Toxic by Lydia Kang

Author:Lydia Kang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: forced proximity; star-crossed lovers; sci-fi romance; Thailand; death; ship; Sci-Fi; space opera; suspense; young adult; coming of age; enemies to lovers; forbidden love; opposites attract; Coming of Age Fiction; Teen and Young Adult Books; Teen and Young Adult Coming of Age Fiction; Teen and Young Adult Sci-Fi Mystery eBooks; Teen and Young Adult Literary Fiction; Teen and Young Adult Literature and Fiction; Teen and Young Adult Literature and Fiction eBooks; Teen and Young Adult Science Fiction and Dystopian Romance eBooks; Teen and Young Adult Science Fiction Action and Adventure; Teen and Young Adult Girls and Women Fiction; Teen and Young Adult Loners and Outcasts Fiction; Teen and Young Adult Emotions and Feelings Fiction; Teen and Young Adult Friendship Fiction
Publisher: Entangled TEEN
Published: 2018-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

HANA

Fenn stares at me with the strangest expression. It’s something like defeat and relief mixed together.

Which is a good thing. Because I didn’t know if I could stand up to him or anyone else much longer. My hands are balled in fists at my side from the excitement of learning my first efforts actually worked. I did it. But it’s not enough. Fenn is willing to help, and if I have help, there is hope to save Cyclo. To save all of us.

“Okay,” I say. “The first thing we need to do is find out if Cyclo has any stem cells. If she does, then maybe we can harvest them. I mean, we have gestational chambers. They’re only human-sized, but if we can grow her cells in one of them, then there’s hope we can repair some parts of the ship.”

He turns on his holofeed and switches the settings to his drone-driving application. He starts gesticulating on the 3D display bubble in front of him before his own eyes take over. I can see there’s a progress bar on the right of his feed. It’s only one-third green. There’s a tick mark at the middle that shows he ought to be halfway done with his work. Not good. “All right,” Fenn says. “I’m at your command.”

I grin back. I’ve read and reread about Cyclo’s own birth and creation in the Annals of Astrobiophysics. Since Mother would happily chat away about all the intricacies of how she creates the human embryos for the ship’s crew and matures them to birth, I know how to do it all, in concept. I just don’t know how to work the machines. And judging from the content of her diary, she didn’t document that for my benefit now. But perhaps Fenn and I can figure that out together. Right now, we just need to find stem cells.

“Okay,” I say. “Stem cells are going to have very specific cellular markers on them that set them apart from other tissues. We need to program the bots to find these markers and tell us where to harvest them.”

Fenn grins suddenly. “Oh. This is on Portia’s list. It green-lights this as one of our collective objectives if we contribute to other crewmembers’ research.”

“So this won’t sabotage your work?”

“No. It’s good!”

Together, Fenn and I prepare to launch a dozen nanobots. Fenn sends out a cadre of a whole separate dozen set to gather info according to Doran’s schedule for him—measurements of the tritium and chlorine-16, plus other compounds I’m less familiar with. But for me, we’ll zone in on Cyclo’s stem cells. I ask, of course, ahead of time, if Cyclo can simply point them out to us herself. But she garbles the information when she responds.

“Her communication neural network is one of the first things we have to fix. It will make everything easier,” I say.

“Noted,” Fenn says, but he’s got that glassy stare again, which tells me he’s flying his bots, concentrating mostly on navigating. “Hey, this is good news.

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