Neptune's Tears (20 page)

She had to give the go ahead. She knew she had to, but the minute she did, Rani’s life would be over. She looked across to the other gondola, close enough now for her gaze and Rani’s
to meet. The intensity of their feelings formed a bridge for all that was in their hearts, and Zee felt Rani’s thoughts as strongly as if they were her own.

Wrong boy again. My fault, Zee. Not yours.

Never dropping her gaze, Rani kissed her fingertips and tapped them against her chest.

Zee felt a tremendous throb, as if in that one gesture Rani had conveyed all of her lifeforce to Zee and set her free at the same time.

Not your fault, Zee.

Then in one fluid movement, Rani placed her slim foot on the rail of the gondola, brought herself to standing position, and stepped off into the air. Her sari wrapped and fluttered around her
like a golden flame all the way to the ground.

‘Shoot!’ David yelled. ‘She’s sure, and her best friend just gave up her life to prove it to you. Don’t you see? Rani knew Zee would never give the go ahead with
her in the gondola. That’s why she jumped. So shoot, before he shoots us and releases that stuff all over Cornwall.’

The policeman fired, but his shot was a second too late. The anarchist managed a volley of shots before he collapsed, and Zee reeled as the balloon started to plunge. She couldn’t see what
happened to the pilot, or to the policeman, but she and David stayed together and held each other all the way down.

It was Mia who found them. Zee could hear her yelling at David to wake up. Wake up, get up and get out of there.

Zee tried to move but couldn’t. She was surrounded by something firm and white. It crushed against her rib cage, forcing the air from her lungs. Even her face was covered, and she had to
twist her neck just to breathe. If it hadn’t been for David’s hand still clutching her fingertips, she might have thought she was dead. It was the air bags, she finally realised,
trapping the four of them in the tangled positions they’d fallen in. Finally, Mia got David out of the tipped gondola, and this gave Zee enough slack to slide out as well.

‘The other two?’ she asked Mia.

‘They’ll be out for a while,’ Mia replied confidently, as if she’d had something to do with it.

‘Good. David, Mia’s right. You have to go.’

‘I’m not leaving you, Zee.’

‘But you can’t be found here. This was an anarchist attack. They’ll want to interview each of us.’

‘She’s right,’ Mia said, and Zee shot her a grateful look. ‘There’s no way this isn’t going to get back to Omura. You two can’t be found
together.’

‘But the others will remember that there were four of us in the gondola. What will you say?’

‘That you were someone I just met. That all I know about you is that your name is Reggie and you said you’re from Bournemouth, or Weymouth, I don’t remember. Hurry,’ Zee
cried. ‘You have to be gone before they get here.’

‘All right, but I’m not going back to London without you.’ He looked beseechingly at Mia. ‘Will you stay one more night, to give us cover?’

Mia rolled her eyes but agreed. She wrote a number on a scrap of paper and thrust it into Zee’s hand. ‘Call me when they’ve finished with you. I’ll come and get you.
Safer me than David.’

Zee did not breathe easily until they were safely away.

The hardest part was calling Rani’s parents. Zee insisted on doing it herself. She didn’t want them hearing from a stranger that their daughter was dead. Pending
identification by next of kin, Rani’s body was being held at the hospital morgue, and Zee told the Kapoors she would meet them there. There was nothing she could do to change things, but she
could at least make sure Rani’s parents knew how brave their daughter was, and that her courage had helped an MI5 team recover their first undetonated anarchist bomb. What they learned from
it would help them trace members of the group and how they operated.

Most of the afternoon, though, was spent being interviewed by government security forces. Initially, the questions were aggressive. Since her best friend had died with an anarchist, both she and
Rani were suspects. However, once the head of the investigative unit spoke to Major Dawson, the atmosphere changed. The questioning shifted to things she might have observed or felt, and since she
was no longer a suspect, their interest in Reggie from Bournemouth disappeared as well. By the time they finished, she’d convinced them that Rani was an innocent victim, and took some comfort
in knowing that her friend’s parents wouldn’t be confronted with accusing questions about their daughter.

Even with Rani’s parents, Zee didn’t cry. It was only later, alone with David in his hotel room that she felt the wires and strings that had held her together all day begin to
loosen. What began as mere tears exploded into a torrent of wild, jagged sobs. If only Rani had turned down that invitation! If only, just this once, she hadn’t gone off with the exciting
stranger! Where was she now, everything that was Rani? And how was Zee going to live without ever seeing her friend again? The anguish of it sent her to her knees.

Zee would forever love the way David let her cry. It must have been terrible to watch, and just as bad to hear, but he didn’t try to coax her out of it. Finally, when she was completely
spent, he gave her his hand and pulled her to her feet and held her close.

‘I think we need some dinner,’ he murmured gently.

They ordered from the room service wall, an expensive luxury. The wall was a mosaic of screens, each depicting an item that could be delivered to your room within ten minutes, arriving on a
little glassed-in conveyer belt embedded in the wall. There were so many items it took them forever to decide what they wanted, and they had a good time bargaining with each other.
Okay,
I’ll share a General Tso’s chicken with you if we can share a milkshake too. What do you mean milkshakes don’t go with Chinese food? Of course they do.
Zee laughed in spite of
herself, and while the distraction didn’t take away her grief, it did remind her of the day’s joy too. Twenty-four hours before, she thought she’d never see David again.

It would have been easy to go to bed content with that, but she knew she couldn’t. The day had underscored the fact that life was unpredictable and could be surprisingly short. It was time
to do what she had been telling herself she would do if she ever saw him again.

‘We have to talk.’

‘I know,’ he said with a sigh. ‘There are some things I have to tell you.’

‘Me first,’ Zee insisted. Not because she wanted centre stage but because she suspected much of what she was about to say would cancel anything he might have in mind.
‘You’re going to think this has something to do with today, but it’s something I decided a few weeks ago.’

She touched the Neptune’s Tears that lay at the hollow of her throat, and heard again Mrs Hart’s admonition:
Be bold with your life, Zee.
She hadn’t taken the necklace
off since that day, just as she hadn’t taken off the charm bracelet with the two Buddhas that David had given her.

‘When you go back to Omura, I want to go with you.’ The shock on his face was more than she’d bargained for. Clearly, he’d never considered the possibility.
‘It’s the only thing that makes sense. They won’t let you stay here. They’ve trained you, they need you there. So I’ll go back with you.’

‘But – but I’ve told you what Omura’s like. No art, no literature, nothing for the imagination. It’s my home and I belong to it, but you’d hate it.’

‘I’ll hate a lifetime without you more.’

He stood up and began pacing back and forth. ‘You can’t, Zee. You can’t come with me.’

She stood in front of him, blocking his path. He thought he’d never seen anyone made so beautiful by passion. His lovely Zee.

‘Why can’t I come with you?’ she questioned. ‘You said yourself that Omura’s underpopulated. They need people, families, lots of children. We could make a life
there.’

‘No, we couldn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because there is no Omura! That’s what I have to tell you, Zee. The whole thing is a lie.’

She was caught completely off guard. ‘I . . . I don’t understand. It’s on the galaxy maps. I’ve seen it.’

‘Yes, the planet you call Gliese 581 C exists, but as far as anyone knows, there’s no life there. We picked it as a likely spot. Omura and everything about it is invented.’

‘I still don’t understand,’ she said, ‘but I know that we were meant to be together, and if you can’t stay here, I’ll go with you when you’re sent back
home, wherever home is.’

‘You can’t go with me, Zee,’ he said. ‘You can’t because you’re already there. The aliens – me, Mia, all of us – we aren’t aliens at all.
We’re time travellers from a future Earth!’

She was silent a long time. He watched waves of confusion break across her face as she tried to work out what he’d just told her. Finally she looked up at him. ‘If you’re from
Earth, why are you here harvesting the art and literature? Or isn’t that true either?’

‘No, that’s true. We’re systematically copying it and sending back as much as we can.’

‘Why?’

He took her by the shoulders and stared straight into her eyes. ‘If I tell you, Zee, you have to promise to tell no one. Not your family or your friends, not the Major – no one.
It’s a terrible promise to ask of anyone. You’ll hate me for asking it of you, but I have no choice.’

She leaned into him and felt his arms go around her. ‘Nothing could make me hate you, David. I promise to keep the secret, whatever it is.’

‘We’re here harvesting because some time soon there’s going to be a catastrophic meteor strike on the planet. Almost everything will be destroyed, and what isn’t
destroyed will never be the same. In that sense, I
do
come from an alien planet. I was born on Earth fifteen-hundred years from now.’

Zee closed her eyes. For the first time, she felt no wall of reserve. His soul flowed into hers as freely as water running to the sea.

‘How long?’ she asked. ‘How long until the meteor hits?’

‘We aren’t exactly sure. Time isn’t as reliable as you’d think. Sometime within your lifetime.’

She understood now, why his feelings had always seemed to pull in two directions. But that understanding had come at a terrible price, and now she felt the full burden of knowing her world would
be destroyed. Knowing, and not being able to do anything.

‘But you must know when the meteor will strike?’ she said.

David’s brow furrowed. ‘No, we don’t know for certain. Pinpointing an event in time is difficult. When the meteor hit, it wiped out all our knowledge. Our computers can only
make projections based on the new data we’ve collected and input and there are huge holes in our information.

Zee clung to him fiercely. ‘I still want to go with you,’ she said. She remembered all the whispered reports of those said to be involved with aliens vanishing. ‘They’ve
let others go there, haven’t they?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then that’s what we’ll do.’

‘It’s not that easy, Zee.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The time leap is too great. Most emigrants can’t adapt. There’s a high rate of drug and alcohol problems. Not to mention suicide and unemployment.’ He looked intently
into her eyes. ‘How could I let you take that risk?’’

She saw the pain in his eyes, the torn feelings that had been there from the start. ‘That won’t happen to us, David.’

‘There’s something else. The Lists. Immigration from the past is tightly controlled because even small changes can alter the future. There are three lists that govern who can and who
cannot immigrate. First, the Inconsequentials, those who died when the meteor struck, never had children, or produced little of value post-meteor. They can immigrate, at least theoretically,
because they have no influence on the future. Second, the Researchables. This is the largest pool, people about whom nothing is known or no records survive. They are allowed to immigrate
only
if they can prove themselves irrelevant to the future. The final list is called the Essentials, people who will never be allowed to immigrate because they make key contributions after
the meteor strike.’

‘Those sound like good odds.’

‘I started the research before I left Prambanan. I’ve already looked you up, Zee.’ He hesitated, his voice cracking with emotion. ‘So far, it looks like you’re on
the Essentials list.’

She felt a wave of desolation. Not to be with David, never to see him again . . . His arms tightened around her, holding her so close she could feel the necklace Mrs Hart had given her pressing
against her neck, the trio of false diamonds, Neptune’s Tears, making a warm spot at the base of her throat. As if Mrs Hart herself were standing beside her, Zee heard again the last words
the woman had said to her.
No matter what happens, be bold with your life. Don’t settle for small.
That was the true message of Neptune’s Tears. She pulled back just enough to
look up at him.

‘Then we’ll find another way to be together,’ she said fiercely. ‘We’ve come too far to lose each other now.’