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  I didn’t want to open my eyes, but when I did, Liam’s face blurred into focus and my skin tingled in soft, secret ways. There was something kind and wanting in his eyes, and I’d never seen anyone look at me like that before—not even Sully when he leaned in to kiss me that night. I wanted to stretch out Liam’s look so it lasted forever, but Iago’s voice shook me out of it. The rest of the world adjusted back into reality, and Liam’s face darkened into shades of angry hatred before I came face to face with all the destruction I’d caused.

  The aftermath of what I’d done was too much to accept, but I made myself remember the drifting, dead otter-shark and the millions of colors I’d drained out of existence.

  “What did you see?” I asked Iago and pulled my hands out of his.

  “There was a bright flash about thirty feet from the boat, then the two of you Hopped onto the bow.” Iago reached over to pull a towel from one of the cabinets and wrapped it around my shoulders. “That otter-shark was insane. You were just trying to protect yourself, Texi, but this is an example of how much we still don’t know about you. I know the past few days, you’ve gotten tired of me reminding you how cautious you need to be, but this should show you we have reasons to be worried.”

  Something didn’t make sense about the conclusions he was drawing. What had happened went beyond trying to protect myself. I had the answer right at the tip of my tongue, but it wouldn’t solidify into thoughts and words. I stared out at the water, feeling my legs shake underneath the weight I put on them until the boat settled into a new spot. The scenery was the same as this morning except for the lack of dead sea creatures.

  “Let’s go somewhere,” Iago said as he twisted my wrist to pull up the screen from my bracelet.

  “Now’s not the time.”

  “You don’t have much of a choice on this one,” he said as he entered the coordinates and pressed the button.

  I was afraid to enter the Nothing again, because entering it in Liam’s arms reminded me there were things I didn’t understand about it. For the first time, imagining dissolving into it was terrifying rather than freeing. But when Iago pushed the button, the Nothing was as it always was. Peaceful and empty beyond empty. Though Iago held my hand, the feeling of his skin against mine did not exist, and I was truly and infinitely alone.

  When we completed the Jump, we stood on a ledge that made me gasp. “What is this?”

  “The nickname on record for this Vein is Prickly. We are technically on S-840, V-1200-L/34234, Stag.” It was an attempt to keep teaching me about coordinates, but I couldn’t concentrate on something as mundane as numbers. This lack of concentration didn’t stop Iago from continuing his explanation. “The Knowing will take a moment to equalize here, because we didn’t do an Interim Jump to a Strand first. You might feel dizzy or nauseous for a minute, but I think you can handle it.”

  I waited for the dizzy feeling he spoke of to overtake me, but nothing happened. I noticed that Iago’s face held traces of pale like his body was adjusting to new air, but I was strangely, perfectly fine. Maybe I didn’t need to adjust like the others. It was probably yet another perk of being some type of mutant. I made another mental note to come up with some better way to describe myself besides “mutant.” Continuing to think of myself as one was bound to give me a complex. Then I put my fingers on my wrist to find the Culture Pulse.

  Thump-thump. Thump-tha-thump. Thump-thump.

  It had a different feel from the Vein we were on to learn Culture Pulses and from the water-logged planet I’d spent the last week on. Despite the fact that there were no signs of anyone around for miles, life was everywhere here. Then the zip-line of time ripped me into understanding, and I witnessed the slow and steady starvation of an entire people. I didn’t cry this time. Instead, I withdrew my fingers from my wrist and tried to harden my heart to it. I’d had enough doom and gloom for the day, and I was going to have to get used to the pain of Culture Pulses sooner than later.

  When Iago spoke again, his face was no longer clammy. “When I first learned to Jump, I used to come here when I needed to clear my head. I like that this spot is approximately where Texas is back home. The entire west here is covered in desert until the point where Austin should start. The civilization on this continent exists up where our Canada is, and the Austin skyline should be there.” He pointed up, but where the skyscrapers should have been, there was nothing scraping the sky except gigantic cacti. It was a cactus forest, and prickled, green plates lived in glops of colonies, building up to the size of trees. There were giant boulders here and there to break it up—hills that had been broken down by wind and time. They made perfect viewpoints to see that the prickly pears stretched out as much as they stretched in with pears that hung like bright, red apples.

  “There’s a beauty in dying,” Iago said. “I know it’s hard to understand, but views like this couldn’t exist if Veins weren’t Stagnating. Plus, when a Vein begins Stagnation, it only means that the Multiverse is redirecting its Energy elsewhere, towards a more promising Path. We have to believe there’s hope in that because it means there’s a Path to find.”

  I examined his face. There was so much belief written there that it made me feel guilty for feeling even an ounce of despair or distrust. It was just that there was something wasteful to me about accepting a Vein’s death so easily. Why discount so many human lives just because they were dying? It felt like going into a nursing home and unplugging anyone past the age of sixty, because, hey, they’re going to die anyways. It didn’t add up, even though I felt the truth of what Iago said so deeply in my heart that it hurt in too many ways to count.

  “Go ahead, take the Culture Pulse,” Iago said. He put his hand over his heart. “Feel it.”

  “I already did.”

  An expression of pride washed over him. “You’re already a pro at it.” He reached out and ruffled my curls like he did when we were kids, but it wasn’t comforting in the way he wanted it to be.

  I could feel the heavy-handed cruelty of destiny, and the unfairness of it exploded within me.

  Iago read this in my expression and tried again. “Look, Texi. There’s a bright side, okay? At least you’ll get to see things like this for the rest of your life!”

  There was something true in that. Even though the universe was careening into Stagnation, the colors grew to their most vibrant and the prickly pears smelled beyond the limits of floral. What I witnessed was its own form of beauty, even if I knew it was only this beautiful because it was dying.

  He looked back out at the cactus forest. “Don’t let what happened this morning haunt you. You can’t change the past, and the boat is already on a dead Vein. There was no large harm done with your mistake. Learn from it? Yes, but don’t dwell on it. That’ll get you nowhere.”

  I sat down on the hard limestone ledge and let my feet swing out in the air. Iago sat down next to me, and it brought me back to when we were kids sitting on Papa’s tailgate near a campfire, kicking our tiny feet in tiny boots and stuffing our faces with hot, gooey s’mores.

  I had to trust in someone to be right. Why not Iago?

  We sat there in silence for a few hours, and Iago gave me time to gather my thoughts. He was good about things like that, and I wondered where he learned to be so patient. When we were little, he was never patient. He always wanted to be up and moving on to the next adventure.

  Yet when all was said and done, when I needed to be calmed, he knew just how to do it.

  He knew me.

  But with everything that had happened, I finally had the acute understanding that just because he knew me, it didn’t mean I knew him.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The forums were layered with news upon news and histories upon histories. My entire existence had been publicly torn apart in the Humanitarian Project Trails before I’d even learned to talk. There were so many sides to take that not even I knew how to feel about myself.

  I read the next line of the article out loud, because my
eyes didn’t want to understand what it was reading. The alphabet was similar to the one back home, and my brain translated the text just as it did the languages. This translation was so fluid that I had to really look for what the difference was between the two. Finally I noticed slight variations in how the vowels were written and the one missing letter in the alphabet.

  The Gaian alphabet lacked any type of letter Z.

  It was such a funny letter to do away with!

  I missed alphabets that were normal. Heck, what I really missed was home, but home had become a series of letters and numbers that indicated a dying universe. Iago told me to call home “Geronimo.” “It’s normal to nickname universes,” he’d explained. “Geronimo is what I’ve always called ours, and no matter what comes next, that is where you are from—sort of.”

  But I wasn’t from Geronimo. I was from a Gaian lab.

  “These are not children. They are failed experiments that are dangerous and therefore must be destroyed.” The words were heavy metal on my tongue as I reread the transcript of the speech I’d just watched. That second day, Iago had told me not to question my humanity too much, but all these videos and articles made me do nothing but question it. Perhaps I wasn’t an alien, but was I even human?

  I closed the screen and watched it disintegrate back into the bracelet.

  “It’s just another thing to adjust to,” I whispered to myself and got up. There was a little cove on the top deck where the gardens were, and I spent the day there combing through the news feeds Liam had directed me towards. I was growing tired of sifting through the differing extremes in opinion, and I needed to do anything else.

  Liam said his friend, Nobu, used to love taking care of the gardens, and doing “garden maintenance.” It looked like the gardens were feeling the week of this boy’s absence because the weeds were peeking their green heads out of tiny crevices of the soil. There was something so normal about plucking them from where they grew and tossing them over my shoulder, and it brought me back to the hours we spent in Papa’s garden. He’d brought back cow patties from the ranch to flip into the compost, and I remembered the smell of decay as he turned shovelfuls from the bottom to the top. I remembered Ringo showing me the difference between a carrot top and a weed, and the way his hands always seemed too big for such a little job.

  I should have been at peace here, in the garden, but not even the blooming flowers and swaying rows of corn calmed me. After what happened in the water yesterday and reading about all the conflict my very existence caused an entire population, I didn’t know what to think of myself.

  My eyes traced the way cucumber vines looped in on themselves and the way tomato plants were taller than tomato plants should be. The sun was setting over the horizon, and I waited for the stars to fight their way into the sky like they did every night. As the days on Geeta passed, there had only been one cloudy night that prevented me from seeing the expanse of sky, but there hadn’t been any rain. It made me worry that the plants were feeling the pains of thirst. I saw an orange hose coiled neatly around a wheel, and pulled it out. I wouldn’t let this Nobu dude’s plants die on my watch.

  What plants needed was simple.

  What I needed was not.

  I kept thinking about the two types of reactions I could have: I could bury my head in the sands of pity or I could learn to live with my situation. I’d already made an agreement with myself to be adaptable, but where the truth and lies collided, I couldn’t tell one apart from the other. It kept preventing me from moving forward, even though I knew there was no going back.

  I took a deep breath and smelled every particle of salt in the air. Why was it that I didn’t feel the urge to save this universe the way I did on other Veins? The Culture Pulse terrified me. The populated universes were so different from Geeta, where no one existed but us. In other universes? People were alive, and we left them on their course towards death like it was a normal day’s work. Iago said not to do anything to help, but I wanted to. Something in the way Liam looked at me that night told me he wanted to as well. Maybe Iago was wrong. Even if the only thing I could have given that Vein was time, maybe that’s all anyone ever needs to figure out how to fix things. Lord knows I could have used more time at home. “But sometimes home don’t last forever,” I whispered Ringo’s warning to the tomatoes. Was he trying to tell me something that day? He knew things were about to change for me in big, big ways. Why couldn’t he have just told me? Prepared me?

  I closed my eyes and felt the tug of color underneath my lids. I could Splice in Spain? I created four different universes without any effort on my part. Maybe I could do that here too. I pushed out choices from my skull, but they only bounced around an empty expanse of thought. I squeezed my eyes and willed another universe into place, but where I stood felt as Stagnant as before.

  Why could I do it in Spain, but not here?

  “Understand before you believe,” I whispered to the cucumbers as I sprinkled them with water. The dark soil absorbed the liquid so that the dry became spongy.

  I didn’t know what to believe about myself, so I needed to stop thinking there was only one way to see myself. I needed more information first, and all this talk about the dangers I posed was only fuel to an already-consuming fire. I had to remember who I was. Texi Nicholson. There was nothing special about me a little over a week ago, and there didn’t need to be anything special about me now. Now I needed to recognize that there was great potential in who I could become. I couldn’t explain it, but I felt a choice looming in front of me. One that would either set me free or trap me forever.

  No one seemed to believe me when I said I knew how to stop myself from destroying a Vein when I Spliced. It was just that ever since I did it in Spain, knowing how to control it made sense. Like breathing and blinking are involuntary until you think about it and force a breath to hold or an eye to wink, I knew I could hold in the urge to Splice. I also knew when it would help more than harm to activate a parallel universe into existence.

  What should I trust? My instinct? Or their fear? But after what happened this morning, could I blame them for being afraid?

  I wandered through the corn, and they grazed the sky just above my head in five stout rows. They were heavy-eared and ready as I walked between them with the hose.

  Maybe their thirst was all in my head. Maybe there were a lot of things all in my head lately, like the way Liam looked at me after he saved me from the otter-shark or the way his eyes were exploding into a million shades of blue. Just as I thought about how his lips looked soft and firm all at once, another obscure thought occurred to me that made me release the nozzle on the sprayer. There were probably technologies at work on Geeta that I didn’t understand, because this garden was too expansive for one person to care for alone. Liam said something about garden maintenance, so maybe they had automatic gardening technology. There were probably sprinklers, and watering the plants was probably a stupid waste of time.

  I began to wind the hose on my arm, but something froze me from stepping out of the corn. It was a beautiful voice, though it was one I’d never heard before. It was like silver liquid melting into puddles in my ear, even though it was a simplistic word like, “Hey.”

  “You’re late.” That voice I did know. Who was Iago meeting?

  “We don’t have much time. We are on the heels of the Sullivan boy. We’ve already contacted the Elders who have summited a complaint to the Gaian Order.”

  Iago grunted. “Paperwork. Like that’s really gonna help. He tried to strangle her, Nobu.”

  Nobu. The name flittered through my memory. Liam’s friend. I kept trying to get Liam to open up about his life on the boat, but he went beyond the definition of reserved when it came to me. I don’t even think I’ve ever seen him smile since that first night until this morning. He had one of those dramatic smiles—the kind that transformed the entire face into something beautiful and real. All week long, he’d kept it to himself, though he could beat me in any contest
involving who was the biggest smart-ass.

  “It’s something. It’s an admission that the Shadow Boxers have overstepped the will of the Order once again in attempting to terminate the subject.”

  I chewed on the inside of my cheek. This new boy was starting to piss me off. I’d just spent the entire day reading about the subject, but hearing someone actually refer to me like a lab rat made me angry in ways I didn’t know existed.

  “Texi. Her name is Texi,” Iago said.

  “Keep your objectivity, Santiago.”

  “Oh, it’s kept all right. Did you reevaluate the Veins she Spliced?”

  There was a drip, drip, drip from the hose’s sprinkler, and each drop of water landed and expanded into a mini puddle under the sheath of corn leaves blocking me from their view. I stilled myself, and modified my breathing so that I needed less and less air. They were standing where I’d been sitting all day watching vid feeds and reading articles, and something told me to stay hidden from view. They were talking about things without putting on the filters Iago and Liam used when explaining things to me. I was tired of the slow and steady approach in terms of answers. This conversation was real, and I somehow justified the idea that it belonged to me.

  “You were right in your theory. She only bought it time, but she can’t sustain it. More is needed to go beyond the initial burst of Energy,” Nobu answered.

  “But, it’s official? She Created? How?”

  “Theories are all I have, but I think she used the Collective Energy to power herself up, then used the Energy to replicate more.” Nobu laughed. “The good news? She did nothing to harm the Veins from what we can tell. It was almost like she gave it a Botox injection to spruce it up a bit. However, the Order is all ruffled up over it. You need to be more careful.”

  “You act like I had a choice.”