The Unsound Theory (STAR Academy Book 1) Read online

  Yalena squeezed his shoulder in sympathy. His pain wasn’t difficult for her to imagine. Not at all. If anything, it was awfully familiar. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “You know I understand.”

  “If anything, that makes me feel worse. I can’t imagine what it must be like for you. I mean, at least I know my father. And I have Cooper.”

  “Yes, you do. And you also know who she was.” Yalena tried not to dwell on her own situation. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help with the signal.”

  “I wouldn’t count you out just yet,” Eric said, and he seemed grateful for the change of topic. “We have the recording now. All you need to do is keep trying.”

  With nothing else to say, Yalena agreed and prompted him to head back downstairs.

  “I don’t think people realized we were gone,” Eric said, scanning the thinning crowd at the party.

  The waiter bot collected empty bottles and mini-quiche wrappers left on the silky cocktail tables.

  “There you are, love birds.” Natalia pushed Yalena and Eric apart as she passed between them, dragging Alec behind her. His hands on her hips, he seemed to be trying to keep her from tripping, while the Moonie let out a few tipsy giggles. If things had reached that phase, the event was at its end.

  Yalena scanned the room. “How long do you reckon we were gone for?”

  “A while.” A voice behind her made her turn on her heel.

  “Chris.”

  “I searched for you,” he said, voice controlled, but cheeks flushing. If it wasn’t for the awkward vibe hanging in the space between them, she would have put it down to one too many drinks.

  “Sorry, I was talking to Eric.” The words were difficult to force out.

  Eric cleared his throat. “Come find me after. I’ll...” He motioned left then right with his hand and wandered off without finishing the sentence.

  Chris pulled Yalena a little closer, his palms grazing her elbows. “Is something wrong?”

  Being understanding felt like a punishment. “No,” she said. Somehow, she knew that whatever followed, guilt would eat at her.

  “I thought you were into this.”

  She swallowed away the dryness in her throat. “I’m sorry, I just...”

  “Maybe you’re picking and choosing,” he said, using Natalia’s words. There must have been a discussion she wasn’t present to defend herself at. “That’s fine, I guess.”

  Part of her bubbled with the desire to object, yet the words never made it out into the air. She stared at him, speechless, as he walked off, leaving her to watch him go in one direction or turn to watch Eric go in the other. Minutes must have passed, but she stood rooted in place.

  “You didn’t want to tell him?” Yalena felt air getting trapped in her lungs at Nico’s question. “This must be more serious than I thought.”

  She whirled around to face him. His almond eyes narrowed. Nico sought to get some sort of reaction out of her, but not the way Natalia would. He was examining her, like a private investigator studied a new piece of evidence. Intuition screamed at Yalena. He knew something.

  “You didn’t want to tell Chris why you ran off with Eric.” It was an observation, yet it felt like a threat.

  “That’s between me and him.” Yalena tried to sound calm.

  “Not when it involves a log-in to the commander’s account.” His dark eyes didn’t even blink. “I doubt the commander had time to do that, seeing as he was talking to me.” He studied her for another long moment. “It seems I keep missing things when it comes to you. I thought we were tight, the four of us. We hang out as friends, but then I come across something like this.”

  “Are you going to tell on us?” Lips trembling, she couldn’t keep up the pretense.

  “Are you going to ask me not to? I don’t know if we’re such good friends.”

  “Yes,” she hurried to say. Yalena didn’t know if both desperation and decisiveness displayed in equal parts in her expression. “We’re only trying to help.”

  “Without the commander’s permission?”

  “He wouldn’t let us try to help,” she evaluated each word as she said it. “Not until we graduate, and it might be too late then.”

  Nico paused, looking like he was considering how plausible this was. “Just be warned—The Woodpecker sees all.”

  Chapter 12. The Circles

  “SO? WHAT HAPPENED?” Jen had managed to keep from interrogating her friend long enough for Yalena to make tea and join her on the couch in the student lounge.

  “Nothing.” Yalena looked back to check if they were alone.

  “I don’t buy that for a second,” Jen said. Even though the party had lasted till well after midnight, her complexion was as even and flawless as if she had had all her beauty sleep. “Spill.”

  “I just went to talk to Eric, that’s all.” She’d rehearsed it in her head, but it still sounded dumb in person.

  Jen’s jaw was fixed stiff. The more Yalena avoided any truthful explanation, the more she was going to be bothered by it.

  “Does it have anything to do with the silicone patch you asked me for?” Yalena must have given her a sheepish look in response, because she added, “Off the record?”

  “I meant what I said to you then,” Yalena whispered, sure that somewhere out there, The Woodpecker’s watchful eye was on her. “It’s being used to help others.”

  “You’re scaring me a little.” Jen dropped her gaze, deflating. “I thought we were, you know, in the same position here, trying to keep up with everyone else.”

  “We are,” Yalena said, reaching a hand out to squeeze her shoulder. “Eric thinks my language skills can help the commander, but I’m not so sure. That’s all we’re trying to figure out.”

  It was a simplified version of the reality, but it wasn’t a lie. With every careful glance from Jen, Yalena lost a piece of her resolve to keep up a front. Half-truths and sneaking around had caused her enough headaches already. Having no idea if or when she would be able to help Eric left her more open to admit they were working on something. As soon as they failed, they would move on from it and any discussion on the topic would be moot.

  “If you insist,” Jen said, still eying her with some suspicion. “But whatever you’re up to, you’ll have to be more careful. Everyone noticed you two were gone.”

  “And Chris?”

  “He got a bad case of bruised ego, and Natalia added fuel to the fire to make things worse.”

  “That’s not hard to imagine.” Yalena couldn’t help the flash of guilt that any recollection of last night caused her. The only consolation for her now was that Chris would be too proud to address the topic again. “With time, people will forget about it.”

  “With lots of time, maybe,” Jen corrected, tying her loop-through ponytail anew. “Everyone was asking about you two, and they all came to me,” she said. “First, Chris, trying to be casual and failing; then Heidi, because she sees all social moves somehow; then Cooper, who is a real gossip, by the way; and even Nico. Can you imagine?”

  Yes, she could.

  “What did Nico ask?”

  “Where you were, and if I thought you and Eric were an item.” Jen’s voice cracked a little. Her eyes darted away from Yalena’s face on instinct. Eyebrows furrowing, Yalena couldn’t make sense of the flinch.

  “Perhaps Nico likes you and just wanted to chat you up.” It felt wrong to throw distractions of this caliber, but Yalena didn’t know what else to do to dissolve some of the tension.

  “Hardly,” Jen disagreed. “If anything, he was keeping tabs on you two.”

  Why does she have to be so intuitive and right? Yalena fumed on the inside.

  “Look, I promise all this pressure is going to evaporate.”

  As soon as I decipher the signal or prove that I can’t, she added to herself. With that vow, instead of lifting from her chest, the pressure wrapped around her in a tight clench.

  THE ONLY ADVANTAGE of it being exam period was that the up
coming tests gave the students a lot more than gossip to focus on. Yalena still didn’t miss the cold shoulder Chris gave her, nor the way he avoided looking at her when they passed each other in the corridors. Even harder to ignore were Natalia’s comments, which showed no sign of diminishing in frequency.

  “Hi, lovebirds,” she’d say any time Eric and Yalena were even remotely close to each other, making them both look away.

  Heidi also did her best to squeeze out a confirmation of whether Yalena and Eric were dating, but her roommate pushed back, insisting it was too soon to say. While that may have given Heidi the wrong idea about Yalena’s intentions, it did keep her from meddling further. Everything came at a price. And all the while Yalena weaved the web of half-truths that could come crashing down like a house of cards, she felt there was one person she could not fool. The Woodpecker.

  “He knows something,” she tried to convince Eric when she walked in on him alone, practicing in the flight simulator before breakfast.

  “Maybe.” Eric didn’t even lift his gaze from the screen in front of him.

  One glance at the swooshing make-believe fleet on it was enough to bore Yalena. “Why are you even doing this?”

  The harsher question made him gaze up. “The flight simulator? I have to.”

  “Doing the five multi-player sessions required, I would understand, but going one-on-one against the computer—not so much. If you’re not a pilot profile, why bother climbing up in the rankings?”

  “Listen,” Eric said, switching the discussion back on topic. “Nico showed a lot of rule-breaking potential before he was even at STAR Academy. Did you know how he got invited?”

  Yalena shook her head, sour mood still on.

  “He hacked Unifier code and left us an application letter, or rather, a riddle mocking our systems and their vulnerability.”

  “Are they that bad?”

  “No, they’re top-notch. Nico is just a world better, and he knows it. If he’s been quiet so far, it’s because he wants to be a part of it somehow.”

  The thought hadn’t occurred to her before, and Yalena took a minute to evaluate it. Eric disabled two of the enemy ships in that short pause.

  “Does that mean you’ll let him in on it?”

  “Maybe.” Eric looked up for a split second. “If you find me a reason to.”

  “Me? You’re the one at the helm here.”

  Eric finally gave up on maintaining his simulation at the same time as the conversation, and seconds later, his home base blew up in flames. He didn’t even grace it with a glance, turning to Yalena, who saw his name sink into sixth place in the freshmen rankings on the wall behind him.

  “I didn’t mean to make you feel like I’m transferring the responsibility onto you,” he said. “I just meant that we don’t yet need anybody else. If you feel that we do, I’m open to a discussion.”

  Yalena hunched down, feeling smaller. “Let me first see if I can actually get anything out of that seamlessly uniform white noise.”

  Despite having heard it just once, she could swear she still felt it buzz in the background somehow, refusing to dissipate and let silence be. How Eric was patient enough to go on with exam preparations until the end of the semester with the signal already on his Berry, she’d never know.

  “As soon as the others leave and we’re sure no one will catch you as you work on the recording, we’ll get right on it.” Eric clasped his hands as if to highlight this was the end of their discussion, but when Alec, Dave, Heidi, and Natalia entered the simulator for their group session, a wave of whispers and cleared throats prompted them to free the space and continue in hushed voices outside.

  “You know, you could go back to Earth for the break,” Eric said, looking guilty. It was difficult to determine if that was because of the additional workload he’d given her or because he felt bad for complicating her dating life. He still hadn’t commented on the latter.

  “Can I get the signal and work on it on Earth?”

  “It can’t leave the station. My dad might eventually forgive us for sneaking in, especially if we figure the signal out,” he said, “but bringing sensitive information out of the space station would be unforgivable.”

  Yalena shrugged. “Then I can’t go.”

  “Remember that it was you who said that, not me. If you wanted to silence the whispers, you could go home.” His watery blue eyes were glued to hers. “I’m not keeping you here.”

  He may have been right, but all his statement did was reconfirm she couldn’t go. Yalena may have been blown here by chance winds, but she would never let herself run away from a challenge, from a way to help, if she could. Doing the right thing often felt scary, and that’s why many people shied away from it. But the wrong thing, much like running away from gossip-fuelled crowds, felt rotten and out of sync.

  “It’s not my style to get bullied into leaving,” she said.

  “Then let’s start working on the signal tomorrow evening,” Eric said. “We should finally have the privacy we need once they all leave after the exams.”

  AS WELL AS THE ESSAYS and the pop quizzes, which tested their understanding of the more than generous reading materials for the semester, some of the exams involved small games of resource allocation under specific constraints. That last one wasn’t something they were trained for, and the class complained vigorously about it. Still, Yalena remembered O’Donnell’s welcome speech, and it occurred to her that such unexpected twists were his way of inviting the students to think on their feet.

  All in all, Yalena thought she did all right, especially on her Life Beyond Earth essay. After the worst Space Travel exam imaginable to her was over, most of the students headed to the ships bound for Earth, Mars, and the Moon. Yalena hurried to get back to her room for a shower, thinking she could even try to get a nap in. Having the room all to herself over the break was supposed to have some benefits, but to her disappointment, rest wasn’t among them. The second she sat down on her bed, the doorbell buzzed. Eric was at the door, and although he had light purple circles under his eyes, he was smiling.

  “Look what I’ve got,” he said, holding up his Berry after the automatic door slid shut behind him. He touched the tip of his Berry to hers, finally giving her rights to the file.

  “I wondered when we’d find ourselves in this situation again.” Why was she excited about this?

  There was a brief pause, stilting the conversation. They were in this together, and right now, they were the only two students left on Unifier. It would make sense to stick together. Still, as unsure as Yalena was of her ability to decipher any hidden code in that signal, she was positive that Eric couldn’t help.

  “I can take it from here,” she said. “Now that Heidi’s gone, I won’t have any interruptions.”

  “Take as long as you need, and don’t get discouraged if it takes a while.” With that feeble pep talk, he turned to leave. Yalena nodded at the door that closed behind him, but she couldn’t help thinking that even if she listened to the signal forever, she would never get it. She folded her legs under her to get comfortable on the bed with the tablet on her lap, listening to the buzzing sound.

  The monotonous noise made her head grow heavy. Was this really an alien signal? Was it a signal at all? she asked herself for the thousandth time. She might have a brain hardwired for languages, but it felt too small to host all the conspiracy theories. Yalena knew that if they were ever to find the answer to this riddle, she shouldn’t think like this, but the truth was that her mind was blank. There was no way to extract words or even letters out of the hum.

  She tried to think of anything it reminded her of, but the only thing she was sure she could distinguish were the slight changes in the sound, like hiccups. Desperate to do something with her hands to fill the stretching time, she opened a blank sheet on her tablet and scratched up and down with the stylus. Its tip left a jagged black line behind.

  Yalena huffed and hummed to herself in what she felt was the inexplicab
le frequency the signal seemed to make her vibrate with. Doodling kept her listening to it on a loop until well after midnight and left a couple of pages worth of inexplicable scribbles behind—some edgy spikes, some circles of varying sizes, linked by lines. A far stretch from anything intelligible.

  When Eric’s return was announced by the annoying doorbell, Yalena scrambled to her feet.

  “You didn’t answer your Berry,” Eric said, moving his gaze from the burrow of pillows she had built for herself on the floor to the tense, but delirious look in her eyes. “Did you spend all this time listening?” He seemed a little worried, and Yalena realized working on the signal must have taken its toll on her.

  “Yes, and I made no progress. No progress,” she repeated quietly.

  “And what’s this?”

  “You said to decipher an alien signal,” she said, her voice groggy. “That’s how I imagine it. Weird nonsensical geometry. If any aliens are out there, they need to figure out a better means of communication before sending stuff our way.” It was a silly complaint—the type she would normally expect Natalia to pester people with.

  “Let’s think about that later,” Eric said. “Come on.”

  He walked her over to the bed and pulled the covers up to her chin like she was two years old. Yalena hated feeling so helpless, but no matter how hard she tried, blinking the fatigue away wasn’t successful.

  “Eric,” she said, looking up at him as he tried to arrange her pillows. “Do you really think it’s them out there, one of the Migration missions?” It felt like a moment of clarity. She hadn’t had the courage to bring this up before, but the way he was taking care of her now made her more confident.

  Eric scratched his forehead. “I hope so.”

  “And you really think I can help them?” she demanded again, trying to sit up.

  “I do.”

  “I don’t,” Yalena mumbled, feeling her eyes closing. “I think that if we want real answers, we’ll have to go get that stupid satellite ourselves.” Her muscles couldn’t keep her trying to rise anymore, so she relaxed and let drowsiness work its magic on her.