I cried then. I cried like Dad did when I was in his house. I had known myself so much better by virtue of her being such a different creature from me. But the one time it meant the most, she understood.

  She was right. I had to come. Just like I had to know what that bit of metal was and what was in that room, and what it could mean.

  Who do I talk to now about the objects in God’s city? Do I want to inflict this on anyone else? Everyone here has a right to know about what I’ve found, but they could unravel too. Our little colony, huddled in the shadow of God’s city, built on lies and hopes, could be shattered.

  Or would it? Would it simply put the city into perspective? Would it make us study it more and keep one eye on the sky for the arrival of another Pathfinder? Would it help bring Suh down from her unique pedestal? Perhaps it would do some good.

  My hand is pressing too hard on my eyes and bursts of ghostly light splash across my private darkness. I’m thrown back to a night as a child when I learned that I could still try to look even with my eyes closed. The thought plunged me into a panic when it felt like I could never rest again; my eyes didn’t feel closed even when they were shut tight. I just couldn’t help trying to pierce my own darkness.

  Now I open them and watch a lone cloud, fearing I’ll never rest again, but for a different reason. I’ll never know who wore that suit. I could recover the pieces and see if any genetic material has been preserved, but even if I build a model of that person, I’ll never know what they loved or feared or hoped for. Perhaps the pilot didn’t die and then rot away, instead taking off the suit and abandoning it in one of the tunnels. Maybe he or she reached the top room too. Maybe . . .

  An urgent message arrives from Mack and I’m tossed back into the fear that something terrible has come about because of that fake seed. I watch the icon flash insistently, unable to summon the courage to open it. I know it has something to do with Sung-Soo. Something to do with the way he looked as Marco spoke. My body knows it; it knew it back then and drove me out of the city.

  Another icon begins to flash; over ten messages have arrived in the last minute. Then another. My stream is full of mentions of my name, but I don’t dare open it and read what they’re saying. I shut the notifications off, sit up and tuck my arm back into its sling as my heart feels like a ram trying to butt its way out of the cage formed by my ribs. I’m paralyzed by fear of what is happening back there. I imagine a fierce crowd baying for blood, having learned the seed is false and that I was the one who planted it.

  But if they know that, they have to know about Mack.

  Perhaps his urgent message is a call for help. A tight croak is squeezed through my throat as I realize I have to open it. He may need me.

  I can feel my pulse in my throat as I blink twice at the icon and the text floats across my vision. I have to read it twice to get the meaning through the thick fog of anxiety.

  Ren, you need to watch this. Sung-Soo is saying things about you and I don’t know what to believe.

  There’s a share link below and my chest burns as I’m unable to take another breath. My cheeks are burning and my lips tingling. I can’t handle this. I close the message box and curl into a ball, letting myself tip onto my side, holding my slinged arm tight against myself with the other.

  It has to be about my house. He threatened me and now he’s making good on his promise and I want to run. An urgent message from Kay arrives and my fear sucks in shame and guilt with it, like a black hole within my chest, pulling everything into itself. The fear and guilt are compressed as more images of people outside my house burst into my imagination, making a dense ball between my lungs, growing every second.

  The MyPhys software pops up. “Your health care provider is requesting access to your physical well-being files. Would you like to give permission?”

  I can’t speak. I tuck my head down until my chin is pressing against my chest.

  “Your health care provider will access your current well-being files in ten seconds if you do not respond.”

  I can’t breathe. My lungs are turning to stone inside me, my throat to iron, my skin to wet paper. I want to dissolve into the earth below me, to collapse into a pile of component parts, all the little pieces of my mosaic no longer held together.

  The voice counts down. I’m unable to stop it. When it reaches zero a dialog box pops up, showing the things Kay is looking up right now. My heart rate, my blood pressure, my oxygen saturation, and then lines and lines of other data fly up the screen. I recognize neurotransmitters and find my voice. “Stop it,” I yell. “MyPhys, stop access!”

  The connection is broken and I curse myself for not acting sooner.

  Another warning icon, just for a second it seems, and then I can hear Kay. It’s her privilege, as my doctor and as one of the colony’s emergency health care providers, to be able to speak to me via the chip without any need for permission to be established.

  “Ren, you’re having a panic attack. I want you to listen to my voice. You’re going to be okay.”

  She doesn’t know anything.

  “This will pass. All you need to do is focus on something nearby. You’re out in the grasses—find a cloud to watch; can you do that for me? I want you to look at the cloud and breathe in to the beat of three and then out again.”

  Even though I don’t want to, even though I can’t believe it will do any good, I look up and find a cloud that’s too rounded and generic to be imagined into the shape of anything else. I let her talk me down and my breathing eases.

  Right up until another message arrives from Mack, tagged “urgent” again.

  “I’m going to come out to you,” Kay says.

  “No.”

  “I want to help you back and make sure you’re okay. You can come to mine if you don’t want to go to the med center.”

  “No. I’ll be okay.”

  “Has Mack pinged you? Is that what set this off?”

  Her question confuses me briefly. She may have been with Mack and Sung-Soo. She may know too!

  Know what? I don’t even know what he’s said yet.

  “I’ll come back when I’m ready.” I say it without any idea when that will be, nor any desire to attempt to return.

  I expect an immediate reply but there isn’t one. Perhaps she’s ignoring me and is coming anyway. I struggle to my knees so that I can peer across the top of the grass back at the colony. That’s when my neural alarm sounds. Someone’s heading toward my house. The second bang triggers seconds later and I open the data on who it is, expecting Mack’s weight, or Sung-Soo’s.

  My stomach feels like it’s dropped into the soil when I see the numbers. At least a dozen people are outside my house.

  32

  I STAND, MY legs feeling like they’re going to collapse from under me at any moment. The panic within me shifts into something with purpose: stopping those people from entering my house. Instead of destroying me from the inside, it focuses my body and mind and I run, desperate to return and put myself between them and my door.

  But the shoulder pain caused by the sudden exertion is too much and I have to slow down to an uneven jog. It’s been hours since my last dose of painkillers and I’m feeling the extra movement I’ve been putting it through. The colony is farther away than I appreciated, slowly growing larger as I hurry toward it, wincing with each step. It feels like one of hundreds of nightmares I’ve had over the years in which I’m trying to get somewhere and things keep slowing me down. The despair yawns wide within me and I open the first message from Mack, hoping that if I arm myself with knowledge of what has happened in my absence, I’ll be able to handle it better once I arrive.

  I select the link and there’s a few minutes of footage recorded through his own LensCam by the look of it. Sung-Soo, Kay, Pasha and a handful of other people are there; Carmen too. Mack is one of the group of people clustered around Sung-Soo at the edge of the Dome. The music sounds muffled in the background, the LensCam software applying selective filters to the auditory data entering Mack’s chip so Sung-Soo’s voice can be heard more clearly.

  “—if I thought I could do something but I can’t. I’ve tried and she’s just so . . . broken. And I’ve been standing here at this party and seeing how much you all care for one another here and I know how much you care for Ren and it feels wrong to stay quiet about it. I know you’d want to help her. But she keeps it all hidden from you, so how can you help if you don’t know?”

  I stumble, but I don’t want to slow my pace.

  “How bad is it?” Carmen asks.

  “You can’t walk in. You have to crawl through a tunnel made of garbage. She doesn’t have a space to sleep. There’s trash everywhere.”

  “I don’t think this is something that should be discussed in a public place,” Mack says.

  “I didn’t want to tell anyone—I don’t want to break the trust she has in me—” Sung-Soo spreads his hands, the picture of the concerned friend, and I’m overwhelmed by a surge of hate-filled anger. “But I know I can’t help her and it’s going to kill her one day. It has to be public. Her problem is everyone’s problem here.”

  “Why?” I mutter at the grass.

  “It makes sense,” Kay says in the footage and she swings into view as Mack looks at her instead. Kay’s eyes are closed and her hands are pressed against her cheeks. When she opens her eyes again they are shining in a way that wrenches my heart. “She never let me into her house, even when we were so close.”

  “But if it’s as bad as this, how could we not know about it?” Mack asks.

  “She’s very clever,” Sung-Soo says. “And all of you are too polite to press her. You never even ask her anymore; you just leave her alone.”

  “We have to go there and help her,” Carmen says.

  “What about her privacy?” Mack asks.

  “If it’s as bad as Sung-Soo says, she’s ill,” Kay says. “We may have to force an intervention. It sounds like it’s part of the OCD spectrum. Dr. Lincoln knows much more about this than I do. I’ll contact him and I’ll check on Ren. Make sure she’s okay.”

  I close the recording as I reach the southern gate and veer toward my home. I open Mack’s second message, now several minutes old. This time it’s just one line.

  I’m trying to stop them getting into your house.

  The low dome of the house that is my sanctuary, my haven, comes into view and I can hear shouting. It’s Mack.

  “She has the right to her own space and what she does in there—”

  There’s the sound of scuffling and then grunts of effort as I round it to reach the front door, panting and sweating. I arrive as Sung-Soo and Nick are wrenching the door open between them, the sensor pad at the side of the door smashed.

  Kay is there with Dr. Lincoln, having an intense discussion that pauses as the door opens. Pasha is there, Carmen, Mack and half a dozen other faces I can’t bring myself to look at.

  They are all staring into my house. Hands cover mouths and noses, and tiny moans of disgust and distress slip through them. Carmen’s eyes are wide with horror and blatant excitement.

  I look at Kay, dreading what I’ll see, but she’s not looking at the house. She’s looking at me. She stretches her hands toward me. I can’t see any disgust, only . . . What is that? I don’t—

  “Ren . . . Ren, it’s all going to be okay,” she says and I can’t face her a moment longer.

  I look away and stumble a few steps closer to my house, feeling as naked as if they’d torn the clothes off my body. Their words and sounds and movements fade into an awful backdrop as I stare at the sensor pad. They didn’t have to do that. They could have just bypassed the lock through the network. Why be so violent?

  “Ren—” Sung-Soo steps toward me and I twist away to keep air between us. I reach the edge of the doorway, aware of pairs of eyes flitting between the contents within and me. The contents within me. Me.

  “I had to tell them,” Sung-Soo says and comes toward me again.

  “Don’t fucking touch me!” I scream at him and everyone draws in a breath sharply enough to be heard.

  “You need help,” Sung-Soo says. “I can’t help you. I tried but—” He waves a hand toward the stuff. “I couldn’t get through to you.”

  “Just don’t—” I can’t finish the sentence. There are too many words that need to fit into that space.

  Dr. Lincoln takes a step forward. “Renata, you’re suffering from a mental illness. I—we—can help you, but the first step is going to be the hardest for you. I understand that.”

  “You don’t understand anything! You bastards! You can’t . . . You don’t have the right to break my door and—”

  “That’s my picture frame!” Nick’s voice is like a sword through me. He stomps over from the gathering crowd and pulls it from the top of the tunnel. “I put this in my chute. It’s cracked. What is it doing here?”

  I reach for it but he steps back, holding it close to his chest as if reclaiming ownership. But it’s mine now. “I was going to fix it.”

  “It isn’t yours to fix.”

  “You didn’t want it anymore!”

  Another movement in the crowd. “That’s my comb!”

  “That’s the cup I threw out a couple of months ago!”

  “Shit—that’s the folder I used to keep my notes in!”

  A surge of people rush forward, jostling to reclaim discarded things, made valuable once more by the fact that I own them now. I try to push Nick away as he starts to poke about looking for more of his ex-belongings, and he shoves me aside.

  “This all needs to be cleared out,” he says. “We need to just pull it all out and get this place sorted!” He looks at Sung-Soo, ignoring my distress. “Is it like this farther in?”

  Sung-Soo nods. “Every room. It’s been going on for years. You can hardly move in there.”

  There are five of them now, three pulling things from the pile to pass back to the others, who stack them outside. The tunnel collapses and I cry out, now trapped outside my home. I make another attempt to pull Nick away from my stuff but hands grab my shoulders and pull me back.

  I’m spun around and now I’m facing Mack, who has been silent up until now. He’s terribly pale beneath the black of his beard and I can feel his hands shaking as they hold me in front of him. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  There’s no answer to that. I try to twist free, knowing they’re going to break my things and take those objects back even though it’s wrong. But Mack holds me tight and pulls me farther away. “Why didn’t you tell me!” It’s almost a shout. There are tears in his eyes.

  Why? I’m the one this is happening to!

  “This isn’t the way to handle this!” Dr. Lincoln’s reedy voice calls out above the rabble, but nobody stops. I can hear comments filled with horror and loathing, the sounds of things falling and crunching underfoot, the din of my life being ripped open. “Renata needs to be a part of this process if we’re going to help her!”

  “We are helping her.” That was Carmen. “How can she get better with a house full of trash?”

  “No, you don’t understand.”

  The argument fades into the background when I see a tear roll down Mack’s cheek. I have never seen him cry. Not even after Planetfall. But there it is, sinking into the hair of his beard, another following it.

  “I had no idea,” he says, his voice strained. “I thought you just liked your privacy. I had no idea.”

  I look down at the buttons of his shirt, studying the pale plastic rather than his eyes. They’re easier to stare at; they have nothing to say.

  And then I’m outside of myself, detached from the storm of emotional shit raging through my body. There is an unspeakable calm. It’s done now. They know. Sung-Soo no longer has any power over me. I don’t have to be afraid of how bad the revelation of this secret life will be because it’s happening now. I know that beast. I don’t feel anything at all.

  “Oh God, what’s this?”

  Nick’s question pulls me back into my body like it’s at the other end of a taut elastic band. I manage to turn to see him holding a cloth with blood on it, so old and dried out it’s nothing more than a brown stain.

  “I cut my hand. A while ago.”

  “But why did you keep it?”

  “I must insist!” Now Dr. Lincoln is putting himself between them and my house, even taking a shoe from Carmen’s hands and putting it back over the threshold. “Please stop and listen to me. This is already getting out of hand. This is deeply traumatic for Renata and I know you want to help, but the most important person in this process is her, not all of you.”

  I can’t believe he’s standing up for me. I can’t believe I need him—or anyone else—to stand up for me. Who are these people tearing out my belongings, violating me and judging me? Have I really lived alongside them all these years? Did I really travel millions of miles with them, build their houses and construct the foundations of their colony?

  “There’s no ‘process’ here,” I say. “I don’t want your help. It’s none of your business.”

  “But the Pathfinder said there was still work to be done!” Carmen is flushed too, like she’s excited. Like she’s enjoying this. “She spoke through Marco and this is what she meant! Who found out? Sung-Soo! He came here and found this . . . this . . . canker and exposed it and we have to act now! She meant this is the work—not the experiments, not the other distractions—it’s this! That’s what Marco meant!”

  “Bullshit!” I shout back. “That was nothing but—”

  Mack pulls me back around and starts manhandling me away from them. “You need a time-out,” he says, loud enough for everyone else to hear. “Think about what you’re saying,” he hisses into my ear.

  “I’m not going to let that stupid, crazy woman convince everyone that doing this to me is God’s work! She’s just bored and if they knew—”

  “Ren!” He’s steered me over the colony boundary and into the grasses, at a direction that rapidly puts the entrance to my house out of sight. “Think about what you’re saying!”