“So is Alma. I think they’ll probably host her with us. We’re both female, in the same age group. We study together. It’s logical.”
When I hear my words out in the air they sound like a desperate attempt to convince her I’m capable of the internship. I’m as transparent as the three-dimensional animals Dr. Espada projects in the Greenhouse.
“Yes, it’s logical” is all she says.
We’re silent while I eat, and I keep my eyes on my plate. There is almost always tension between my father and me: a constant thrum like the coming of a perpetual storm. But it’s different with my mother. This pain is new.
“Afua.” Her voice is too soft. The blaze of my anger wavers.
“Yes.”
“Look at me.”
My jaw trembles. I’m not quite in danger of crying, but I feel . . . something. The buzzing in my head—the same sensation I felt when Dr. Espada was staring at me intently—isn’t quite there. Instead it feels like an echo of the buzzing, the shadow of noise. I grip the edge of the platform and sway ever so slightly.
“What is it?” she says. I don’t know if she’s referring to my apparent dizziness or my attitude.
“I don’t know,” I say, which isn’t entirely a lie. How can I tell her I feel like I’ve changed but that I don’t know why or how?
“And what do we say about what we don’t know?” she asks, picking the knife up again.
My father returns, peering at his slate.
“I’ll likely stay in the Avian compound tonight,” he says. “I just received word that Albatur would like to see their progress with Oscree 32.”
“Why the sudden interest in avian species?” my mother says, beginning to slice the bread. “Surely the Head of Council has more important projects to oversee. It must be fascinating. A pity that only the councilmembers who voted for him are privy to these projects.”
I was nibbling a piece of zarum, but it’s as if the temperature in the ’wam dropped thirty degrees: her tone freezes my jaw and everything else. My father, also ice, raises his eyes from the screen of his slate to study her. He squints, his face beginning to twist with something like anger. But then it’s as if a wind blows that rearranges the expression into something else, something pained. He lowers the slate.
“While we’re asking questions,” he says, “maybe you’d like to use this opportunity to share some of your notes with me about telepathic contacts between predator and prey? Or perhaps the Myn 44–Kunike 27 lab comparison that you decided to pursue on an independent basis without consulting me whatsoever.”
“You didn’t—” my mother starts.
My father’s voice inches up nearer to a shout to drown her out.
“All your criticism of N’Terran competitiveness, and yet you wanted to make that discovery yourself. Do I need to tell you again what a fool I appeared to be when Dr. Albatur came to discuss it with me?”
“Albatur is—”
This time he slices the air with his hand as well as his voice, as if physically blocking her words from entering his ears.
“Dr. Albatur is the Head. He was elected. Your refusal to work with him speaks to your ineptitude, not his!”
He pulls in his lips, as if trying to take back what he has just said. But then he lets them out again, glaring.
“Octavius,” my mother says.
“Samirah?”
The way he says her name sends an explosion of goose bumps racing down my arms. This isn’t his voice. The air I breathe doesn’t fill my lungs as air would—it’s as if I’ve walked into a cloud of the disintegrating pieces of their love and inhaled its graying vapor. They stare at each other for two heartbeats, and then my father leaves without saying another word. Before the door whispers shut behind him, the clang of hammers from the commune slides into our ’wam, stirring the still air he leaves behind.
My mother exits the kitchen in a hurry and I think she’s going to follow him, but her path leads her to the wall, where the photo of her parents hangs in its chipped gold frame. She stands, gazing at them, her arms crossed over her chest. I’ve seen her do this before, and it occurs to me that I’ve never asked her how well she knew her father before he died on the Origin Planet, if Nana ever really got over losing him. The two of them here on the wall are like an altar and I’m hesitant to speak, but I do.
“Mom?”
She squeezes her eyes shut, shaking her head against my voice.
“I can’t, Octavia. I can’t.”
“You can’t what?”
“Have you not been listening?” she snaps.
I jerk my head backward, her sudden anger like a slap.
“What?”
“Pay attention, Octavia! Pay attention!”
“To what?” I cry. “To you? To Dad? For what? So I can learn how to be miserable?”
“So you can learn how not to be!”
“You don’t have to worry about that,” I snarl. “I have no intention of being anything like either of you.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“Like hell,” I shout.
She laughs, so loudly and sharply it stuns me into silence.
“Hell,” she says. “I don’t know where you learned about it, but you don’t know what it is. I do.”
She blazes out of the ’wam, the sound of the hammers louder again with the door open and muted when it closes. I long for the clanging. The silence of this room might suffocate me—my breath comes in short spurts, as if the fire of my anger has eaten up all my oxygen with its smoke.
I stalk back to my room, flinging myself on the bed. I close my eyes and try to find the smell of ogwe trees, buried in my senses somewhere. I can’t actually smell anything at this moment, but the memory of the scent—the impression of it—slowly brings my heartbeat back to normal.
I breathe out in a long sigh and reach under my mattress. My fingers grope around until they find the egg. I’d raised my mattress and spent an hour carving out a hole in my bed platform to hide it. It hadn’t been easy, but it feels safe. I stroke it with my fingers, enjoying the way it heats my fingers ever so slightly. I wonder if the spotted man knows he dropped it, or if he might have dropped it on purpose.
I hear a tiny muffled noise, a sound like a small woodchip striking another piece of wood. It’s my slate telling me I have a message, buried in my bag from school. I return the egg to its hiding place and reach for the bag. The message is from Rondo.
I know something about the spotted man, his message reads. I immediately sit up to respond but he’s already sending a second message. Let’s talk in person. Meet me at our spot.
CHAPTER 8
He’s already waiting for me when I near the bridge. He stands with his elbows propped on the rail, gazing over the edge at the stream running underneath. As soon as I set foot on the bridge, he speaks without taking his eyes off the water. “I wonder if the fish can hear what I’m thinking.”
I don’t respond. I lean my elbows on the rail too and look over the edge. Below, myn sweep their tails slowly left to right like lazy fans.
“I think your brain has to be wired a certain way for that,” I say.
“How do you figure?”
I shrug.