who tended to my mother. The blue cord on his shoulder was threaded with gold. Council member. Ronen noticed it too.
“Why would she need the head doctor for the flu?” he demanded, jostling my father’s arm. “If it’s viral, she should be better already!”
But our father didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Doctor Rafferty had appeared at the door, his olive features drawn.
“There’s a mass on her liver,” he said. “It’s . . . very unusual. I’ve read about this but never seen it. ‘Cancer’ is what it was once called. Uncontrolled cell growth. It seems to have already reached her lymphatic system.”
Doctor Rafferty’s expression was wrong. His lower lip twitched. There was something in his eyes, something I couldn’t quite pinpoint. But my father and Ronen accepted the diagnosis without question, so I told myself I must have been crazy—told myself there was no time to worry about Doctor Rafferty. There was only Momma, dying.
A few weeks later she was gone, and high spring came stumbling back. And there was no one left to walk with me.
That night I dreamed of her.
We were walking through the atrium together, down the twisted paths. It was summer, a season I hadn’t seen since I was a little kid. Dragonflies, their long bodies gleaming like ancient amethysts, swarmed the dome. As I followed my mother over the overgrown brick, I swatted insects from my face. But it didn’t do any good. Between the tangle of vines and the fury of wings, I lost my mother down a fork in the path.
“Momma?” I called. I crossed a wooden footbridge where flashes of green caught my eye from over the rail. Turtles milled through the water below. Everything was too bright, too hot. It made me dizzy.
Then I heard movement in the jungle. I stalked forward, squinting through the heat.
“Momma?” I pushed the branches aside.
There, standing in the jungle, was my mother. She smiled at me, reaching out a hand. I pressed forward.
But then she turned, and I saw that she wasn’t alone. A boy stood just behind her. But his face was obscured by a veil of Spanish moss that spilled off one of the tree branches above.
I couldn’t make out his features, but this much I knew: He was tall, taller than Momma. Taller than me. The flowers all turned their faces to him, like they couldn’t wait to soak up his warmth. In turn his thin body bent unnaturally toward me as I stepped close. It was like he had no spine, no bones, like he was just a reed bending in the breeze.
I woke in the pitch dark of my bedroom, my heart doing a wild dance in my chest.
5
The next morning I hustled across the ship, pushing my sleeves up over my hands and listening to the clock bells strike out the quarter hour. It wasn’t entirely my fault that I was late, of course. The labs were practically a world away from the grimy port district where we lived. To reach them I had to make my way through the commerce district, then the fields, then the pastures, then cross the narrow footbridge between the library and school. The concrete buildings that housed the labs rose up out of the ground near the far wall of the ship.
I made my way through the winding hallways, smiling nervously to the other specialists as I passed. They hardly noticed me as they rushed by, white coats streaming. When I finally reached the door to the botanical lab, I hesitated.
Truth be told, when I pressed my hand to the panel by the door, I hoped, for just a moment, that the door would stay shut.
No such luck. It slid away, revealing metal floors and walls. Everything would have been gleaming if it weren’t for the junk everywhere. Metal shelves reached up to the ceilings, but the books had begun to topple off them. Waterlogged papers spilled like leaves off a row of steel tables. And there were plants everywhere. Vines curled out of pots of soil and from planters overhead. Little trays of seedlings were stacked along the floor. Open bags of fertilizer steamed heat into the cool air.
The lab smelled like disinfectant, soil, and heady pollen. I wrinkled my nose.
“Hello?” I called as the door slid closed behind me. I walked carefully, doing my best not to trample any of the books that were set open on the floor. For a moment there was no answer. But then I heard movement near the rear of the lab. A woman hovered over one of the desks, behind a massive monitor. The computer terminal looked like it wasn’t often used. The keyboard was strewn with papers.
The woman was sharp eyed, with gray-threaded hair cropped close to her head, and a hook-shaped nose. And she was tiny—much shorter than I was, and slender, too, though her coat fit much better than mine. It had been taken in at the waist and sleeves, tailored to her. I watched as she squinted down into the long tube of a microscope, her expression a sort of grimaced wink. She didn’t acknowledge me standing there, waiting.
“Um, Rebbe Stone?” I said, clearing my throat. “I can come back later if you want.”
She waved a hand at me, but her gaze didn’t move from the microscope. “Don’t call me ‘Rebbe’! The Council might think they can make me teach you, but they can’t force me to be as formal as all that.”
I chewed my lip. “You didn’t request me?”
“Bah,” Mara said. “?‘Request.’ They’ve been trying to strong-arm me into retiring for years. They think you’ll be my deathblow. Sit down!”
The only chair was behind her, and it was piled high with books. So I crouched in place between a stack of field guides and a prickly needled bush.
“On Earth there was a country called Iceland,” she began. She had a craggy, sort of froggish voice. It matched her nose. “Of course you haven’t heard of it. Their chief cultivars were potatoes, kale, cabbage. Hardy grasses. That sort of rubbish thing, and limited to the warmer lowlands. But with geothermally heated hothouses, they could add almost anything to their diet. Tomatoes for vitamin C. Grapes for wine. Small scale, mostly, but still. They’ve been an excellent model for us.” She finally looked up at me, one eye still squinted.
“Only problem is, for the last year, blight has been hitting our hothouse fruit trees. And Zehavan fruit salad’s going to be exceedingly bland if all we have is crab apples and figs. You know, when they told me they were sending me a girl, I was worried you’d be an addlebrained fool. But I’m glad to see they didn’t send me one of the pretty ones.”
I blanched. I’d long known that I was no Rachel—my frame was gawky, and my fair hair hung in a frizzy curtain down my shoulders—but I wasn’t used to people saying it so plainly. The woman scowled.
“Oh, don’t
I didn’t say anything. The woman looked amused. She offered me her hand.
“I’m Mara Stone.”
Her knobby fingers were cold. “I know,” I said. “My father told me . . .” Then I trailed off. I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to share what my father had said.
“Terrible things, I’m sure.” Mara turned to her microscope. “Terra, isn’t it? It’s an interesting name, considering. Do you know what it means?”
“No,” I said, and then added: “Considering what?”
“Considering your new vocation. ‘Terra’ was another name for Earth. But also for the stuff on it. The land, the soil.”
“Oh,” I replied, not really sure what to say to that. “It’s a family name. My mother named me after some ancestor.”
“Your mother, yes.” With those words something about Mara’s expression changed. Her hard mouth didn’t exactly soften, but her frown sort of crumbled away. “You know, I’m sorry about that. Well, not
