Control

CHAPTER 14

THE NEXT MORNING, I WAKE UP STILL wearing my club clothes. I stink of stale chemicals and cigarette smoke.

My head throbs with a distinctive shade of pain I only get after oxygen deprivation. A hypoxia headache, thanks to my spell of breathlessness in Argent’s Alucinari Room. I wonder if the rest of the crew feels like this, a can of condensed awfulness. I unclasp the necklace from my neck, stretching my chest to its max with a deep inhalation. If only I could exhale all the ugliness of last night. The confusion of meeting Micah, the pain of seeing Dyl, the torture of not getting her back.

I’ve got a week to try to find what Micah is looking for. I switch on Dyl’s holo, listening to the poem again, letting her voice soothe me. And then I search her diary for mentions of traits, but there’s nothing. Like me, she’s in the dark. Unlike me, she’s being slowly killed for it.

I do a secondary search within her diary for Dad. At first, there’s nothing substantial. But then there’s this. She’s reading a different poem, when she stops.

“I wish Zel would read this one. I wanted to show her, but there’s no point. Dad says she doesn’t like poetry anymore.” She huffs dismissively. “Sucks.”

I pause the diary, shocked. Dad told me to stop obsessing over poetry to focus on cell bio classes four years ago, so I could work in the lab more. I never stopped loving poetry. I only stopped reading it because he wanted me to. I always thought Dad knew me so well.

Now I’m wondering if he knew me at all.

All those years, he guided my education, my likes and dislikes. And for what? So Dyl could have nothing in common with me?

My search leads me back to the original poem. I close my eyes, listening.

Remember the mind.

Let it shift and move like water,

First to understand

Then to turn with ease

The boulders of the earth.

Boulders. Right. I have to do the impossible. Dad always emphasized my weak and flawed body, my Ondine’s curse. But I have this brain. I’ve got to make impossible things happen. My skills in the lab were a gift that he nurtured and subsequently told me to dump. But right now, there’s no way I’m giving them up.

I have a week. I’ll get her out of there; I have to believe it, because I cannot consider the horror of other possibilities.

After a quick shower, I walk as fast as my throbbing head will allow. The common room and kitchen are empty. I don’t want to be alone this morning, not with Marka gone and Ana wandering the darker hallways of Carus.

I run through the selections on the efferent and order a huge pot of strong, black coffee and half a dozen pieces of dry toast. Some headache patches would be nice.

“Cy?” I call. At first, I’m rewarded with silence, but after a minute his gravelly voice enters the kitchen.

“What?”

“Can you . . . please . . . get some headache patches from the medic room and bring them down to breakfast? Enough for everyone?”

Cy grunts in reply. I can’t believe he didn’t cuss me out. Then again, maybe he’s still sleeping and not really listening.

I bring the coffee, toast, jam, and sunseed butter into the common room and lay out creamer and agave sugar. Might as well make enough for everyone, I figure. I put my hands on my hips and call out loudly.

“Wilbert, Vera, Hex, Cy—there’s hot coffee and toast in the common room.”

Cy walks in as I say this, rumpled and gorgeous in what must be his pajamas. A loose white T-shirt hangs off his angled shoulders and a pair of drawstring pants barely hang on to his hips. Yesterday’s tattoo mask is completely gone and his skin is uninked as yet. His face looks softer, kinder. I watch him toss several medicine-infused patches onto the table, then peel one for myself and place it on my neck as he grabs the coffee decanter.

“And there’s headache medicine too,” I add loudly to everyone.

“By god, you’re good,” Hex mumbles from his room.

Within minutes, Vera, Wilbert, and Hex all shuffle in. Vera collapses into a chair at the table and immediately puts her head down. I place a patch in her open palm, and without lifting her head, she slaps it onto the side of her neck. Her index finger lifts, as if it’s the last effort she can manage.

“Coffee,” she mumbles against the tabletop. “Industrial strength.”

Wilbert grabs two patches and slaps one on each of his heads, and Hex actually lies down on the floor with four hands covering his face. He groans miserably.

“Hex, are you okay?”

“I will be, if everyone will go mute for a few days.” He drops two hands to gently massage his stomach.

“Well, I’m glad I didn’t make any cocktails for breakfast,” I say lightly. At the mention of cocktails, Hex jumps off the floor, beelines into the kitchen, and pukes noisily into the sink.

Vera lifts her head to look at the kitchen door and then me. Cy emits a noise that sounds like air escaping from a balloon. We all burst into laughter. It’s the warmest sound I’ve heard in days. Wilbert starts pouring cups of coffee, when Hex stumbles back into the common room.

“Please don’t say that word again. Or anything that means the same thing.” He sits down at the table and Vera pushes a fresh cup of coffee over to him.

“Thanks,” he murmurs, and Vera’s lips twitch against her raised mug.

I survey the scene, realizing that for once, we’re all in the same place and not trying to yell at each other. “So, uh. How often do you guys do this club thing?” I ask, yawning so widely that my jaw actually cracks.

“Occasionally,” Wilbert says.

“Never,” Cy adds. I watch Cy after he speaks, and he turns to watch me right back. Finally, I drop my eyes to my coffee.

“But it’s never that exciting, that’s for sure. This one’s going into the books,” Vera says. “Locked away, never to be spoken of again.”

“Locked away would be nice. I saw things I never want to see again,” Hex says between coffee slurps.

As did I, I want to say, but I don’t. “Did you have fun, Wilbert?” I ask.

“All I remember is puking,” he says, grabbing some toast. “And wishing I had a mouth on this guy”—he pats his faceless head—“so I could puke twice as fast.”

“Schweeeeeet,” Hex slurs, and there’s another round of laughs. Even Wilbert’s being a good sport, joining in.

“Did Marka come home yet?”

“Not yet,” Wilbert answers. “She might be there for a few days. We never know until she shows up.”

“How often does she bring kids home? I mean, there aren’t a lot of you guys here,” I say.

“Not often. Well, before you there were the twins, little Edgar and Pria. They had these extra eyes on their body. Creepy, but kind of cute after a while. Something wasn’t right with their brain development, though. They couldn’t walk, or eat right. They died within a few months.”

“How did they . . . you guys . . . get the traits? Can they be undone?” I ask, thinking of Dyl.

Vera shakes her head. “No way. Every cell we have is altered—”

“Undone? We’re not errors that need fixing,” Cy interrupts, glaring at me.

“I didn’t say that!” I retort, exasperated. I turn my back to Cy and ask Hex, “So, is there something in the water that I don’t know about?”

“No,” Vera says, softly rubbing her skin. “It’s not something in the water. Our traits aren’t random mutations. You can’t get subdermal chloroplasts without purposeful tinkering.”

“Then how?”

It’s silent for a while. Everyone steals a look at Cy, but no one speaks, as if they’re afraid of him. Finally Cy clears his throat. “New genomic sequences, directly targeting the oocytes of women. With the right cell uptake vector, you could make it into a pill. The women would never know until something like Wilbert showed up on ultrasound.”

“That technology doesn’t exist,” I counter.

“You’re looking at proof that it does,” Cy says, sitting up and returning my glance. “No legal lab has access to that kind of technology.”

“And it’s been going on for a long, long time,” Wilbert adds. “Way before we were born. I mean, look at Marka.”

“But who could possibly be doing that to women? Is it Aureus?” I wonder aloud.

“I don’t think so,” Hex says, rubbing his unshaved chin. “The way they keep trolling the orphanages and foster homes? It’s like they’re Easter egg hunting, only someone else hid the eggs out there, you know?”

The conversation dies, right then and there. Everyone grows silent, thinking of their own twisted beginnings, all with the same empty space of an answer. I attempt to restart the conversation.

“So Wilbert, you came here two years ago?”

“Yep,” he responds, then smiles shyly when Vera doesn’t add some scathing remark afterward.

“And before that . . .” He trails off, eyeing Cy.

“We came five years ago,” Cy says.

“We?” I say.

He puts his coffee mug down on the table. Everyone flinches when he gets up, but he only walks calmly to the door. “My sister and I. And Ana doesn’t deserve to be in a hangover discussion.”

I feel bad. I wasn’t trolling for gossip, but Cy probably doesn’t know that. Before he leaves, he says quietly, “Thank you, Zelia, for the coffee.”

We all breathe a sigh of relief at his exit.

“Girl! What did you put in that drink? An elephant tranquilizer?” Vera asks.

I shake my head, surprised myself. I reach for a piece of dry toast, thinking about Cy, seeing him in my mind’s eye walking within Carus. Maybe he’s going to the lab. My heart thumps an extra beat in anticipation of going there myself to work.

“I’m home, guys.” Marka’s voice sounds from the room’s wall-coms.

“How’d it go? Got a new rugrat to introduce to us?” Vera asks.

“No.” The deadened tone of Marka’s voice immediately squelches any good feeling in the room. Maybe she knows about our excursion.

Minutes later, she walks in and dumps her overnight bag on the floor with an exhausted sigh. Hex sits up to watch her every movement and Vera pours a cup of coffee for her.

“What is it, Marka?”

“I got there too late,” she says, her voice slightly hoarse. Vera puts her hand to her mouth.

“Too late? Too late for what?” I ask her. “Did Aureus try to take him?”

“No. Aureus probably passed on this kid a long time ago. Not a useful trait. By the time I got there, they’d already put him down. He was just five years old. If only I’d gotten there sooner.”

I shake my head. “You sound like you’re talking about dogs or—”

“We are dogs.” She grimaces at her cup. “No, we’re less than that. We’re nonexistent mistakes in the eyes of the government. They’re trying damn hard to keep up the nonexistent part of their promise. I’m lucky they didn’t kill me too.” She lifts her head from her coffee, her eyes rimmed with red. “My contact there isn’t willing to risk her neck for me much longer. I’m so glad you guys were all safe here while I was gone.”

At this, Hex coughs guiltily. I know we’re all thinking the same thing—there won’t be another club excursion for a long time. Maybe ever. We each give Marka a hug and disappear to our separate sanctuaries, to swallow down the reality of who we are, and how close to dead we could be.

I practically run to the lab, hungry to finish the next step and bury myself in work, formulas, lab protocols. Dyl constantly invades my thoughts, and I use the panic to work even harder. The hours fly by before I realize it’s the middle of the night. Cy never appears. Although I’m disappointed at first, I welcome the solace and lack of distraction.

Finally, exhaustion overtakes me and I head to bed. My feet take a path that swings by Cy’s room. Stupid feet. I don’t really want to talk to him, but it doesn’t matter, because his room is empty. I’m so tired that I bump against the walls a few times on the way to my room. Finally, the door to my bubble room comes into view.

Well, half of it comes into view.

Cy is sleeping there, propped against the doorjamb and obscuring the lower half of the closed door. I walk over and stoop down next to him. He must have put on some tattoos after breakfast, but they’re so faded now I can’t tell what images they were. He looks like he just rolled around in some ashes. His face is serene and relaxed. And beautiful.

I nudge his arm with my knuckles. Softly at first, then more firmly.

“Cy,” I say. He doesn’t flinch. I try a louder volume, but he’s really out. Too bad I have to do this.

I hit the button for the door, and it slides open. He falls with a clunk onto the floor. I think his skull actually bounced.

“Goddammit!” he curses, rubbing his head. “Why did you do that?”

“How else was I going to get in, with you barricading the way?”

“You could have asked.”

“I tried,” I say, squeezing by him and making my way to the closet inside. Any glamour I had from the club night is long gone. I’m exhausted and edgy from my lab work, which isn’t going as fast as I’d like. Now is not the time for any arguments with Cy. I shut the door and start undressing. I’ve got my shirt over my head when Cy slides the closet door open and walks in.

“Hey!” I protest.

“I’m not done.”

“Can you be ‘not done’ somewhere else?” I clutch my shirt to my chest, but it doesn’t hide my bare legs and underwear. “Get out!”

“No. I want to talk to you.” He’s wearing his hostility all over again, as if I’ve somehow insulted him between breakfast and now. “I want to know why you were with that piece of trash Kw.”

“Ugh. Fine. But turn around so I can change,” I warn him. Thankfully, Cy obliges me. I throw my shirt down and find one of Cy’s stolen shirts long enough to cover the top of my thighs. After I’m decently covered, I look up to see Cy’s reflection in the mirror by the closet wall. He’s been watching me the whole time.

“Arrggh! I told you not to look!”

“You told me to turn around. I obeyed you. I didn’t put that mirror there.”

I push past him, but he follows close behind.

“Answer my question.”

I sit on my bed, bunching up my bedcovers against my chest. As if that will remove the image of my half-naked body from his mind. It’s not going to work, but what the hell.

I take a breath. “I saw him at New Horizons. That’s all.”

“So, that’s enough of a history for you to be all over each other?”

“We weren’t all over each other.” I hear my voice rising defensively. “And you’re not my mother.”

“You need one. Kw is not someone you should look at, let alone talk to.”

“Why?”

Cy opens his mouth and closes it. “He doesn’t have your best interests at heart.”

“Why?”

“You have to trust me. He’s not good for you, or for your sister.”

“Look. I do really well with details. Proof. Data. Try me. I’m all ears.”

Cy squeezes his fists so hard that one of the tattoos on his wrist fades, like dust being whisked away by a breeze. “He works for them, you know.”

“Aureus? I know.”

“That should be enough to stop trusting him.”

“And?”

“And that’s all you need to know.”

I throw up my hands. What a waste of a conversation. “If you can’t be honest, you might as well go.”

“And you’re the queen of honesty? You’ve been talking to him and not telling anyone.” He must see the surprise on my face. “Yes, I know about those holo transmissions. Wilbert told me. It wasn’t hard to guess where they were coming from. You don’t trust any of us, and all we’ve done is given you a home and a family. You and your goddamn honesty, Zelia!”

“Home? Family? You’ve been as welcoming as a splinter since I stepped in this place! You don’t know what the word family means!”

Cy rushes right back and leans over me, one millimeter between us. The heat of his fury washes over my face and neck.

“You have no idea what you’re saying,” he seethes. He’s breathing so fast, so angrily, his chest nearly touches mine. “Ask yourself, Zel. What would make someone want you? Your face and a three-minute holo conversation? Is that enough for him to want to kiss you?”

“Shut up.” Tears blur my vision. I know I’m ugly. But for Cy to throw it at me like that? “So how much neurodrug did you snort before you could touch me, huh? I’m not worth kissing when you’re sober, right?” I spit back at him.

Cy pauses, his confidence disappearing.

“I thought so. Get out,” I say, my voice cracking. When he doesn’t move, I gather all my rage, my ugliness, my weakness, and shove him as hard as I can. Cy stumbles back, astonished. “Get out!” I scream.

He leaves without another word.

THE NEXT DAY, EACH MEMBER OF CARUS buries his or her guilt in work. Vera perfects her injectable plant organelles, sunbathing during her breaks. Hex pretends to research retinoic acid protocols but actually plays a one-man game with two basketballs in the holorec room. Wilbert constructs a new nanocircuit gel in the form of a gummy bear, which Callie promptly eats and subsequently gives her horrible diarrhea.

After all my failures, I’ve finally done it. Dyl’s DNA is finally isolated and copied. I almost cry at my success, but before I get too excited, I move on to the next step—comparing fragments of her DNA to mine. The results will take at least an hour. Cy won’t miss me. He’s been violently ignoring me all day anyway.

As I walk out of the lab, I feel so alone. Being unwanted is a solitary business, for sure. In my head, a whispered voice answers my unspoken dejection. It’s a girl’s voice. It sounds like Dyl, but it can’t be her. And I know it’s not my imagination.

Please.

Come to me.

Please.

To add to the bizarre voice, I feel the faint brush of a hand on my shirt, tugging insistently, like a tiny child trying to drag me forward.

That’s it. I must be going crazy. As soon as the word crazy hits my brain cells, a puzzle piece snaps into place.

Ana.

A few minutes later, I’m at Wilbert’s lab/pigsty. Callie is mercifully asleep in the corner of the ugly couch and Wilbert is disemboweling some other machine on the floor. He waves a hand covered in circuit gel. I wave back.

“Wilbert. I need some information.”

“What do you want to know?” He wiggles his eyebrows. “I am the eyes and ears of this place, after all.”

“This is serious. I’m getting kind of freaked out.”

“’Bout what?”

“Ana. I think I’m going crazy. I think I can hear her thoughts. I think . . .” I swallow dryly, trying to push the words out. “I think she’s making me hallucinate.”

Wilbert puts his fingers to his lips. “Turn off room-com,” Wilbert orders. “Lock door.”

“Room-com deactivated,” a woman’s voice answers. The shiny door slides shut with a prompt click.

“Who are we keeping secrets from?” I ask. “Marka didn’t say her story was off limits.”

“Not Marka. Cy. He hates it when we talk about her, so we need to keep it quiet.” Wilbert vaporizes the gel off his hands in the sink and offers me a seat on the couch. “Ana,” Wilbert announces, “is our resident ghost.” He’s trying so hard to cover his grin. He really does love gossip.

“You don’t actually mean—”

“No, no. She’s flesh and blood. But we don’t see her, ever. She’s practically a myth.”

“But why—”

The room-com woman beeps at us. “You have a request to talk, from Cyrad.”

“Just a minute,” Wilbert replies. “Geez, it’s like he knows we’re talking about her! We better hurry up, before—”

“You have a second . . . correction, you have a third request from Cyrad,” the voice says.

“Okay, okay. So, why is she here?” I say, rolling my hand to speed up the Q & A.

“She’s Cy’s little sister. She and Micah went off on a junkyard run together, and—”

“WHAT? Micah used to live here?” I’m halfway screeching and choking the words out.

“Well, yeah. I mean, no one talks about it. Cy gets so pissed. Ana had run off, said she was sick of being stuck in Carus forever and Micah tried to stop her. Marka and Cy went nuts trying to track her down, but Cy wouldn’t leave the compound to go after her. Super-paranoid about being caught by Aureus, that one. He even hates going up to the agriplane.”

“But he went to Argent,” I say.

“Yeah, that was way weird.” Wilbert stares into space for a second, as if the whole space-time continuum was screwed by Cy’s anomalous behavior. “Anyway, before Micah could bring her back, Aureus snapped them both up. Four weeks later, Ana knocks on our front door, but she was totally bonkers. Marka ran some tests. She had some stroke in her frontal lobes or something. Been a nutcase ever since.”

“That’s what happened?”

“Yeah. But Aureus never let go of Micah. He’s like a servant there, a gopher.”

“Gopher?”

“You know, ‘go for this, go for that.’ Gets them stuff so they don’t have to risk getting caught. He blends in with the masses, unlike some of us.” Wilbert pats his extra head.

My mind is on overdrive trying to process this. “What’s his trait?”

“He’s got some electric eel thing going.” Wilbert picks up Callie and nuzzles with her. “Generates current in his skin. He used to shock me all the time when I first came here. Drove me crazy.”

“And Ana’s?”

“She sheds this sensory antigen—”

Bang. Someone’s pounded the door. Callie squeals and jumps out of Wilbert’s arms, ducking for cover.

“Wilbert! Open up!” Cy’s muffled yell comes from the other side.

“I’m—I’m covered in circuit gel! One sec!” He whispers so fast I hardly understand him. “Cy’s never forgiven himself for not going after her. Keeps trying to think up ways to cure her brain with neural transfers and stuff. It’s all he ever works on in the lab now. He keeps trying to track Aureus down and somehow ‘out’ them to the public, but they’re always one step ahead—”

“WILBERT!” Cy yells.

“Okay, okay!” he hollers back.

“I was never here!” I hiss, and jump behind a huge tower of broken processor units. I crouch down, well below the level of machinery in front of me.

“Unlock door and activate room-com,” Wilbert says, as calmly as possible.

I hear the door open and Cy’s footsteps entering.

“What the eff?” he says, irritated.

“What the nothing, I was in the middle of a delicate procedure.”

“Yeah, okay, if that’s what you want to call what you do with your pig.”

Speaking of pigs, Callie has snuck up behind me and is now enthusiastically sniffing my ass. “Get away!” I mouth at her, flapping my hands. She doesn’t go away, just keeps sniffing.

“Where’s the pig-rat, anyway?” Cy asks.

“You know Callie, probably found some new toy.” I hear Wilbert cleaning his hands off in the vaporizer sink for a second time. “Speaking of new toys, what do you think of Zelia?”

My eyes nearly pop out of my head. Is Wilbert trying to make me choke and reveal myself?

“Oh. Her.” Cy’s voice grows colder.

“She’s pretty smart.”

I smile. I really like Wilbert.

Cy snorts. “She’s sloppy in her lab work and pathologically nosy.”

I frown and give Cy the finger behind my tower. Callie looks at me sympathetically, if a pig could do such a thing.

“She’s cute anyway,” Wilbert says, rebounding.

“Whatever,” Cy says, flustered. “Anyway, did you finish that test yet? I didn’t come here to discuss societal rejects.”

“Like us?” Wilbert adds, snickering.

“Shut it, Wilbert.”

“Okay, okay,” he says, scared. I hear him scrambling around his stuff.

They start murmuring about cross-hemispheric neuronal transfers and nano-biogels, and I lose the thread of discussion. After forever, Cy leaves and Wilbert locks the door again.

I pop up from behind my wall of broken electronics and grunt, shaking out my cramped legs.

Wilbert shrugs his shoulders. “Sorry. I actually thought he had a crush on you.”

“Ha.”

“No, really! He stares at you all the time. Haven’t you noticed?”

“I repeat: Ha.”

Callie runs from behind the equipment and Wilbert scoops her up and kisses her affectionately. Callie licks both his skulls and I have to hold the stomach acid down. Anyway, it’s time to get back to the lab.

“Thanks, Wilbert.”

“Sure thing. Oh, and remember. Lock your door at night. Ana tends to wander around after hours. She’s not exactly, er, stable, so I wouldn’t go into her room either.”

“Yeah, too late for that.”

THAT NIGHT, I LIE IN BED.

Freaking out.

Will Dyl end up like Ana? Is Dyl already hurt beyond repair?

Ana’s been shoved down to the nonexistent floor of Carus. No one visits her. They pretend she doesn’t exist. I jump out of bed and pad out the door and into the hallway. Time for insomniacs to unite.

“Where is Ana’s room again?”

“Go left, three flights down. Seventh door on the right.”

Bits of trash, torn clothing, and doll amputees increase in density on the floor as I approach her room.

I pause, then press the button and walk in. I recognize the huge canvases with their dismembered body parts and miniscule, painted babies. Today, the streaks on the wall are clearly pain, and the ruined chair is almost comfortingly familiar.

More broken things are strewn over the floor. I pick up a few books, covers missing and their spines ready to crack from age. I know those novels and their themes—suicide, heartbreak, psychological torture. My, Ana has dark taste. Brown apple cores with dry, curled skins are piled like a cairn next to a stack of dirty dishes.

Against a corner of the wall is a mattress covered with a mound of blankets in a swirling mess. Next to the paintings, more books litter the floor. I wonder why she doesn’t just read off her holo, like most people would. Then again, Dyl had her book too. I hadn’t understood her either.

“I have so much to learn,” I murmur to myself.

“Me too.”

I jump inside my skin, suppressing a shriek. I can’t see her anywhere. The lavender light emerging from the bottom of the walls doesn’t illuminate anything but the mess on the floor. The ceiling stays dark, like a starless night.

“Where . . . where are you?” I whisper.

“Heeeeere, sister.” Her inflections are innocent, like a child’s, but the tone has a silky depth to it, like a young woman’s. My heart softens at her words, though I’ve done nothing to earn the title from her.

Sister. A word steeped in blood and genes and tethered hopes.

“Here I am,” she whispers again. Something must be wrong with my ears. I can hear her, but am totally unable to locate the direction. It doesn’t sound like it’s coming from the wall-coms either.

“Ana.” I turn around slowly, not knowing where I should address my words. Hoping that nothing sharp or dangerous is heading my way. “How are you?”

I hear her take in a breath and hum. “How. How do I get my trinket back? R and U are letters. You ask strange questions.”

Uh. Okay. “I can’t see you. Where are you?”

“South of the sun, and north of the Earth’s core, that’s what I know.”

“There’s no such thing as ‘north’ in space,” I say, trying to play her game.

“I use my own compass. Don’t you?”

“Yes. We all do, don’t we?”

Oh my god. I’ve really fallen into the rabbit hole this time. But I don’t want to leave. Not yet.

“Can I see you?” I ask.

“Do you have my trinket?” she whispers.

“No. I don’t think so.” What trinket? A jewel, or charm?

“Pity.” A rustle sounds from the corner, where her messy bed quivers with movement. A spindly white arm emerges from the mess of blankets, like a sped-up video of a bleached, growing seedling. The arm grasps the mound of blankets and pushes. A dark head with enormous blue eyes peeks out over the heap of covers. Her nut-brown hair is long, lank, and messy from lying down.

“Hi,” I say. I don’t venture forward. My instinct says not to move at all, the same instinct that doesn’t approach a songbird ready to take flight.

“You’re Zelia.”

I hear her, but her lips don’t move. How does she do that? Ana blinks. More of the blanket falls from her face. Deep shadows hang under her eyes, and her mouth is a perfect little bow of pale pink.

“How . . . how do you do that, exactly? Talk without . . . talking?” I ask. Her next words enter my mind with the clarity of the most perfect holo transmission, but without the holo.

“How do you remember to live, every minute?”

“You mean my breathing? I make myself do it. It’s not easy.”

“I don’t have to try.” Her mouth stays taut, curls into a smile. “It is what it is.”

“Can you read my thoughts too?”

“I am a one-way street.”

I take her cryptic answer as a no. I even test her, asking her in my head if she likes apples, which I know she does from the pile of apple cores, but she stares blandly back at me, clearly not hearing my mental query. Ana proceeds to study me with her great, water-blue eyes until I lose the staring match. My eyes fall to a broken novel on the floor.

“Why do you read books, when you can use a holo?”

“I like things. Real things.” She reaches for a nearby book and presses it into her chest. Brittle bits of paper snow onto her lap. Something terrible lurks behind the blue eyes that watch me, almost clinging to me as I take a step back. My impulse to flee is gathering strength in my veins.

“No,” her voice whimpers in my head.

“I’ll come back sometime.” Oh, words. I offer them as a consolation prize, because I don’t know if I’m brave enough to back them up with the truth.

“No. No one comes back.” She wipes her nose clumsily, the way a little child might. The same way Dyl did as a kid. This time, my words will mean what they say. I undo my retreating steps and come close enough to touch her hand.

“I will. I promise. I’ll come by very soon.”

Ana clasps my hand, as if she’s captured a butterfly. “I like real things,” she says, and opens her cupped hands, freeing me. I know what pain it is for her to let go. She closes her eyes and burrows under the waves of blankets.

“Real is good,” I say, though I’m not sure what her flavor of real is.

I keep my hand on the wall as I walk back to my room. I feel off center, desperate to regain my balance. After that trip to Ana’s, I’m not quite sure that my north is north anymore.