Planetfall by Emma Newman Page A

other older ones, but none of us that were born after they landed.”
    â€œDo you want to be chipped?” I ask and he frowns. “Do you want to be able to see things like we do?” I clarify.
    â€œI don’t know,” he says and looks at Kay. “What’s wrong?”
    He’s perceptive; at first glance I would think there was only concentration on Kay’s face, but she’s concerned about something.
    â€œNothing’s wrong,” she replies, a beat too slow. “You’re just very interesting, that’s all.”
    The words make me feel sick. Sung-Soo’s attention goes back to me and all I can do is try to smile as reassuringly as I can.
    â€œShow Ren,” he says. “Make her see what you can. Please.”
    Why does he trust me so?
    â€œI can explain everything once the scan is done,” Kay says.
    â€œI want Ren to see it now.”
    Does he want to see my reaction? Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps he can see that Kay is harder to read than I am. She pauses the scan with a flick of her right index finger and turns to me.
    â€œAre you comfortable with that?”
    I shrug. “I don’t understand this stuff as well as Dr. Reed does,” I say to Sung-Soo. “I don’t think I’ll be much use.”
    â€œPlease,” he repeats and Kay nods.
    She sends me a ping from her place on the cloud, and after I’ve followed it, passed a security check and agreed to various confidentiality clauses, her view of the scan’s live feed is overlaid across Sung-Soo’s body. As I’m trying to make sense of it I see her fingers moving in my peripheral vision. She’s using a v-keyboard and in moments a private message arrives from her.
    There’s an organism living in his gut. Don’t freak out when you look at it. It’s indigenous and I’m not sure if it’s parasitic or symbiotic yet—that’s what I’m trying to work out.
    Like a tapeworm?
    I’ll be able to tell you more soon. Keep him calm.
    â€œWe’re trying to work out how you can eat those nuts,” I tell him, aware of his scrutiny. “It’s a hard puzzle, but nothing to worry about.”
    â€œI feel fine,” he says to Kay. “I walked here. I’m fit, just tired.”
    â€œHow long did it take you?”
    â€œAbout two months.”
    Kay looks at me. She opens her v-keyboard. Did he have a map we could follow back?
    No sign of anything like that. He says he pieced together some clues from what he’d heard his father say about the Pathfinder’s visions and used the pod’s computer to work out the direction from the first scans we did of the surface.
    While the analysis is crunching I’ll take a look at his brain. I had no idea there was anything between Lois and Hak-Kun.
    I don’t reply to that. The scan is complete. We take longer to examine the results than it takes to create them. I watch as she zooms in on his brain and enlarges it, identifying major structures and exploding them out like a construction blueprint. I know most of them, but not everything about what they do and how they interact with one another.
    Huge hippocampus! she types to me. His spatial memory must be phenomenal.
    â€œDo you mind if I ask you some questions?” she asks him. When he shakes his head, she begins to quiz him on how they lived, from what they ate to where they built and what they used.
    I can feel the need to leave increasing. I haven’t had a chance to take this in properly. It’s all happened too fast. I need to beby myself and fit a better lid on the huge, bubbling pot of emotions boiling inside me.
    He answers all the questions without giving any sense of feeling invaded by her curiosity. Why is she fussing about this and not the thing living in his gut? I can’t help but think about the awful stories Dad used to tell me about what his grandparents dealt with as frontline medical care