“You could’ve gotten that blood on you before you boarded the ship,” DJ said.
“Possibly, but that’s not my only evidence.” Jenny took another deep breath. “Someone wrote Noa the note in his hud for him to see when he first woke up in space, and they left you instructions as well, didn’t they, DJ?”
“Yeah, but—”
“However, that doesn’t prove someone else is on the ship. Whoever abducted us could have arranged the notes before leaving.” Jenny rolled on confidently, and I wondered if there was a room where she’d taped our pictures to the wall and used bits of string to connect the various clues.
“Kayla proved that it was possible for someone to live on Qriosity without us knowing. We never saw her, and there’s conveniently no video of her.”
“How can that be?” I asked.
Jenny looked pointedly at Jenny Perez. “That’s what I was trying to find out.”
“Sorry about it!”
“I don’t think you are,” Jenny said.
Everything Jenny had laid out was odd, but odd on Qriosity was pretty much the norm. I didn’t see how she thought there was still someone hiding on the ship. “How do you know Kayla wasn’t the one who locked you in the toilet?”
Jenny glared at the hologram one last time. “Like I said, the blood wasn’t a match, but I also don’t think she ever left that room.”
“She had to use the bathroom sometime,” DJ said.
“Yes. She did.” Jenny waved her hand in the air, and Jenny Perez projected a three-dimensional image of Kayla’s quarters onto the table. “While you boys were picnicking, I searched that room one square millimeter at a time. Know what I found?”
I glanced at DJ. “I’m really hoping it wasn’t gallon jugs of urine.”
DJ snorted, earning me Jenny’s ire.
“Show them the recording,” Jenny said.
The image wasn’t an image at all. It was video. And it began to play. On the recording, Jenny walked into the room and began crawling around on the floor, looking beneath the bed, pulling the furniture away from the walls. We watched as she found a Nutreesh bar under Kayla’s pillow and began to eat it.
“You can skip ahead,” Jenny said.
The video flashed forward, and suddenly Jenny was standing in front of the wall directly opposite the door with her hands on her hips and her head cocked to the side. After a few moments, she pressed her palm to the wall, and a door appeared that absolutely had not been there before. Jenny pushed it open and stepped inside. The recording ended there.
“Was that—”
“A bathroom, Noa,” she said. “Complete with a shower and everything. It’s the only private bathroom on Qriosity that we’ve found.”
“Restrooms and showers are no-no zones for surveillance,” Jenny Perez said.
“That’s reassuring,” I muttered.
DJ’s mouth was hanging open. “A secret room with its own secret bathroom?”
“I know,” Jenny said. “I’m totally blowing your mind right now.”
“A little.”
“But how does this prove there’s someone else on the ship?” I asked. “The only thing this proves is that Kayla was trapped in that tiny space until she died.” Thinking about her locked in there alone made me feel awful for the complaining I’d done. At least I’d had the whole ship to mope around in.
Jenny dismissed the recording. “That’s where the mystery of the vanishing food comes in.”
“Vanishing food?” DJ asked. “I didn’t realize food was disappearing.”
Jenny nodded. “There’s the lemon cake that I swear I didn’t eat the last of.”
“The chocolate croissants,” I said. “I accused Jenny of eating them during the repeating day from hell. When she said it wasn’t her, I assumed someone was waking up in the middle of the night with the munchies.”
“Wasn’t me,” DJ said. “At least, I don’t think it was me.”
“I don’t believe it was any of us.” Jenny waited until we refocused our attention on her before continuing. “Food only seemed to go missing when it was left out in the open, so I placed some treats in random locations before I went to bed. In the morning they were gone. But it still could have been one of you, so I repeated the experiment with Nutreesh because—”
“I would eat my own toenails before eating Nutreesh,” I said.
“Exactly. And in the morning, they were also gone.”
DJ turned to Jenny Perez. “How about video of that? Did you see who took the Nutreesh?”
“Unfortunately, there appears to have been a malfunction in Qriosity’s monitoring system during the requested period. Sorry about it!”
Jenny gave the hologram the finger. “See? I tried to go back to different instances where food went missing, and there was a malfunction every damn time.”
I didn’t know what to say. Neither, it appeared, did DJ or Jenny. It was a lot to wrap my mind around, and the truth was that DJ was the only mystery I was interested in unraveling. We could search the ship again, but we’d done that multiple times and hadn’t found anything.
Jenny Perez coughed to get our attention. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but there seems to be a problem with the water filtration system.”
“What kind of problem?” I asked.
“A fairly wet one.”
THREE
DJ SPRINTED TO THE LOWER decks where the water storage tanks were located. Jenny and I caught up a few seconds after. The doors to the room were shut, and DJ was heaving on the handle to force them open. The hologram hadn’t told us what we might be walking into, and I wasn’t convinced rushing in was the best idea. No one had asked me, though.
When DJ finally wrenched the doors open, lukewarm water streamed into the corridor.
“This seems bad,” Jenny said. Again, she wasn’t wrong.
Together, we sloshed into the room and immediately spotted the problem. A pipe as wide around as DJ’s torso that ran from one of the enormous tanks into the wall was spewing water into the air like a fire hydrant. The sound of it was deafening.
DJ was shouting, but I couldn’t hear him over the geyser. I had a pretty good idea what he was saying, though. We needed to shut the water off. The tanks were huge, and Qriosity’s water filtration system was exceptionally efficient, but we couldn’t afford to have gallons of water spilling into the ship and going to waste.
I pointed at a valve on the tank, and DJ pointed at another where the pipe ran into the wall. We didn’t know whether the busted pipe was carrying water into or out of the tank, so we needed to shut both valves to be sure.
We slogged through the ankle-deep water to reach the valves. I gripped the wheel in both hands and tried to turn it clockwise, but it refused to budge. I hoped DJ was having better luck than me. Jenny appeared with a crowbar, which she shoved through the spokes of the wheel. Then we each grabbed one end and used the additional leverage to turn the valve. Even with both of us, it was difficult, but the flow of water from the busted pipe slowly began to recede until it was nothing more than a dribble.
“Well, that was fun,” I said.