“I won’t.”
A chime sounded, and a few seconds later, students poured out of the classrooms, filling the silence with their discordant symphony of voices. They looked like people I could’ve gone to school with. They also acted like people I could’ve gone to school with in that none of them paid attention to me.
DJ scanned the crowd. “Robot teachers but human students?”
“Apparently.”
“Weird.” DJ was a master of understatement.
“So I guess we should find our classes?” I said without enthusiasm.
“You might have fun.”
“Trade me, then. You go to PE and I’ll make a ceramic vase.”
DJ kissed me gently on the lips, and I hated that it felt like a goodbye. I knew it wasn’t—I knew I’d see him again—but I didn’t want to spend any time apart from him that I didn’t have to. “Three periods until lunch,” he said. “And if you hate it, we’ll lure Jenny back to the shuttle with Nutreesh.”
“Deal.”
DJ took off, leaving me alone.
I had spent hours and days wishing to be anywhere other than Qriosity, and now that my wish had been granted, Qriosity was the only place I wanted to be.
“Excuse me,” I said to no one in particular. “Can you tell me where the gym is?” I had kind of shouted my question into the mass of students in the hopes that one of them would answer, but the most they did was side-eye me as they walked on.
I was about to pick a direction at random when I spied a familiar face. A face that couldn’t exist. “Kayla?” I shoved through the crowd, forcing my way upstream to reach her. “Kayla!” I hadn’t really known her, but I’d spent enough time with her dead and dying body that I’d memorized her face. Her round cheeks and crooked nose. Her black hair and long neck. It had to be her. It couldn’t be her.
She peeled off from the group she was with and entered one of the buildings. I followed her inside. I jogged to catch up and get her attention. “Kayla?”
“Sorry,” she said, seeming annoyed at being stopped. “You got the wrong person.”
But I was so certain. “Is your name Kayla?”
She shook her head. “Talley.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Do you remember Qriosity? It’s a spaceship.”
“Uh, pretty positive, and no.” She turned up her nose at me and motioned for me to move, which I did. I didn’t know what to do or think. She wouldn’t have known me because she’d spent the majority of our time together dead. And it couldn’t have been Kayla anyway because the last time I’d seen her was when we’d committed her body to the stars.
My mind was playing tricks on me. Everyone has a doppelgänger, right?
The bell chimed again and an alert flashed on my hand, warning me that I had two minutes to get to class or I would be punished. The warning was followed by a map showing me the fastest route to the gym. I ran the entire way, but I couldn’t outrun the doubt that followed me.
NINE HOURS EARLIER
ALL THE ROBOTS WERE CALLED Teacher. That was the first thing I learned when I ran, huffing and wheezing, into class as the final bell rang. The second thing I learned was that gym uniforms are universally hideous. The one I was given consisted of blue shorts that were borderline indecent and a mustard-yellow shirt with “Beta Cephei High School Stellar Fragments” printed on the front. I refused to wear it until I was threatened with punishment. After I changed, my class of thirty students was broken into four teams and sent to play volleyball. The only game I hated worse than dodgeball was volleyball.
I wish I could properly convey how deeply strange it was to be playing indoor volleyball with a group of students I’d never met before, all of whom attended a school with robot teachers on a domed rock floating in the middle of space that I had accidentally traveled to in a spaceship that had torn a hole in the fabric of the universe. At the same time, it was also so aggressively normal. The way the students looked faintly uncomfortable in their ugly gym uniforms while trying to pretend they weren’t; the uncoordinated students flinging eye daggers at the athletic students; the undercurrent of whispered conversations, each student assuming everyone who wasn’t talking to them was talking about them. It was comforting to know that, even on the other side of the universe, high school locker rooms smelled like sweaty crotch and cheap body spray.
If I ignored the robots with the murdery red eyes, it could have been home.
“Hey.” It took me a moment to register that the boy standing next to me had spoken. He was long-limbed and gangly, like he’d grown two feet overnight and was still trying to figure out how to move without falling on his face. “I’m Thao.”
“Noa,” I said. “I’m awful at this game, by the way.”
“Me too.”
I heard someone laughing, not like they were having fun but like they were about to make someone else miserable. The sadistic kind of laugh usually heard from psychopaths or children in horror movies. And then a volleyball smashed into Thao’s face. He crumpled to the polished maple floor as blood spurted from his nose.
“Heads up!” shouted a guy from the other team, probably the same one who’d spiked the ball at Thao’s face. He was tall and fair with messy auburn hair and the kind of grin that said he’d definitely pulled the legs off grasshoppers when he was a kid.
I scrambled to help Thao stand. “We should get you to the nurse or infirmary or whatever you have here.”
Thao’s eyes widened in terror, and he tried to use his sleeve to wipe away the blood. “I’m fine.”
“Your nose could be broken.”
Teacher rolled toward us, its bulbous red eye fixed on me and Thao. “You are leaking.”
I hiked my thumb at the guy who’d started this. “I’m pretty sure he did this on purpose. Aren’t you going to punish him?” I hated bullies. I hated them more than dodgeball and only fractionally less than volleyball.
Thao whipped off his shirt, ignoring the laughter from the other students, and pressed it to his nose. “It’s fine. I’m fine. I need to sit is all. The bleeding will stop on its own.”
Teacher’s eye pulsed once. “You may be absent this game. If you can’t return at the conclusion, you will report to Nurse.”
Thao said, “Thank you,” in a way that was too eager to be normal. He turned to go, stopped, and said, “Can the new kid come with me? The teams will be uneven otherwise.”
Teacher took a moment to process the request. “Yes,” it said, then rolled away.
I followed Thao to the bleachers.
“I’m sorry about your nose.”
“You didn’t do it.” Thao’s voice was nasally, which made sense, seeing as he probably couldn’t breathe well.
“But I’m benefitting from it,” I said. “I really hate playing volleyball, so you getting hit in the face is the best thing that’s happened to me since class began.”
Thao laughed, but it was more of a snort that sounded like he was choking. “It’s cool.”
I looked back at where we’d been playing. The athletic guy who’d started this and some of his friends were scowling in our general direction. “What’s his deal? Did you do something to piss him off or is he just genetically predisposed to being a dick?”