Nebula Awards Showcase 2016 (46 page)

The covers of both books were worn, the spines cracked, the pages yellowed and brittle at the edges. Why keep a book about fruit you had never tasted and never would eat? Why read at all, when they frowned upon literacy in humans and often banned books outright? She never asked him. Mr. Charles had seen their conversation, though she doubted he had heard it, and re
quest
ed that she refrain from speaking unnecessarily to the
har
vest.

So when Jeb stared at her across the table with eyes like a snuffed candle, she turned away, she forced her patty into her mouth, she chewed, she reached for her orange drink.

His favorite book became his means of self-destruction. She let him do it. She doesn't know if she feels guilty for not having stopped him, or for being in the position to stop him in the first place. Not two weeks later she rests beneath a kukui tree, the flesh of a fruit she had never expected to taste again turning to green pulp between her teeth. She reaches for another one because she knows how little she deserves this.

But the skin of the fruit at the bottom of the bowl is too soft and fleshy for a kiwi. She pulls it into the light and drops it.

“Are you okay?” It's the boy from unit two—Kaipo. He kneels down and picks up the cherimoya.

“What?” she says, and struggles to control her breathing. She has to appear normal, in control. She's supposed to be their caretaker. But the boy just seems concerned, not judgmental. Rachel rolls onto her back and opens her eyes.

“You screamed,” Rachel says, sleep-fogged and accusatory. “You woke me up.”

“Who put this in the bowl?” Kaipo asks. “These things are poisonous! They grow on that tree down the hill, but you can't eat them.”

Key takes the haunted fruit from him, holding it carefully so as to not bruise it further. “Who told you that?” she asks.

Rachel leans forward, so her chin rests on the edge of Key's lounge chair and the tips of her purple-streaked hair touch Key's thigh. “Tetsuo,” she says. “What, did he lie?”

Key shakes her head slowly. “He probably only half-remembered. It's a cherimoya. The flesh is delicious, but the seeds are poisonous.”

Rachel's eyes follow her hands. “Like, killing you poisonous?” she asks.

Key thinks back to her father's lessons. “Maybe if you eat them all or grind them up. The tree bark can paralyze your heart and lungs.”

Kaipo whistles, and they all watch intently when she wedges her finger under the skin and splits it in half. The white, fleshy pulp looks stark, even a little disquieting against the scaly green exterior. She plucks out the hard, brown seeds and tosses them to the ground. Only then does she pull out a chunk of flesh and put it in her mouth.

Like strawberries and banana pudding and pineapple. Like the summer after Obachan died, when a box of them came to the house as a condolence gift.

“You look like you're fellating it,” Rachel says. Key opens her eyes and swallows abruptly.

Kaipo pushes his tongue against his lips. “Can I try it, Key?” he asks, very politely. Did the vampires teach him that politeness? Did vampires teach Rachel a word like
fellate
, perhaps while instructing her to do it with a hopefully willing human partner?

“Do you guys know how to use condoms?” She has decided to ask Tetsuo to supply them. This last week has made it clear that “sexual flavors” are all too frequently on the menu at Grade Gold.

Kaipo looks at Rachel; Rachel shakes her head. “What's a condom?” he asks.

It's so easy to forget how little of the world they know. “You use it during sex, to stop you from catching diseases,” she says, carefully. “Or getting pregnant.”

Rachel laughs and stuffs the rest of the flesh into her wide mouth. Even a cherimoya can't fill her hollows. “Great, even more vampire sex,” she says, her hatred clearer than her garbled words. “They never made Pen do it.”

“They didn't?” Key asks.

Juice dribbles down her chin. “You know, Tetsuo's dispensation? Before she killed herself, she was his pick. Everyone knew it. That's why they left her alone.”

Key feels light-headed. “But if she was his choice . . . why would she kill herself?”

“She didn't want to be a vampire,” Kaipo says softly.

“She wanted a
baby
, like bringing a new food sack into the world is a good idea. But they wouldn't let her have sex and they wanted to make her one of them, so—now she's gone. But why he'd bring
you
here, when
any
of us would be a better choice—”

“Rachel, just shut up. Please.” Kaipo takes her by the shoulder.

Rachel shrugs him off. “What? Like she can do anything.”

“If she becomes one of
them
—”

“I wouldn't hurt you,” Key says, too quickly. Rachel masks her pain with cruelty, but it is palpable. Key can't imagine any version of herself that would add to that.

Kaipo and Rachel stare at her. “But,” Kaipo says, “that's what vampires do.”

“I would eat you,” Rachel says, and flops back under the tree. “I would make you cry and your tears would taste sweeter than a cherimoya.”

“I will be back in four days,” Testsuo tells her, late the next night. “There is one feeding scheduled. I hope you will be ready when I return.”

“For the . . . reward?” she asks, stumbling over an appropriate euphemism. Their words for it are polysyllabic spikes: transmutation, transformation, metamorphosis. All vampires were once human, and immortal doesn't mean invulnerable. Some die each year, and so their ranks must be replenished with the flesh of worthy, willing humans.

He places a hand on her shoulder. It feels as chill and inert as a piece of damp wood. She thinks she must be dreaming.

“I have wanted this for a long time, Key,” he says to her—like a stranger, like the person who knows her the best in the world.

“Why now?”

“Our thoughts can be . . . slow, sometimes. You will see. Orderly, but sometimes too orderly to see patterns clearly. I thought of you, but did not know it until Penelope died.”

Penelope, who looked just like Key. Penelope, who would have been his pick. She shivers and steps away from his hand. “Did you love her?”

She can't believe that she is asking this question. She can't believe that he is offering her the dreams she would have murdered for ten, even five years ago.

“I loved that she made me think of you,” he says, “when you were young and beautiful.”

“It's been eighteen years, Tetsuo.”

He looks over her shoulder. “You haven't lost much,” he says. “I'm not too late. You'll see.”

He is waiting for a response. She forces herself to nod. She wants to close her eyes and cover her mouth, keep all her love for him inside where it can be safe, because if she loses it, there will be nothing left but a girl in the rain who should have opened the door.

He looks like an alien when he smiles. He looks like nothing she could ever know when he walks down the hall, past the open door and the girl who has been watching them this whole time.

Rachel is young and beautiful, Key thinks, and Penelope is dead.

Key's sixth feeding at Grade Gold is contained, quiet and without incident. The gazes of the clients slide over her as she greets them at the door of the feeding house, but she is used to that. To a vampire, a human without a shunt is like a book without pages: a useless absurdity. She has assigned all of unit one and a pair from unit four to the gathering. Seven humans for five vampires is a luxurious ratio—probably more than they paid for, but she's happy to let that be Tetsuo's problem. She shudders to remember how Rachel's blood soaked into the collar of her blouse when she lifted the girl from the bed. She has seen dozens of overdrained humans, including some who died from it, but what happened to Rachel feels worse. She doesn't understand why, but is overwhelmed by tenderness for her.

A half-hour before the clients are supposed to leave, Kaipo sprints through the front door, flushed and panting so hard he has to pause half a minute to catch his breath.

“Rachel,” he manages, while humans and vampires alike pause to look.

She stands up. “What did she do?”

“I'm not sure . . . she was shaking and screaming, waking everyone up, yelling about Penelope and Tetsuo and then she started vomiting.”

“The clients have another half hour,” she whispers. “I can't leave until then.”

Kaipo tugs on the long lock of glossy black hair that he has blunt-cut over his left eye. “I'm scared for her, Key,” he says. “She won't listen to anyone else.”

She will blame herself if any of the kids here tonight die, and she will blame herself if something happens to Rachel. Her hands make the decision for her: she reaches for Kaipo's left arm. He lets her take it reflexively, and doesn't flinch when she lifts his shunt. She looks for and finds the small electrical chip which controls the inflow and outflow of blood and other fluids. She taps the Morse-like code, and Kaipo watches with his mouth open as the glittering plastic polymer changes from clear to gray. As though he's already been tapped out.

“I'm not supposed to show you that,” she says, and smiles until she remembers Tetsuo and what he might think. “Stay here. Make sure nothing happens. I'll be back as soon as I can.”

She stays only long enough to see his agreement, and then she's flying out the back door, through the garden, down the left-hand path that leads to unit two.

Rachel is on her hands and knees in the middle of the walkway. The other three kids in unit two watch her silently from the doorway, but Rachel is alone as she vomits in the grass.

“You!” Rachel says when she sees Key, and starts to cough.

Rachel looks like a war is being fought inside of her, as if the battlefield is her lungs and the hollows of her cheeks and the muscles of her neck. She trembles and can hardly raise her head.

“Go away!” Rachel screams, but she's not looking at Key, she's looking down at the ground.

“Rachel, what's happened?” Key doesn't get too close. Rachel's fury frightens her; she doesn't understand this kind of rage. Rachel raises her shaking hands and starts hitting herself, pounding her chest and rib cage and stomach with violence made even more frightening by her weakness. Key kneels in front of her, grabs both of the girl's tiny, bruised wrists and holds them away from her body. Her vomit smells of sour bile and the sickly-sweet of some half digested fruit. A suspicion nibbles at Key, and so she looks to the left, where Rachel has vomited.

Dozens and dozens of black seeds, half crushed. And a slime of green the precise shade of a cherimoya skin.

“Oh, God, Rachel . . . why would you . . .”

“You don't deserve him! He can make it go away and he won't! Who are you? A fogey, an ugly fogey, an ugly usurping fogey and she's gone and he is a dick, he is a screaming howler monkey and I hate him . . .”

Rachel collapses against Key's chest, her hands beating helplessly at the ground. Key takes her up and rocks her back and forth, crying while she thinks of how close she came to repeating the mistakes of Jeb. But she can still save Rachel. She can still be human.