Lira's cheeks were still hot when she found Uchenna in her bunk, although thankfully, the tears had stopped falling. Also thankfully, though Uchenna shared the room with half a dozen other crew members, the two of them were alone for the moment.

She'd had no meeting with the geologist, of course. It was a lie – Lira knew now that everything out of Uchenna's mouth since launch day had been a lie.

Lira stepped into the doorway and cleared her throat. Uchenna spun around, hand going to her chest.

"You scared me."

"I thought you were meeting with Dr. Rostov."

"Umm, I did, it was a quick one," she said. "I was just getting…" She looked around but the only thing out of place near her bunk was a worn paperback copy of The Grapes of Wrath. She wasn't getting anything – she'd been planning to give herself a little impromptu breaktime and leave Lira to deal with the rabbits on her own for however long she could get away with it. Like she had been for the last eighteen days.

Well, the free ride stopped now.

"Who are you?"

Uchenna blinked, her brow furrowing. "What?"

"I don't know what you’re up to, but I know something is very wrong." Lira stepped into the room and the pocket door slid closed behind her. "Tell me what's going on."

"I don't–"

Lira held a hand up to stop her. "No more bullcrap." Her throat closed up. Damn it, there were the tears again, right on schedule. She was hoping to get through this confrontation without them, but the odds were never in her favor. "You didn't know the rabbits have been in the same closed system since the day they were born. You designed the system, Uchenna."

The woman across from her opened and closed her mouth like a fish out of water, but now Lira was on a roll and she had three weeks' worth of frustration to get out.

"You stumble through the protocols we spent weeks practicing. You're never in the rabbitat if you can help it. You didn't even know how to read the respiratory rate in their charts. What is going on here, Uchenna?"

The exobiologist closed her eyes. Lira watched her take a deep breath, and was surprised when a tear slid down her umber cheek. Then she looked straight into Lira's eyes, unflinching. "My name isn't Uchenna. It's Ada Bello. Uchenna is my twin."

Lira's heart stopped. Deep down, she'd figured it had to be something like that. Nothing else made sense, unless she was living in some scifi movie where someone had stolen Uchenna's face, or erased her memory. But… "Why?"

Before Ada could answer, rage pushed Lira’s tears aside.

"You stole your sister's seat? Why would you do that? Do you even understand what that means for her mission, or how hard she worked to prepare for it?" She started pacing, wishing for all the world the gym was attached to the crew quarters so she wouldn't have to walk half a ship's length just to punch something. "You know you probably damned the entire rabbit program, right? We needed Uchenna to make it work!"

"I can explain," Ada said, hands up defensively.

"Please do!"

She just stood there for a moment while everything clicked into place for Lira. The short hair, the fact that perfectly made-up "Uchenna" hadn't worn a stitch of makeup in the last three weeks. The personality transplant on day one.

Even the broken implant.

There was no implant, because this wasn’t Uchenna.

"Well?"

Now, Ada was the one who burst into tears.

Lira was startled.

She didn't figure Uchenna… Ada… would be happy to be found out. But she wasn't expecting this absolute deluge of tears. Ada was gripping the edge of her bunk as if she needed it to hold her up, and as much as Lira wanted to believe these were crocodile tears, she could see the agony etched across Ada's face. Lira's body started moving of its own accord toward her, to comfort her. Then she stiffened.

No. This woman was a liar, and she owed Lira an explanation. And a darned good apology.

She didn't deserve to be comforted.

"Why would you do this?" Lira demanded, hands on hips. "Do you even know how much this meant to your sister? Do you know the rabbits are supposed to be our first experiment into reproduction on Mars and that your sister is vital to conducting that research?"

She was practically yelling now, and Ada was shrinking away from her. Good. She should feel bad. 

"Can you keep your voice down?" Ada asked meekly.

"No!" Lira roared, but then she did take a deep breath and try to get herself under control. Nobody else needed to hear this – not yet. Not until she figured out what exactly was going on. "I'm going to need some answers really freaking quick."

"I'm trying to save someone," Ada said, then burst into a fresh round of tears. She crumpled, her knees giving out until she landed heavily on her bunk, and she buried her face in her hands. "What if Bart's right and there are no more ships?" 

The words were just barely recognizable through her sobs, and an unwelcome twist of sympathy wrenched Lira's gut.

She remembered the way Ada's complexion had dulled and she'd pushed away her lunch that day in the galley when they listened to that news brief. When Bart said they were lucky to get off Earth when they did. 

A ripple of anger pulsed down into Lira's fists.

"I did steal her spot," Ada confessed at last. "And I knew exactly how much it meant to her. She talked to me all the time about her research. She’d wanted to go to Mars for years before the rabbit program was created and she thought it was tailor-made for her. I know it meant everything to her. I just… thought she'd be able to catch the next shuttle."

She met Lira's eyes for the first time since the accusation.

The news briefings hadn’t said anything definitive about the state of VossCorp and the shuttle program, but things hadn’t been rosy back on Earth lately either.

"I didn't mean to mess anything up with your rabbits, I swear. The reason I'm never in the rabbit module is because I'm scared I'll accidentally screw something up. I kept finding excuses to stay away, but all it did was make you think Uchenna was a slacker."

"So why did you do it?"

"I need to get to the colony," Ada said. "I have to see it in person, it's the only way I can find out the truth." She took a deep breath, then rose to her feet. "I'm an investigative reporter for The New York Times. I've been looking into VossCorp ever since Uchenna first started watching the mission job board and I started noticing some really disturbing things."

"Like what?" Lira's heart fell into her gut.

"Like colonists getting deepfaked on the company's social media feeds."

"What are you saying?"

Ada looked at the closed door behind Lira, then back at the veterinarian. "That depends… on what you're planning to do about the fact that I'm not Uchenna."

Lira blinked. She looked over her shoulder, and for the first time since they boarded the shuttle, she felt utterly alone. In a closed-off room with an imposter. Her heart skipped a beat. "What are you going to do?"

She wouldn't.

She couldn't.

But then, this was not the exobiologist Lira had spent the last several months working and training with. This woman was a stranger who had been willing to betray her own sister to get here. 

Would she stop short of hurting Lira?

She took a step back, her heel thumping against the closed door.

Ada's eyes widened as she realized Lira had her hand behind her back, groping for the door sensor. "Oh my god, I'm not going to kill you!" She took a step forward and Lira flinched, so she withdrew, hands up. "I swear, I don't want to hurt you."

"Then what the heck did that mean, 'that depends'?"

"Well, I'm not gonna tell you the truth about what I think VossCorp is doing if the first thing you’re gonna do when you leave this room is send a message to VossCorp!" She threw her hands up in exasperation. "That's all I meant. I wanted to know if I could trust you!"

Lira couldn't help loosing a sardonic chuckle from her chest. "You want to know if you can trust me. That's rich."

"You don't know what I know about this company." Now it was Ada who looked genuinely scared. Lira let her guard down – just a little bit, her shoulders relaxing a few millimeters.

"Let's say I keep your secret. I don't tell mission control, I don't tell Bart, I just keep calling you Uchenna and pretending you're running experiments… Speaking of which, what the heck have you been doing on the computer every day?"

Ada looked sheepish. "Trying to look like I knew the difference between biology and my own butthole. I'm sorry I lied about my work, and those stupid microgreens. I've never grown anything in my life. When I decided to do this, I figured they would have built some redundancies into the system and it wouldn't be a big deal that I was here. I thought Uchenna would be pissed, but she’d get a spot on the next shuttle out and I’d just hold down the fort until she got to the colony. Please believe me, I never meant to hurt anyone. I didn't want–" She gestured between the two of them. "–this to happen."

"So we're not gonna have anything fresh for the rabbits to eat for the next five months unless I can manage to grow it," Lira said. "All of the research about the rabbits that your sister would have been instrumental in providing during the trip is just lost now, and whether I tell or not, that won't change…"

She thought she saw hope in Ada's eyes at the direction her rant was heading in, which annoyed the hell out of her. Her gaze hardened and she turned squarely on the imposter.

"If those rabbits fail to thrive here or on Mars, that is a hundred percent on your shoulders. Your sister worked tirelessly on this project and there are over nine hundred people in the colony who were looking forward to seeing their first animals in decades that don’t come from the cricket farm."

Ada nodded. "I understand. This doesn't necessarily damn the rabbits–"

"But it makes their survival so much harder."

"I'll still do everything I can to help you." She caught the sharpness in Lira's eyes and added, "Or I'll make up an excuse that makes sense to the rest of the crew and then never step foot in the rabbit module again. Whichever you want."

Lira thought. Was she actually considering letting Ada continue to masquerade as Dr. Bello? A woman with so few scruples she was willing to do this… who had no background in science… who wouldn't even tell Lira what she was really here for?

"Exchange credit for your thoughts?" Ada joked meekly.

"I feel sick."

"I'm sorry."

Lira let out a long, shaky sigh. "Right now I can think of more negative consequences for keeping your secret than for telling it."

"Lira–"

She leveled Ada with her most withering glare. "If I tell VossCorp right now, they can be sure Uchenna gets a spot on the next shuttle, and maybe she can walk me through some of the experiments she planned so that this time won’t be completely wasted–"

"Wait," Ada interrupted. "Before you do that…"

She turned to her bunk, lifting the mattress pad and producing a pocket-sized notebook. 

"This is everything I've got on VossCorp. I wouldn't ask you to trust blindly or to make an uninformed decision." She smiled and those irritating little dimples popped. "I know how a scientist would feel about that."

She crossed the space between them and held the notebook out to Lira. 

"Read this first, then decide if you want to keep my secret."

Lira snatched the notebook. It was well-worn, and when she flipped through it, she found it almost full of small, neat printing. 

"Please," Ada begged. "Just read it."

Lira let out another jagged, tired sigh. "Okay. But I’m not promising anything."

Ada nodded and Lira left the bunk room. She walked up the short hall to her own. She was shaking by the time she flopped down in her bunk, then turned her head to look at the electronic display on the wall. Her credit tally, earned for all the routine tasks she’d been performing since she got here. A photo of her and her mom taken just before she left Manila for the last time. A staff photo from her veterinary practice before it flooded and changed the trajectory of her life forever.

There was also a digital rendering of a window, which she'd configured to show her the last view she'd had from her bedroom on Earth. Green grass, a gentle breeze flowing through a magnolia tree and rippling across the lake, little speck-sized birds flying in the distance. Maybe not even accurate anymore, if the news briefs were to be believed.

That was what she was leaving behind.

She was still five months away from the red dust and perpetual twilight and modular, pressurized structures awaiting her on Mars.

She often fell asleep wondering if she'd made a mistake not fighting harder to reopen her clinic, leaving her mother and her life in the Philippines… leaving Earth. 

A lot could go wrong on a six-month trip through deep space, and in a colony isolated from the rest of humanity by sixty million kilometers. Now she had one more thing to worry about. She hoped she wasn't making her biggest mistake yet.

She opened the notebook. "Okay, Ada Bello, what have you gotten me into?" she breathed into the empty room. She started to read.

The End

* * *

Lira and Ada's story doesn't end here. The secret Ada uncovered is only the beginning.

Read what happens next in Children of Glass – a free 175-page novella that reveals the secrets the colony tried to erase.

It's free for subscribers at BestDystopianBooks.com/newsletter

Thank you so much for reading Exodus. I hope you'll continue Lira and Ada's adventure with me!
KN Tristan (Kaylin)