BREAK
I’VE BEEN SAVING my mother’s brick of chocolate, sealed up in its foil like some sort of shrine.
I tear into it.
Break off one small piece.
Things are not okay, not even a little bit.
37
UNSETTLE, UPROOT
IT ISN’T EASY to forget everything I know, but tonight, it is necessary. It’s imperative that I use wide-open eyes to take a good, hard look at the familiar—that I dislodge my biases, approach each file as if it belongs to the killer.
The familiar has become strange.
Yuki and Grace, for example: no longer are they merelytwo girls who went missing, orgirls with porcelain bones who are more likely to be broken than to break.Now they aregirls who had access codes to SSL, girls who broke in without permission, girls who stole witch hazel from Pillar 97. Girls who might break other rules to preserve their own good.
And Akello—how he looked like he wanted to strangle the truth out of me, how he looked like he might have tried if not for the glass between us—his eyes on me during the mandatory check-in said he knew about Mila before we’d even announced it. I assumed it was because they were inseparable as friends, but it isn’t like I knew the inner workings of their relationship; maybe it was an enemies-closer situation, how he alwayshung around her. Maybe he twisted and snapped. He’s certainly imposing enough to overpower a victim or three.
It isn’t such a stretch to connect some people to the deaths. Like Mikko, ready to attack Cameron for stealing his father’s razor blades. The fact that he had razor blades at all—and the fact that Cameron stole them.
On and on, I sift through the files. I consider each one, jotting notes as I go, mapping connections between them, until I’m left with just six.
Five, if we’re not counting me.
These are the most difficult biases to set aside. Sometimes, biases are there for a reason: because there are people who are implicitly trustworthy, people you’ve grown close to because they’re worthy of closeness, people you know—know—would never do the unspeakable things in question.Couldnever, because you’ve seen straight down to their souls, shadows and all. That even their shadows aren’t so dark as to hide murder, murder, murder.
Heath. Haven. Natalin. Leo. Zesi.
They’ve been working tirelessly alongside me, tending to the station just like I’ve been doing. I trust them, every single one.
Though, if I’m honest, Natalin doesn’t completely seem to trustme.
And I’m learning new things by the day about Heath, when I thought I knew all there was to know—how he feels about me, for one. How he never told me about his crash landing last year.
Weallknow every turn of the station.
Every security camera.
Every single code for every single room.
I thought it would make me feel better to go through the manifests, but instead of ruling people out, all I’m left with is a mess of notes and the pervasive feeling that it could beanyone.
The only people I can absolutely trust are dead.
38
GIRL AGAINST TIME
IT’S FOUR-MORNING, AND I’ve now had three pieces of chocolate, a full fifth of the entire bar. Even at this early hour, I take great care in spreading my supplies out in perfect order on the laboratory island.
I’m running on three hours of broken sleep. Aside from obvious concerns—the who and how of these murders—we’re coming up on the thirty-six-hour mark from when Zesi and Heath set off forNautilus. I know well enough not to expect them to return atexactlythirty-six hours, since they will have had to dock and load up the fresh batch of supplies, but I find myself waiting on the edge of my stool regardless. In my limited, broken sleep, I kept dreaming of explosions: a perfect burst of fire from the heart of the bee, complete destruction in the span of a single second, all of it silent in the void of space.
I’ve been trying not to dwell on the things that make me afraid. Trying to find answers instead, fumbling around for something solid and within my control, rather than tying myself into anxious knots over things so far out of it. The mysteryof the deaths has been a more than sufficient distraction thus far—but not a satisfying one.
Instead of neatly tied answers, I’ve dug up a tangle of questions.
