“Hello, everyone,” she says, smiling. “Did I scare you, Octavia? I tried to sneak up on you.”
“Yeah, a little bit.” I force a laugh. I dropped the piece of zunile when she grabbed me and I peek at the floor to see if I can find it. When I look back up, my plate is in my mother’s hand. Walking toward the biotubes to dispose of the remains of my meal, she says over her shoulder, “Come with me, interns. It’s time to get you back to the sorting room. From what I’ve been told, you have quite a bit left to do.”
After we drop our platters off at the biotubes, my mother turns to the group to make sure we’re all accounted for. I study her face, looking for traces of our argument yesterday. Her eyes wander to the back of the Atrium, where they fall on the platform that the bone-faced Dr. Albatur sits at. Dr. Albatur watches my mother too, his insect jaw set into a square, his eyes shining like two beetles. They keep eye contact for only a moment before he ducks his head and continues speaking to the other councilmembers. If they’re Council, why isn’t my mother sitting there with them?
My mother turns away and leads us back out into the white hall. Her face betrays nothing, but I can sense her unrest as if it’s a scent seeping from her pores. She actually seems relieved by the distraction of my fellow interns, who pepper her with questions. Despite her reputation for brilliance, she also has a reputation for kindness: the stiffness that the presence of my father tends to induce is washed away and everyone relaxes under her smile. Yaya tails my mother closely, interrogating her with as much delight as Yaya’s studious mask allows for.
“Dr. English, how did it feel when you first discovered that animals across different genuses and species could communicate telepathically?”
My mother chuckles, a sound I know well and have inherited. Her laugh used to fill our ’wam, and the knowledge of its absence turns those memories into ghosts, floating hollow around me. I miss those days, when I felt like I actually knew her. Both of them. It stings even more when I realize that the answer she’s giving Yaya is a story I’ve never even heard.
“It was incredible,” my mother says. “At first I wasn’t entirely willing to believe what I had discovered. But all the tests were conclusive, and after two or three days of checking everything twice and thrice, I allowed myself to feel excited.”
“That’s amazing,” Yaya says, and my mother grants her a smile that brightens the whole hallway. I didn’t inherit that. Or maybe I did, but I don’t think I smile enough anymore to really know. Rondo falls back to walk alongside me.
“Returning to your precious eggs,” he says. I wonder if he means to make his voice low and soft like that, or if it’s just how it comes out. The texture of his words almost makes me forget about my sadness—I can’t believe talking to him used to make me nervous.
“I don’t know about precious,” I say. “So. You knew that two hundred of the original N’Terrans were scientists. More hacking, I assume?”
“How else?” He shrugs. Protocol is so important in N’Terra and Rondo just . . . doesn’t give a damn.
“Always hacking. I thought you were into music.” I bump him with my shoulder.
“I can’t be interested in more than one thing?”
“Well, N’Terra hasn’t outlawed that.”
He bumps me back.
“Yet,” he counters. “To be honest, the only reason I started messing around with computers was because the whitecoats are so secretive about everything. I would love to just focus on music but . . .”
“But, again, we have no musical compound,” I tease.
“I’d make one,” he says. “But it’s like no one on the Council cares about anything except expanding N’Terra.”
“So you started hacking to . . . what? Make a point?”
He laughs lightly.
“Not necessarily. Just boredom, I guess. They won’t let me study what I want, so I study them instead.”
“Watching the watchers,” I say with mock solemnity. “Very deep.”
“I don’t think I’m the only one who does it though,” he says, his smile fading. “When I was doing some looking around last night, I saw someone else in the files too.”
I steal a glance ahead at my mother to make sure she’s not listening—she’s fully engaged in conversation with Yaya and Alma. Jaquot has fallen some distance behind us, alone, but he’s in his own world, chewing a piece of fruit he’d brought out of the Atrium. Also against protocol, I would imagine, but that’s Jaquot for you.
“Who was it in the files?”
“Don’t know. Their access point was encrypted.”
“Which means what exactly? They were purposefully covering their tracks?”
“Yep.”
“And do you encrypt your access point?”
He twists his mouth to the side and gives me a sidelong glance, a nonverbal obviously.
“Good,” I say. “If you got caught, they’d probably kick you out of the Zoo for a decade—you’d be on sanitation duty until your hair was gray.”
“And?” he fires back. “Like I said, I don’t even want to be in here.”
“If they let you play the izinusa on sanitation duty, I’ll come listen on my breaks.”
He pauses and gives me a long look, his lips twitching in a smile before he goes on.
“Why are we talking about me? We should be talking about you. Wandering out into the main dome at night spying on whitecoats? Pretty sure they’d kick you out for that too, and I doubt you’d be as cool about it.”
I almost expect the hypothetical idea of being barred from the labs to affect me on a gut level, prepare my stomach for the flood of theoretical panic. But it doesn’t come. Instead I feel something almost like . . . relief? Like sand washing away to expose something shining and hidden under its drifts.
“We didn’t get caught, did we?”
“No,” he says, returning the smile. It’s a small brief offering of teeth, but it feels like a gift. “Not yet anyway.”
My mother, Alma, and Yaya have reached the doorway of the sorting room and turn to wait for us to catch up. Alma raises her eyebrow at me in a teasing way, but I dodge making eye contact with her, afraid of what my face might betray.
“This is where I leave you,” my mother says, and the door opens to admit us. “Three more hours and you’ll be free, if you have the rest of the eggs sorted by then.”
Jaquot groans, making Yaya laugh—she’s in love with him, I decide: only love makes people laugh at stupid things like this—and our group files through the doorway. I’m about to go back in too, my mind still on Rondo’s smile and wondering if maybe I’m stupidly in love as well, when my mother reaches out and touches my arm lightly.
“Octavia, a moment, please.”