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  I shake off the thought. “They’ll assign you someone else,” I say to the glass. “Someone good.” Maybe Dr. Osmani herself will spend some time with the pollinators and see that I wasn’t the one killing them after all.

  I send off my morning report and race downstairs to the wellness level, avoiding the crowds on the lift. I don’t want to see loads of people on a good day, and if Lian is right about Rubio’s gossip reaching everyone, I especially want to stay hidden today.

  The walls of the wellness level glow with a soft, lunar blue. Calm settles over me as I navigate the corridors. I know the ship is subtly manipulating my emotions, bathing me in shades empirically proven to exert a soothing influence, but my amygdala doesn’t care that it’s being had. My shoulders start to relax. A hologram of interlaced tree branches overhangs the ceiling, a blue sky sparkling beyond them. Only the smell gives away the lie—crisp, sterilized air where there should be leaves and damp earth.

  I stop and double-check the schedule on my handbook. SEMINAR ROOM 12A—MINDFUL FOCUS WORKSHOP. I hug the screen to my chest and slip down the hall, checking the display on each glass doorway I pass until I find the one that matches my schedule.

  The counselor sits at a table with his back to me, talking to a young man in a pale gray flight uniform. I know the pilot. Alan Hwang. A few weeks ago, he took one of the fighters out into the black and tried to sit in it until he ran out of oxygen. I can’t be as bad off as he is, can I? I didn’t try to off myself, after all. Maybe that’s why I’m still on partial duty rotation and Alan has been confined to the wellness level for almost a month straight. I guess preadmission psych tests don’t catch everything.

  My forehead bumps the glass with a light thump. The counselor turns, smiles beatifically, and waves me in.

  I square my shoulders. The sooner I get this over with, the sooner I can concentrate on socking away supplies and using Jyotsana’s security clearance to hack the Ranganathan’s logs. The dakait ship’s call signature, the shuttle’s security override codes, it’s all there, waiting for me to download to my crow. But for now, I have to act normal, or as normal as someone undergoing a psych evaluation can be. I activate the door.

  “Mindfulness increases accuracy and precision,” Advani-ji reminds me. “Daily practice can reduce overall anxiety.”

  Alan looks up at me as I walk in. He seems healthy enough—maybe even a little pudgy—but his gaze is dull and subdued, like he doesn’t have the energy to meet my eyes. No wonder. He’s nineteen and his career as a pilot is over before it started, on top of whatever took him out into the emptiness in the first place.

  I sit down across from him at the broad table in the center of the room. Stacks of pastel origami paper sit between us.

  “Specialist Guiteau, right?” our instructor says. “So glad you could join us. Today we’re learning how to make cranes.”

  If I have one good thing to say about origami, it’s that it keeps me from worrying that I’ve made a horrible mistake, that I’ll get caught and end up like Alan, everything over before it’s begun. I go over the plan in my head as I fold, check it for glitches. Tomorrow, during ship’s night, we’ll pass within a short flight of Ceres Station. Three hours into third shift, when the flight and deck crews have retired to their bunks, I’ll meet Cassia on the hangar floor. We’ll sneak aboard a shuttle together, and the rest depends on speed and surprise. And Commander Dhar’s distaste for altering the Ranganathan’s course simply to chase one tiny ship. I fold my koi paper in half so it forms a triangle and crease it with my thumb.

  “How’s it coming, Miyole?”

  I jump. David, the counselor, smiles warmly and leans over my shoulder to inspect my work. Everyone else on the ship goes by his or her title and surname, but for some reason, the counselors are always simply David or Yumiko or Stjepan. I guess so we’ll feel comfortable opening up about our innermost fears and anxieties to them or something.

  “Fine.” I gesture at the growing pile of therapy cranes I’ve managed to finish folding over the last hour. I tried doing them with my gloves on at first, but that didn’t turn out so well. At least Alan and David don’t seem like the gossiping types. So far, they either haven’t noticed my scarred hands, or they don’t care.

  David plucks a bird out of the pile and examines it. He straightens out its beak, which, if I’m honest, I wasn’t the most careful about folding.

  “You’re rushing.” David gently places the crane back down on the table in front of me.

  “I’m not trying to,” I lie.

  He takes a seat next to me and pulls a fresh piece of paper from the top of the stack. “It doesn’t matter how many you make, you know.”

  “I know.” I sigh and flick the lopsided bird back into the pile with its flock.

  David folds his paper in half and creases it in one smooth, practiced motion. “Can I ask you something?”

  I shrug.

  “Do you like taking walks?”

  I frown. “I guess.” Back in Mumbai, I liked swimming and riding better, but water’s too scarce for that out here, and we don’t have any use for horses.

  He opens up the paper and folds it in the opposite direction, so the creases cross each other. “This isn’t a race. Think of it more as a walk. A stroll. Something you do simply for the pleasure of doing it.” The square slip of paper becomes a diamond.

  I nod and look down to pick at a hangnail. “I get it.”

  I don’t mention how I never walk for fun, only when my coms remind me I’m falling behind on my weekly exercise quota or I’m too worked up to think straight. Or when I want to avoid the crowds in the lifts. I don’t have room in my life for things without a purpose.

  David finishes with a flourish and hands me a perfect paper crane with movable wings. “Be where you are, Miyole. If you’re stuck up here”—he taps his head—“you’ll only make yourself anxious over things you can’t change. You’ll miss everything out here.” He spreads his hands to indicate this room, the ship, the universe.

  And I know he’s right, in a way. I should appreciate what I have. Out of all the billions of people on Earth, only a million or so have the education to qualify for a Deep Sound research mission, and out of those, only a few thousand actually end up selected to serve. I could have been born in the Siberian wastes, far from the center of the world. I could have grown up poor and been forced to take a factory job before I finished school, or worse. I could have died in that hurricane. Instead, all my dreams have come true. My pollinators will bring life and food to a newly terraformed colony. Someday people will live there and ease the overcrowding on Earth.

  But all of that is so far away, so abstract. Cassia and Milah need me now. And there is something I can change. I have the chance to do for Milah what no one could ever do for me—give her back one of her parents. What good is all my luck and education if I can’t do that? What good is my being here if I can’t at least try to right this one wrong?

  After the workshop, I’m supposed to spend an hour walking in the gardens. Instead, I wander wellness, keeping an eye out for Cassia. She’s bound to be here somewhere. Her father has been getting skin grafts to cover his burns, and today bionics is replacing his injured eye. I know I probably should be avoiding her, but my stomach feels like it’s percolating. My whole body quivers with nerves, as if I’ve downed an entire pot of tea in one sitting. I’ll feel calmer when I see her.

  “Wellness tip,” Advani-ji chirps. “Have you had enough liquid today? Drinking water can reduce an elevated heart rate.”

  “Stuff it,” I mutter, and switch her to silent.

  I find Cassia in one of the visitation anterooms, watching her father sleep in a hospital bed on the other side of a glass partition. White gauze covers his left eye, and a tube snakes down his throat, parting his lips. His chest rises and falls regularly, but patches of sickly pale tissue show through the red, flaking skin along his shoulder and neck, where the medics haven’t finished applying their dermal grafts yet. C
assia sits in the dark, eyes wide and back straight, almost swallowed by the white expanse of couch filling most of the room.

  I sink down next to her. For a moment, neither of us says anything.

  Then she speaks, raw and throaty, without breaking her gaze from her father’s bed. “We shouldn’t be seen together.”

  “I know.” I stare straight ahead beside her. “I just . . .”

  I needed to see you, I want to say. I need you to remind me why I’m doing this. For a fleeting moment, an impulse to reach out and squeeze her hand flitters through me. But Cassia holds herself so stiff, as if moving might cause her pain.

  “How is he?” I nod at her father.

  “Better.” She finally turns to look at me and scratches unconsciously at her own bandages. “Your people fitted him with an eye.”

  “His body’s accepting it?”

  She nods and half laughs. “It’s even the same color as the one he lost.”

  “That’s . . . good.” I don’t know what else to say.

  “Right.” Bitterness seeps into her voice and she looks away again. “It’s great. Everything’s perfect now. He can go right back to bidding out on repair jobs, like nothing ever happened.”

  My anger flares up like a shield. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

  Cassia clenches her jaw. She glares at me, and I glare right back.

  Cassia looks away first. “I’m sorry.” She lowers her voice, but her words tremble with the effort. “It’s not that I’m not grateful. It’s just . . . I know my father would give up that new matching eye if it would bring Nethanel back.”

  “I know.” Before I realize what I’m doing, I lay my hand over hers. Her fingers rest cold and still beneath mine. Whatever fire was in her moments ago has burned out, making her touchable.

  She looks down at our hands, and suddenly my body flashes hot with embarrassment. What am I doing? I don’t want another incident like the one my final year at Revati, when we played the kissing-bottle game and my spin landed on Kiran. She had long brown arms, skin almost as dark as mine, and a funny dent in one of her knees that sealed my crush, for some reason. She had been smiling at me across the circle—shy, from underneath her long dark lashes, and I had been wondering if there was an algorithm that would help you control where the bottle stopped. When we kissed, it was chaste and slow, and an electric ripple shot through my nervous system. If I’d had feathers, that kiss would have ruffled them. But when Kiran pulled back, she scrunched up her face and made a big show of wiping off her lips, then trying to wipe her hands on all the other guys and girls around the circle. Since then, I’ve tried to be more cautious, more private. Not make assumptions.

  “I’m sorry.” I start to draw back, but Cassia’s fingers twitch as if she’s suddenly come awake, and she folds them up in mine.

  “Don’t.” Her voice is dry. “Don’t go yet. Stay with me.”

  Cardiac output equals heart rate times stroke volume.

  I swallow so my throat won’t stick together. “Okay.”

  The backs of her fingers brush my palm. I can’t feel anything along the tracks of my scars, where the nerve endings are damaged, but everywhere else, her skin is warm on mine. Her hand freezes. I tense. She’s felt the lines of waxy scar tissue, and now I know what comes next. Revulsion, or worse, a sick curiosity.

  She turns my hand over and sucks in a breath. “What happened?”

  I wince. But seconds pass, and she doesn’t pull away.

  “It was a long time ago,” I say. “I didn’t get to a medic in time to stop the scarring.”

  She nods, and I remember that access to medics is far less common out here than in the midst of modern Mumbai. Maybe I’m less of a freak to Cassia than I would be to any of my crewmates aboard the Ranganathan.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “It doesn’t hurt anymore.”

  She doesn’t say anything else, but she doesn’t let go of my hand, either. She holds on to it, tight but not too tight, as she stares at the long glass window between her father and us. My skin warms against hers. The warmth travels up my arm, quieting the nervous hum inside me. She doesn’t care about my scars. She doesn’t need me to prove I belong. She only needs me. I’ve been looking all my life for a way to make the world a little bit right, and now that I have my chance, I’m not letting go.

  Chapter 7

  I lie in my bunk, fully clothed, the privacy shroud pulled closed to shutter the light from my handbook. In an hour and a half, I’m supposed to meet Cassia outside the hangar. Will I be able to fly the shuttle out of dock like I promised? Ava always said flying isn’t something you forget, but it’s been months since the last time we practiced together.

  I roll over and plant my face in the pillow. There are way too many variables, so many ways for everything to go wrong. What if someone finds our supplies hidden aboard the shuttle before we get there? What if someone saw us holding hands? What if someone overheard Cassia and me whispering in the burned-out wreck from the very beginning, and Commander Dhar is only waiting to catch us in the act? Cassia hasn’t exactly been quiet about wanting to go after her brother. Maybe they’re watching her. I stifle a groan. I should have stayed up in the common room this evening. I should have talked to my bunkmates like everything was normal and I wasn’t about to commit the kind of theft that could end with me brought before the DSRI’s correctional board and banned from any future Deep Sound expeditions. Or worse, sent to a detention camp.

  Every cold, logical part of me knows this is the stupidest thing I could ever do. I know what Soraya would say. Her voice circles in my head, disappointed, concerned. You worked so hard for this. You’re throwing away your future.

  She was so proud when I told her the DSRI had made an age exemption for me, the first ever. I even gave her fake forms to sign. Why shouldn’t she believe it? I had been taking advanced classes at Revati since I was eight. I was accepted to the university when I was fifteen. Why shouldn’t the DSRI let me in early, too?

  Maybe they wouldn’t have cared. Maybe they really would have made the first age exemption ever. But I couldn’t risk it. I couldn’t bring myself to their attention that way. Because if they said no, I was stuck on Earth until the next DSRI mission, taking courses just to have something to do, bumping into Vishva on the trains, always being the youngest, the darkest, the exotic outlier in my class. I would have been swimming in circles.

  Ava was the one who saved me from that.

  Ava was the one who got me here.

  A few weeks after I dropped in on Rushil to plead my case for an identity hack, he and Ava invited me down to their place for dinner. I kept waiting for him to say something all through the meal, and then afterward as we sat around the orange glow of a citronella lamp in the back garden. But then it was long after dark and Rushil begged off to go sleep.

  “I guess I should head back,” I said.

  “Stay a little.” Something about the way Ava said it brought a charge into the air. She had a funny look on her face, as if she were trying to hide a frown.

  I lowered myself back into my chair. The lamp cast sharp shadows on Ava’s features.

  “Rushil told me,” she said.

  “Ava—”

  “Why would you do that, Miyole?” She leaned forward and looked down at her feet. “Don’t you get what you’re asking?”

  “I do get it,” I said quietly.

  “But you did it anyway.” She looks up. “What’s your rush, Mi? It’s not like this is the last DSRI mission ever. There’s going to be another in, what, three years?”

  “Yeah, but I’ll be twenty by then,” I said.

  Ava raised an eyebrow.

  I knew how silly it sounded, but it wasn’t only another two years studying, it was another two years waiting to do something useful, waiting for my life to begin.

  “But if I can go now,” I pressed on, frustrated, “I would turn eighteen only a few months into the voyage. Sev
enteen and a half? Eighteen? Does it really make that much of a difference?”

  “Maybe not.” Ava shrugged. She looked away at her ship, the Perpétue, named after my mother. We both knew what she had been doing at my age. Running for her life. Flying a ship all on her own. Taking care of me.

  “I’m ready,” I said. “All my friends at Revati are gone and the people I know at university are setting up their practicals and internships. What am I supposed to do, hang around for another couple of years and take more organic chemistry classes?”

  “You like organic chemistry,” Ava reminded me.

  “That’s not the point,” I said.

  Ava sighed. “You really want this, don’t you?”

  “I haven’t ever wanted anything else.” We both knew it was true. Ava was there the first time I announced at dinner that I wanted to be a Deep Sound engineer. She read me science articles at bedtime when I was younger. She saw me studying late all those nights in my room.

  Ava stood. “Come on.”

  My nerves picked up, half excited, half frightened. “Where are we going?”

  Ava didn’t answer at first. She picked up the lamp. “You have money?”

  “Two thousand rupaye,” I answered.

  She nodded. “If I do this for you, you have to promise me something.”

  I tried to keep my voice from squeaking. Was she saying what I thought she was saying? “Anything.”