“Okay,” he says. “Feel free, then.”
“Really? Thanks!” Annika reaches for one again.
“No problem,” he replies. “So long as you don’t mind your stomach exploding as soon as the first bite reaches it. You probably won’t feel it, though, since your tongue would have swelled to four hundred times its normal size, causing your head to explode first.”
Annika pulls back her hand and sighs. “You could have just said no.”
“Just wanted to give you the choice,” Ash says. He leads us past the table. “Okay, we’re at the lab now. What aren’t you supposed to do?”
“Touch anything,” we recite in unison.
“Exactly.”
I look around us for the lab, but the only door anywhere is a white one marked CLOSET. Ash takes a key from the chain and slips it in the keyhole. The door swings open to reveal a small laboratory. I spot all the high-tech equipment OnWorlders have brought back over the years, some attached to the walls, but most piled up on the floor. Kal would go crazy in here.
Why are all the cool places behind doors marked CLOSET?
“Come on in,” Ash says, blowing away the dust clinging to the door. I watch as the dust ball floats slowly to the floor. You almost never see dust in The Realms, since our skin rarely flakes. That only shows how long this room has sat unused.
“This is your lab?” I ask. “It doesn’t look like anyone has ever used it.”
“They haven’t,” he replies, moving some boxes out of the way so we can come in. “We’ve never had anyone to analyze until now.” He rubs his hands together and beams at Annika.
She frowns. “Promise no brain slicing.”
“You won’t feel a thing, scout’s honor.”
I don’t know what a scout is, but it seems to do the trick.
“Okay,” Annika says. “Let’s get this show on the road, then. We’ve got a planet to rebuild.”
Ash sets to work attaching different pieces of equipment to each other, pouring vials of liquid into various beakers, and generally making the small room feel even smaller. He sets his holoscreen up on the table beside him and says, “All right, take off your shoes and we’ll begin.”
Annika wrenches off her boots and stands awkwardly in the center of the room. She looks shorter and, for some reason, more vulnerable than I’ve seen her. Even when she was crying in the Afterlives.
Ash leans toward his screen. “Species: Human. Earth. Orion Arm, Milky Way, Virgo Supercluster. Gender: Female. Name: Annika.” He glances up at Annika, who says, “Klutzman.” He repeats it. “Annika Klutzman. Looks to be about twelve years of age.”
“Almost thirteen!” Annika interjects.
Ash gives her a cursory glance, then turns back to his screen. “Typical human,” he dictates. “Not extraordinary in any way.”
“Hey!” she says. “That’s not true! I’m double-jointed, see?” She clasps her hands behind her back, then brings her arms over her head without her hands pulling apart.
“Not all humans can do that?” Ash asks, interested.
She shakes her head proudly.
“And does that improve your life in any way? Give you an advantage over the rest of your species?”
“Not that I know of,” Annika admits, letting her hands drift apart.
“Moving on,” Ash says, holding out an empty jar. “Spit in here, please.”
She moves her tongue around her teeth, then spits a glob of saliva into the cup. He pours it into the top of a square metallic box that starts humming and beeping.
“Hand,” he says. She holds out her hand. He takes what looks like a tiny spoon and gently scrapes it over her palm.
She giggles. “That tickles.”
He takes the spoon and pours whatever invisible cells he got into the machine on top of the saliva.
“Now, while that’s analyzing, let me just—” He stops talking and, quick as a flash, yanks out a few pieces of hair from Annika’s head without even jostling the hat of leaves.
“OW!” she cries, rubbing the spot vigorously. “You could have warned me!” Small pieces of ivy fly from her head.
“Sorry,” Ash says, not sounding it. “Needed to get the root intact.”
She grumbles and keeps rubbing while he drops the hairs into a long, yellow tube and goes to check the readout from the spit.
“Hmm,” he murmurs, holding up the narrow piece of paper that came out of the end of the machine. “Have you recently swum in the tide pools of Shalla in the Pegasus Dwarf Galaxy?”
“Yes, actually,” she replies. “Right after I went fishing on Venus.”
Ash furrows his brows. “There’s no water on Venus. It’s much too hot. How could you go fishing?”
She looks to me for help.
“Annika was just kidding,” I explain. “She hasn’t been off of Earth. Until now, of course.”
“Right, right,” he says. “I forgot how primitive humanity is.”
“There’s that word again,” she says. “Can I put my shoes back on?”
He nods absently and returns to analyzing his data. “I’ll be right back,” he says, leaving us alone. Neither of us speaks while Annika laces up her boots, more slowly than necessary.
“Thank you for doing this,” I finally say.
“No problem.”
Then we’re back to no one speaking. The room seems even smaller than it did when we first entered.
“Um, thank you, too, Joss,” she says. “For, um, well, for being such a good friend these last few days. Or however long I’ve been here. I’ve lost track.”
I figure explaining about how time works differently here can wait, so I just say, “No problem. I’m just glad your brain is still in one piece. You seem very attached to it.”
She laughs. “Do you even have a brain?”
I pretend to be offended and cross my arms. But then I just shrug and say, “Sort of.”
Ash returns to find us grinning at each other. Most of my other brothers would have started teasing me. Ash just hands Annika a small plastic bag, tied up at the end with a string.
She holds it up and we both peer at it. The bottom of the bag is filled with tiny grains of material of various colors, which is strange enough. But at the top of the bag swirling smoke mixes with about a hundred tiny bubbles. “What in the world is this?” she asks him.
“Isn’t it obvious?” he asks. “It’s you.”
Without water it’s all just chemistry. Add water and you get biology.
—Felix Franks, chemist
Me?” Annika asks. “How can I be in a plastic bag? I’m not a sandwich! Although I could use a good grilled cheese and tomato right about now.”
“Those are samples of the chemicals in your body,” Ash explains, beginning to dismantle the lab equipment. “You’re made of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus atoms, with a smattering of the other elements found in the soil of your planet.” He hands her the printout. “Everything in the bag is listed on here, along with the varying amounts. I gave you all I had. The heavier elements are very hard to come by so don’t lose it.”
She gives the bag a little shake and frowns. “This is all that’s inside me? There’s not much here.”
“No, no,” Ash says. “That’s much, MUCH more of each element than what’s actually inside you. Trillions and trillions times more. Remember, all creatures are mostly empty space. If you squash the atoms of your whole human race together, squeezing out the empty space between the nucleus and the electrons surrounding it, you’d all fit inside a pinky toe.”
“We’d all fit inside a pinky toe?” she repeats. “What size pinky toe are we talking about? A baby’s? Or like, a sumo wrestler’s?”
“Sumo wrestlers can still have small toes,” I offer. “I’ve seen it on the view screens.”
“Don’t feel so bad,” Ash says. “Here in The Realms we have so few atoms in our bodies we wouldn’t even fit inside a pinky toenail. Anyone’s pinky toenail.”
While Annika stares at her bag, I take the chance to thank Ash. “I owe you one,” I tell him.
“Not at all,” he says. “You’ve helped me, too. Which reminds me!” He turns back to Annika. “Ready to be immortalized?”
“Huh?” she asks. “Oh, right. I get to permanently mingle with all of them.” She waves her hand vaguely toward the main hall.
Ash adjusts a large gray knob on the wall. “There’s not much mingling, I assure you. Now stand in the center of the floor, please.”
I scurry out of the way and Annika takes her place in what’s approximately the middle of the room. It’s hard to tell with all the mess.
He points to the hat Aunt Rae made. “You’ll need to take that off or for billions of years to come young children on field trips will think humans had leaves growing out of their heads.”
She hesitates, then places it on the table and fluffs up her hair. “If my eyes roll back in my head, please let me know.”
“Will do.”
She smiles at me, showing all her teeth, almost like a grimace. I’m not exactly sure why she’s smiling like this, but I can hear my mother’s voice saying it would be rude not to smile back. She shakes her head in frustration. “Well? Do I?”
“Do you what?”
“Do I have food in my teeth?”
“Oh! No. You’re good.”
She smooths down her dress and pinches her cheeks. “Okay, ready!”
A flash of light floods the room for an instant, blinding all of us.
“Sorry about that,” Ash says, rubbing his eyes, too. “Like I said, I’ve never had a live subject before. The other people are generated from old data dot footage.”
Blinking rapidly, Annika and I make our way through the main hall and outside to the street. “Never a dull moment here in The Realms,” she says, tucking her bag of chemicals into her dress pocket.
“Trust me, there are many dull moments. Eons and eons of them.”
“Where to now?” she asks.
I think back to what Professor Sagan was saying about the order of things. “Now that we know what’s inside you, I don’t think we need to start with the supernova anymore. We can tell what kinds of chemicals must be in your sun now. So let’s start there. Let’s build a sun!”
“Let’s do it!” she says. Then adds, “Is it getting warmer out?”
I shake my head. I’m about to tell her the temperature in The Realms never changes when I notice her eyes are becoming glassy. And it’s not from the flash of light. “Lie down,” I command her. “I’ll be right back.”
I race inside, darting around the holo figures to the back room. The hat of leaves is right where Annika placed it. I grab it without a word to Ash, who whistles as he manipulates the new holo image of Annika, now projected right where she was standing. My brain (which I do have, even if I couldn’t readily explain that to Annika earlier) registers that the holoviewer did an excellent job of capturing not just her image, but her personality somehow. I run back out to find Annika panting, but still conscious. She grabs the hat and throws it back on her head.
“I’m really sorry,” I tell her. “I feel like I’m not taking very good care of you.”
“You are,” she insisted, her breathing already becoming steady again. “Now let’s go build a sun!”
I shake my head. “I’m taking you back to my house. You need to eat. My mom makes the best grilled cheese and tomato sandwich in all The Realms.”
“Really?”
I shake my head. “No. We don’t usually get to eat things like that. But I’m sure she’ll figure it out.”
Annika spends the whole walk talking about her family and her cat and her friends and school. I spend the whole walk listening. Being an almost-teenager on Earth sounds exhausting. I now know that her favorite subject in school is Language Arts because they get to pick whatever book they want to read. Her least favorite is History because she “can’t keep all the dead dudes straight.” I know her brother wiggles his butt when he gets in trouble so everyone will laugh and forget what he did wrong. And I know that her mother can make her own hair into a perfect French braid with her eyes closed.
I even know that her friend Rachel has a crush on a pop star whose name is the same word as a foot fungus that is rapidly spreading through the Cartwheel Galaxy. Annika laughs when I tell her that. “I can’t wait to tell Rachel.” Then she frowns. “If I ever get the chance.”
“So this is Annika!” my mother exclaims, throwing her arms around Annika even before we’re halfway in the door. Then she steps back in delighted surprise. “Why, she’s so solid!”
I nod.
“Yup,” Annika says. “I’ve heard that.”
I glance up at the screen to see who’s home. Besides Mom, it’s just Bren. I clock in and my face joins his.
“Neat!” Annika says.
“Mom, will you feed Annika while I talk to Bren?”
“Of course!” Mom says, putting an arm around Annika. “I’m sure us girls will find lots to talk about.”
Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. I pause, but Mom is already guiding Annika down the hall and pointing at the holographs. Hopefully she’ll skip past the more embarrassing ones.
I feel my pocket for another confidentiality agreement for Bren. Not that there’s anything I want his help with, but I need to tell him what’s been going on. It feels weird keeping it from him, more than anyone. I call his name, but he doesn’t answer. That’s not unusual, since he often has headphones on. I check his room. Since Bren’s job involves testing all the new technologies from the inhabited planets, he spends a lot of time in his room with his friends. I’m always invited to join, but usually I’m hanging out at Kal’s house, or down at Thunder Lanes. I linger in the doorway and wonder if I’ll spend more time here now. Then I shake the thought out of my head. I’m going to bring Kal back. No room for doubt.
I’m about to turn away when I notice a large lump under Bren’s bedcovers. Since we spend so little time in bed, the covers are almost always flat, the bed tightly made. Maybe it’s a new video game he doesn’t want me to see. Nearly every civilization that makes it as far as making moving pictures quickly follows it up with video games. I can’t imagine why Bren would hide a new one, though. Sure, he knows I’m jealous of his job, but who wouldn’t be?
We have a strict rule in the house to respect each other’s privacy. I haven’t snooped in any of my brothers’ rooms in thousands of years. I don’t want to end that streak now, over some video game.
But if he took the time to hide it, it must be really cool.
I rush over to the bed and pull back the covers before I change my mind. I stare down at the last thing I’d expected to see.
My box of data dots.
And the worst part? It’s empty.
The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the Universe to do.
—Galileo, mathematician
Our house is not that big. Okay, it’s sort of big. Not Afterlives big, or Hall of Species big, though. I should be able to find one teenage boy. There aren’t that many places to hide. I’ve checked in all the closets, under the beds, in the art room, the music room, the entertaining room, the laundry room. I even looked in the storage area beneath the stairs where Bren and I used to hide when we were younger (okay, sometimes we still do). But no sign of him. Either he’s found a new, really good hiding spot, or he left and forgot to clock out, which means he’ll feel Mom’s wrath. She considers leaving without clocking out as bad as not coming home in the first place.
By the time I get back down to the kitchen, my anger has turned to disappointment and confusion. Was Bren really trying to ruin the project? Is he jealous that I’m finally doing something more important than delivering pies? Or was he just playing a joke and doesn’t understand the importance of why I needed that data? I’ll need to find him to ask him.
My mother an
d Annika are sitting at the table, hunched over some book. Annika points and says, “That’s him?” Mom nods and they both burst out laughing. I get a sinking feeling.
“That’s not my…” But I see that it is. Mom is showing Annika my sixth-grade graduation holograph. Doing something like that should be illegal! Sixth-grade pictures in general should be illegal! Capturing that awkward gawky phase is just not fair, and I was stuck in it for soooo long. Longer than any of my classmates, as I recall. I reach over and snatch the book away.
“Aw, don’t be mad,” Annika says, reaching for her last bite of sandwich. “I think you look adorable. And your ears grew to match your head, so it’s all good.”
I force myself to calm down, because I don’t want to yell at my mother for embarrassing me. I would only sound like a brat and get more embarrassed. So I just shove the book into a kitchen drawer and shut it firmly. “Mom,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady, “have you seen Bren? His picture is on the screen but I can’t find him.”
She shakes her head. “I haven’t seen him. Annika and I have been having a lovely conversation, though. She tells me you’re planning to rebuild her planet?” She says this lightly, almost breezily, like she’s just making conversation. But I can hear the undercurrent of surprise and an edge of accusation.
I glare at Annika, who goes on chewing, oblivious to the fact that she just spilled the biggest secret I’ve ever had. Do I dare ask my mom to sign one of the confidentiality agreements? I don’t have the nerve. So I tell her the story, even about Kal disappearing and his parents being on Earth. The only part I leave out is about Kal contacting me from another universe. I’m afraid to risk him or his parents getting into some kind of trouble and maybe being stuck there if I say the wrong thing, or tell the wrong person. The idea of there even being other universes is so huge that I can’t risk it. I also don’t tell her about finding the empty box of stolen data dots in Bren’s room. That’s between him and me.
I finish up by making it clear that I had repeatedly told Gluck I wasn’t the best person for the job, that I’m a pie deliverer and not a solar-system builder, and that I have no idea how I’m actually supposed to make this happen, but that I’m going to finish as best I can.