A Conspiracy of Stars



I’m dreaming of my mother. She’s standing in a green field, with plants that I’ve learned to identify on Faloiv. They are as deep green as they are in life, but richer somehow, their smells even more complicated. And among it all stands my mother: she’s younger than the way I know her to be, her locs shorter, her face slimmer. But it’s my mother, and in the dream she opens her arms, although I’m not sure if she’s opening them to me or to everything around us. My feet are bare, which would never be allowed on Faloiv, and buried in short green plants bearing round purple buds.

“Listen,” says my mother.

“Mom?”

In the dream she puts a finger to her lips.

“Listen,” she repeats.

I listen. I hear wind. I hear birds: the chipper sound of the oscree and the booming caw of the muskew. Both are soft. I hear water, somewhere distant.

“Listen,” my mother says a third time.

I strain my ears. Plants swaying against each other. The creak of branches in the trees that line the meadow we stand in. My breath sighing through my nostrils. And then I hear it.

My name. I hear my name, the syllables whispering through the grass under my feet, slithering up my legs, and sliding into my ears.

“Octavia . . .”

“I hear it!” I say. “I hear it!”

“Octavia . . . Octavia?”

Dr. Adibuah is gently nudging my shoulder with the back of his hand, his voice close and soft. A doctor’s voice, I think as I come awake. Calm. Soothing.

“Octavia, are you all right?”

I open both eyes and stare at him for a moment before answering.

“I think so.”

It’s hard to sit up—a pain throbs in my neck: a deep, sharp pain—but I do. My vision swims, and my body is clammy with sweat. Our skinsuits were designed to radiate our bodies’ heat out and away from us—a technology we learned and borrowed from the cellular structure of the ears of an animal called a maigno—but usually its benefits aren’t needed indoors. I look down and realize I’m staring at my bare stomach, deeply brown against the white of the skinsuit. My suit has been unfastened to the waist, meaning I’m lying there in my chest wrap in front of Dr. Adibuah. I cross my arms over my chest and struggle to fully rise.

“What happened?”

“You were unconscious,” Dr. Adibuah says in his doctor voice. My father sits behind him with his hands on his knees.

I was? Why was I unconscious? The memory comes back like a spark of fire. The philax . . . his eyes . . . falling . . .

This time a pain in my head flowers, lancing out and down, gripping my heart. I cry out without meaning to, falling back onto the bench where I’ve been laid. I’m in a small room and the sound is louder than it should be.

“Octavia, what’s the matter?” Dr. Adibuah has my shoulders in his hands and leans down over me. My father remains seated, watching.

“I . . . my head.”

“What happened, Octavia?” My father stands now, his hands in the pockets of his white coat.

“The—the bird . . .”

I can’t tell him. It’s the feeling you get pulling your hand back from the fire before you even touch the flame—instinct. I swallow my words.

“A philax managed to escape a facility room,” Dr. Adibuah says. “It somehow got out into the main dome. Did it hurt you?”

Dr. Adibuah’s eyes roam down my bare arms with renewed concern, looking for wounds.

“No, it didn’t hurt me.”

“Did it upset you?” he asks, his voice gentle.

Did it upset me? It seems such an illogical way to describe what I felt in the dome.

“Yes,” I say slowly. “It . . . upset me.”

The lie tastes sour in my mouth.

“Octavia is sensitive,” my father says. “I’m sure it was a shock. It happened very quickly.”

I say nothing, glowering.

My father studies me, his hands still in his pockets. Dr. Adibuah’s eyes are softer.

“Do you want to get her home, Octavius? Her neck has a minor sprain from her fall.”

My father doesn’t answer right away. One hand has crept from his pocket, the fingers curling below his lip and resting there, motionless, as he takes me in.

“Yes,” he says eventually. “Octavia, can you walk?”

Pulling my skinsuit back up over my upper body, I stand quickly to prove that I’m fine. I’m punished with an array of spots before my eyes, the room spinning. I ignore it and nod but don’t speak.

“Before you leave,” Dr. Adibuah says, his finger raised, “you should allow me to apply some of the narruf. For her neck.”

My father looks at me, his face stone. But he nods.

“I’ll get it,” Dr. Adibuah says, and leaves us alone.

I lean back against the platform where I awakened. My head isn’t spinning and the noise that had crowded my brain earlier has subsided to a whisper. But I feel strange, open. Like a room in my mind has been unlocked, the door ajar but the room empty.

Dr. Adibuah returns with a beaker containing a gelatinous substance. He’d said “narruf,” which I know is a species of bird, but I half expected him to return with the animal itself, not a jar of orange goo. I want to ask what it is—these are the things I love about what we do here: the mysteries that, once deciphered, might mean our continued survival. But my father’s face is granite, so I close my mouth around the question.

“This is a substance from inside the narruf egg,” Dr. Adibuah says, as if he can sense my thirst for the knowledge, dipping a small, thin spatula into the goo. “It’s collected at hatching. It has healing qualities for injuries sustained after leaving the egg, such as falling from the nest.”

He wipes off the excess on the jar’s rim and motions for me to turn my head to the side. I obey, and he reaches forward to spread the thick substance along the side of my neck, from just under my ear down to the outside of my shoulder. My throat begins to tingle.

“Does it feel warm?” he asks, the spatula hovering.

It does. The warm feeling spreads, a small, sudden fever. I nod.

“Good.” He drops the spatula into a sanitation pouch hanging from the wall and returns the lid to the jar.

My father opens the door.

“Let’s go.”

My father and I ride in silence, this time with him steering the chariot, at his insistence. We travel the same red dirt road, but something has changed. The distance between us is always present, but now it feels like a chasm.

“Next time I go to the Avian Compound, I know to come alone,” my father says.

I jerk as if his words are a spear he’s lodged in my ribs.

“Wait, what?” I say, ignoring the little stab of pain left over in my neck that spikes when I raise my voice. “Sir—”

“Octavia.” He cuts me off, making an effort to sound nasty. “You do realize that to do what we do—to be a scientist—you must control yourself, don’t you? Are you aware of that?”

“What? Control myself?”

My father takes his eyes off the road for an instant to glare over at me. I’m almost as tall as he is, but suddenly I’m rendered small. Even through his driving goggles I can feel the intensity of his stare, shrinking me.

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