The Life Below

by Alexandra Monir

  I pull a notepad and pen out of my bag, forced to go low-tech after my flash drive was erased the same morning Dot was reset. But the ISTC couldn’t scrub my memory. I start jotting down everything I remember of the data I scooped from Dot, hoping that if I can see it all written in a row—the DNA properties, chemical elements, and cell types—I can form a picture from the clues.

  I don’t realize I’ve fallen asleep until my earpiece starts chirping with a robotic voice. “Good evening, Naomi. You are expected in the medical bay in exactly twenty minutes. Please meet your crew there.”

  I roll over with a groan, punching my pillow in frustration. Clearly I’m not going to come up with a way out of the RRB injection in just twenty minutes. I have no choice but to face the needle—and hope I won’t be the next one to have a reaction.

  Something is crinkling under my hip, and I scoot over, rescuing my notes from getting wrinkled beyond recognition. I glance at the page, covered with scribbled words, formulas, and numbers that don’t reveal any pattern just yet. But I know from experience that it can sometimes take reading the same data fifty times before an answer or conclusion jumps out at you.

  I drag myself off the bed and out of my room, stepping into the elevator pod at the same time as Jian. We smile hello, but there’s a nervous energy in the pod as we swoop down to the second floor. I wonder if Jian is as leery of the RRB as I am. And then an old exchange between us comes flashing back to my mind.

  “Last night, when Suki was having her—her reaction to the RRB, she kept repeating something in Mandarin. . . . It sounded like ‘tā hái huózhe.’ Is that—is that a real phrase?”

  I’ll never forget the way he stared at me then.

  “She was saying, ‘It’s alive.’”

  I watch him now, his brow furrowed in thought. Is he remembering the same thing? But before I can ask, the elevator spits us out on the second floor, where Minka, Dev, and Beckett are already gathered.

  My stomach flip-flops with every step we take to the medical bay and the waiting chair. Suki’s face floods my mind—my roommate and friend, transformed into a clawing, screaming stranger the night after her third dose. I think of Callum, of his kind blue eyes, shut forever that same week. They said it wouldn’t happen to us, that we’d know by now if we were in the small percentage to experience side effects. But that was back on Earth. No one had tested the serum for an extended period of time in space before. What if that changes our reactions? What if I’m next?

  Sydney is waiting for us, wearing a white medic’s coat over an ivory sweater and black pants, her hair pulled back in a ponytail that highlights her beautiful dark brown skin and hazel eyes. The medical uniform helps her slip into the role, serious and professional as she swirls the viscous blue serum into a syringe, then plunges the needle without blinking. I’m not surprised to find Tera is back, standing watch, with her camera-eyes beaming down to Earth proof of the Final Six following protocols.

  I hang back, waiting to go last and willing something to happen that could distract from my turn. But all too soon, I’m the only one left, and everyone’s looking my way, waiting for me to get this over with so I can get to the kitchen and prep our first meal. My throat is like sandpaper as I walk to Sydney’s chair and pull up my sleeve. The pain fires up my arm as she presses down on the needle, and then my hands fly to my head as an image enters, unbidden.

  Dark water is climbing like a chimney, oozing a smoky substance, emitting a low, vibrational hum. I try to move away from it, but something slithers against my skin, and I stop cold—

  “Naomi! You okay?”

  My eyes snap open. Whatever I just saw—thought I saw—is gone. It’s only Sydney, looking down at me in concern while the rest of our team mills about, oblivious to my second of madness.

  “Yeah,” I mutter, my face flushing. “I just—thought I saw something . . . weird.”

  But when Sydney bends down to apply the bandage, I make a split-second decision.

  “I have something to tell you. Tonight, after dinner.”

  Five

  LEO

  SOMEONE IS PLAYING PIANO IN A PLACE WHERE MUSIC doesn’t belong. I’ve never heard anyone play like this before—like there’s a fever in their hands and the only cure can be found in the keys. It’s a melody of rolling minor notes, the kind that tugs at your chest and pulls out whatever might be hiding there. I see my parents and sister, jumping up and down in time with the music as they wave Italian flags outside the WagnerOne rocket launch site. My face hurts from smiling, it’s so good to see them again—alive again. And then, a blink later, Naomi is floating in front of me, her dark hair falling like a cloud in front of her face as she leans forward to whisper something in my ear. I grin in response, taking her hand to spin her around—but I must have been too fast, too clumsy, because now she’s looking down at her finger in panic. “The ring!”

  It’s gone. The signet ring I gave her has slipped off, floating away into the void. I lunge forward to catch it, but now I’m the one falling, away from her. The music seems all wrong suddenly as it continues to play, too upbeat, too loud—

  I sit up in bed with a gasp. Just a dream. It was just an anxiety dream, to be expected when—as Greta keeps reminding me—I’m about to take the most daunting spaceflight in history. Except . . . I still hear the music. It couldn’t be more out of place in this austere, left-brain environment, but there it is.

  My eyes dart up to the guest room’s coffered ceiling. It sounds like the piano is coming from there, upstairs in Greta’s suite. And now I’m even more intrigued. It’s almost impossible to imagine this melody, this soul, pouring out of a mind so consumed with numbers, formulas, and facts. What else does she have up her sleeve?

  I imagine what Naomi would say if I told her I discovered a whole new side to her idol, a secret talent no one knows about. I can bring her the story like a gift. It just requires a little effort.

  I hoist myself out of bed, throwing on a T-shirt and sweats over my boxers before moving to the door. I’ve spent the least amount of time here in the domestic wing, so I don’t really know my way around—but I do remember seeing a staircase at the end of the hall.

  I make my way through the dark, the blinking lights of all the wireless tech giving off just enough of a glow to guide my steps. The stone staircase is cold beneath my bare feet, and I jog the last few stairs to a carpeted wing, where Greta lives. It’s my first time seeing this section of the compound, and even through the dark, I can tell that it’s impressive.

  I track the piano’s rising volume, passing a series of doors until I reach the one that is slightly ajar. It looks like some sort of private library, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a touch-screen desk, a leather couch and armchair, and there in the corner, a baby grand. But—the piano bench is empty. The keys are moving on their own, programmed to impress, just like everything else in this place.

  The crush of disappointment catches me by surprise. It shouldn’t matter that the “musician” who moved me to leave my room in the middle of the night turned out to be fake, but it does. Maybe some part of me needed to believe that the person taking my life in her hands, sending me to space on my own—had that kind of soul.

  Instead, Greta is standing behind her desk, studying and swiping at the touch screen as if it’s the middle of a workday instead of two in the morning. On the opposite wall, right above the piano, a flat-screen monitor flashes with images and symbols I haven’t seen before. They move too fast for me to register what they are, exactly, except for one: a double helix, the structure of DNA. We spent a whole school year on this topic, back in my former life. And then I notice what might be the strangest sight yet. The images on the monitor are moving in tandem with the notes to the song.

  Greta lifts her head, and that’s when I see her lips moving—mouthing something intently while staring at the screen. I squint, trying to decipher what she’s saying. Is it the letter B or D? I’m almost sure I can make out the word “minor.” And th
en the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

  It’s like she’s conducting an invisible player with just her voice, reading the sheet music aloud, while each note in the song corresponds with an image on-screen: a block of numbers, a string of DNA—and my face.

  My heart jumps in my throat. I squeeze my eyes shut and open them again, but when the minor chord progression returns, so does my photograph. It’s the same dated photo that circulated in the media when I was first drafted to ISTC.

  The screen freezes on my face; the piano stops. And then a new, spare melody fills the room, coming from somewhere else—a response. That’s when the screen floods with a row of foreign symbols, washing across my photo. Greta’s lips curve upward in a smile, and I feel a trickle of fear. Who is she having this coded, clandestine conversation with about me? And . . . what does it mean?

  Greta’s head turns sharply and I scramble back against the wall, holding my breath. She heard me.

  I inch my way along the wall in the opposite direction, biting my lip to keep from making a sound. After a few moments of Greta eyeing the dark outside her door, she finally turns back to the screens, and I take off in a silent run down the corridor. I come to a halt at the end of the hallway, in front of a door that’s halfway open. There’s no staircase on this side of the corridor, so I’m stuck here until Greta closes her door and I can get by her unseen. I might as well hide out in this empty-looking room until the coast is clear.

  I take a tentative step inside. My eyes adjust to the darkness, and I let out an exhale of relief at the ordinary sight in front of me: empty bed, desk, dresser, and TV console. Must be another guest room. I flick on the light.

  Something cold grips my chest. All it takes is one look for me to know I’m standing in the room of someone who doesn’t live here anymore—who wasn’t planning to leave.

  The room is like a time capsule from five years ago. There’s an old calendar hanging on the wall, sharing space with posters of Europop bands I remember being big back then. The bed isn’t just empty, it’s unmade and gathering dust with a half-open backpack tossed at the foot of it. The desk is littered with school papers written in German, and I can clearly make out the date scrawled across the top. I spot a corkboard of photos above the desk, and I stop in my tracks.

  The boy in all the photos looks the same age as me, and bears a striking resemblance to Greta. The similarities are right there on display in the one picture of the two of them together, smiling almost identical smiles at the top of a ski slope.

  She had a son. What happened to him?

  Since I arrived here, there hasn’t been a single sign of Greta having a family, not now or in the past. And the idea of a Greta 2.0 the same age as me and Naomi is the kind of info I know she would have relished and told me about, so it must not be public knowledge. But why keep her son a secret?

  I glance around the eerily preserved bedroom one last time before bolting out of there, nearly tripping over my own feet in my haste to get away.

  I thought Greta was my lifeline, handing me the answer to my prayers. But now, for the first time since her plane picked me up from Johnson Space Center—I wonder if I was right to say yes to her.

  “Morning, Mr. Danieli! It’s time to begin today’s training. Dr. Wagner is waiting for you in the lab.”

  I unearth my head from under the pillow and find myself looking sideways at a silver, compact humanoid robot wheeling up to my bed with a tray. It’s Greta’s butler, Corion.

  Greta. For a second I can’t remember why I feel a prickly, unsettled sensation at her name, and then the memory of last night comes flooding back. After I snuck back down to my room, I used the guest tablet to dig for answers online, but anything I tried—“Dr. Greta Wagner son,” “Dr. Wagner child,” or any variation of the words—returned zero results. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen that happen, as if those search terms were blocked . . . or something.

  I slump against the pillows, wanting to just stay here and avoid facing Greta and all her secrets. But then, giving up on her would mean losing my one ticket to Europa. To Naomi.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Danieli?”

  Corion’s eyes swivel outward, peering closer at me, as he sets down a tray with coffee and breakfast at the foot of the bed.

  “Y-yeah. Just groggy. And you can call me Leo.”

  Mr. Danieli will always be my father to me, no matter how long he’s been gone.

  “Copy that, Leo. I’ll wait outside for you to eat and dress, and then I’ll escort you to meet Dr. Wagner.” He pulls open the dresser drawer that used to be empty, now suddenly full of folded shirts and pants. “We noticed you didn’t arrive with much in the way of clothing, so Dr. Wagner instructed me to bring you these. They should all be in your size.”

  “Th-thanks.”

  My mind flashes to the guy in the photograph from the abandoned bedroom—my age, my size. A pit forms in my stomach at the thought of wearing his clothes, and I cross my fingers that I’m wrong, that I’ll find brand-new clothing instead. But when Corion leaves and I glance in the drawer, none of the clothes have any tags. They could easily be his. And there’s no way to explain my reluctance to wear them without revealing last night’s snooping.

  I take a deep breath and slip one of the shirts over my head, trying to ignore the creepy feeling crawling up my spine. I step into a pair of track pants and my own sneakers, and then hurry out the door, where Corion is waiting. He briefs me on the day ahead while we make our way to the underground lab.

  “You will begin on the flight simulator, practicing liftoff from Earth. From there, you’ll move into a run-through of the critical Mars maneuver.”

  “Right.” I nod, trying to appear more confident than I feel. The Mars intercept is the single trickiest task of this whole solo mission. I can’t afford even the smallest mistake, if I have any prayer of docking with the Final Six.

  At the opposite end of the lab from the Europa surface mock-up, Corion shows me to the replica WagnerOne rocket, wired with the training sim software. Greta is waiting for me outside, leaning against the machinery with her head bent over her tablet screen. The sight of her silver hair and pale, creased skin gives me a jolt of nerves after last night. Am I crazy to still trust her blindly, without asking about what I saw? Then again, I can’t picture her taking kindly to being spied on. I have to swallow my questions and form my own conclusions. And right now, my conclusion is that she’s all I’ve got.

  I hold my breath as her ice-blue eyes fix on me. Her stoic mask slips for a second, so brief that I would have missed it if I hadn’t known to look. But it’s there, something like hope in her eyes, at the sight of me in these borrowed clothes. I drop my gaze to the floor.

  “Morning, Leo,” she says after a beat. “Are you ready to learn how this ship flies?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Good. Now, I understand the ISTC focused your training on underwater specialties, and didn’t provide you much in the way of flight training,” she begins. “So while I’m busy tending to other areas of your launch, I’ve brought on someone whose round-the-clock focus can be preparing you for piloting your own craft. At the same time, you’ll receive a crash course on surviving space travel from an experienced former astronaut.”

  “Okay. This sounds promising.” I feel my spirits lift. Greta can’t be too unstable if she’s going to all this effort to make sure I’m safe. What I saw last night in her study must have just been the eccentric-genius version of preparing a mission. And as for her family secret . . . well, it’s none of my business, is it?

  “All right, you two,” Greta calls into the training capsule behind her. “Come on out!”

  The hatch door opens. And when I see them step outside, I could swear I’m dreaming.

  “Asher?!” I run to my friend, throwing my arms around him. “And Lark!” I pull her into our hug, and for a moment it’s like we’re kids again, jumping and hugging and yelling our excitement. I pull back, an arm slung around e
ach of their shoulders, drinking in the sight of their faces. “I can’t believe you’re both here!”

  “Same.” Asher grins. “It’s great to see you, man.”

  “How did this happen?” I stare at the two of them in amazement. “How’d you get this past Dr. Takumi and the general?”

  Lark grimaces. “Um. I basically had to jump ship.”

  “Lark is our newest hire at Wagner Enterprises,” Greta says with a proud smile. “And her first decision as mission strategist was to bring in Asher for your flight training.”

  I beam at Lark.

  “That was a great decision, all right. But what happened with you and the ISTC? You seemed so committed to Dr. Takumi and the mission.”

  I knew Lark was enough of a rebel to orchestrate the flight switch when I was supposed to get shipped back to Italy, by sending in Greta’s disguised jet in place of the official Italy plane. But I never would have predicted her leaving ISTC and NASA altogether.

  Lark lets out a long exhale.

  “It was a long time coming, really. I mean, I did believe in the mission at first, and for a long time I saw my career path as following in the general’s footsteps. But then I started to sense something shady was underfoot with the two of them, especially after what happened on the Athena.” She looks away. “Do you know the name Remi Anders?”