Rachel Hawkins - Grim

“What happened?” Levi reaches out to touch me, but stops midway, dropping his hand and his eyes to his lap.

I run my fingers over the stubble of my scalp, pausing at the incision that meanders across the side of my head. The skin is puckered and raw where the stitches pull together. I hate the pity lurking in Levi’s eyes. I should’ve eaten in the lab like usual.

“An experiment. Dr. Saxon says I have a lovely brain.” I mean it to be a joke, something to lighten the mood, but Levi doesn’t laugh. The concept of humor eludes me more often than not.

“Don’t you hate it?”

“What?”

“The tests?” Levi says. “The experiments? Not being able to do whatever you want?”

I attempt to focus on eating, but the food is particularly offensive today. Though I’m not hungry, eating gives me something to do with my hands while I avoid answering Levi’s question. When I realize that he’s still staring at me, still waiting, I say, “It’s the reason your father created me. I’m little more than a lab rat, my only purpose to be experimented upon in the hopes of finding a cure for the Disease.”

Levi glances at his bony, wasted legs. The Disease has devoured his muscles, left him unable to stand or dance or relieve himself unassisted. “I hate it,” he says. “The way they stare at me like it’s my fault I’m alive while their damn kids are frozen in stasis.”

A pale, gray-haired woman at a nearby table runs from the cafeteria, sobbing, leaving behind a wordless, breathless vacuum. We become the focus of attention. Eighty-seven sets of eyes on us. Watching. Judging. Staring at us like we are the Disease vectors rather than simply a broken boy and wind-up girl.

“I’m sorry,” Levi whispers. The words barely escape the gravity of his guilt. It doesn’t matter that, one day, the Disease will force him to join the other children in stasis, waiting for a cure that may never come. Levi bears the guilt of health all the same.

I nervously run my finger along the ridges of my incision.

“Does it hurt?” Levi’s desperation to talk about something, anything else, is carved into his frown.

I nod. “Dr. Saxon says that my pain isn’t real. It’s merely a series of electrical signals from my skin to my brain.”

Levi tilts his head to the side slightly. His hand trembles as though it wants to move but cannot. “If you feel it, it’s real.”

I can’t stand the way Levi is looking at me, like we are the only two people aboard the Hamelin. Part of me wishes we were. But the rest... “It’s ugly. I’m ugly.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Levi says. “You’re pretty.”

I don’t know how to respond to...that. I blurt out, “You’re pretty, too,” without thinking, and Levi chuckles. Only, it wasn’t a joke. “You are. You’re the prettiest boy on the Hamelin. ”

“I’m the only boy on the Hamelin. The only one your age anyway.” Levi bites the corner of his lip and looks down at his long, thin fingers. “I’m sorry he hurt you.”

“It will be healed by tomorrow.” I pick at my food, unsure whether Levi is sincere or just humoring me.

“I didn’t know you healed that fast,” he says, trying to hide his surprise.

“I’m not like you.” It’s a simple statement, and true, but it twists in my gut, reminding me that Levi and I will never be the same.

“No, you’re not.” Levi lifts my head, forcing me to stare into his pale blue eyes. “You’re better.” Levi holds me there for a moment before letting go and pushing away from the table. He steers his lift chair out of the cafeteria.

As I watch Levi leave, I try to think of something to say, some way to tell him that he’s wrong. But I cannot.

I like to watch them sleep. Especially Levi.

I like the way his mouth puckers when he’s dreaming, and the way his fingers curl and flex.

I wonder whether he dreams of the home he never knew or of the new home he will likely not live to see. When the colonists set out aboard the Hamelin in search of a habitable planet over two hundred years ago, I doubt they ever once dreamed that their descendants would perish on this ship, their children’s children slowly devoured by a pitiless disease. The last gasp of humanity searching frantically for a cure that they may never find.

Levi is the last of the Hamelin ’s children not in stasis. His father, Dr. Saxon, hoped to discover a cure before the Disease forced him to put Levi into the long sleep, too.

I wonder if he would dream in stasis.

I do not dream or sleep. Instead, I wander the ship alone, listening to the Hamelin purr as she carries us in her belly through the long, dark night.

But if I did, I would dream of where we have been, where we are going. Of the billions of stars that are not home, and—somewhere waiting in the cold void—the one star that might be.

I would dream of Levi.

“Will I ever fall in love?” I ask.

Dr. Saxon, sitting on the edge of his stool on the other side of the examination table, looks up from my arm as the blood bubbles up through the needle into the tube. The remains of his hair are wild and gray, and his skin sags deeply today. He completes the task before pulling the needle from my vein and setting his instruments on the counter behind him.

“What makes you ask?”

I shrug. I’m unsure how he’d react if I answered honestly. “Curiosity, I suppose.”

“Oh.” Dr. Saxon gathers the vials of blood he has drawn from me and takes them to the other side of the room. He places them in a centrifuge and sends them spinning around and around. “Do you know what you are?”

“An artificial being. A collection of biological machines assembled into the facsimile of life.”

“Indeed,” Dr. Saxon says. He returns to the table and grabs my hand. Before I know what’s happening, he slashes the soft flesh of my palm with a scalpel that he produces from the sleeve of his white coat. I cry out but do not pull my hand from his.

“Watch” is all he says.

We watch together as the blood pools from the deep gash in my palm. Dr. Saxon sliced neatly through the dermal and hypodermal layers, through the muscle, nearly to the bone. However, within seconds, the flesh begins to rejoin from the bottom to the top like a meaty zipper snapping shut. In barely a minute, only blood and the memory of pain remain.

Dr. Saxon releases my wrist. “Clean up.”

I slide off the table and do as I’m told.

“I hate you.”

If Dr. Saxon is afraid, he doesn’t show it. I could tear his head from his neck and he couldn’t stop me. I could kill them all. Instead, he motions for me to sit at a table in the corner of the lab, while he takes the chair across from me. “You say you hate me, but you don’t. You can’t. You aren’t real.”

“What if I am?”

“You’re not.” Dr. Saxon scrubs his face with his worn hands. Though wrinkled and lined with veins, they’re still steady. “You are an experiment, Pip. A means to an end. I hoped studying your unique physiology would help me find a way to cure the Disease, but all my hoping has proven fruitless.”

I’ve read all of Dr. Saxon’s research. I know that the Disease isn’t a disease at all. It’s a syndrome—a collection of symptoms for which Dr. Saxon has yet to find a cause. He once hypothesized that the Disease was similar to the allergies that developed on Earth in industrialized societies, that generations of living in space had caused it. But the only cure for space travel would be to find a habitable planet, and we are still light years from the nearest one.

“Your personality, your knowledge, were fabricated from the ship’s computers. Your responses and so-called feelings are not real. You are not real. You can’t hate me, because you can’t feel hate. You won’t ever fall in love because you will never know what real love feels like.”