Free The Sowing by K. Makansi Page A

secret. After all, it’s entirely possible this information has already resulted in the deaths of a classroom full of students. 
    “Some genius. Why couldn’t whoever created this have left us some sort of clue as to how to crack the damn thing?” I mutter while spinning one of the chromosomes aimlessly on the plasma. I’ve been especially bitter the last few days—everyone else in our group is either a science whiz or a master computer programmer. They all speak math and physics and can babble on endlessly about formulas, vectors, and compiling programs—subjects about which I am woefully ignorant. I’m the lone artist of the group, and my skills are notoriously useless when attempting to analyze DNA. So I’ve mostly been playing with my plasma and staring over someone else’s shoulder as they work. I even did a pen and ink sketch of one of the chromosomes. Not that it helped. But it looks good.
    “Maybe he didn’t want anyone to figure it out,” Jahnu replies. He sounds just as depressed as I am. As a mathematician, Jahnu’s specialty is in puzzles and patterns. He helps the comm team encrypt messages sent between bases, so Eli was especially hopeful he’d have some insight to offer on the project. Obviously that hasn’t panned out quite the way he’d hoped.
    “Well, that’s stupid. Why would he go through all the trouble of coding it in the first place and then putting the DNA in the cell nuclei or whatever if he didn’t want anyone to get to it? And, how do you know it was a he?”
    Jahnu stands and stretches. “I’m gonna go find Kenzie. She should be off of KP by now.”
    “Gonna spend some special time with your new girlfriend before you head in to work, huh?” The one bright spot on this whole extravaganza has been Kenzie and Jahnu. The two of them are just over the moon about each other, and while I’m sure it’ll pass and they’ll get back to normal eventually, right now they’re preoccupied with being as annoyingly adorable as possible. They walk hand-in-hand all through the tunnels, he puts his arm around her when they’re in the mess hall, and I accidentally walked in on them in various stages of undress two nights ago.
    “So what if I am?” he shoots back at me. His skin is too dark to see a blush, but I have no doubt his cheeks are flushing.
    “So nothing!” As sulky as I’ve been recently, his happiness is infectious. I shove him playfully as he walks by me on the way out the door. “Make good choices!” I yell after him. He swears at me and slams the door.
    I go back to spinning the model on my plasma. I don’t begrudge Jahnu and Kenzie their happiness. It’s just that it reminds me of the last time I felt that way. I rub my temples, trying to erase Vale’s face from the images behind my eyes. Maybe it’s just how little sleep I’m getting, but since we watched the graduation ceremony, I can’t get him out of my head. Every time I close my eyes, he’s waiting in the black.
    When we were friends at the Academy, even before he kissed me, I always sort of liked him. He was two years older than me, in between me and Tai, and he was a good friend of Moriana Nair, Jahnu’s cousin, so we all ended up spending a lot of time together, especially after Tai and Eli started dating. He was modest and polite, even though he was the son of the chancellor and a prominent OAC researcher. There were a lot of other kids at the Academy who had something to prove, and they were pretentious and spiteful. But never Vale. Never to me, at least.
    But then Tai was killed. I’ve only spoken to him once since the day she died, and that was just the day after. I was still in shock, and I was a wreck—a limp, wet puddle of tears, and he held me and told me he was there for me and to just call him if I wanted to talk. I clung to him, crying into his shirt, and he just held me tighter. Then Eli told us what the killer had said about Madam Orleán, and that he thought she had something to do with