A moment later a black box appears in the message stream. When Alma taps it, the box’s lid opens, releasing a file.
It’s an image of a brain scan. We’ve studied brain research for years in the Greenhouse, and although neither of us are experts, Alma and I both know enough to know that this particular brain is unremarkable. No unusual swatches of color, no strange shapes or shadows.
So what? I take the slate back from Alma. It looks normal to me.
Exactly. But what did it replace? She encrypted the deletion: no one but me will probably ever notice. But the file you’re looking at replaced something else.
Alma and I look at each other. Her mind is crunching, trying to come up with a theory. A ping from the slate draws our eyes back to its screen.
You have to get to her device, Rondo has typed. If you can find the original brain scan, maybe it will tell you something about why you can communicate with the Faloii. And who knows what else you might find?
I don’t know if I can do that, I respond.
There’s a long pause. I can’t tell if he’s typing a long response or if he’s just thinking about what to say.
I don’t like it either, O. But we need answers. I’m going to sleep. See you tomorrow.
“Well?” Alma says. Her face seems knotted.
“I can’t,” I say. I’ve already spied on my mother once before—listening at her door, I learned that she wanted to keep me out of the internships. It has bothered me ever since, has changed the way I look at her. That’s the thing about secrets: once you uncover them, sometimes you wish you hadn’t. But we need answers.
“There has to be another way,” I say eventually. I put my palms over my eyes, pressing them. “I’m not going into her study.”
Alma stares at me for a long moment, and I wonder if she’s going to argue. But she doesn’t. She sits up away from the wall.
“Look,” she says frankly. “I told you all I care about is becoming a whitecoat, but I’m involved now. And if I’m gonna be involved, then we need to go all the way. I’m not going to tell you what to do, and we’ll be in a position to learn something in the Zoo tomorrow . . . but we need to learn what we can, where we can.”
“Yeah . . . ,” I say, not wanting to commit to anything. Never would I have thought that it would be Alma convincing me to push harder to dig up the truth.
“I’m going to sleep,” she says, and I realize how tired she must be. She’s been looking after me with Rondo while I slept the days away. I nod and she extracts herself from where she’s been sitting on my bed, climbing up to her own ledge, where I can hear her settling in. I stand and press my palm against the light pad, and the room goes dark.
“Alma,” I whisper when I’m back in my bed.
“Mhmm.”
“Thanks for . . . you know. For not telling anyone. And everything.”
“Of course.”
I can’t sleep. My body seems to have a surplus of energy and my mind is like a cloud of insects, alive and swarming. In the dark I picture Rasimbukar. I may not know everything—about my people or hers, or even about myself—but I feel it in my bones that Rasimbukar is telling the truth. The compound has done something wrong, and I need to make it right.
I sit up in the dark. The ’wam is quiet with all the lights off—only the soft murmur of the cooling system. The pale light of the moon filters in through the cracks around my window shade. I have the urge to open the shade and look out at the sleeping commune, but I know the light would wake up Alma. Even with my eyes closed, I can picture it: the compound I was born in, the ’wams lit up like moon rocks at night, the trees sprouting up around us under the transparent dome rising into Faloiv’s sky. My home. Now I picture it all burning, crumbling under the flame of a war started by my people. I remember what Rondo told me, the night we kissed in the dark: Not everything has to make sense. Maybe he was right. But some things I have to figure out.
I’m standing at my bedroom door before I’ve fully realized what I’m going to do. I slowly slide it open, cautious for any creak or crack. The hallway is even darker than my bedroom. Down the hall, my parents’ door is still. Before I know it, I’m passing it like a shadow, one foot in front of the other. The packed-dirt floor is forgiving of sound, not like the branches and the foliage in the jungle. But even without a dirixi hounding me, my heart pounds in my chest. It’s so loud, I’m certain its rhythm will echo down the hall and into my parents’ room. But I’m outside the study a moment later, my hands reaching out in the dark to find the door, sliding it slowly open, only wide enough for me to squeeze through.
Around me, the study smells like my mother: warm and rich. Technically this study is for both my parents’ use, but my father prefers his den in the Zoo. I think of all the work she’s done in this room, the discoveries she’s made. I wonder how many of those discoveries have been against the wishes of the Faloii, violating agreements that were made before I was born.
I pick my way through the dark to the desk. I don’t need to see it to know that it’s cluttered with slides, a disorganized mass of research that only my mother knows the order of. I need more light, but I don’t dare turn on the room’s lamp. I fumble over to the window, tripping on a woven runner mat that covers the dirt floor, and inch the window shade open, just a tiny gap to let in some light.
Moonbeams flow in eagerly, illuminating the desk with their softness. I turn back and take it in, searching for her slate in the chaos of her other research.
I don’t see it anywhere. I wanted to avoid moving things around—I have no way of knowing what she might notice and what she’d miss—but I don’t have a choice. Gently, as if handling eggs, I move the slides around, shift the projector to free the thick transparent files trapped under its edge. I glance at them in the dim light: charts and recordings, notes on various specimens, illustrations of brains that clearly aren’t human. I set them down and keep up my silent search until my fingers brush the smooth, solid edge of a slate.
I hold my breath as I ease it out from under a small tower of slides, then sink down to the floor, leaning against the desk and waking up the device.
The light from the screen blinds me at first after all my creeping around in the dark. When my eyes adjust, I see that the last screen my mother viewed before she switched off the device was her list of files. All of the file names are unremarkable. Tufali 8 Neurological Assessment. Kunike 21 Behavioral Analysis. Dozens and dozens of files, some with attached documents in the hundreds.