Living in Threes (7 page)

The light was dim and Meru’s sight kept blurring, but there was no mistaking the glistening red of blood that had trickled from ears and nostrils and eyes. Her hands were clenched into fists, her knees drawn up in a knot of pain.

Meru felt nothing at all. Not a single thing. There was so much to feel that there was no room in her for any of it.

Vekaa’s body moved between them. This time the starwing let him be. Meru stared blankly up at him.

He looked like Jian. They all did in the family. He was Jian’s brother; he had been the closest to her of any, except for Meru.

Meru could see no expression in his face. His eyes were sad, maybe. It was hard to tell. He was a scientist. He had been raised and trained to be coldly clinical.

She had been raised and trained to be a scientist, too. That was part of why she had gone so perfectly quiet inside.

She was observing, recording. Processing. Keeping a wall between herself and the tidal wave of feeling that would, eventually, drown her.

Her mother was dead. Something impossible, something no one could ever have planned for, had killed her.

“People don’t get sick on this planet any more,” Meru said. “They just don’t. How did you let it happen?”

Vekaa made no effort to defend himself. “We don’t know what it is,” he said. “We do know that it’s virulent, and powerfully contagious.”

“She’s not even supposed to be here,” Meru said. Her walls were cracking. Her voice was trying to. “Why would she—”

“Please,” Vekaa said. “I understand. When there’s time, I’ll listen, and mourn with you. But you have to leave this room. The Guard will take you to decontamination.”

No, thought Meru. Oh, no. Absolutely not. She shook her head. “I’m already contaminated. I’m not leaving her.”

“Every human being who has contracted this disease has died,” Vekaa said. His voice was flat. “This sector has been sealed off with all who are in it, living or dead. Do you understand, Meru? You can’t leave the sector until the seal is dissolved.”

“Then I can stay here,” Meru said.

“You can’t,” said Vekaa. Was his voice trying to crack, too? “You’ll die.”

The starwing hissed. Vekaa stiffened. So did Meru, who had never heard such a sound from it before.

The sound had meaning. Meru burst out with it before she stopped to think. “It says I won’t die. It’s protecting me.”

Vekaa ignored her, or maybe he had not heard. Two large members of the Guard loomed on either side of her. They had weapons—here, Earthside, where weapons were banned.

She had not been thinking of all that this meant, only that her mother was here, and she was dead, and Meru could not—all the way down to the bone could not—leave her. Now understanding began to dawn, slow and brutal.

The web streamed knowledge of plagues on Earth and off, as far back as Meru could stand to go, overlaid with laws and defenses and restrictions that had kept Earth from enduring any such thing in over a thousand years. The laws were clear and uncompromising. Any plague that touched Earth, from any source offworld, was to be sealed off and eradicated without hesitation and without mercy, before it could spread beyond the spaceport where it began.

That was law. Reality was this tiny, dingy, antiquated room and the body abandoned in it. That dead thing had been Meru’s mother, who should have been light-years away, safe and healthy and exploring an alien city.

The Guards moved in closer. Meru stilled the starwing before it tried something any of them might regret.

She was supposed to leave in two tendays—less than that, now: ride up the cable to the spaceport and then get on board a starship to the school for starpilots. She had devoted her life to getting there, and built all her hopes on it—and she had been accepted: one of only two on all of Earth this year, and one of a hundred from the known worlds.

It all seemed terribly remote now, and terribly unimportant. Meru had wanted the stars since she first began to remember—and much of that wanting was wrapped up in her mother.

Her mother was dead.

She reached out to the web and crashed headlong into a wall. She could see it, hear it, sense it through the implants that made her part of it. She could even detect the signal that was Yoshi, pinging and pinging again. But she was invisible and inaudible.

Then even that was gone. The silence was enormous. Meru was alone inside her own head.

While she talked to Vekaa, Consensus had finished locking down this whole sector and everyone in it. Meru cried out to her uncle with voice and data stream, but no answer came.

Every link, every connection, was cut off. The very root of it, the warm and constant presence that was the collective mind of her family, had vanished. Where it had been was nothing. Utter void. Absolute emptiness.

The shock was so great that it shut down her mind. She forgot how to resist. She could barely remember how to move.

The Guards herded her away from her mother’s body, down the long flights of stairs and out into the bleak and empty street. She came to herself a little there, enough to eye paths of escape. But the starwing had gone dormant. Everywhere she turned was an armored Guard.

They meant this. There was no pleading they would hear, and no logic that would convince them. The only logic they knew was the order that sealed the plague away from the rest of Earth.

Chapter 7

Holy crap.

I’d fallen asleep with my laptop in my lap. The clock by the side of my bed said
5:24
. For a long few seconds I couldn’t remember what the numbers meant.

That wasn’t a dream. That was memory. I had
lived
that night and day.

My throat was tight and my stomach wrenched with grief for someone else’s mother. I’d been that someone else, living a life somewhere on the far side of time. I knew what death smelled like, and what a starwing was, and what it was like to feel the whole of the worlds-wide web inside my head.

How could I be remembering something that must be hundreds of years in the future? Memory only works one way. Everybody knows that.

Alternate worlds.
Rick would say that, if I worked up the guts to tell him how far around the bend I was going.
Bubbles floating in a cosmic sea. Sometimes they touch. And when they do, for a few instants we can see. We can know…

“Horse puckey,” I said in my stuffy little room, where the air conditioning never really worked right, and the ceiling fan could whip up a gale. “I’m suffering from writer’s psychosis. That’s what it is. Stories gone bad. Taking over my head. Mom will say I’d do anything to get out of going to Egypt.”

And then she’d make me go anyway. Mom doesn’t give up once she makes her mind up to something. I could be straight-out barking crazy and she’d just shovel me through security in my nice white coat with the nice tight straps.

I didn’t feel crazy. I felt gutted, because I’d just seen my mother dead and lost everything I—the other I—knew. But my mind was clear. Everything around me, now I was wide awake, made sense. Or as much sense as anything ever does.

I skated along over the top of the dream or memory or whatever it was. I got dressed up, went out, ate rock shrimp and fried grouper and hush puppies, and Mom didn’t ask me if anything was wrong. I wasn’t
that
good an actor. Was I?

By the time we got home I was almost back to abnormal. Cat and Rick were waiting on the patio with flashlights, armed and ready for turtle watch. Rick was texting with Greg as usual. Cat was stargazing, also as usual.

Sometimes Mom came, too. Tonight she said, “I’m too full to move. You go, do us proud. Happy counting!”

I swapped out dinner clothes for shorts and a tank and my beach shoes, caught a drive-by Mom kiss and headed for the beach.

We do turtle watch for the community college every summer. In May and June we go down to the beach after dark, when the sea turtles come up out of the surf. They dig their nests and lay their eggs, and we count them for the community college. Then in July and August when the eggs hatch, we go back again and count the ones that survive, and watch as the tiny turtles make their bound and determined way toward the ocean.

I had the map of the beach up on my phone—already marked in a dozen places where we’d seen turtles making nests in the past week or so—and the app was ready to start counting as soon as a turtle came in. It was early for turtles: the sky was dark, but the horizon over the mainland was stained blood-red with the last of the sunset.

The air wrapped around me like a warm blanket. For a few seconds it felt impossibly strange, as if I’d been expecting the biting cold I’d felt in my dream. Memory. Whatever.

The sound of the ocean was the same in the dream and out of it. The long slow heave and sigh was louder than usual tonight. “Must be a storm out to sea,” Cat said.

Rick grunted. It was a comfortable sound. Familiar. Friendly.

The waves were high, and the moon was up, shining down a long silver road like the road from Meru’s island to the spaceport. The foam glowed white against the black water. It was so beautiful it hurt.

I was homesick already, and I hadn’t even left for Egypt yet. Cat and Rick headed off down the beach in opposite directions—covering as much territory as possible. That left me to hold the middle.

I sat on the steps down below the dunes, next to a sea grape that rustled and creaked in the wind off the ocean. When I looked down at my hands in the moonlight, they looked like someone else’s. I was half expecting them to be long and thin and the color of black coffee, like Meru’s. These shorter, fatter, whitey-brown things didn’t make sense to me at all.

Bonnie, Mom, Egypt, the dream that was so real, were all tangled up in my head. I couldn’t tell anybody about it, even Cat, who knew everything else about me. What could I say? Nothing made any sense.

While my mind spun its wheels, my eyes scanned the surf. Dark things floated in the foam—a log, an escaped buoy, a clump of seaweed trapped in plastic.

One thing wasn’t like the others. It was solid and rounded, and it moved against the thrust of the wave. It washed up on the beach just past the foot of the steps, rocking when the wave tried to suck it back.

The turtle didn’t pause to get its bearings, the way most of them did. It was already moving, fighting against the weight of the air, digging flippers in and dragging itself forward.

It was a big one, as big as I was, but much heavier. It left a deep trail cross-hatched with flipper tracks, right up past the foot of the steps.

I saw the water dripping from its shell, and the knots of weeds and barnacles, and the pale line of a scar from the middle to the edge. This turtle had come a long, hard way to lay its eggs.

Out of the water it was almost blind. As long as I didn’t move, it couldn’t see me. With what for a sea turtle was serious speed, it dug in its hind flippers and sent sand flying, digging the hole for its nest.

It was right beside me. I could see its face, and its big scarred head. The moon glimmered on the tears that ran down its cheeks, ran and ran, all the while it made its nest and laid its round white eggs. My finger on the phone’s screen counted each plop as a new egg landed on top of the rest.

It didn’t even know I was there, or if it knew, it didn’t care. I counted ninety-six plops before the turtle paddled sand over them all, burying them as deep as it could. Then it kicked and struggled itself around to face the water.

It went back fast. They always do that: slow coming in, as if the weight of eggs and earth is too much for them, but quick going back, as if they can’t wait to be home again.

It hesitated just before the wave rolled in. Bracing itself, like Meru before she stepped onto the road. Then the water caught it and lifted it up, suddenly weightless, and carried it away.