“That explains why you look lost.”
Rondo doesn’t answer. He merely smiles in the quiet way that I always see him smile in the Greenhouse. Rondo is the one our classmates listen to when he speaks, myself included. Maybe it’s because he talks so rarely. There’s something interesting about a person who knows what he has to say is correct but chooses to keep it to himself.
“What’s in there?” I ask, nodding at the case under his arm. I realize suddenly that this is how my father apologizes—by changing the subject, making his voice gentle. Never really an apology.
Rondo withdraws the case from under his arm. I don’t recognize the smooth black material.
“An izinusa,” he says.
“A what?”
“An izinusa. It’s an instrument.”
“For the lab?”
He chuckles low in his throat. The sound has a rhythm of its own, as if it too belongs in the drum circle.
“No, a musical instrument.”
“Oh.”
“It makes a beautiful sound.”
“You can play it?” I’m impressed. My dad tried me on his drum once or twice, but it wasn’t a skill that came naturally to me.
“A little.”
“How did you learn?”
“A woman in my compound was teaching me before she passed. Now I’m teaching myself. This was hers.”
“Can I see it?”
We catch eyes for an instant, his as deeply brown as mine but the lashes thicker, making his expression gentle. I look away, at his hands where they grip the edge of the case.
“Of course you can.” Something about the way he says it—soft—makes my face hot.
With the case being so rigid, I envisioned the izinusa itself as metal, serious. Instead the instrument is like a lovely fruit hidden inside rough peel. I sigh at the sight of it: sloping brown wood almost the same color as his skin, elegant strings, Rondo reaching in the case and lifting part of it out so I can see better.
“Wow” is all I can say.
“I know.” His voice carries a smile—I can see it without having to look.
He carefully settles the izinusa back into the case. His fingers are like instruments themselves.
“You’re not going to play me something?” I tease.
“Not today, O.”
He talks to me as if we’ve been alone like this before. As if we’re always alone. Now we stand in silence, looking at each other without looking at each other. It’s strange that in a class as small as ours—thirty of us, together year after year—I’ve never spoken to him one-on-one. N’Terra encourages rivalry, and the result is much self-chosen independent study. You have maybe one good friend, and everyone else is competition. Rondo has strictly been the latter. Perhaps we’d be closer if he had lived in the Paw. And now he does, I think.
“So you’re just carrying that thing around?” I ask to distract myself.
“It was just delivered from the Beak. My dads ‘forgot’ to bring it when they finished transporting our stuff today.”
“You play that badly, huh?” I smile. “They tried to leave it behind?”
He grins at this, and a thrill shoots through me.
“I think they’d just prefer that I focus on my studies. I’m not exactly the best pupil.”
“Disagree. Dr. Espada loves you. Whenever you contribute you’re rarely wrong.”
“Contributing and doing assignments on time are two different things,” he says. He runs his hand along the curve of the izinusa one more time before closing and latching the case.
“Well, you’d better get it together. I heard a rumor about them introducing internships.”
Why did I tell him that?
“Hmm.” That’s all he says, and I’m disappointed. Any other greencoat would have snapped at the bait, but as his eyes wander over the commune, I become more and more sure that Rondo isn’t like any other greencoat.
“What do you think the tower is for?” he says, nodding at it. “They’re building one in the Beak’s commune too.”
I turn to follow his gaze.
“An observation deck is what I hear.”
“Observing the commune?”
“No. What purpose would that serve? It’s to observe the sky. The stars.”
“The stars,” he says, and that’s all.
“Yeah. You know how it is. Always trying something new.”
He nods.
“I need to get back,” I say. I’m reluctant to leave. “I don’t want to run into my dad out here.”
“Why not?”
I hesitate.
“It’s a long story.”
“Maybe next time.” He catches my eye and the pain in my neck momentarily subsides, or maybe I’m just distracted by the tingle he infects me with.
“Yeah, next time.”
I turn away before he has a chance to catch my eye again—otherwise I might end up standing in the commune all night. Still, I can feel his gaze on my back until I turn the corner and go out of sight. Even then I feel like I can still see his eyes.
I follow my feet along the wide path to my home, the ground made smooth by the daily travels of many feet. When I reach my ’wam, I slide my hand across the illuminated panel and the front door hums open.
I assumed my mother would be home from the Zoo since it’s my parents’ rest day, but the ’wam is dark and quiet. While some whitecoats run shops during their days outside the lab, rest days never really mean much to my mother and father. The Zoo is the only thing that distracts them from their grief.
My grandfather died long ago: before the Vagantur even rose into the stars. But somehow losing my grandmother here was a different depth of tragedy for my parents. She was my mother’s mother, but my father had loved her just as much. Me too. I didn’t see her often: she was even more obsessed with science than my parents. But my mother says I got my logic from them and my passion from my grandmother.
“Hey, you.” I jump at the sound of my mother’s voice. I didn’t even hear the door hum open, which she walks through carrying a slate and a box of slides for her three-dimensional projector.
“Oh, hey.” I peer at the labels of her slides to see if there’s anything interesting I can sneak a look at later. “You’re just getting home?”
“Yes. And I ran into your father in the lab.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, oh,” she says, placing her slides on the kitchen platform. She levels her gaze at me, and it’s like looking into deep water. I can see my reflection, but there’s so much swimming behind it. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine now. I don’t even know what happened.” Once upon a time I might have looked to her for comfort, a refuge from my father’s stoniness. But his words on the way back from the Beak have lodged themselves in my skull: emotional. Irrational. The implication of ineptitude is too much. Bending to it now—even with my mother—might make it true.
“They say you were unconscious.”
“I guess.”
“What do you remember from before it happened?”
I pause before answering. Sometimes I can’t tell if my parents actually care or if everything is an experiment to them.
“Not much,” I say. “I mean, I remember the philax.”
“Yes, your father told me.”
We’re silent, and I wonder what it is that’s hanging inside the quiet, if she’s thinking what my father was thinking.
“Do you think I’m emotional?” I ask.