Pi in the Sky Read online

  “Okay,” he says. “Feel free, then.”

  “Really? Thanks!” Annika reaches for one again.

  “No problem,” he replies. “So long as you don’t mind your stomach exploding as soon as the first bite reaches it. You probably won’t feel it, though, since your tongue would have swelled to four hundred times its normal size, causing your head to explode first.”

  Annika pulls back her hand and sighs. “You could have just said no.”

  “Just wanted to give you the choice,” Ash says. He leads us past the table. “Okay, we’re at the lab now. What aren’t you supposed to do?”

  “Touch anything,” we recite in unison.

  “Exactly.”

  I look around us for the lab, but the only door anywhere is a white one marked CLOSET. Ash takes a key from the chain and slips it in the keyhole. The door swings open to reveal a small laboratory. I spot all the high-tech equipment OnWorlders have brought back over the years, some attached to the walls, but most piled up on the floor. Kal would go crazy in here.

  Why are all the cool places behind doors marked CLOSET?

  “Come on in,” Ash says, blowing away the dust clinging to the door. I watch as the dust ball floats slowly to the floor. You almost never see dust in The Realms, since our skin rarely flakes. That only shows how long this room has sat unused.

  “This is your lab?” I ask. “It doesn’t look like anyone has ever used it.”

  “They haven’t,” he replies, moving some boxes out of the way so we can come in. “We’ve never had anyone to analyze until now.” He rubs his hands together and beams at Annika.

  She frowns. “Promise no brain slicing.”

  “You won’t feel a thing, scout’s honor.”

  I don’t know what a scout is, but it seems to do the trick.

  “Okay,” Annika says. “Let’s get this show on the road, then. We’ve got a planet to rebuild.”

  Ash sets to work attaching different pieces of equipment to each other, pouring vials of liquid into various beakers, and generally making the small room feel even smaller. He sets his holoscreen up on the table beside him and says, “All right, take off your shoes and we’ll begin.”

  Annika wrenches off her boots and stands awkwardly in the center of the room. She looks shorter and, for some reason, more vulnerable than I’ve seen her. Even when she was crying in the Afterlives.

  Ash leans toward his screen. “Species: Human. Earth. Orion Arm, Milky Way, Virgo Supercluster. Gender: Female. Name: Annika.” He glances up at Annika, who says, “Klutzman.” He repeats it. “Annika Klutzman. Looks to be about twelve years of age.”

  “Almost thirteen!” Annika interjects.

  Ash gives her a cursory glance, then turns back to his screen. “Typical human,” he dictates. “Not extraordinary in any way.”

  “Hey!” she says. “That’s not true! I’m double-jointed, see?” She clasps her hands behind her back, then brings her arms over her head without her hands pulling apart.

  “Not all humans can do that?” Ash asks, interested.

  She shakes her head proudly.

  “And does that improve your life in any way? Give you an advantage over the rest of your species?”

  “Not that I know of,” Annika admits, letting her hands drift apart.

  “Moving on,” Ash says, holding out an empty jar. “Spit in here, please.”

  She moves her tongue around her teeth, then spits a glob of saliva into the cup. He pours it into the top of a square metallic box that starts humming and beeping.

  “Hand,” he says. She holds out her hand. He takes what looks like a tiny spoon and gently scrapes it over her palm.

  She giggles. “That tickles.”

  He takes the spoon and pours whatever invisible cells he got into the machine on top of the saliva.

  “Now, while that’s analyzing, let me just—” He stops talking and, quick as a flash, yanks out a few pieces of hair from Annika’s head without even jostling the hat of leaves.

  “OW!” she cries, rubbing the spot vigorously. “You could have warned me!” Small pieces of ivy fly from her head.

  “Sorry,” Ash says, not sounding it. “Needed to get the root intact.”

  She grumbles and keeps rubbing while he drops the hairs into a long, yellow tube and goes to check the readout from the spit.

  “Hmm,” he murmurs, holding up the narrow piece of paper that came out of the end of the machine. “Have you recently swum in the tide pools of Shalla in the Pegasus Dwarf Galaxy?”

  “Yes, actually,” she replies. “Right after I went fishing on Venus.”

  Ash furrows his brows. “There’s no water on Venus. It’s much too hot. How could you go fishing?”

  She looks to me for help.

  “Annika was just kidding,” I explain. “She hasn’t been off of Earth. Until now, of course.”

  “Right, right,” he says. “I forgot how primitive humanity is.”

  “There’s that word again,” she says. “Can I put my shoes back on?”

  He nods absently and returns to analyzing his data. “I’ll be right back,” he says, leaving us alone. Neither of us speaks while Annika laces up her boots, more slowly than necessary.

  “Thank you for doing this,” I finally say.

  “No problem.”

  Then we’re back to no one speaking. The room seems even smaller than it did when we first entered.

  “Um, thank you, too, Joss,” she says. “For, um, well, for being such a good friend these last few days. Or however long I’ve been here. I’ve lost track.”

  I figure explaining about how time works differently here can wait, so I just say, “No problem. I’m just glad your brain is still in one piece. You seem very attached to it.”

  She laughs. “Do you even have a brain?”

  I pretend to be offended and cross my arms. But then I just shrug and say, “Sort of.”

  Ash returns to find us grinning at each other. Most of my other brothers would have started teasing me. Ash just hands Annika a small plastic bag, tied up at the end with a string.

  She holds it up and we both peer at it. The bottom of the bag is filled with tiny grains of material of various colors, which is strange enough. But at the top of the bag swirling smoke mixes with about a hundred tiny bubbles. “What in the world is this?” she asks him.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” he asks. “It’s you.”

  Without water it’s all just chemistry. Add water and you get biology.

  —Felix Franks, chemist

  Me?” Annika asks. “How can I be in a plastic bag? I’m not a sandwich! Although I could use a good grilled cheese and tomato right about now.”

  “Those are samples of the chemicals in your body,” Ash explains, beginning to dismantle the lab equipment. “You’re made of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus atoms, with a smattering of the other elements found in the soil of your planet.” He hands her the printout. “Everything in the bag is listed on here, along with the varying amounts. I gave you all I had. The heavier elements are very hard to come by so don’t lose it.”

  She gives the bag a little shake and frowns. “This is all that’s inside me? There’s not much here.”

  “No, no,” Ash says. “That’s much, MUCH more of each element than what’s actually inside you. Trillions and trillions times more. Remember, all creatures are mostly empty space. If you squash the atoms of your whole human race together, squeezing out the empty space between the nucleus and the electrons surrounding it, you’d all fit inside a pinky toe.”

  “We’d all fit inside a pinky toe?” she repeats. “What size pinky toe are we talking about? A baby’s? Or like, a sumo wrestler’s?”

  “Sumo wrestlers can still have small toes,” I offer. “I’ve seen it on the view screens.”

  “Don’t feel so bad,” Ash says. “Here in The Realms we have so few atoms in our bodies we wouldn’t even fit inside a pinky toenail. Anyone’s pinky toenail.”