Of course I did. I'd been subjected to the brain-numbing retrospective vids in rehab. She'd been an Olympic . . . swimmer.
"It's a pool," I said faintly. "But how . . ."
"She had a special request. I arranged it. Don't worry, the water is exactly like what is found on Earth. I can make it fresh or salt. She preferred fresh water for the pool."
I went to the edge, crouched down, and dipped my fingers in the water. It was warm as a bath.
"Do you swim, Beatriz?" he asked.
"Yes," she said, and sounded brighter now. She knelt next to me and touched the water. "I used to swim in the ocean. We would pack up the whole family, bring lunch, and I'd bodysurf with my brothers while my mother and grandmother slept in the sun. It's been years since I've been. This is so beautiful!"
Nadim said, "It can be much more so. Beatriz, is it all right if I show you the stars?"
She took in a deep breath. "Not yet. I just need a little time." She let out a shaky laugh. "So stupid! I studied for this. And yet when I look out there, I feel so . . . so lost."
"You aren't," Nadim said. "I can navigate a very long way. Even if I can't see the stars, I can hear them. Does that make you feel better?"
"I . . . suppose," she said. "I'll try tomorrow. Okay?"
"Yes, Beatriz. Do you mind if I show them to Zara?"
"Go ahead," she said. "I'll . . . be in the hall."
She retreated, and I stood. "You already showed me the stars," I told Nadim.
"Not like this." He sounded smug and a little delighted. "Look up."
I did.
The entire vast roof seemed to vanish. It was just me, the glimmer of the water, and . . . depthless black shot with stars. I should have felt dizzy, I suppose; I should have felt overwhelmed and terrified.
It was the most magical thing I'd ever seen. I sat down, then sank flat on my back to stare. The joy that moved through me felt like the purest thing I'd ever known.
"That's my home," Nadim whispered, and I felt how he felt. What had he said about me? Warmth and the taste of stars? Like that. I could almost hear those stars now, a high singing that pulled at me, pulled. . . .
Nadim's voice came again, sharper. "Zara?"
"Yes?" I felt dreamy. Floating. Everything was warm and wonderful and perfect. The stars were closer. Louder. Echoing in my head and my blood.
"Stop!"
That snapped me back to reality, in a hurry. I sat up, and now I did feel dizzy, and small, and incredibly insignificant. Cold. I felt cold.
"Stop what?" I demanded. I had an edge in my voice too. Something that wasn't quite a word whispered through the air between us. "I don't understand!"
"That was . . ." He didn't seem to quite know how to say it. "You were . . . you saw . . ."
"It's okay when you pick at our feelings, but not when I do it to you?"
"Yes." Nadim still sounded very odd. "I realize that's wrong, but--no one has ever done that before. Reached so deep. I'm not sure--"
"You're not sure you like it," I finished. "Fine. I'll stay out of your head, you stay the hell out of mine. Deal?"
"Yes." His voice had no emotion to it at all. Just sound.
The stars vanished overhead, and it was just a room, just water, just the taste of my own disappointment.
I stalked out into the corridor and found Beatriz. She looked at me funny. "What?" I snapped.
"You had a fight," she said, and smiled. "With an alien. That's quite a first day."
I shrugged like it didn't matter. The truth was, I was still reeling from that rejection; it shouldn't bother me since I'd been looking at people's backs for as long as I could remember.
"Yeah, well. Pissing people off is kind of my superpower." Nothing in my training had prepared me for wriggling into a Leviathan's thoughts. I didn't know how I felt about it-- Wrong? Ashamed? Afraid? Maybe all of that, and yet it had felt so right at the time. Beatriz didn't seem to get to Nadim like I did, so why . . . Maybe it's the surgery that fixed my headaches. That little piece of Leviathan DNA. I might be tuned to Leviathan frequency now or something. It would explain a lot. That was . . . terrifying and exciting in equal measure. Did it make me strong in this place, or weaker than ever?
Beatriz suddenly yawned, and I caught it too, and we both laughed. "Is it night?" she asked. "I don't even know what time it is. But it feels like I've been up too long."
That was an excellent question. How did time zones even work out here? That was something nobody had asked in our informative sessions, but to keep a schedule, we had to operate on a clock. I led the way back toward the data hub, which seemed like the central point of our useful space.
Nadim, I noticed, didn't light our way for us in helpful pulses on the walls. Maybe he was still offended. In training, the instructors had explained how the Leviathan kept track of us, and essentially, it was like we were always on his alien GPS. Ghosts inside his skin he could feel moving, breathing, existing.
The interface obligingly told us the time, and Bea was right. It was late. Somehow, time had slipped by, and I hadn't even noticed. After skimming some historical facts about how near-Earth space used to be set on Texas time, but now was international, I realized we were living on Icelandic time. Until we decided mutually what sleep/wake schedule to use.
It dawned on me with a rush that we could soon be so far away that time would have no real meaning, no sunrises and sunsets to regulate our days. Just schedules. We weren't going to be bound to even those ancient rules. We could make our own.
Maybe hours would have more than sixty minutes. A week could be ten days. It was like all the rules that bit at me like barbed wire, my whole life, might soon drop away, and I wanted to stomp my feet and shout in exultation.
No limits.
"That's a happy look," Beatriz said. "Why?"
There was no point in trying to explain. She seemed like someone who had colored inside the lines in school while I was out back spraying my incomprehensible art all over the walls. Maybe that's why they paired us up, checks and balances. More to the point, I could at least answer her other question.
"That's because I can tell you, it's ten thirty at night in Rio right now. Twelve thirty in the morning, ship time."
"You should rest," Nadim said then. "Your alarms will sound in six hours."
Nadim wasn't kidding about the wake-up call. It started as a quiet, respectful chime. When I rolled over, groaned, and pulled a pillow over my head, it got louder. Louder. Became a gong, relentless and metallically pounding next to my head.
I yanked myself away from the wall and off the bed. They'd walked us through mock-ups of the crew quarters during our orientation week in New York, and I knew where to find the pull-out toilet, the slide-open shower.
Clean, uniformed, and still cranky at the early start, I headed straight for the canteen, where I found Beatriz finishing up her breakfast. She gave me a cheery smile.
"So what the hell did we have to get up for?" I meant the ask for her or Nadim, whoever wanted to answer. Beatriz's smile pulled a cute dimple in her cheek this time.
"You didn't check your H2?"
"I don't have one."
"It's in your quarters," Nadim said. "It contains your assignments for the day, and you must track and enter progress. Please get it."
I gave Beatriz a pleading look, and she shook her head, but she got up, left at a run, and came back with the device. She handed it to me, and I opened it with a tap. "Oh, seriously, come on."
Beatriz turned her device on, and we turned them side by side. We had exactly two things in common today: lunch and dinner. Apart from that, we'd be working on our own until nearly seven Iceland time. Twelve hours, minus two for meal times. From my uninformed, quick view of her schedule, it looked like Beatriz was going to be doing some programming work, database updates, and various math-y tasks. A few things in the lab.
I checked mine. "You're kidding me," I muttered.
"You will be assisting with assembly of upgrad
e equipment," Nadim said.
Beatriz finished her coffee and carried her plate and cup to the small disinfecting unit, then came back to pluck her H2 out of my hand. "See you at lunch, Zara."
I glared at the handheld left to me, put it down, and defiantly drank a cup of coffee before I got to work.
I ended up in a room I hadn't been in before, a space built out as some kind of storage and workroom; I wondered which of the former two Honors had been in here using the tools, which ranged from blunt sledgehammers to fine-pointed, delicate circuitry points. I knew my way around most of them--time in the Zone would do that--but I'd never seen so many together or in such careful order.
The handheld showed a bin to pull, and I walked down a long row of closed storage containers; the one they wanted me to access was enormous. It was also on wheels. When I touched it, it glided out and followed me like a pet back to the workbench, then obligingly opened to reveal . . . something. My first impression was that it was an engine of some kind, but it was massive. Not a design that looked totally human-inspired, either, though it had some familiar aspects. I looked through the notes. Lots of information about putting thing A into slot B, but nothing much about what it was supposed to actually do.
And that bothered me. A lot. The knowledge the Leviathan had shared with humanity was mostly biological or biotech in nature--including genetic cures, like the DNA patch that had ultimately fixed the headaches I'd endured through my childhood. I had a tiny little piece of Leviathan DNA in there, fixing what was broken. Everything they'd given us had an organic root to it, a grown kind of technology.
Was this what they were getting from us? Human labor and mechanical ingenuity? Somehow, the PR had all been about "cultural exchange" and such. Like the Leviathan delighted in learning things--which might actually be true. But this machine . . . this was something else entirely.
"Nadim," I said. "Can you hear me?"
"Yes," he said as if he was standing right next to me. "How can I help you?"
I jumped a little. That, I thought, was going to take some getting used to. "What is this thing?"
"An upgrade," he said. "For me."
"I mean, what does it do?"
"Its purpose is classified."
I dropped the handheld onto the workbench with a bang. "Not doing it."
"Zara, if you don't do your work--"
"What, you'll fire me? Bounce me back to Earth?" I didn't want that, I really didn't, but I wasn't about to let him know it. I was careful to keep my anger up front. "Look, I don't like secrets. I want to know what this is, or I don't touch it. Understood?"
Silence. A lot of it. I could feel something rippling through the air, but I couldn't tell what it was, and though I was tempted to put my hand on his wall and try to figure it out, that seemed . . . intrusive. So I crossed my arms and waited.
Finally, Nadim said, "You're being difficult."
"Is that a disqualification?"
"Not doing the work will disqualify you," he said. "Zara, please. I don't want you to be expelled from the program. Can't you--"
"Take somebody's word for it that what I'm doing is a good thing? No way in hell. That's why I hated Paradise--I mean, New Detroit. It was twenty-four-seven rules for our own good and nobody could tell me why. And this?" I gestured around the workroom. At him too. "This is all secrets too."
"Secrets are necessary sometimes," he said. "You must have a few."
"Yeah, well, I'm not asking you to work on mine, am I?"
More silence. I was aware that there were time limits, progress reports to be filed; I was aware that I was flunking out, again, on what might be the biggest test of my lifetime.
"Screw this, I'd rather--"
"All right," Nadim cut in. "I'll tell you what I can. Is that acceptable?"
"Depends on what you say."
"That is part of an alarm clock."
I couldn't help it. I laughed out loud, a burst of shock that turned into genuine amusement. "I'm sorry? An alarm clock?" Nadim, I realized, wasn't laughing. At all. I didn't get any sense of amusement from him, and his silence was telling. "Okay, apparently I'm wrong, it isn't funny. Explain?"
"I shouldn't," he said. "I could get in trouble."
"With who, exactly?" Because everything I'd ever seen about the Leviathan, on all the holo documentaries and in the orientation classes, had classed them as loners . . . born in space, separated almost immediately from their parents to travel the universe and grow as sentient beings on their own. They learned by doing and listening. They weren't social, exactly, and I didn't think they had a reporting structure--at least, none that anyone had ever talked about. But he'd referred to an elder. Maybe that was who he was worried about.
Nadim didn't shed any light on it. Instead, he brought up a vid that shimmered in the air a meter in front of me.
I didn't recognize the face of the young woman. She spoke in what sounded like Russian, but in the next second, it switched to English. Nadim automatically translating it, maybe.
The woman--the Honor--looked sick and scared half to death. "I don't know what happened," she said, and glanced over her shoulder. What was in view appeared to be the data console room, though there was something wrong with the color of Nadim's wall-skin; it seemed purplish, bruised, wrong. I thought the picture was out of focus. Then I realized what I was seeing was smoke, or at least some kind of visible fog obscuring it. The Honor tried to wave it away, coughed, and then bent off to the side to spit out a thin trail of blood. "We should have followed the course that was recommended, but he said the alternate route was fine when we proposed it. Now we can't wake him up, we can't--"
"Another one's coming!" someone shouted, this time in Mandarin, offscreen. I recognized two words of it from chatter in the Zone, and the translation provided the grammar. The Russian girl looked down at the data console and frantically tried to do something. It must not have worked, because she let out a helpless cry. A blur, a shudder, and she fell away.
Then the wall behind her shattered open, a sucking, gaping hole into space, and the smoke that had been hanging in the air vented out in a thick, twisting rope that snaked out and left nothing behind.
The air, I thought, and gripped the edges of the workbench tight enough I felt a sting. The air just got sucked out. And though I hadn't seen her disappear, she must have been pulled out with it. There was no movement, no sound. The hole slowly closed up. It took long, silent minutes.
The vid stopped. I felt hollow and sick.
Nadim finally said, "I fell asleep."
I spun around and faced the wall, as if he was standing there. As if he wasn't all around me. "What happened?"
"We were in the black," he said. "The black between stars. Off the course we should have followed, but I thought--I thought that the alternate route would be more interesting. I was very young, and it was too far between stars. I . . . I could not ration my energy so far. I fell asleep."
Trying to understand, I asked, "What's so bad about sleeping?"
"For you, it's a quiet period, but for us, it can be more. Deeper."
"Like hibernation?'
He considered the word before answering, "Like that, yes. That was the first time I fell into a very deep, unplanned sleep; it is a failing that is rare among my kind. I never realized it could be dangerous until then. But my Honors didn't know how to wake me, and . . . several meteorites pierced my skin. By the time I'd healed and woken, it was--it was too late. The system that provided them with air had been damaged and took too long to heal."
"When . . . when was this?"
"My third voyage," he said quietly. "I am very careful now to stay to the approved routes, where I know I will receive enough light. On the Tour, I don't stray too far into the black. But I am graduating soon, so I have asked for this device. You must complete it. Before I take the Journey, it will be installed, and when I fall asleep, it will shock me awake. An alarm, to protect my Honors."
A wave of grief swelled, crashing
down, closing on me from all sides--Nadim's guilt. It was easier to sense his emotions when I touched him, but this was powerful enough that even without contact, it felt like being coated in ashes, in a thick, choking pall of utter sadness. This story hadn't been circulated by the media; that was damn sure. The Honors program must have compensated the families for the loss and quietly swept the tragedy under the rug. Way before my time.
"I was so young," he said. "And I will never let it happen again. That's why this is important, Zara. That's why you must do the work. Please."
I could hardly breathe under that crushing burden. Nadim's guilt hadn't faded, though this must have happened decades ago.
I put a hand against the wall. Not a conscious decision. Comfort. One wasn't enough. I put both hands there, leaning toward him. His emotions came through even more clearly, and it was everything I could do not to weep for him. "It wasn't your fault. Everybody sleeps. Even Leviathan, right?"
"I should only go into a dark sleep when it is safe to do so. It was my responsibility. I can't fail again," he said.
I didn't even know why I did it. Maybe just because I needed to. But I bent forward and rested my cheek against the wall. I felt a pulse of something like surprise, then relief, then a rush of something very complicated bolt through me and through him too.
The choking grief slowly eased away, replaced by something like . . . wonder.
"It's . . . less. You made it less."
I didn't ask if he meant the grief or the guilt, mostly because I was basking in the unique pleasure of making things better with just a touch. With just caring. For a few seconds, we floated together, just streaming that inexplicable connection. Quietly I pushed off, out of--what was that? An embrace?--and picked up my H2.
Sometimes I wasn't sure what questions would bother him. "Is it some kind of genetic condition? I mean, with all your advances--"
"Yes, it is linked to a mutation. Because of it, when I am awake, I am much better at channeling energy in a crisis than most of my kind. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. You probably don't know why Beatriz is good at math and you prefer more practical concepts."
He had a point. "Well, she's studied more, and I do have a knack with gadgets."
"Among my kind, having this . . . mutation can be seen as something that could disqualify me from taking the Journey. But if I make this modification, it should convince the Elder that I can manage my condition appropriately." Nadim paused, like maybe this was a gray area.