Hwa-jeon. It was a dessert in Korea. When she was little, Hwa thought her nickname being a dessert meant she was sweet and special, a nice treat at the end of a nice person’s day. Then she asked Sunny to make it for her.
<<Why would I want to eat those? They’re all rice flour and sugar. You know I can’t eat things like that. Why would you ask me to spend money on something I can’t eat?>> Her mother had taken one look at Hwa’s face and rolled her eyes. <<Besides. I don’t have edible flowers, much less purple ones. How can I make it look like your face, without big purple flower petals?>>
“Hwa?”
“Huh?” Hwa blinked at Mr. Branch, who was peering at her with his head cocked. In the specs, his emotions didn’t register like the students’ did. Maybe the faculty all had theirs screened out. Not exactly sporting. “What? Sorry. Were you talking to me?”
“Yes. I was asking you where your homework was. I was calling the roll for missed assignments. Five hundred words on one problem you’d like science to solve?”
Hwa frowned. “What?”
“Just get me the assignment,” Branch said. He started calling off more names.
“You can have mine,” Joel whispered to her. “I wrote two.”
Of course he did. “Why would you do twice the homework?”
“I’d already written one, on faster-than-light travel,” Joel said, “but then I pinged him about it, just to show off, and he shot me down. Said he wasn’t taking any biology questions in physics class.”
“So what’d you write about, instead?”
“How the ITER alternative reactor failed, in France.”
Hwa nodded. “That’d be good for science to figure out.”
“Science has figured it out.” A smirk tugged at the edges of Joel’s lips. He lowered his voice still further. “That’s why we’re building another one.”
Hwa turned to him. “We?”
“Our company,” he said. “Well, the self-assemblers our company owns. They’re building another experimental thermonuclear reactor, right here. Underwater.”
“Underwater.” Hwa pointed at the floor. “Under this water?”
Joel nodded. “Under the city.”
Hwa drew breath. “What the hell kind of James Bond villain bullshit—”
“You promised your father you wouldn’t discuss this outside the family, Joel,” Síofra said. “Hwa signed a nondisclosure agreement, but you shouldn’t make it difficult for her to adhere to it.”
“You’re building a fucking sun under this town, and I’m the one you’re worried—”
“Miss Go!”
Hwa’s head snapped up. Branch did not look happy. Shit.
“Since you and Mr. Lynch have so many things to discuss, perhaps you’d like to discuss them in the hall. Eight bins of fetal pigs were just delivered for Miss Jarvis’s biology class, and they’re not getting any colder sitting out in the mail room. I’d like you to bring them from downstairs to the science lounge, and load them in the refrigerator.”
“Can we have the elevator pass?” Joel asked.
Branch smiled. “No.”
Hwa shrugged. She stood. “Come on.”
“But—”
“It’ll be good for your arms. Let’s go.”
*
“So, are you guys gonna disconnect the whole rig and fire everybody, or just wait until your science experiment explodes and kills us all?”
“It won’t explode.” Joel grunted, lost control of his one bin, and set it down on the floor. “Why wouldn’t they give us a dolly or a hand truck or something we could use to lift these things?” He flexed his fingers. “My hands hurt.”
They were barely out of the mail room off the main entrance. They’d been walking for all of two minutes, and hadn’t even cleared the lobby yet. Even if the death threats against Joel were totally bogus, and Hwa was inclined to believe they were, she’d be damned if she didn’t whip him into shape. The kid could barely lift twenty pounds.
“That’s because you’re using your hands and not your arms. And that’s because you got no arms.”
Joel flapped his arms at his sides.
“No. I mean, you got no arms.” Hwa squatted to put her two bins down and straightened up. Her spine popped as she rose to her full height. She’d been slacking off on her vinyasas, and that was clearly a mistake. She stepped close to Joel and flexed her right arm. “Feel that.”
Joel poked her arm. His eyes widened. “Is that your bicep?”
“It’s the mass of time plus discipline. That’s all it is.”
Sheepish, Joel shuffled back to his bin and tried to lift it in a single mighty move. Hwa winced as his back sloped forward. He was trying to carry the thing on his nonexistent belly, like a fetus. Which was ironic, given the contents of the bin.
“Okay, lesson one,” Hwa said. “Put that thing down.”
“We have to get back to class.”
“Oh, please. Fuck that guy. Seriously. Besides, this is physics, too. Sort of. The physics of not fucking up your lumbar region.”
“I think that’s kinesiology.”
“Whatever. Put that down. No, really, put it down. Now, watch me. See how my back is planked? It’s a straight line, from the back of my head to the bottom of my spine. See?”