Star's End

  I opened my eyes. He was staring at me, his arms still stretched out across the sofa.

  “I hate you,” I said.

  “You don’t hate me enough,” he said. “Tomorrow, I’ll take you to the Hawley Lab. It’s brand-new.” He lifted his chin. “Inner circle only. You want to know what happened to the creatures who lived on this planet first? You want to know what Isabel’s surgery was really for? You’ll find out tomorrow.”

  My whole body trembled.

  “Get some sleep.” Dad turned away from me, moving toward his bedroom. Over the corner of his shoulder he said, “Tomorrow’s probably going to be difficult for you.”

  • • •

  I woke up the next morning sprawled across the sofa in my suite. For a few seconds, before I fully woke up and remembered, everything was peaceful. Sunlight and the scent of seaweed poured in through my open windows. I rolled onto my back and blinked up at the ceiling, where dots of light chased each other across the room. I dug the heel of my palm into my eye socket. Light burst against darkness. Last night almost felt like a dream. Had I really confronted my father? Had I really stormed into his personal suite? It didn’t seem real.

  The Connectivity chimed.

  “Ms. Coromina! There’s a car waiting for you downstairs.”

  And with that, everything came back. Harriet’s hidden message. Aliens. My being a Ninety-Nine.

  “Ms. Coromina? Are you awake?”

  “Thank you,” I choked out. “I’ll be down in a moment.” My voice wavered, but I doubted Grace heard it. The sunlight suddenly seemed too bright. Out of place. I marched across my room and yanked the curtains shut, hoping the darkness would calm me. It didn’t.

  I was going to the lab today. That was what Dad wanted, and so that was what was going to happen. What I wanted didn’t matter.

  But part of me was afraid that maybe this all was what I wanted. The idea frightened me. What if I wanted this to happen not just because I would learn the truth so I could protect Isabel and Daphne and even Adrienne, but so I would know?

  My stomach churned, and I dressed, pulling a pressed gray suit out of my closet. I brushed my hair back into a ponytail. I didn’t bother with makeup.

  Adrienne and Daphne were eating breakfast in the dining room with Grace when I went downstairs. I just stood in the doorway and told Alice to grab me an energy pack to eat on the way. I couldn’t stand the thought of actual food.

  “Where are you going?” Daphne said with mild interest. She didn’t take her eyes away from the glow of her lightbox.

  “To work,” I said, more curtly than I intended. Adrienne snickered and Daphne glared at her.

  Alicia pushed through the kitchen doors with my energy pack. “If you see Isabel,” she said, “tell her I’m worried about her.”

  The sound of Isabel’s name sent a sharp bolt of panic through my system. “Why?” I said. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” Alicia said. “Just the same old thing. She keeps dragging herself around the estate.”

  Adrienne looked up at that and frowned. I took the energy pack from Alicia, thanked her, and left the dining room before I could have any more of a conversation with my sisters or the staff. The mention of Isabel stirred up my guilt and confusion even further, and I was afraid if I spoke, I would say something to reveal the kind of damage Dad had done to our family. To Isabel most of all.

  The driver waiting in the car wasn’t John or any of the other usual drivers. He leaned up against the side of the car, his eyes shrouded in a cap. I could hardly see his face and I wondered if that was on purpose.

  “Ms. Coromina,” he said, and he looked at me for a second longer than usual. My skin tingled. He was scanning me. Making sure of my identity.

  “Good morning,” I said, and climbed into the car so I wouldn’t have to interact with him further. He waited a beat and then climbed in too and started the engine. I peeled open my energy pack and the car shot out of the drive and onto the highway.

  We sped away from the village, toward the east, in the opposite direction of the office. I sucked on my energy pack and stared down at my lap so I wouldn’t get even more nauseated than I already was, from the blur of trees on the side of the road. The driver didn’t say anything to me. I didn’t say anything to him.

  We sped through the countryside.

  The trip was longer than I expected, far into the lush tropical forests that grew around the shore. I asked the car for the time and discovered we’d been driving for nearly an hour. Dread coiled in my stomach. I had no idea where we were going.

  Twenty minutes later, the car slowed down enough that I could see the forest again, towering maneles heavy with flowers. The road twisted through the woods. I didn’t recognize any of this. The woods here were wilder, less cultivated than the woods outside of Undirra City, where the Veiled Garden was tucked away behind its facade.

  I pressed my face against the glass like I was a little kid flying on a shuttle for the first time, looking out at the stars and the streaks of color on the planets below. Just swap flowers for stars, narrow flat tree leaves for planets. It felt just as foreign to me.

  But not nearly as magical.

  And then the trees fell away and the car pulled into civilization.

  That was the wrong word. Deep down, I knew that. But it was still my first thought upon seeing all those gleaming glass-and-metal buildings reflecting the green of the surrounding forest. We drove through an energy barrier, the faint electronic tingle tickling at my skin. The space behind my eyes hummed. I wondered what would have happened if the scanner had read the wrong DNA. I could ask; Dad had to tell me now that I was a Ninety-Nine.

  Not that I was sure I wanted the answers. Not anymore.

  The driver pulled the car up to the overhang. The tropical forest crushed in on the building, vines and flowers already growing along the glass. The builders must have activated the terraforming to get all this ready. Even the buildings had that look of being terraformed, the glass melted down from sand and sculpted into place. I could just picture Dad and the rest of his team standing behind a reinforced barrier, watching this little world come into existence.

  I stepped out of the car.

  The air was soupy and still. I didn’t bother saying anything to the driver, no thank-you like I usually did. I doubted he’d care, doubted he’d even respond. He would have been trained not to.

  Heat clung to my skin. All around me was the earthy rainy scent of the forest. I went inside, hoping the cold jolt of the climate control would rattle the anxiety out of me. It didn’t.

  There was a receptionist, an Alvatech soldier with her hair clipped short. My heart stuttered: at first; she looked like my mother. But it was the wrong military, and when she lifted her face, her eyes had an odd reflective sheen that meant she’d been bioengineered for scanning vision. She looked younger than my mother, less hardened by the universe.

  She scanned me, that same faint prickle as the energy barrier. “Esme Coromina,” she said. “Level Ninety-Nine. You’re to go up to the twenty-seventh floor. Ms. DeCrie will be waiting for you.”

  She turned back to her holo, that swirl of swimming fishes.

  Ms. DeCrie. Flor. I took a deep breath, bracing myself.

  The elevator was narrow and oddly shaped, nestled into a groove in the wall. Definitely a terraformed building. The little glass pod shot up to the twenty-seventh floor, showing me the progress on a holo installed in the floor. When the doors slid open, they revealed a long, tiled hallway lined with pale white lights. Flor stood waiting for me, her hands clasped behind her back. She smiled like she didn’t know this whole trip was just my father’s way of torturing me.

  “Esme,” she said. “It’s so good to see you again.”

  I thought about the wariness behind Isabel’s eyes anytime she passed me in the hallway. The sorrow. This woman had helped put it there.

  But I only smiled at her and said, “Yes. You too.”

  “Philip said he
recently amped up your security level. I suppose congratulations are in order.”

  “Yes, thank you.” I tried to force an enthusiasm I didn’t feel. It worked better than I expected.

  Flor turned and gestured with one hand down the hall. “I hear you’re interested in the Radiance Project. I must say it’s exciting to get to talk with you about it, especially when I couldn’t say anything back on Catequil.”

  My stomach twisted around. “Not Project X?” I was trying to be polite. Professional. Maybe this would be easier if I heard the standard pitch, and not the cold harsh truth.

  I stared down the pinpoint of the hall. It seemed to stretch on for longer than it should.

  Flor laughed. “No, that’s the name the gossip hounds give a top secret project when they don’t know the real thing. There have been about twenty Project Xs since the Four Sisters were founded.” She winked at me. “You’ll get to hear about them all in good time, I’m sure.”

  I wondered how many of the other Project Xs involved Dad kidnapping his own daughter.

  “Anyway,” Flor went on. “I thought we’d get straight to the heart of things.” She started walking down the hall and I followed her, drawn on a line that had been cast by my father. The lights flooded over us, as thick as water. I could drown in those lights.

  “The whole point of the Radiance Project was to perfect our biogenetic soldier program,” Flor said cheerfully. “But it started with an unusual discovery Philip made several years ago.”

  “The aliens?”

  I’d been trying to shock Flor into dropping her good corporate facade, but it didn’t work. She just glanced at me and laughed. “Philip said you uncovered our big secret.” She said big secret like it was a joke. “Quite an accomplishment.”

  I didn’t say anything. We kept walking past closed doors, their locks all blinking red. Activated.

  “But no, I wasn’t referring to the discovery of the Radiance themselves—that happened before my time, during terraforming.”

  “What?” I stared at her. “He terraformed even though the planet was populated. That—that was illegal. Wasn’t it?”

  Flor laughed. “If your father cared about legality two hundred years ago, none of us would be here.”

  I said nothing.

  “Besides, the actual discovery of the aliens wasn’t the key. I was referring to the connection between the indigenous species and the flu epidemic,” Flor said. “Philip discovered it during the outbreak. Well, Philip and a few members of R&D.”

  The flu epidemic. My skin felt cold and my stomach felt hollow. It was a piece of the puzzle I hadn’t even considered.

  “He was trying to develop a vaccine, of course. But they realized the flu was—well, nonhuman, for lack of a better word.”

  “All viruses are nonhuman.”

  “Yes, of course.” Flor laughed. I wasn’t trying to be funny. “But we still share a common genetic structure. We’re all from the same place originally. That’s something that’s easy to forget during wartime.”

  That caught my attention, and I glanced over at her. But she was staring ahead, still chattering along.

  “So, this virus,” Flor said, “it didn’t have the structure we expected to see. It had something completely different, something—alien.”

  The way she paused made me think she’d practiced this speech in front of a mirror. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she had, knowing Flor.

  I wondered how many Ninety-Nines there were.

  “Philip was ecstatic, of course. The virus provided a safe way to study the Radiance. We’d been trying during the whole life of the company, but we couldn’t get at them. Now we could.” Flor’s voice flushed with pride.

  The whole life of the company. Dad had found existence of other life in this universe and then terraformed over them.

  “So, Dad killed the aliens off and they left a virus behind.” I thought about Dad’s taunt from last night, the insinuation that these creatures, these aliens—the Radiance—were still here. Maybe this was what he meant. Their virus was still here, picking us off.

  “Anyway,” Flor said. “When he realized what he had found, Philip divided up the team in two. Half were looking for the vaccine, the other half—well, they were looking for ways to apply this information.”

  We’d come to the end of the hallway. Flor swiped her hand over the sensor beside a door and the door popped open. She opened it, gestured for me to go through first.

  I stepped through the door. The air shimmered. Another energy barrier. I’d passed; my DNA was acceptable. We stood in a stairwell, empty and echoing.

  “We’re going down again,” Flor said. “Sorry about the convoluted path; it was part of the design of the building. Lots of ways of keeping secrets, you know. So, the second R&D team noticed some unusual transformative properties with the flu. It wasn’t a flu at all, of course, but that was an easy enough name for the newsfeeds. This was actually a kind of . . . terraforming bug, in a sense, writ small. It did to the human body what our terraforming programs do to planets.”

  That cold, sickly feeling returned. Every time I stepped down my stomach lurched. We twisted around a couple of turns of a spiral and came to another door, another sensor. Flor swept her hand over it and I stepped through another energy barrier.

  This hallway was indistinguishable from the last one. Flor strode along, talking to me over her shoulder.

  “The flu’s ‘terraforming’ mostly wreaked havoc on the human body,” Flor said. “That’s why it was so deadly. We’re still not sure why it jumped around the way it did, but we have our theories. Do you want to hear them?”

  “No, thank you.” I walked past door after closed door. We hadn’t passed another human being once.

  “You know you can, now that you’re a Ninety—”

  “I don’t want to hear the theories. The flu was the aliens’ way of terraforming the human body. Why? To make us suitable for the planet? That makes no sense. This was long after we’d changed the atmosphere.” But as soon as I spoke, I knew that wasn’t the answer.

  Flor stopped in front of a door. It looked like all the other doors. She let out a small cough. “You’re right,” he said. “We think it was chosen for its destructive power. We think they were trying to kill us off.”

  I stared at her. “You mean to say they were still around during the epidemic? The Radiance?”

  “That’s the theory.” Flor’s expression was easy, friendly, like this information didn’t bother her in the slightest. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe she’d known it for a long time. Maybe this indifference was what happened when you were a Ninety-Nine.

  “Well then, where are they?”

  “That, we don’t know.” Flor swiped her hand over another lock. “We think your sister might.” The door opened. I half-expected to see a stairwell, but instead I got another hallway, this one much narrower, much more dimly lit. It slanted slightly downward. No doors.

  “This lab was built to hold secrets,” Flor said, “We’ll be there soon.”

  I didn’t give a damn about the lab’s architectural structure. “My sister,” I said, trying to keep my voice measured. “You think my sister knows where the Radiance are?”

  We passed through the doorway. Another energy barrier. My skin was drying out; my hair was charging up with static electricity, strands of it floating away from my head.

  “We do. And if you’ll let me finish—” Flor tossed her hair over her shoulder. “We learned that the only humans who could survive the violent change brought about by the flu were fetuses, since they were already developing anyway—the bug just worked its way into their system and starting messing with things.”

  I was numb. The overhead lights flickered. A door waited at the end of the hallway and I knew that I wouldn’t like what I saw on the other side.

  “Only two infected babies were born,” Flor said. “Most of them died when their mothers did. The first belonged to a woman who was already nine months pregnant
, and the baby didn’t require time in an incubator, as Isabel did.”

  I felt breathless. There was another baby? Another child my father had tortured? “What happened to it? The other baby?”

  “Nothing. She was unaffected except for a case of synesthesia and an aptitude for reading people’s expressions. I’m sure she’ll go far. Your sister was the important case.”

  We’d come to the door at the end of the hallway. Flor turned to me. Her features were blurred out by the dim, shadowy lights. “What I’m trying to say is: your sister is the closest thing we have to an indigenous specimen. Her DNA is not human DNA. If the Radiance are here, hiding, she probably knows where they are.”

  I took deep, gulping breaths. The hallway seemed to spin around. I pressed one hand against the wall, trying to steady myself. Isabel was an alien? I didn’t know if I should believe Flor. Maybe this was all a joke. This was Dad fucking with me for demanding answers.

  “At the moment, we’re not terribly focused on the Radiance themselves. Let them hide—the real threat is OCI. And Isabel is the reason we’re going to win this war. That’s what the Radiance Project is all about. Defeating OCI and unveiling the best bioengineered soldiers in the galaxy. And your sister helped.”

  The surgery on Catequil. Isabel on the holo, telling me she was fine. It had never been about Lasely fever, just like we’d suspected. It was something darker. Something crueler.

  And I hadn’t stopped it.

  “You used her DNA without her permission,” I said.

  Flor turned away from me and swiped her hand over the lock. The door didn’t open; instead, a holo sprang up, asking her to solve a word puzzle. She did without looking at it. Then the door slid open.

  “It was just her DNA,” Flor said.

  The other side of the door was not a hallway but a room: a wide room lined with vats. It looked the same as any other bioengineering room on the Four Sisters. I’d been in dozens of them since Dad moved me from PM to Genetics. But I didn’t want to go into this room. It was a moment of decision. I could step through the doorway and pass under the sensor crackling on the air, or I could turn around and follow our path back to the lobby. I could wash my hands of all of this.