“That was fun,” I commented drily.
“It was helpful,” Analeigh stressed, striding into her room and yanking her blue pajamas out of a drawer.
Sarah and I made eye contact and smiled.
“Tomorrow’s a big day, Kaia.” Sarah yawned. “Have you decided what you’re going to do?”
My seventeenth birthday. True Companion go-time. It had never been a big deal to me, or anyone else for that matter, but Sarah had different feelings about it. For obvious reasons. “I’ll probably find out. Why not?”
“You never know,” she said, cheeks reddening.
“I guess that’s true.”
But that wasn’t always the case. Sarah and Oz were the anomaly. The exception, not the rule. I wouldn’t be so lucky.
*
Stars in My Pies, a popular restaurant a brief stroll from most of the Academies, was pretty crowded for the middle of the week. Older kids from different apprenticeships filled several tables—pass restrictions expired once we turned eighteen. The insignias on their breasts were hard to distinguish from far away, and I sucked at keeping everyone’s colors straight. It looked like some Mentors and perhaps some kind of Medical Science Academy apprentices joined us for the evening.
I must share my birthday with a few others, because there were at least two tables filled with kids too young to be out without a special pass, plus a red vinyl booth occupied by another group of Historian apprentices in my class.
I knew Jessica Beaton’s birthday and mine were the same. She’d been born on Petra, an outer planet that contained mostly water, but we’d been at the Academy together for years. We’d never gotten along.
I wondered if she was going to find out the name of her True Companion tonight. In general, I felt more curious than swoony over the whole thing, probably because of the impossibility of it all. Still, it would be interesting.
“Kaia, Analeigh, over here!” Sarah’s happy voice floated over the laughter and mid-twentieth century music floating out of a reconstruction of something called a jukebox. It ran on digital files like everything else, but the owner, Max, liked the throwback feel of the place. The robot servers even wore roller skates and red gingham aprons.
The metal chairs made screeching noises as they scraped against the black-and-white tiled floor, and Analeigh and I flopped into them. I hadn’t told her about finding Jonah’s cuff even though keeping secrets made me nervous. She knew me well enough to know I was hiding something, so if we’d been alone it would have been nothing but an endless interrogation. Thank goodness Sarah and Oz had been granted passes to celebrate with us. I needed a buffer.
The two of them shared a chocolate milkshake across the table, poring over a menu even though we ate here every month. We all ordered cheeseburgers—except Oz, who didn’t eat meat, not even the fake, synthetic kind Genesis had to offer.
Once the menus were gone Sarah and Analeigh stared at me while Oz examined his cuticles. Discomfort started in my belly and slowly tightened all of my limbs until my fingernails dug into my palms. Being the center of attention did that to me. “Yes, I’m going to find out, okay? Stop staring like I’ve got a big glob of spinach in my teeth.”
“We could be staring at your unruly eyebrows. Honestly, Kaia,” Analeigh admonished.
“Oh my stars, I will get them done tomorrow.” My heart wasn’t in the retort, my mind mired in the decision to get me up and moving toward the info pod in the corner.
The True Companion calculations had nothing to do with fanciful notions of fate or destiny, the way people used to believe. Science had simply managed to break down genomes into their most basic, molecular components and isolate ones that lined up seamlessly. Like puzzle pieces.
Before we could predict molecular compatibility, most people were happy with regular love—Chosen Companions. Chosens were far more common than Trues, and couples in Genesis were content. In the end, that would be enough for me, too, but for tonight, the curiosity was too much to bear. What if my True lived down the street, or on Angkor or Persepolis?
“Well, go do it!” Analeigh’s green eyes shone, her excitement affecting me in spite of my best efforts. Her seventeenth birthday wasn’t for several months, so she was living vicariously tonight.
I grinned and stood up, rubbing my palms together and cackling. Analeigh and Sarah laughed, but when I met Oz’s smoky-gray gaze, his eyes were serious. They peered into mine as though hoping to see something specific, but I had no idea what. He looked away first.
Victory.
I left them and headed for Stars’ information pod, a shoulder-high metal machine that spit out all kinds of information. Jess stood in front of the display screen, shifting her weight from one foot to the other as she waited, hand outstretched, ignoring me. Once we turned eighteen and received transport cuffs like the one Jonah left behind, we wouldn’t have to use the pods to access a database while away from the Academy. They only existed to track information requests of the apprentices.
The machine beeped once, its red lights flashing to green, and a slip of pink cardstock slid into Jess’s hand. The name of her True Companion. “This is stupid,” she mumbled in my direction.
I shrugged. “It’s kind of fun. Like how people used to go to those silly fortune-tellers and pretend they could see into the future.”
“Except now we can actually see into the future.”
“Not really,” I corrected out of habit. “Trues are the only part of the future we can predict. The people are there, but their paths are always changing based on the choices we make now. Too many potential trajectories.”