stuff inside my brain, like, fresh.” She nods, pleased with her reasoning. “We need to get back into that lab.”
I look away from her. “One, what I need is to get some sleep.” It’s the middle of the night, and I have to be at the media facility in four hours.
One is silent.
“If I screw up at work, I’m as good as dead. And if I’m dead, you’re dead, and this whole lab plan will be moot anyway. Okay?”
I turn back to One. But she’s gone.
It occurs to me that I’ll never know when one of her disappearances is her last. One day she’ll blink out, just like this, and I’ll wait for her to reappear … but she won’t.
For all I know I just saw her for the last time.
I force my face deep into my pillow and try to sleep.
I arrive at my console the next morning groggy and bleary-eyed, dreading the next twelve hours. I take my seat next to Serkova and dive into the data stream.
Despite my fuzzy head, I pull a decent rank after my first hour. But with exhaustion creeping up on me, I can feel my productivity beginning to slip. By the fifteen-minute mark of the next hour, I know I’m headed back to the bottom of the pack.
So I come up with a little trick.
For every five or so sources I legitimately review, I automatically throw another one in the Discard directory. I know my provisional accuracy percentage will take a hit, but from what I can tell it carries a relatively low weight on overall ranking compared to Discard and Investigate totals.
Using this technique I’ve climbed all the way to number six by the next hourly rankings, with seventy-three Discards and seventeen Investigates. My provisional accuracy is 73 percent, lower than the hour before but not bad enough to raise any red flags.
I can feel Serkova sneering at me. I don’t bother to hide my smile.
I pass the day like this, racing against Serkova. Giving up on finding time for research, I use the task in front of me to distract myself from everything: from One’s perilous condition, from Zakos’s strange work in the lab, from my hateful father, from what the work I’m doing even means. My only goal is to get ahead of Serkova in at least one hourly ranking.
My last rank of the day is number two. Right ahead of Serkova at three.
“Better luck tomorrow, Serkova,” I say, wearing a bright, fake-friendly smile.
He curses me and heads out of the lab.
After work, I head upstairs to my room to wash up before dinner. My mother told me Kelly’s skipping dinner again for her afterschool program in the Nursery. Yeah, right. I know the real reason: she doesn’t want to share a table with me.
But not even that can get me down: beating Serkova, even just the once, was too big a victory. I find myself racing up the stairs to my room, three steps at a time.
I open the door to my room, hoping to find One. I can’t wait to crow to her about kicking Serkova’s ass. When I enter, I see her feet peeking out from behind the corner of the bed.
“One?”
I step closer.
She’s flat on her back on the carpet. Mouth and eyes open. She looks glazed, and her skin is doing that milky flickering thing that it did back under the baobab tree. Only much, much worse.
“What happened?” I crouch beside her on the floor. She’s silent. “One?”
After a moment’s silence, she speaks. “Nothing.” Her lips barely move and her voice is raspy. “It’s just that each time it’s darker than the last time. It hurts more, it’s more … obliterating.” Her eyes swim around in her head, searching for me.
Her gaze finally finds mine. “It’s like, what’s blacker than black, you know?”
“Yeah,” I say.
But I
I hear my mother call me for dinner.
I turn back to One. “I’m going to stay with you.”
She shakes her head, almost imperceptibly.
“No,” she says. “You should go.” Her eyes drift back to the ceiling as she lies there, flickering in and out of view.
Heartbroken, I leave.
My father joins my mother and me for dinner. He barely speaks, except to ask my mother for seconds—he has a true warrior’s appetite—and to give us an update on Ivan. “His superior officer says Ivan is doing excellent work. Says he has the makings of a general, himself.”
