THIS TOOK SO LONG. Approx 10 hours of work just on chapter 18. Some of the work is in the chapter 17 video, the other three videos are in order from top to bottom. Very pivotal chapter, and a big direction shift for this rewrite.

18.

“Oh god,” Freya said, rolling her eyes and shutting the book. She could picture Garbuglio hunched over his computer screen, smirking as he strained to crowbar more bullshit into every sentence. She now regret not hucking The Fragile Phoenix into the trash when she had the chance. When she started a book she finished it.

“Why didn’t you just let the magic happen Freya? Just let the elves and pixies spirit you away to a land of enchantment?”

Freya spoke in a piping, high pitched voice, and then looked around to make sure no one had snuck up behind her. She was sitting alone on the top step of the west entrance stairs at Grayson. The only people who came this way during the school day were sneaking off through the woods to smoke between periods. No one would bother her here.

The worst part of reading The Fragile Phoenix was the part of her that wanted to buy into it. A small, lazy piece willing to swallow the nonsense whole, because anything was better than being empty. The voice of capitulation.

You can’t just surrender.

The unwelcome memory of Lassa’s voice rang in her head. Freya knew Lassa was disappointed in her for not fighting back. She would have been thrilled if Freya had been the one who got hauled away to jail for headbutting someone unconscious. It was all so stupid.

Freya reached into her pocket and gripped the Starball, remembering the night she’d found it. In a way, letting go really was magical. She’d felt truly alive after she nearly drowned in the Sillas River, and not for a moment since.

She’d been putting this off long enough. Freya slid the awful book tome into her backpack and headed for the science corridor. She could hear voices burbling in the classes as she passed by. She tried to walk with intent, so it looked less like she was cutting class. She just couldn’t take another hour of Mr. McCallahan shuffling through the motions. He probably wouldn’t even bother to take attendance. So far sophomore English had been a complete wash, she would have gotten so much more if she could have just re-taken Mr. Rutteridge.

As soon as Freya turned the corner into the science hallway her stomach felt upset. She considered ducking into the bathroom, but decided it was nothing and pressed on. The discomfort grew with every step, and she had to pause outside the lab and fight back the urge to throw up.

Stop it. It’s all in your mind.

The nausea was obviously psychosomatic. She was just nervous about what she might find. It took an effort of will to open the door and enter the lab.

Grayson High School had one big lab that all the science classes shared. It had just been remodeled last year, the sink fixtures were still gleaming and the black phenolic resin countertops were unscathed by graffiti. There was a faint stench of viscera in the air, there must have been dissections earlier in the day. Fortunately the nausea had abated.

Clearly psychosomatic.

Mrs. Birmingham glanced up from her desk and gave Freya a little wave before her eyes dropped back to her phone. She a large woman with short hair who taught Pre-Calculus and Physics. She was wearing a bright blue dress that reminded Freya uncharitably of a tarp.

Freya had never liked Mrs. Birmingham, who had once singled Betty and Freya out during a school assembly and yelled at them to stop laughing, even though literally everyone else was talking too. That was last year, no doubt Mrs. Birmingham had forgotten, but Freya hadn’t.

The lab was strangely empty. Students were allowed to use the lab during lunch to catch up on assignments, but the lingering stink had cleared everyone out.

Freya wanted to use the digital microscope but the laptop attached to it wouldn’t wake up, the power light just pulsed orange. She eyed the “DO NOT TOUCH!” sticker taped over the power button and looked over to find Mrs. Birmingham still totally engrossed in her phone. Freya ignored the sticker and held down the power button until the laptop restarted. When the computer finally sprang back to life, the microscope software auto-launched with windows. A pop-up complained no microscope was attached to the system. Freya unplugged the USB cord and plugged it back in, after a few seconds it detected successfully.

With a hairband, Freya made a tiny circus ring on the specimen tray so the Starball wouldn’t roll away. She had to work out how to get the microscope to focus, feeling dumb for not remembering. She’d done this a dozen times in Mr. Farrelli’s class.

At 500x Freya could clearly see her fingerprints on the glossy surface of the orb. She used a lens-cleaning cloth to remove the oil and looked again. There was very faint indication of texture beneath the perfectly smooth transparent outer layer.

Freya swapped from the 4x to the 10x objective lens and then had to fool with the gooseneck LEDs to get focus through the sheen. Under the highest magnification she could see the texture clearly. Beneath the outer layer, the Starball’s surface was made up of minute diamond shapes, arranged in groups of three to make squares that looked like isometric cubes. Very thin raised lines of slightly lighter material separated them, the whole pattern was flawless.

A quiet gasp escaped her, and then there was dead silence in the lab. The sound of Freya’s pulse began to hammer against her eardrums. She couldn’t look away from the screen, it felt like the world had zoomed out around her and she had become impossibly small.

That pattern hadn’t occurred naturally. Something must have built the Starball.

Freya’s legs felt weak. She clung to the black countertop for support, eyes locked on the screen. With shaking hands she reached out and nudged the ball, the Starball became a blur and then slid back into focus. Freya turned the orb around and around, looking for any marking or break in the pattern, but it was contiguous from any angle. She remembered how it had poked her the first night, but couldn’t find any way it could have. Its must have been a sharp piece of the shell.

Was she wrong? Could it possibly be natural? Freya searched for mineral textures on her phone, but there was nothing comparable.

She wondered if it was possible the microscope was just seeing a reflection of its own imaging sensor. Freya looked up the specifications for this model, an Erlang Cyclops 6980. The microscope’s sensor was a CMOS, and when she looked up images of them it turned out not to be a terrible guess. CMOS sensors had square cells where minute lenses were surrounded by a raised grid. Beneath them were red, green, and blue color filters that were called a Bayer Matrix. This couldn’t just be a reflection. The Starball was something else entirely.

When Freya compared the microscope’s output side-by-side with the image on her phone, there was no comparison. The Starball had been built with a much higher degree of precision, its lines were flawless and exact. Whatever process built the Starball was as distant from the CMOS circuit’s manufacture as Lassa’s BMW was from a Model T Ford.

Freya took the Starball from the specimen tray and held it up to her eye. Without the microscope it looked like nothing more than a purple marble. The skin was rigid, she remembered how there had been some give to it the first night, if she was remembering correctly.

That was another complicating factor. How much of her memory could she trust? It had definitely been colored by her near-death experience. She’d been certain the Starball jabbed her, but under the lens she couldn’t see how that was possible.

Did an alien make this?

Freya couldn’t accept the idea, but neither could she come up with an explanation. She wondered what the Starball would look like under an electron microscope. Could the electron beam penetrate the glossy layer or would it just bounce off? What about an X-ray, or some kind of magnetic imaging?

There was no x-ray or electron microscope in the Grayson High School Laboratory. They did however have scales that were more precise than Lassa’s kitchen scale. Freya’s next step was to figure out what the Starball was made of. She took the halves of the meteorite shell out of her backpack and weighed both, then she weighed the Starball.

At first, she didn’t know how to calculate the volume of the hollow sphere. She searched the internet for a method and the math looked intimidating. But then she realized she could just take then 75mm sphere, apply the simple V=4/3*π*r^3 to get its volume. Then she could do the same thing for the 25mm cavity, and subtract that from the first value to get the volume of the hollow shell. It was pretty simple but she was still proud of herself for figuring it out.

She found a material calculator that could work with spheres. A 75mm sphere should weigh 1.9686 kilograms if it were whole and made entirely of nickel, as she suspected. When she plugged in what the inner core should weigh, it was only 0.0729 kilograms. She re-checked her calculations, thinking it was an error, but she just had to wrap her mind around how much more material was in the shell. The sphere weighed 1.8951 KG. So it was pretty close to being made of pure nickel.

This was another sign the Starball wasn’t natural. From the research she’d done over the past few days, Freya knew that very few Ataxite meteorites had been found with a nickel content higher than 25%. No one had ever discovered one that was pure nickel. Ataxite was just her closest guess. Properly classifying the shell would require a lab with a gas spectrometer or a mass spectrum analyzer which would check for traces of gallium and iridium. That was a bit too much to ask from a high school science lab.

Now that the shell was out of the way, Freya could concentrate on the Starball. She was so excited, it was a thrill just to weigh the orb. She realized she was enjoying herself, for the first time in months. The problem was so difficult that it consumed all of her attention, she couldn’t dwell on how awful her life was. If anyone knew how much fun she was having geeking out in the lab she would probably never hear the end of it. But it was a secret, and that made it even better.

The Starball weighed .0696 kilograms, far too heavy to be amethyst or tourmaline. The closest match was a rare earth metal called Dysprosium, which was mainly found terrestrially in a mineral coincidentally called Xenotime.

One concerning thing in the article, Xenotime was sometimes slightly radioactive due to the presence of Uranium and Thorium in samples. But the Starball was too dense to be made of Xenotime, unless it had a dense core surrounded by a less-dense outer layer. Dysprosium itself wasn’t radioactive, but it was used in control rods for nuclear reactors and dosimeters.

This was what Freya was most afraid of. She thought the lab had a Geiger counter somewhere but she didn’t see it. She would have to ask.

“Hey Mrs. Birmingham?” Freya asked. Mrs. Birmingham’s head shot up, and she set her phone down abruptly with the screen against the desk. Freya noticed there was a touch of color at her cheeks.

What in the world had she been looking at?

“Yes Miss Jokela?”

“Is there um, a geiger counter in the storeroom?” Freya asked.

“I think so! Why do you need one?” Mrs. Birmingham said, her face slipping from embarrassment to concern.

“Oh, I just have this meteorite from my dad’s collection. I want to see if there’s traces of uranium or thorium in it. It would be a teeny tiny amount.” Freya was glad Mrs. Birmingham was on lab duty today. The lie wouldn’t have worked with Mr. Farrelli. Chondritic meteorites were the ones that generally had those deposits, they weren’t shiny. After days of reading, Freya probably knew more about meteorites at this point than anyone else at Grayson.

“Oh, whew. So no plans to build an atomic bomb?” Mrs. Birmingham joked, her voice loud and forced. Freya could tell Mrs. Birmingham didn’t like her much either. Maybe she did remember that assembly after all, or maybe she was just annoyed at being distracted from flirting on her phone.

“Oh, haha, you caught me,” Freya said, throwing her hands up.

Mrs. Birmingham slid her phone off the desktop and slipped it into a drawer. Then she took a deep breath and rose, the seat creaked in relief. She spent a while rummaging in the supply closet before she returned with the geiger counter. It was very old, a squat yellow box with a probe on a coiled cord. Velcroed to the top of it was a silver tin that said URANIUM OXIDE on top.

“Do you know how to use this?” Mrs. Birmingham asked. Freya didn’t, but she nodded anyway. It didn’t look too complicated.

“It belongs on shelf 4B. Just put it back when you’re finished.”

The Geiger counter had a layer of dust on top of its chassis, it was too early in the year for the radiation unit in Earth Science. Freya hoped it still worked. Across the room she could hear Mrs. Birmingham’s chair groan as it resumed its burden.

She plugged the Geiger counter and began figuring out how to use it. The front panel reminded her a little of a synthesizer. She turned it on with a chrome toggle switch, and watched the analog needle jump. Printed above the meter was a scale of counts per minute, beneath it were milliRads per hour.

Freya pointed the probe at the Starball, expecting the needle to leap directly into the red danger zone. Instead it trembled at just above zero. She brought the probe close to the uranium tin and the needle jumped halfway to 100 CPM even outside the tin. The speaker in the counter was clicking like mad. She unscrewed the lid and pointed the probe directly at the yellow layer of uranium oxide inside. CPM peaked at 150 counts per minute. She tested the Starball again and the needle dropped to almost nothing.

The Starball wasn’t radioactive.

Until this moment, Freya hadn’t realized how much the idea had worried her. She was relieved, but now she had to figure out how the Starball was so warm all the time. The lab had an infrared thermometer gun, she pointed it at the orb and got a reading of 38.33 degrees Celsius.

A 101 degree temperature. The Starball was running a fever. Freya was glad she wasn’t just imagining it being hot. What kind of battery could output that heat for days without running flat? She had a set of heated gloves with a battery twice as big as the Starball and they were only good for a couple hours. She would have to do more reading, if no such battery existed, it was another strong argument for an alien origin. The only other explanation she could think of was that this was some secret government project, but the idea didn’t sit right. More importantly, she wanted the Starball to be an alien. She would be really disappointed if this was just some new kind of spy satellite.

Freya glanced back at Mrs. Birmingham, thinking she might let her know the meteorite wasn’t radioactive, but she was back on her phone, oblivious to everything else.

Freya tucked the Starball back into her pocket. Maybe she should be more careful with it, find a padded case or something. It was probably irresponsible to keep the only evidence of alien life in her jeans. But she didn’t want to. The Starball had been in her pocket almost the whole time since she’d found it. She touched it twenty times a day, there was no chance she would lose it.

What the hell was the Starball, and what was she going to do with it? Maybe it was a message from an alien civilization with instructions for faster than light travel. Maybe it was a homing device that would lead an invasion force here. Maybe it was a bomb that would wipe out all life on earth.

Or maybe it didn’t do anything. Maybe it was art, or religious. Wasn’t that what archaeologists always said when they couldn’t figure something out?

Freya packed the meteorite halves away in her backpack then re-attached the probe to the side of the geiger counter. She screwed the lid back on the uranium and wound up the power cord, then returned it to right shelf in the supply closet. Mrs. Birmingham was still entranced with her phone. Freya could have walked out with pretty much half the supply closet if she’d wanted to.

She looked up at the clock over the door, she’d already missed most of 4th period. She left the lab and checked her phone, of course, no one had texted her. Betty hadn’t replied to her email. She wanted so badly to tell someone what she’d discovered, but there was no one she could trust. She sighed.

Might as well skip the rest of the day.

When she looked up from her phone, she froze. Mr. Farrelli was at the end of the hallway. He’d spotted her and was on an intercept course.

Oh no.

Mr. Farrelli had seen her coming out of the lab. He would have so many questions. Freya wanted to turn around and run, but that would only make it worse.

The girl’s restroom was halfway between them. She hurried forward and gave him a little wave, just as his eyebrows raised in preparation to call out to her. Before he could, she ducked into the bathroom. With each step she was afraid he was going to call her back, but he didn’t.

There was no one else in the restroom. She hid in a stall, wondering how long it would take to wait Mr. Farrelli out. He wouldn’t hover outside the girl’s room and wait for her would he? That would be so creepy.

If only she’d been a little faster in the lab. Now Mr. Farrelli would definitely ask Mrs. Birmingham what she’d been doing. In her head she could see the whole thing spiraling out of control, phone calls being made to Lassa about the geiger counter, everything unravelling. She felt herself starting to panic, and wondered if she could escape by climbing out a window.

Stop and breathe.

That was one part of The Fragile Phoenix that was actually useful, the breathing exercises in the second chapter. Freya took a deep breath, held it for as long as she could, then exhaled through her teeth very slowly, holding the Starball. After fifteen breaths, she started to feel better.

Freya flushed for appearances and left the stall just as Claire Meadows entered the bathroom. Claire was in her purple gray and blue Peacocks uniform and her hair was a sweaty mess. She was lugging a bag full of lacrosse stuff with her. Freya went to the sink to wash her hands.

“Hey do you have a hairband? My last one just snapped,” Claire asked and Freya nodded. She took the band she’d used to hold the Starball on the specimen tray from her pocket and gave it to Claire.

“Thanks! Aren’t you Jane’s friend?” Claire asked.

“Yeah, I’m Freya, you’re Claire right?” Freya replied, though she wasn’t really sure she was Jane’s friend anymore. Claire nodded, and started attacking her hair with a brush, setting the hairband on the sink.

“Hey, is Mr. Farrelli still out there?” Freya asked.

“Nope, he was walking down the hall. You cutting?”

“Yeah, just fourth period.”

“Well you’re caught now. That guy’s so fuckin’ nosy. He probably would have let you go if you just talked to him though. He’s soft.” Claire tilted her head, her tone superior. Freya wasn’t impressed.

“Yeah, you’re right. I should have. Oh well,” Freya said, hitching her backpack to leave.

“Hey are you taking karate with Dan Gregulus?” Claire asked, it was a little bit of a demand. Freya had to re-assess the situation and fight the urge to correct her. Claire was an inch shorter than Freya but far more filled out. She was on JV Lacrosse. Was she into Dan? Was this about to be another fight?

“Yeah, my mom’s making me go, after that thing with Tammy,” Freya explained. She wanted to make it clear it wasn’t her choice.

“That was so fucked up. I can’t believe they didn’t expel her. Does that shit actually work? Are you gonna fuck her up next time?”

Freya nodded, though she hoped there wouldn’t be a next time. She also hoped Claire wouldn’t go around telling everyone Freya had said she could beat Tammy up. That was exactly her kind of play.

“Jane was thinking about taking the class, she likes Dan,” Claire went on.

“Yeah, she wouldn’t shut up about him last year. She should totally sign up. It’s actually pretty cool. Good exercise.”

“He ever say anything about her?”

“Not to me. I’ve only done two classes,” Freya said. The tension between them had evaporated, and she felt pretty sure she wasn’t about to get her ass kicked. Freya couldn’t tell if Claire was trying to say Dan was off limits on behalf of Jane, or if Claire was into Dan, or if she was into Jane. She really didn’t care. None of it mattered.

“Thanks for the hairband,” Claire said. Freya was free to go. For just a second, there was kind of a hopeless look in Claire’s eyes. That was what this was all about, she liked Jane. Freya suspected she was wasting her time, but really what did she know about Jane Yang? Jane hadn’t spoken to Freya in months. Just thinking about it gave her a sinking feeling, and as she left the bathroom she made up her mind to skip the rest of the day. No one would care.