Nadia grew up in the Red Room. But the place she felt most safe in the world was a calming pastel pink.
“Millennial Pink,” Priya had called it.
One of the only television shows Nadia had been allowed to watch in the Red Room was an animated show called Sailor Moon. The girls discovered it by messing with television antennas and receptors until they picked up Televiziunea Româna?—Romanian State Television. Their handlers were strict about what they could watch on their stolen signal, but Sailor Moon was deemed acceptable because it was essentially about teenage girls who murdered people (good role models!). Though Nadia understood that the show had originally been made and recorded in Japan (because you could still hear the original Japanese track, if you listened to the show carefully enough), the version she saw in the Krasnaya Komnata was also dubbed over in Romanian. One man played every single girl on the show, using slightly different voices. Nadia was obsessed with it.
And it had taught her Romanian, too!
There were many things Nadia loved about Sailor Moon; Sailor Mars was her particular favorite, though she had a soft spot for the brainy Mercury. But Nadia especially loved the title character’s home in thirtieth-century Tokyo, the Crystal Palace. It looked like it had been carved directly from a giant piece of quartz. It was gleaming and clean and brilliant; when Nadia closed her eyes at the end of a long day in the Red Room, it was where she imagined herself, serenaded by the deep, masculine tones of Sailor Moon and her Sailor Scouts.
So, of course, when Nadia had the opportunity to create her own special home in the Microverse, she decided to create…the Crystal Lab.
Though Nadia was smaller than any other human in the entire world, the Crystal Lab still loomed in front of her (proportionally) like a massive place of worship. Except here, Nadia worshipped science. And, okay, also Sailor Moon, really. The lab’s exterior was all pale pink and blue and purple, like a piece of quartz come to life. A massive two-story door was framed by equally tall windows. Matching bell towers framed the structure. Jutting out of the center of the palatial Crystal Lab, elegant but sturdy pink supports suspended a massive, multifaceted crystal sphere. It was a globe; a brain; the universe; the center of all things. It represented the never-ending search for knowledge.
Also, it looked extremely cool.
Nadia raced up the crystalline steps to the lab, taking them two at a time like she had in her own house. The rubber on the flat bottoms of her boots kept her from slipping on the glassy surface. Nadia looked down as she ran, checking the inside of her left wrist where a digital clock face flashed 10:04 PM at her in block numerals.
NADIA’S NEAT SCIENCE FACTS!!!
When a person, say, me, since I am the one doing it most often…so, yes, okay, when I want to escape reality, I—No, well, usually when I feel this way the first thing I do now is call my therapist. Progress! But, say, okay…
Let’s start over. When a person (me) shrinks to subatomic size—so small the human mind can barely comprehend it—my compressed matter is forced through an artificially created nexus into the Microverse. (The Microverse is also where my excess matter is shunted whenever I shrink at all.) This parallel dimension operates on a quantum scale; everything is in measurements of mere nanometers. This means that the laws of physics, the way most humans understand them, do not always apply.
Because you are (I am) so, so small within the Microverse, time passes differently. I can compress whole days into just hours. I can spend all night inside the Crystal Lab, and only minutes will have passed for everyone else. As you can imagine, this becomes quite dangerous for someone with bipolar disorder. Which I have. Having bipolar means (for me) that I can have periods where I am very low energy and sad and empty and I don’t eat and I can’t remember appointments and even if I did remember them I wouldn’t be able to keep them. Those are depressive episodes. But then there are other periods where I am extremely energetic and wired and focused and excited about what I’m doing!
But these manic episodes are actually just as troubling as the depressive episodes. Extremes aren’t good in either direction, and mania (for me!) also often means that I forget to eat or take my meds, I stop sleeping for days, I lash out at the people I love, and I can even do things that put me or the people around me in danger. For a certified workaholic (again, like me!), you can see where it would be a slippery slope from a three-day work binge in the Crystal Lab to “I haven’t taken my medication in a week and when Priya tried to come get me I punched her in the face.”
To be fair, that only happened the one time, but I would very much like to never do it again.
And that’s why having bipolar in the Microverse can be dangerous. Brain chemistry meets time dilation. Science!
But Nadia wasn’t focusing on time or brain chemistry right now. She wasn’t focusing on much of anything, really, except her need to be somewhere quiet, with the journal still clutched against her chest. She burst through the great double doors and into the lab, passing 3D printers and leaping over the cables that criss-crossed the floor. She took the stairs (still two at a time) up to the right bell tower and used her wings to slow her momentum as she skidded to a halt at the top.
“Breathe, Nadia,” she reminded herself, stopping to regulate her heart rate. “Breathe.”
She hit a button on the back of her neck and heard the familiar psshhhh of depressurization as her helmet disconnected from her suit. Nadia sat on the edge of the bell tower, her feet hanging off into nothingness, crystalline mountains small and far below. For the first time since she found it, Nadia set the journal down next to her. She pulled her helmet off and shook out her bob, then set her helmet down on her other side. It was black and cherry red, like the rest of her suit. Nadia had modeled it after the Red and Black Mason Wasp, an American variety of wasp that stung (oh, it stung), but also helped to pollinate plants.
Helpful and beautiful…unless you became a threat.
Nadia’s heart had slowed, but her hands still shook as she picked the leather journal back up, hardly believing that she was holding a deeply personal piece of the mother she had never known.
It felt nearly impossible to Nadia that this thing, these words, had once belonged to her mother. Not for the first time, Nadia was struck with a heavy feeling, holding this thing that her mother had once held. She felt a sense of connection, sure, but it walked hand in hand with a suffocating feeling of loss, of missing a bond entirely unknown and unknowable to Nadia.
Nadia thought she’d come close. There’d been a time, earlier in the year, where someone claiming to be her mother had gotten in touch with her. It had filled her with hope, an almost desperate and unspeakable hope, that she might actually get to meet her mother. That her mother might be alive, after all. But it had all been a plot by A.I.M. to try and bring Pym Labs down. They’d impersonated her mother, and when Nadia discovered the truth, there was devastation where the hope had been. Evil scientists—there was no depth to which they would not stoop.
After a lifetime in the Krasnaya Komnata, Nadia knew that for a fact.
But there was no way A.I.M. could have infiltrated Hank’s secret laboratory. The solid layer of dust in his bedroom was proof enough of that.
Swallowing, Nadia cracked open the front cover again. There it all was—the bookplate, the signature, everything.
Maria Trovaya.
In the same neat, measured handwriting Nadia recognized from the few log books Hank had kept.
Nadia flipped
to the first page, not sure what to expect. Diary entries? Tirades against Hank? Entomology notes? Song lyrics?