I put everything back as close to how I found it as I can manage. A notification flashes that the meeting is about to begin, and thanks to Mack’s “critical” tag I’m forced to actively notify the network that I won’t be present. It’s like he’s forgotten everything about netiquette in the last hour. I don’t shut it out completely though, mindful that he wanted me to keep an eye on things. We both know he’s on his own really. But I find myself keeping the stream open and minimalized, my own settings watching for mentions of my name by default. I know most of the questions will be about what happened this morning and then the rest are relatively predictable: Can we be sure he’s the only survivor? Why didn’t we know they were there? I want to hear Mack’s response to that one when it comes up, so I add that to the session alert parameters.

  The pack has left a dark smudge on my trousers. I stand, putting it back on the bed, smooth out the divot I left and then brush the dirt off my clothes. Beneath the ambient guilt of going through Sung-Soo’s things is an uneasiness, like the pack’s contents have given me emotional indigestion.

  Something is missing. He spoke of carving and I saw a small knife that looked like it could be used for whittling (is that what they used to call it?), but no carvings, not even small ones. I shake my head. Why would he carry anything like that? It would weigh him down and he was busy surviving. But that bit of mental grit doesn’t disappear.

  He wouldn’t have had time to sit and carve trinkets while traveling, but before he would have. Did he really have nothing he wanted to keep after hours of crafting before he set out to find us? Before—yes, that’s it—there is nothing in that pack from his life before. Nothing of his parents, of the others who survived at least some of the years he’s been alive.

  But he wouldn’t want to carry it over a thousand kilometers. I tell myself that other people aren’t as sentimental as I am. He didn’t have the luxury of keepsakes. Every gram carried had to help him survive. He’s lost his people and then been forced to leave everything behind.

  I couldn’t have done that. I would have to take a lock of hair at least. But perhaps he didn’t even have that. A pebble, then, a pebble from the place he was born, something to root him.

  When I had to pack before we left Earth it was a thousand tiny agonies strung together. I can still see the empty metal box in front of me, only half a cubic meter in volume.

  “That’s all we get?” I put a hand on Mack’s shoulder, stopping him from leaving.

  “It’s all we get. Even Suh.”

  I suspected he would sneak on an extra one for himself and he saw that in my frown. “It’s all been worked out, Ren. No exceptions. Not even Nick can take more than that.”

  “He tried, then?”

  Mack laughed. “Of course he did. Offered two million per locker if he could take more. He couldn’t understand it wasn’t like excess baggage or his country’s government. You got an upgrade, didn’t you?” He tapped the side of his head and I nodded.

  I’d got a faster chip, a better lens and as big a personal server and cloud storage space as I could afford. All my photos, films and music were there already.

  “Well, then.” He shrugged. “You can print everything else you need once we’re on the ship.”

  I looked around my room at the pictures my mother had painted, the antique microscope my grandfather had left me and the hand-stitched embroidery lovingly crafted by my grandmother. The shells collected at the beach on the day I first felt my baby move inside me. The casts of her feet and hands when she was only a week old, her first pictures, the three candles from her last birthday cake and her ashes. My father’s notebook, given to me at my graduation, in which he had handwritten letters to me throughout my life. Every single one made me cry, whether it was about the day I took my first steps or the first time I built my own printer. He always had the foresight to plan ahead for the most beautiful things. That was why it was so hard for him. He didn’t see it coming. He couldn’t plan ahead for losing me that way.

  How could I choose which of these to take and which to leave behind? How could I know which of these threads, weaving me into my past and my family, could be cut without unraveling the deepest parts of me?

  Mack seemed to notice the things filling the room for the first time. His gaze rested on the castings, on the tiny bronze toes and fingers. “I’ll have some room left in mine, I think. I’ll be happy to take something if you want.” It was the first time I saw something other than the Ringmaster in him. It was the first time I understood why Suh looked at him the way she did.

  I should have gone to the meeting and supported him properly. I check on his stream and it’s identical to the meeting one. He’s fielding questions, being the perfect mix of reassuring and informative.

  I’m here if you need me. My private message is met with a smiley.

  I find myself staring at the pack again. Sung-Soo may not need anything to make him feel rooted. Perhaps he’s more enlightened than I am. Perhaps he’s always looking ahead, eyes on the horizon.

  There’s no map.

  That’s the other thing missing. How could he have made that trip without one? Quite aside from the sheer distance covered, there would have been obstacles that could have thrown him off course if he was using simple navigation techniques.

  Perhaps he’s chipped. Perhaps they found a way to do it. I go back into the living room and kneel in front of him. He hasn’t moved. There’s a speck of dried shake on his chin and his eyes are still beneath the lids in his dreamless sleep.

  It takes me a minute or so of reaching toward his scalp and then pulling back before I can bring myself to run my fingertips through his hair and feel the skin behind his ears. The violation makes me shiver but I am compelled to feel for myself. I should wait until we do a full scan.

  There’s no sign of anything and my attention turns to his wrists. Nothing is strapped to them and then before I realize what I’m doing I’m patting down the pockets in the rest of his clothing.

  I snatch my hands away. What am I doing? Then I see a thong of leather tied around his neck, tucked beneath his top. I pull on it, whispering an apology, and a carved pendant the size of my thumb is revealed. It’s a tree, artful, beautiful, one of the native species that remind us of oaks. There’s even a little creature realized in its branches with just enough nicks and chips out of the shape to give it large-eyed character. The leather is threaded between two branches.

  I don’t know what it’s carved from. It looks and feels a little like soapstone, with an iridescence that reminds me of the inside of a paua shell I had to leave behind on Earth, given to me by the father of my child. Purples, blues and indigo swirl through it. I wish it were mine.

  Reverentially I ease the pendant back behind the fabric and drop it softly onto his chest. He did take something with him.

  A gentle beep from the health kit pulls me away. The light is now green and I download the genome to my server rather than the colony one. I want to know first.

  I run the quickest, dirtiest analysis, thinking that I’ll get myself a drink while the program chugs away and then drill down into the data once the meeting’s over. I don’t reach the kitchen. The first results flash up a notification that stops me midstride. The genome is contaminated and the program recommends immediate quarantine. When I query why, the response makes me shake: Verify sample taken from Homo sapiens subject.

  I’m still standing there, one foot in the air, wondering what the hell that could mean when the software monitoring my stream pings that the question I was interested in has been asked by Nick. He’s there in person, being on the council, so I open the full feed and see the Dome’s interior with practically every colonist in the central amphitheater. It’s big enough to seat everyone, with rings of soft mossed seating running up the slopes. I have the choice of several cam locations, rigged as it is to be recorded and broadcast for all sorts of entertainment as well as the meetings.

  I pick the cam closest to Mack, wanting to see what he does. So many faces looking at him expectantly. I was right not to go. I would have been freaking out by now.

  “Because I thought you used Atlas to scan for them,” Nick continues.

  “I did,” Mack replies. “The same bank of sensors and camera equipment we used to locate God’s city. As many of you know, we looked for them for weeks, taking shifts to watch for any movements or hints they might have survived, but there was nothing.”

  “Were you looking in the right place?” a man calls from the back, out of shot.

  “Of course we bloody were,” Nabiha retorts. “I was the one who found the crashed pods. We all saw the pictures that Atlas took of them. And before anyone asks, we know there’s nothing wrong with Atlas’s array because I tested it only last week.”

  “Sung-Soo himself has told us there are no other survivors and he implied a nomadic lifestyle, which could account for why we lost them. But the most important thing to focus on now is the man recovering in my house. Does anyone have any objections to his being welcomed into our community?”

  I shut down the live feed, seeing Mack’s living room properly again and the health kit’s green light. I can’t tell him anything now, not while he’s there in front of them all.

  I sit down so I can focus on my v-display without risk of tripping over something. I have a tendency to do that when I get engrossed. I open the analysis program and confirm the source of sample is Homo sapiens, male, approximately twenty-two years old. I then call up the data that prompted it to suggest Sung-Soo is anything other than that.

  When I drill down, I recognize some of the key markers in the DNA as indigenous. Stupidly, I look back at Sung-Soo, at his fingers and toes almost black with dirt. He’s human. He’s Suh’s grandson. I run a cross-match against her stored genome data and that of his parents, just to be certain, and there’s ample evidence that’s the case. I’m shocked by the identity of his mother. Lois and Hak-Kun? They never got along. Perhaps the trauma brought them closer together.

  But there’s something else’s DNA in him too, and enough of it to trigger the program’s warning. I cross-match the alien DNA with our growing database and the closest thing it matches to is an organism similar to a tapeworm. It makes my stomach flip with worry.

  The full medical scan is the only thing—short of my stripping him off, which even I won’t do without his permission—that will show if anything is physically amiss. I want to do a full analysis of his secondary genome too. I have to wait for Mack to come back, or wake Sung-Soo early and take him there himself. He should probably eat something soon anyway.

  I check the network for the locations of the colonists and it’s obviously the best time to take him to the medical pod. Everyone’s either in the Dome or in their homes, watching the feed. I’m surprised there’s no one camped outside waiting for the first glimpse of him, but I think Mack’s open approach is helping demystify it all.

  I print a stimulant that will counteract the sedative. As gently as I can, I pull down his lower lip and dab the paste on to the moist skin near his gums. Within a minute his eyes are opening and he stretches. The first thing he notices are his missing shoes and the new footstool.

  “You fell asleep.”

  “I needed it, I think,” he replies. “Where’s Mack?”

  “Telling everyone else about you. How do you feel?”

  “Hungry.” He looks around the room. “Where are my things?”

  “I’ll get them for you.”

  I retrieve the pack and check the stream. There are no objections and they’ve already moved on to making plans for building him a house, even preparing a chip for him, should he want one.

  When I give him his pack, he rummages inside and pulls out the petri dish containing the nuts. He chucks a couple into his mouth and holds out the rest toward me.

  I watch him chew, swallow and then frown as he realizes I’m confused. “They’re good,” he says, popping another into his mouth.

  “We can’t eat them.”

  “Who can’t? Why not?”

  “Humans,” I say and then realize how terrible that sounds. “I mean . . . people here, in the colony, can’t eat those. It makes us ill.”

  He stares down at the nuts. “You sure it’s the same ones?”

  When I nod, he shrugs, unconcerned. “More for me, then.”

  6

  BY THE TIME I’ve got Sung-Soo to the medical center, Kay is ready and waiting with everything fired up and ready to go. She’s been following the stream from her lab, thankfully; otherwise her leaving the meeting at the Dome after my call would have sent the gossip dogs loose among us.

  Kay has one of the best smiles on the colony, a mixture of dimples and the promise of a fantastic sense of humor. Even after all the years since we had our fling, I can still remember the feel of her body against mine and the way she blew raspberries on my stomach whenever I tried to leave her bed. Her skin is slightly lighter than my father’s was, her hair a wild afro explosion pulled back into a tight ponytail now that she’s on duty. She doesn’t hide her delight when meeting Sung-Soo and shakes his hand warmly with both of hers. That smile has a predictable effect upon him and I see him relax in moments. That’s why I took him to her instead of Dr. Lincoln.

  “You look like your grandmother,” she says to him as she leads him over to a chair. “Did Ren tell you that?”

  Sung-Soo shakes his head. Once seated he looks around the room at the minimalist equipment and the three empty beds. His gaze lingers over some of the covered trays next to one of them, no doubt the swabs and other things Kay will use in the tests.

  “No need to be nervous,” Kay says, sitting opposite him. “All I’m going to do is take a few samples from you so we can map your secondary genome and take a look inside you to make sure everything looks tickety-boo.”

  Sung-Soo’s hands slap over his stomach protectively. “Inside me?”

  Kay’s glance at me reveals her brief discomfort. She’s realizing just how divorced his life has been from ours. “I don’t need to do anything invasive. There’s a scanner, over there. You’ll just lie down and relax; you’ll feel a slight tingling in your skin, that’s all.”

  He nods and after a beat says, “Secondary genome? I thought Ren already did all that genetic stuff.”

  “I’ll take swabs from your skin, inside your mouth, and a stool and urine sample.” Kay’s voice is light and pitched exactly right to put him at ease. “From those, I’ll be able to identify your microbiome—the bacteria that lives in and on you. We all have it—in fact that bacteria keeps us healthy—we just think yours will be different from ours because you grew up somewhere else.”

  I’ve already sent the first findings to her and told her about the nuts, so she must be desperate to get started. She’s hiding it well though. Lincoln would have had him swabbed by now, not giving a shit about putting the boy at ease. After a brief stab of paranoia I check on his location and he’s at the Dome. I can’t imagine the meeting lasting much longer and wonder if he’ll already know that I’ve brought Sung-Soo to the other doctor. I’m not looking forward to the next time I see him.

  “Will you stay, Ren?” Sung-Soo asks and I nod.

  “Of course.”

  Another look from Kay. She can see he trusts me. She doesn’t know how little I deserve that. I pull over another chair so I don’t have to hide that from my face.

  She takes the swabs first and the only time Sung-Soo will let me out of his sight is when he has to go to the bathroom with a sample cup and reddening cheeks. Once the samples are loaded for processing and the extraction started, Kay has Sung-Soo lie down to start the scan.

  “Does everything look okay?” he asks. “Where can I see my insides?”

  “Try to keep still,” Kay replies and returns her attention to the scan.

  When Sung-Soo looks to me, I smile. “Only Dr. Reed can see the scan. It’s supposed to be that way. Anything to do with your health remains confidential between the doctor and you.”

  If he were chipped, Kay could share what she sees overlaid across his body, if she considered it a risk worth taking. There have been times when patients have demanded to have the scan’s results shared to their vision through the cloud, only to freak out at the sight of something perfectly normal. There aren’t any physical screens in here to show Sung-Soo what’s going on and I feel the gulf between our experiences widen. It must seem bizarre to him.

  “My father could see things that weren’t there,” he says. “And a couple of the other older ones, but none of us that were born after they landed.”

  “Do you want to be chipped?” I ask and he frowns. “Do you want to be able to see things like we do?” I clarify.

  “I don’t know,” he says and looks at Kay. “What’s wrong?”

  He’s perceptive; at first glance I would think there was only concentration on Kay’s face, but she’s concerned about something.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” she replies, a beat too slow. “You’re just very interesting, that’s all.”

  The words make me feel sick. Sung-Soo’s attention goes back to me and all I can do is try to smile as reassuringly as I can.

  “Show Ren,” he says. “Make her see what you can. Please.”

  Why does he trust me so?

  “I can explain everything once the scan is done,” Kay says.

  “I want Ren to see it now.”

  Does he want to see my reaction? Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps he can see that Kay is harder to read than I am. She pauses the scan with a flick of her right index finger and turns to me.

  “Are you comfortable with that?”

  I shrug. “I don’t understand this stuff as well as Dr. Reed does,” I say to Sung-Soo. “I don’t think I’ll be much use.”

  “Please,” he repeats and Kay nods.

  She sends me a ping from her place on the cloud, and after I’ve followed it, passed a security check and agreed to various confidentiality clauses, her view of the scan’s live feed is overlaid across Sung-Soo’s body. As I’m trying to make sense of it I see her fingers moving in my peripheral vision. She’s using a v-keyboard and in moments a private message arrives from her.