Searching for Sun Chapter Nine

Nine

Cordon Bleu is too a color.

—Mandy Twelve

Cloey’s JPV

“Seaweed snack?” Cloey proffered a crackly green sheet towards her.

The android had been laying in wait for her right at the threshold. She had to wonder sometimes how Cloey knew when she would return unless she simply stood at the door for hours. Perhaps it was acute hearing.

“They’re very healthy for you. Only thirty calories in a whole container, you could basically eat these all day and not get fat.”

“I might turn green though,” Asami frowned at the snack but took a leaf. It looked like warped stain glass and shattered under the pressure of her lips before dissolving with a satisfactory crunch.

Once she’d finished putting away her work tablet to charge and had stripped off her uniform jacket, she could no longer ignore the stare Cloey was boring through her back.

“What?” Asami rubbed at her face, brushing off salt from her mouth.

“Did you pass? The scavenging test, did you pass . . . so you won’t have to retake it . . . and we can go to that hot party, being not failures.”

“It’s just lunch.”

“And”

“Yes.”

“Yes, you passed? Oh, mother of steel and electronic panels, say you passed.”

“I passed. You can thank Alec; he got the samples in on time for me. Actually, he did most of the work,” Asami scowled. She knew she was becoming apathetic to the entire schooling experience. It was simply difficult to motivate herself to work at collecting particle samples that didn’t even exist. She felt like she was a rat in the lab being tested.

“Glory. We are totally wearing blue. Like, I will too, you know, on my nails. You can wear those blue leggings because this is not a uniform function. No, don’t complain, we all know those uniforms are unifying blah blah, what can I say, it’s not your best color.”

“But blue is.”

“It will bring out your eyes.”

“My best feature.”

“Any girl’s best feature,” Cloey flaunted her eyes, tilting her face to be admired.

“Those beauties must be the reason you got your own invitation, which means you could have gone without me if I hadn’t passed,” Asami lay back on her bed.

“Yeah . . . but if you didn’t pass that means Alec wouldn’t have either. Meaning, why bother going at all.”

“To show the other ladies how it’s done of course.”

“True. You know it’s been all the rage to get pink skin since Mandy’s android, that new butler fad the ghosts have, got glitter eyes and pink prosthetics but I think I’ll stand out with a shimmery sea foam blue, like, because half the people here have never even seen the sea, much less sea foam.”

It might be all the rage, but the cosmetic alterations were all G.P. property, meaning the androids were top quality but half owned, so Heidi had half custody of the android’s time. Asami would never give anyone that kind of leverage over her or Cloey.

“Fine. I’ll wear blue.”

“What do you think Alec will wear?”

“Probably black. He’s as dramatic as you.”

“Did you ask him?”

“No, I didn’t ask him, I don’t think he even knows what he’s going to wear, probably his uniform,” Asami let that jab sink in as she rolled into her covers for a nap, smiling at the dismay writing its way across Cloey’s features as she recalculated what they should wear should Alec indeed appear in uniform.

“He wouldn’t do that . . . would he?”

Asami was surprised how uncomfortable she felt in plain clothes; she was so used to eating, sleeping, and working in uniform. She had the odd feeling of being conscious of her lungs so that she breathed too deeply and then too shallow. The royal blue leggings had no pockets, which bothered her more than it should have, and this combined with a roomy gray-blue sweater tunic made her feel overly coordinated, and yet asymmetrical, like a walking piece of art. She had not, in the end, let Cloey do her hair, and now they walked in tart silence.

Cloey had borrowed one of Asami’s chic shirts and had made a dress, her metallic blue nails shimmering on the ends of her hands like jewels, and her hair piled in a dramatic bun with blue cornflowers.

As they passed people in the hall, no one paused to stare, yet Asami braced herself each time she met someone’s eyes to smile or nod. She almost wished she had failed the test except one look at Cloey’s wide smile made her reconsider.

It was a small lunch party in Erika’s quarters. A room Asami often visited, more so since the second freeze, when Erika was her only friend awake. The peaceful room with its sofa and reading nook—Erika liked to read from paper, not behind her eyelids—had been transformed. The sofa pressed back against the wall as extra seating. A new table held cookies, croissant apple chicken sandwiches, plain scones with jam and clotted cream, and two large pots of tea. Erika had decided she would adopt British culture at a young age, and tea and sandwiches were her thing still, though she had dispensed with the old British accent long ago. Alec had claimed a seat nearest the food with two scones already jammed and buttered.

Asami, glad to see both Erika and Alec in plain clothes, busied herself with getting tea and food, while Cloey promptly took a seat beside Alec and looked at Asami, pleased to silence. A younger ghost girl had been invited, whom Erika introduced as Mandy; the girl herself only nodded mutely, her hair dyed pure white with orange tips. Asami wondered if this was the famous Mandy with a pink-skinned android, as she took a seat between her and Erika, feeling faded between the two, Erika glowing in a red and white wrap, her cloud of thick black curls hovering just above her shoulders, and Mandy—dressed to be Erika’s opposite, white hair, and translucent black skin, in a short white dress and orange capped sleeves.

Mandy had a plate full of nothing but butter cookies with jam inside. She had chosen one of each design: sandwich, heart-shaped, flower, and classic thumbprint. Instead of tea, she balanced a glass of mango juice on her knee.

“Jam cookies are my favorite too,” Asami said. She’d taken two thumbprint cookies for herself.

The girl peered at Asami, her face looking more and more confused.

Across from her Cloey made a ‘sorry’ face, tapping her head.

“You can’t chat?” the girl’s voice sounded rough from disuse.

“No.”

“I don’t really talk to anyone out loud,” Mandy looked uncomfortable.

Asami felt her friends politely not looking at her, though they must all have gotten echoes of Mandy’s public chat to her. Most of them were probably using both forms to communicate.

“There are benefits to not using chat.”

“Like what?” Mandy’s face displayed doubt.

“The peace and quiet.”

Mandy smiled in response, “But chat is even quieter.”

“You think so? People get tired of talking but they never get tired of spamming you links, and they never filter their thoughts the way they do speaking. I bet right now, you’re following everyone else’s public chat and trying to talk to me.”

“My friends don’t use anything but chat. Everyone can hear everyone, so no one feels left out.”

“Well, that’s something if it’s true,” Asami gulped at her tea wishing the delicate teacups held more. She traced the soft lines of the cup studying the small pink, blue, and yellow flowers upon the flawless surface. A strong temptation to keep the cup stirred inside her, rather than allow it to be recycled with all the other utensils and dishware. There was something strange about the continuous creation and destruction of utensils that bothered her.

“Sometimes it would be nice not to know everything,” Mandy said.

“Don’t you all keep secrets?” Asami asked.

“Secrets are the worst, especially if they aren’t your own,” Mandy crumbled the flower cookie absently between her fingers.

“Friends can be that way, getting one another in and out of trouble.”

“My friends aren’t bad. They just think they have to do something in order to know it’s true. I keep trying to explain that, mathematically, doing something once doesn’t prove anything, not really.”

“No, not with everything.”

“Not that I would want them to do it more than once.”

“Did they do something mean?” Asami asked.

“I didn’t think so at first. Everyone had been interested in death since . . .”

“Since some of the freezys didn’t make it?” Asami tried not to let emotion enter her voice or face. Three freezys had died before the so-called experimental medicine stopped killing them.

“Everyone has been thinking about it, but logically, to really make a conclusion about human death we would have to see humans die. A mouse’s death really doesn’t compare.”

Looking across the room at Cloey, it wasn’t the first time Asami wished she could chat.

“What did the mouse’s death tell you?” Asami asked, careful not to let judgment enter her tone.

“It was sad.” Mandy broke another cookie. “It made me sad. But I could tell some of the others liked it. It made them feel fascinated, horrified, but fascinated.”

“You can feel one anothers’ emotions then?”

“All the time. I suppose if one of us died, that would be the closest we could come to knowing death, living through it with them—but like I said, that is just one death. To really know death, we would have to know a range of deaths.”

Asami could not suppress a shiver. That line of reasoning could end very badly.

There was tittering across the room. Cloey looked mad, her cheeks puffing up like balloons. Alec’s face had gone mute. Mandy sat up a little straighter, eyes widening so her fake lashes crowded out her eyebrows.

She turned a shade of red and looked guiltily at Asami, but her focus was inward—chipward as Asami thought of it. “How did it feel to be shot?”

Asami no longer felt like eating. Her tea was cold. Someone was re-sharing that stupid video of her getting shot.

“Same as falling off a cliff.” She shook her head as Cloey looked ready to burst. Mandy seemed a decent sort, the other ghosts didn’t know her, and she could imagine the things one could do with that video . . .

“Sorry,” Mandy rubbed a hand through her hair. “They’re being rude. They shouldn’t have—you must feel glad,” Mandy turned towards her abruptly, changing the subject. “Knowing the freeze is over. Knowing you won’t get sick, I mean.”

“Sure,” Asami nodded. “Guess I’m one of the lucky ones.” She found her fingers grinding a small nib of dough, smashing it again and again between thumb and finger until it resembled a dull gray pill. She was glad, she thought, very glad. For her, freeze had been nothing but silence, absolute earsplitting silence. She smiled bitterly. She couldn’t even convince herself of that anymore.

Laying in the dark, Asami listened to herself breathe. The dreams had never stopped. She faked peaceful nights, telling Cloey that she had an upset stomach, but some nights she never knew if she was sleeping or waking. She felt that she had left someone behind in the dreams, that she was supposed to do something about it.

“Asami?” The insides of Cloey’s mouth glowed dimly in the blackness. Electronics coming to life within her.

Asami stared where she had last seen the light trying to draw herself from the void of sleep. But her vision narrowed in the darkness. The world was a hole. She was spiraling into it. Her fingers dug into the stiff mattress clutching for a hold. She could feel her body ripping. They were going too fast. Her atoms could not hold their place, they were shifting, sliding, rearranging.

“Asami, you’re doing it again,” Cloey’s eyes blinked in the dark like dim flashlights, her mouth left white spots, punching pockets into the solid black wall before Asami’s eyes, adding depth and pattern to the void. The white spots faded in bruised colors of blue and purple.

“Let me get you some water,” Cloey’s hand ran across her damp forehead, but her fingers felt like tentacles, rubbery and untextured.