I sat up straight, my blood rushing. “Really? What does it say?”
Adrienne’s brow furrowed. White light from her holoscreen washed over her features. “It’s super vague. I don’t—I don’t know why she would send this to you. It doesn’t even make sense, really.”
“What does it say?”
Adrienne looked at me through the glare of her holoscreen. There was something in her expression I couldn’t place. A kind of sadness.
“Adrienne,” I said. “Please.”
She kept looking at me. Her eyes never left mine. “I could be wrong,” she said, “but if I’ve organized the numbers correctly, then it should say, it should—”
She hesitated and I shrieked in frustration. “Just tell me!”
Her eyes burned into me. The holoscreen light turned them golden.
“ ‘Something was here first.’ ”
• • •
My body was humming with adrenaline. All these years, and I had finally uncovered the secret my mother had been trying to tell me—the secret I’d given up on as I grew up, as I started to turn cynical.
Except I didn’t know what the secret meant.
Night had fallen, and the house was dark and silent. Red planetlight flooded through my suite, turning everything sordid and eerie. I tumbled Harriet’s message around in my head, trying to make sense of it. Adrienne didn’t want to talk about it—“This sounds like a company secret,” she’d said, and despite what had happened with Isabel, she still trusted the company to do what was best. And I knew what I thought it said, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. For one, how would she even know? Unless she’d seen something when she was stationed here—
I paced around my room, fingering the edge of my blouse, trying to fit together all the pieces. Humanity had never encountered other life-forms—at least not intelligent ones, and I doubted Harriet would encode a message about bacteria wriggling in the unlivable soil of a pre-terraformed Ekkeko. My whole life, I’d grown up with the idea that aliens were a silly myth, a child’s story. If they existed, people said, they existed so far away from us that we’d never find them. Adrienne said the same thing, after the silence that followed her decoding the message. It had to be something else. A code within a code. A company cipher we had no right to crack.
And part of me believed her. Because it would have been the scientific discovery of the millennium if the Coromina Group’s scanners had uncovered alien life on the Four Sisters. The credibility alone would have soared the company to new heights of notoriety, and I was certain Dad would have found a way to transform the discovery into profit.
I stopped pacing. I was next to my window, the red light spilling across my feet. If there had been something living there, Dad would have lost the Four Sisters. There would have been no place to set up his corpocracy. He would have had to start over from scratch.
I felt sick to my stomach. I gripped the window frame and peered out into the reddish night and thought about what this world had looked like before terraforming. I’d seen pictures as a child, learning about the process in tutoring. The air had been toxic, the soil rocky and barren. It seemed impossible for anything to live here. But maybe something had. Maybe Dad had wiped them all out and lied about the terraforming.
And maybe he’d gathered up the life-forms first; maybe he had done something with them. Experiments. Like the experiment on Isabel—
I pressed myself against the wall and took a deep, shuddery breath. If these were the questions I was supposed to be asking, no wonder I hadn’t found any answers through my usual channels. A secret like forced terraforming and a genocide was something you couldn’t risk letting out. It was a secret you would kill for.
I wasn’t afraid, though. Not for myself. If this was Dad’s big secret, he was going to have to tell me eventually. He would hold onto it as long as he could, because he liked his power, but I was going to be his heir.
I wanted my answers. And I knew the only way to get them was to go to Dad directly.
That, more than anything else, was what frightened me. Dad frightened me. But then I thought about Harriet, my mother, encoding this horrible secret in a holo she recorded for her infant daughter. She had to have known Dad would watch it. But she did it anyway.
My mother’s bravery, her refusal to fear my father, was the whole reason I existed. She had been the only one willing to speak to him in that bar. And I had more at stake than she did. My questions were more important. Isabel had been hurt. She’d probably never had Lasely fever.
I wanted to know everything.
So, I went upstairs and followed the hallway to the western wing. Went to his office first, even though it was so late. But no one answered when I knocked.
I pushed the door open anyway.
The lights were out. With the windows drawn, it was too dark to see anything, but I peered in anyway, making out the unfamiliar shapes in the shadows. My fear turned to an anger that simmered deep down in my chest. Dad’s lies and obfuscation had forced me to hurt Isabel. I wondered how many others I’d hurt inadvertently. I didn’t want to think about it.
I stalked out of Dad’s office, slamming the door shut. And then I did something I’d never done before.
I went to his bedroom suite.
No one had ever forbidden me from going to Dad’s suite. But the threat was always there, embedded in the walls of Star’s End: you are allowed to visit his office, but you may not go any farther.
But I was an adult, and I would not let my father tell me what to do. Not anymore. From now on, I was going to be more like my mother.
My heart pounded as I marched down the hall, thumping in time with the rhythm of my footsteps. Twice I considered turning around and going back to the eastern wing and forgetting all of this had happened. But I didn’t. I kept moving toward the double doors at the end of the hall. I’d never been to Dad’s bedroom suite before, but I still knew where it was. It existed in the house like a heart. You always knew it was there.
I stood an arm’s reach from the doors.
The doors were mahogany, stained the color of Coromina I’s storm, inlaid with a greenstone carving of a planet flowering with life. My anger flared at the sight of it. Liar.
I curled my hand into a fist and set it against the center of that planet. The stone was cool to the touch.
I took a deep breath.
And then I pounded on the door.
It felt like the ultimate transgression, like I was breaking every rule I’d ever learned since I was a little girl. But once I realized what I had done, I didn’t stop. I only pounded harder, so hard that the doors rattled on their hinges. “Open up!” I shouted. “I know you’re in there! Get the hell up!”
I kept beating against the door, taking out all my rage and frustration, all my fear about the war and about Isabel and about who I was becoming. My bones rattled inside my hand. My knuckles began to hurt. I didn’t stop.
The door opened.
I tumbled forward, I’d been beating against the door so hard. But I caught myself and looked up, and I found Dad gazing back at me with a cold expression.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he said.
That sharp edge in his voice might have been enough to stop me before, but it wasn’t enough to stop me today. I shoved past him and stepped into his suite without permission. A floating lamp was switched on, hovering next to a potted spider plant. The lamp cast just enough light to see how cavernous Dad’s sitting room was. Tall, arching ceilings, a long stretch of hardwood floors covered in rugs from the Kiran system.
“I learned something interesting tonight,” I said, “about Ekkeko’s history.” I didn’t look at him but in the direction of the door that led into his bedroom proper. It hung slightly ajar, although I couldn’t see into it. And I was glad. That was too much of a deep look into my father’s life. I didn’t want it.
The double doors clicked shut.
I jumped in surprise. He was lettin
g me stay—or he was locking me in there with him.
I turned around. Dad stood with his arms crossed. I couldn’t see his expression in the dim light.
“Did you, now?” he said. “And you thought it was so important that you had to wake me up?”
I hesitated. I’d been propelled here by my rage, but now I didn’t know if I still had the strength to face him. He wore his nightclothes and slippers, but even without his impressive tailored suits, his presence was enough to generate fear.
“It was a shock,” I finally said. “And I didn’t think you should keep this particular information from me, given that I’m set to inherit the company.”
He didn’t say anything, just watched me through the darkness. I pressed on.
“Something lived here,” I said. “Before you terraformed. This world wasn’t abandoned.”
Dad’s expression gave nothing away, but that didn’t mean anything. He was practiced in this sort of thing. “That’s not Ninety information,” he said. Then, speaking to the room: “Lights up! No use standing around in the dark.”
The floating light blinked off and the overhead lights brightened in a careful, calculated way. The light was warm and diffuse like sunlight, a much softer, much more expensive version of the golden lights we had the other rooms of the house.
It made Dad look like a king.
“I don’t give a damn if it’s Ninety information or not. I figured it out. And I think it has to do with Isabel’s surgery.” I took a deep breath, drawing up my courage. “I know she didn’t have fucking Lasely fever. You made her lie to me and Daphne and Adrienne. I want answers.”
Dad lifted his chin and gazed at me from under heavy lids.
“But you’re a Ninety,” he said.
“Fuck being a Ninety!” I shouted. “Fuck your whole stupid system. If you don’t tell me what the hell is going on, I’m taking this information public.”
Dad laughed. I glared at him.
“I’m taking it to the Connectivity Underground,” I hissed. “I know my way in. And they’ll—”
“You knew your way in,” Dad said. “When you were a girl. They won’t listen to you now that you work for the company and you don’t have your trashy village friends to vouch for you.”
Something snapped inside my chest. I hadn’t let myself think about Laila and Paco in years. Their memories were too painful. “Don’t you dare talk about them like that.”
Dad laughed again.
My anger was burning up inside me. I kept curling and uncurling my hands into fists. Dad looked at me, looked at my hands. And then he smiled, small and knowing.
“Calm down,” he said. “Tell me, how’d you find all this out. Do you even have proof?”
I hesitated. As soon as I did it, I knew I’d made a mistake.
“I can find it,” I said. “I have my own channels in the company. I know how to get information.”
Dad smiled at that. He ambled toward me. “I know you do. You think I hadn’t noticed you trying to fix all the system’s shithole villages?”
The air was sucked out of me.
“I know about you looking into Isabel’s surgery, too, even after you saw her on Catequil. I guess that wasn’t enough for you.” Dad tapped the side of his temple, as if his ranking was a measure of his intelligence. “It always impressed me. I’ll say that much. You certainly are the most tenacious of my daughters. I do think you’re the one best suited to taking my position.”
“No,” I said. “Don’t you dare. You are not going to pit us against each other.”
Dad nodded. He turned away from me and strolled across the room, his hands tucked into the pockets of his nightclothes. I didn’t move, just listened to my heart beating too fast, felt my chest growing tighter and tighter and tighter.
Dad sat down on his sofa. He crossed one leg across his knee, stretched out his arms along the back cushions.
“See?” he said. “You really are the best suited. I’m sure Adrienne would have fallen for that. She’s so competitive.”
I glared at him.
Dad settled back further into the cushions. He tapped out a rhythm with his fingers.
“So, you caught me,” he said. “You went snooping and caught me.”
I wanted to tear around his suite, ripping the light paintings from the wall and hurling them against the ground so that their energy flowed across the wooden panels. I wanted to break the glass in his windows. I wanted to smash down the door to his bedroom.
I wanted destruction.
“I find it impressive,” he went on. “I don’t like being defied, but your determination at undermining me is almost admirable.”
I didn’t say anything to that. This conversation was a web drawing tight around me. I knew I wasn’t leaving there with any answers.
“Look at me, Esme.”
I did, but only out of the periphery of my vision. I couldn’t help myself.
“Look at me.”
The air was as thick as smoke. I couldn’t breathe. He’d sit there in that sofa forever. I’d never known anything as certain as I knew that, in that moment.
So, I looked at him.
His mouth curved up into a smile crueler than anything I could muster.
“You’re my daughter, and I’ve every intention of you inheriting the company after I die.”
If you’ll ever die, I thought.
“Not just because you’re the oldest. You really are the best option out of your sisters. Daphne’s a lost cause. Isabel doesn’t give a shit about her studies, and she’s useful to me in—other ways besides.”
“How?” I felt cold. I felt sick. My suspicions had been right. “How is she useful to you?”
He just grinned at that and wagged his finger at me, like I was a little girl being told I couldn’t have a puppy. “Adrienne’s too pretentious, too focused on appearances. You, my dear, are my best choice. I always thought a son would be easier to groom to take my place, but you came along quite nicely.” Another smile. It made my skin crawl. “These secret projects show a good corporacratic attitude, they really do. That’s why I admire them so much.”
“What if I just leave?” I said. “It’s wartime; once I jump out of the system, they’ll never let me back in—”
“You’re not going to do that.” Dad rolled his eyes like he was bored.
“You don’t think so?” I glared at him. “You think I want to be the CEO of a company that killed an entire species just so they could have a planet to themselves?”
“Oh, is that what you think? That they’re dead?”
He was toying with me, trying to trick me somehow. I fumbled for a response.
“I’ll defect to OCI—”
“Oh, stop it.” Dad sighed. “This posturing is exhausting. How about I raise your clearance level? All the way to Ninety-Nine. Then you can find out my deep, dark secret.”
“What?” I gaped at him. This was certainly a trick. What else could it be?
“What can I say? Your little investigation has impressed me. Besides, I’ve been meaning to upgrade you. You need to know how to run a war.”
Silence. Dad was grinning. I wanted to storm out of the room like I was still a teenager, capable of throwing tantrums, but I didn’t. I just took steps backward until I bumped up against the closed doors. The soft light of the room seemed to choke me. Dad kept grinning. My anger was seeping out of me a little at a time. And why wouldn’t it? My anger was impotent. It had always been impotent.
“How about I change your clearance level now?” Dad turned his gaze upward. “Bring up CG Connectivity.”
A panel slid out of the end table beside the sofa. Dad tapped it and a holo appeared, filling up the entire room. All I could see was the sweep of a mountain vista, but Dad said, “Full view,” and the vista melted away, replaced by a floating cluster of unfamiliar icons. Through the murky haze of the holo, Dad tapped an icon shaped like a DNA strand, and the screen blossomed into something like a wild, windswept tree.
It looked like art.
“All the clearance levels in the company,” Dad said. “Lovely, isn’t it?”
I was swept up in a riptide. I was being dragged out to sea. I came up there thinking I’d rage and scream into the wind, but instead, Dad was giving me the answers I’d always wanted.
Shame was just like heat. I couldn’t escape it. So, instead I said, “I didn’t think getting a Ninety-Nine clearance was so easy.”
“It is when you’re my daughter.” Dad tapped out a pattern on the holo that sent it raveling and unraveling through those branches of security levels. I couldn’t make any sense of it.
“Esme Coromina,” Dad said.
The holo stopped. My full-body image appeared, dressed in a gray suit, my hair pinned back away from my face. I looked harsh and unfamiliar.
“All your information is contained in that image,” Dad said. “Just like how your own body contains all of your information. Code and DNA. Clever, isn’t it? I still think about the woman who designed all this, back when we first started the company. Brilliant woman, simply brilliant. Refused to take rejuvenation treatments.” Dad looked at me through the image of myself. “Clearance level change requested.”
It was as if I were watching my own surgery. My image on the holo flowered open, and in the stream of visual information was a number. Ninety.
“Don’t,” I whispered, but I knew I didn’t really mean it, I knew that I wanted this. The thought turned my blood cold.
Dad touched the number twice. It glowed golden.
“Ninety-Nine,” Dad said.
The number changed. I expected to feel different, to feel my skin tingling over my bones like when you passed through a scanner, but I didn’t.
“Security lock, shut down.”
A pause, the images pulsing. And then the holo disappeared.
I closed my eyes and dropped my head back against the wall. I thought of my mother’s message. Something was here first.
“Now you can know all the secrets,” Dad said.