The Final Six (The Final Six #1) - Alexandra Monir Page 0,36
so sorry, Leo. You—you don’t have to tell me anything else, if you don’t want to.”
I reach up to squeeze his shoulder, and his eyes refocus on me.
“I had a sister.” The words come tumbling out, as if they’ve been bottled up for too long. “Angelica. You would have liked her. She was smart, funny, the light of our family. A real firecracker, too. She could stand up to anyone, and no one could match her wit.” He smiles to himself, but then his expression falters. “I wasn’t supposed to ever see her like that—my baby sister underwater, her face—”
He breaks off, unable to speak, and I close the space between us, wrapping my arms around him as my own eyes well with tears. I can hear his heart pounding through his shirt, can feel his chest rising with each hollow breath.
“I’m sorry . . . I’m so sorry. And I—I know how you feel, in a different way.” We break apart, and I lean heavily against the stacks. “My little brother, Sam, is everything to me. When he was diagnosed with his heart condition, and the doctors told us he was living on borrowed time—it nearly broke me. Especially when we discovered it’s from a genetic mutation, something I could have gotten too, but I didn’t.” I shake my head, the years of pain returning anew. “I’m the big sister. It should have been me instead.”
Leo looks at me with understanding.
“We’re supposed to be their protectors. Not the survivors.”
“Yeah,” I whisper. “Exactly.”
A clatter of footsteps echoes through the library as another group of finalists enters, jarring us from the moment. Leo and I step out of the stacks, a slight shyness between us now that we’ve both just revealed something so personal. But there’s something else too, and I can see it in his eyes before we go our separate ways.
It’s the feeling of solidarity—of finding a friend in the dark.
I can’t sleep that night, my mind spinning between thoughts of Europa and fears about home. It doesn’t help that I’ve now gone my longest stretch yet without talking to Sam or my parents. I can feel the hole of their absence like a physical pain, a wound made sharper by worry. I never had to wonder before how they were doing, how Sam was feeling—I was always right there, close enough to know everything with just a glance. But now all I can do is guess, and the uncertainty has me wide awake. If I could just talk to them, if I didn’t have to wait till the stupid scheduled video-chat, then maybe I’d be okay. . . .
And that’s when I remember—the envelope from Sam. I didn’t want to open it in front of Suki, but now that she’s fast asleep, I have my chance.
I throw off the covers and reach under my bed, grabbing the flashlight stowed there in case of storms. I tiptoe over to my backpack, the light’s thin glow hovering above it as I unzip the hidden compartment and pull out the white envelope. I tear it open . . . but there’s no letter to be found. Instead, I’m holding a metal flash drive. One that I recognize.
My heartbeat quickening, I shuffle through my backpack until I find my handheld tablet—the only personal electronic device we were allowed to bring to Space Training Camp, since it works without a cellular or WiFi connection. I power it on and plug in the drive, climbing back under the covers as it loads.
A spinning alien head pops up on the screen, and I stifle a gasp. It’s just what I suspected. Sam, you are one crafty little bro.
The drive contains my own hacking software—the prototype I coded two years ago, when I was desperate to access the Burbank Hospital computers. Sam was struggling to stay alive then, his heart fighting against the old medication, and I couldn’t just sit and wait. I needed the internal data, the files and DNA sequencing that hospitals never release—just in case I could see something that the overwhelmed, scattered doctors might have missed. So I put my computer skills to their best use. I was already adept at Python, so it was just a matter of coding the server scripts, and then I was in.
My software is how I hacked Sam’s DNA records and figured out that he needed a biotech drug instead of a pharmaceutical, and it’s what ultimately led me to come up with my DNA editing