“Ha ha,” DJ said, cutting through our giggles. “But now that we’ve saved Qriosity from blowing up and searched it from top to bottom, what’s our next step?”
I raised my hand. “I vote we figure out how the ship works, turn it back on, and go home.”
“You heard Jenny Perez,” DJ said. “We can’t.”
“Have you tried?” I fixed him with an unblinking stare, all the laughter and mirth from before now gone.
DJ wore a wounded expression, like it pained him just to look at me. “There’s still so much we don’t know, Noa. Like, how long have we even been on Qriosity?”
“The hologram that stole my name said our memory loss shouldn’t go back more than a week, so we can’t have been here longer than that.” Jenny looked back and forth from me to DJ. “Right?”
DJ pursed his lips. “It takes at least three days to reach the moon, between five and ten months to get to Mars. I’m willing to bet we’re not in our own solar system anymore, so…”
He let the thought trail off, but he didn’t need to finish it. If he was right, we might have been gone months, possibly years. I imagined those first few days when I didn’t come home. My mom would’ve gone off the rails with worry. Posting flyers up and down 45th, checking in with Becca and Enzo and anyone she thought I might have talked to, to see if they’d heard from me. I pictured her having to go back to work after a month even though she didn’t want to. Coming home at the end of her shift, rushing right to my room to see if I was there, her hope crushed each time she saw my empty bed, still unmade the way I’d left it. Her heart breaking into smaller pieces every night when she sat down to eat dinner alone.
Even if we could have turned Qriosity around and returned to Earth that second, everyone we knew might’ve already been gone.
DJ rested his hand on mine. His skin was warm and soft. “Hey,” he said. “We’ll get home.”
“It’s not even about going home.” My voice was low, almost a whisper. “I mean, it is, but it’s also that we don’t belong here, DJ. I’m not just going to accept that this is my life now and make the best of it. I can’t.”
Even as I said it, something about DJ tugged at me, and I wanted to give in to the moment we were in rather than holding on to the past. I wanted to stop fighting and embrace my new normal. It would have made my life so much easier.
I pulled my hand out from under DJ’s and dropped it into my lap, watching as he folded in on himself, as he grew smaller right before my eyes. I kept hurting him. He’d put himself out there, tried to be nice to me, and I’d fashioned his good intentions into weapons and wounded him with them.
“We never should have shut down the reactor,” I said.
“What’s stopping us from turning the reactor on again?” Jenny asked.
I didn’t have an answer, but it was a good question. I looked to DJ to get his opinion and, instead, saw a swarm of organized twinkles flowing from the vents and assembling on one side of the table into the hologram of Jenny Perez.
“Not again,” I said. Apparently, the ship had heard Jenny’s question and decided to respond. It was creepy to think that Qriosity was listening to every word we said. An invasion of privacy, no matter how helpful it tried to be.
“Hi! I’m your host, Jenny Perez, whom you probably remember as the precocious kid detective and bestselling author Anastasia Darling on the award-winning mystery entertainment program Murder Your Darlings. If you’re seeing this holographic message, then that means you’ve asked about restarting the Cordova Exotic Particle Reactor.”
“Does she have to say that every time?” I muttered. “We know who she is.”
“The answer is yes!” the hologram said. “I’m contractually obligated to repeat the standard greeting each time I’m initiated. Sorry about it!”
Jenny unwrapped another Nutreesh bar. “Well, that’s silly.”
I agreed, but I didn’t want to get sidetracked. “How do we restart the Cordova reactor thing?”
“I would advise not shutting down the Cordova Exotic Particle Reactor,” Jenny Perez said in a painfully cheery tone.
“Too late,” I said at the same time as DJ said, “We didn’t have a choice.”
“That’s a shame,” Jenny Perez said. “It really would have been better if you hadn’t shut it down.”
I threw my hands in the air. “Okay, but we did, so can you tell us how to turn it back on or what?”
Jenny was busy putting more Nutreesh in her, but I caught DJ looking at me, and when I did, he said, “Try not to get so worked up. You were dead only a couple of hours ago.”
I understood that DJ was trying to help, but if there was ever a time to get upset, it was now. It bothered me that DJ and Jenny were still so calm. I wanted to throw things while they were chatting with a hologram and eating their roach bars.
“I don’t need you to look after me. I can take care of myself.”
Jenny was motioning at us with her half-eaten Nutreesh. “I’m sensing some serious sexual tension here.”
Gritting my teeth to keep from saying something I might regret later, I gave the hologram my full attention. “Just tell us how to restart the damn reactor, okay?”
Jenny Perez flickered momentarily. “So you want to restart the Cordova Exotic Particle Reactor.” She paused and smiled like she was trying to get us to sign her petition to save the snails or to join her cult that she promised totally wasn’t a cult. “Reinitializing the Cordova Exotic Particle Reactor after an unplanned shutdown requires rebooting Qriosity’s main computer, a Nexus Systems Quantum Cluster Advanced Logic Engine—whew! That’s a mouthful!—a bleeding-edge system designed specifically for use aboard Qriosity. Capable of performing the one hundred sextillion simultaneous calculations required by the Trinity Labs Quantum Fold Drive for instantaneous travel through space, the Nexus Systems Quantum Cluster Advanced Logic Engine should only be rebooted by a qualified Nexus Systems technician.”
I clenched my fists and stood. “Do holograms feel pain?” I was seriously considering trying to strangle it. I felt like it was taunting us when all I wanted was a simple answer. The more Jenny Perez droned on, the angrier I became.
DJ gently tugged on my sleeve, pulling me back to my seat. “We don’t have a Nexus technician,” he said to the hologram. “We’re still in high school.”
“That sounds even stranger when you say it out loud,” Jenny said, mostly to herself. She wasn’t wrong, though. I should have been in class, sleeping through Mr. Wilkes’s lecture on the French Revolution, not sitting on a ship, listening to a lecture about reactors and computers from a hologram. It was surreal in a way that I hadn’t had time to process yet. I felt like I was on a roller coaster that had taken off before I’d gotten strapped in, and it was whipping around corkscrews and flipping upside down, and I was barely managing to hold on. If I loosened my grip for even a second, I would plummet to my death.
But Jenny Perez didn’t seem to care how old we were. “In the event that your Nexus Systems technician is missing, incapacitated, or dead, and a reboot of the Nexus Systems Quantum Cluster Advanced Logic Engine is absolutely necessary, please be advised that there is a one-in-five-million-three-hundred-fifty-thousand chance that the quantum states within the computer will collapse, irrevocably damaging the system and leading to the total loss of Qriosity and everyone on board.”