So I changed the plan.
I put Noa in the spacesuit, but I posted a note in his hud to prevent him from panicking. I ran to Ops before Jenny woke up, and I dragged her to the head and locked her in. The cut on my arm from our escape attempt started bleeding again, and got on Jenny’s sleeve, but I didn’t have time to find new clothes for her. When I was done, I raced to Reactor Control just as Noa was waking up.
You lived the rest.
NOA
I DIDN’T THINK IT WAS possible to love someone so much, and hate them, all at once. But that’s how I felt about DJ by the time he finished his story. I wanted to kiss him because I did love him and I loved him for what he had done to be with me. But I wanted to kick him for every lie and every deception. He had betrayed me so thoroughly, but he had done so only because he loved me so thoroughly. And he was staring at me, hopeful, waiting for me to tell him that I understood, waiting for me to forgive him. I didn’t have the words, at that moment, for either.
Ty broke the silence. “How did you get away with it?” he asked. “Surely, Production attempted to stop you.”
DJ nodded. “They planned to. As soon as the crisis on Qriosity was resolved, Jenny Perez was going to keep her promise to kill Noa. But Jenny Perez was the one who had said everything is about ratings, and ours were the highest for any debut in history. Viewers fell in love with me and Noa. They wanted to watch our story.
“So Production quickly retitled the program Now Kiss! and let it play out.”
Ty looked somehow appalled and impressed simultaneously. “You’ve just been doing whatever you want this entire time?”
“No,” DJ said. “I’d changed the nature of the show, and Production was angry. They let me know they were still in charge by cutting us down to emergency power. They invented the Phone Home protocol that sent us skipping through space to make Jenny and Noa hate me. Every single awful thing that’s happened to us has been arranged by them.”
“The looping day?” I asked.
“Best episode by far,” Ty said.
DJ nodded but then stopped and shook his head. “Kind of. The loop was intended to torture me, but Jenny found the time device before she was meant to, and the nanites that MediQwik used to repair your brain injury after you died protected you from the loop. That’s why you remembered what happened when it reset.”
“What about Kayla?” I asked. “Did you kill her?”
“No!” DJ said. “She was the spare companion. The one who would take your place if Production decided to remove you. She escaped on her own. I think Production had her killed somehow.”
“Is that everything?” I asked. “Are you keeping anything else from us?” The question came out harsh, and DJ flinched.
“No,” he said. “That’s everything.”
Jenny had been quiet for a while, which was unusual. In a low voice full of icy rage, she said, “This was supposed to be my story? I really was supposed to be the star, and you hijacked it?”
“Jenny, I—”
“You don’t talk, DJ. You don’t get to talk to me at all!”
But DJ ignored her. “This was important, Jenny! You’ve got to see that.”
“What I see is that you have been gaslighting me this whole time,” she said. “You changed the results when I did the DNA test so that the blood on my jacket wouldn’t match yours. You’ve been the one erasing the footage from cameras—”
“Production’s doing that.”
“With your knowledge!” Jenny yelled. “I get it! I get that you wanted Nico back, but what about me? What about the story you stole from me? Did you even give that a moment’s thought?”
DJ opened his mouth to answer, closed it, and shook his head.
Ty cleared his throat. “Sorry for shooting you, Jenny. I’d be happy to shoot DJ if that would make amends.”
“Don’t tempt me,” she said.
I looked up and DJ caught my eye. I could feel the questions he was dying to ask, feel the things he needed me to say. Maybe it would have been easier if I had yelled at him the way Jenny had. Gotten the anger out in the open. But I couldn’t. Instead, I simply stood and walked away.
THE WEIGHT OF THE TRUTH
ONE
THE FALSE SUN OF THE oxygen garden warmed my face as I lay by the pond with my eyes shut. If I ignored the subtle vibrations running through Qriosity, I could almost imagine I was stretched out on a blanket at the park on a summer day. That if I opened my eyes, my mom would be sitting beside me reading a book and Becca would be on the other side trying to take the perfect picture. But I wasn’t outside. It wasn’t summer. I wasn’t on Earth. I didn’t even know if Becca and my mom were real. The sun was a lie. Everything was a lie.
“I’m sorry, Noa.”
I’d known DJ was there. It couldn’t have been Jenny because she shuffled her feet when she walked, and there was no way DJ would let Ty run free on the ship. I kept my eyes closed because I wasn’t sure if I could look at him.
“Don’t you mean Nico?”
“I mean you,” DJ said. He let out a low growl of frustration. “This is so confusing. Nico’s gone, I know that, but he also isn’t. He’s still in you. At the same time, he was never real to begin with. Neither is Noa. The person I’m in love with isn’t Nico or Noa. It’s who you are when everything else is stripped away.”
I opened my eyes and sat up, still unwilling to look at DJ. “If I’m not Noa, if I’m not real, then who am I?”
DJ sat across from me, keeping his distance. “Noa’s just a name. Changing it doesn’t change you.” He plucked a blade of grass and held it up. “We could call this a dribble of jelly instead of a blade of grass, but that wouldn’t change what it is.”
He reached his hand to me, but I ignored it and he slowly pulled back. “None of this is fair, Noa. I get that. I’ve had months to wrestle with these questions and I’m still struggling.”
The last thing I wanted to hear was how much DJ hurt when his wounds were mostly self-inflicted. “I cried myself to sleep at night, thinking about how worried and scared my mom must have been when I never came home. She’s not real, though. None of them are real! Not Becca or Mrs. Blum or…”
“Noa—”
“Christ, DJ! Was what Billy did to me real?” I fought back a sob. “Did Production stick a memory of me being raped into my head because they thought it would make me more interesting?”
“I know how you feel.”
“No you don’t!”
DJ’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Part of my backstory on Arcas, the reason I kept away from people and enjoyed fixing things more than socializing, was because I had a head full of memories about older brothers who tortured me. They locked me in a dark closet and left me there for hours. They used me as a practice dummy for tackling. I idolized them and I despised them and I was terrified of them. By the time I got to Arcas, I wanted nothing to do with anyone.”
I finally looked at DJ. I had no reason to believe him except that I did. “Don’t you see how twisted and cruel that is? We don’t mean anything to Production. We’re just a collection of tragedies the audience gets to watch make out.”