embedded in the wall. After scanning the head medic’s retinas, the computer pulls up the patient’s treatment plan. She taps on the screen a few times and then turns to me. “Any reason your sister might want to poison your father?”
Again, my foot jerks in the air. Again, I stumble over nothing. I know Blanca’s sitting in the red cells. I’m the one who sent her there. But I didn’t expect her guilt to be presumed.
“You think she’s responsible.” The words are a statement, not a question.
“I saw her report to the council, Vela.” Her voice is gentle, as though she’s breaking difficult news to me. My best friend’s dead, I want to shout. Not much is difficult compared to that. “We think Blanca got it into her head that she needed to make a grand gesture to impress us. Something unexpected, something that would guarantee her spot as the Successor.”
I don’t say anything. If Blanca was receiving the same type of talks that I was, if she felt the same pressure from the council, I get it. I would’ve been searching for something bigger, too.
“We told her ‘no,’ of course. I want you to know, Vela, we struck down her suggestion as soon as she made it. Not for a moment did we consider terminating Astana.” With a shake of her head, Mistress Barnett absolves herself of any blame. “But your sister just couldn’t let go of the idea.”
The head medic isn’t walking fast. In fact, she keeps stopping to check her patients’ screens. But I drop farther and farther behind, as though my brain is spinning so fast my legs fail to work.
I don’t buy it. The explanation that Blanca was looking for a grand gesture, sure. The fact that she wrote the report, she admitted herself. But this conclusion that she was somehow involved in my father’s poisoning?
No. Way.
“You didn’t see her,” I say. “After my dad toppled off the stage, she completely fell apart. Her reaction was like when my mom passed away, but worse. Because he’s the only parent we have left.”
“You’re right. I didn’t see her. But I have a hard time imagining Blanca falling apart at anything.”
“She didn’t poison the King. I can guarantee it.” There are few things I know to the core of my being. This is one of them. Blanca loves our father. She could never hurt him.
“You may be right,” Mistress Barnett says. “But for now, she’s our only suspect.”
We arrive at the TCU. The site of Astana’s death. I’ve been keeping the grief at bay, but now, gushing, hot despair knocks me over.
I reach for something—anything—to keep steady and end up hugging a medical cart. The scene replays in my mind like a hologram. Astana mouthing, “I love you,” to her brother. Denver’s unspeakable rage. And then my sister, pleading with me. Please, Vela, she said. You know I would never do that. You know it.
I refused to listen. But I’m listening now, Blanca. I’m listening as hard as I can.
Mistress Barnett goes into the glassed room to speak to the man lying inside. He’s probably my father’s age, with skin more creased than forgotten laundry. Even his wrinkles have wrinkles. This is the kind of patient the TCU usually receives—people near the end of their ninety years. Not girls like Astana, whose lives have just begun.
“Vela?” a clear, bell-like voice says as a soft hand lands on my shoulder.
I look up and see riotously curly hair gathered into a ponytail. Hanoi. In all this chaos, I forgot to think about my sister’s assistant. Forgot to consider how she might feel now that her boss has been imprisoned for killing a patient with the exact same condition as her.
I lunge forward, gathering her in my arms. “You don’t have to worry,” I say fiercely. “She’s in the red cells now. She can’t hurt you. If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll find a way out of this mess. I’ll find a way for you and the others to live.”
“Are you talking about Blanca?” Hanoi asks, puzzled. “I’m not afraid of your sister. In fact, she made me the exact same promise. We’ve been meeting with the Fittest families every day, a few at a time. She’s mounted a campaign to introduce them to all her patients, so they could understand whose lives they were saving. Starting with me.”
I pull back. “She had a plan to save her patients?”
“Yes!” Hanoi squeezes my hands. “That’s why I’m here. There’s been a terrible mistake. Blanca didn’t kill Astana. She couldn’t have. She may not show it much, or at all, but there’s goodness at her core. I believe that with every bite of food I’ve eaten, with every pill that Blanca’s given me.”
All of a sudden, I’m certain she’s right. Blanca might be cold. She might’ve even been willing to let me be tortured. But she’s not a murderer. I know that she didn’t poison our father, so it stands to reason that she didn’t kill Astana, either. She may be the only suspect so far, but she’s not the right one.
Now I just have to prove it.
Chapter
Thirty-Eight
I dig my fingernails into my palms as I walk into the red cells. The last time I saw my sister, she begged for my help. And I turned her down. Hard. I left her to the mercy of the royal guards. How will she react when she sees me now?
Palmetto tells me to go to the last cell in the row. I’m alone, for once. After a heated discussion with Master Somjing, he agreed to retire my surveillance bot. I was planning on turning it off any chance I got, anyhow.
What’s more, I’m beginning to wonder if the murderer has access to the security feeds. Maybe that was how they knew to strike as soon as Astana’s bot was shut down. If so, there’s no point in broadcasting my every move.
I walk down the corridor. Scratchy Girl and Defecating Guy are still here. As soon as they see me, they shuffle to the edge of the red beams. I nod and wave, but I don’t say anything. We didn’t have that kind of relationship—the talking kind.
To my shock, they spread their palms against their chests and tap three times. What? No. No. I don’t know what they’ve heard, but I haven’t been named Successor. The King is still very much alive. The royal greeting should be reserved for him.
I tuck my chin to my chest. A ruler wouldn’t act this way, but I’m not a ruler. Yet.
The word slips out. Now when did that happen? When did the Successor position go from elusive dream to reachable goal?
I arrive at Blanca’s cell, and the red beams blink off long enough for me to go inside.
“Nice of you to stop by. No one’s been here other than Hanoi.” My sister sits on the concrete floor, her face clammy with sweat. Her hair l
ooks like it hasn’t been brushed in days, much less washed. “To what do I owe this visit, Princess? Or maybe I should call you Successor?”
“Nothing’s been determined,” I say.
She snorts. “Right. I’m an inmate, if you didn’t notice. No longer in the running for any race, much less the Successor.”
“I was red-celled,” I point out. “And I wasn’t disqualified.”
Hope lights up her face, and then, like a flickering candle, it dies. She sighs and pulls on the threads at her pant cuffs. Already, one pant leg is a couple inches shorter than the other. “Even if I’m found innocent, there’s the matter of the council report. I wrote it. That’s enough to knock me out of the race. So congratulations, little sister. The position is as good as yours.”
Her voice cracks on the last word. She’s lost so much these last few days. Her freedom. Her credibility. Most importantly, her dreams. Everything she’s been working toward her entire life. Without these goals, I’m not sure who my sister is anymore. I don’t think she knows, either.
“I didn’t do it, you know,” she says, the words directed at her pant leg. “No matter what I said in the report, I would never kill Astana. I would never advocate for a policy that would hurt Hanoi.”
I sit on the floor and pick up a strand of her hair. “Yes. I’m beginning to believe you.”
“You do?” She blinks half a dozen times and then bursts into tears.
I drop her hair. I’ve never seen my sister cry. Ever. Not when she fell and skinned her knees. Not when our mother burned in the incinerator. Not even when we waited in the lounge to hear news of our father.
“The analysis…is…sound…” She gulps at the air between words. “Even CORA agrees with me.” The facts seem to calm her, and after a few more gasps, she’s able to talk with only a bit of hitching. “Under every scenario where Astana was made an Aegis, CORA predicted everything from unrest to systemic collapse. The council needed to be aware of the findings.”
She takes a shuddering breath. “I guess I was too forceful in my word choice. I didn’t mean we should actually terminate Astana. I just wanted to impress upon the council how serious the situation was.”
I stare at her. “You mean, your arrest was a semantic mistake?”
“Bad luck for me, she ended up dying. So, my poor word choice became a fingerprinted confession.”
I look over my shoulder. The inmate in the next cell is listening to us. After being followed day and night by a surveillance bot, the extra audience shouldn’t faze me. But the murderer could be anyone. They could have ears and eyes anywhere.
I shift closer to Blanca and push a button on the electronic fob in my pocket. Immediately, a wall of silence surrounds us. Along with calling off the surveillance bot, Master Somjing loaned me his muffler. Now that I’m tracking down my best friend’s killer, he thought the device might come in handy.
“You didn’t suffer bad luck.” I’m taking a chance, telling my sister. If I’m wrong, I could be giving information to the enemy. But I’m not wrong. I’m staking Carr’s life on it. “Astana was poisoned. If you didn’t do it, somebody else did. And we have to find out who.”
“How?”
I peek at our neighbor. He has his head cocked, as if puzzled why he can no longer hear us. Good. The wall seems to be working.
“It’s got to be the same person who poisoned Dad. The same one who wiped the files and deleted Zelo’s identity. For some reason, they don’t want me to find Zelo. So I’m thinking that’s a good place to start.”
“Have you tried tracing Zelo through his kid?” she asks.
I shake my head. “He doesn’t have a kid. That’s part of the problem. He has no family whatsoever.”
“Zelo Hale?” Both her voice and her eyebrows jump. “Of course he has a kid. I saw him in the patient pool a bunch of times, visiting his daughter. Just ask Hanoi.”
I go still. Because I remember seeing Zelo, too. In the wait lounge, after Carr’s seizure. I thought he was there to check on Carr, but could he have been visiting someone else?
“You mean that little girl is his? The one with the pigtails?”
“Yeah. Brooklyn.” The confirmation makes my stomach sink. That’s the one. The one who leaped off a stretcher into my arms. The one who couldn’t keep in her feeding tube. Catch you, she said to me. Hold you. Save you.
“She called him ‘Daddy,’” Blanca continues.
“Zelo lied to me.” My voice is dull, my heart duller. He said he had nobody in this world, no family, no friends. Certainly not an adorable little girl with flaxen pigtails. The guy whom I thought was so worthy, so deserving to be remembered in our history, lied.
What does this mean? Is he somehow connected to Astana’s murderer? Could he be the murderer?
“The task was disbanded once I got arrested,” Blanca says. “The council sent all the patients home with a month’s supply of formula and told them we’d be in touch once they figure out what to do with me.”
“So Brooklyn’s gone?”
“Yes, but you can find her.” As usual, my sister has the solution. “If Zelo never admitted to having a family in his Fittest profile, then the killer wouldn’t know about Brooklyn. They wouldn’t know to erase Brooklyn’s file. The address is probably right where it’s supposed to be. Find the girl, and you find Zelo.”
Unless, of course, Zelo’s behind this entire thing. In which case, he would know exactly what to delete. Still, I’ve got a lead I didn’t have before.
“Blanca, you’re brilliant.”
“So they say. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help me right now.” Her mouth twists. “Before you run off, there’s something else I want to say.”
She takes a breath. And then another. As if she needs all the oxygen in this entire cell to give her the courage. “All my life, I’ve been so fixated on being the best, the smartest, the most logical. I’m not lovable like you. So I had to earn my position as Princess somehow. I had the rest of my future completely outlined, and I didn’t think there was room for anything else. Not for friendship, not for kindness. Not even for my sister.
“That’s a problem, V. It’s a problem when my own sister doesn’t believe I’m innocent. That means I’ve been living my life very, very wrong.”
“Blanca, I’m sorry—”
“No, don’t apologize. You had no reason to believe me. Hanoi’s the first friend I’ve ever had, and that’s only because she wouldn’t let me put up my walls. Every stone I laid, she punched out with equal force. I know I need to change. Now I just have to figure out how.”
She turns her hand over, offering her wrist. That one hesitant movement means more to me than a hundred hugs from acquaintances, a thousand casual handshakes. Whatever else she’s feeling, my sister’s not acting now. This girl is the real Blanca, the one I used to know. The one I’ve always loved.
I cover her wrist with my own. “No, Blanca. You don’t need to change. You just need to remember who you used to be.”
Chapter
Thirty-Nine
I race down the corridor toward my father’s recovery unit. I want to skip and jump and shout. In fact, I do, a kind of spin-hop that gets me a few inches off the ground and draws stares from the passersby and bots. The bots, because they’re programmed to detect sudden movements. The medics, because they’re wondering if they should be worried.
I don’t care. Because I did it. I got Brooklyn Dorset’s address. Colonists’ Slag E3, Unit #422. The information was right there in the file, like Blanca said. In fact, CORA took less than a second to pull up the data once I keyed in the request.
I’m still not sure why Brooklyn’s file was intact. Did Zelo get careless and forget to erase it? Or is he not connected to the murderer, after all?
Either way, I’m on the verge of an answer. I can feel it.
A bot whirrs up beside me. “Where are you going? Who are you seeing? Can I come?”
Since it’s not my Nosy Bot, I put on a little speed an
d ditch it. And I don’t even feel bad.
My breakthrough is exactly the news my father needs. He was devastated by Blanca’s arrest. Oh, sure, he tried to hide his distress, but there, in the set of his lips, in the stillness of his gaze, I could see the questions. Is this my fault? If I had been a better parent, more accessible, would this crime have happened? What could I have done better?
I round the doorway, and my thoughts and feet stop short. My father has company.
He lies against a standard-issue pillow, eyes closed, a single wire extending from his chest to a bulky machine. His hand is on the shoulder of a young man. I can’t see the guy’s face—his head is lowered over clasped hands—but I’d recognize that sliver of forehead anywhere. Carr.
I sway on the threshold. Should I go in? Neither of them are speaking, and yet, I get the feeling they’re having a very definite moment. One I can’t bear to interrupt.
I back from the door, before either of them sees me. I no longer feel like jumping. My father and the boy I love. The two most important men in my life.
Most girls would be overjoyed to witness their connection. Not me. Because if this address doesn’t pan out?
I may not get to keep them both.
…
The fluorescent bulb in the hallway is out, so the only light comes through a broken window no one’s bothered to fix. The entire floor could use a good sweeping, but as with the bulb and window, there’s nobody to clean. Nobody to care.
I find the right door and slap my hand against the panel. Immediately, the door lights up and begins to flash. The Dorsets live in a similar unit to the Silvers, but I never had to light up Astana’s door. I always walked right in.
Not anymore. I’ll never barge in on my friend, with or without lighting her door, ever again.
My chest tightens, and I work to keep my breathing regular. In and out, in and out. Not now. This is not the time to miss my best friend.