“Every hour, Linds. Every hour.”
This room is so white, so clean, so vast, so empty. No place for his words to hide.
“How about this?” I say. “If you ever lose yourself, I’ll come find you. Bring you back.”
I wouldn’t have a choice. If I lose him, I lose parts of myself. Then again, we’re too tangled together for either of us to go far.
“You’re in luck,” he says with a small grin. “Deal works both ways.”
9
SOLAR FLARE
ONE DAY WHEN we were young, maybe seven or eight years old, the entire station flipped from chill and predictable, from rhythm and routine, to a blazing-hot panic. It took less than a minute for the station to turn to chaos.
Lieutenant Black, stationed in Control, had detected a powerful solar flare on the radar—the last one of similar severity had given astronauts a mere fifteen-minute window to take shelter before the burst of radiation passed through. It could have been worse: the engineers could have left the magnetized flare shield offLusca’s exterior entirely, could have failed to consider it at all. But it also could have been better: the flare shield takes a full eleven minutes to settle into place, like a shell around the station. We were not rich in time.
Leo, Heath, Haven, and I were sent directly to the safe room at the station’s core, along with everyone else who wasn’t critical to handling or monitoring the situation. We were to wait it out there, in that dull gray box of a room right atLusca’s center; it had been primarily designed to shield us from rogueasteroids, not solar flares, but it must have made our parents feel better to dosomething. When I asked my mother why she couldn’t stay with me, she only replied,I’m the heart.
Haven chattered away nervously the entire time we spent huddled together. Heath picked at her words—as Heath still does, to this day—calling out her exaggerations, her half-truths, her flat-out lies. Leo and I sat back-to-back, silent. I hugged my knees and thought about my mother’s words. What did it mean to be the heart? It was obvious why the hands had to stay on duty, because the hands do the work. I would have understood why the head had to be there, too, all strategy and solution—honestly, I was surprised my mother hadn’t chosen that one for herself.
But the heart? The more I thought about it, the more I understood. The heart works all the time. The heart keeps pumping because that’s what a heartdoes, because that’s how it keeps everything from grinding to a halt. And the heart is more than just a muscle: it’s a mystery, too. It has its own electrical supply, Leo told me once, and will continue to beat even when separated from the body. Like my mother: she was never truly able to leave her mind at work when she came home. And in reverse, she was never truly able to leave me out of her mind when we were apart.
Leo, Heath, Haven, and I—along with everyone else—stayed in the safe room for much longer than the eleven minutes it took to activate the flare shield. We stayed for at least two hours, until they were sure it had passed, sure we were wellout of radiation danger. Sitting together that long, just the four of us in our dark little corner, was the first time I noticed how different Leo and I were from Heath and Haven, how different Heath and Haven were from each other. And how, much like my mother was part of a body, I was, too. Despite our differences, though, I had a harder time labeling our little group.
We all felt like the heart.
10
CRACKING OPEN THE UNIVERSE
I SCRAPE MILA’S blood from her reader, careful not to waste a single drop. Half goes onto a plate for the electron microscope; the other half will go under the microsphere nanoscope. I’m going to crack this virus open inside and out.
I prepare a concentrated stain so I won’t have to wait as long, immerse the plate in it. It’ll have to sit for ten minutes at least before I can take a look. Growing up on a station full of scientists has certainly come with its advantages—I could run tests like these with my eyes closed. Which is good, since it’s been so hard to keep them open lately.
Leo left a while ago—River, who’s eight, locked himself out of his cabin. Again. There are only a few under-tens, and they have their good days and their very bad days. The girls, Evi and Elise, moved in with Natalin; River stays with Leo now. Evi cries a lot at night, Natalin says, only when she thinks no one can hear. Elise is the opposite. She talks nonstop and hasn’t shed a single tear. Neither will discuss anything real.
And River forgets everything, always.
I put in a call to Heath. Take a deep breath, hope the awkwardness I feel over what happened between us doesn’t find its way into my voice. “Find the girls yet?” I ask when he picks up.
“Negative,” he says. He sounds totally normal, like he always has—like he never kissed me at all—and it’s a colossal relief. “Talked to Mikko and the guys, but they say they haven’t seen them since around three-morning.”
About half an hour before we found Mila.
“At Mikko’s, or where?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Dash said they all crashed out around then in Mikko’s main room, except for Grace and Mikko, who were...”
“Right.”
“When Siena and the boys woke up, Grace and Yuki were gone. Mikko slept on the couch, alone.”
I glance at the clock, at my stained sample—not done yet. In just under two hours, I’m supposed to meet Natalin, and she’ll kill me if I’m late. Multitasking has never been my thing, but lately, I’ve had to embrace it.
I let out a long breath. “Okay, here’s what I think,” I say. “Tell Haven to put out a station-wide call for a mandatory check-in on the mezzanine, and tell her not to say why. I can be there in twenty minutes.” We’ve done too many of these lately. I’ve been trying to avoid them as much as possible, for my sake and everyone else’s. If I call too many meetings, people will stop taking them seriously. The check-ins eat time on top of that. And people ask too many questions.
“You got it.” He pauses, and the silence starts to gape. It’s not like him to be at a loss for words, especially around me. Right as I start to fear the worst—the conversation I’d really rather avoid until we absolutely have to deal with it—he adds: “If we find them before then, I’ll have Haven cancel the check-in.”
