Hikari was only three when she was diagnosed with Anier Syndrome.

When we got the phone call, Daddy and I were still working in the archives. I was his assistant then, in charge of running up and down the databanks making sure nothing was on when it shouldn’t be, or touched by the never-ending patches of mold sprouting all over the ship.

Daddy found me in aisle 2B, picking at a stubborn patch of moss with my scrape tool.

“Aiya,” he said softly. “They know what’s wrong with Hikari.”

The way he said it immediately rubbed me the wrong way. “There’s nothing wrong with her,” I snapped. “She’s fine.”

That couldn’t have been more untrue and I felt stupid for insisting that it was. I was ten years old already, too old to be lying to myself about the world. But Daddy did not seem to care that I still was.

“I meant they know what’s making her feel so ill all the time.”

“Oh,” I said, putting down my scrape tool. “Okay.”

Daddy said, “Okay.”

And then we were clocking out for the day.

My little sister was lying on a bed too big for her, in a room crowded with adults I didn’t know. They were all wearing white gowns and crowded around Hikari’s bed like a flock of seabirds. Most of them greeted us when we entered, though no one looked like they wanted to.

“We’re not in the old place,” I pointed out, but Daddy ignored me. He was too busy talking with one of the adults. I couldn’t understand much of what they were saying, so I pushed my way through to see my sister.

Hikari was asleep. Her eyes were puffy and her cheeks blotchy, which meant she’d been crying. I glared at the adults around us, trying to work out who the culprit of my sister’s discomfort might be, but no one looked at me. It seemed like they didn’t even know I was there, so fixated were they on staring at my sleeping sister. Many were talking, their voices hidden behind turned heads and cupped hands, and their rudeness made me angry. Who were these people? Why were there so many?

“And why is she not in the old place?” I demanded the last question loud enough to make eyes flicker down on me. “That place was better. The walls were painted pink.”

Pink was Hikari’s favorite color, though I wasn’t going to divulge such a private secret to these gown-wearing adults.

“These walls look like someone has smeared poop over them.”

“Aiyano!” Daddy gasped and swooped me away. I struggled, but he was stronger.

“We must not talk like that here,” he chides me when we were off in the corner. “These doctors are amongst the best on the ship. The entire fleet even. We’re lucky they’ve spared so much time and resources studying Hikari. If we were on any other ship, it would not have worked out this well.”

I frowned. “Why are they studying her? Shouldn’t they be helping her?”

Daddy blanched. “Of course they’re helping her.”

“But you just said-”

“Aiya,” Daddy sighed. “Forget what I said. Just stay quiet and out of the way of these people, okay?”

I pouted.

“Promise me, Aiya,” Daddy pressed. “You’ll get time to play with Hikari once this is all over. Right now, they need to figure out how to fix her.”

There he went again. Fix. As if my little sister was a broken hard drive that could be re-formatted or reset. But I knew what he meant. So I nodded and said, “Promise,” and that was that.

As Daddy went back to the doctors, I went back to Hikari. I made sure to shoulder through as many people as I could on the way, so they knew not to mess with me, and in effect Hikari.

“It is an incredibly rare disease,” I heard one of the doctors tell Daddy. “It’s something we’ve only started to see in rose bushes after the Horizontal Reset.”

“Rose bushes?” Daddy asked. “Why rose bushes?”

“It’s something that affects the specific biological makeup of the Rosaceae family.” The doctor went on to explain, though I understood not a word of it. I reached out for Hikari, finding her hand under the crisp white sheets.

There were a whole bunch of wires attached to her and I felt the hard edges of a clamp on her index finger. It was too big for her, like a crocodile was chomping down on my sister's tiny hand. I wanted to pull it off, yank all the wires and leads and tubes snaking out from under her covers, but then someone clasped a heavy hand on my shoulder and said,

“Don’t jostle her, sweetheart. Better to let her rest.”

I shrugged the hand off and said, “Don’t touch me,” but then remembered Daddy’s words and pulled back my own hand.

“This will be the first case observed in humans,” the doctor went on. He had a gross nasally voice, like he was always on the verge of spitting but just wouldn’t. I knew he was talking about Hikari, but his words made little sense to me and that made me angry all over again.

“As there have been limited studies in any diseases not directly linked to the human genome after the Reset, we do not yet know the long-term effects the Anier Syndrome will have on your daughter, Mr. Chinen.”

I turned around. The doctor was staring at the wall while he talked and Daddy was staring at the floor.

“But you can be assured, Mr. Chinen, we have the best medical team on the E.H. Michael working to unravel the secrets behind your daughter’s illness.”

The hand was back on my shoulder. I whipped around, ready to bite it off, but the hand produced a finger that poked me right in the cheek as I turned.

I glanced up shocked to see a lady doctor smirking down at me. She had shoulder-length black hair that was greying at the sides, and pale eyes that crinkled at the corners.

“Aiya, right?” she whispered.

I nodded.

“Are you hungry, Aiya?”

I shook my head no.

The lady doctor looked disappointed. “That’s a shame, because I am, and I was wondering if you could keep me company while I went down to the canteen.” She looked around at other adults who I thought were her friends, but then she said in a loud whisper, “None of these guys ever seem to eat,” so that meant they weren’t her friends.

She was silent after that, and I realized it was because she was waiting for my answer. I wanted to tell her to go by herself, but then I saw Daddy was looking at me. And his words echoed back to me.

Just stay quiet and out of the way.

I looked back at the lady doctor. “Fine,” I said.

“Wonderful.” The lady doctor reached down and took my hand. “I’ll be quick, I promise.”

We got to the canteen, and it turned out I was hungry after all. The lady doctor watched as I shoveled spoonfuls of omelet rice into my mouth. I knew I was making a mess but didn’t really see why I should care.

“My name is Dr. Oswald,” the lady doctor said. “But you can call me Lindsey.”

I nodded, taking a sip of juice before attacking my food again.

Dr. Oswald propped her elbows onto the table and rested her chin on her threaded fingers. She was kinda pretty, I noticed, like the photos Daddy kept by his bedside table. He told Hikari and me that it was our mother in those photos, but I never really believed him. For starters, I'd never seen a picture of them together.

“You really love your sister, don’t you, Aiya?”

“Mmh-hm,” I said. “She can say my name already.”

That was not entirely true. The closest Hikari got was “Iyaya,” which was a long way off. But I didn’t want to tell Dr. Oswald that.

“I promise we’ll find a way to cure her,” Dr. Oswald said, and I paused in my eating just long enough to answer back,

“Don’t make promises you cannot keep.”

Dr. Oswald’s thin brown eyebrows moved upward, but it didn't really seem like she was surprised.

“You’re... absolutely right,” she said finally, breaking into a smile. “I should be more careful with my words.” She brought her own cup to her lips and took a careful sip. It was a pretty cup, wide-rimmed with a curved handle. I hadn’t seen many like it on the ship, and when I told her that, Dr. Oswald’s smile grew wider.

“That’s right,” she said. “This is my own cup. I brought it with me when we boarded the E.H. Michale.” She twisted it so the other side was facing me. “See this pattern here?” She ran a finger along the cup’s side. “It’s a Starbucks logo.”

I studied the little green circle as I chewed down a spoonful of beans. There was a face inside the circle, I now saw, with wavy lines that looked like... hair?

“Is she a Starbuck?” I asked, pointing with my spoon.

Dr. Oswald was beaming now. “Sort of,” she chuckled. “You know, I’m willing to bet no one else thought to bring this kind of memorabilia aboard. It’s just a coffee cup sure, but if you think about it, this could very well be one of the last coffee cups we’ll ever have to remember what we left behind.”

I frowned at the foreign words. “What’s a memra…ra…”

“Memorabilia? It means something we keep to remember something or someone from long ago.” Dr. Oswald took another sip. When she put the cup down, I saw that her lips had left behind a red smile around the rim. “Do you have something like that, Aiya?”

I thought about it for a while. “No,” I said finally. “All the mem…bralias we have belong to other people.”

Dr. Oswald seemed confused for a second before she understood. “That’s right. You work in the archives.”

I nodded but didn’t want to tell this woman anything more. The work I did with Daddy was special to me. It was always just the two of us down there in the lowest section of the ship, which meant that on days when work was light, he’d let me pick out a datadisk by random to play on the projector. Sometimes it was music, sometimes it was boring papers. If I was lucky though, it would be a movie or a T.V. show, and we’d sit together to watch it.

I wasn’t going to tell Dr. Oswald any of that though, so I inhaled the rest of my food, picked up my empty tray and juice, and walked them over to the return station.

When I came back, Dr. Oswald had finished the smelly brown juice she was drinking. She wiped the cup’s rim with a handkerchief before tucking it into a little bag she carried at her side. “Ready to head back?” she asked as I approached.

I nodded. “I want to see Hikari now.”

“Sure,” said Dr. Oswald, holding out her hand. I stared at it until she retracted it.

I didn’t want to talk to Dr. Oswald as we made our back, but that didn’t stop her from asking her questions.

“How old are you, Aiya?”

“Ten,” I answered. Technically I was nine, but I didn’t want to seem immature. Besides, my birthday was in two months so I was basically ten already.

“Hm,” said Dr. Oswald as we continued down the corridors. There were wide windows on either side of us and I looked through them as we passed. There weren’t many kids on those hospital beds, let alone any as young as my sister.

“Do you know about the MKII God Gier program, Aiyano?”

I remembered Daddy talking to me about it some time ago, but couldn't quite remember what he said. Something about me never needing to do it or something. But all the same, I told Dr. Oswald I knew what she was talking about.

“Then you should also know that in three year’s time, you’ll be old enough to apply for the academy?”

I kept my gaze on my shoes. “I know that.”

Dr. Oswald slowed her pace, forcing me to slow as well. “Then… do you have an interest in joining, Aiya? It could save your sister’s life, you know.”

I looked at her in surprise. “Really?” I had anticipated her question but not her statement.

Dr. Oswald took a few more steps before noticing that I’d stopped walking. She turned to face me.

“Every student in the academy will get a generous reward for studying there, no matter if they end up passing or not.” She smiled, but this time her silvery grey eyes did not crinkle in the corners. “But if you do pass the final exam, you’ll be one of the most important people in the entire Eternal Heaven fleet. You and your family will get access to the best equipment, and the resources allocated to you will be many times that of ordinary people.”

A shout made both of us turn. Through the windows of the room we were passing, a man was screaming in his bed. He had one leg bandaged and tied to a railing above him, and as I watched, a patch of bright red was growing beneath the bandage. The man was calling out and twisting like a trapped fish, but there was no one around to hear but us.

We stood by the window, both of us unmoving.

“Do you know what I’m saying, Aiyano?”

The man looked to be younger than Daddy. He had black cropped hair and tanned skin that was now wet with his sweat. I wanted to go in and help him, but Dr. Oswald’s hand was back on my shoulder once again, heavy. Through the reflection in the glass, I could see that her nails were painted gold, and rounded prettily at the edges in that way I saw done by actresses in old movies.

I noticed that she was looking at me through the reflection too.

“If I sign up for the academy,” I said, “then Hikari will get better doctors to look after her?”

Dr. Oswald gave me a pat on the shoulder. “Clever girl,” she said, then tucked her hands in her coat pockets and continued down the corridor.

I stood by the man’s window for a second longer, thinking, before pressing the button to go in.