“That wound is never going to close if you keep picking at it,” my sister said from the door. 

I bandaged the palm of my left hand and stuck my tongue out at Meili, who hovered in the doorway. That was as close as she got, balanced on the balls of her feet with shoulders and hips outside the threshold, her head tilted away from me as if she were feeling the effect of an unseen forcefield. She said it was for my privacy, but I knew that she feared contamination.

“Mom said we’ll have a family meeting at dinner,” Meili told me, her face serious. She was only two years older, though it often felt as if she were the third adult in a family where I was the only child. This time, her seriousness had cause. With overwhelming scientific evidence that environmental pollution caused instability in the human genome, the World Congress finally declared the earth uninhabitable for human life.

I watched her swivel to go, her steps drumming a rhythm down the stairs. We had not always been so estranged. Meili—called Maeve at work (she said her given name was too difficult to pronounce) moved out of the family home years ago, lived about three hours away in the city. I still lived here, in the same room I had growing up, the poster child for failure-to-launch.

Our parents had bought this big colonial on the edge of the nature preserve for a song and restored it themselves; back in the day it was the envy of the neighborhood. Now, no one envied us our house, living so close to the largest mutating biomass in the five surrounding counties. Even with the sealant on the windows to separate indoor and outdoor air, I could see the light from the forest, amber and gold, reflecting off the leaves. It used to be that such colors were only there during the fall, but this was spring. The deciduous trees had stopped dropping their leaves a few years back. Every tree remained a glorious gold-red all year round and glowed in the evenings. The color reminded me of those hikes we would take as a family into the forest, before the masks and suits, before the fear of contamination. It bothered my dad the most. He would pull the blinds down when he came into my room to help change my bandages.

Downstairs, I could hear dad rattling the big pots in the kitchen. I slowly rewrapped the bandage on my hand. 

*     *     *
“It is either the Martian cities, the moons,” Meili said as she stirred more noodles into the soup pot, “or to gather in the least contaminated places and wait for the space-farms to be finished. But construction will take years, if not decades.”

Meili was staying for dinner. Mom and dad went all out, even opening the deep freezer where we kept all the food from before, the one with its own circuit and backup generator. Mom did the prep and washed dishes while Dad and Meili cooked and chatted and moved together in the kitchen like they were a hive mind.

“Mars is the best option, of course,” mom said, “though it will be impossible; they are almost overpopulated already. They will not take anyone without a specialized skill.” She was dicing scallions—the ones from the greenhouse, grown on the last ten-inch square of de-contaminated soil that we had left.

“Most people will have to wait for a space farm,” my sister said. She took the plate of frozen fish balls from the counter and tilted them into the boiling water with barely a splash. “Mars can make requests. Everyone else enters a lottery.”

Across from them in their little huddle, I set the table. That was my job, the one task that involved nothing sharp or hot or wet. Three sets of chopsticks for them. For me, a plastic cup and a packet of amino acid/protein powder, which should taste a little more like chocolate given its astronomical price.

Dad added a splash of sesame oil to the pot. The soup noodles smelled good, like childhood, like the before times.

I haven’t been able to digest normal food for a few years, but the smell still made me hungry, and I sometimes indulged. It wasn’t good for my system, nor was it good for my wounds. Most days I just sipped my drink upstairs in my room. Mom would eat in front of the TV; she was the only one still able to stomach the news, or felt it was her duty to watch the news. Dad retreated to the basement.

I was mixing the powder with water, trying to dissolve the clumps, when Meili said, “In my current position, I am considered essential personnel for the governing body of the World Congress. Since they’re going to be located on Mars, I was given dispensation to bring my family.”

I think we all stopped breathing for a second. My parents were awestruck. To be honest, so was I.

Then I saw Meili fiddling with her necklace, turning each bead over one after another, a nervous habit that made it look like she was trying to undo a particularly difficult combination lock.

“But they only gave me three tickets,” Meili plowed on, “for me, and two others.”

The congratulatory hubbub ceased.

My dad asked, into the silence, “Why only three?”

“They don’t take contaminated people on Mars,” Meili said, not looking at me.

My face felt hot and cold. The palm of my hand began to tingle. I laughed, but the sound came out wrong. “I thought medical records were supposed to be sealed. What did you do, Meili, tell them on your first day of work that your sister was a freak?”

“That is not my name,” she said.

Dad reached over slowly and turned off the heat on the stove. He grabbed the ladle from the sideboard and began to fill a bowl. “We should eat,” he said, “and it is an easy fix. I am the eldest, I will stay behind and enter the lottery.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” mom retorted, “they’ll need aerospace engineers, I can put my request in for Mars separately. They may need my skill set.”

Meili and I stared at each other across the dining table.

“You don’t want me to go,” I said.

Meili pointed at my murky brown protein drink, the clumps still floating on top. “You’ve dragged mom and dad down with you for years. Dad had to quit his job to take care of you. You don’t do anything. You have no quality of life.”

“Stop it—girls,” dad dropped the ladle with a clank.

But my sister kept going. “Being dependent has always gotten you attention. They’ve always loved you more. Did you hear them? They will even die for you. No matter what I do, how good I am, I’ll always have to wonder if they would have done that for me.”

“Meili,” mom said, “you cannot say things like that. Apologize to your sister.”

“Fine. I’m the monster,” my sister said, her eyes starting to fill up, “you’ve always taken her side. You both do.”

I felt strangely like laughing. How strange to think that Meili envied me, of all people. I had envied her for so long I don’t even remember when I started. Was it the day of her college graduation—summa cum laude, of course—when dad and I were late for the ceremony because the doctor was running behind at the wound clinic where I was being seen for a second opinion? No, it must have been before. But that was the day our paths began to diverge so clearly, hers leading to bigger and better jobs, achievements, influence; and mine leading me to the next doctor, and the one after that.

I was angry, wasn’t I? Maybe I had changed so much I could no longer feel the depths of that anger I used to feel for my sister. I did feel sorry for her. Her moment of triumph ruined because she dared to say what she had held back for so long. Annoying as my sister was, she was always a break in the silence. She never went along with the mutual pretense that everything was going to be ok.

Sometimes one had no appreciation for one’s own gifts until someone else looked on them with envy.

“Dad, I agree with Mei—with Maeve,” I said. My throat was dry. “I am not going to Mars. I am staying here. On earth.”

Then everyone started yelling. My sister looked angry, and then confused. 

Maybe I should have done this sooner, but my wound was doing one of those cyclical fluctuations when it seemed to get smaller. Whenever the wound got smaller, dad became more hopeful, and mom was less stressed, and everything was peaceful at home.

It was time to come clean. I did not need to be shielded anymore.

I showed them the wound in my hand under the kitchen light. Overruling dad’s objections, I peeled back the skin of my palm, and it came away easily, like the rind on a ripe fruit. And where there should have been flesh beneath, instead there was something shiny, striated, like an insect’s shell made of plastic.

They were still confused. 

I had everyone suit up. We went to the edge of the forest, which even now, after dinner, was a phosphorescent yellow, glowing in the dark. I opened my palm before them then and they could see it, iridescent green-yellow-pink dots running along the tissue beneath the wound. 

From inside my palm, I pulled out a globule the size of a kernel of corn, bright yellow-green and having the same consistency as plastic beads strung on a bracelet. I dropped it to the earth, and they saw the glimmer of it in the ground. 

As we waited for the next ten, fifteen minutes, I told them about that day, when Meili graduated from college, and I went to the wound care clinic.

Dad was in the packed waiting room, trying to estimate how late we would be for Meili’s graduation party.

The medical assistant saw the wound on my palm. She just won’t undress this one, she said. The others looked like normal wounds, but not this one. When the doctors see it, they’ve been told to report it to the authorities, and she did not know what was going to happen to those people. Don’t let the doctor see it, she said, as she went out of the room.

Some wounds were not to be opened before others. Some wounds were not to be spoken of. 

I didn’t stay long enough for the doctor to show up. I told dad I was feeling nauseous, and we never returned to that clinic.

My parents and sister heard me out. They watched as a phosphorescent yellow shoot emerged from the ground and unfurled an orange-yellow-green leaf.

I held the seeds of life in the palm of my hand. The forest behind us has had unnatural growth and density in recent years, because of me. 

I told them that I had changed, that I was changing, and I knew I could live in this new earth—because it was made for people, for creatures like me. 

Back home, we stood in the decontamination chamber in silence. My parents couldn’t look at me, not for a couple of days. But Meili—Maeve—did. For the first time in a long time, she looked at me without glancing away, and in her eyes I saw respect.

*     *     *
A few weeks later, I watched the rocket taking my sister and my parents to Mars until it vanished into the sky. I watched and waited, until even the trail had dispersed. 

That evening, I walked past my respirator and my protective suit where they hung in the foyer, into the teeming air. I stopped at the edge of the red-gold forest and began to peel at the wound in my hand.