INVALID

INVALID - Chapter 6: The Perfect Woman

Helios training wasn't training. It was culling.

They take 200 Valids with scores over 95 and over 10 months, they break them until only 50 are left worthy of boarding Titan. The official reason is that interstellar travel requires psychological perfection. The real reason is that they need to prove that even among perfect people, some are more perfect.

I arrived on Day 1 with a dead man's blood in my veins, a dying brother hidden in a maintenance locker in my dorm, and a body that was rejecting itself.

My name tag said JEROME MORAWSKI. My sweat said GQ 98. My pain said FRAUD.

The barracks were glass cubes overlooking the launch pad where Titan was being built — a black spear against the white desert, so big it created its own weather. Every morning we woke up to its shadow.

We were 200 gods in white uniforms. And then there was her.

Cassia Voss. GQ 99.8. The highest score ever recorded in the New Sonora district.

She didn't look designed. She looked evolved. Tall, not in the way I was now tall — tall like a predator, efficient. Her hair was shaved to 2mm, because hair was deemed an inefficient heat regulator for space. Her eyes were black, not for cosmetics, but because she had been given nictitating membranes to protect against stellar radiation. She was what humans would look like in 10,000 years if we let the sequencer decide.

She sat next to me on the first day of centrifuge testing. The instructor was explaining G-force tolerances.

"You have a tremor," she said, without looking at me.

My left hand was shaking. Rejection fever from the dermal graft.

"Residual anesthesia from the jump," I said, using Jerome's backstory. "Old injury."

"No," she said. "Anesthesia tremor is 8-12 hertz. Yours is 4-6. That's immune response. You're rejecting something. Graft? Implant? What did you buy on the black market, Jerome? New liver? Your family has a history of hepatic carcinoma, I read."

She had read my file. My stolen file.

The centrifuge started. We were spun to 7 Gs. Most Valids didn't even grunt — their hearts had been engineered to not fail.

My blood pump, the cheap black-market one Aris had installed, started to slip under 7 Gs. I could feel it tearing slightly from my subclavian vein. My vision tunneled. Not from the Gs. From anaphylaxis.

Cassia, in the pod next to mine, was watching my vitals on the shared screen. She saw my histamine levels spike. She saw my heart rate hit 148.

She reached over, mid-spin, and slammed the emergency override on MY pod.

The centrifuge stopped violently. Medics rushed in.

She leaned over me as I lay gasping, my perfect face covered in my own sweat that now read as Jerome's.

"If you die here, Jerome Morawski, you will contaminate my training cycle with an investigation," she whispered, so only I could hear. "I need this mission. So I will keep your secret. But you will owe me a favor. And I collect."

She stood up and told the medics, "He had a panic attack. Very unbecoming for a Morawski. He'll be fine. He just needs to remember that his family name is a privilege, not a right."

That night, I snuck Eli food from the mess hall. He was hidden in the air vent above my cube, where the temperature was 38 degrees and the air was recycled. He was too weak to complain.

"Is that the girl?" he whispered, looking down through the vent slats at Cassia, who was doing perfect one-handed push-ups in the cube below.

"Yes."

"She's pretty."

"She's the most dangerous person on this planet," I said.

Eli looked at me with my old glasses on — he had found them in my bag and wore them even though he didn't need them. "She's like you now. Pretending."

I froze. "What do you mean?"

"She pretends she doesn't get scared. But she does. I can hear her breathing at night. She breathes fast like me."

An 11-year-old Invalid boy had noticed what 200 Valids and a wall of scanners had missed.

Cassia Voss was afraid.

And that made her more dangerous than any of them, because perfect people who are afraid do terrible things to stay perfect.

Later, after lights-out, my tablet pinged. A message from an unknown ID, but with a GQ 99.8 signature.

> TOMORROW IS THE BLOOD MARATHON. 42KM IN VACUUM SUITS. YOUR PUMP WILL RUPTURE AT KM 30. I HAVE A REPLACEMENT IN LOCKER 99. IT'S MILITARY GRADE. IT WILL LAST UNTIL LAUNCH. IN RETURN, YOU WILL HELP ME FAIL THE PSYCH EVAL.

> WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO FAIL?

> BECAUSE IF I PASS, THEY WILL PUT ME IN COMMAND. AND IF I'M IN COMMAND, I WILL HAVE TO LEAVE YOU AND YOUR LITTLE BROTHER IN THE VENT TO DIE WHEN WE LAUNCH. AND FOR SOME REASON, I DON'T WANT TO DO THAT.

I stared at the message.

The perfect woman wanted to fail.

And she needed an Invalid to teach her how.

---