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  When I finally got to the boat, Santiago and Texi were not on the deck, and I plopped myself onto a chair, thankful for some time alone. I both hated and enjoyed that Texi was here. She kept clouding into my thoughts, like a deep, dark smog, but there was still something about her I was missing. There were still things I didn’t understand.

  I stared up at the stars and felt the peace of calmed Energy. For the first time, I was sad for my home. I finally understood how sick it was, despite the beauty I witnessed on a daily basis here. I used to think Stagnate planets were lucky with no humans to muck them up or ruin them, but now I knew there had to be a balance. The alternatives only brought us one step closer to the end.

  Since Texi and Iago got to Geeta, I’d found myself sleeping in the strangest of places. The couch in the den or the benches in the garden. It hadn’t rained in a while, so everywhere I slept was temperate and comfortable. If she knew the room she’d taken was mine, she wasn’t letting on about it. She’d taken to leaving her mark on it, and I let her.

  And so it happened that I fell asleep on the deck, under the infinite weight of stars, with the inevitable taste of Destruction in my heart.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  It was her laughter that woke me up. I stood up and glanced around for her, but didn’t see her on the deck. The sound was coming from close by, and I followed it with my ears until I realized it wasn’t coming from the boat. I poked my head over the railing and sighed.

  Of course she’d gone swimming.

  Time is funny when schedules don’t exist. I’d never had to live by one before, because living a solitary life on a solitary boat on a solitary planet didn’t really tie me to that type of responsibility. I worked and rested when either was necessary. Santiago and Texi had lived a life paying attention to time and its expectations, so, over this week, they had trouble adjusting to making their own schedule. Santiago had taken to the habit of sleeping until almost noon, while Texi woke up every morning around six to go for a swim. How a teenage girl had that type of internal alarm clock was beyond me, but then again, she had more to think about and digest than before.

  When I asked her about the swimming the day before, her face grew sad, and I remembered that she used to go swimming with Sully all the time at that spot on the river. Instead of bringing that up, she said she wanted to swim in the sunrise. “The way the colors bounce off the water makes me feel like I’m swimming in orange juice.”

  She was right. The reflection on the water overtook everything for a good ten minutes every morning and every evening. I wondered what it meant for her to look out at the horizon and realize that there was so much more out there than what she’d always known. Did she have a new reverence for the sunrise? Did she seek it out just so she could swim away her frustrations?

  There was a school of neon-bright fish swimming circles about her body, and with every stroke she made, they adjusted around her. Bright blues and purples and oranges darted this way and that, and their movement harnessed to her laughter. I felt a tingling in my gut, the remnants of fear. It was as if she was controlling the paths of the fish with every movement she made with her own body. How did she manage to manipulate movement like that?

  She looked up and saw me watching her. “Come in! This is awesome!”

  I shook my head no. It was getting harder and harder to be around her. It felt like any wrong move would crack the shell of something bigger, and I hated to admit how much this confused me. “Naw,” I lied. “Those fish always creep me out.”

  “Liam Martinez! You mean to tell me Mr. Universe is afraid of little school of fish?”

  For a moment, I wondered how she learned my matriarchal name. Then I realized she must have been combing through journals in my room. I shook off the feeling of invasion. It was fair for her to disregard my privacy. It evened the playing field a little.

  Before I could reply, she was gone. I rubbed the sleep sand from my eyes and almost wondered if I’d imagined her, but within the second it took to think the thought, there was a push from behind. I felt a brief tingle from where her fingertips had applied pressure, and it jolted through every inch of me before I landed face first into the water. I thrashed to reorient myself and find the surface, and I sputtered up a breath just as another splash fell in next to me. She surfaced and started laughing.

  In just a couple days she as getting good at the Bucket Hop. Rather than walk the halls of Geeta, she kept appearing out of thin air. Santiago joked at lunch yesterday that she was going to eventually get fat if she refused to walk, to which she replied by shoving mashed potatoes into her mouth. The way the two of them acted around each other made me miss Nobu because I saw so much of us in them.

  I moved my hands through the water and wondered if her Planck Activation Bracelet was even turned on or if she was doing Hopping on her own. I was about to ask her, but she cut the question off before it came out. “You should have seen your face! I didn’t know boys could squeal like stuck-pigs!”

  “I didn’t squeal.”

  “Dude. You. Squealed.” She propelled her hands in the water so she put more distance between us, and I caught the light in her eyes. They kept terrifying me because they were a cucumber green—not the peel of a cucumber, but the guts of it. Since the Change, the color kept shrinking in on itself, shifting between cucumber guts and celery like inefficient mood rings.

  Because of it, I found myself examining my own eyes in the mirror. They’d become strange shades of blue, especially next to the almond color dark on my cheeks, but this past week, it looked like turquoise was battling with the color grey. I couldn’t help but wonder if it had something to do with her presence.

  Her laughter shifted like it was constantly discovering new notes. It reminded me of soft bells learning how to dance in a rain storm, and for each breath she needed to push the sound out, a raspy gasp was barely audible. The laughter crunched up her eyes and pulled her lips into a smile over a mountain range of bright teeth. It made her face change in ways that shouldn’t have been possible. Light entered dark and shadows ran away, and her hair was everywhere: drifting in the water, sprouting into the air, curling around her ears, and trapping in the sunrise.

  I hadn’t heard her laugh like that in person, because it was a laugh she reserved for her friends.

  Feelings moved from one realm into another, and my breath caught in my throat. I surprised myself with my own laughter, which laced into the strings of hers before she dove underneath to play with the fish.

  I closed my eyes to the sun as it rose in my face. It was the soft warm of morning, and I plopped over onto my back and floated.

  Texi’d touched me. Briefly. But the world didn’t implode. She made me laugh, and the Vein didn’t collapse. Was I being too cautious? Was I reading too much into what I thought was my role in all of this?

  The water flooded my ear canals, and I focused on the sounds. I could hear every little fin movement as the fish created a giant, swishing, underwater symphony. Tiny little flutters like butterfly wings swirled around Texi’s feet as they moved back and forth in mini, kick-drum tidal-waves underneath the surface. It was her feet that struck me, over and over again with a tsunami of ripples.

  I hated whatever was happening inside of my chest. I kicked my feet, too. I wanted the kicking to pound whatever was going on out of me, but it only pounded it into me.

  Then there was something bigger. A tail going from side to side in large fluid movements. I righted myself and looked in its direction. I gasped, angry at what it meant. How could I have been so stupid? The schools of neon-fish always attracted otter-sharks.

  “Texi!” I yelled. Her head bobbed about thirty feet from me, and she faced the sun as it made its last push into the sky. It was a perfect orb, bright beyond bright, and it made her head a dark speck just above the surface. “Texi!” I yelled again, but she didn’t hear.

  I wondered if she’d turned down her hearing completely to swim in silence. That’d be the only reason she
couldn’t hear me.

  By the sound of the swishing, the otter-shark had picked up speed and was headed right towards her. If I swam to her, I wouldn’t make it in time.

  “Think, Liam. Think.” But I didn’t need to think. I needed to act. I closed my eyes, Bucket Hopped, and exploded out of the Nothing so that I was face to face with her in the water.

  She gave me a startled gasp that I ignored, and I wrapped her in my arms to Hop back to the boat. But before we entered the Nothing, I felt the fire in her skin—the explosive nature of Creation making every hair on my body stand on end. And when we went into the Nothing, I wasn’t alone. I felt her in my arms, bare skinned and slippery. Every atom that existed within us was aflame—like ice being dragged across every inch of flesh, and I shuddered at the painful pleasure of it all.

  Existence should not reside within the Nothing, but there we were. I buried my face into her neck, afraid that letting go of her would mean letting go of so much more, and when I tightened my arms around her, I felt her heart beating within her chest. There was a feeling of infinity within the Nothing, as well as the feeling of possibility.

  When we reappeared on the bow of the boat, I still couldn’t let her go. I pulled my face back and noticed that when she opened her eyes, they had shifted into the color of celery with cracked lines of lavender. I touched my forehead to hers and our breathing ran in rapid parallels, pulling out a simultaneous feeling of desire and repulsion. I wasn’t sure which feeling I felt towards her and which I felt towards me. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to rip her apart. And none of it made sense.

  There was a shiver of fresh air that hit us and chilled the water dripping from our bodies, and it jolted me back into reason.

  I had to let her go…

  “Um. Guys?” Santiago asked from the balcony of the second deck. “What was that?”

  Texi

  ‘On Her Innocence’ from The Eightieth Generation

  You say she’s guilty, but of what? Being born? Is it her fault that others manipulated how she was made? She couldn’t help her beginnings any more than you or I could.

  Consider this. The Manifesto says, ‘It is not the rhine that makes the fruit, therefore it is not the body that makes the human.’ So I ask you, what is it that makes us human? Sure, in some ways we all look similar, but there are so many biological differences among us that how is it possible to say we are all made the same? This girl simply has biological differences, but she still contains within her the possibilities of humanity.

  More importantly, she still contains within her innocence, and she has done nothing to indicate a destructive nature. To convict her of a crime that may or may not exist is heavy-handed and unjust, to let fear drive us into action is weakness, and to solidify theory as fact is unscientific.

  What’s done is done.

  The girl exists.

  I just hope she can forgive us when she discovers what we’ve done to her, for the time will come when she’ll learn the truths behind the lies we’ve told her.

  —Geronimo,

  —S-1, V-1.

  Chapter Thirty

  I opened my eyes and felt the weight of Liam’s forehead on mine. Each hot breath that landed on my cheeks burned currents of Energy through me, and when he finally opened his eyes to look at me, so many conflicting feelings collapsed into my heart.

  Liam’s eyes traipsed between cerulean and turquoise. They almost seemed to swirl the way mine could, but I didn’t think I could trust my vision. Nothing about what I was seeing or feeling made sense. His jaw set his lips in a steady embrace, and I almost reached up to touch them because I had a feeling there was a softness to his lips, even if they were pushed together in such a firm expression of anger. My senses began to return, and I heard every drop of water as it fell to the wooden floor of the deck and every rasp of breath that neither of us seemed to be able to catch.

  When Iago spoke from the balcony above, Liam dropped his grip on me. Then, Iago spoke again. It was the first time I understood what he was saying, and I tugged at my earlobes, willing my hearing to fall back into place.

  “Did y’all do that?” Iago asked. He was looking out into the water, and whatever he saw was making him tremble.

  I took a step back and tried to breathe. “Do what?” I managed to ask.

  “Texi,” Liam said. He leaned his back against the rail and glared at me as he gulped in air. “She almost got attacked by an otter-shark.” I stared at him as his eyebrows furrowed. I couldn’t decipher the reactions racing across his face. Then he lost it on me. “Never go swimming without all your senses ever again! I yelled for you! Do you have a death wish? Because if you do, let me know so we can quit wasting all this time on you!”

  The admonishment struck a different nerve as his face shifted from anger to what looked like hatred. Who was he to boss me around? “Get over yourself,” I said. “You have no right to—”

  “Seriously? Seriously? Are you really that stupid? Are you really that—”

  Iago interrupted. “Guys! Stop it! Look.” The confusion in his voice startled me enough to make me look up at him. He pointed out into the water, so I turned and ran to the railing next to Liam. We both sucked in scared breaths, and I gripped the railing with my fingernails.

  The ocean was afloat with millions of brilliant fish, belly-side up, swimming in their own death. Liam let out a whimper that transformed into an angry growl. Then something hit the other side of the deck, and I ran to look over the opposite rail.

  The “otter-shark.”

  It was about the size of a killer-whale, with the body of a shark and a hairless otter-shaped face. The face was huge, and the slack-jawed expression of death made its sharp teeth protrude out of its black lips.

  “That almost ate you!” Liam yelled. “Never close yourself off to any sense so completely unless you know it’s safe to do so!” He stalked back inside and slammed the sliding door behind him. The shivering glass noise rang in tiny vibrations against my ears. I wanted the glass to shatter like I wanted the world to shatter with me inside of it. I couldn’t pull my eyes from the beast, and I couldn’t care that Liam was mad. The only thing I could care about was the question repeating in my head: How could I cause that much death?

  I didn’t see how Iago got to me, but suddenly he was next to me saying, “It’s okay. You were afraid for your life.”

  But I knew it was something else. Before we Hopped, it was almost like Liam and I sucked up all the Energy and life from everything around us. I looked at my hands, flipping my palms up and down and stretching my fingers out. They looked like they always did. Slender and knobby at the same time, with young wrinkles cracking the skin. I couldn’t have done that much damage on my own! It wasn’t possible.

  “You’re safe now.” Iago laced his fingers into mine so that I had to stop stretching them in and out. He tried to calm me with the gesture, by showing my hands how to relax into his. The rumble of the engine fired up, and I shook along with the boat. “Liam’s just moving us before the sun starts baking all the dead fish. It won’t smell pleasant after a few hours,” Iago explained, but I didn’t hear.

  I replayed what happened over and over again in my head as the boat cut through the dying colors. I’d been blinded by the sun as it came up, and I swam with my eyes closed to it. It felt so good to not see, that I turned my hearing down so silence became the only thing I heard. Even the smell of things faded away, because I only wanted to feel how the liquid interacted with my skin. I felt every grain of salt in the water and every lick of movement by the fish. I felt the sun seep into my skin and transfer Energy into the world, and I stayed within the peace of it until eventually I didn’t feel anything at all. Iago had told me it was possible to turn down one sense in order to heighten another, but it turned out I could turn down more than one at a time. It was another freakish side effect that I kept to myself because I was thankful for it. I didn’t want anyone to dirty up a gift like that with words like mutation and abnormal.


  The truth was, turning down most of my senses was the closest I felt to the Nothing without having to enter it. With everything being so chaotic, I found myself craving the Nothing more often than not. In the Nothing, I didn’t have to think about missing Ringo, Papa, Lindsay, and Mrs. Ortiz. I didn’t have to think about how I’d never see Sully again or admit that the reality of his betrayal cracked my heart in ways that could never be explained. And, most of all, I didn’t have to think about all the secrets still being kept from me and all the new things I still had to learn to accept.

  Then feeling came back into my toes, and I felt a larger swishing in the near-distance. Then I felt arms wrap around me before we entered the Nothing. I was still without my other senses, so I couldn’t see. I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t smell. I could only feel arms and heartbeats and explosions. A deep and steady want filled my gut, and I needed to devour all the Energy that existed in the place it shouldn’t have existed at all. I couldn’t figure out how there was so much of it, nor could I figure out who held me in their arms. It could have been anyone who’d grabbed me, and I could have ended up anywhere. What if Sully’d found me? What if I’d been taken by a Shadow Boxer?

  When we reappeared, the arms solidified, and my body became itself again as my senses adjusted back into place. Whoever it was smelled like sea-salt and sunlight, and I kept my face buried in his chest, afraid of who I’d see when I stepped away. I hated the part of me who wanted it to be Sully. The way the muscles tightened around me made me feel safe, like nothing could get to me if I just stayed locked up in them. Sully used to make me feel that way, until all of a sudden, he didn’t.