Translucent (7 page)

“Yeah, but they’re this all-American family, right? They’re rich, they’ve got connections.” I toweled off and returned to her bedroom, but now my crackling adrenaline seemed to gather in the tips of my fingers, and my thumb made little circles on the pad of my index finger. “They’re going to keep looking.”

My skin still felt sticky.

“What connections?” she said.

“He drives this convertible. I don’t know, it looked expensive.” I pulled my fingers apart—and felt the sticky stuff pull apart into a strand—then pressed them together again, squishing it.

“Let’s look up their family,” said Megan, sprawling on her bed and opening her laptop. “Emory Lacroix . . . see what his parents do.” She began typing.

“Wait, don’t. Just don’t . . . looking him up, that seems suspicious.”

She scrolled through the search hits. “You’re being paranoid. I’ll clear my browsing history.”

“They’re the
police
.”

“Looking up a hot senior isn’t weird, Leona. We’ll say we have a crush on him—hey, here’s his dad . . .” She gave a low whistle. “Yep, he’s loaded. Guy works for a defense contractor called Rincon Systems.”

I slammed her laptop shut and glared at her. “
Don’t
. We talked about this. No obsessing over the family, no looking them up.”

“You’re the one obsessing,” she said.

“I’m not obsessing, I’m worried.”

Her eyes narrowed. “How do you know Emory drives a convertible?”

I lowered my eyes, rolling whatever was on my finger into a ball. “I . . . kind of talked to him.”

“You
what?
”

“I didn’t mean to,” I said guiltily. “I followed him after school, and . . . and he offered to give me a ride home. I didn’t know what to do.”

“You are so stupid,” she breathed. “You are so fucking stupid.”

Her words stung. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“You’re telling me not to look him up because that would be showing a suspicious amount of interest in him, and yet you
followed
him. Are you insane?”

“I wanted to see how it affected him.”

“Why?” Her voice carried bite.

“I don’t know.” My voice grew defensive. “Maybe because what we did was really fucked up and I feel like I owe something to the family. I need to see how much we hurt them, I need to own up to it. I’m not like you, Megan. I’m a nervous wreck. I don’t even sleep anymore. It’s like I fall into this gray zone for a few hours and then wake up. That’s what my life is now.”

“You’re doing it again,” she said. “You’re acting like I wasn’t there. You always do that.”

“Oh, please,” I sneered. “You weren’t in the driver’s seat.”

“We were both there.”

“So what? It was my fault.”

“Stop saying that. We made the decision together.”

“It was my fault, and you know it.” I looked away, and my gaze ended up on the terrarium in the corner of her room—her pet garden snake, idiotically named
Salamander
.

“You want to know something?” she said. “I’m jealous of you. I’m
jealous
. You’re okay being vulnerable and sobbing your heart out and moving on with your life, but I can’t. I can’t let it out. You want to know what that means? You want to know what that feels like? It feels like I’m dead inside. Like I’m hollow. That’s what it feels like for me, and that’s how it’s always going to feel. So quit acting like you’re in this alone. This is our burden, and we shoulder this together.”

I nodded, my eyes tearing up. She was right.

Here I was, crying again, letting my emotions out. She never cried.

“I love you,” I muttered.

“Love you too,” she said.

In the silence, I realized I was still rolling the sticky stuff around with my thumb, playing with it and stretching it around my finger, which tingled a little. How was there
more
of it now?

I looked down.

The sight made me gasp, and a choking terror squeezed around my throat. It was a moment before I could spit out the words. “My finger . . . my finger! Where’s my finger?”

Chapter 7

Megan’s bedside lamp
warmed the back of my hand. She brought over her desk lamp too, plugged it in, and trained it on my fingers, and I felt the blaze on my cheeks, the side of my neck. Sweat beaded on my forehead.

“Hang on, one more,” she said, rushing out the door.

“Megan, wait, don’t leave me!” I called, hating the fear rising in my voice.

I tilted my hand, and felt another wave of nausea.

“It’s spreading,” I whimpered.

She dragged in a tall lamp with three pivoting bulbs and set it up above me. I felt more heat, brighter light. Finally, she knelt in front of me and grabbed my wrist, tilting it to examine the finger—or lack thereof.

“That is so weird,” she said. “It’s not bleeding.”

“I can see the bone.”

“Yeah, but it’s not bleeding. Does it hurt?”

“
Look at it!
It’s gone.” At the joint, my index finger ended in a stump—a gray center surrounded by purple flesh. “Oh God . . .”

“Why aren’t you bleeding?”

“Call your mom,” I begged. “Call 9-1-1 . . . I had something on it, something sticky . . .”
Flesh-eating bacteria
. I winced and averted my eyes. “Eww, this is so gross.”

But with my eyes averted, I noticed something.

I didn’t feel anything. No pain.

Just that weird tingling.

I’d heard about that. People who lost limbs sometimes described phantom pains that seemed to come from the missing limb itself, even though it wasn’t there. Did that explain the tingling?

I closed my eyes and imagined moving the finger, even though I didn’t have it anymore. Sure enough, I felt the sensation of it moving.

Just an illusion.

I lowered my hand and imagined tapping the hardwood floor.

A phantom touch registered. It sure
felt
like I still had my finger. But when I opened my eyes, there was nothing there. Just this gruesome stump.

A stump that wasn’t bleeding.

Cleanly severed, the cross sections of individual veins gleamed in the light, a bluish violet color. Quivering slightly. As if blood still flowed through them.

Why wasn’t I bleeding?

“Why is it blue?” said Megan.

I thought of something else. Blue blood. Blood was only red when it oxidized in air. Otherwise it was blue. That’s why veins looked blue under your skin.

“Hang on,” I said. “Hold out your palm.”

She yanked her hand back. “Nuh-uh. No way. You’re not touching me with that.”

“I’m not going to touch you.” I grabbed her hand and held it up, then slowly lowered my severed finger toward her palm.

“You better not touch me.”

I ignored her and focused intently on the closing distance.

“Leona,” she warned.

“Shh.”

Two inches from her hand, though nothing appeared to touch her, I felt the tip of my finger touch her palm. Her hand flinched away, and she stared at me, wide-eyed. “What was that?”

My heart pounded. “Did you feel that?”

“You touched me. What was that? Was that some kind of NLP crap?”

“My finger,” I muttered, staring at where it should have been, “it’s not gone . . . it’s still there. You just can’t see it.” I probed the air with my other hand and found it. Right where it was supposed to be, floating in empty space—my fingernail, the joint, the whole finger.

I could touch it, but I couldn’t see it.

Invisible.

It felt sticky.

“I think I know why.” I went to the base of my finger, still visible, and peeled back the sticky stuff, rolling it off my finger like a latex glove. My finger came into view again, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Still there.

I rolled the substance into a squishy ball the size of a pea. I could feel it, but couldn’t see anything. “It’s that sticky stuff.”

“Let me touch it,” said Megan.

So I transferred the drop onto her fingertip, and she started playing with it. It was so weird watching her play with something I couldn’t see. She reached behind her, snatched up an eraser, and began stretching the substance around it. Bit by bit, the pink rubber vanished from sight until her hand appeared empty.

She grinned and made a motion of throwing. “Catch.”

I flung out my hands and my eyes darted, searching for movement. The eraser hit me it the face, bounced off my knee . . . and vanished.

“Brilliant,” I said, combing the floor. “You already lost it.”

“You were supposed to catch it.”

We went in widening circles until my hand brushed the eraser, and I heard it thump a few inches away. I chased the sound and snatched it up before Megan did.

My fingernails dug into the rubber, and I peeled back the invisible stuff to expose a section of pink, then rolled it into a ball again. It seemed to want to stick to itself, now that there was enough of it. Surface tension or something. My fingers were finally clean. I stretched it back around the eraser, fascinated.

Megan watched me. “You don’t . . . you don’t think it came from the . . . you know . . . ?”

“From the meteorite?” I finished for her.

“It was wet, remember?”

A tremor of fear went through me. Suddenly, it made sense. “I think this was what the Air Force was looking for. This was why they ripped up my room.”

I had a cut on my finger.

“You don’t think it’s dangerous, do you?”

“Considering they came in with hazmat suits and incinerated everything in sight and put up biohazard signs around the impact zone, no, Megan, I’m sure it’s perfectly safe.” I pulled out my cell phone and the business card Major Connor had given me. “I’m going to call that Air Force guy and tell him.”

“Are you serious?” she said. “It can make stuff invisible.”

“It’s the right thing to do.” My phone clicked on in my hand, and I typed in his number.

“Leona, it can make stuff invisible.”

“I’m aware of that,” I said.

“So let’s just, I don’t know . . .” She fidgeted. “Let’s just hold onto it for a while. What’s the harm in that?”

“No, Megan. I’m doing the right thing this time.”

“Oh, I see. You think calling him is going to make up for what we did? Is that it? You think being all goody two-shoes is going to make up for Ashley Lacroix?”

“Shut up,” I said heatedly, my thumb poised on the call button.

“I’m right, aren’t I?”

“It’s dangerous.”

“Since when do you care about danger?” she said. “You leapt down into a burning crater to get this stuff, aren’t you a
little
curious?”

I hesitated. She had a point.

Already, doubt had begun to enter my mind. The invisible fluid hadn’t actually done anything to my finger, but Major Connor
would
do something to my finger.

Like cut it off.

And I was pretty curious.

“Look, my sister goes to UCSB, right?” said Megan. “One of her best friends is a physics grad student. She has access to all the labs and equipment. Why don’t we take the stuff to her and have her analyze it, and
then
we can give it back to the government if it’s dangerous.”

I lowered the phone and sighed in exasperation. “Fine. We’ll take it into a lab.” I shoved the invisible eraser in my pocket. “But
I’m
keeping it.”

“Hmm . . . that
is
strange . . . very strange.” Eyebrows knotted, Megan’s grad student acquaintance hunched over a microscope in one of the UCSB physics labs on Thursday. “I can’t see it with an optical microscope, which suggests its refractive index is very close to one.”

“Uh . . . in English?” said Megan.

The grad student—Sarah was her name—leaned back and restored her glasses. She wore her red hair tied back in a tight bun. “Well, have you ever wondered why you can still see glass, even though it’s see-through? It has to do with the index of refraction.”

“Uh-huh,” said Megan.

“It turns out light travels slower through glass,” said Sarah. “Which causes it to refract when it hits the surface. It bends. Here . . . you see it everywhere.” She rummaged through a bin of optics and extracted a glass prism, which she held up to the sunny window. A tiny rainbow danced on the opposite wall. “The higher frequency light bends more, so the colors separate.”

A little behind them, I scanned the aisles of gleaming linoleum, distracted by the polished tubes and rubber hoses sprouting from a dozen scary-looking hulks of machinery. Science labs always gave me the chills.

The rainbow flicked into my eyes, and I squinted and held up my hand against a blinding onslaught of blues and violets.

“You paying attention?” said Sarah.

“Yeah, sorry, the colors separate,” I said, repeating the last thing I’d heard.

“How much a given substance bends light is called its refractive index. Diamond, for example has a really high refractive index. It bends light a lot, which is why diamonds sparkle so much.”

“Uh-huh,” Megan and I said together.

“Light gets in there and starts bouncing around off all those facets, ricocheting in all directions. Glass is much lower, but it’s still higher than air, which has a refractive index very close to one.”

My eyes went back to the lab equipment, gleaming stainless steel tubes and giant, humming boxes. The sight stirred in me a deep unease.

Sarah continued to explain, but I was no longer paying attention.

“So what do you think it is?” said Megan.

“Can you guys do DNA sequencing in here?” I blurted out.

“Huh? What?” said Sarah.

“Like if someone brought in a sample of blood, you could do the sequencing here and figure out who it belonged to?”

“Yeah, but not in this lab,” she said.

“What if it was so small you couldn’t see it? I mean, let’s say the police took a sample off a car bumper, or something, would they be able to—?”

Megan’s incredulous look told me to shut the fuck up. I did.

Sarah continued, “Anyway, if the refractive index of a translucent material was nearly the same as air, light would pass through it and hardly bend at all. You’d barely see it, like this . . .” She rummaged around some more and pulled out a tiny crystal. “This isn’t glass, it’s cryolite—refractive index of 1.33, exactly the same as the refractive index of water. Now watch.” She leaned over the glass she’d been drinking from and dropped the cryolite into the water.

The moment the crystal slipped under the surface, it vanished completely. Only a tiny hint of its outline remained visible.

“Whoa,” I said.

“Exactly. Now you can still see it a little bit because this is tap water, it’s got electrolytes in it, which changes the refractive index a bit. For comparison, here’s regular old glass.” She dropped in a simple lens. This one remained plainly visible, next to its invisible partner. “My guess is that substance you brought in is to air as this cryolite is to water, they have the same index of refraction.” Her eyes twinkled. “Shall we test my theory?”

Megan and I glanced at each other. “Uh . . . okay.”

She pulled the slide out from under the microscope, which she’d treated earlier with a droplet of our mystery fluid—the rest we’d already coerced into one of my old contact lens cases—and held it over the glass. “I’m guessing it won’t be invisible underwater.”

She dunked the slide under the surface.

We all leaned closer.

And saw nothing.

The slide appeared empty.

“Hmm,” she said, pulling it back up. “Did it dissolve in the water?” She tapped the center of the slide, rubbed her fingers together and muttered, “No, still there.” She held the slide up to the light. “And whatever it is, the water hasn’t adhered to it. Now that
is
strange. So it’s not index of refraction . . .”

“So what do you think?” Megan borrowed the slide from her and touched it herself, then stared blankly at her fingers. “What do you think it is?”

“I’m not actually sure,” said Sarah, raising the water glass to her lips.

I rushed forward. “No!”

Megan saw too and shouted, “Don’t drink—”

Sarah took a swallow and looked up. “What? It’s fine.”

I shared a nervous glance with Megan. But when the grad student didn’t drop dead, I relaxed a little. I’d been wearing it on my finger all day. How bad could ingesting it really be?

“Okay, here’s what I’m thinking.” Sarah took the slide from Megan and sealed it in a Ziploc baggie. “I’ll get this analyzed, and we’ll see what we’re dealing with.”

“How are you going to analyze it if you can’t see it?” I said.

“We’ll hit it with everything we got—electron microscope, electron microprobe, mass spectrometry, X-ray diffraction, X-ray fluorescence . . . something’s got to be able to see it.”

It was now
in two places—stuck to a microscope slide in a Ziploc bag, and somewhere at the bottom of an empty contact lens case. I reflected on this on Friday evening as I lay in my room, now starkly furnished with a mattress, a throw rug from the living room, and a pile of clothes.

Like the prison cell I would soon live in.

Two places.

The contact lens case sat by my phone next to my pillow, where I could see it, check that it was still there. Guard it. I supposed I could keep track of it if it was just in two places.

Why did I tell myself that lie?

It wasn’t in two places. Not anymore. It was under my fingernails, caked into the tiny valleys of my fingerprint—I could feel the lingering tingle, the urge to rub it. It was pressed into the threads of my jeans. It was on Megan’s finger, too. In the physics lab at UCSB, and inside Sarah’s intestines. It was still in the meteorite, wherever they’d taken it, and on all the clothes and furniture the cleanup crew had removed from my room.

And it was buried under eight feet of concrete in the San Rafael Wilderness.

It was everywhere.

No wonder they had rushed in like that to contain it.

I couldn’t ignore the obvious anymore.

The amount of this stuff on Earth was growing.

Why can’t we see it?

I rolled onto my side and stared at the contact case. I could touch it, I could
feel
it . . . so why couldn’t I see it? My hand went to the case and unscrewed the cap, and I raised the container to look inside.

Nothing there.

Invisible.

I should have called Major Connor.

Instead, I just stared down at it, my pulse drumming faster and faster. My body knew something wasn’t right here. Hands trembling, I touched the inside of the case. The fluid jumped to my fingertip and spread out, startlingly cool on my skin. Like picking up a contact lens.

Put it in your eye
, said a voice in my head.

“Um . . . no.” I held it up to the light. Nothing there.

But there
was
something there.

The wetness bothered me.

Put it in your eye . . . Then you will see
.

My hand inched toward my eye before I caught myself.
No, Leona.
Shuddering, I scraped my finger off inside the contact case, returning the liquid to the bottom, and quickly twisted on the cap.